Darryl Burling @ Work : User Groups

Home Server Draw - Hardware specs

dburling — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:03:00 GMT

I thought I'd put up the details of the specs of the boxes we will be using and giving away at the end of the Summer Road Trip.

To re-iterate - if you want to win this - you'll need to register and turn up and fill in an eval form on the day to be in the draw to win one of these puppies...

Gigabyte GA-MA68SM-S2 AM2 Motherboard (*Onboard DVI and VGA ports *4xDDR2 800 slots* PCI-Ex16 slot *2xPCI *4x SATAII *1 PCI-E x1 *RAID 0,1,0+1,5 *GbE *8ch ALC888 audio *IEEE1394)
AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core 6400+
4x 2Gb DDR2-800 A-Data RAM (8 Gb total)
2x Western Digital Caviar SE 500Gb SATA II (16Mb Cache) HDD
BENQ SATA DVD RW
Silverstone SG01 SFF Case - Black
EZ Cool 500W PSU (*20+4 pin connector *2 SATA *6 x 4-pin Molex *2 FDD *8 pin 12V connector *No PCI-E connector *500W *120mm fan for quiet operation)

Also, the product team at Microsoft have agreed to throw in a copy of Vista Ultimate and Windows Home server with these machines (thanks guys!).

At the end of the road trip we will do a prize draw for two of these machines from the evaluation forms we collect. We will then check to make sure the form is matched to a registration, and then contact the winners via email. Judges decisions will be final, etc, and the prize will be drawn by either Chris or Jeremy (i.e. by the .Net User Group).

Full details of where and when we will be coming to a town near you is contained in my previous post. Don't forget to register here.

*UPDATE* - note that there is no keyboard, monitor or mouse included with this.

Adam Cogan on Performance Point Server

dburling — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 05:39:14 GMT

Adam Cogan (Regional Director and MVP from Australia) is in New Zealand this weekend for the Boot Camp in Christchurch.

If you dont get to boot camp, but you want to get along to see what he's been up to with Microsoft Performance Point Server, you can catch him in Wellington at the SQL Server User Group on Tuesday November 6 at Intergen at 6pm. You can mail Adrian to let him know if you want to come (that way he can feed you).

Adam will also be presenting again on Thursday the 8th of November at the Ellerslie DNUG (also on facebook) at Olympic Software in Auckland.

If you are keen to find out more about Performance Point Server, I suggest you get along to one of these events!

User group events this week

dburling — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:12:55 GMT

Well, its another week with several user groups on.

Tomorrow night (Wednesday) the Auckland CBD .Net user group is meeting at Microsoft (22 Viaduct Harbour) at 6pm. Andrew Tokeley will be repeating his excellent Dynamic Data Controls talk from Tech Ed. If you've been at one of my sessions on my tour, you would have seen this mentioned ("one line of code and you get this"). This presentation will delve into the depths of this very cool new technology from the ASP.Net Futures pack.

On Thursday I'm presenting the second to last presentation of my User Group Tour (the last will now be November 14 in Invercargill at the new Southland .Net User Group that is being established there). So if you've missed me or need an excuse to visit Napier, then I look forward to seeing you at 4:30pm on Thursday afternoon at EIT in Taradale.

Finally the second ZamDes meeting is on in Wellington this week at 6:30 pm in the Wellington City Council buildings:

Nigel Parker and Nas Khan present Designing with Expression Blend - This session will spotlight Microsoft Expression Blend and how it can be used to create compelling User Experiences for the Windows client and the web with Microsoft Silverlight. Join Nas and Nigel as they review the current design process… and workflow and lead into a live demonstration of the workflow which Blend and Visual Studio offers designers and developers.

As usual, you can join the mailing lists for all these groups by heading to http://mscommunities.net.nz and sending the leader a message to add you to the mailing list. You can also use the form there to send additional feedback to them or ask venue details, etc.

