Hey, hey, hey dear Devlicio.us readers. Today we are adding another valuable member to our roster and we are very happy about it.

Join me and welcome Scott Seely to our group. I've known Scott for only about one year and he hasn't stopped surprising me with the breadth and depth of the things he writes about on his blog, his books, articles, and presentations.

As if that isn't enough, Scott is very participative in the developer community, organizing a user group and participating in many others. He was also one of the driving forces behind the recent Chicago Code Camp.

So, I hope I got you as excited as us to start reading Scott's material on our site. Check out his original blog for older posts for a little taste of things to come.

Welcome on board, Scott.

Here are two user group events that are happening soon and that I'm directly involved.

July 8^th, Chicago ALT.NET

0-60 With Fluent NHibernate
See the full description of the session over at the Chicago ALT.NET home page. We will have Hudson Akridge tell us all about Fluent NHibernate, a project that has been instrumental in getting people on NHibernate by simplifying a lot of that ORM's configuration chores.

The Chicago ALT.NET meetings start at 6PM in the Sears Tower. Check the website for complete location details.

July 14^th, WI.NET

JavaScript - Beyond the Curly Braces
I'm taking my little JS presentation to the WI.NET UG in Milwaukee. The group's website hasn't been updated with the presentation details yet but it's basically the same presentation given at other local UGs.

The meeting starts at 7PM. Come ready to be surprised.

This Wednesday, June 17^th, the Chicago .NET Users Group, CNUG, has invited me to bring my JavaScript presentation to their monthly meeting.

Despite of what the event description might lead you to believe, the talk is hardcore JavaScript, not much specific to Ajax at all, although I believe the material will greatly help you with the Ajax work as well.

You can read the complete talk description and register for the event. Hope to see you there.

The ALT.NET universe in Chicago gets together again on June 10^th, this time to learn and talk about Git, the SCM you're probably tired of hearing people jabbering about and still have not taken the time to look at.

The presenter will be myself and I hope to explain how Git works and how it can be a good alternative even for non open source projects.

Git Without Puns

This month we will take a look at Git, a distributed version control system that has been gaining a lot of popularity since its introduction.

As with everything that is new and is touted as a replacement for an existing product, it's easy to try and map Git's functionality to Subversion, CVS or TFS for example. To better use Git, we should avoid too much comparison and also try to understand how it was built and how it works under the hood.

Here are the things we will be seeing and discussing in this session.

• Brief tour of Git on Windows (SSH, PuTTY, Git Bash, GUI)
• Git is distributed. How does that benefits me?
• Git's object database.
• Git's main objects (blobs, trees, commits and tags)
• Git workflows. Choose or create yours.
• Working with Git
  • Configuration tips
  • Create a repo
  • Clone a repo
  • Add/Commit changes
  • Reference another repo
  • Update repo (to/from)
  • Branching, merging, rebasing
• Hosting Git
• Github, social project forking

As a brief inspection of your RSS reader will quickly tell you, it's Code Camp season. Not to be left out of this party, the developers in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas have a great option this year.

The Chicago Code Camp, which happens on May 30th, is strategically located right between these two cities.

The agenda has been published and it's pretty exciting to see so many interesting and useful topics in a single event.

.NET still dominates the schedule but there's a lot of options for developers of virtually all walks of life. Here's a quick summary (we will have 33 sessions but some cover more than one topic)

• .NET: 20 sessions
• Ruby: 6 sessions
• TDD: 6 sessions
• JavaScript: 3 sessions
• Functional Programming: 3 sessions
• Cloud computing: 3 sessions
• Python: 2 sessions
• Java: 2 sessions

The bad part is that we can't be at all the sessions we'd like — there will be 5 or 6 concurrent talks. Here are some sessions that interest me in particular:

• Haml / Sass / Tenplate
• Firefox Extensions: Making Your Web Application More Accessible
• Guarding your code with Code Contracts
• TDD and JavaScript
• Rails-like development using ASP.NET
• Ruby Kata and Sparring
• Python
• Limelight

Those are only a few of the talks. I'm sure you'll be able to find sessions of your own interest. RSVP below. Hope to see you there.