The intention of the group from the beginning was to bring the conversations between designers and developers closer together from a platform agnostic approach. As Anthony expounds on below, the group started to gravitate to more discussions focused on a particular area – Silverlight. Changing the name only solidifies the charter of the groups intent to the community and provides a means to bring more people together around a common cause (a “community”).

We are still able to facilitate conversations and idea sharing between designers and developers through events such as RIApalooza. Myself, along with the leaders of the Chicago Silverlight user group and the Chicago Adobe user group are currently in the planning stages of RIApalooza 3. More details to come.

Here is Anthony’s message…

In the past 18 months, the Chicago Designers and Developers User Group has sought to walk the lines between design and development while remaining platform agnostic. We’ve had some great presentations and speakers in the past; however, it has become increasingly difficult to find and schedule topics that appeal to designers and developers in both the Adobe and Microsoft worlds. After careful introspection and evaluation, the CD2 leadership team have chosen to clarify our place in the community and focus on Microsoft Silverlight & WPF.

And so, we’re extremely excited to announce the creation of The Chicago Silverlight User Group. The core purpose of the group (better designer/developer collaboration) hasn’t changed, but includes a renewed focus as we concentrate on all that Silverlight and WPF have to offer as a rich platform. We invite all of CD2′s members to continue to join us in this new and excited SIG in the coming months.

In effect, this is the sunset of CD2 as we know it today. We realize that some of the content we sought to bring to CD2 is already capably provided by the likes of IxDA and the Chicago Area Adobe User Groups. We believe these groups also add value to the designer and developer communities.

The new user group’s inaugural meeting will be at 6PM on Wednesday, March 3rd at The Illinois Technology Association (ITA) 200 S. Wacker Drive, 15th Floor | Chicago, IL 60606

We will be launching a new registration website in the coming weeks. If you have any questions or comments about The Chicago Silverlight User Group, please contact us at the email addresses below.

I am happy to report that I will be speaking at the (re)inaugural meeting of the Chicago Silverlight user group on March 3rd. We will be discussing the new features of Silverlight 4.

These sessions are targeted toward Developers, Architects, and Quality Assurance teams. Attendees will be given the unique opportunity to have a first glimpse into the products and interact directly with the Redmond team responsible for designing and delivering these products to the market. We will cover a broad range of important topics including Software Quality Assurance, historical debugging, manual test runner, test impact analysis and test lab management.

Book raffle and Zune Give-a-way

One random attendee will be selected to receive a brand new Zune HD!

Agenda:

This roadshow will travel across 17-cities in the Central Region with a session focused on the IT Professional in the morning and digging into the Development side of the house in the afternoon.

You can find all the details by visiting my Event Calendar.

What??? You didn’t know I had an event calendar? Well, I do. The Event Calendar gives me the ability to keep you up to date on the developer events taking place without getting lost in the blogroll.

Join us for the July local meeting of the Cloud Computing User Group – this month in Downers Grove.

Our topic this month is Multi-Enterprise Business Applications (MEBAs), a new category of application for business collaboration that the cloud makes possible. We’ll review what the current thinking on MEBAs is from Microsoft and the cloud community followed by an in-depth demo and code exploration of an Azure business collaboration application.

Dave Bost, Developer Evangelist from the Developer Platform and Evangelism team at Microsoft will be the presenter. He will discuss how MEBAs facilitate business processes that span enterprises, how they are enacted by the exchange of messages, and how complex, cross-organizational challenges are managed through these applications (e.g. Security, Data, Management and Governance).

In this session, I will discuss the work that I was recently a part of in Redmond on “Project MEBA” in partnership with the Platform Architecture team. If the planets align, we will have the visionary and brainchild behind “Project MEBA”, Jack Greenfield join us by conference call.

You can find all the details and registration information at http://www.azureusergroup.com/events/event/show?id=2698780%3AEvent%3A13229&xgi=6zA1EHT.

Part of my job as a Microsoft evangelist is fostering developer communities across the region. It just so happens that my region (officially) covers Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. However, I like to help provide support to any and all developers communities where and whenever I can.

One of the areas of the region that hasn’t seen much action in way of community (at least that I know of) is the southern half of the state of Illinois. Well…that all ends now. Darrin Bishop, in partnership with Levi, Ray and Shoup, are bringing the Central Illinois SharePoint Users Group to Springfield, IL.

(You can read the full announcement over on Darrin’s blog.)

I’d like to see additional developers groups started in the southern area. If you’re interested in starting a user group, there are a few organizations like INETA that can be a valuable asset and resource. To learn more, check out INETA’s whitepaper on Starting and Running a User Group.

First… let’s point you to the slides presented at the Fall ‘08 series of MSDN Unleashed events. MSDN Unleashed is a series of events that the Microsoft Evangelist present across the country to keep you – the developer audience – up to snuff on what’s going on in the world of development around the Microsoft Platform.

I presented an overview of Silverlight 2 at both MSDN Unleashed and the St. Louis Code Camp, therefore, I’ll only link to it once here…

St. Louis Code Camp

The St. Louis Code Camp was great! I’d like to thank Scott Spradlin and all of the organizers for inviting me to participate in a great event. I’d also like to think Brian Moore for letting me crash at Chateau Moore. I look forward to participating at future events in and around St. Louis.

At the St. Louis Code Camp, I presented an overview on Azure and the Azure Services Platform. I also filled in for a speaker who had to unfortunately back out at the last minute and presented an overview of Silverlight 2 (see slides above).

