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Phoenix.NET:
I did some looking for a Phoenix-area group for .NET developers, but didn't find anything. Even though I'm not yet a .NET guru I decided I'd take the initiative to just start a group myself. It's not like there has to be big monthly meetings, but rather that there's a site and a mailing list for people to exchange ideas and information.
A little about my background, and some ranting about the evolution of development tools:
I'm a web development consultant, mainly doing intranet database applications using ASP and SQL Server. My specialty is "metadata-driven applications" - where applications can be modified and extended by changing the application metadata (the application model represented by data). This allows for very agile applications, where changes in the structure can be immediately reflected in the site, without "hand coding".
As for types of applications, I'm currently working on a flexible content management system - that I'll be using to develop web sites. There ARE a number of content management systems out there (a lot of which are pretty expensive), but I haven't found one that's an easy-to-use purely data-driven system (see "metadata-driven applications" above!). I'm working on an architecture for this via .NET.
As for .NET, I'm just starting to immerse myself in it. I'm an ASP developer, who's also been heavily into object-orientated programming, so I'm excited about being able to truly combine the two. No more having to simulate object-orientation on the back end with VBScript!
And .NET seems to be great for desktop applications as well. At least it has so far for the simple apps I've done. I do enjoy working with it. I certainly couldn't say that about "Visual" C++ and MFC. Well .NET, with C#, is like the VC++ that I'd been wanting. Like Java, C# is basically a better more-user-friendly C++. C# is kind of a cross between VB and Java.