Auckland SharePoint user group tomorrow night

dburling — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 23:18:47 GMT

Also - just a reminder for those of you in Auckland who are interested in Sharepoint - the first ever Auckland Sharepoint user group kicks off tomorrow night - October 10.

You'll want to be at Microsoft at 4pm. Details follow:

Microsoft,
Level 5 22 Viaduct Harbour
Auckland

Head around the corner to the MPC room (the big room around the back). Your hosts are Richard A'Court and Alan Marshall.

Promoting your user group

dburling — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 04:06:00 GMT

The following post was written by Rodney Lake. Rodney runs the .Net User Group in Tauranga, and recently had 54 people attend one of his user group meetings due to smart promotion. He shares his tips for you here.

Promoting a user group

One way to recognise a healthy user group is to see how many new faces are at each meeting. Whether or not those faces return is up to the quality and relevance of the topics. If you assume they do return, then new faces mean your user group is growing.

Getting new faces is all about promotion; getting ‘awareness’ of your group out there. This is mostly common sense, just think about your ‘target market’ (developers, students, hobbyists, BA’s, project managers, business owners, designers, technical writers, etc, etc… Don’t assume its just developers) and do those things that will reach that market.

The following are some tips and idea’s that I have either used, or intend to use sometime in the near future:

Email communications: These should be kept to a minimum so receivers don’t feel like they’re being spammed – I use these general guidelines:
1. 2 event reminder emails per month (unless a change in venue, time, topic, etc requires extra emails)
2. 1^st email 7-10 days out – this targets those who plan ahead and need time to add the meeting into their schedule.
3. 2^nd email on the morning of the meeting – captures those who didn’t bother to add a reminder into their calendar, but think – “Oh that’s right, I forgot… actually, I can make it tonight” – the unorganised ones without kids who can still make spur-of-the-moment social-life decisions – you know who you are…
4. Keep them brief and relevant: Intro, speaker, topic, where, when, giveaways
5. Keep them personal – write in first-person. User groups are run by people, not businesses – so take advantage of the networking exposure you are getting and be personal, eg: “I look forward to seeing you there…”. Then sign off with your name.
6. Include links to the speaker’s blog and/or their business, and links to the technology they are speaking on.

Event names / Topic names: Keep them obvious. There is nothing worse than someone trying to be too clever with the topic name and leaving everyone confused. Make sure you have an event synopsis. Get the speaker to supply a one or two paragraph overview of their talk. This is really important as the title may not be enough for may people to make a judgement call as to “Is this worth giving up a few hours of my time for”.

Dangle a few carrots when announcing the group – include any and every incentive you can think of, such as:
1. I always say “Pizza and drinks provided” – I am surprised (maybe slightly offended?) about how many have told me that this is what makes it worth their while (anyone remember being a poor student? Free food was a good incentive back then!).
2. Promote the speaker if they are worthy of it – highlight their achievements and position, a high ranking speaker is more attractive than some newbie who reads straight from a MSDN whitepaper.
3. Have giveaways if you can: These come from INETA (ha ha ha ha) or Microsoft (for beta software or training DVDs) or maybe local sponsors(if you are lucky?) – Books, T-shirts, software, exam vouchers, DVD training resources, whatever. I always try to give away at every meeting either:

i. One good thing to one or two people (software, T-shits, books), or

ii. A training DVD or some other software (beta/trial software, or express edition software) to everyone who turns up…

When I get a launch pack of software (Vista, Office and Visual Studio) which I am suppose to give away all copies at the one event, I actually only give away 2 copies at the launch event itself and keep the rest back for future events (1 copy per event until I run out). This spreads the value of “Come along and win a copy of X” across many months – this works really well – especially for full copies of Visual Studio.

