The next ALT.NET NYC user group meeting is Wednesday October 22, 2008 and the discussion topic will be Agile Project Management.  Our group is off to a great start with a tremendous turn-out for the first meeting in late-September at Microsoft’s offices in Midtown Manhattan where we had a solid 30-40 attendees.

I want to give a shout out to both Bill Zack (Microsoft Architect Evangelist for our region) and Peter Laudati (Microsoft Developer Evangelist for our region) for their help in our organizing the first meeting, their providing of the space for our group to meet at Microsoft’s offices, and (of course) for their providing the pizza for the group’s first meeting.

After I gave a brief background presentation on the issues that O/RM is trying to address, an open discussion was had on the pros and cons of different O/RM technologies (can you guess which one I came down in favor of? ).  If anyone is interested or for anyone who couldn’t attend, a discussion post with links to the videos of the meeting has been posted here.

Our next meeting is going to address a bit less technical topic, that of managing projects in an Agile context.  We hope to elicit some war-stories from the attendees, share some pain and some successes, and debate about whether Agile can work in every project or whether its really a niche management approach that’s applicable to just a narrow context of software development projects.

If you will be in the NYC area the 4th week in October and would like to attend the meeting, visit the Meetup site and sign-up to attend.  Details can be found there re: time, location, directions, etc.

For more information about the ALT.NET NYC group, bookmark our homepage for regular updates.  Hope to see you there~!