If you're a .Net usergroup leader, or invovled in some level of making user group events happen be sure to plan on attending the INETA Community Leadership Summit being held on Saturday June 2, 2007 in Orlando, FL right before Tech Ed.

More information about the summit is available on the INETA Community Leadership Summit web site http://Summit.INETA.Org

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If you've ever attended a Tech Ed conference, and are planning on attending the years Microsoft's Tech Ed conference on Orlando, you know how great the INETA sponsored Birds of a Feather sessions are. If you're not familiar with them, they are a great opportunity to bring people together with common interest in a particular topic. They may bring together a group of experts, a group of beginners, or a mix of them all willing to share and exchange ideas.

They key to this is that the topics come from the community! Which is why it's very important that your voice is heard. If you have a session you would like to see, submit. If you want to vote on which of the submitted topics should be ensured a room, you need to go vote on the sessions.

Submit Birds-of-a-Feather topic ideas now
Vote for Birds-of-a-Feather topics

More information and voting is here.

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If you're like me and have been patiently waiting to see some of the sessions you missed or review others you attended but want to see again, you'll be happy to know that the recorded sessions have been posted to the www.msteched.com website. DVD's are apparently on their way out soon, but for now it's great to have this resource. I wish there was some way these could be online by the time our planes landed on our way home to really help drill in what we learned. (If you didn't attend, unfortunately you need an atendee username and password to view them, but there is lots of free stuff on the www.virtualteched.com site!)

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It was a good time in Boston for Tech Ed last week. Although Boston is a pretty cool place, I must admit that it’s been my least favorite venue for Tech Ed. Don’t get me wrong here, Boston is cool; it’s just not as conference friendly as some of the other venues. Maybe I’m just bitter because they wouldn’t let me switch just one of the seven TV’s off of the Red Sox game the other night to watch a little hockey! Maybe it was the fact that transportation sucked, although the drivers on strike might have been the major factor there. Even still, I was lucky that my hotel, (In the middle of the bay) was close, but for many the conference was a long bus ride, or an extremely expensive subway ride away. I'm certainly glad or their subway which quickly allowed me to get almost anywhere for a mere $1.25

The conference however was great! As planned, I spent much of my time attending sessions but on by the WPF (Avalon) and WCF (Indigo) teams. Let me first say, what a great group of people these folks are! It is amazing the expertise and passion that these teams have for their products, and the time they take to help us understand it. Both of the teams made themselves extremely accessible in the technology lounges during the week to answer our questions and help us understand! A special thanks to

Beatriz Costa, Chris Han, Clements Vasters, Karen Corby , Kevin Moore, Lauren Lavoie, Robert Ingebretsen, Steve Maine.  

You guys alone made Tech Ed worth attending!

Thank you!

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As I frantically rush to gets things wrapped up, the excitment is building in advance of attending Microsoft's TechEd conference in Boston. I'm a huge fan of these events, both for their educational value and from the energy that's created when you bring large amounts of really smart people together in one room, one very very large room!

Aside from attending any session containing the terms WCF, WPF, WWF, Mobile, CRM, Communications Server, and the odd Exchange, IIS, Atlas session, here are a few of the other activities I'll be tryign to attend:

Party with Palermo: Tech Ed 2006 - Sat June 10th 7:30-

INETA Leadership Summit - Sunday June 11th 9:00-1:45

Mega User Group Meeting on Monday 6/12 from 6:30-9:30

Dop me a note if you're in the neighborhood! See you in Boston!

TECHED06

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On Sunday June 11th, user groups from throughout New England are hosting a special event at the Waltham Microsoft Offices. The event is targeted at members of user group “leadership”, meaning not just the president, or official group leader, but all of those people involved in making user groups happen. While the event is being hosted by local groups in the Boston area, anybody that happens to be in the area for TechEd is invited to attend. The day will be full of opportunities share ideas and energy about building user group communities.

