The Rational Guide to Building Technical User Communities does a good job of covering a variety of topics related to starting and maintaining technical user communities.  The author's opinions come from years of working with user groups in various capacities, and all his opinions are backed up with stories from his own experiences.  His ideas seem to be mostly common sense, but it is helpful to have all the information aggregated in one location.

The book is easy to read and is a good length.  I found the discussion of recruiting volunteers to be very helpful.  The one point on which I disagree with the author is his opinion that meetings should always have two topics.  I certainly don't have the experience that the author has, but I have found that there is just not enough time to allow for disussion, handle group business and giveaways, and cover two topics in a reasonable amount of time.

Overall, I was very pleased with the book and will be passing it around to the rest of the leadership of our user group.

If you're running Visual Studio 2008, I would highly recommend PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008.

From their page on MSDN Code Gallery:

PowerCommands is a set of useful extensions for the Visual Studio 2008 adding additional functionality to various areas of the IDE.

Basically, it adds a number of menu items to the right-click menu in various areas of Visual Studio.  My favorites are "Open Command Prompt", "Open Containing Folder", and the ability to modify recent files and properties.  Head over to the MSDN Code Gallery page for full details.

Last night, the Fort Smith .NET User Group (FSDNUG) had its first meeting with Raymond Lewallen speaking on Behavior-Driven Design (BDD).  We had 35 people show up from Data-Tronics, EagleOne, Golden Living, OK Industries, and Wingfoot.  There were a couple of minor logistical issues with signing in, but overall everything went really well.  David Mohundro has an excellent writeup of the content of the meeting on his blog along with links to numerous BDD resources.

Thanks to everyone who helped make the meeting happen.  I'm looking forward to our next meeting March 31 when Chris Koenig will be talking about Silverlight.

This has been in the works for a while, but I'm just now getting to blogging about it. A group of .NET developers in the Fort Smith area are starting a Fort Smith .NET User Group (FSDNUG) and our first meeting is Monday, March 3 at 6:00 PM. See our website for more details and directions. There are many individuals locally and from the Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group that have put in a lot of work to make this happen.

The vendor participation has been much greater than I initially thought it would. We've got books, T-shirts, and tons of really good software to give away. Of course, much credit goes to the guys from our group that are handling that as they sent out countless emails.

Announcements by others involved with the group:

• David Mohundro
• Randy Walker

If you are in the area Monday and can attend the meeting, we'd love to have you!

I typically shy away from posting links to new versions of products, patches, etc. because I know there's no way I can keep up and there are already so many good sources available for that type of thing.  However after installing the Visual Studio 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix, I have been so pleased that I thought I should share.

The hot fix deals primarily with performance issues related to web development in VS 2008.  I knew that the HTML view was often taking a long time to load, but I attributed that to me having something setup incorrectly or invalid HTML.  However, this hot fix has drastically reduced the screen freezes I was getting on a regular basis.

Another issue that was driving me crazy was the occassional disappearance of the "View Code" link from the context menu when in HTML view.  I never realized how much I used that feature until it was no longer there.  Luckily, one of the fixes listed on ScottGu's blog entry is:

“View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.

So evidently the issue had to do with my use of the web application project model.  Interesting.

Anyway, the download was small (~ 2.6 MB) and the install took less than a minute.  I would highly recommend this update to anyone writing web applications with Visual Studio 2008.  Thanks Microsoft!

After encouragement from Zain Naboulsi, Saturday I attended my first meeting of the Second Life .NET User Group.  This was actually the first time I even ventured into the Second Life world and was surprised at how similar the meeting was to a user group meeting in real life.  Just like in real life, it was slightly uncomfortable for me to walk up to a stranger and strike up a conversation.  But just like in real life, once I did start conversations, everyone I spoke to was friendly and interesting.

There is a virtual auditorium with a podium and stage and seats for attendees.  The speaker at the meeting was using a microphone so I could actually hear him through my computer speakers.  Most of the others interacted through text chatting which was a bit difficult to follow, but helpful too.  The speaker was reading the chats, too, so he could respond to any comments or questions.  This particular meeting there was no formal presentation, but I'm told Powerpoint presentations can be shown on screens in Second Life.

Overall, it was a much more natural-feeling experience than what I thought it would be.  I'll try to attend the next couple of meetings to continue to get a feel for it.

After stepping away from studying for a couple of months, I finally decided I wanted to pass my first certfication exam in 2007.  So, I studied more intensely for a week leading up to the exam and finally took and passed it on December 20.

To me the exam was actually a bit easier than the practice tests that I was using from the Training Kit book, but I've read the opinions of others who say just the opposite.  There were some questions I was able to figure out just based on the context of the questions and general programming knowledge.  There were others that I never would have known had I not specifically studied for this exam.  For example, my day to day job duties typically don't take me anywhere near topics like encryption, COM, or anything beyond basic threading, but those were areas that were covered in the Training Kit book.

I am now trying to decide which test I want to try and tackle next.  I've got an upcoming web project, so I am leaning in that direction.  That would be Exam 70-528 - Web Based Client Development. 

After taking the first exam, I definitely have a better idea of how to study for this one.  Rather than stretching out the studying over months, I will most likely study intensely for a week or two and maybe take a day off work before exam day.

I just got back from DevLink in Nashville and the first thing that comes to mind is "Wow!".  The quality of speakers, the facilities at Lipscomb University, and the organization of the event were amazing.  And to think, it only cost $50 to attend.  Kudos to the organizers.

There were tracks on general .NET, ASP.NET, databases, project management, and architecture.  At each time slot, there were multiple talks that I would have liked to attend.  After arriving at the conference and looking over the agenda, I decided that many of the database sessions looked interesting as I do a lot of database work and have never had much training in that area.

Highlights for me included a talk by Paul Nielsen on smart database design and the keynote by Ron Jacobs on test driven development and the model-view-presenter (MVP) design pattern.  I still need to look a bit more at Ron's example, but I sure feel a lot more comfortable with MVP after his talk.

The best part about the conference was the friendliness of everyone I came across.  The organizers (who were easily identifiable by the very cool DevLink jerseys) were always friendly and willing to answer questions and the speakers that I had a chance to talk to personally were all easily approachable.  And there's nothing like being surrounded by a couple hundred programmers to make for a fun weekend. 

Great conference, and I'll do my best to attend next year.

Looks like I'm going to get to go to the devLink Technical Conference in Nashville, TN on October 12-13.  I don't remember where I first heard about it, but the speaker list includes some pretty big names for a whopping $50 registration fee.

There are a wide variety of sessions on topics such as .NET, architecture, database design, and even some project management sessions.  I'm really looking forward to it!

Microsoft has begun updating a page listing the number of Microsoft Certified Professionals worldwide:

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/certified.mspx

This gives me more motivation to get through the tests as the numbers are much lower than I thought they would be.  Looks like getting to my goal of MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer would put me in a fairly elite group (1,813 as of 7/19/2007).