If you're in Auckland this Sunday, come along and check out the latest Microsoft technologies from MS Communities.

It's happening Sunday 29 August from 930am till 530PM at the University of Auckland Business School. This is a free event so please Register and attend

The MS Communities website is at http://mscommunities.net.nz/summit/ with the days agenda

[I just sent this email out to all user group attendees]

Merry Christmas!

Because the year is winding up, I wanted to send you an email to thank you for being part of our great .NET user group community in Wellington this year.

The highlight this year has been the branching out of the .NET User Group: Sky Sigal has started the Silverlight user group and Mark Carroll the VSTS user group.

Another great thing we've done this year is increase the number of meetings. It has been 7 years since the first meeting in Nov 2002. In 2003 we met every two months, in 2004 we switched to monthly and this year we've switched to fortnightly (weekly, if you attend Silverlight meetings as well!)

Stats:

Across the three user groups we had 31 meetings, which is pretty amazing for a 52 week year.

Looking at the stats for the Wellington .NET User Group on it's own: we had 21 meetings with 650 attendees. I went through the list and there were over 250 different people!

It has been so great to welcome new faces to our community, and to see familiar faces offer to present some of their ideas and wisdom for the benefit of others.

We ran a Code Camp again this year at Whitireia in Porirua, which went really well. I was also involved in our biggest Code Camp yet which was in Auckland before TechEd and had over 300 people attend.

Thanks:

I'd like to give an extra big "THANKS" to the speakers who worked so hard to put together sessions this year:

Alex Dean, Amir Shevat, Andrew Tokeley, Andy Prow, Bevan Arps, Bohdan Szymanik, Chakkaradeep Chandran, Chris Klug, Daniel McGaughran, Ivan Towlson, James Hippolite, Kevin Daly, Mike Zeff, Owen Evans, Richard Dingwall, Scott McKenzie, Sky Sigal and Tim Heuer.

Their willingness to share their experiences, put together talks and field the difficult questions really helped us all in our quest for knowledge. Also, thanks to them, I only needed to inflict myself on you as a speaker four times this year :)

I'd like to thank my employer Xero for hosting so many meetings, as well as Intergen and Provoke for hosting us in our times of need. I'd also like to thank Vicky for organising our drinks --- we appreciate it!

The prizes:

I bet you weren't expecting prizes. Aren't you glad you read this far down the email?

The inaugral winner of the "Geek of the year" goes to Bevan Arps. He was the person who attended the most user group meetings, and he presented the most sessions too. Bevan wins a Microsoft LifeCam VX-5000 valued at $100.

Please remember Bevan: when your computer is watching you, the whole world can see what you're wearing :)

To draw the winner of the "Lucky Geek" prize, I gave one entry for each meeting you attended, and used Simon Green's famous RandomDraw program to pick a winner.

The winner of the "Lucky Geek" award is Ram Petikam. Ram wins a copy of Rise of Nations / Rise of Legends, which I'm sure his teenage son will enjoy.

Your Challenge:

A lot of geeky stuff is going on in the Microsoft world. Spend a few hours this holiday season trying out something new (maybe even win an MSDN subscription http://bit.ly/6LK8vN ). Tell us what you did in our first meeting of the year, and you may win a prize!

Final thanks:

And the final, biggest THANKS to Microsoft! We appreciated every slice of the almost 400 pizzas we ate this year!

Have a great holiday season, a Merry Christmas and a happy new year. I look forward to seeing you at meetings in the new year.

Kirk

For your edification, here are the 31 meetings we had this year. How many did you come along to?

VSTS - 2 meetings:

02/99/2009    Introduction to Visual Studio Team System 2010
18/11/2009    Team System, two years down the track

Silverlight - 8 meetings:

01/07/2009    Building Accessible Silverlight Applications
29/07/2009    The Gestalt Project
09/09/2009    All about using Unity CAL, and Prism in Silverlight
30/09/2009    Creating stuff in WPF and Silverlight 3
14/10/2009    Bindings
28/10/2009    RIA Services
11/11/2009    Silverlight Animation
09/12/2009    Styling a WPF/Silverlight application

DNUG - 21 meetings:

