My favorite part of these things (as always) is meeting the other attendees. We retired to a nearby bar after the meeting, where I cliqued up with Brian Dailey, Ryan Weaver, Jeremy Kendall, and others.

Topics that came up during that discussion included the books "Mythical Man Month", "Fooled By Randomness" and "Managing the Next Society".

You can find out more about the Nashville PHP User Group from their website including meeting times, location and future topics.

I talked about the amazing improvements in FastCGI over the past few years, the Web Application Gallery and Web Platform Installer (WebPI), URL Redirect, WinCache and many other things that Microsoft is doing to embrace open source technologies.

The slides for the talk are over on Slideshare but if you want something a little more engaging, check out the webcast from php|architect this coming Friday (April 9th) by Mark Brown and Ruslan Yakushev on the same subject.

As part of their drive to let developers know about Azure, Microsoft have been reaching out to development communities that would traditionally be non-Microsoft centric - in particular PHP and Ruby. [...] So, this month Microsoft are bringing Josh Holmes to Dublin to talk directly to Irish developers about building and deploying web apps on the Azure platform.

It's a free event and all who are interested are welcome to come. It'll start February 21st at 7:30pm (19:30) at the Radisson Hotel on Golden Lane. There's no charge for the event, but you still need to register to reserve a spot - there's only so much room, after all.