Last night was the last VB.Net SIG meeting of the year. We’ve had a great time so far and I hope my involvement in the group continues to grow.
We lead off last night with a presentation from your truly on SharePoint Technologies. I had a slideshow AND demos this time. Paul Lockwood was kind enough to prepare a VPC for me with SharePoint Portal Server installed so I could show the group some of the great scalability and personalization services offered. I got some good questions and a generally positive response. I followed this up with a quick presentation on RSS, and Aggregators (or “What are Blogs and why you should care”). While most of the people in the room said they knew what blogs were, almost none of them had ever knowingly read one. Aside from Jim, Paul, Brendon, and myself – no one in the room had even heard of an aggregator like RSSBandit or SharpReader. I think everyone really perked up when they learned how cheap and easy it was to get started reading blogs. With the volume of information out there on personal blog spaces only increasing, it will be easy to get left behind if you’re not following along. At least keep your finger on the pulse of MS technology by reading Scoble!
After the excitement wore down and we took a break, Brendon presented the group with SQL Server Reporting Services. He kept his presentation deliberately short so we could proceed to the meat of the wrap-up session but he still managed to introduce practically everyone there to how easy and nice SQL Reporting Services really are. We saw some sample reports, some useful error reporting tools, the free web-based portal MS provides, and the report designer in Visual Studio. Once again, Paul stepped up with a VPC so we could practice installing RS (a generally quick but sometimes confusing process) but time constraints prevented us from seeing that.
After the two presentations, Jim took the floor and lead us in the discussion of what the meetings should look like in the future. For old times’ sake he dragged out a notebook with a list of topics originally thought of back in 2000 that still hadn’t been covered (and are still worth covering). We came up with some new topics; we flirted with the idea of a larger group project, and toyed with the idea of changing the meeting format a bit. No firm decisions were made, but people are thinking. We did manage to plan the first two meetings of the year out. The first meeting will mostly be a presentation of our favorite toys. I’ll give a quick book review and show off OneNote (on a Tablet). Jake will be presenting Visual Assist and John will be showing off some third party web controls which have some great client-side features. The second meeting will be Paul Lockwood giving us another look at nUnit – this time with a focus on the practical application of the technology. I’ll follow Paul with a quick review of some of the free tools offered by the incredible Mark Russinovitch of SysInternals.
-- Matt Ranlett
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