Well it was good to get back to going to the London DotNet User Group. And I picked a really good meeting to go to. Dino Esposito gave a really cool talk on Partial Rendering on Ajax. Apart from giving the best introduction to Ajax I've heard, he introduced me to this rather nice technique that leverages some of the Ajax bits and pieces such as the script manager and by hosting your ASP controls in UpdatePanels. By using these techniques you can produce some rather cool Ajax like results.

More on this can be found here

I'm going to enjoy impressing Rob with this stuff in the morning.

One of the reasons I thought I'd start this was to write about music and the like, so first off I'm going to write a few words about the gig I went to last night.

Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip are 2 Essex geezers who met on MySpace. One is a poet, or spoken word if you will and the other plays breakbeat off his laptop. To tell the truth I have no idea who is who. But the poet has a great looking beard which I'm quite jealous of. But enough of my childish beard envy.

Scala is not my favourite venue - and it unfortunately let the lads down. Not much can go wrong with performing from a laptop, but the spoken word was all live. But the sound was crap and you couldn't really make out the words at all. So I missed most of the (cough) artistic value of the performance.

But what the hey - the beats were cool, and the crowd responded well to the more popular of their tunes. Though shalt kill was performed well, but by far the last song was the fans favourite. It was their recently released single Beat That My Heart Skipped and the crowd lapped it up Even one of the people I went with had a great time at the front even though she doesn't like crowds much. So they must have done something right.

So - is this eveyone's cup of tea? Nah - too poncy for some, too weird for others. But if you're in the mood for learning some wisdom from the bearded one make sure you hear them at a venue with decent sound.

OK so in my last post I said I wouldn't go to the pub. But the very next night I did. Then I went to the pub and then on to a gig. Many beers then missed the last tube home. And true to form I've eaten badly again. Dear oh dear.

Better luck tomorrow hopefully - It's Ruth's leaving, but I'm going to a DotNet London User group meeting for the first time in ages. Dino Esposito is speaking about Ajax. I'm looking forward to it. Then I'm going to try and hot foot it over to the pub for Ruth at about 9 I think. And no beer.

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