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In This Issue
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President's Note
DiDN
Kathleen
Rocket City
Winners!
Editor's Note
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Sponsors
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Microsoft

Ivis

Telerik
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INETA Live!

TechEd 2006
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 Happenings Around INETA North America (NorAm)

Chris Pels As I got more involved as a volunteer in INETA over the past four years I learned about how the organization works internally and thought it would be worthwhile to share some of that with you this month. INETA has five worldwide regions (Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America, Middle East-Africa, and North America), each of which is led by one of my peers. Each region is responsible for planning and execution of programs and services, all of which is done by volunteers. The regional leads also talk and meet regularly to coordinate high level issues across all regions.

Here in North America the nine member Board of Directors is responsible for planning and coordination in the United States and Canada. We're a not-for-profit corporation which last year had an operating budget approaching $500K serving approximately 240 user groups representing 100,000 members so it is a pretty big responsibility and effort. We have a weekly conference call, several in-person meetings each year, and average volunteering about 15 hours each week. Beyond the Board there are about 50 volunteers helping with implementation of our programs and services. Nancy Mesquita, our administrative assistant, is the only paid person on our staff. Almost all of this work is done virtually.

One challenge given the size of the organization is to keep informed about what is going on locally and get feedback on our efforts. If we have surveys, ask for information about your user group meetings, etc. it is solely for the purpose of understanding our membership or using aggregate data (never individual) to solicit sponsorship so we can better serve our membership. In addition to helping us with these efforts we always welcome individual feedback or ideas. The door is always open to listen to you. Please let me or any Board member know how we can better serve you and the developer community.

Chris Pels, President, INETA NorAm chris.pels@ineta.org
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 How To Have a Successful Day-Long Conference

I am the president of the WI .NET Users Group, and we held our 4th annual Deeper in .NET conference on April 22, 2006 (our first since I became president last year). The event was a great success, and people keep talking to me about wonderful they thought it was. I've just posted a summary of the work that went into that, as well as our results.

Deeper in .NET 2006 was a great success with about 400 people in total attendance. We had five incredible speakers - Michele Leroux Bustamante, Scott Hanselman, Julie Lerman, Bill Hatfield and Jason Beres (four on the Speaker's Bureau) - and we had over $70,000 in prizes (150+ pieces) to give away!

Are you a users group leader? Many groups are having these day-long, mutli-session events. Why not yours? To find out how we made ours a huge success, take a look at this article.

Scott Isaacs
scott@scottisaacs.com
President, WI .NET Users Group
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 Speaker's Corner with Kathleen Dollard
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Kathleen Dollard INETA Speaker Kathleen Dollard visited three INETA user groups on an extended trip to the Gulf Coast this spring. She shares with us her impressions of what she saw as well as how the .NET community is doing there. Being there in person clearly made a huge impact on Kathleen which she shares with us here.

The Gulf Coast is an interesting place right now. On the one hand, it's almost impossible to imagine what the storm and engineering failures did. Yet on the other, the beaches and bayous remain beautiful - even if a couch and chair sit half submerged at the end of a wild bayou we explore in a kayak. Carrying the boat back toward my cousin's FEMA trailer and half-repaired house, a man comes over to talk. He offers to carry my end of the kayak and invites us for a beer. We stand on a cleared concrete slab overlooking a canal where there remain seven refrigerators, a piano and piles of unrecognizable chaos. The sky is blue and the day is gorgeous.

Across it all, the recurring theme is the humanity, both collapsing under and rising above the weight of the debris and the emptiness of slabs as far as you can see. Each slab was a home or business - and many had stood through Camille. This scene recurs in every city and town along the Mississippi coast. I'm here on an INETA tour, but it's also a chance to check in on the parts of my family from Pascagoula, Gulfport, Long Beach, and Hattiesburg.

