INETA APAC Newsletter December 2006

About INETA
INETA is the next evolution in user group communities—a non-profit, independent organization, chartered with supporting all user groups interested in the Microsoft .Net platform.

INETA is run by a Board of user group leaders, elected by their peers, and supported by Microsoft Corporation and other sponsors.

Happenings Around INETA Asia Pacific (APAC)

Happenings around Asia Pacific
One of the most important services which INETA offers it’s member organizations is a pool of the most experienced speakers for their user group meetings. This is available at no cost to all member organizations. This month there are two speaker engagements, Sri Lanka: Praveen Srivatsa from the Speaker Bureau will be visiting CDNUG in Sri Lanka and presenting on “Windows Vista - for developers” and on “Office 2007 - for developers”.
India: Aman Gupta currently working in ASB Bank, New Zealand is travelling to India and Singapore, and he will be speaking at the Dotnetbuzzdelhi user group, in New Delhi, India. Please login in to INETA APAC and request a speaker for your meetings. If you know of potential speakers who could be enrolled in the speaker bureau please ask them to fill in the speaker application form. Each group can request a speaker for their meetings 3 times in a year. INETA fully sponsors the speaker travel cost.

User Group Kit
Shipment of the user group kit has begun, those groups who have been able to provide us their logos will have their custom banners shipped, others will receive T-shirts of INETA with the new logo. If you would like to see specific material from a vendor do drop an email to colt.kwong@ineta.org and the marketing team will work towards enabling a discount or giveaways with that vendor.

Sanjay Shetty,
President, INETA APAC sanjay.shetty@ineta.org

Editor's Note

At INETA APAC, we would like to wish everyone a Merry and Joyous Christmas! Hope everyone had an eventful year, and all geared up for L.O.V.E in 2007!

We would also like to extend a warm welcome to the Hawke's Bay .NET User Group, from New Zealand. We touched base with Gerard, who shares with us the activities that his group has been organizing.

The newsletter committee is looking for volunteers in this team who can assist in various areas such as data collation, editing, proof reading, design and formatting etc. Please feel free to drop me an email.

Wee Hyong
Editor, INETA APAC
Newsletter Team

The APAC .Net Channel

Usergroup Activities around APAC

India

Hyderabad
by Sudhakar S

Microsoft user Group Hyderabad conducted Devcon 2006 on Nov 19th, Sunday at the Microsoft Campus.The full day technical event on Microsoft Platform and was packed with 340 developers from different companies across Hyderabad. The speakers were eminent industry experts and Microsoft MVPs from several companies like Microsoft, Satyam computers, Accenture, Cordys and MAQ Software.

Anjana Ramamoorthy from Satyam Computers, Ramakrishnan from Microsoft and Vinod Kumar from Microsoft gave a series of enlightening technical presentations on the capabilities and usage of Microsoft's database SQLServer 2005.

Sudhakar Sadasivuni and Janakiraman from Microsoft spoke about building next-generation web applications on Microsoft Platform using MS AJAX and Windows Live.

Anand Kumar from Accenture along with Harish Ranganathan and Lakshmi from Microsoft spoke on the new release of C#.

Pratap Ladhani from Microsoft and Arun Ganesh from Accenture spoke on some of the best practices and architectural patterns.

There was also a session on Mobile development by Harshal Pachpande from MAQ, and a session on Service Oriented Architecture by Vignesh Swaminathan and Anand Doraisami from Cordys.

There were quiz contests in between and every attendee had an opportunity to win some goodies and take aways.

