It’s recently been a very busy couple of weeks for me, causing me to miss several user group meetings.  I also forgot to update the Mobility website for an entire month!  I’m really sorry about that.  I’ve also been having Exchange problems – the server ended up having hardware problems that required complete replacement (replacing the motherboard and both hard drives didn’t fix it).  All of this trauma aside, we managed to have a very successful UG meeting.

Michael Earls presented a topic totally unrelated to Mobility programming, membership services with ASP.Net 2.0.  Beginning with a few slides to introduce the basic concepts of Members, Roles, and Profiles, Michael quickly dove into a demo where he built an entire website with a membership database and login capabilities right in front of the group.  The demo went extremely well; even when Michael couldn’t get a tool to work, he was able to show off the depth of his knowledge by attacking the problems in different directions.  All this while fielding questions from the group!  Extending the scope of the discussion a bit, Michael also showed off Master Pages and some of the new Beta 2 capabilities.  Refactoring, Intellisense support of custom types, generics, etc.  I hope he’s ready to represent this discussion (again – Atlanta isn’t the first group to see this particular presentation).

Following the meeting and the traditional raffle of prizes provided by our sponsor (everyone say “Thanks” to Doug Turnure at Microsoft for both the continuously available meeting space and the incredible wealth of swag), the Mobility UG leaders got together to discuss the future of the group.  We talked about widing the scope of our meetings to include more presentations on other .Net topics.  The general feeling of the group leadership is that we seem to be running out of mobility topics due to a lack of presenters in the area.  So if anyone wants to present mobility topics, feel free to contact us and get yourself scheduled!

— Matt Ranlett