Who to target: Be creative in your promotional medium – here are some ideas:
1. Networking / Word of Mouth: By far the most useful is good old word of mouth. Mention the group to anyone you meet who might be interested, and then get them to think who they know who might be interested. I often say at the bottom of my meeting announcements emails “Please forward this onto anyone you think might be interested in coming” and also say something similar at the end of each meeting. I am growing my group by about 3-4 per month just through word-of-mouth.
2. For a really basic introduction topics that have a border appeal: Phone the local papers and ask to place an announcement in the ‘Whats On’ section. Not sure if I got anyone along from this (only once) – so might be a waste of time. Also be very careful – I said very clearly to the granny on the end of the phone “Dot net… That’s full-stop, N, E, T, User Group” – even said it twice as I suspected she was a bit soft in the head, yet she still put down “Net Group” – which resulted in someone phoning to ask if the group taught how to use the internet… We can thank the geniuses in Microsoft’s marketing department for that little gem of a brand name!
3. Contact any local ITC advocacy groups or the local Chamber of Commerce. I got my introduction level presentation emailed out to 330 on a targeted technology business mailing list. This was very fruitful for my introduction to .Net meeting as it produced a bunch of Java & PHP developers, BA’s, Project Managers and business owners who would otherwise have never heard of my user group.
4. Contact your local university and polytechnic – try to get a member of academic staff in the ITC department who can forward on your announcements to internal IT academic staff and students.
5. Use the regular announcement methods at www.dot.net.nz – post the event on the site and use the mailing list.
6. I remember Darryl suggesting we post our groups in Computerworld magazine – has anyone done this? How much notice do we need to give? Was it successful?

A few more little tips:
1. Keep the meetings on the same weekday each month (mine is the first Thursday of each month) – over time the regulars keep that day free. I got a right earful when I tried to change it one month!
2. Always mention at the end of the event that anyone is welcome to do a presentation – its important to get new talent otherwise you end up with the same people doing all the work.
3. I don’t require an RSVP for my group as it gives people more freedom to turn up on the spur of the moment. I order our pizza about 10 minutes in when numbers are roughly known – so that works okay. But I buy my beer and juice in advance, so it means that some months I have too much beer and other months I don’t have enough – although over time I am getting better at estimating numbers to ensure the more desirable outcome of too much beer…
4. Keep your ear to the ground: Talk to people after the event, find out what they came for and what they would like to see in the future. This is where I got my motivation to do my introduction to .Net talk which saw three times my average head-count turn up. Let them have their say and take advantage of the enthusiasm of others: “That’s a great idea, how soon can you do it?”.

Just to close, I think its important to be aware that the difference between the most experienced and the least experienced in any user group is HUGE!! And that there will always be a skew in numbers towards the latter. There are lots of people who come along each month who don’t know their generics from their lambda’s, their abstracts from their concretes, or their MVC pattern from their MCP pattern (in fact I still don’t know the difference in that last one!) – and are too afraid to ask questions in case they sound dumb.

These aren’t just the green first year uni students (you know – the ones who think they know everything), they are also the highly experienced and mature professionals such as BA’s, Project Managers, network engineers, Java & PHP developers, etc… who have seen what .Net can do and now want some .Net skills of their own to round out their existing skill set.

Typically as a group leader you aim for as wide a mix of topics as possible; from beginner to advanced – but the truth is that even the beginner topics are still advanced for some. We really need to cater to these newbie guys more – and spend less time in the snobbery intellectual towers we have set ourselves up in. The problem is that it’s actually quite hard to step back down into the shoes of a beginner and try to explain second nature everyday concepts in novice terms.

But if you can manage more introductory level topics, then you will attract more people who are completely new to the technology. If their needs are met, then they will return, your group will grow, and naturally this will grow the entire community to the benefit of all.

Rodney Lake
Tauranga .Net User Group
Managing Director of Spectra Data Solutions

Lots of User Groups this week!

dburling — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 02:10:21 GMT

I was just looking at the user group schedule around the country and there are lots on this week.

Just tonight there are the following user group meetings:

Auckland SQL Server User Group

Wellington SQL Server User Group

Wellington Office User Group

Wellington Sharepoint User Group

Wellington .Net User Group (go Tokes!)

