Hi everyone,

Today I went to my first meetup and Hack day :) Great stuff! http://bit.ly/bb938Z

The meeting was about creating C# Apps for Linux using Visual Studio.

Took me a while to find The Box Cafe but was worth it, the Venue was good (although the internet didn’t work for me) and the people were (are) even better!

The goal was to meet new people, speak with brilliant developers and test Mono by building a simple app (decided during the meeting) on Windows to run it on Mac and Linux without any re-build process at all.
Everything happen according to the plan and I was impressed by the simplicity of setting up mono-tools and mono on all platforms. We were able to finish our first example in minutes (Form Window with a button that shows a ‘Hello World’ message box).

My group (of 3 people) worked on a MacBook with Visual Studio running on Parallels and we managed to finish a simple BBC News Feed reader in no more than 3 hours. Apart from some rendering issues, everything ran ok on both Windows and Mac OS :)
(I was a bit clunky today, too much PHP in my head…) 

I also got to know what a Netduino is (very very very impressive how easy it is to debug it) http://netduino.com/

After the meeting we went to The Tram Depot pub and talked for a while :) (Thanks for the drink, Adrian. Next is on me)

In the end of the day I felt happy, I really needed to do something like this! It’s great to spend time out and meet new people. I learned a lot and I’m definitely going to repeat it!

Cheers :)
Diogo