Dave Noderer, who does SO SO SO much for INETA as a board member and a very active member of the user group relations strategic committee was recognized by INETA as the Volunteer of the Year at our Sunday meeting. I can’t begin to tell you how well-deserved this was.
Thanks for everything Dave.
Eric Sink has another wonderful addition to his ongoing MSDN column “The Business of Software”. This one is about being a vendor at a trade show – “My Tech Ed Diary“. The SourceGear booth was right by spot where the INETA booth, the Microsoft Tablet PC and the various Developer Tools booths were on the edge of the Microsoft area, so I saw him frequently and got to chat and visit with him a number of times.
Additionally, Eric has a post on his blog addressing a question that is in the forefront of many of our minds: how does the new source control part of the VS2005 Team development tool compare to and affect the future of SourceGear Vault? SourceGear has had a huge advantage in having a great product to compete with Microsoft’s own greatly flawed source control tool – Visual Source Safe. Eric addresses many questions head on and says that probably the biggest problem he will see from this new product is that reduces his chances of becoming a billionaire by age 40. (That was followed, of course, by a big grin…)
I was a bad blog girl all week. I just had a dizzying and fun time seeing so many friends and meeting so many new people and learning learning learning. (oh and a party or two…)
I thought I would just try to get my experience down on [paper?] though much of this will be redundant from many many other posts.
(Day – 1) I flew in Saturday. I arrived at the airport at 6:15 am (mind you, I am not a morning person…) to find that my flight was cancelled and I would be flying out at 1:30pm instead. This meant missing an important INETA meeting on Saturday afternoon that I was really looking forward to. I met up with Christian Nagel, (author, Austrian MSDN Regional Director, INETA Europe Director and wearer of many other hats as well) in the Dulles airport while we waited for our flight to San Diego. I got to see the 4 possible covers of his upcoming Addison-Wesley book on Enterprise Services and had an opportunity to vote on which cover I preferred. This new book is part of the awesome A-W .NET Development Series. Very impressed!
In S.D. we found Jas Sandhu while we were waiting for our bags and Jas and I headed up to La Jolla for Michele Leroux Bustamante’s party at her wonderful home and finally got to meet her hubby. I also met Richard Campbell in person for the first time there. what a great guy he is! Ted Neward had a car so we drove back to SD with him, almost by way of Los Angeles since the exit was really easy to miss. Ted exhibited a trait that we were all impressed with. He pulled off the highway and asked directions. Clemens Vasters was a exhausted from many hours of travel and [still blogless] Cathi Gero and I were teasing him that he was like one of those strangers on the NYC subways that doze off and end up with their head on your shoulder.
(Day 0 – INETA) Sunday was our all day INETA meeting. What fun it was to arrive and meet Joan Murray from Addison-Wesley after 2 years of communicating by email. There were so many people there and lots of new faces thanks to 20 “scholarship” invitees by D.E.s around the country. The meeting was all day. We had presentions by various INETA illuminati as well as a number of Microsoft folks. We learned how too work with sponsors, how to extend training within a user group, what Microsoft Developer Community Champions, Developer Evenglists and MSDN Regional Directors do and how to connect with them. We were presented with lots of information on how to work with resources at Microsoft. We also got to meet with many vendors (key to user group sponsorship and swag provision…). My own INETA committee, the User Group Relations committee, had an opportunity to do a little evangelizing to acquire some more liaisons. Since we are working with over 200 user groups in North America, we try to ensure that each user group leader has a personal relationship with someone at INETA and we continuously have to grow our committee in order to achieve that.
After the meeting, we migrated to a great cocktail party for INETA (surely, you’ve read about the tequila bottles by now) and I was also able to hook up with my Burlington pal, Ali Aghareza, who was very excited to be attending his very first conference.
After the cocktail party, Ali and a few others and I walked over to the convention center to register. By now it was about 9pm. On the way there, we bumped in to one person after another that was someone I am friends with and so happy to see, Stan Schultes, (frequent VSM author and founder of the .NET Pub Clubs – link is to Russ Fustino’s page but has info on the pub clubs), Don Kiely and a host of others.
Back at the W MSDN was instrumental in sponsorship of the INETA meeting and had provided a block of rooms at the W San Diego Hotel that were filled up by many people attending the meetings. The W is a very trendy hotel. It’s not the kind of place where you can go buy a candy bar late at night. It is just filled with bars. It is also the hottest new nightspot in San Diego. Lots of young women with low cut tight fitting shirts (it seems to be the main fashion trend in S.D.). Very trendy. I felt like a freakin’ school marm walking around there. Egads. But oh well. I finally went to bed at about 1:30 am (this is 4:30 my own time and I had gotten up at 5am that morning and of course did not sleep on the plane) and could still hear music from the bar way up on the 7th floor. Next time, I’m going to the old folks hotel. However, my room was beautiful and of course I love those fantastic Heavenly beds that are also in sister-hotel the Westin are, well, heavenly!
N. Alex Rupp was one of the many user group leaders invited to the INETA User Group Leader Summit on May 23rd. However, Alex is not a .NET User Group Leader but a Java developer who is very involved in the Java community. His weblog posts from the summit as well as his reaction to what he saw at TechEd are fascinating. I must admit, since I don’t know very much at all about the inner workings of EJB and all of the java techs, I did glaze over some of the deeper technical parts of the posts. But on a high level, comparing the communities, the tools and even the leaders (Ballmer’s keynote vs. McNealy’s at JavaOne) are very insightful.
Here are his posts from Day1, Day2, Day 3 and Day4. Thanks to Chris Pels for pointing out these posts.
I didn’t have a free moment at TechEd. I will write it all down soon…
Rob’s last day with Microsoft was yesterday. He finally blogged about it. Earlier this week he said that he had actually been hoping the secret would get leaked and was impressed at how seriously people take a request to keep things mum.
Rob will certainly be as available and visible as ever and having a huge impact on our industry and our community. His first non-Microsoft public gig will be at DevTeach in Montreal June 19 – 22. I’ll be a speaker there as well so am looking forward to spending more time with so many of my pals and meeting lots of new developers.
Watch this space for Rob’s new company, Telligent Systems. THere will be at least one familiar face on board there as well. It should be a good match. Rob lives in Texas, so if you think “texas“ and someone who has recently announced a job change, that should be enough for you to figure out who.
I took advantage of the 1/2 price (for first 500…) cert tests taht Pearson/Vue was offering at TechEd and finally took some tests. Other than the recent .NET Security beta that I took I have never taken cert tests in my 20 years of programming. I took the Windows Forms VB.NET and Web Applications VB.NET tests. The first was the windows forms and I took it totally cold and just barely passed. There were many things on there that I have never happened to do or use before. Also, I found that my deployment and debugging skills were my weakest. I can definitely attest the fact that I have not done a lot with tracing and event logging and it showed. I know quite a lot about them, but just don’t have hands on experience. MeasureUp was offering one free practice test there also, so I spent about an hour with that in prep for the web app test. There were definitely some new things for me which I got into my head before taking the real test. They weren’t on the real test! Once again, the deployment and tracing stuff was my weakest suit but I passed that test with no problems. I didn’t think I had and was surprised by my score!