New Plymouth .Net User Group

Tomorrow night also adds the Hamilton .Net User Group. For my part, I'm speaking tonight in New Plymouth and in Hamilton tomorrow.

If you are interested in heading along, you can contact the UG leaders from http://mscommunities.net.nz

See you there!

MSDN Flash - Silverlight, Rugby and Visual Studio 2008

dburling — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 04:52:00 GMT

I know - the last one only just came out yesterday. I'll blame the spam legislation :-) Here is this weeks - should be in your mail box Friday or early next week.

Silverlight, Rugby and Visual Studio 2008

Silverlight 1.0 is out! The final release of Silverlight was announced a couple of weeks ago, and means that if you’ve been waiting for the production release of Silverlight, it’s here and you can get into it.

You might have heard about a small Rugby tournament that is going on somewhere else in the world at the moment too. Obviously the New Zealand Rugby union is pretty focused at the moment, keeping AllBlacks.com up to date with interviews, match highlights, table standings and scoreboards. To help you keep up to date, AllBlacks.com launched its new Rugby World Cup Windows Vista sidebar gadget a couple of days ago – built entirely in Silverlight 1.0. The cool thing about this gadget is that if you don’t have Vista installed yet, you can access the web version of the gadget with your web browser and because it’s Silverlight, it will run on Windows Vista, XP and on Macs. Get the gadget here.

One common question we get around Silverlight is what are we doing to get designers interested in this technology? If you are fortunate enough to live in Wellington Nas Khan has set up a user group for designers called ZamDes. We are also kicking off a global design event in Auckland on the 4^th of October called “Expression around the clock”. Places are limited, but please tell any designers in your organization to register for the free half day event. If you can’t make it, you can always follow along on the global website at http://expressionevent.com.

I’ve also kicked off my User Group tour of New Zealand with presentations to more than 70 people at the new .Net User group in Ellerslie (read Jacqui’s summary) and the .Net User Group in the Auckland CBD. My presentation covers a bunch of the new features in Visual Studio 2008 across Windows Client, Web, Office, Mobile, Services and some of the new language features.

Feedback about Visual Studio has been very positive so far. Here’s what Chris Jacques, who runs his own consulting firm - B2B 24-7 in Auckland said:

“B2B 24-7 will be using the Web and Mobility features in Visual Studio 2008 in the development of all future customer solutions. We believe Visual Studio 2008 will allow us to deliver a richer customer experience within an affordable timeframe in an exciting market place”.

If you are interested in learning more about how Visual Studio 2008 will reduce the time you spend configuring and increase the time you spend coding and allow you to build richer applications, come along a user group meeting on my tour. We also announced our community leader of the year award recently – so support your local community leaders by getting along to a user group. We’ll have copies of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 for you and I have a few other prizes to give away.

We’ve also updated the mscommunities.net.nz site with a couple of new user groups – so make sure you check it out and stay up to date with community news.

To sign up for Microsoft New Zealand newsletters (including this one) - visit http://microsoft.co.nz/subscribe.

Continuity, speakers and good running.

dburling — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 01:19:08 GMT

The following post was written by Kirk Jackson who leads the Wellington .Net User Group. Kirks group is one of the most consistent and well run groups in New Zealand.

Continuity, speakers and good running

I organise the Wellington .NET user group, and over the past 5 years we have had about 45 user group meetings, and consumed approximately 800 pizza!

As you can imagine, it's easy to struggle under the weight of all those pizza, and finding speakers for each meeting is the most challenging part of my role. I'll try and share a few hints and experience on how I do things...

Regularity:

Sports clubs, cultural clubs, churches and other outside-work activities all have a regular interval, and I'm convinced that holding meetings on the same day of each month makes it easier for our members to schedule meeting attendance. It also helps motivate me to get things done, which is pretty important too!