Developers interested in being a part of Microsoft User Group Hyderabad(MUGH), can visit http://www.mugh.net/
Madurai
by Nirmalanand Jebakumar

MaduraiDotNet UG Meet of November 2006

Date: 29.11.2006 (Wednesday)
Venue: Web Design Lab, CSE Dept. Thiagarajar College of Engineering

Topics Covered:
Introduction to C# Language by Suganya
AJAX Application Development by Jebasingh
CLR Internals & Types of JIT Compilers by Padmashree
Programming in MSIL by Nirmalanand

The MaduraiDotNet User Group Meet for the month of November was held on 29.11.06 (Wednesday) at the Web Design Lab, CSE Dept. Thiagarajar College of Engineering. The meet started off with a session on “Introduction to C# Language” by Suganya. This was followed by a session on “AJAX Application Development” by Jebasingh Later, in the meet a session on “CLR Internals & Types of JIT Compilers” was handled by Padmashree. This was followed by a session on “Programming in MSIL” by Nirmalanand. In this meet a couple of juniors were given opportunity to handle sessions. The meet lasted for 2 hours which was attended by 25 students. Awareness on the ongoing Imagine Cup contest was given to the attendees. With one more month to end this year filled with activities, we are all set to hand over charges to the next generation.

Japan

Colt and Sanjay went up to Japan to meet up with leaders in Tokyo, the meeting was a discussion about the various activities of INETA and the new procedures we’re adopting to ensure that INETA gets better at supporting the user group community. In addition we met up with Amazon Web Services to explore possibilities of providing speakers for INETA user groups across Asia Pacific.

Karaoke in Japan User Group style

Colt, Sanjay and the rest of the leaders at Japan.

Up Close with .Net Leaders

In this issue, we got in touch with Gerard van de Ven, usergroup lead for the Hawke's Bay .NET User Group. Gerard shares with us how the usergroup was formed, and the activities that has been organized. He also shared with us his personal photos from the recently conducted SQL Server Code Camp.

Contact Gerard at gerard at birdwoodsoftware.co.nz

Gerard van de Ven

Hawke's Bay .Net Usergroup Leader

1. Can you share with us briefly how the Hawke's Bay .Net usergroup was formed, and an overview of the developer community scene in Hawke's Bay?

The Hawke's Bay .NET User Group was formed late 2004, after a visit of a Microsoft representative to the local NZ Computer Society and he asked for a volunteer to start a user group here.

But to get to that point is a little bit of a story. When my wife and I moved from the Netherlands to New Zealand in 2003, we came to Hawke's Bay, because my wife had successfully found a job at the local polytechnic from our home in the Netherlands, using the technology the Internet is offering us. With my 18 years of IT experience, a friend in Auckland warned us that I would be "like a fish without water" in Hawke's Bay, with not much of an IT scene existing here. And in a way he was right; compared to the main centres of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, Hawke's Bay has a very small IT industry. That is compensated by a lovely climate and it is a great area for growing grapes and fruit.

So, with not many other options, I started my own software development business. At the start of 2004 I complemented that with a part time job teaching software development in the Bachelor Computing degree at the same polytechnic that my wife was already working at. In this polytechnic I had a few colleagues that were a member of the NZ computer society and early 2005 a group of local members came together to start a local group of this society. The meetings of this society have a similar goal as the .NET user groups. So we needed presenters for these meetings too. I had a long bond with Microsoft software in a lot of my work. This was a bit different from many of my colleagues at the polytechnic, who like often happens with academics, are more geared to open source software. So I saw an opportunity to get them a bit more informed on Microsoft developments and in particular the .NET framework. I asked Microsoft if they had a speaker to present about .NET to the Computer Society. And they had: Darryl Burling had recently started in his role as Developer Evangelist and he was keen to come over and enlighten us about .NET 1.1 and Visual Studio. It was at the end of that presentation that he asked for a volunteer, trying to spread the good news into all the corners of New Zealand, no matter how small and far away. Being relatively new and building up my own business, I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to build something in the local community. So I said "yes". How I have regretted that ever since ... . No not really, just kidding. It has worked out reasonably well. We now have a group with roughly 25 members, of which between 15 and 20 come to the group meetings. The group consists of a mix of IT professionals, lecturers and students.

