GNO.NET: January Followup and February Meeting with Sara Ford

[George Mauer]

Hello everyone, my apologies for the long email but please read through it.  Lots going on.

What a whirlwind couple of days!  The January GNO.NET meeting with Ted Neward was wildly successful with about 30 attendees!  Sure a few of them were nefarious Java-guys, but I think we can forgive and forget.  For those of you who didn't make it up to Baton Rouge on Wednesday to watch Ted talk scripting languages you missed another excellent session that has me seeing IronRuby and Powershell opportunities everywhere I look.  Again, a special thanks to New Horizons for accommodating our group each month, S3 for sponsoring the food and INETA for covering Ted's Travel & Expenses during his stay in New Orleans.

Now I know you all are hoping to get a respite from me prattling excitedly about the next meeting which you "absolutely positively cannot miss" but guess what?  Due to the efforts of Tiffany from New Horizons we've got Sara Ford of Microsoft, VSS Tips, Codeplex, and jumping off of buildings fame making her way down for a special Mardi Gras session on the 9th of February.  And yeah, this is a talk you cannot miss!  Ted's talk on architecture might or might not have been for you, but if you are a Microsoft developer and would like to have the deepest and darkest secrets of the tool that you use every single day revealed or if you'd like to learn about Microsoft's open source efforts then this session is for you.

RSVP on LinkedIn

Link to the meeting on ugss (But that site sucks)

Now, on to group business.  

1. So far I've been mailing announcements from my personal account.  As we're growing this strategy is not going to fly.  We have for a long time had a yahoo mailing list however it's awkward and nobody uses it so let's look at other options.  A good one is meetup.com but they cost about $100 per year.  A free option is LinkedIn, since nearly every developer I know is on there I've got a LinkedIn GNO.NET group going and sent out invites. Please join the group.  There is a built-in mailing list, a place for job-postings, and I've set up some .NET newsfeeds.  I am going to start posting announcements to there.  While we're having people transition I'll continue sending announcements to the yahoo group and from my personal email.  I apologize in advance for the duplicates.
2. We only got 12 responses from the Telerik survey.  If you have not yet done so please fill it out here.  It should literally take no longer than two minutes, you don't have to include your name, and the more we fill out the more swag we're going to get from Telerik.
3. Two words on the website: I suck.  I've been waiting until I get more time to work on it but things are only getting worse in that regard.  I need help.  I spiked on this for a weekend a few months back and got something kinda working using SharpArchitecture (an ASP.NET MVC, NHibernate, Castle Windsor, T4 Templates, JQuery stack optimized for TDD and Domain Driven Design).  What I've done so far is available on google code here. Please take a look at it and let me know if you're interested on getting it going (or if you want to start over that's fine too).  We'll start a committee and I'll make sure everyone has commit privileged.
4. I mentioned that we're going to be staging some sort of event around TechEd.  We're wide open for ideas.  I've started a discussion on the LinkedIn group, please join the conversation.
5. Barrett talked at the meeting about gnocode.  This is a group founded this summer that aims to be a platform-agnostic umbrella group for all the programming usergroups in the city.  The meetings are on the third Wednesday of the month at the Launchpad IP building.  They usually feature a short (< 30 min) technical presentation and then just time for networking and shooting the shit.  If you want to get to know the local technical community check out their meetup page.  If you are interested in learning about the Perl job that Barrett mentioned or the SXSW trip that is a great place to start. 
6. I'm going to be presenting my using lambdas talk at the Wednesday 27th VirtualAltNet meeting. Check it out if you're interested.
7. Finally, between NOLA, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Shreveport the Louisiana .NET community is starting to pick quite a bit of buzz, I've had quite a few people contacting me wanting to speak so here's the tentative schedule:
• February 9th - Sara Ford on Visual Studio Tips and Tricks.
• March 16th - John Kellar.  We had to bump the meeting up a week to accommodate his schedule.  Please go vote on what he should discuss.
• March 23rd - Todd Anglin.  Originally planned for April but his schedule changed.  Todd is an excellent speaker and will be in town anyways so we might as well call a 'special session'.
• April ??? - Zain Nabousi.  Zain is our regional Microsoft Developer Evangelist.  Not sure yet if this will be our regular meeting or another "special" one.
• May - I don't know but I am working on Claudio Lassala.
• June 7th to 11th - TechEd
• June 8th - Scott Allendar  on DotNetNuke
• Plus at some point we've got our own James Thompson standing by to talk IronRuby.  Let me know the level of interest and I can cajole him into presenting sooner rather than later.

So to summarize.  Group is moving to LinkedIn.  Join it.  And RSVP for our next meeting while you're at it.  Oh, and let me know if you want me to take your name off my personal email list.

Thanks a lot it was great seeing all of you.

George Mauer,

Vice President GNO.NET