In the beginning I'd organise meetings every 4 or 5 weeks, but since I didn't have any regularity about it, people couldn't calendar the event until I had organised the speaker, venue and sent out the invite. Now, I have a fixed "first Wednesday of the month" schedule for the Wellington group, and that means that I don't have to start advertising the details of the event until one week before the event.
Also, this helps with booking the venue (we are hosted by Microsoft Wellington), and our chaperone (Darryl).

We're just trailing fortnightly meetings in Wellington to see how they go. The plan is to see whether we can keep numbers up even when we're meeting twice a month.

Venue:

Just a quick word on venue.
We're lucky to have a regular booking for the meeting room at Microsoft in Wellington, which is a nice, neutral place for people from different companies to come. I think it's easier for members if we always meet at the same place, although there hasn't been many problems when we've moved somewhere else in the CBD. One thing to watch for is the time that the front doors or elevators lock -- there's nothing worse than locking out your attendees!

Speakers / topics:

This used to be the most difficult part of organising the user group, so I won't kid you and say it's going to be easy. Things have gotten easier lately now that Wellington has a good community of regular presenters, but in the beginning I used to find myself presenting regularly.

It helps if you have a willingness to present, and keep a topic in mind in case you find yourself short one month.

We normally have 60-70 minute sessions each month, and discounting the break of Christmas normally have ten or eleven sessions per year. In the .NET space, 12 hours isn't enough to learn about everything new, so it's hard to choose which topics to focus on.

We normally have forward-looking topics at our user group, based on technologies, products or techniques that have been recently released or demoed at conferences. I normally try to map out 6 months of session ideas, and then approach speakers from the community who I think may be interested in presenting each topic. Through Darryl at Microsoft, the .NET user group incorporated society, and travelling speakers, we get a lot of other speakers coming through Wellington with prepared topics, which are usually on upcoming technologies.

For speakers, it usually makes sense to prepare once for a talk and then present it several times. The .NET user group incorporated society has some funds to transport speakers around the country which you could try to tap into, or you could contact speakers who have presented in other cities and try to convince them to present in your city next time they are visiting. Also, if a speaker is presenting at another event nearby, you could try and lure them to your user group with the promise of pizza.

Mixing it up:

Lightning talks are an idea that I stole from the Perl user group. Each year we do 10 or 11 sessions, and often it's hard to do justice to all the new and cool things going on. Once a year I like to organise a lightning talk night, where 10 or so presenters each speak for 5 minutes on a topic. It's a good idea to find out a little information on a lot of topics.

Refreshments and Costs:

The NZ user groups try to keep to a budget of $7 per person for refreshments. I know, it sounds like an awfully large amount of money, but you'd be surprised how hard it is to eat healthily on that budget, especially when you want to buy beer as well. I normally buy a mixture of beer and soft drink, and budget for half a large Pizza Hut / Dominoes pizza per person, as they are pretty good value-for-money, and fit the developer event stereotype.

In the beginning we used to take money at the door to cover the costs of pizza, which worked well but was quite difficult to manage. Now, the .NET user group incorporated society collects sponsorship money to cover the costs of pizza, and user group leads get reimbursed for the costs. The incorporated society may be able to help you with your food costs, so you should get in touch. A third option is to find sponsorship for the pizza and drinks for each event, or perhaps even find a sponsor willing to sponsor all of your events.

Motivation:

And now a closing thought on motivation. It's tough to find the energy sometimes to organise a user group event, especially if you're sick or busy at work. Sometimes you'll get some negative feedback from an attendee, or you'll find it tough finding a replacement speaker at the last minute.

Don't give up! Think of all the people that come along each month with their enthusiasm, looking forward to something new!

Starting a user group (Lessons learnt)

dburling — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 03:43:17 GMT

The following post was written by Chandima Kulathilake who was one of the founders and is a leader of the Wellington Sharepoint User Group.

Starting a user group (Lessons learnt)

Darryl from MSFT NZ sent a few of the New Zealand User Group leads an email the other day asking if we could come up with a guest blog entry on how we went about launching our SharePoint user group. I was delighted because I had wanted to do a post and which I had constantly put in the to-do list most of the time. So now I had an ultimatum to deliver this post which you are reading.

