June 12, 2010
Harrison, Arkansas
North Arkansas College

SharePoint Saturday Ozarks is a FREE, educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of topics focused on Microsoft SharePoint technologies.  If you’re a SharePoint developer, or power user, SharePoint Saturday is for you.  If you use SharePoint for your job, then SharePoint Saturday is for you.  If you want to learn more about SharePoint, then SharePoint Saturday is definitely for you. I’ve been to a couple of these events, and they’re always very well run, have great content, and fill a great void in the typical .NET developer user group meeting or community conference event.  This event is ALL SharePoint, ALL day long.

Besides, it’s being run by the SharePoint Hillbilly – who doesn’t want to learn about SharePoint from him?

http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ozarks/default.aspx

There are quite  a few interesting (and cool) events coming up in SCD over the next couple of weeks… Check these out, mark your calendars and let ALL your friends know about them!

Launch Event – Visual Studio 2010, Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2

Tuesday, May 18, 2010 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM

The event date is now SOLID, but the location is not.  We’ll be showing off VS2010, Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2.  More to come on this launch once we have the info – I only just got the final word on dates this evening.

MSDN Events Presents: Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0 and SharePoint Development

Wednesday, February 24, 2010 1:00 PM, North Little Rock, AR

Join your local Microsoft Evangelism team for a lively tour our latest version of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. We’ll start with an overview the IDE and explore how you can use the latest features to develop great applications in a flash. Next, we’ll look at the newest changes to the .NET Framework and how you can leverage them today. Finally, we end the day by looking at the new tools in Visual Studio that will supercharge your SharePoint development.

SESSION 1: What’s New in Visual Studio 2010
SESSION 2: What’s New in the .NET Framework 4.0
SESSION 3: SharePoint Development using Visual Studio 2010

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Software Engineering 101

Saturday, February 27, 2010 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM

This is a one-day, FREE event focused on core skills that modern developers need to have to be successful today.  This isn’t about learning the basics of Silverlight, WPF, or <insert_new_tech_of_day>, rather, this conference will help you understand how to build software that is better designed, more maintainable, and more testable. They’re spending the morning on fundamentals around object-oriented programming, the SOLID principles and a few other important skills, while the afternoon is all about hands-on skills development using Pair Programming techniques to work through a series of challenges. 

If you’re in Nashville, you can attend in person, but for those of you not in Nashville, there is still a chance to participate! The event will have an associated webcast that will allow people to play along from home.  You will need your own laptop with Visual Studio 2008  (or 2010) pre-installed before arriving.

There is more stuff on the horizon, but I’ll save that for later blog posts.  If you have any questions about these events, just let me know!

Attention all you peeps in Ft. Smith, Fayetteville, Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale and surrounding areas!  Tonight and tomorrow night are the first parts of my 2010 #ugPDC tour.  Visiting the FSDNUG tonight and the NWADNUG tomorrow night, I’ll be talking about a bunch of the cool stuff announced at PDC09 including Azure, Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2010, parallel programming features, dynamic language features, and more!  Here’s the info for each of these groups so you have absolutely no excuse to skip out!

January 11, 2010 – Fort Smith .NET User Group
http://fsdnug.org
EagleOne Headquarters
4001 Planters Rd. Fort Smith, AR 72908
Meeting starts at 6:00 pm.  Food will be provided

January 12, 2010 – Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group
http://nwadnug.org
Jones Center For Families
922 East Emma Avenue, Springdale, AR 72764
Meeting starts at 5:30 pm.  Food will be provided

There are more #ugPDC visits scheduled for next month, including the Fort Worth .NET User Group and the Dallas ASP.NET User Group.  If you’re interested in having one of our Developer Evangelists come out to your User Group during January, February or March to tell you about all the cool, new and exciting things announced at PDC, just drop me a line and let me know!

(screen shot photo courtesy of wikipedia)

Who doesn’t like the game Centipede – fast, furious action in the garden where centipedes and spiders attack you mercilessly as you dodge through toadstools trying to eliminate the unwanted pests.  Ever wonder where this game came from, and who created it?  Now is your chance to meet the creator of Centipede – Dona Bailey – at the upcoming Harrison .NET User Group meeting on November 3rd, 2009.  Not resting on her laurels, Dona has remained busy in the software industry, and will be speaking that night on  3D modeling as well as her experiences at Atari and with creating the game Centipede.

To register for this FREE event, just visit http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=141461 and sign up.

Oh – and did I mention the prize?  The User Group will be giving away a Vintage Centipede Arcade Game as the grand prize!  Here’s a picture, in case you are curious on how well it will fit in the back of your Ford Festiva: