The Visual Studio 2005 Ascend Training is being held in Sydney this week. For those who haven't heard about the program, it's a Microsoft event for large and medium ISVs to get up to speed on .NET 2.0. I'm pinch-hitting on Day 4 (Thursday) with C#, C++, BCL and Security sessions. For the many MVPs and folks I know who are doing the course - make sure you catch my sessions on the Tools & Integration track.
There are also two user group meetings being held in Sydney this week. The
SSW User Group is running on Wednesday night at Microsoft, and
SDNUG is being run in its usual first-Thursday-of-the-month slot. Adam had to delay his group for a fortnight to get over the exhaustion of being carried up some mountain in Africa by a team of pygmy porters.
Australia has two cities that have multiple .NET user groups - Sydney and Melbourne. In Sydney's case,
Dan and I were talking about founding a user group most of 2001 when the group that became the first Sydney .NET user group was still a VB/ Access/ SQL Server group.
Adam beat us to become the "Sydney .NET User Group", so we became the Sydney Deep .NET User Group. The two groups have quite different styles, and we have found that there is very little overlap in attendees. This seems mostly due to the fact that we are in the CBD and attract public transport users who work for large companies while Adam is up at North Ryde, and attracts mostly people from ISVs located in the suburbs who drive to work. While there is a certain level of healthy rivalry, everyone in the Sydney .NET scene is quite friendly, and we regularly attend each other groups.
Finally, Cronulla sunrise taken on 1st Nov
Posted
Nov 02 2004, 01:57 AM
by
nick