So how do you go about starting a user group?

Well first of all you need a topic or a subject or a common interest (typically Technology related) that you and a few people you know think is interested in. Because you are starting a “user” group after all and you need users to attend. Starting a user group and having you and your mate at each meeting would probably not be ideal. :-)

This means that your topic of interest will have to be something of interest to a range of people who have similar interests. And you yourself as the user group leader (yes don’t kid yourself you are finally a leader) has a real passion and have a deep and meaningful connection to. (Ok I sound a bit wacky right about now but bear with me) What I mean is just don’t start something if you were told by some one that you should. Think about what you are getting into. You will have to be spending extra time organising your local events and even regional events later on when things get really humming. This means that you will need support from your work place and other community leads as well as family. Also you should have an active interest in the topic of the user group you are starting. Engage in early conversations and if you can attend a few other local user group meetings yourself. Then you will need to follow through your plan of action.

Formulating an “Action Plan”

My idea to start the SharePoint user group came about in early 2006. I had been working on many SharePoint projects and having spoken to various people in the SharePoint space I saw that there will be a benefit in starting a user group. So I started talking to a few people whom I knew had similar interests.

Contacting the right people

This is where you need to contact people of similar interest. First of all when I started talking about starting the user group I drew up a plan. And in the plan I had a list of technology companies that I wanted to contact. Ideally you should have an individual’s name from the company who you can contact. Because every leader has to have a side kick (that’s the fun part of being a leader or co-leader you get to delegate) J. So I contacted my buddy JD (John-Daniel) who worked at Intergen at that time. JD introduced me to OJ (Mark Orange). Mark like me has been a SharePoint specialist for a long while and we met over a coffee and came up with a plan to start the user group. If you have another person to share the work load things are way easier to manage. Between the two of us we are able to send the emails out and organise our events as a team. Then we asked Microsoft about what type of support we would get. Typically it’s like having a venue and drinks and pizza for the meetings. (More on this later). Ryan Duguid from MSFT facilitated our conversation with Microsoft Office Product Managers and provided the first A-List speaker from Microsoft Corp (Mike Fitz). We had our first official launch at TechEd 2006. Ryan presented at our inaugural user group event in Wellington on October 2006 and a few subsequent user group events.

Now a year down the track we have SharePoint user groups in 3 geographic locations Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland.

Creating a charter and a vision

The charter is an important thing. This does not have to be a 100 page document. A two pager with your objectives and why you are starting the group should suffice. Ours is available on our home page. Feel free to take it but make sure you state where you got it from. That’s just what communities do share and acknowledge each other’s efforts.

The charter can also be extended to provide an indication of the events planned for the year or 6 months ahead. We typically plan out for 3 months and try to keep the topics fresh. For example since SharePoint technologies are now getting a lot of press lot of business users are interested in the capabilities. Ideally if possible try and cater for a mixture of development related content and business content should give your user group members a lot of value. Having a charter also give the group a focus and can help when you seek sponsorships.

Finding a venue

Ideally you should have a regular venue and a time. But since our user group wanted to provide the opportunity for others to share their experience we decided to host it within Wellington CBD in any available venue. The venues were allocated by who had a presentation topic and a presenter available. This also provided diversity in terms of providing opportunities to others to come forward and present. In my experience getting people involved from similar interests helps a lot in getting a venue. Since the start of our user group September 2006 we have had monthly meetings in various venues. For a list of the topics and where we held our events go to our previous session’s page on the Wellington SharePoint user group site.

Speakers and Topics

This can sometimes be tricky. Try to get participation from your own group members. If you have a web site get feedback on what types of sessions they would like to see. And try and get real world working examples or case studies to be showcased. Sometimes it’s not just about technology but how a certain real world problem was solved using a particular technology.

