INETA APAC Newsletter September 2007

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

Call for Volunteers
We're indebted to our existing volunteers who have helped support our mission. We encourage more leaders out there to contribute their time in order to help us support groups. To volunteer please drop an email to apac.admin@ineta.org

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

Editor's Note

In this month's newsletter, we bring you the DevCon 2007 event which took place in India. We also caught up with the leader of Dotnetchaps usergroup.

If you have a story or photos to share about an event happening in your region, do send us an email so that we can feature it in the newsletter.

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 an email to weehyong.tok@ineta.org

Ivan Wong
Editor, INETA APAC
Newsletter Team

The APAC .Net Channel

Usergroup Activities around APAC

India

DevCon 2007
by Mahesh Mitkari

The DevCon 2007 was organized by Pune User Group (PUG) in association with International .NET Association (INETA). It was supported by Microsoft India as well as the Technical Education Quality Improvement Program (TEQIP) project at College of Engineering, Pune.

PUG started this initiative back in 2004 and had less than 300 students and approximately 100 professionals attended. This year has more than 150 professional and 1000+ students attended DevCon 2007.

This event enjoyed sessions from speakers like Raj Chaudhuri, Nauzad Kapadia, Dhaval Faria and Sarang Datye. These speakers covered topics like Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), New features in Visual Studio 2008 and Project Mono (implementing .NET on Linux platform).

Dhaval Faria demonstrates how Mono works

Nauzad Kapadia in AJAX session

The audience in Professional track

Raj Chaudhuri in the Windows Communication Foundation session.

Sarang Datye in the Windows Workflow Foundation session

Over 1000 students attended

Team Pune

Up Close with .Net Leaders

In this issue, we got in touch with Dotnetchaps usergroup leads - Ravi Patel. He shares with us his experiences in running usergroup.

Ravi Patel
Usergroup Lead, Dotnetchaps

1. Do tell us more about the background of the Dotnetchaps usergroup.
Dotnetchaps usergroup was started by a group of students 3 years ago. The idea of starting the usergroup came when i met Nauzad Kapadia when he had came to deliver a session on .NET in one of the colleges. The first meeting of the user group witnesses presence of 20 participants. We have over 500 members including developers and students now. Most of the user group sessions organized so far have been taken by me and Mrityunjaya Kumar who is also the lead of dotnetchaps usergroup.

2. What is your vision for the usergroup?
I want Dotnetchaps to be a platform for developers and students to solve their daily programming challenges..

3. Do share with us some of the memorable activities that were organized.
The first big event managed by Dotnetchaps was the launch of Visual Studio 2005. It was conducted in January 2006 and we had nearly 200 participants attending the events. We are very much thankful to Microsoft and INETA for the full support given during the event. It was the first product launch event ever organized in Anand and people were very excited about it.

4. Do share with us your experience in running the usergroup.
It has been very exciting journey of 3 years running the usergroup. I knew that initially it will be difficult for the usergroup to grow as the concept of usergroup is not known much in Gujarat where our usergroup is based. I was lucky to have people like Mrityunjaya. Bhavin, Kiran and Falgun who has always supported me in all the events.

5. What is your wish list for next generation developer tools?
I am eagerly waiting for Visual Studio 2008. I have started working on SharePoint and Windows Workflow Foundation and its fun to have hands on these tools.

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