I recently gave a presentation to the Development and Engineering Center of Excellence at Northwestern Mutual. The presentation was joint effort. I presented first and discussed user interface design patterns. Mark Bender, a coworker then talked about front end XML. Overall things went really well. There were a few technical problems getting the second campus connected through the video feed, but other than that things went fine. Researching patterns has been interesting. Coming from a design background, I've never opened a single pattern book. Most the documentation out the primarily has to do with architectural patterns and system design. I'm happy to see that professional in the community is realizing that there's action on the front end too. Jenifer Tidwell's book is going to be great when it is released. There is no other book out there that even comes close in its thoroughness.