For our first ever meeting, I was thrilled with how last night went. We had 35 people show up for our first meeting. It was great to see all of the people in the room that I didn’t know. Of the 35 people, I knew about 15 of them. That’s one of the great things about user groups and community is that it’s a great way to meet people.
We are following the format that’s proven to work well at GANG where we have a 45 minute tutorial session followed by the 90 minute main presentation. The tutorial session is designed to give the audience the basic background that they might need to understand the main presentation. It also gives our members a good chance to get some speaking experience without as much pressure as the main presentation gives with a longer talk and a more advanced subject.
Jay Wren of ADP gave the tutorial session on Introduction to ASP.NET 2.0. Honestly, I was still running errands like getting copies of the eval made and all of that type of thing so I didn’t hear all of it. But what I did hear was very good and as complete as you can be in 45 minutes. It also seemed to be well received. We haven’t compiled all of the evals but it’s a good sign when there are people standing in line to ask questions afterwards.
Following that, I gave a session on ASP.NET 2.0 Personalization. See how the tutorial set the stage for this session? I actually stayed pretty close to on time. This is a new resolution of mine is to start staying within my time limits. I usually start answering questions within the time limits and then end up answering questions for a long time. I’m really trying to cut off the questions and have people with questions stay after and ask me offline so that we can cover it in more depth and people that aren’t interested can leave.
I enjoy the Personalization talk because there are a good number of GPMs (Gasps Per Minute). My brother, who is not a developer, came to