Earlier this week, I flew down to Virginia Beach to speak at WeProgram.NET, one of the two local .NET user groups. I have long wanted to be able to speak at more user groups, but it is not possible because of the distance. However, I was very fortunate to be added to the INETA Speaker Bureau for the 2006 roster and I got to sneak my first gig in before the start of the year.
INETA was started nearly four years ago with the mission of enabling user groups all over the world to pull from a pool of speakers that extends beyond who is available locally. It has been an incredible thing for my own user group, Vermont.NET, where we have had the likes of Rocky Lhotka, Billy Hollis, Ken Getz, Kathleen Dollard (and oh so many more- you can see here, on the Past Presentations page) at our little user group in northern Vermont. Although INETA has grown and evolved, this is still one of the core functions of the organization.
It was serendipitous that just after I joined the speaker bureau, a request came in from Virginia Beach. I owed my brother and his family, who have lived there for 4 years, a visit. It worked out beautifully, I went down a few days early, spent lots of time with Matt, Maria and the boys (Josh and Zach) and my great pal, Zeus (their 12 yr old lab).
Speaking at the user group was icing on the cake!
To make it even more fun, I was picked up for the meeting by Susan Lennon, who runs the other group in Virginia Beach and lives closer to where I was staying. She arrived in this hot number! I was happy the predicted snow storm had avoided that region.
We zipped off to the meeting where I gave a presentation on ADO.NET 2.0 Integration with SQL Server 2005. This was a merge of the "What's New in ADO.NET 2.0" talk I have been doing and evolving for a while and "ADO.NET 2.0 and SQL Server Integration" session I did at TechEd South Africa (which was based on Pablo Castro's DAT320 session at TechEd U.S.) This time, I made the talk my own, using my own demos and replacing many of the TechEd slides with my own.
As I have learned about ADO.NET 2.0 more and more, my original presentation was taking longer and longer to get through, which is why it is necessary to target a more narrow topic . My favorite sub-topic, Query Notification, has turned into it's own presentation which I did at Visual Studio Connections last month. So, needless to say, I just love sharing all of this great information with other developers.
Although the group is small, I had a blast (what's more fun than presenting on one of your favorite topics) and we had great Q&A throughout the session.
So big thanks to the WeProgram.NET user group, Susan Lennon, INETA and Pablo Castro (and the whole ADO.NET team). I am definitely looking forward to my next INETA gig (TVUG in Albany NY Jan 25th) where I will be talking about one of my other favorite topics, WSE 3.0. And in the meantime, I am going to beautiful Montreal next monday to present on Tablet PC Development to GUVSM, one of the .NET user groups there. My trip there is being sponsored by MSDN Canada.