Daily Archives: May 19, 2004

“INETA Groups”?

Ineta

I’ve seen a references here and there to people talking about INETA groups. There is really no such thing (in my own mind – though I am the co-Chair of the User Group Relations committee…) as an “INETA group“. There are .NET user groups and many of those groups are members of INETA. They become members of INETA by applying and going through an approval process based on a set of criteria. If you are curious how that works and for lots of great info on how to start a user group check out this page on the INETA website.

Also INETA has public forums where many user group leaders discuss all kinds of things about running user groups from how the pizza gets paid for to if it’s necessary to be a non-profit. These are not technical forums, but truly dedicated to user group leaders sharing information.

Enjoy!

Speaking at ASP.NET Connections!

Just Rambling

Well, it’s official – my name is on the website (although my pic and bio haven’t made it up yet). I will be doing 3 sessions at ASP.NET Connections in November in Vegas.

  • Developing Ink-Aware Applications with the Tablet PC SDK
  • What’s New in the “Whidbey” Base Class Libraries for ASP.NET Developers
  • Web Services Security for Dummies with WSE2

The Tablet talk is the only tablet specific session in the whole DevConnections line-up.

The WSE2 talk is the only WSE session.

The Whidbey talk is definitely NOT the only Whidbey session! 🙂

Vegas, baby!

New TechEd BOF: How to Start a User Group

Ineta

Eric King has just added a Birds of a Feather Session to the TechEd schedule. He will be leading a BOF on How to Start a User Group. Eric is someone who is wildly enthusiastic about his group and helping other groups. He is on the INETA User Group Relations Strategic committee and is an enormous help to him.

If you have ever thought about starting up a user group, this would be a great way to get some very useful and helpful information.

small – tier markets and Microsoft events

Community Cheerleading

Burlington is a small market. We have a lot of developers coming to the user group meetings considering how small we are – anywhere from 20 – 50. But unfortunately, the MSDN events that have been here have not been drawing enough people to justify the expense of them. Totally understood. We try, but it is what it is.

However, I LOVED reading Eric King’s post today. He is a user group leader in a tier-3 market (Chatanooga). He convinced MSDN to come to his area because there is a very strong developer community there. And they drew more people than Nashville’s MSDN event – Nashville is the usual target city for these things. I know Eric worked hard to promote the event. GOod work, dude!

Risk-taking in Business: The Six Apart Saga

Blogging

Those of you who do not stray far from the weblogs.asp.net feeds may not know about the larger blogging world around us. One of the big (and innovative) players is Six Apart, creators and owners of the MovableType weblog software and the TypePad weblog service. There was a recent shakeup when SixApart decided that it was time to charge something for MovableType and the controversy seems to be around how much they are charging  – not that the software is no longer free. I have not followed it closely (not much of an as the world turns kind of person…what can I say) but I know that they are responding to the outcry…check this recent post on their site:

If free isn’t an issue for you and you’re willing to pay for a version of Movable Type (say the $69 version) and the blog/author limits won’t work for your current use, write a non-emotional post explaining how you’re using Movable Type and TrackBack this entry.

Key words here “a non-emotional post“… so far there are 159 trackbacks to that one. (This will make 160.)

Shelley Powers wrote an interesting post about this and compared the tough decision on SixApart’s part to the “bite the bullet” moments of Oracle’s major change to version 6 and Microsoft’s huge change with .NET. Shelley’s got some deep roots in the software world and this is definitely an interesting read. Go check it out.