Newest INETA Members

An incredible growth spurt for INETA in November as we gained 33 new user groups! Breaking them down by INETA's Regions the groups hail from:

LATAM: Argentina, Brazil (5), Chile, Colombia, Peru, Portugal and Venezuela (2).
North America: Canada: Alberta and British Columbia. US: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York (4), Ohio and Virginia.
Europe, MEA and APAC: UK (3), Indonesia, Israel, Russia and Thailand

There are now over 450 User Groups representing nearly 130,000 user group members worldwide! Welcome to our new members! Click on this chart to see a full view of INETA's incredible growth since June 2002.

FREE Website Hosting available for INETA User Group websites

Do you need a website to let your members know about upcoming meetings and events?  Already have a site but interested in portal software like the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit or DotNetNuke?  Want both of these for FREE?  INETA is pleased to announce its new Web Hosting Program bringing you the best of the world of ASP.NET Web Hosting.  Just go to www.ineta.org/hosting and sign up with any of our participating hosting partners (more partners to be added shortly) to receive a free web hosting account.  Many of these offers include free portal support and database support.  And did we mention that its completely free for your user group? 

 INETA's CHOICE! Tell your User Group!!

Have you ever thought to yourself: why don't any of the magazines that I read cover the .NET topics that I want to learn about? Well, starting January 1, 2004, your wish is .NET Developer's Journal's command! SYS-CON Media, in association with the International .NET Association, will be launching a program -  known as INETA's Choice - whereby you and all the other members of your .NET User Group will be able to actively participate in the selection of topics to appear in the 2004 Editorial Calendar for .NET Developer's Journal.

Specifically, INETA has added a page at http://www.ineta.org/inetachoice whereby any member of any INETA User Group worldwide can nominate and/or vote on potential topics for inclusion in  .NET Developers Journal during 2004. On February 26, the most popular topic will be chosen and jointly announced by Brian Loesgen, President of INETA and Derek Ferguson, Editor-in-Chief of  .NET Developers Journal at the Edge East 2004 Development Technologies Exchange in Boston, MA. This topic will become the theme of the first ever INETA’s Choice issue of .NET Developer's Journal, to hit newsstands in April of 2004.

SYS-CON Media has provided a number of incentives to encourage your participation!

• The individual making the winning topic proposal will receive a free 1-year subscription to the .NET Developers Journal
• The .NET Users Group represented by the winning individual will receive a free box of their INETA's Choice issue of .NET Developer's Journal
• Any and all INETA members wishing to attend the Edge East 2004 conference can register with the VIP code INETA4 for discounted admission

There will be a total of three INETA's Choice issues in 2004. The second issue will appear in August 2004 and will be chosen and announced in May at Microsoft's Tech Ed 2004 conference in San Diego. The third issue will appear in December 2004 and will be chosen and announced at the Edge West 2004 conference.

 

A Happy .NET Holiday!

Is your User Group doing something special for the Holidays?  A special meeting format? An organized event? Something charitable? Let us know so that we can include it in an article in the January Newsletter. Send your user group name, url and a short description of what your group did for the holidays and we will create a list to share with all. Pictures are always fun too! If you think your group did something extra special, please share it with the rest of the INETA community and send us an article. Send it to newsletter@ineta.org.

Canadian Academic .NET Fall Tour

In affiliation with the MSDN team and the Bigger Better Basic tour, Microsoft Canada Academic .NET Team organized the "Academic .NET Fall 2003" tour specially geared towards the academic crowd. The Academic Tour made stops in five cities in Canada: Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Students and professors from more then 20 post secondary institutions attended the talks. In addition to technical talks, an overview of Microsoft Canada’s student community initiative was presented; a new initiative to help both educators and students realize their potential. In order to raise awareness about INETA and its newest academic initiative in Canada, INETA Academic promotional pamphlets were handed out to all students and short info sessions were held; all in hope this will further increase academic involvement from Canadian student groups.

Past INETA Newsletters now available

We have posted all of the past INETA Newsletters at www.ineta.org/newsletters. You may find some of the images missing in the older newsletters as we still need to repoint them to the new location they were given when we updated the website.

