For anyone interested in Microsoft Virtualization technology there is an upcoming even this Monday in Atlanta. Its free as far as I can tell.

https://www.getvirtualnow.com/usevents/CitySelect.aspx#cities

Several people have already asked me when the next meeting is.

I'm pretty sure its going to be 12 Jan 2008 (Monday) unless we do anything in December.

Dave Cameron, Chad Brooks, and myself are going to put together a survey of as many data centric technologies as we can squeeze into one presentation.

We haven't finalized anything yet, but things we are throwing around include Linq, ADO.NET Entity Framework, nHybernate, Code Generated DAL, ADO.NET Data Services, ASP.NET Dynamic Data.

I can't promise which of these will make it into the presentation but that's what we are throwing around.

Have another data technology that you want to throw onto the list? Send me an email (use the contact link on the web page).

That just leaves December. I'm trying to get more details but Glen Gordon from Microsoft was telling me that the Atlanta .NET Group(s) don't have a regular meeting in December but they do throw a Christmas party and the other area groups are invited. He asked me if I thought anyone was interested in going.

I will get the date and location from Glen and post it.

If you think you are interested, send me an email. The Atlanta people just want to plan how much food and stuff to have. We could also do a carpool.

Later..

Glen Gordon is spreading the word about an upcoming 1 day developer conference in Atlanta. The date is 16 Dec 2008. That's a Tuesday.

It is unfortunately, $99 per attendee but there is some pretty cool content.

The event is all day (8:30 to 4:45PM; registration is 7:30AM to 8:30AM) at the Westin Peachtree Plaza.

There is one track dedicated to cloud services including one presentation titled "Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Services".

There is one track on UI development that includes presentations on Silverlight, WPF, and the last one of the day is on ASP.NET 4.0 which is a future release.

The last track which I'm usually very interested in is "Tools, Languages and Framework" but it looks like it is all future stuff. There's something the "future of C#, F#, and VB". There is something on VSTS 2010. I'm not using VSTS and 2010 is still a ways off. The Paralell Programing for Managed Code Developers sounds really cool but it's only for the next version of Visual Studio which comes out in 2010.

If you are interested in Cloud Computing or WPF or Silverlight then this looks pretty cool. Or if you are really interested in all the stuff that's going to be in VS 2010 then you should go to this as there is lots of material for that.

So tell your boss you need $99 and off on Tuesday for training.

There are also giveaways but I haven't been able to pry out of Glen what they are yet. Will let you know if it is something really cool.

Here are some links if you watch to check it out:

http://www.msdndevcon.com/Pages/start.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/glengordon/archive/2008/11/05/announcing-msdn-developer-conference-in-atlanta.aspx

I was just talking to Chad Brooks from Microsoft and he was telling me about an upcoming event in Atlanta for .NET developers and Windows Admins.

From September 23 to 25 Microsoft is holding TechDays '08

It is 3 days of talks on various topics. Fortunatly or Unfortunatly depending on your schedule these are all week days: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday but some of the talks look interesting.

If anyone is interested in going to one or more of these, we could organize a carpool.

Here are the links:

Signup here: TechDays '08 Atlanta

Read here for Glen Gordon's description: Pla.NET

Don't forget to come out to tonight's meeting!

The next meeting of the Macon .NET Users group will be on Monday, 8 September 2008 at 7PM at the Bear Rock Cafe on Mercer's campus.

Kevin Simmons will be presenting on ASP.NET MVC which should be pretty cool.

MVC stands for Model View Controller and is a popular pattern for building applications. Its used by executable applicaitons like Windows Forms and Java and it is used in JSP. There have been MVC tools for ASP.NET before but Microsoft is releasing a very nice MVC toolkit for ASP.NET that will be officialy supported.

Here are a few links on ASP.NET MVC

Scott Gu

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/14/asp-net-mvc-framework.aspx

MS ASP.NET MVC Site

http://www.asp.net/mvc/

So grab all of your friends and I'll see you there.

I was trying to schedule our next meeting for 30 June but I couldn't get our meeting location reserved. Instead, I've scheduled the next meeting for 14 July at 7:30 PM.

Location is the same as last time, the Bear Rock Cafe on the Mercer University Campus.

We will have some pizza or other snacks. The Cafe also has coffee and snacks if you don't like what we bring.

Tonights presentaiton is by Kyle Kelly

Title:    Infragistics Web Control Programming

Tonight’s lecture will cover Infragistics webcombos, webgrids, and webtrees.  Issues related to programming, formatting, Ajax and javascript will be addressed.

We will also have some books and software from Microsoft to give away so be sure to show up.

Many of my colleagues and I lament the fact that while Atlanta has such an active software development community, our city of Macon and the surrounding area does not. So I decided to do something about it.

On Monday, 31 March 2008 at 7:30 PM we will hold the first meeting of the Macon .NET User Group.

There will be some pizza and softdrinks to snack on. 

Click here to add this event to your calendar:

The meeting will be held at the Meeting room at the Mercer University Coffee Shop which is named the Bear Rock Cafe. The Bear Rock Cafe is inside the Univeristy Center. Below is a map of the Mercer Campus with annotations showing where to park and where we are meeting.

Everyone will be required to sign in at the University Center but they are expecting us so no one should have a problem getting inside.

Doug Turnure from Microsoft has volunteered to come down and get us started and give a presentation and several other Microsoft people have offered to help us from time to time.

Doug's presentation will be: A technical overview of Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. In this talk, we will discuss how Silverlight is architected, and how designers and developers can collaborate more effectively using Expression and Visual Studio. We'll attempt to untangle some of the term/version confusion around the releases. Finally, we'll do some basic code demos to show both how the current release works, and the state of the latest beta.

I would like to thank Mercer for hosting our meetings. We look forward to seeing some of the students at the user group.

This is a great opportunity to meet some of the other software developers in Middle Georgia. Please pass this invitation on to any other software developers that you know.

I would also like to thank my employer, SPINEN for sponsoring the user group's web site and providing some snacks and food for the meetings.

In addition to the presentation, part of the agenda for this meeting will be a discussion of how often we should meet and future presentations. It might also be a good idea to bring a few business cards to exchange with some of the other attendees.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me using the Contact form on this blog. That goes right to my email.

Zack Moore
Senior Software Developer
SPINEN