What does it say about a group when even its speaker doesn’t show up? There were only two of us there: myself and one coworker (who I’ll call Ramez, since that’s his name). I thought a few more people would show up, but nobody did.

I brought the pizza; Ramez brought the soda. Neither of us remembered plates or napkins. And needless to say, I not only broke my diet, I annihilated it. I had more pizza tonight than in the last five months combined.

We ended up watching a couple of video podcasts. We watched one of the Stanford videos, followed along with the project, then experimented a bit on our own.

We learned quite a bit about Cocoa. That’s the important thing. And, crazy though it may seem, we’re not giving up. We’re gonna meet again, and I’ll keep everyone posted.

The success of David Hayden’s Tampa Bay MVC SIG, devoted to learning ASP.NET MVC, has inspired quite a few people on the Twittersphere to discuss starting an Objective-C/Cocoa developer’s group, with an iPhone focus, in a similar vein. One of my coworkers, who I will refer to as “RS”, pointed out that we either need to fish or cut bait, and suggested we start the group ourselves. So we did.

We’re still arranging things. I’m something of a de facto PR person for the group (as I’m the Twitter veteran). Our meeting location is as yet undetermined; we’re in touch with USF Polytechnic regarding the use of their space. We also have no sponsors: this is strictly out-of-pocket for now.

I can’t promise great things yet, but we’re trying to get the ball rolling.

For more information, contact me at benjamingeiger (at) lakeland.cocoasig.org or @benjamingeiger on Twitter.

Typemock is launching a new product for ASP.NET developers – the ASP.NET Bundle – and for the launch will be giving out FREE licenses to bloggers and their readers.

The ASP.NET Bundle is the ultimate ASP.NET unit testing solution, and offers both Typemock Isolator, a unit test tool and Ivonna, the Isolator add-on for ASP.NET unit testing, for a bargain price.

Typemock Isolator is a leading .NET unit testing tool (C# and VB.NET) for many ‘hard to test’ technologies such as SharePoint, ASP.NET, MVC, WCF, WPF, Silverlight and more. Note that for unit testing Silverlight there is an open source Isolator add-on called SilverUnit.

The first 60 bloggers who will blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Free Isolator ASP.NET Bundle license (Typemock Isolator + Ivonna). If you post this in an ASP.NET dedicated blog, you’ll get a license automatically (even if more than 60 submit) during the first week of this announcement.

Also 8 bloggers will get an additional 2 licenses (each) to give away to their readers / friends.

Go ahead, click the following link for more information on how to get your free license.