October 2008 Area User Group Meetings
October is here, and the crispness of Fall is in the air. Before you know it, Halloween will be here. But even sooner than that is the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008 in Los Angeles, CA! I’m looking forward to heading to LA myself in a couple of weeks. This promises to be an exciting PDC!
It seems every other day the PDC website leaks out a few more teasers on what’s coming. Looks like there will be lots of information on cloud services, mobile development, and the future of the Windows platform, namely, Windows “7”. All conference attendees will receive a 160GB hard drive packed full of all sorts of goodies, including the first pre-beta bits of Windows 7! Registration is still open at www.microsoftpdc.com, but it’s getting close to selling out. So if you haven’t already, sign up and book your ticket to sunny southern California!
Last month was an active one in the NY Metro area tech community. VSLive! came to Brooklyn with lots of great .NET developer content. Then, Web 2.0 Expo came to NYC at the Javits Center. Microsoft had a spot on the expo floor showing off the new Microsoft Surface, as well as other cool stuff including Silverlight and MS AJAX.
On the 13th, Microsoft hosted the Silverlight 2 Firestarter in New York. Over 150 of you came out to spend the whole day learning about Silverlight from Shawn Wildermuth, Jason Beres, and Todd Snyder. Major thanks to those guys for putting together some great content to share with the crowd!
Don’t forget about your local community user groups! Microsoft events only come to town once and a while. But user groups meet in the evenings on a monthly basis throughout the area. There are over 25 groups in our metro area! These are all free opportunities to come out and mingle with your peers after work, eat free pizza, and learn about new technologies from experts in the field.
In September, two new user groups met for the first time. On the 25th a good crowd came out for the inaugural NYC Alt.NET user group (http://nyalt.net ). Congrats to Steve Bohlen, Yitzchok Gottlieb, Alex Hung, Dan Berlin, and others for helping kick off the group. The crowd stayed past 9pm actively discussing pros & cons of Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tools and frameworks in a “fishbowl” format. And on 9/30, the NYC VSTS User group (http://nyc-vsts-ug.com ) will host their first meeting too.
Here’s the line up for October:
New Jersey
New York
| User Group Name | Location | Date | Topic & Speaker |
| NY Enterprise Windows User Group | New York, NY | 10/2/2008 | Network Access Protection – Dwayne Fernandez, Microsoft |
| NY PC Visual Basic SIG | New York, NY | 10/1/2008 | F# – Luke Hoban, Microsoft |
| Long Island .NET User Group | Melville, NY | 10/6/2008 | A Glimpse into SharePoint and SharePoint Web Part Development – Todd C. Bleeker – English, Beeker, and Associates |
| NYC SharePoint User Group | New York, NY | 10/1/2008 | Findability & Taxonomies: Notes from the Field – Bill English |
| NYC Connected Systems Group | New York, NY | TBD | TBD – Check site for details |
| NYC .NET Meetup Group | New York, NY | 10/21/2008 | TBD – Check site for details |
| NYC .NET Developers Group | New York, NY | 10/16/2008 | Introducing Silverlight 2.0: .NET Framework Development in your Browser – Dmitry Lyalin, Microsoft |
| NY Metro SQL Server User Group | New York, NY | 10/23/2008 | TBD - Check site for details |
| International Association of Architects (IASA) NYC | New York, NY | 10/21/2008 | Software as a Service, Software + Services and Microsoft Cloud Services Architecture – Bill Zack, Microsoft |
| NYC VSTS User Group | New York, NY (NEW GROUP!) | 10/28/2008 | TBD – Check site for details |
| NYC ALT.NET | New York, NY (NEW GROUP!) | 10/22/2008 | TBD – Check site for details |
Connecticut
Pennsylvania
| User Group Name | Location | Date | Topic & Speaker |
| Pittsburgh .NET User Group | Pittsburgh, Pa | 10/14/2008 | Get Up And Running with DotNetNuke and LINQ-to-XML/LINQ-to-SQL – Shaun Eutsey, ConsultUSA |
| Philadelphia SQL Server User Group | Conshohocken, Pa | 10/8/2008 | Pub Night – The American Pub (relax, mingle, and network this month since Philly Code Camp is on 10/11.) |
| Lehigh Valley .NET User Group | Center Valley, Pa | 10/20/2008 | ASP.NET 2.0 Provider Model – Al Nyveldt |
| Central Penn.NET | Harrisburg, Pa | 10/21/2008 | TBD – Check site for details |
| Philly.NET | Fort Washington, Pa | 10/11/2008 | CODE CAMP 2008.3!!! at DeVry University. See Philly.NET website for details on a great line up!
Philly.NET will host a “pub night” at The Great American Pub in Conshohocken, Pa on 10/22, which is the regular night of the user group meeting. |
| .NET Valley | Nanticoke, Pa | TBD | TBD – Check site for details |
| Philadelphia Area SharePoint User Group | Malvern, Pa | 10/29/2008 | TBD - Check site for updates |
| Philly Office Geeks | Malvern, Pa | TBD | TBD – Check site for updates |
| Philly Alt.NET | Philadelphia, Pa | TBD | TBD – Check site for updates |
Delaware
