The April 2004 edition of the INETA NORAM (North America) Newsletter just went out and is also up on the INETA site at http://www.ineta.org/newsletters. Some of the other regions also have newsletters now and they are on this page as well. The “NORAM” newsletter is not explicitly about US & Canada. I try to pick up info from different areas of the world as well. Enjoy!

HEre’s the deal

When you first go to www.ineta.org/bof you will see a choice of TechEd 2004 or Tech-Ed EUrope 2004.

Select one of those BEFORE you click on the Proposed Topics, Submit a Topic or VOte on a Topic links.

Also,  you can vote from within the proposed topics or by selecting “Vote on a Topic” from the topline menu.

THere are 4 pages of topics right now. Be aware that there are two for Tablet PC, but one of them is cancelled (Brad Abrams). Instead, I am doing one, so if you want a Tablet BOF, that’s the one to vote for.

If you *must* look up the definition: here!

Tim Huckaby, known simply as “Huckaby” to some, is coming to speak at Vermont.NET on May 10th. Tim lives in California, so to take advantage of the trip east, he and his wife will be doing an enviable little New England B&B tour (NH, Maine, etc.) before arriving in Burlington.

Besides his impressive c.v. (CEO of InterKnowlogy, INETA Speaker, MSDN RD, etc. etc. with some very impressive clients as well) Tim is a very entertaining guy. His .NET Rocks interview is a classic!

At the VTdotNET meeting, Tim will be doing a talk on Smart Clients that he will also be doing at TechEd.

Many thanks to INETA for bringing Tim all the way here from California. We have our next INETA sponsored speaker, another RD from California, in fact, Michele Leroux Bustamante, coming in June. Oooh are we going to have fun!

I have been maintaining a page on the INETA website that has links to all of the INETA Newsletters, including those from LATAM and Europe. The LATAM are in English and Spanish. Check them out!

Many of the people who volunteer for INETA have been doing it for a long time. As INETA grows, we are fortunate that our volunteer base grows.

For those of us who have been at it for a while, it has really become a part of our life. Many of the INETA volunteers spend time almost every day, sometimes hours, doing things related to INETA. Sometimes that is connecting with user group leaders (there are over 500 groups now) and helping them out with questions or problems. Other times it is helping to be sure that these leaders are well aware of great opportunities that are available to them and their members — whether it’s a booth to promote their group at DevDays (thanks to MSDN), the ability to drive the focus of a .NET Magazine publication through the INETA Choice program, or even have the Visual Basic or C# Team come right to their group to do a presentation.

The revision of the INETA website is a major undertaking that is being led by Devin Rader and his team is doing the work of a full time job during their own personal time as volunteers.

Whether it is someone coordinating flights and hotels for a speaker going to a user group, or a user group liaison giving a user group leader some advice on running their group, an academic committee member helping a student group find judges for their Imagine Cup events, it amazes me the amount of passion that everyone who is volunteering for INETA brings to the table. It amazes me every day.

I was just looking at the list of many schools that could still use volunteer judges that is on the INETA Website. The best way to see is on this page http://inetaacademic.com/imaginecup/matrixmatches.aspx

• About 15 in California
• Boulder, CO
• Storrs, CT
• Dayton Beach, FL
• Athens and Kennesaw, GA
• 2 in Honolulu (sorry you have to get yourself there)
• in Indiana at Purdue and Bloomington
• In Boston – M.I.T, Boston Univ, UMASS Boston (Dorchester) and Amherst
• Townson U in Maryland
• 4 in Michigan
• Rolla and St. Louis, Missouri
• Greensboro , NC
• 4 in New Jersey
• New Mexico
• Columbia University in NYC, Baruch, and Stonybrook and Binghamton, NY
• 3 in Ohio (Oxford, Bowling Green and Cincinnati)
• Pittsburgh, PA
• Columbia, South Carolina
• Middle State Univ in Tennessee
• Texas A&M and Univ. of North Texas Dallas
• Salt Lake City, Utah
• Old Dominion and James Madison Universities in Virginia
• Seattle (that shouldn’t be TOO hard!)
• Wisconsin: Marquette, Univ. of Wisc at Madison
• Univ of Wyoming in Laramie

Amy Sorokas from SAMS sent me a bunch of ASP.NET books to give away at DevDays! Since there is no time really to do that after my talk (since there is the 4th session immediately) I will bring them to the User Group booth and we will be raffling them off. The booth will be a shared effort by the local Boston user groups and some outlying groups, like my own – Vermont .NET. I think the plan is that we will give the books away at the end of the day.

I am *so* happy to see this. Sam did this talk at Vermont.NET last summer. It is a phenomenal presentation that made everyone in the group (from newbies to experts) feel like they gleaned a real inside understanding of .NET. And Sam is a lot of fun when he gets going on this topic that he is so passionate about.

Here’s the schedule that I have gleaned from his blog (though you can find the entire upcoming ineta speakers schedule on the www.ineta.org website).

These are all INETA sponsored events.

New Hampshire .NET 3/18

Maryland and Pennsylvania Microsoft Users Group 4/29

MSDN was very generous in purchasing a booth at each DevDays event for local user groups to share in order to let attendees know about the user groups.

If you are a user group leader and are NOT set up to do this and want to be for an upcoming DevDays event, contact [email protected] asap.

If your user group is about to do a booth and has any questions, needs to talke with other local u.g. leaders or whatever, let us know and we will help you.

Lastly, if you already have done this at a now past DevDays event, again, let us know how it went!

The folks on the infrastructure committee for INETA, especially Devin Rader, are building a phenomenal new website for INETA. They are spending a lot of their personal time on this, as it is a volunteer project, and would welcome some volunteers with C# and ASP.NET experience to help them out. Read more at http://www.ineta.org/developers/