July 26th meeting of the Atlanta Visual Basic .NET UG featuring ME
The Atlanta Visual Basic .NET Study Group met at it's new location for the second time since loosing the LaVista Rd. facility. Last night's meeting featured me talking to the group about SharePoint 2007 and Groove 2007.
Before I went on, Jim Wooly Wooley wrote a quick demonstration app that showed how to implement a queue for logging purposes. The question a member asked was how to handle multiple simultaneous application accesses of a log file. Jim showed how a simple queuing app can handle writing to the log by popping updates off a stack and how multiple apps can send messages to the stack at the same time.
Next up was my discussion of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. I covered a lot of the same kind of material covered by Microsoft's E-Learning Clinic 3370: Getting Started with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. I blatently ripped off some of the graphics and bullet points from their slides for my own. This was actually a discussion last night - about how much free Microsoft stuff is out there in terms of free tools and training when compared to companies like IBM and Oracle. It's honestly amazing! Anyway - after I covered the basics of what MOSS 2007 offers, I stumbled around in my seriously underpowered VPC attempting to demonstrate some of the great new features of MOSS 2007.
Once I finished up the MOSS portion of the talk, I showed the group a little bit about Groove 2007. I had a great slide deck for Groove that I nabbed off of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Beta 2) Technical Resource DVD. This is actually where I got my VPC for the SharePoint demos as well - as the VPC I built didn't allow any SharePoint sites to be created/browsed. However, my demo VPC did work with Groove installed, although without a network connection and another machine to show the changes, it was sort of useless to show the demo. Whatever, the people seemed to be impressed.
We had 8 people present at the meeting, and six of us went out for a beverage after the event where conversations ranged from software topics, future of the study group, quantam computing and cool TV programs.
If you couldn't make it to my preview of SharePoint 2007, try to make it to next Monday's meeting of the Atlanta .NET User Group where Brendon will be presenting MOSS 2007 for the first portion of the meeting.