The St. Louis developer community came out strong and I thank them for their hospitality. On to the slides…

Once again… my apologies for the tardiness of posting these slides. But if you haven’t figured it out by now, you can find all of my presentations up on SlideShare. You may also understand my tardiness once you read some upcoming news I have for you (my poor attempt at a teaser). Stay tuned!

I just received word today that attendees of the Chicago stop of the MSDN Developers Conference (MDC) will be some of the first people to get their hands on Windows 7 Beta 1 DVDs! All MDC attendees will receive a copy of Windows 7 Beta 1, but Chicago looks to be the first. For the MDC events taking place before Jan. 13th, you will receive your DVD in the mail after Jan. 13th. Bob Familiar has more details on this.

What is the MSDN Developers Conference you might ask? Well, apparently you don’t read my blog as I’ve discussed this already. Don’t worry, I’ll let it pass *THIS TIME*.

Anyhow… MSDN DevCon is a “Best of PDC” show for developers that the Microsoft Evangelist team is bringing to 11 cities across the country.

The Chicago MDC will be taking place on January 13th, 2009 at the Chicago Hyatt Regency. Ron Jacobs will be kicking things off with the morning keynote followed by a number of sessions covering Microsoft’s Cloud Computing initatives, the latest in Client and Presentation development, as well as what’s new in Tooling, Languages and Framework. We’ll also be running a “Community Courtyard” series of sessions throughout the day as well.

Register now for the Chicago MSDN Developers Conference, or check for other MDC’s events happening in your area.

There is a $99 charge but that is peanuts compared to what PDC registration cost. :)

It’s unfortunate, but true. Not everyone can attend the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC). That’s why the Microsoft Evangelist team across the U.S. is bringing the PDC to you. We’ve taken some of the best content from last week, packaged it up, wrapped it up in a pretty bow and will bring it to you through a series of events across the U.S. We’re calling it the MSDN Developers Conference (MDC).

In the grand tradition of DevDays events of the past, we will be conducting a 1-day conference covering some of the best sessions from PDC including announcements and developments around Visual Studio, the .NET Languages including F#, WPF, Silverlight, “Oslo”, Team System, ASP.NET, Parallel Programming and of course the Windows Azure Services Platform and Windows 7. We’ll also have a third track available for an Open Spaces area.

(As a side note, for those of you outside the U.S., poke your local Microsoft Evangelist team and ask them to bring MSDN DevCon to you!)

To register for the event in the city closest to you, simply click on the city link. This will take you to the landing page for that particular event where you will get more details about locations and the great speakers lined up for your city.

Locations
Date	City
12/09/2008	Houston, TX
12/11/2008	Orlando, FL
12/16/2008	Atlanta, GA
1/13/2009	Chicago, IL
1/13/2009	Minneapolis, MN
1/16/2009	Washington, DC
1/20/2009	New York, NY
1/22/2009	Boston, MA
1/22/2009	Detroit, MI
1/26/2009	Dallas, TX
2/19/2009	San Francisco, CA

If you missed the opportunity to attend PDC in-person, don’t miss your chance to hang with your developer community peeps at the MSDN Developers Conference.

You can also follow all the MSDN DevCon shenanigans on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Twemes and MSDN Social.

This month’s meeting will have your’s truly providing an overview discussion of the recently announced Microsoft Silverlight. We will also take some time to discuss the group and what you, the community, would like to do with it. Tod will be looking for additional volunteers to help with group activities and coordination.

It’s sure to be a greattime and we hope to see you there!

Also, if you are a business, academic or private institution that would be willing to host the Bloomington .NET Users Group, please let us know. The Microsoft offices in Bloomington just doesn’t have the capacity to support this growing community. Ideally we’re looking for space that can house 50-75 (maybe more) with comfortable seating, A/V capabilities and an environment that nurtures great networking and community connection.

What: Bloomington .NET Users Group
Topic: Microsoft Silverlight
When: Monday, June 18th, 2007, 6PM – 9PM
Where: Microsoft, 2203 E. Empire Street, Suite J, Bloomington, IL

To get an accurate count for the food, please be sure to register.

Technorati tags: bloomington, asp.net, aspnet, ajax, silverlight

If you’re interested in learningin how to create unit tests for your database schema or controlling your database schema changes with baseline versioning and change management control or how the database professional fits into the Team System Lifecycle Management process, you won’t want to miss this one.

Chicago Visual Studio Team System Users Group

Microsoft Corporation, 77 West Wacker Dr., Suite 2300, Chicago, IL. 60601
June 13th, 2007, 6PM – 9PM

Agenda:

6:00pm – 6:30pm Welcome, Introductions and Pizza
6:30pm – 8:30pm Angela Binkowski Presents Data Dude!
8:30pm – 9:00pm Q&A, Raffle and Wrap Up

Presenter Bio:

Angela Binkowski is the Developer Tools Technical Specialist for the Midwest District. She has been with Microsoft for just over 11 months now, and previously spent 8 years as an IT consultant. She has experience as an architect, developer, tester, business analyst, database engineer, and project manager in the software industry, specifically focused on Microsoft technologies. Angela is a co-founder of the VSTS User group in Chicago. You can read her blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/angelab/default.aspx. Angela is a graduate of Northern Illinois University.

Be sure to bring your Smart card badge from previous meetings to qualify for special prizes! We will be issuing smart cards to new members too, while supplies last.