As I drive I-90 to New Orleans and the first of three INETA speeches, the landscape remains punctuated with blue tarp roofs and I spend half an hour on the I-10 bridge because of repairs. New Orleans itself is a different place. Even in crises, the pace is so slow that I can not understand. I meet a friend at City Park and he takes me on a tour and to lunch. He explains that the levies did not overtop and breach as I had imaged, but failed at the base because they were not set down to the clay as the engineers specified. I am appalled to hear that well over half the city remains without power. Mile after mile of houses, gutted, or waiting to be gutted - uninhabitable neighborhoods that are blocked from repairs by the glacial process of setting new flood maps and the bankruptcy of the electrical company.

My first INETA speech on this tour is to the Greater New Orleans .NET User Group. They meet in Kenner - an area which seems OK. I realize my thoughts on OK have shifted. Floors of the hotel and nearby businesses are still closed and most of the people in the hotel seem to be evacuees. But as I go through my speech, the normalcy seeps through. During announcements, the question is whether to meet the next month because the meeting falls during the jazz festival. These are still programmers trying to figure out .NET and fit it into their lives.

I drive I-10 to Mobile Alabama and speak to a much larger crowd at the Lower Alabama .NET User Group. On to the University of Southern Mississippi for my third day of speeches, and the first INETA speech in Mississippi. The reach of the storm up through Mississippi is not the devastation of the coast, but underlies the breadth of the damage, because I am still far from the northern edge.

For those hit by the storm, repairing means moving on. One member of the New Orleans group said, "We just sort of redefine what normal is." User group meetings and jazz festivals go on. For those of us not directly affected, we have choices on both a political and personal level. I do not need to challenge your political position because regardless of your party, anyone who believes the job of government includes schools, traffic lights, flood maps, sewers and electrical infrastructure can see that something is wrong in New Orleans. On a personal basis decide to make a difference. I'll be donating my honorariums, and money is still needed. So are volunteers, and if you can't go yourself, encourage a local youth group to help people get back into their homes. All the way from Alabama to Louisiana, an incredible amount of work remains to be done.
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 Alabama Code Camp #2 - dotNet Rocks in Rocket City
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The volunteers for the Code Camp (from HUNTUG.org and elsewhere) showed up at 5:30 this morning (April 22, 2006) to setup the Virginia College classrooms in Huntsville for Alabama's second dot-Net Code Camp. About 7:30 DCC Russ Fustino rolled into code camp along with flunky, DE Joe Healy. Techies from all reaches of Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida and Georgia began flooding in for the 8:30 start of the all day event – including the after-hours Pub Club.

Once inside, the volunteers were very organized, providing a welcome package for each code camper. One of the biggies: the MSDN content DVD with content on enterprise libraries, ASP.Net WebParts, and dotNet language enhancements. Also a resource CD from Infragistics with a NetAdvantage a 20% off coupon, and another coupon for 20% off of any CodeSmithTools Purchase. Next step was breakfast of course! With water and bread (bagels & cream cheese to be exact) ... and coffee, life blood on a Saturday morning code camp. Immediately I ran into Wallace Allison of the Birmingham Software Developers Association filling in before one of the first presentations. I talked to the students in every class I visited about INETA - and suggested they all visit live.ineta.org to attend the next webcast.

As the day cruised on, reading & popping in on the presentations listed on the schedule sheet, I realized that picking the right presentation was a matter of choosing which would help me at work, or in my new HowToVS.Net crosscut/aspect SIG, or just on a personal growth level. I stuck to work first, with Developing N-Tier Applications with C#, MSSQL 2005 and XML (Jonas Stawski). The second set of presentations was just as great a dilemma as the first set of presentations. I threw up my hands and went with my old buddy, Wally McClure [MVP, Author] on CLR Objects in Sql Server 2005 which can help me immediately in all three aspects.

During lunch I talked to Camp Director, Sujata (Sue) Devraj, HUNTUG S/W Review Chairwoman, and told her how well it was organized. All I have to say on that subject is a huge "Thanks Sue"!