Secure your speakers in advance. Microsoft can help here by providing a list of available technology specialists. But in most cases members feel that members and attendees want to hear examples from actual users and developers. Try to keep a level of independence in your topics and speakers. (Don’t depend on Microsoft to provide everything.)

It’s all about networking and having fun

Provide a neutral ground for discussions and raising questions. Allow your members to actively contribute and participate.

Depending on the time you plan to have your events you will need to provide user group members time to network. This is where the pizza and drinks come in. We allow at least 20 minutes break when having a meeting. If possible break up and go to the local pub for more networking J. In terms of getting funding for the pizza and drinks try and get sponsorships. There are a lot of local technology companies that can afford the occasional pizza and drinks bill. We have a “flexi rule” that if we use a venue and a presenter then they host us the drinks and pizza. The .Net User Group has a support program in place that Microsoft user groups can leverage if they are happy to comply with its rules, so definitely investigate this option

Finally have fun! Don’t get too serious usually people come to these events after work and don’t want to have rigorous rules and process applied. Hope this has inspired you to start the next user group in your area! J Trust me it’s a great feeling when you have a room full of people that are keen to hear about a new technology or topic so keep them coming back for more by providing interesting topics!

Guest Blogging - Starting and running a User Group

dburling — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 19:02:25 GMT

We've got some smart people running User Groups in New Zealand. They have been running user groups for a variety of periods from several years to several months, but they are all smart, hard working people who know how to start and run these groups well.

I've asked some of them to share their knowledge with others out there who are interested in starting or running a user group and publish what they know here.

Over the next week you'll start seeing some of their knowledge come out in the following subjects:

How to start a user group - Chandima Kulathilake

Speakers, topics, costs, refreshments - Kirk Jackson

Promoting user groups and maximizing opportunities - Rodney Lake

If you have any other topics you'd like to know more about, feel free to drop me a line.

Watch out for these over the next few days.

Community Leader of the Year

dburling — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 04:17:36 GMT

The user group leaders in New Zealand do an outstanding job.

These are the people who out of passion for technology start and/or run a user group in New Zealand. Month in and month out they organize venues, speakers, beer, pizza, mailing lists, attendees, prizes and a host of other things just to enable you to get together with friends and colleagues and learn about the latest technology.

At Microsoft, we recognize the work these tireless people do, so we felt it was time we did something to recognize the best of these leaders.

So - I'm thrilled to be able to announce the Community leader of the year award!

The goal of this award is to reward the top community leaders based on:

Consistency of meetings
Growth in attendee numbers
Number of speakers presenting at the group
Volunteers from inside the group getting involved in community initiatives
Demonstrating initiative and innovative strategic thinking
Helping other community leaders improve through sharing best practices or similar
PR or media coverage of group activity

What are the prizes?

1st Prize: 5 Day holiday package for two to the Gold Coast valued at approximately $2500*

2nd Prize: XBOX 360™ Elite Console

3rd Prize: Microsoft® Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000

Who's eligible?

The award is designed for leaders of User Groups related to Microsoft software products and technology. The only criterion for entry is that the leader must be listed as a contact for a User Group on http://mscommunities.net.nz.

Entry is open to user groups started and running before November 2007. Groups should be active through to July 2008. Winners will be announced on June 23^rd, 2008.

Terms and conditions (the fine print):

All decisions of the judges with regards to the prize winners will be final and no correspondence will be entered into. Prizes are not transferable or exchangeable or redeemable for cash.

It is a condition of receiving a prize that prize winners agree that to the extent permitted by law, Microsoft New Zealand Limited, its associated companies and agencies will not be liable for any direct, indirect, or consequential loss of damage whatsoever, including personal injury, which is suffered in connection with receiving any prize.

It is a condition of accepting any prize that the winner agrees to Microsoft publicly disclosing the winner’s name and town or city.