21/01/2009    C# 4 and .NET Framework 4.0
04/02/2009    Windows Azure
18/02/2009    LINQ Refresher, Anti-XSS and SDE Libraries
04/03/2009    Recipes for Scalability
18/03/2009    Silverlight 2
15/04/2009    SQL Data Services
22/04/2009    Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services
29/04/2009    Teaching the good-guys bad-tricks
06/05/2009    Best practice - Caching
20/05/2009    Best practice - Towards Maintainability
27/05/2009    Using the AJAX Controls Toolbox in SharePoint
03/06/2009    Dependency injection using Ninject
17/06/2009    ASP.NET MVC - a deeper dive
15/07/2009    How To: Design and Develop an Application to Ensure Its Quality
05/08/2009    Towards Supportability
19/08/2009    Windows Mobile 6.5 Widgets
23/09/2009    Domain Driven Design 101
07/10/2009    .NET on the iPhone using MonoTouch
21/10/2009    Behaviour Driven Development
04/11/2009    Unit Testing 101
04/12/2009    PDC Announcements, Azure, Silverlight 4, Sharepoint 2010

Daniel presented this talk at the Wellington Silverlight user group last Wednesday.

I enjoyed this talk. Daniel went back to basics and showed how to get up and running with Silverlight and WPF development, covered the various layouts you can use in XAML, and went through some of the fundamentals of how XAML and code interact.

I think the part I most appreciated was the content that Daniel left out of his talk. He was very well prepared, and had intentionally kept things simple, which is hard to do when you have deep technical knowledge and enjoy sharing it - I struggle with keeping my talks focussed without diverting on a tangent.

Well done Daniel, I'm looking forward to your next talk!

Kirk

I attended Richard's Domain Driven Design introduction at the Wellington .NET user group back on the September 23.

Richard introduced Domain Driven Design and the motivations behind using it, covered the 'building blocks' and then gave some examples of how to put it in practice.

Richard has blogged the details of his talk here: Slides from my Domain Driven Design 101 Talk

I enjoyed Richard's slide deck, and his presentation style - simple slides so that my focus was on what he was saying. The parts of his talk that I took the most out of were the encapsulation of business logic into Specifications (different from the testing concept), and the explicit anti-corruption layer when interfacing with any external system.

Thanks Richard!

Kirk

Code Camp is less than two weeks away!

If you want to catch some free sessions on the state-of-the-art in .NET development, SQL Server and developer security then sign up for Code Camp Auckland 2009 now.

Code Camps are non-profit, and organised by members of the local developer community. This year the Auckland Code Camp is the day before TechEd (Sunday 13 September), so we've managed to nab a few great speakers on their day off to present to us.

It's the biggest Code Camp ever - over 14 hours of sessions across 3 streams from 10am till 5pm:

Development...

• What's Happening in .NET Languages and Why Should You Care?
• .NET on the iPhone and Beyond
• Behaviour Driven Development
• Domain Specific Languages
• C# 4.0 new features
• Silverlight with Prism
• Becoming Certified
• Lightning Talks
• and more!

The latest and greatest in development topics, by the people that know!

SQL Server?

• SQL Server Virtualisation Best Practices and Recommendations
• SQL Server Analysis Services and Gemini
• Query Optimization and Query Tuning
• Understanding SQL Server Indexing
• SQL Server Maintenance

Training and guidance from the best SQL trainers in the industry!

Security!

• Secure Development Lifecycle and Threat Modelling workshop
• Secure Coding Practices

We are lucky to have Michael Howard, author of Writing Secure Code and 24 Deadly Sins of Software Security giving a free workshop for developers, architects and team leads on Threat Modelling and the Secure Development Lifecycle. This will be followed by a session on how to write secure .NET code.

Auckland has never seen such an awesome free event!

Presenters that are offering their time include Greg Low, Nicholas Dritsas and Auckland's Alex Henderson of Architecture Chat fame.

To cover the costs of the event, we have the help of our generous sponsors: Microsoft, Datacom, Intergen, INETA and Xero.

All that's left for you to do is to visit the website for more details, and sign up now!

See you there on Sunday 13 September,

Kirk

Today at the Wellington .NET User Group, Kevin presented a talk on "Windows Mobile 6.5 Widgets".

Kevin has kindly provided his slides and samples for download:

I found this interesting. I haven't developed any applications for Windows Mobile, though I have played around a bit with the emulator and deploying code from within Visual Studio.

Widgets seem like a lot simpler application development model than native or compact framework applications. The application development model is similar to Vista sidebar gadgets, as there is a packaged zip file containing the application inside - and the application is 'simply' Javascript and HTML. Widgets can use XHR or DOM manipulation, and have access to a small amount of local storage to store preference information.

Windows Mobile 6.5 treats widgets as first-class application citizens within the OS - they have icons on the revamped start screen, and appear in the uninstall screen. As far as the user knows, they are the same as a native application.

Where the process is currently let down is in deployment and debugging. Currently a widget can only be deployed through the Windows Mobile marketplace, after the developer has signed up and the application has been reviewed (I think!). Debugging from Visual Studio seems non-existent, meaning that development is through trial and error.

I could see an enterprising person (like Kevin) building a Javascript library that simulated the API provided by the widget infrastructure, so that widgets could be developed and tested on a desktop before being deployed on a device. Kevin, am I right that all that is needed is the Widget object and some fake ActiveX controls?

All up, an interesting session.

Cheers!

Kirk

Today I went to Nelson for lunch, and presented on Caching to the Nelson .NET User Group.

The talk was a repeat of my Wellington and Auckland talk from a few months ago, and covered various places you typically cache data in a .NET app, motivating the discussion of memcached and Velocity.

It was nice to get down to Nelson to briefly soak up the sun and meet a few new people.

View my previous post on Caching for further info.

Thanks for having me Daniel!

Kirk

So this was a few weeks ago, but I thought I would post some notes here anyway.

Bevan gave a talk at the Wellington .NET User Group titled "Towards Supportability" (view his slides and notes).

Apart from marvelling at his good looking slides, the main thing I took away from his talk was the points he made on documentation. Bevan gave an approach for document systems for the person fighting the fire when all hell breaks loose. When a system is broken, and people are all over the poor systems administrator to fix it, they don't need thick architecture documents, they need something quick and actionable.

The 'Supportability' document structure:

• Architecture - a summary of physical deployment
• Symptoms - a list of failure modes that users might encounter
• Actions - possible remedies
• Procedures - step by step instructions for common procedures
• Reference - additional reference material

The most important parts are the symptoms and actions - how to diagnose what's wrong and how to recover from it.

Cheers Bevan!

Kirk

There's a lot of technology groups in Wellington. I decided to get together a list of all of them so that we could see if we clash on our regular meeting days. Please let me know if your group is missing, or the details need updating.

Most of these groups run free events with the support of their sponsors!

Form more info about geek events in Wellington, head over to wellington.geek.nz or dot.net.nz.

Microsoft technology focussed:

• Wellington .NET User Group: First and Third Wednesday of the month
• Wellington SQL: Third Thursday of the month
• Wellington Sharepoint: Last Wednesday of the month
• Wellington Dynamics: No fixed day, normally near the end of the month
• Wellington Infrastructure: Monday night, once every 2 months
• Wellington Silverlight: Monthly
• Wellington Team System: Bi-monthly
  

Other technologies:

• OLPC Friends in Testing: Saturday mornings
• Wellington Python User Group: Second Thursday of the month
• Erlang Users Group: first Thursday of the month
• Wellington Perl Mongers: second Tuesday of the month
• Wellington Creative Suite User Group: First Tuesday of the month
• Flex User Group: Second Wednesday of the month
  
• Wellington Java user group: third Wednesday of the month
• WellRailed
• Wellington PHP Group
• WellyLUG Linux User Group: Third Wednesday of the month
• Wellington Macintosh Society: Mondays
• Wellington Agile Professionals Network: Mondays
• Wellington Novell Users International: Monthly
  

Technology 'agnostic':

• Wellington Geeks Lunch: Tuesday lunchtime
• Unlimited Potential: various days of the month
• NZ ICT - voice of industry
• Wellington Solution Architects Forum: lunchtime
• Wellington's Web Design & Dev Meetup
• Thursday Night Curry: Thursday evenings
• Information Security Interest Group (ISIG): Last Thursday of the month
• Technical Communicators Association: Last Monday of the month
• Test Professionals Network
• NZ Computer Society

Happy Geeking!

Kirk

Well, what did I learn while at Code Camp last weekend.?

