Thanks to everyone who made it to our first meeting!  For those who couldn't come, here's a quick recap of what you missed.

Rich Henning and Steve Smith welcomed everyone, laid out the proposed agenda, and made sure everyone was familiar with the software craftsmanship manifesto.  We had everyone introduce themselves and describe their programming experience, current job, and what they hoped to get out of the group.  Most of the group was comprised of Microsoft .NET developers, with a fair number of FoxPro developers and one Java developer, and many devs with experience in other languages "on the side" like perl, ruby, python, etc.  In all there were 22 people in attendance, which was just under the number of chairs we managed to fit in the large conference room hosting the event.  Our maximum capacity is about 30.

After introductions, three people gave "lightning talks" which were brief presentations limited to 10 minutes focused on topics of interest (hopefully) to the group. 

Rich led off with a presentation on application frameworks, and how using existing frameworks could provide a great boost in bringing a product to market, especially for a team that is new to the technology platform as a whole.  Watch the recording here.

Next, Steve Smith presented on the topic of Software Dependencies, and how to keep them under control by using the Dependency Inversion Principle and Dependency Injection.  We failed to record this one. :(

Finally, Brendan Enrick presented an introduction to testing, in which he quickly showed the difference between unit testing and integration testing and brief walkthrough of how to get started with unit testing.  Watch the recording here.

After the lightning talks, over pizza and soda we discussed ideas that those in attendance had for the group.  We'll be implementing many of these going forward, and we have already had some volunteers to give additional lightning talks at next month's meeting.  We'll also spend more time on open spaces and hands-on coding exercises in future meetings.

Finally, we pulled out our computers, paired up, and worked on some code.  For this first meeting, we chose the first in the Project Euler series of problems to tackle, ideally using TDD, in whatever language was comfortable.  Afterward, we reviewed two working solutions, one using traditional looping structures and another using LINQ-style expressions to accomplish the same thing.  We wrapped up by walking through the Bowling Game Kata on the projector, and perhaps at a later meeting we'll code through it.

Afterward, about 8 of us hung around at a nearby bar for another hour or so, discussing software craftsmanship, the group, and plans for the future.  All in all, it was a great start to the group.