We had our 2008 Microsoft Launch event last Tuesday. When word came down from Microsoft that they were going to have Community Launch Events, I immediately asked for the details. I was told we could have at most, three presenters. In the last year, several members of the user group have really stepped forward to help me with things, and I thought it would be nice to reward them by giving them access to this great experience. So, I wrote a letter back, describing what these people have done, and could they be involved. The answer was "yes". I also mentioned our meeting schedules and our Launch would be a week before Community Launches were supposed to start. Again, they said it wouldn't be a problem. So it was game on. I invited the members I had thought of and away they went.
Well, the "official" training started to trickle out, and there wasn't much there, so these six people, went ahead and created their own content. Launch day came and was I impressed! Here is what the lineup was:
- George Ande – ASP.NET Ajax with .NET 3.5
- Sean Dorsett – Visual Studio 2008 Tips and Tricks
- Volkan Uzun – New features of C# 3.0
- Steve O’Brien – LINQ
- Matt Penner – GIS and Spatial Analysis in SQL 2008
- Cigdem Uzun – Silverlight 2.0
What totally amazed me was how with minimal official training content there was, they each came up with six dead on, concise, to the point, and top notch presentations. Each presentation went about 25-30 minutes, and the amount of questions which were generated, just blew me away. The amount of energy in the room was great. Two recruiters, Armando Lopez from Robert Half Technology, and Brant Jones from San Bernardino County talked about local jobs.
Attendance was great, with standing room only and I'm grateful to Robert Dottl at Riverside Medical Clinic for giving us the bigger room.
Here are the stats:
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RSVPs: 36
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Attendance: 34 - a new IEDOTNETUG Record
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Non RSVP Attendees: 8
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First Time Attendees: 11
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Total Raffle Ticket Sales: 364
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Number of software licenses (VSTS 2008, SQL 2008, WS 2008, telerik, CodeSmith, ReSharper, Infragistics) won: 38
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Number of books (O’Reilly, Wrox, Pearson) won: 22
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Number of job offers mentioned after break: 4
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Pizza slices left over: 1
Oh, and that's not a typo. This was not Visual Studio Standard Edition given away at the public launches, this is Visual Studio Team Suite!
Pictures of the launch are on Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/iedotnetug
Wow, I'm still on a high