INETA Boston User Group Leadership Summit

“User Group Leaders today faces many challenges such as promoting your group, financing, engaging existing members, recruiting speakers, finding new sources of content, leveraging local Microsoft relationships; etc. The New England INETA user groups along with INETA, in hopes of building a more close knit community, invites you all to join us on Sunday June 11th, prior to the start of “

Registration for this FREE event is now open, as well as a schedule with more information @ http://www.wedevelop.net/leadershipsummit.aspx

See you in Boston!

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For anybody following my Tech Ed posts, I will hopefully be getting info from my other days up online in the near future. There were in fact many more days packed full of exciting sessions and valuable information learned. I met many great people! This was definately a worthwhile trip, hectic, yet high valuable. Unfortunately I now sit in another airport heading back to the head office for some "face time".

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Tech Ed 2005 has officially started with Steve Balmer presenting as only Steve can. It's my first live view of one of his presentations, and while somewhat subdued to what I have seen video of in the past, he certainly is an extremely passionate speaker. According to Steve, there has been not better to be working in the technology industry.

Highlights included:

- Quick stage apperance of the new Lenovo / IBM Thinkpad Tablet PC - Apparently this little device has a 6 hr battery life. I hope to find one on the show floor.

- A great demo of PUSH technology between the upcoming Exchange 2003 update and mobile devices pushing messages and providing device managemen an security similar to some of the functionality currently on RIM's Black Berry Devices.

- Using MOM to manage devices at a hardware level, including a demo of telling a crashed system to boot from a backup drive when the primary device had failed. I definately want to look more into the remote manage capabilities of MOM.

Those are some of the key points, but now I need to decide which of the 3 sessions in that are about to start is the one I want to attend. More later.

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Today is what I am referring to as Day 0 at Tech Ed. I've reserved day one for the tomorrow when the keynote takes places and the sessions begin. This may get confusing as my Tech Ed schedule calls today day 1, but that just doesn't seem right. Now with that out of they way....

Today was the INETA User Group Leaders Summit which brought together the organizing leaders from INETA as well as user group leaders from all over the place. This was a great event that allow me to finaly meet face to face with many that I have exchanged emails or phone calls with in the past, or other who's names I have just heard. Somehow being talked into working the registration desk gave me a really good opportunity to say hi and chat briefly with many of the attendees as well. The day included a variety of workshops aimed at helpign user groups be more effective in promoting themselves, obtaining sponsorship and adding value for all participants. If you're involved in a .Net user group and are not familiar with INETA, please check them out. If you're not involved in a user group, it's time to either go find one or start one up!

On of the highlights of the day was also having Ari Bixhorn present Indigo. It was a brief but very interested session where he even build a peer-to-peer cha application in under 5 minutes. I'm looking forward to much more Indigo content throughout the week.

And in other important news, today I stated the official collection of Tech Ed T-Shirts. So far 4 shirts and counting!

Now, it's off to try and decide which sessions I'll be attending tomorrow hopefully leaving time for the hands on labs and other networking.

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After a wonderfully short flight compared to my recent travels, I arrived today in Orlando for Tech Ed 05. Upon checking in at the hotel I received my first SWAG of the trip. My very 0wn bottle opener on a key chain. Just what every developer needs. I've heard stories of other attendees receiving goodie-boxes, but I think that must be soemthing special for MVP's and certain user group leaders. Hey, I'm a user group leader! I guess I'll just have to wait until somebody trom the Tablet PC or other group nominates me or something.

After getting settled in, my first task was get get myselg to the Peabody Hotel to attend Jeffrey Palermo's "Party With Palermo" which was attending my a whole mess of people. Thanks Jeff for organizing the event which drew a great turnout The name tags were a bit geeky, but very helpful. I enjoyed meeting some new people (Jean-Luc David, Chris Dufour, Amanda Murphy, and others) and some familiar faces (DonXML, Brendon Schwartz, Matt Ranlett, Chris Williams)

Speaking of Chris Williams, Charleston, SC Code Camp is taking place September 17th!

After seeing how many .Net developers we could fit into a 2 door car, I decided call it an early night. (Don't worry, I'm sure photos of the car inicdent will show up sooner than later on a blog) I'll start tomorrow at the INETA event and go form there.

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