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What is a successful User Group to you?

2009-05-22T04:03:00Z

In discussion yesterday, Brian, Kent and I skirted around the idea of what "success" would be for this user group. What's interesting was how each of us, while being passionate about the idea of having a local user group, had varying ideas of what would define "success." It's not that our ideas conflicted, it was more the emphasis which was put on all the different factors that will define the group. My personal idea of a successful user group has the following elements:

Community
A place where people are able to exchange ideas and grow from one another. We don't have to all be in agreement to grow - bring on all the "controversial" topics from whether stored procedures are useful to static vs dynamic languages to something as trivial as style and whether you put your curly braces on a new line - at the end of the day having good discussion and building friendships will be a big sign of success.

Content
It will be really important to have a steady diet of knowledgeable speakers and information sharing. Although getting along and having fun is good, I'm wary of a group that simply operates as a "club" where some people are "in" or "popular." I hope we can plumb the depths of whatever topic is at hand and be a great resource for those who participate to learn.

Swag
I'm hoping that as time passes we'll get better at getting swag for people who attend.

So that's a few of the things I think would make a good user group. How about you? Post in the forum!

What are you interested in these days?

2009-05-14T15:39:00Z

As we commence with planning this user group it will be important to get a feel for what people want to hear about; we'd be a failed group if we focused on topics that were too narrow or quirky for general interest. Left to my own devices I'm into some pretty esoteric things: Perl and other dynamic languages, compilers, code generation, and other things that usually don't make it past the enthusiast to regular life as a "business" developer.

From a more mainstream angle, here are some topics that I'd be interested in hearing about at our user group:

1. Dependency Injection and IoC

2. ASP.NET MVC and other .NET MVC platforms

3. Dynamic Languages in .NET (IronPython, IronRuby)

4. Visual Studio 2010

5. Blend

6. Silverlight/WPF Techniques

7. SCM (I dislike TFS and would prefer to hear about other products but anything on this topic would be interesting to me)

8. Functional Programming Techniques

9. Data modelling, Object Relational Mapping, and Entity Framework

10. Communication Frameworks (WCF etc... ) and methods (RPC / REST / etc... )

Some other places one could go to dig into what topics (and speakers!) we could pursue are conference schedules. For example, the TechEd Developer Track. There are a lot of other conferences to look for topics: CodeStock, CodeMash, and so on.

So what do you want to learn about? Post your answer in the forums: http://sfdnug.com/forums/p/7/8.aspx#8

Endtroducing

2009-05-11T21:56:00Z

I call it an endtroduction because of two things: a reference to an artist that pegs my youthful salad days and also because it will be the last time I veer from programming topics into my personal life. You ought to know who writes this blog, however, so I’ll add that dimension especially since upon finding interesting things on blogs myself I always look for that introductory post to know more about the writer.

I’ve been writing software since just before the “dot com” era, beginning my web applications on platforms like ASP and desktop applications with Visual Basic. Over the years although I’ve tinkered in other environments, most of my living has been made from Microsoft development tools. My first truly object oriented language was Java and for a few years I worked with the web application side of the Java world: Servlets, JSP and java application servers. I’ve been working with the .NET Framework since the first beta releases from Microsoft. It doesn’t feel like it, but it’s been a while.

Aside from the stalwarts of McBusiness I’ve always had an interest in other languages and tools. An old college friend of mine inspired me towards Perl as programming language and culture so for a long time I was a wallflower in that world. I still love Perl and will always return to it as my first multipurpose dynamic language. At my first TechEd I developed an interest in dynamic languages that cooperate with Microsoft’s .NET platform and for the single reason it was ready for public exploit before IronRuby, IronPython is my language of choice for Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime.

I'm writing this blog as a journal of trying to get the Sioux Falls.NET User Group going. I and my cohorts have hatched a plan to get people from the area together to learn and grow in our understanding of software development with the Microsoft technologies as our backdrop.

I’ve lived many places in my short life – I’m a Ugandan by birth but spent most of my childhood in one of three places:
Nairobi, Kenya
San Bernardino, California
Portland, Oregon

I remember Nairobi best and loved Portland the most.

As an adult I’ve lived in southern California and South Dakota. I’ll never leave the Californian in me behind but for the foreseeable future, Sioux Falls will be home.

Thanks for stopping by. If you’re in South Dakota I hope to see you at one of our meetings.