• Wellington .NET dev community is passionate and quite diverse
• Objective C is more smalltalk-ish than I realised from previous snippets I had seen
• Xcode IDE is less 'integrated' than Visual Studio
• I now know more about CRM and other Microsoft solutions
• A panel discussion (Usability or Security) can be fun when the audience participates
• How to make my code slightly more maintainable
• Code contracts gel with me more than Spec# did. and I like them
• F# continues to be awesome and yet awe-inspiring
• Sync framework looks like a good solution for occasionally connected apps, with a good set of functionality out of the box
• And I demoed a beta IDE in a beta VM on a beta OS (VS2010 in Windows Virtual XP on Windows 7)

Sponsors are awesome!

• Whitireia Community Polytechnic (in particular, the Bachelor of Information Technology staff) were very accommodating hosts
• Mindscape surprised by offering prizes of 2 LightSpeed licenses and one "bundle of everything"
• Microsoft NZ sent through prizes, and the Microsoft MVP Programme sponsored some of the costs
• INETA APAC, the International .NET Association also sponsored some of the costs
• Xero also sponsored towards the costs
• DTS provided internet for the weekend

Go Go Gadget. Karting!

I had fun at the go-karts. The winners of the team event were Simon and Bert:

I visited Napier at lunchtime today to present at the Hawkes Bay .NET User Group.

The presentation was a mixture of my earlier web security talk and the talk I gave recently on the Anti-XSS library which helps when you need to encode untrusted data.

• The Microsoft Anti-XSS Library (use instead of HttpUtility.Encode)
• Security Runtime Engine - automatically encode ASP.NET control properties
• The Classifieds web site starter kit
• Which ASP.NET Controls Automatically Encode?
• Clickjacking video
• Framebusting:
  http://pageofwords.com/blog/2008/10/06/FrameBustingInJavascript.aspx
• OWASP - The Open Web Application Security Project - http://www.owasp.org

Subscribe to my blog: http://pageofwords.com

Cheers!

Kirk

I presented a talk at the Wellington and Auckland .NET user groups this month titled "Best Practices -  Caching". The goal of the talk was to discuss why we might need to add caching to our applications, and the way that we typically add it to each layer:

• Client-side: reducing data flowing to the server, enable caching through expiry etc
• ASP.NET: stashing data; page-level, fragment, IIS caching
• Business layer: cache objects to avoid computation
• Data layer: cache raw data from the database; identity maps
• Database: reduce hits on disk

The difficult part when caching at any layer is invalidating the redundant data that is stored in the cache when the source data changes. It's easier depending on the type of the data:

• Reference - shared reads (e.g. Catalog)
• Easy to cache and distribute
• Activity - exclusive write (e.g. Cart)
• Can cache each user's data separately
• Resource - shared, concurrency read/write, large number of transactions (e.g. Auction bid)
• Caching is hard
• DB is best source of data, with careful caching

The second half of the talk we looked at two caching technologies - memcached and Velocity.

The presentation: Caching.pdf 

Some links:

• Microsoft Project code named Velocity
• Steve Souders - High performance web sites
• YSlow

Kirk

Developer survey from Microsoft. Each answer you put in displays a different cartoon reflecting your choice. Fill in the survey here.

I'll post the slides from my AntiXSS talk later, once I've cleaned them up. In the meantime, here's a couple of links:

• AntiXSS library (including the Security Runtime Engine)
• MarkAntiXSSOutput flag for the SRE
• XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheat Sheet - here's some examples of places you can inject script into HTML to get around filters that people write
• List of ASP.NET controls that need encoding

I will post the slides later.

Kirk

It was a nice sunny day in Nelson yesterday, and it was nice to have a little look at the scenery afterwards (thanks, Daniel!).

I presented a similar "Overcoming your web insecurity" talk that I gave in Auckland recently [slides], and it was good fun diving in to some depth in the extra time we had... hopefully I managed to scare some people!

Next Wednesday at the Wellington .NET Users Group, Owen Evans (who also works at Xero) and I will be presenting two sessions.

Owen will be doing a LINQ Refresher to get us up to speed with the LINQ syntax for selecting, grouping, where-ing and more.

I will be talking about the Anti-XSS library, which is now in beta. The library is pretty cool and helps a lot with encoding data before it ends up on your website :)

More details of the event are here: LINQ Refresher, Anti-XSS and SDE Libraries

Hope to see you on Wednesday!

Kirk

I've got the afternoon off work this Wednesday 11 Feb, and am popping over to Nelson to present on web security (details below).

I hope to see you there!

