Dayton .NET DevGroup Update

It's been a busy week for me. I've shoved off most of my studies to concentrate on a couple big things for the Dayton .NET Developers Group. First off, our group has an official home! New Horizons Learning Center agreed to host our monthly meetings. We'll be meeting at their Fairborn facility on the fourth Wednesday of each month at 6pm. Secondly, we're going to have our kickoff event on 4 May at the Greater Dayton IT Alliance's Tech Day. This is a great opportunity to show our group's potential while several hundred folks from the local IT community come by. Brian Prince of QuickSolutions, Inc. will be giving a great presentation on implementing web apps in ASP.NET 2.0 (Whidbey). Make sure to drop by if you're in the area -- it's free admission. Thirdly, I've been learning CSS in order to get the DevGroup's website somewhat in reasonable-looking shape. The page header's logo is my poor attempt at graphic design using a killer picture my brother took during the Garrett Lemire Memorial Grand Prix. You can see some of his photos (with other shooters' too) here. (On a side note, if you're good at graphic design and would like to donate some time to a good cause (namely making my bad attempt look professional), drop me a line. I'll pay you with some great home roasted coffee!) Fourthly, I've gotten several speakers rounded up for our group's first few meetings.

• As I mentioned above, Brian Prince will kick us off at the 4 May Tech Day.
• Drew Robbins, Microsoft's regional Developer Evangelist, will speak at our first "regular" meeting -- he'll talk about the many exciting technology releases coming out in the near future.
• In July, James Avery, author of Visual Studio Hacks from O'Reilly, will talk about getting the most out of Visual Studio's IDE.
• Josh Holmes
, newly-minted MVP for C#, will give a talk for us in August. Details to follow later.

Fifthly, I've been doing a fair amount of tree shaking trying to get the word out about our formative group. Flyers went out to GDITA and a couple local IT firms. I hope to get more exposure in the coming week in order to prime the pump for our Tech Day event. I'm also having to keep a damper on my enthusiasm. Just because 350 - 400 heads come through the doors at Tech Day doesn't mean they'll all come to the kickoff meeting. Breathe, dude. Lastly, I've also gotten a helluva lot of work done around the yard. No, it doesn't particularly pertain to the .NET DevGroup, but it's another reason (besides diapering our latest tax deduction) why I haven't gotten as much studying done as I'd like. Life goes on.