On 27th September the London .NET user group will be hosting noted .NET author and speaker Dino Esposito. We will be at Microsoft's new venue in Victoria (start time 7pm). This will be a great talk and I encourage you to sign up to attend either via mailing us through our website or by joining our yahoo group

Partial Rendering for AJAX Purists and AJAX Real Programmers

The advent of AJAX is radically modifying the user’s perception of a Web application and it is subsequently forcing developers to apply newer and richer models to build modern Web applications. In ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, we find two approaches to AJAX : partial rendering and script services. As dramatic as it may seem, only the second approach is pure AJAX . Partial rendering has little to do with AJAX , but it's an incredibly smart trick that brings with it flicker-free pages. In this talk, I'll give an architectural perspective of partial rendering and unveil some of its inner secrets

Silverlight, which brings the power of WPF and the CLR to the browser, hits 1.0 yesterday widening the capabilities for rich content delivery to the browser. What's more, Microsoft has inked a deal with Novell to provide Linux support through Mono's Moonlight offering. For .NET developers the fact that Microsoft is happily endorsing Mono with this kind of announcement is great news for reach.

Read the news over at Wired.

I went down to VBUG Brighton last night to give my presentations on LINQ (the general one) and LINQ to SQL (the deeper dive on one of the LINQ technologies). It was a good crowd, and still feels quite local to me (I'm one of those Londoners that likes to think of Brighton as London-On-Sea, which probably offends everyone living in Brighton.

There was a huge turnout from local software house Madgex, the team behind the Mix UK 07 back network. When I see this kind of commitment from a team to personal learning, I always suspect that their shop is a great place for developers to work, and the conversations with the team and their questions certainly left me with the impression that they were a switched on group. I'm told they are hiring too, so if you on the south coast and looking for a new challenge you could probably do worse than checking them out.

Thanks to everyone for making me feel welcome.