Newest INETA Members

14 New Groups joined INETA in September! In the US three new groups started in Alabama, Indiana, and Michigan. In other countries like Argentina, Brazil, (Canada) Ontario , Iceland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, Russia, Switzerland, and Venezuela, some new groups have joined INETA. Welcome to all of our new members! There are now over 360 User Groups representing nearly 109,000 user group members worldwide!

International Organizational Meeting held in London

Following on the successful LATAM kickoff event in early September, international INETA representatives and regional Microsoft management for developer relations gathered together in London with the INETA board to "Put the 'I' in INETA". Community leaders from Hong Kong, India, Austria, Turkey, South America, Brazil, and Russia worked together to define the organization for the four international INETA regions: Latin America, Europe (including the Russian Federation), Middle East / Africa, and Asia Pacific. In addition to agreeing on a common model for operations, a comprehensive world-wide system for budgeting, funding, and reporting was developed. Additional meetings have helped to secure Microsoft funding for Europe as well as an initial funding for India.

Got an INETA Speaker coming to your group?

Grab  this graphic! Courtesy of Vermont .NET (where you can see it in action). Feel free to plaster this graphic on your website, in your newsletters, even on your gym locker if need be!  This is a great way to show your appreciation to all of the volunteers in INETA that work so hard to create these opportunities for you and your user group members.

New User Group Relations Committee Liaison in Canada

Joel Semeniuk, leader of the Winnipeg .NET User Group and an MSDN Regional Director, is now sharing the role of User Group Liaison in Canada with Guy Barrette of Montreal's GUVSM. Guy is the contact person for groups in the Quebec Province, so you can rest assured you have a nice French speaking person to help you out. Joel will cover the rest of Canada. As the number of groups in Canada grows, we will eventually add more liaisons. Thanks to Dwayne Lamb of Toronto's VBDogs for his help on the User Group Relations Committee in the past.

INETA LATAM Regional Meeting and Road Show is a huge success!!

The entire INETA Latin America region was represented at the first regional meeting for INETA LATAM September 15 - 17. The meeting, spearheaded by Jose Berrios, head of INETA LATAM, Federico Raggi from Microsoft and Eric Ewing from Microsoft, brought together representatives from countries including Mexico, Peru, Columbia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and several others to the Microsoft offices in Buenos Aries, Argentina to hammer out the goals for INETA LATAM next year. The meeting was full of energy, and full of different languages, and was a massive huge success. The end goal from the meeting..."To be the #1 .NET User Group region in INETA".

With Jose Berrios' unending dedication and energy to LATAM, it is sure to be an awesome year and all of the LATAM committees are excited about building a great .NET User Group organization.

In conjunction with the regional meeting, there was an INETA Tour with showcased the awesome presentation and technical capabilities of Mike Amundsen and David Chappel. The weeklong tour, covering Brazil and Argentina, broke all attendance records for any technical conference in those countries with over 3,000 developers seeing these great INETA speakers. In Latin America, developers certainly know INETA now!
 

Bring PDC To Your User Group!

Over 100 attendees of this year's PDC will be reporting on the sessions and technologies they see before, during and after the event. You can enhance your website with news from the PDC using the PDCBloggersFeed user control. Displaying news from PDC will keep your website fresh with new information so readers return often to check up on what's new.

The PDCBloggersFeed user control displays an article list from PDCBloggers.net on any website. The list updates automatically when articles are added to PDCBloggers.net. The user control is a single ASP.NET control (ASCX) file that is customizable for insertion into any ASP.NET web page (ASPX).

Full instructions are available at: http://pdcbloggers.net/News/79.item

ASP.NET User Group Tour - Coming to a city near you!

Rob Howard and Scott Guthrie, Product Unit Managers for ASP.NET, will be touring 12 US cities between the months of October - March, to deliver exciting content about Microsoft's premier Web development platform. Attendees will come away with all the basics to get you started as well as deep technical information to improve your current skills. Stay tuned to the INETA website and to msdn.microsoft.com for more information!

INETA Sponsors Don Box Presentation at Boston .NET User Group

Don Box and the crowd with Miguel de Icaza, and
INETA Speakers. Patrick Hynds and Carl Franklin, in the front row

Over 150 people spent an enlightening evening listening to Microsoft's XML Messaging architect Don Box at the Boston .NET User Group August meeting. Don gave a live demonstration of Whidbey, the next version of Visual Studio .NET for almost two hours. In addition, Miguel de Icaza of Ximian fame was also present. There was a very spirited discussion between Don and Miguel on various architectural issues, strengths, and weaknesses of the .NET Framework. It was a fabulous opportunity to see not only many of the new language features in Whidbey, but to hear about the why certain features were added and how they might be best used. As a special treat, Ken Levy of Microsoft also demonstrated some really cool and useful XML related features being added in Whidbey. Everybody had a great time and enjoyed an almost unlimited helping of Devil Dogs, Twinkies, and other nutritious food sponsored by INETA.