After lunch, Wally asked all the Alabama User Group (UG) Leaders, Joe & Russ, and myself as Alabama Membership Manager for INETA to participate in the weekly podcast on ASPNETPODCAST.com (read: listen to the podcast!) to discuss Alabama's User Groups' cooperation in this code camp. The great thing that came out of this was that the NEXT code camp would be in Montgomery, in October, with Bruce Thomas as Camp Director.

The last session of the day was LINQ, my own personal growth choice I mentioned earlier. The title was actually Language Enhancements and the Search for the Missing LINQ (Jim Wooly, INETA Membership Manager for GA).

Afterward, we all gathered outside had a drawing for door prizes: books, Ts, games, and software. Everyone got something, with some swag leftover for future doorprizes at the local Users Group.

Then we headed en-mass to a local bar & grill, Madison Station, for Russ' first dotNet Pub Club in Huntsville. Overall this was way beyond what I had thought it would be! I was extremely impressed with the coordination and how well it was organized.
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 March Winners Announced - INETA Membership Survey Sweepstakes
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Chris Wallace $100 to Chattanooga Area .NET User Group, Chattanooga, TN, USA
and $50 to Anthony Bowman

$100 to Greater New Orleans .NET User Group, Kenner, LA, USA
and $50 to Mike York

$100 to Wichita Developers .NET, Wichita, KS, USA
and $50 to Joey Brenn

plus to INETA Membership Manager, Territory: AL, LA, MS
$50 to Dan Wygant
We are excited to bring you the first awards in our INETA monthly membership survey sweepstakes. Congratulations to each of the above winners who won a $100 USD or a $50 USD gift card each.

You and your INETA user group are automatically entered when your INETA User Group Leader or Representative submits your INETA monthly user group survey for your INETA user group.

Your INETA user group can't win unless your INETA User Group Leader or Representative plays! Make sure your INETA monthly user group survey is submitted - it's easy and just takes a minute!

These surveys are vital for our continued support from Microsoft and our other sponsors. We read each survey, including your comments, so please submit yours monthly.

We continue to receive tremendous positive feedback so far indicating from our user group leaders that they deeply appreciate our interest in their meetings and how we can obtain more information regularly about your membership and topics of interest. Of course this is just one method of communication with you - our Membership Managers are always there to assist you first with any INETA membership questions!

Watch for future announcements to see if your user group is a sweepstakes winner!

Chris Wallace, Vice President - Membership, INETA NorAm chris.wallace@ineta.org
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 From the Editor
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Scott Spradlin So, there I was, standing in the doorway of a room that contained a room of about 400 developers. Julie Lerman was on stage talking about ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005. We had just been fed as much pizza as we could eat. Like the other speakers at WI's Deeper in .NET day long extravaganza, Julie was scheduled to speak for an hour and a half. "There's no way these people will stay awake for that long after eating that much pizza" I thought to myself. But, just like the pizza, the crowd ate up what she had to say. WI's Deeper in .NET was a success!

Four of the five speakers that day were on the INETA Speakers Bureau - which means they could come to YOUR user group. Each of them were incredible. I encourage you to schedule your speakers early!

Scott Isaacs and his band of black-shirted merry men were calmly taking care of details throughout the day as this mass of developers swarmed into Milwaukee from miles around. Sponsors were displaying their wares, people were enjoying sessions, prizes were being handed out left and right. I wanted to beam the other leaders from my user group up there to share the experience so we could try this at home. I told Scott that he just had to write down exactly how regular user groups could do this same thing. Read his short article above and then click the link to read "the rest of the story." You'll be glad you did.

Scott wrote a great event registration application that helped his volunteers check people in and printed custom nametags for them on the spot. He said he might make that available to interested parties for a reasonable trade. Drop him an email if you are interested. (Ask him to explain the different badge formats ... VB vs C#)

The .NET user community is alive and well in WI. Could your area use a boost?

Don't forget about the free webcasts brought to you as part of the two series - INETA Live! and Live from Redmond!

Scott Spradlin, Vice President - Marketing, INETA NorAm scott.spradlin@ineta.org

Archived newsletters are available on the INETA website at www.ineta.org/newsletters.
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Copyright 2006 by INETA
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