Chris Seary, Dave Oliver and I kicked off the Oxford branch of the Next Generation Usergroup last night. Chris press ganged me into giving a nugget, a quick presentation, on ASP.Net's membership database. I attempted to show how easy it is to add membership facilities with a couple of clicks and a drag. I got a laugh when I pointed out the login and registration controls use table based layouts, bad Microsoft, bad!

This was followed by pizza and then Tony Rogerson gave a stunningly detailed presentation on developing for SQL server including how to track deadlocks, how to break count identity columns and a rather interesting framework for testing concurrency. Funnily for me it included things I had him fix on my databases; for developers who are looking at high usage databases its well worth watching out for the next time Tony presents this near you.

Thanks should go to Jim Allen and Research Machines for providing the facilities. RM developers beware; Jim is going to encourage you to stand up and talk at furture events.

Rich and John, founding members of the nxtgenug also made an appearance with the swag box, including pairs of the infamous Microsoft socks which I throw out at DDD for cheeky questions. Suitably I queried Tony on one of his answers and ended up getting a pair myself. So now I have a pair of the original shocking blue and the followup grey versions. Very sexy.