Last night was Vermont.NET’s 6th Anniversary. Our first meeting was Feb 2002 with Russ Fustino starting us off to an unknown future.

So now it’s been 6 years and we have had a meeting almost every single month in those 6 years. More importantly, we have built a great community of developers who have become old friends.

We have a few thank you’s to distribute for last night’s meeting.

First of course, thanks to Sarah Cameron, a VSTS expert who through her company, InCycleSoftware.com, works with clients to handle enormous deployments of and training on VSTS at companies with development teams in the thousands. Now that the Unit Testing feature from VSTS is in the Pro version of VS2008, she came to show us how it works. She is extremely knowledgeable and very impressive in handling the many challenging questions asked throughout the presentation. Sarah drove down from Montreal (a 3 hour drive) so after the meeting, she stayed overnight at our house and I got to spend a bunch of time with her. She wasn’t even daunted by the -7 fahrenheit temperature in the morning. It’s a heat wave compared to Montreal in January!

Thanks, as always to VTC for letting us have our meetings there, even if they understandably have to charge us a nominal fee.

Thanks to CONIX.com for sponsoring this meeting in a big way. They provided the pizza and soda and even the birthday cake. They also paid the room fee. Tom Cooley, a long time VTdotNET member and employee of CONIX went out of his way to not only order, pick up and deliver all of the goodies. but when we realized that we hadn’t co-ordinated on plates and cups, he went back to the pizza joint to pick them up. The sad part of the story is that unbeknownst to me, Tom was not feeling well, so after he dropped off everything, he went home. Isn’t that really sad? 🙁

Thanks also to Goodrich Corp (Vergennes Vermont location) whose long time attendee, Bret Griswold, arrived with a gift for the user group. He presented us with a check to cover the cost of our meeting space for a whole year! This is huge for us and means that I won’t have to go begging for a while to cover that. (We still manage not to have to charge dues.) So thanks to Goodrich. It’s a drop in the bucket for such a big company, but it means a lot to Vermont.NET.

What’s a user group meeting without swag? Thanks to Infragistics and JetBrains for providing licenses to raffle off, to Codezone for some great swag and great MSPress books and to telerik for sending a small pile of my FAVORITE t-shirt in the world so that I could give one to Sarah and a few of the other gals who attended the meeting! Last time I had some of those shirts, they were snagged by many guys to give to their wives/girlfriends/daughters.

And thanks to everyone who continues to be part of the Vermont.NET community. Every speaker who has come to our group from elsewhere has commented on what a friendly and fun group you all are.