Wow! We had 41 people at our meeting last night. That’s a lot for our small group. As Dave reports, the room was jam packed.

Laura did a great job with the presentation on ASP.NET 2.0. Boy, it was some styling powerpoint Microsoft gave the community launch team to use!! What was great about her talk was that she didn’t dwell on the slides and went right into gobs of demos. She showed the group master pages, profiling, declarative data binding and the controls that make membership really easy to do. There are a lot of people who this is all brand new to (I would say 80% of the attendees probably hadn’t seen any of this stuff yet). I learned a bunch too as I have focused on the framework stuff and not as much on the “look, ma! No code!” tools.

One thing that makes me extra proud of our little community is the fact that we far exceed the average percentage of women attendees. 25% of our group last night was women.

In addition, I believe from a show of hands (and new faces) that there were 10 people there who had never been to a VTdotNET meeting before. It’s great to have some kind of lure to get them there. Most often, once they attend a meeting and realize how much the group has to offer and what a tight (yet welcoming) community it is, they continue to attend meetings.

We still have to figure out how we are going to burn 200 DVDs to distribute. But since we are doing part 2 of the launch next month as a joint meeting with the VTSQL group,and giving away another 5 VS2005 Pro/SQL Server 2005 licenses, I expect most of those people to return and hopefully we will have it solved.

Lori McKinney from the Huntsville Alabama group spent her christmas vacation burning 700 dvds for her group. I won’t be doing this, that’s for sure. I just don’t have the time. We are trying to find a local company with one of those machines that you can load a stack of dvds into and let it just spit out copies.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org