Message from INETA Marketing

The marketing committee would like to let everyone know that we do not directly endorse or recommend any product or service offered by any vendor including those listed on the sponsorship page at ineta.org. We list companies on the sponsorship page in recognition of their contribution to INETA and not as an endorsement or recommendation of their products or services.

Also, the only specials that have been negotiated by INETA are those that are listed on the UG Specials page at ineta.org. We currently do not allow any vendor to use our logo in any communication with our member groups, their members or our volunteers.

Academic .NET Coding Contest for High School and College Students

Eric Maino, a Microsoft Student Ambassador and leader of the Grand Valley .NET Users Group (GV.NET)  together with the Grand Valley State University Computer Science and Information Systems Department in Michigan  is holding the 1st International Educators Programming Contest (IEPC). This contest has been developed to focus on one of the most innovative new technologies:
Microsoft .NET. This contest invites all high school and college students to compete. The main goal of this competition is not to try and determine the best developer, but to have fun and immerse students into a technology which they may not be familiar with. The competition will focus on problems derived from real world problems and situations as well as computing and mathematical fundamentals. The competition will be held on Saturday, January 31, 2004. For more information please visit their website: http://dotnet.csis.gvsu.edu/iepc.
 

ASP.NET Exposed! Road Show - through February

The team that created ASP.NET is coming to city near you! This is your chance to learn from one of the creators of Microsoft's web development platform. Get the knowledge you need to start developing secure, next generation ASP.NET Web applications with ASP.NET and Visual Studio .NET. After the introduction, we'll dive deep into the product and help you bring your skills to the next level.

	Tour Schedule
	December 2 - Denver December 4 - St. Louis December 8 - Seattle January 12 - Chicago January 15 - Orange County	January 29 - Portland February 4 - New York February 5 - Boston February 10 - Houston

If you are a User Group Leader in one of the Road Show cities, please contact Catherine Vegher at cvegher@microsoft.com, to find out how your User Group can participate.

Register and learn more at http://www.asp.net/roadshow/.
 

Phenomenal Growth of INETA LATAM
(from INETA LATAM Newsletter)

Today, INETA LATAM represents approximately 25% of the INETA Worldwide User Groups, with more than 100 User Groups both professional and academic. Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela and Peru maintain the greatest number of User Groups in Latin America. The high number of existing academic groups in Colombia stands out due to the activities that INETA altogether makes with the training centers of that country. Many activities are happening simultaneously around Latin America.

Speaker Corner - Get to know the INETA Speakers Bureau

This month, Academic Committee member Jason Bunting, interviews Deborah Kurata.

JB - What is your area of specialty?
DK – I enjoy speaking about .NET application architecture, object-oriented design and development, best practices, and Whidbey. My “Best Kept Secrets in .NET” talk has been very popular; every user group member who has heard it has said that they learned something that they had not known before.

JB - How long have you been using .NET technologies?
DK - Since the Alpha releases.

JB - What are you currently working on?
DK – I have been doing a lot of architecture and development work recently. My company has defined an application architecture for our systems and we have leveraged that architecture for several of our clients. It has been great fun.

I am also beginning my "Doing Objects in .NET" book and hope that it will be out for the Whidbey release.

JB - What has your experience been in speaking to user groups as part of the INETA Speakers Bureau?
DK – I enjoy talking to designers and developers and the INETA Speakers Bureau has been a great way for me to do just that. There are so many ways to do things in .NET, it is great to have other people to discuss ideas with and see different solutions to development issues. The user groups are always willing to share in the discussion, which makes things more lively and more fun!

MSDN News for your User Group Members

Missed PDC but really curious? Microsoft has been releasing the DVD content on their sitestream site.  The sessions are streamed audio files (speaker's voice) synchronized with presentation slides and demos from the breakout presentations, lunch sessions and both the Security and Architecture Symposiums. They are available at microsoft.sitestream.com/pdc2003. You can also purchase these sessions as a DVD. For more information, go here.
 

About this newsletter

Thanks to Sasha Krsmanovic, Eric Maino, Guy Barrette and Manuel Carruietero for their articles.

Anyone can sign up to receive this newsletter on the home page of www.ineta.org.

Archived newsletters are available on the INETA website on the Repository page.

Please send news (and pictures) from your user group so we can include it in a future newsletter! Contact us at: newsletter@ineta.org.

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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