Good bye 2008 … Welcome 2009!
by: Victor Rojas

Well, October has passed and Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming up!  Can you believe that?  We started off our Pensacola SQL Server Users Group almost mid year with a great presentation by our own Pensacola VP SQL Architect expert, Rodney Lundrum and Shawn McGehee, the coauthor of the Apress book “SQL Server Reporting Services 2008”. We all enjoyed the presentations this year on SQL Server, Visual Studio 2008, ASP.NET, C#, VB.NET, WPF, XML, XNA, Silverlight 2, and many other topics and tips that we have shared and learned.  We were very fortunate having the best technical speakers such as Joe Healy, the Microsoft Developer Evangelist for Florida, Russ Fustino, a Microsoft expert with more than 25 years of development experience, Barry Ralston from Comframe.com, Matthew Panzano, an expert in Microsoft SharePoint, Jeff Barnes, and many other local speakers that you may already know them, and of course, last but not least our President Karla Remail whom has worked tirelessly in this users group. The turnout on all these events was great and we have received positive feedback from fellow members! And we cannot take all the credit, we all are winners on this one, we all made it possible.  Personally, the best part of all for me was the ‘food’, man …!  Awesome food … and we did not even have to pay for it, everything was basically free, well … it was free for us, in reality we need to thank our good and faithful Sponsors … Thank You Sponsors!!!So, as we get ready to wrap up this 2008, and prepare for the new year 2009 with new plans, excitement, hope and gratitude we want to let you know that each of you are important, let’s pray that 2009 will be the best year ever for us, our families, friends and our user group.  A year full of opportunities, blessings and knowledge!  As our friend Russ Fustino said - “You have to know the code to get in the shed. KNOW THE CODE! “And whatever Code is the one you have, may that code be unleashed this year 2009. Please don’t forget our last meeting / Holiday Social event on December 4, 2008 at the Heritage Hall at Seville Quarter, starting at 6:30pm., you do not want to miss this Social gathering, we will have good food, spirits, music, entertainment, and even a gift for you!  Bring a friend.

Personally for me, it has been a great year in the IT world, I have received many book gifts in these meetings, lots of free Microsoft Programming software, Shirts, flash drives, pens, key-chains, etc. etc.  Oh man … I can’t complain! Is this a great country or what? I have some links below for you if you want to survive the holidays, No excuses … KNOW THE CODE!

See some pictures here …

•         Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Installer)

•         Visual Studio 2008 SDK Version 1.0

•         Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

•         Visual Studio 2005 SDK Version 4.0

•         Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso)

•         http://www.pensacolasql.com/

•         http://pensacola.sqlpass.org/

•       http://www.sqlpass.org/Community/SIGs/DatabaseAdministrationSIG/tabid/80/Default.aspx

•         http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=33024344522

•             http://blogs.msdn.com/rfustino/

•         http://www.msdnevents.com/default.aspx?sid=12

•         http://www.devfish.net/ Joe healy

•         http://www.technetbriefings.com/ Technet Briefings

•         http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/local/#FindEvents Connections (Business Owners)

•         http://www.ts2seminars.com/ TS2 (Partners)

•         http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/default.mspx MBS (Business Pros)

•         http://windowsclient.net/

•         http://www.microsoft.com/learning/books/devtools

•         http://www.loweraldotnet.org/

•         http://msdn.microsoft.com/rampu