Palegoldenrod

I wandered on down to the Newcastle Coders Group’s inaugural Social Gathering at a local pub last night with a friend of mine. Needless to say the nerd factor was high, but boy – I have never had more fun with a group of strange men in my life! 

These guys have been around since about December 2005 they tell me. They are made up of people of any age who like to learn more about programming – not just those who work in the profession. They have a meeting at the local uni once a month where someone (either a group member or a guest) gives a talk about something the group wants to hear about. It could be anything from a specific technique in a particular language to a spiel on the open source community or run downs on some new products or innovations.

I went to my first meeting a few weeks ago, and it was on Dot Net Nuke and Community Server, given by someone with a lot of experience using Dot Net Nuke (and a little community server) but not much development experience. I was both disappointed and pleased at the same time – I would have liked to have seen how easy or difficult it was to develop for these packages, as well as use them; but I was greatly impressed by Community Server, which I had never seen before.

For those who don’t know, Community Server is a .Net website package that is aimed at collaboration and sharing of online communities. It supports forums (complete with moderation, user ratings, etc), blogs, file storage, photo galleries, RSS feeds and aggregation (both a private RSS aggregator for each user, and also a public aggregator for all to see – of internal or external feeds). It also appears to have some small CMS in there but from what I could see it was restricted to the home page (I hope to learn more on this soon, and I’ll keep you posted).

The presenter (whose name escapes me at the moment) indicated that the people who developed Community Server used to be Microsoft employees but have now left and started their own business. Further, the story goes that apparently parts of Microsoft are actually now using Community Server internally.

I have to admit, it appears to be written very well. It is very easy to install directly (I haven’t yet tried the web install) and works like lightning. It has an open source free version (and an SDK). Version differences are in functionlity, not in licence restrictions – the free open source version does not appear to be for non-commercial use only. Paid version have fuller features and are not restricted (the free version has file storage and gallery limitations).

I am about to use it at work to support a client’s need for a good quality .NET forum

The group had observed that in the meetings the group could listen and ask a few questions, but not really interact. They decided to get together in a social type arrangement so that they could talk to each other and get to know each other etc. So off I tramped to the pub last night!

My friend Rob came with me (nice work, Rob) and we had a great old time. There were C++ programmers, ASP, foxpro – I don’t even know what some of the other guys worked with, but they were all pretty good. And the nerd jokes just kept on rolling.