Kirk

Daniel Ballinger wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Kirk Jackson from the Wellington .NET user group will be in town on
> Wednesday the 11th of February and is giving a presentation.
>
> Title:
> Overcoming your web insecurity
>
> Abstract:

> As an ASP.NET developer, there are many things to think about while
> developing your web application. Come along to understand the
> fundamentals of developing a secure web application, and learn how to
> protect your site against the dangers of cross-site scripting, cross
> domain request forging and click-jacking.
>
> This session will be suitable for all levels of experience, and
> developers who use other web development platforms such as PHP or Java.
>

> Presenter:
> Kirk Jackson
>
> Useful links:
> http://pageofwords.com - Kirk's blog
>
> http://mscommunities.net.nz/ - The home of Microsoft communities in New Zealand
>
> When:
> Wednesday 11th February 2009
> Gather at 2:50 pm, starting at 3:00 pm.
>
> Approximately 1 hour 15 minutes plus pizza afterward.
>
> Where:
> FuseIT Ltd,
> Ground Floor,
> 7 Forests Rd,
> Stoke,
> Nelson
>
> (Off Nayland Rd and behind Carters)
> http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=-41.299774~173.236231&style=r&lvl=16&alt=-1000
> or
> http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&om=1&z=17&ll=-41.299774,173.236231&spn=0.005239,0.010042&t=h
>
> If you are parking on site, please use the parks marked FuseIT that
> are at the back of the site.
>
> Giveaways:
> A single copy Microsoft Office 2007 Professional
>
> Catering: Pizza & Drinks
>
> Door Charge: Free
>
>
> RSVP to me if you are going to attend so I can guesstimate the food
> and drink requirements.
>
> However, feel free to turn up on the day though if you can't commit at
> the moment.
>
> Please feel free to invite anyone who may be interested in attending.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Daniel
>
> Daniel Ballinger
> Developer
> FuseIT ™

http://www.fishofprey.com/

That trip turned out to be a bit of a whirlwind. Sorry I had to dash straight after the presentation!

The talk was an introduction to cross-site scripting (XSS), cross domain request forgery (CDRF) and clickjacking, and used a common theme of "never trust users" to show how trusting GET, POST, Cookies, Headers or other user supplied data could be your downfall.

I've already posted the slides to this talk from back when I presented at the Christchurch Code Camp: Overcoming your web insecurity

• Subscribe to my blog: http://pageofwords.com
• The Classifieds web site starter kit
• The Microsoft Anti-XSS Library (use instead of HttpUtility.Encode)
• Which ASP.NET Controls Automatically Encode?
• Clickjacking video
• Framebusting:
  http://pageofwords.com/blog/2008/10/06/FrameBustingInJavascript.aspx
• Security Runtime Engine (coming, will help with ASP.NET controls)
• OWASP – The Open Web Application Security Project – http://www.owasp.org

There's a new beta of the Anti-XSS library that you should check out when encoding your user-supplied data for use in HTML or attributes. At the same link is the new CAT.NET tool that analyses your code for weaknesses.

The Anti-XSS library now includes the Security Runtime Engine, which will help when encoding ASP.NET controls. I'll be posting about it here soon, so subscribe to my RSS feed :)

The SQL PASS Community Connection event is kicking off about now in Porirua (20 mins from Wellington). I'm not able to make it today, but I do plan to head along tomorrow.

Wake up, get up, and head on over!

I'm in Napier presenting my Visual Studio Tips and Tricks talk to the Hawkes Bay .NET Users Group.

I think we're on at 3:30pm at the Taradale EIT Campus, but email me if you're thinking of coming, and I'll get you the info.

Kirk

[Update 8 Dec 2008: Added details below]

The session is at 3:30pm on Tuesday 9 December, at the following location:

Room C117
C-block (Computing building)
EIT (Eastern Institute of Technology)
Taradale end of Gloucester Street
Taradale, Napier

I had fun presenting on ASP.NET security tonight at the .NET Users Group. It was a bit of a whirlwind tour through some common security issues that you might come across when developing and deploying an ASP.NET application.

I've already posted the slides to this talk from back when I presented at the Christchurch Code Camp: Overcoming your web insecurity

I spent the evening at the Summer of Code user group event, along with James Hippolite and Scott McKenzie who are also from the Wellington .NET Users Group.

Summer of Code helps place students into companies over their summer break. At Xero we have James Sullivan currently working on Xero Labs samples on our Xero developer site.

