This month we had our Heroes Happen Here Community Launch Event! We had three speakers fill us in on VS.NET 2008. Kirk Wilson from MAX Technical Training gave a quick overview of what's new in VS.NET 2008 and was followed by Stefan Kyntchev who have a talk on LINQ. Dan Hounshell finished off the event with a presentation on what's new in ASP.NET 3.5. MAX was gracious enough to also provide a lab environment with 16 machines hosting some hands on labs.
We had so much SWAG that everyone walked away with something. We gave away licenses for VS.NET 2008, SQL Server 2008 (voucher) & Windows 2008; Technet Plus subscriptions, and much more.
If you attended the meeting and have some feedback please post it to the Meetings board on this meeting's thread. When I get all of the session materials I'll be posting a message to this thread with a link to the download.
Attendance (60): We had one of the largest turnouts in quite some time this month. I saw a lot of new faces that I hope will come back to join us.
TechNet Subscription Winners: Please contact me at admin@cinnug.org with your name and email address.
Announcements
• Starting in June our monthly meetings will shift to the Fourth Tuesday of every month (switching nights with CincySQL).
• The new Special Interest Group CinArc will have it's first meeting on May 13th at 6:00 PM at MAX Technical Training in Mason (see below for more).
• Other local Heroes Happen Here launch events:
- CINPA launches Windows Server 2008 @ Cincinnati State Technical College on May 7th. http://www.shrinkster.com/vwx
- CincySQL launches SQL Server 2008 & VS.NET 2008 @ MAX Train on May 27th. http://www.shrinkster.com/vwy
• CinySQL - Next meeting will be April 22nd. The topic will be Performance Tuning your Servers presented by Jason Gaige of Idera. Check out http://www.cincysql.org for more information.
• Central Ohio Day of .NET - (previously known as the Cincinnati/Dayton Area Code Camp) - Saturday April 19th at the Roberts Centre in Wilmington, OH. If you couldn't make it, or you came and are looking for session materials keep an eye on the Central Ohio Day of .NET home page.
• Two other Day of .NET events are coming soon to the Heartland district:
- West Michigan Day of .NET on May 10th
- Cleveland Day of .NET on May 17th
• The new OWASP user group has invited our members to their next meeting to see a showing of the documentary "The New Face of Cybercrime". This is on April 22nd @ the Citigroup Building on Carver Road. Check out their site for more information. You MUST register to attend.
• Next DevCares event will be on May 9th at MAX in Mason from 9AM-12PM. (Register here) The sessions this quarter are:
- Power of Designers in VS 2008
- Reach Your Data with SQL 2008
• Next ArcReady event will be on May 21st at the Microsoft Office in Mason from 9AM-11:45PM (Register here). The topic this quarter is Building Scalable and Usable Web Applications. The presenter will be Brian Prince.
Next Month
First Meeting of CinArc (Tuesday, May 13th)
Are you a software architect? Are you wanting to learn how architects think, or want to be share your ideas about software architecture with some kindred spirits? The Cincinnati .NET Users Group is starting a new special interest group focusing on software architecture. These meetings will be very different than the normal CINNUG meeting with less focus on implementation and more on how we should be designing tomorrow's systems.
Our first meeting on Tuesday, May 13th will be a panel discussion with three senior developers and architects. The panel will focus on what it means to be an architect and how the role is evolving. Some of the meeting will also be spent getting feedback on what our members would like to get out of this new SIG.
Panelists:
Mike Levy is an experienced consultant with a track record of technical leadership. His expertise is in Microsoft Technologies. Mike is a talented application developer who specializes in distributed systems. He has considerable experience as an application architect and team lead. Mike has spoken at multiple developer conferences on various topics, and is an active participant of the Cincinnati .NET User Group where he has presented on many occasions. He has written many articles for various technical journals. Mike holds multiple Microsoft certifications.
Leon is a software development engineer on Telligent System's product team. He has 8 years experience as a Microsoft developer and is a advocate of Agile principals, Test-Driven Development, Open Source and the C# and Ruby languages. Leon lives in Dayton with his wife, 2 daughters, 2 cats and 4 computers. Leon runs the development blog fallenrogue.com and is addicted to twitter (twitter.com/fallenrogue)
Joe Wirtley is an independent consultant with twenty years software development experience. He currently works as a .NET architect and developer on both smart client (WPF, WCF) and web (ASP.NET) applications. Before .NET, Joe worked extensively in Delphi and Clipper. He is a member of several user groups in the Cincinnati-Dayton, OH area and has done presentations at user group meetings, Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp, previous Days of .NET, and CodeMash. You can read his blog at http://joewirtley.blogspot.com/ and see his personal site at http://www.wirtley.com/.
The meeting will be held on Tuesday, May 13th at 6:00PM at Max Technical Training in Mason Ohio.
CINNUG: Software Development: A Career (Tuesday, May 20th)
Is writing code just a job for you, or is it a career? For many of us we code because we enjoy working with computers and generating software. We enjoy it so much that we even take our own personal time to come to user group meetings to learn more about technology and best practices. It's a great thing to be doing something you really enjoy as your profession, but have you stopped to think about what you do as a career? In this panel discussion meeting we will talk about what it means to have a software development career. We'll talk about how you can help improve yourself and the company you work for.
Our panelists are made up for three gentlemen who have a collective wealth of experience in the field. Between the three of them they have worked in large companies, small companies, startups and even started their own companies. If you are looking for ways to help expand your career and make you a better developer you should come join us for this meeting.
Panelists:
Ed Summerfield has been playing with computers for 25 years, from the early days of Z80 assembler to the more abstract world we live in today. Ed has worked with a variety of organizations from large corporate carrier minded intuitions to smaller technology or growth oriented positions where your title is Mister. Ed remains indifferent to title, unless, money is involved.
Tim Apke is the President and Owner of S.S.T. Solutions LLC, a consulting firm in Southwest, Ohio. Tim has been developing software professionally for 20 years. He specializes in the architecture, design and development of enterprise applications, with an emphasis on the Microsoft .NET platform. Tim find that .NET development on a Mac is especially satisfying.
Jim Holmes is the Studio Lead of the Information Worker Studio at Quick Solutions in Columbus, Ohio. He graduated *** Laude from Chapman University despite dropping a number of classes due to military deployments and a preference for competitive volleyball over homework. He has two decades or so of experience in the IT domain scattered across a wide range of disciplines including telephone hotline support, network management, systems analysis, and software development. He’s President of the Board of Directors for CodeMash Conference and founded the Dayton .NET Developers Group and the co-author of "Windows Developer Power Tools," from O’Reilly publications. Jim’s contributions to the developer community have earned him recognition as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in 2006, 2007, and 2008. In his spare time he can be found hiking with his family, roasting coffee, working in his rose garden, or trying to find a quiet corner in the house where he can take a nap.
The meeting will be held on Tuesday, May 20th at 6:00PM at Max Technical Training in Mason Ohio.