I was in Sydney again this week and had the opportunity to go along and present at the Sydney Deep .NET User Group. It was a really good turn out, although that wasn't because of me - Martin Granell (also of Readify) was the headline act.
Martin presented on options that .NET developers have when they are considering extensibility in their applications. It was a cool presentation and I really loved the Logo simulation he put together - the drunken turtle got a few laughs.
The great thing about this meeting was the number of people that I actually knew that were there! There was Nick, Troy (Illustrious Leader), Dan Green (aka DotNetDan), Ken Schaefer, Paul Glavich, Colin, Luke Drumm, Charles Sterling, Chris Burrows, there were heaps more - sorry if I left you off the list - but this is starting to sound like an academy speech, I can hear the wind up music now.
My presentation was on extender providers which is a pet subject of mine at the moment. I went through the basics of how you set up your environment to support component development and then gave a bit of a demo on building a provider in that environment. I wrapped up by showing off a new provider that I put together based on some previous work around securing a user interface using component technology on the design surface.
The new one is alot better than the one that I used to use and its alot more extensible. My original plan was to use this provider as the basis for an article in Australian Developer, but it is still not quite bug free yet and there is alot more code in there than I could describe in any reasonably sized tutorial.
Lisa from Australian Developer was kind enough to give me an extension on my deadline for a month so I can pull it together. I was playing around with another provider in my spare time which hooked the WndProc of the host form and rended an additional lunar style button in the NC area of the screen. Looked good, but kinda hacky. Maybe I'll get a brainwave on the flight back to Canberra tomorrow night.