February 2009 Area User Group Meetings

Welcome to February everyone!  Hard to believe the new year is already a month old.  Winter is in full force effect as January was definitely a cold one.  What happened to all of that talk about global warming?  I was beginning to expect palm trees being planted in Central Park.  That doesn’t seem too likely anytime soon now. Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this week, which doesn’t bare well for better weather anytime soon. Let’s hope that Staten Island Chuck got it right instead when he didn’t see his!

On January 20^th, the MSDN Developer Conference came to New York City.  Over 380 folks came out to learn about the newest developer offerings from Microsoft, including the Azure Services Platform, Windows 7, and the .NET 4.0 Framework. Amanda Silver, from the Visual Studio product team, led the attendees on a keynote tour of all the exciting bits. At lunch, we were able to take advantage of the live Silverlight stream of the presidential inauguration and put it up on the big screens as everyone ate.  Thanks to Amanda Silver for keynoting, as well as all of the other speakers and folks who worked behind the scenes to bring you the MSDN Developer Conference.

While the current economic client may have you feeling in the doldrums, there’s never a better time to raise your game a few notches than today!  The upcoming months of this new year will provide plenty of opportunities for you to keep your skill sets fresh and on the cutting edge.

MSDN “Suburban” Roadshow

Bill Zack & I thank everyone who attended our first series of “Suburban” Roadshow stops back in November. We’re looking forward to getting on the road again and visiting all of the area ‘burbs again!  On the line-up for this go around are:

• Syntactic Sugar with .NET 3.5
• RESTful Programming with WCF 3.5
• IE8: What Every Developer Needs To Know

All of the stops this month are scheduled the same day as the local user group.  Our first stop on the roadshow will be East Windsor, NJ on February 12^th. Stick around in the evening for Steve Andrews covering ‘Automation with MSBuild 3.5 & Team Build 2008’.  We’ll be coming up to Parsippany, NJ on February 17^th, where Kevin Goff will present on MDX 101 at the North Jersey SQL group afterwards.  Next, we’ll be in the big city on February 19^th.  Stick around for a great presentation on Silverlight & Live Mesh from Dmitry Lyalin.  Plans are underway to schedule a venue and date for Long Island.  Be sure to let your friends and colleagues know about the upcoming MSDN “Suburban” Roadshow events.

See my previous post for detail and registration info here.

Of course, don’t forget about your local user groups!  There’s never been a better time to come out each month and network with your peers as you learn about the latest developer technologies.  Each month, industry experts come to speak at user groups throughout the area.  These meetings are all volunteer driven and free!  They’re success depends on your participation.  So don’t let a valuable resource go to waste! 

Here’s the line-up for this month:

New Jersey

New York

Connecticut

 Pennsylvania

Delaware