*The Holiday Package for two includes return economy flights to Brisbane and 5 nights accommodation at a hotel on the Gold Coast. The winner and the person who accompanies the winner are responsible for obtaining (at their own cost) insurance, passports, transfers to and from the airport and anything necessary to benefit from the prize. If the winner is under 18 years of age, the winner must have a parent or guardian’s permission to travel and must be accompanied by an adult. Flights are subject to availability and travel must be completed by November 30, 2008.

My User Group Tour kicks off... here is my schedule

dburling — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 14:36:00 GMT

Next week my User Group Tour kicks off. This is the first one since last year, and I have more user groups to go to now too.

I'm presenting on Visual Studio 2008 which is due to RTM late this year and launch next March.

Title: A Lap around Visual Studio 2008
Abstract: Explore all the new Visual Studio 2008 features, from language enhancements; improved designers; Web, Office and smart-client development tools; to Visual Studio Team System, a suite of software lifecycle management tools poised to transform how you deliver software for Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and the Web.

Here is my current schedule:

September

11^th : Ellerslie .Net User Group (New group in Ellerslie!)
12^th : Auckland .Net User Group (CBD)
13^th : ZamDes User Group (Wellington) – not presenting, just attending the first ever meeting
19^th : New Plymouth .Net User Group
20^th : Hamilton .Net User Group

October

3^rd : Wellington .Net User Group
4^th : Tauranga .Net User Group
10^th : (lunch) Nelson .Net User Group
10^th : (evening) Christchurch .Net User Group
11^th : Dunedin .Net User Group
15^th : Porirua .Net User Group
18^th : Hawkes Bay .Net User Group

I'm hoping to talk to most of the large Microsoft partners over this period as well as any smaller groups of developers who can get a small group together and are interested in hearing me.

If you have a group of developers who are interested in this presentation, contact me and we can try and tee up a time for me to come and visit you - if you live outside of New Zealand, please be prepared to pay shipping costs :-)

User Group Meeting at Tech Ed Today!

dburling — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 02:36:00 GMT

Rodney Lake has organized a last minute User Group meeting for anyone interested at 4pm today at TechEd.

If you are around, come to the Milford Room on Level 4 (its down the corridor in behind the stairways where the "Sponsors Rooms" sign is).

The session is a round table open discussion with the head of the Visual Basic team at Microsoft - Paul Yuknewicz. This top Redmond man has put an hour aside especially for the .Net user group today. You wont get an opportunity like this again so don't miss out!!

Update: This was a great event!

Day of Code will rock!

dburling — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 07:51:42 GMT

Kirk and the guys have done a great job of promoting the Day of Code and with the fantastic speakers they have, why not?!

One of the sessions I'm looking forward to is Tony Goodhew talking about how we build Visual Studio - that will be something different and should be interesting.

Mahesh is also doing a session that combines his two Tech Ed sessions on Dynamic Languages - I know Ivan is looking forward to that session.

Over 230 people are signed up to attend - this will be a very cool event - sign up if you haven't already!

Day of Code

dburling — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 22:30:00 GMT

I've been bad to my good community peoples and haven't posted about this (sorry guys), although Nigel did (thanks Nigel!).

The .Net User Groups are having a day of Code the day before Tech Ed at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Auckland.

This is a free event (registration required) where you can hear speakers talking about a range of topics from language to architecture and a host of things in between.

Given that this event is the day before Tech Ed I've been working with Kirk to try and get some of the Tech Ed speakers along to speak.

So - as I dont see announcements anywhere else, I'm pleased to announce that speaking at the Day of Code will be:

Mahesh Prakriya (Program Manager Dynamic Language Runtime)
Tony Goodhew (Microsoft Corp based Visual Studio 2008 Guru)
Tom Hollander (Architect and ex Patterns and Practices guru from Microsoft Corp)
Adam Cogan (Aussie RD and Tech Ed TFS speaker)

Actually there will be others as well so the day should be pretty cool, and all this for no cost. So get along if you can.

To register - head over to http://codecamp.net.nz and fill in the form - there are still spaces left - so do it now.

UPDATE - added link for Adam :-)