A few months back I was invited to talk about the "GeoWeb" at the Texas GIS Forum. Somehow I pulled a great slot - first presenter in the first session following the keynote by Dr. Bill Gail from the Virtual Earth group.  I chose to talk about "Usability in the GeoWeb" - you can download the presentation (as PDF) at SlideShare.net and view it below. The basic gist of the talk is that traditional Web Development groups are moving into our market space. In order to avoid having them "eat our lunch", we need to adopt some of their techniques to make sure we build usable, high-performance applications. Check it out.

Just a quick note that I'll be giving a talk this Thursday, Sept 11, 2008 at the GIS in the Rockies conference. The title of the talk is "Leveraging Virtual Earth to View Fire Risk Data", and I'll be talking about two projects and talking about the "zen" of getting data out of ArcGIS Server (9.2 and 9.3) and into Virtual Earth. This is at 9:00am in the Cross Room. It's part of the "GIS for the Community" session.

I'm also very excited to be giving a talk at the Texas GIS Forum in Austin. The session is currently titled "GEOWEB" but will likely become more specific as we work out the details of the talks. I'll be talking with Kirk Kykendall of AmberGIS and the ESRI forums hall of fame, and Paul  Bissett of WeoGeo, so I think it should be a good session.

Also - for those in the Northern Colorado area, just a note that an Alt.NET chapter has been started up. Things are just getting rolling, but we're sticking to the basic manifesto...

We are a self-organizing, ad-hoc community of developers bound by a desire to improve ourselves, challenge assumptions, and help each other pursue excellence in the practice of software development.

Our movement is new. The conversation just started. All are welcome to shape and form the dialog in blogs and lists and face-to-face gatherings both local and global.

So - if you are a .NET developer who's interested in pushing the envelope, and expanding your repertoire, bounce over to the Google group, and get involved. We are meeting in the DTS offices, and have a less formal meeting approach - basically we decide what people are interested in, and at the next meeting a few people show some code / informally discuss the idea. We'll see how it goes as the first "real" meeting is tonight. On the agenda: ASP.NET MVC overview, and Inversion of Control / Dependency Injection with Castle Windsor.