Next month I'm going to be re locating to Melbourne and as a result I have handed over the .NET User Group leadership today as announced by Darryl. It has been a great couple of years since taking over the user group from Peter Jones. I really enjoyed running the group during that time and regret to be handing it over but I kind of had to :-)

The new user group leader is Christopher Fairbairn whom you might have seen presenting at the 2008 Summer Road Trip that was held earlier this year. So from now on Chris will be the primary contact for the .NET user group and Bryn will be helping as was the case in the past two years.

Next week we will be having our next user group session for the year where Peter Jones will be talking on SharePoint for ASP Developers.

Also coming up this month is a session on Embedded Development which will also be the inaugural session for the newly launching Embedded user group.

More details on the embedded user group session soon.

Don't forget, if you've got any questions, suggestions or ideas for the user group and session content feel free to post a comment here or contact me directly.

Hey everyone and welcome to 2008, so this is my first post of the year and I've deliberately delayed my first blogging so that I start blogging straight after the 2008RoadTrip here in Christchurch.

As you may know, Darryl, Jeremy and Chris have been doing a tour around the country (the road trip) with Chris and Jeremy presenting on SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 along with a local speaker covering Visual Studio 2008 and Darryl tagging along.

I think Chris and JB have done a fantastic job presenting despite Chris feeling a little unwell. Our very own Christopher Fairbairn also did a great job on his part. For me it was a bit interesting being an MC for an event that big and talking in front of over 150 or so people. It went ok though I think.

So with Christchurch now done Darryl, Chris and Jeremy still have Dunedin and Invercargill to go, you can still register for these here

The draw for the windows home servers will be done by Jeremy on the 5th of March so stay tuned!

Also as I mentioned yesterday our next user group meeting will be on the 27th of February and the topic for that is ASP.NET MVC presented by John-Daniel from Mindscape in Wellington.

Finally, thanks for all of you who made it to the event  despite the bad weather yesterday. And a special thanks to Chris, JB, and Chris F for a fantastic presentation.

For some more pictures and more on yesterday see Darryl's blog here.

So it looks like details are finally emerging on the 2008 Summer Road Trip, don't know what I'm talking about yet? read on...

You may have heard that Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 & Visual Studio 2008 are either already in RTM or will be so in 2008. Therefore you might want to start thinking about tuning in to the latest stuff and this is why the 2008 Summer Road Trip is here.

Darryl , Jeremy and Chris will be visiting the following cities on the specified date to talk to each community in the regions below about those three products.

The details are as follows.

The tour will include the following dates and locations:

• · Auckland – Feb 4
• · Tauranga – Feb 5
• · Hamilton – Feb 7
• · New Plymouth – Feb 8
• · Hawkes Bay – Feb 11
• · Palmerston North – Feb 12
• · Wellington – Feb 13
• · Nelson – Feb 14
• · Christchurch – Feb 15
• · Dunedin – Feb 18
• · Invercargill - Feb 19

I'll update the links to the above locations with more details when all information is updated.

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You can register for the event here

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So don't wait, get in soon, it's going to be the best road trip ever!

You can read more about the event at the following blogs: Will try to keep the list below updated as much as I can.

- Mauricio's Blog
- Darryl's Blog
- Chris's Blog
- Jeremy's Blog

More details will be coming soon, in the mean time, don't forget to register here

So it's been a week since Christchurch's first ever Code Camp, Boot Camp 2007, came to an end. It was an AWESOME couple of days. We were worried about the weather a day before the event due to forecast but it turned out to be fantastic!

We had a Boot Camp theme for this event as you know and speakers and helpers (the Boot Camp commanders) got to wear army look T-shirts and dog tags which I thought were really cool. The event had a total of 17 sessions spread over 2 streams presented by 13 speakers listed below, I've linked to the ones that I know have blogs so you can visit their blogs for information and resources if you like...

- Darryl Burling 
- John-Daniel Trask
- Pat Martin
- Nathan Mercer
- Andrew Tokely
- Edwin Dando
- Ivan Porto Carrero
- Jeremy Boyd
- Chris Crowe
- Ivan Towlson
- Bryn Lewis
- Adam Cogan
- Evan Williams

I will be posting more details about presentation slides ...etc soon. All attendees should receive an email with links ...etc over the next week. In the mean time, thanks to those of you who attended and those who helped and a BIG thanks to Peter for bringing code camp down to the south island ... It was a great event and we look forward to future ones.

Lukas Svoboda  of Orbiz has been elected president of the NZ .NET user group community. It looks like we will be hearing more of this sometime soon. I only read the news on his blog here . But I guess this will probably come up on the mailing lists soon...

Congrats Lukas.