The event tonight was to put students in touch with user groups around Wellington. It was great to see the cool user groups that are up and running, from PHP and Linux to WellRailed and SuperHappyDevHouse. Hopefully those students that were there got to see that there's a lot of good support if you're interested in learning new topics, and support for people that want help.

Go Wellington!

Kirk

Hi,

Many thanks to those who came along to our PDC Fireworks session last night. I hope you had an interesting time hearing about what's coming on the horizon, and that your families enjoyed meeting your geek friends!
A huge thank you to our speakers who presented on such a wide range of topics in a limited time. If you want to find out more or watch any sessions from the PDC, you could visit the Channel 9 PDC site, or visit the blogs of the presenters:

• Chris Auld
• James Newton-King
• James Hippolite
• Mark Orange
• Chan Kulathilake
• Owen Evans
• Kirk Jackson

Also, a big thanks to those who helped set up and tidy up the room. Great job!

The .NET user group meets once or twice monthly, usually on the first and third Wednesday of the month. If you'd like to go on my mailing list for upcoming user group presentations, please email me.

If you're interested in the Wellington Sharepoint User Group, or the Wellington SQL User Group, make sure you follow the links to sign up to them.

Upcoming Sessions:

Wed 19 Nov, 6pm - Microsoft .NET Services with Chaks Chandran [.NET User Group]

Microsoft .Net Services is a part of the recently announced Microsoft Azure Platform. What does Microsoft .Net Services provide ?

Microsoft .Net Services consists of three main components:

1. Service Bus
2. Access Control
3. Workflow Services

They provide a hosting platform where you can develop connected, peer to peer applications that can speak to each other without considering the other complexities such as firewall rules and NAT etc,.

Venue: Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington

Please RSVP to kirkj@paradise.net.nz

Thurs 13 Nov, 1:10-5pm - MSDN Unplugged [Microsoft]

Sat 6 & Sun 7 Dec - SQL Pass Community Connection [NZ User Groups]

Wed 3 Dec, 6pm - Overcoming your web insecurity [.NET User Group]

In this hour-long session, I'll be introducing you to some of the threats your ASP.NET website will face, and give you ideas on how to protect your users, company and yourself. This applies to public facing and internal (intranet) applications.

RSVP details will be sent out to the announcement list closer to the date.

Thanks for reading this far!

Kirk

I enjoyed reading this book. Christopher Fairbairn, organiser of the Christchurch .NET User Group recommended it to me as containing a bunch of useful tips for running a user group, and I have to agree with him.

The author is Dr. Greg Low, who has spent a long time organising MSDN and SQL Server user groups in Queensland, Australia. Greg is a big supporter of Code Camps, and has helped organise Code Camps in Australia and spoken in New Zealand. When I first met Greg, I was impressed by his enthusiasm and energy.

The Rational Guide to Building Technical Communities is all about improving your user group, with ideas on running your group more consistently; finding, recruiting and growing your speaker pool; recruiting volunteers; and running the meeting successfully.

The book has the following sections:

• Overview
• People, Not Technology
• Something for everyone
• Finding speakers
• Tried and true
• Starting and growing user groups
• Pizza does not define a user group
• Don't reinvent the wheel
• Recruiting members
• Content and handouts
• User group meetings and conferences
• Using technologies
• Recruiting volunteers
• Conducting meetings
• Tips for presenters
• Legal and finance
• The fine print
• Funding

Some things (like Legal and Finance), we've got sorted now in New Zealand with our incorporated society (although the section on different types of insurance we might need was an eye opener), and others I still struggle with.

Most interesting to me was how to attract and keep new members by making them feel welcome in the group. Some ideas, like introducing new members at the start of a meeting I will try out at our next meeting.

Greg repeats a marketing adage: "the easiest customer to find is the one you already have", and that's too true. Each time someone comes along to our user group, we have to give them as much opportunity as possible to stay in our group -- by pitching future topics at their level, and making sure that they know about them. In our Wellington group we're trying to have some more introductory or general purpose topics to try and appeal to more people.

In summary, I guess the most useful things I drew from this book were about the human side of running a user group. That's what I find the most enjoyable and rewarding, and Greg gives some good tips on how to make it happen.

Cheers,

Kirk

• Open source or free projects you work on or use, and the cool features that mean we should check it out.
• A hot new technique you've learnt in VB, C#, Visual Studio etc.
• Come and work for my company because...
  
