First of all, Rodney and I want to thank all of you for coming to last
night’s meeting. What a great turnout for only our second meeting! AND,
now because of that, we received confirmation this morning from Joe Healy
that he will indeed be our guest speaker at the August meeting!!!

I know most of you last night recognized Joe’s name when we mentioned him,
but for those who haven’t maybe heard of him, Joe Healy (www.devfish.net)
is the Developer Evangelist for Florida. Joe’s geographical responsibility
is to provide ‘developer care’ for the Gulf States District for the East
Region Developer team. As such, he has responsibilities to bring .NET
development to the masses in his area.

Joe serves a multitude of clients, from corporate accounts to broad reach
events and User Groups. He lectures on various development and
architectural topics focused around the .Net Frameworks, Visual
Studio.NET, and associated servers.

Joe worked previously for Microsoft Consulting Services in the custom
Application Development arena, focusing on Internet, Web Services, Rich
Client, B2B, and browser delivered systems for Microsoft Consulting
Services.

Joe’s presentation at the August 28th meeting will be “Visual Studio 2008
Service Pack 1″. - Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Overview – “more than
a service pack” – Currently in beta testing, VS2008 SP1 is planned for
release in late summer. It will deliver significant new components for
web developers, including ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ADO.NET Entity Framework,
and ADO.NET Data Services. Also including are a myriad of other features.
We’ll take an overview snapshot of SP1 during this session.

Having Joe come is a huge honor for our new users group, so please do
spread the word for this next meeting. We will be sending out the new
location info by the end of next week.

Thank you again for all your support, and your feedback is always welcomed!

Cheers,
Karla
 

We will have out next Pensacola SQL Server Users Group Meeting on July 23rd at 6:30 PM.  This meeting’s sessions will be:

DBA Day 1 presented by Shawn McGehee

Designing Reports with SQL Server Reporting Services presented by Rodney Landrum, author of “Pro SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services” (Apress)

Both of these sessions will be beginner to intermediate level.

We will also have more giveaways from our growing list of sponsors and a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate up for grabs.

The location for this meeting will be at the Pensacola Regional Airport, second floor, room 224.  Parking is $2.00 per hour, but if you bring in your green parking ticket, we have reimbursement vouchers for the parking fees.

We look forward to seeing everyone there.

I intentially put the ellipses on the title to represent three kicks of my own butt in not having updated our site with information about our first group meeting until now.  No excuses like overworked and chapters due on the new book and holiday. It is funny when someone says, I won’t give you excuses, like…and then they spell out the excuses.

However, our first meeting was a success.  We met a lot of great local talent who were all engaging and patient as I explained SSIS package varaibales and expressions.  We learned several important lessons for our first meeting.  First, of course, for any good user group meeting is food. Well…ok content should be the main focus, but having good food helps. Second, Thursdays seem to be the worst time for most of the attendees.  So…our next elliptical meeting will include great food again, good content, free parking and will be held on a Wednesday. 

Many people asked for presentation decks to be posted. We will be posting them soon.

And here are some pictures of the first group that braved the drive to the airport. Luckily the jet engine noise was not too bad.

Thanks everyone who attended and we promise the next meeting, on July 23rd (details shortly) will have more swag, more free software from sponsors, and content that crosses the SQL spectrum with introductory sessions as well as intermediate level.  We will be sending out a meeting schedule very soon.

Rodney