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The May meeting is scheduled for Wednesday 14th of May. The topic for this month is an Introduction to Silverlight. A real don't miss presentation.

For more details click here.

After a call for interest in postponing rather than dropping April's WDNUG meeting I have had little interest in running this week (I guess because this is the first week of school holidays) so I have decided to postpone this months meeting completely.

We have a speaker, Deepak Kapoor, locked in for our May meeting (Wednesday 14th) who will be visiting us from Sydney to present on Silverlight.

As discussed at the March WDNUG meeting Microsoft Austrlia are offering registered user group members a free certification exam. Of course conditions apply and numbers are limited to the first 100 registered user group members so if you are interested in finding out more have a look at the Microsoft website. Dont forget Microsoft have also extended the 'second shot free' certification exam deal until June so it is an ideal opportunity to get take the plunge and get certified.

The month of March sees us start the series of Heroes launch user group community events with Stiven Skoklevski presenting an Introduction to the launch and an Overview of Visual Studio 2008. Each month following this we will then be presenting a more in depth look at specific development technologies and enhancments now available in Visual Studio 2008.  If you are interested in participating check back to this site regularly, subscribe to the RSS feed or register on the site.

Our next meeting is scheduled for the 9th of April and the current plan is for Kirk Barrett to present on VS2008 and Building Next Generation Web Apps.

Unfortunately Stiven, our speaker for tonight, will be unable to make it tonight due to urgent work commitments and has asked if we can postpone till Wednesday next week so the WDNUG meeting will now be on Wednesday 19th March at 6:30pm at the usual location.

This month sees us dive into the 2008 launch events. For those of you that are deaf and blind and haven't seen all the press and media coverage, Microsoft are in the process of 'officially' launching Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. As a developer focus group we will be focusing on the VS2008 area with a number of presentations lined up over the coming months. To kick us off Stiven Skoklevski will be presenting an Overview of VS2008 and its capabilities.

Note: please RSVP to kbarret3@csc.com if you plan to attend so we know we will have enough people on the night to make it worthwhile for speakers to travel to Wollongong to present.

Last night's WDNUG meeting went well with some lengthy and interesting conversation around development tools, tips and tricks. We also had some questions raised about 'does anyone know a trick to...' which, if they couldn't be answered, were then given back to the person asking to find out for our February meeting.

We wont be meeting in January as we have found in past years that most members are away on holdiays so our next meeting will be the on Wednesday,13th of February 2008.

The plan for this month is, as announced last month, to have a relaxed Tips, Tricks and Tools night where as a developer community we share our knowledge and experiences in developing .NET applications with tools or utilities that have made life easier or our work more efficient and enjoyable.

Please have a think about what you could share at next weeks meeting and let me know. I will consolidate the information and make sure that we don't have people talking about the same topic/tool.

A NSW.Net special lunchtime event

21 September 2007, 1215 for 1230

Directions in High Performance Computing

Hear Frank Chism, world expert in high performance computing, discuss the future of cluster server technology

Frank admits to "over 40 years in HPC" and is "not looking to leave any time soon because I couldn't afford the cool toys I get to play with if I have to buy them myself."

This is arare chance to hear one of the pioneers of HPC share his thoughts on its future. Frank will demystify clusters, farms and grids, in failover, load balancing and compute applications. All this in an environment where the computing power of a Cray, costing millions of dollars less than a decade ago, can today be obtained for thousands, but where the demand for cycle increases exponentially as the potential for computer intensive applications becomes reality.

Frank is a Technical Solutions Professional with Microsoft, focused exclusively on High Performance Computing. He implements and supports HPC solutions based on Microsoft’s Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) platform, and acts as technical liaison between the CCS development team and Microsoft field personnel and customers.

Frank began working in High Performance Computing in 1965 on a UNIVAC 1107 mainframe. He has written device drivers and numerous utilities for other mainframes like the CDC 6600 and Cyber series and every generation of Cray from the Cray-1 to the Cray XD1. Until recently, his hobby was playing with microprocessors. Now he is paid for playing with microprocessors. He has written in numerous dead, undead, and modern languages such as Sleuth, Cash, Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, and Co-array Fortran. He has focused on parallel HPC for about 15 years. Frank joined Microsoft in 2006.

A sandwich lunch, with tea, coffee and orange juice will be available.

Details

When: Friday 21 September, 2007
Time: 12.15pm for a 12.30pm start - concluding around 2.00pm
Venue: NSW Trade & Investment Centre, L47 MLC Centre 19 Martin Pl, Sydney
Price: No charge for this event – sandwich lunch sponsored by Microsoft

Registrations or more information:

http://www.uniqueworld.net/News/Events/EventRegistration.aspx?EventID=129

Due to problems with the site we have been unable to send out a notice about the meeting but it is definitiely on tomorrow night from 6:30pm.

Adam Cogan from SSW will be reprising his TechEd 07 presentation from last month on Visual Studio 2008. Looks like being an interesting presentation. See you there.

Seems like the combination of School Holidays and the flu that's doing the rounds mean that we will not have enough members tonight to make it worthwhile running the meeting so I've decided to postpone the Jully WDNUG meeting. August is all lined up with Adam Cogan coming to talk about Visual Studio for Database Developers. See you then.
Regards,

Kirk Barrett

We have now introduced a new section to our site for Book Reviews that have been written by WDNUG members. To read our book reviews have a look for the new 'Book Reviews' tab at the top of the home page.

The first review has been done by Stiven Skoklevski on Pro InfoPath 2007.

Your feedback is very important to us and will help us plan future Community Launch efforts. By completing this survey, you will receive a 30% off discount code for use with one Microsoft Certified Trainer exam (choose from the Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, or the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 exam) as well as access to other valuable training and content. These offers may require registration.

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We are all set for the much anticpated Community Launch for Vista, Office 2007 and .NET 3 Wednesday 9th May. This is the only event of its kind planned for the Illawarra!

You are invited to be a part of the largest joint product release in Microsoft history –  Microsoft Windows Vista™, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and .NET Framework 3.0