Another city has fallen to the NxtGen empire in a campaign whose success has not been seen since the Romans walked on our fair land. Southampton is the latest to go all NxtGenUG. Live in a city without a user group ? Be afraid - they’re coming to get you, armed with their pizzas and their swag and their good natured party atmosphere. Be very afraid.

The Southampton NxtGen region is run by Richard Allen and John McLoughlin and the launch night is on Thursday 18th October 2007 (see here for details). Captain Swag himself will be there (that’s Dave McMahon in case you weren’t sure) showing off his 3rd favourite SQL keyword. I think I read somewhere that having a favourite keyword in a particular programming language is one of the top 10 pre-requisites for being a geek. Dave doesn’t have just one though, he has 10 (or at least 10 that he is prepared to go public on).

I am also very proud to be part of the opening night and I have a slot on Astoria:-

• Microsoft Codename "Astoria"
  The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has brought new opportunities and caused us to solve old problems in new ways. AJAX and Silverlight applications need read/write access to data and business objects without performing full page refreshes and without dumbing down the data so much we are just left with primitives. Microsoft’s answer to this problem is Microsoft Codename "Astoria". In short "Astoria" is a data access layer for client-size technologies such as AJAX and Silverlight. This session shows how it works, how you can write "Astoria" data servers and how you can customize "Astoria" to your applications requirements.

If you live anywhere near Southamption be sure to give it a look. Remember there is only ever one first event.

See you there.

Technorati Tags: NxtGen, NxtGenUG, Southampton, Richard Allen, John McLoughlin, Dave McMahon, Astoria