Last night was the first meeting of the Albury/Wodonga .NET User Group for 2009. It was a pleasant surprise to see four or five new faces, as Anton (one of our original members) has scored a new job at Charles Sturt University and managed to drag some of his co-workers along with him! Not only that, but he managed to convince them to present!

The presentation was a bit “outside the box” for us, because it was all about Perl. CSU is deep into Perl and use it for all kinds of things (from login scripts to web forums) so they were keen to give us a (re)introduction to the language. I’m sure it was the first time some of our members have seen regular expressions, and I’m equally sure that they’ll take something away that they can use in their .NET development, since the CLR’s implementation of RegEx is very similar to Perl’s “gold standard”. Many thanks to Ben and the guys for an interesting presentation!

Next month I’m putting my money where my mouth is and demonstrating MEF for everyone! I downloaded Preview 4 last night and gave it a whirl, and there are a lot of positive changes in this release. I’m really looking forward to March! See you there!