• I run a user group or coffee group, you should come along because...
• I'm a software vendor, and 5 minutes is all I need to sell some copies...
• Or perhaps even something humorous?
  

It is a busy time in Wellington .NET User Group land.

Nine months ago I switched us over to fortnightly user group meetings. While it's sometimes a struggle to find speakers, thanks to the great support of the speakers and the Wellington community, we're able to entertain, teach and enlighten every 14 days.

I thought a round-up of our activity over the past 12 months would be interesting:

21/05/2008 - Subversion and Cruise Control - Sky Sigal

07/05/2008 - Visual Studio certification & SQL Server Reporting Services - James Hippolite

16/04/2008 - There's more to life than C# and VB.NET - Kirk Jackson

02/04/2008 - Mocking 101 - Owen Evans

19/03/2008 - Silverlight 2.0 - James Newton King

05/03/2008 - 2008 Lightning Strike! - Various Presenters

13/02/2008 - 2008 Summer Road Trip - Jeremy Boyd, Chris Auld, Kirk Jackson

30/01/2008 - ASP.NET MVC framework - John-Daniel Trask

05/12/2007 - Introduction to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) - Ivan Towlson

21/11/2007 - Dynamic Runtime & Languages - What's it all about? - Ivan Porto Carrero

07/11/2007 - SQL Server 2008 for Developers - Jeremy Boyd

03/10/2007 - A lap around Visual Studio 2008 - Darryl Burling

19/09/2007 - ASP.NET Futures: Dynamic Data Controls - Andrew Tokeley

06/09/2007 - Virtual Earth – Overview on Spatial Development - Matti Seikkula

01/08/2007 - Developing with Windows SharePoint Services v3.0 - Zac Smith

04/07/2007 - C# vs VB.NET - continuing the epic battle - Philip Cox and Kirk Jackson

06/06/2007 - Well MIXed! - Chris Auld

As well as organising 16 of those talks and 20 speakers to present, in the past 12 months I also have:

• Presented a PowerShell presentation at TechEd NZ in August 2007
• Presented on C# 3.0 features at a corporate user group
• Given a presentation for ELCM351 at Victoria University on "Future Directions in Web Development" (more on this later)
• Been the treasurer of the NZ .NET User Group Incorporated Society, and written about 100 cheques for beer and pizza, as well as attending committee meetings and procrastinating about budgets
• Organised the "Dev Code Camp 2007" on Sunday 12 August 2007 in Auckland, just before TechEd. It was a struggle finding speakers, organising catering and sponsorship, and MC'ing the day. Probably the hardest event I've done so far... Watch out for another one this year :)
• Presented on C# 3.0 at the Dev Code Camp as well.
  

It has been great to have the support of the speakers listed above from the Wellington community, and even greater that 8 of them spoke for the first time at the user group this year.

I'm always on the lookout for new speakers. If you're interested, drop me a line!

(I'm looking for a speaker for Wed 4 June by the way :)

Cheers,

Kirk

• Wellington SQL Server Users Group
• Wellington Sharepoint Users Group
• Zamdes (WPF and Silverlight)
  
• Wellington Connected Systems User Group
• Wellington Office Users Group
• Project user group

• Many questions aren't satisfactorily answered (46%)
  
• Helpers give up after a few attempts
• Beginner users have fundamental gaps in knowledge, and need direction to other documentation sources

• 15 recent threads from the NZ dotnet mailing list where a specific question was asked
• I measured similar statistics on the effectiveness and time to resolution, although for some of the threads where the orginal poster didn't reply with thanks, I defined "resolution" subjectively as whether I thought a satisfactory answer had been given
• A count of the number of messages in each thread, the number of helpful / on topic messages, off-topic, irrelevant and unhelpful messages

• 80% of questions received a satisfactory reply!
• There were no off-topic, irrelevant or unhelpful messages!
• Median time to resolution was 20 minutes!
• Longest time to resolution was 2hrs 34mins.
• Best response times are early-mid morning, and mid-afternoon. Slower responses over lunch time.

• The list is an extension of the user groups, and many people know each other in person
  
• Everyone is in the same timezone and industry, which means the responses are fast, and usually at the same time of day that you need help
  
• Off-topic conversation is kept to a seperate off-topic mailing list
• The list subscribers have a wide spread of knowledge and experience, with some members having very deep .NET knowledge
• Timaru is discussed monthly :)