Miguel de Icaza, Don Box,  and Chris Pels (President of Boston .NET User Group)

INETA and .NET Trivia Game

Late this year a brand new trivia game tailored to the INETA community will be available. The purpose of the game is to help build community among the INETA user groups, inform people about .NET and INETA, and of course HAVE FUN. Once the game is created, a pack of cards with 100 questions will be mailed to each user group.

We are taking submissions from user groups for trivia questions on the following five categories: "History", ".NET", "Languages", "Web" and  "Geek Culture". Anyone who has a question selected will receive a t-shirt. Their name will also be printed along with the question on the game cards.
The person who has the most questions selected for inclusion in the game will win an MP3 player.

For more details, please visit www.ineta.org/triviagame
 

Hong Kong .NET User Group

The First Gathering Day was held by the Hong Kong .NET User Group in August to let local .NET developers meet up and interact with each other. Two technical seminars about ASP.NET Caching and .NET Compact Framework was presented and led to fruitful discussions in the Q&A sessions. After the presentations many members left behind to enjoy the refreshment and chit-chat until late. Hong Kong .NET is led by Colt Kwong who is very involved in the .NET Community in other ways. He is a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP, a moderator of the www.asp.net forums and a Microsoft ASPInsider.

Committee Members of Hong Kong .NET

Gathering Day

Things that warm a user group leaders heart

Dave Totzke from Canada's Technology Triangle .Net User Group recently emailed us to share his great satisfaction at having recently connected a user group member with a .NET job that had been brought to his attention. This type of networking is not only invaluable in a user group, but is one of those things that really does make all of our hard work well worth it.

ASK THE INETA EXPERTS in October

INETA will be running "Ask The Experts" sessions at the following industry events. You'll be able to chat one-on-one with some of the most respected names in the industry: members of the INETA Speakers Bureau.

Microsoft ASP.NET Connections & Visual Studio Connections
Oct 12-15, 2003, La Quinta Resort & Club, Palm Springs, CA
User group members save $200.
Microsoft ASP.NET Connections, now the largest ASP.NET event in the industry, co-locates with Visual Studio Connections for the unique opportunity to learn, network and party with over 70 Microsoft and World Renowned gurus delivering 160 in-depth sessions. Use registration code UG202 for $200 off. Want to learn more?


Microsoft Professional Developers Conference
Los Angeles, CA, October 26-30
Look into the future of Microsoft platform software with the developers responsible for building it.
This event will fill quickly. Register today.
 

More INETA Authors

Rob Foster, a member of the INETA Academic committee recently had his book, Programming Windows Server 2003, published by Manning Press. The book covers new features of the operating system and teaches real-world techniques on how to apply them to .NET applications. It illustrates best practices by developing a start-to-finish example and covering topics important to intermediate and advanced .NET developers and architects.

Read more about the book at www.manning.com/foster . Rob Foster is the founder of the Nashville VS.NET User Group, and is a regular speaker at industry events. Robert lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
 

Become an Author... on ASPAlliance

ASPAlliance, the ASP.NET Community run by INETA Speaker, Steven Smith, would love to promote individuals (user group leaders and members) by publishing articles written by them. If you're interested, please contact Steve at aspalliance.com/feedback.aspx. 

HELP WANTED INETA Marketing Committee

No pay, no benefits, weekly meetings required along with volunteer work! With an introduction like that, you can be sure we need some help! The marketing committee is looking for a new member with graphics skills. This highly motivated and talented person will provide expertise on a limited but regular basis to support the mission of INETA and the Marketing Committee. We teleconference Wed. at 1:00 EST so you will need to set aside that time. There actually are some pretty exciting benefits, besides networking with industry leaders (and the rest of us) past treats have included: trips to TechEd and a T-shirt. Mostly though you get to work with a motivated group of knowledgeable, experienced marketing professionals as we help this exciting organization grow. Sign up now and get one free membership but wait....that's not all. With your membership you will also get.....nevermind, you get the point. If you are an INETA member who works in a company with an excellent graphics person, please consider asking them to join us. And the call to action is: The committee must remain small to be effective so don't wait, contact the number on your screen right now! or just email us at marketing@ineta.org.

New in User Group Specials

Want great deals on stuff you really need?

Save a cool $50 on Drop-in Editing Power - CodeWright for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET from Borland

For more User Group Specials visit the INETA User Group Specials page.

MSDN News for your User Group Members

MSDN has posted the Visual Basic Resource Kit (also including lots of good stuff for C# programmers as well). The kit includes many free (fully licensed) controls from Component One, Infragistics, Dundas and Sax as well a lot of sample code, multi-media content and white papers. You can download the resource kit (though it is quite large) from MSDN or order a CD, for which you will have to pay shipping and handling.  http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/vbrkit

About this newsletter

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To contact INETA: Be sure to check the appropriate tab on the www.ineta.org site to see who is the correct contact for your areas of interest. Forums are open to all, but to post, you must sign in with your User Group's login and password