Last meeting was a little light on attendance so we took some liberties and strayed from </>’s and looked at Phone Gap, Windows 8, .NET MVC 4, Web Api, Visual Studio 11 (if you could get it installed <sadtrombone>Pat’s Installation</sadtrombone>) and had some laughs. A few of us also looked at Entity Framework, but that was at the bar. (so, <insert dig on Entity Framework that refers to it forcing users to drink/>)

<Recap/>
Last meeting we planned on doing some review so I’m just going to point you to some GitHub repositories that have some useful information for the topics of first two meetings.
http://github.com/csell5/AngleBracket
Folders:
WebSockets – great intro and examples into WebSockets using NodeJS and Socket IO.
Storage – simple examples using Local storage and Session storage.

http://github.com/csell5/MidwestGeeks
Branches:
Master – Stock .NET MVC4 template using Visual Studio 11. Start building with the latest and greatest.
patsbranch – My layout for Midwest Geeks site using .NET MVC3 and Kendo UI. More of a ‘proof of concept’.

http://github.com/paaschpa/Bingo – Trying to implement the same JavaScript ‘bingo application’ in SproutCore and ExtJS. Still a ‘work in progress’.
Branches:
master-SproutCore
master-ExtJS

<Conclusion/>
angleBracket is a meeting of geeks with little (or no) focus on a single topic. What I’m finding out is that this means anything ‘shiny’ is fair game and attention is going to be spread thin (ie. squirrel attention span). This model works well when 1) you attend the meeting 2) want a quick intro/hack at a topic of interest. It’s difficult to provide much content outside of the meetings because there is a lot discovery going on during the meetings. The benefit is that doing ‘Hello World’ in ‘X’ involves talking and thinking through the process with other curious geeks.

<Pat/>