The IT industry in Hawke's Bay is small. Most of it is in IT Infrastructure. There are a few software and web site development companies here, but the average size is more likely to be 5 than 10. I do not have all the figures, but I believe one of the larger companies has around 15 people. There is some custom software development done with software targeted at the local agriculture. For some reason there are also several companies that work on financial software. There are probably 10 - 15 companies in web site development, most of them very small with 5 or less people working for them. A lot of those companies have their roots in students coming from the local polytechnic. With open source software having had a large focus in the past, there are only a few companies that do software development based on .NET.

2. What is your vision for the usergroup?
I personally think that our local region is much undervalued. With the Hawke's Bay climate, it is a great place to live and work. A lot better than the traffic jammed and crowded streets of Auckland and Wellington. And if there is one industry where distance is not a major problem, it is IT and software development. I have a dream of making IT a lot more important in the region's economy. Part of this will be to present the IT industry in Hawke's Bay in all its potential to the outside world. For this to happen we first will need to get together and get to know each other.

The user group can be both a place where we meet as a group of professionals with the same background, sharing our ideas and work expertise, and also to make sure that we are at the top of our game and have something to offer to the rest of New Zealand.

3. What are the activities that have been organized for the community in Hawke's Bay?
As part of the user group activities we have regular meetings where either one of us presents about a selected topic or where somebody from outside comes to present. These meetings are at the end of the afternoon, which probably reflects the relatively relaxed life style of Hawke's Bay. People actually have time to spend the second half of the afternoon on something like this from time to time. I guess people recognize that this part of their work is as important as the things they are doing in the office. Because of the limited number of potential speakers in our group, we have a meeting roughly every 6 to 8 weeks.

These meetings are as much about socializing as about the technical topic presented. Pizzas are a favourite with many! One of the recent New Zealand wide events that was organized by core members of the New Zealand .NET User group scene was the SQL Server Code Camp on the 25th and 26th of November. This was a wonderful 2-day event with internationally renowned speakers presenting on SQL Server (2005) topics. It was a great way to quickly get up to speed with a lot of the more intricate details of SQL Server. This was very helpful for me, not being much of an expert on these topics, but finding that I need more and more of them in the work I do. And of course I was delighted to win one of the two iPod nanos that was made available by Quest (www.quest.com).

The two photos are of the dinner at day 1, with the first photo showing three user group leaders (Hayley Smith from Hamilton (left), Nick Randolph from Wellington (right) and your's truly in the middle). The second photo shows me being quite happy with winning the iPod.

4. What do you think will be the next-wave of killer-applications?
How often have I had that question? Certainly quite often. When I still worked as a System Architect for Philips Electronics this topic came up regularly. And of course we often had it wrong. But let me try again, although maybe not as specific as you would like. Looking at what is happening in the industry I would expect ubiquitous Internet connectivity to finally become a reality in the next 5 to 10 years. This will in my humble opinion see the the combination of mobile devices and the entertainment industry be a real killer. But hey, if you put your retirement investment into that area in it does not work out, don't come back to me.

5. What words of wisdom would you give to fellow user group leaders?

My first thought is: "Who am I to presume I have enough wisdom to pass on something to my fellow group leaders?" Being new to the scene and only in the job of a User Group leader of a very small group in rural New Zealand for just about a year. But two things that I think are important:

Make sure you do not lose sight of the human part of the job. Getting together in an informal environment where you can share and discuss is at least as important as the technical content of the meetings.
Delegate; do not do it all yourself. Everybody that is there wants to be part of the group and wants the group to exist and keep going. So share your responsibility with them to come up with topics and speakers.

Special Offers

Gurock Software is offering one or more SmartInspect licenses as a raffle prize to .NET user groups. SmartInspect is a logging tool for debugging and monitoring .NET applications. Learn more about SmartInspect on its website at http://www.gurock.com/ . In exchange for the licenses, Gurock Software would like to see a link to the SmartInspect website added to the user group website (in an appropriate section like "sponsors", "prizes" or in a meeting
announcement).

Additionally to one or more free licenses, Gurock Software is happy to give an additional license to user group members who want to demonstrate SmartInspect at one of the meetings. To take advantage of the free licenses for one of your meetings, just contact Dennis Gurock at dg@gurock.com and include the name and size of your user group.

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