Nothing but .NET

Although I already have personal FriendFeed and Twitter accounts, I have also set up FriendFeed and Twitter accounts for Empoprises, not to push information out, but to take information in. One of the first gems that I've discovered is the existence of the Inland Empire .NET User's Group. (See one of James Johnson's tweets on the topic.)

I am not a programmer (well, I was writing some things in HyperTalk about 20 years ago), and a good chunk of my marketing work revolves around Oracle, but it does appear that the Inland Empire .NET User's Group is a pretty active group. Here are some things that are currently featured on their page:

Next User Group Meeting!
Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Riverside Medical Clinic from 6:30 to 9:30 pm.

Reza Madani - Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2008

Reza Madani is a principal architect with HarborObjects, a Microsoft partner in Newport Beach, CA. He has over 20 years of experience designing and developing enterprise software solutions and is the current president of Orange County .NET User Group. For the past few years, Reza has been focusing on SQL Server business intelligence solutions and Windows Presentation Foundation based user interfaces.

And although the time to get involved in this has apparently passed, it looks interesting:

Free beginner ASP.NET classes!

The Inland Empire .NET User's Group is sponsoring FREE beginner ASP.NET classes! IEDOTNET Study Group Director, Volkan Uzun, has made arrangements with Cal State San Bernardino to host this 12 week course. The first class will be on Saturday, March 22, 2008 from 1:00 to 3:30 pm in Jack Brown Hall, Floor 3. Download the course syllabus and course information.

While this course is free, the University does charge $5.00 per day for parking. But, where can you get hands-on ASP.NET training by an industry expert for $60?

And, looking for an outside perspective on the group, I found this post (at an MSDN blog, naturally) from Keith Smith, who presented to the IEDOTNETUG in April 2006:

The meeting, which was held at ITT Technical Institute in San Bernardino, was started promptly at 6:30PM by James [Johnson], President of IEDOTNETUG. My presentation went from 6:45-9:30PM.

I was supposed to present for 2 hours but there were so many good questions and I took time to answer each one. Additionally, there was a 15-minute break midway through. There were about 25 members in attendance which made for lively discussion on Master Pages, Site Navigation and the "Atlas" UpdatePanel control and the "Atlas" Client Script Library.

Similar to the Orlando .NET User Group, the IEDOTNETUG membership was most keen on learning how to begin using "Atlas" as quickly as possible in their existing Web sites which I thought was pretty cool.

More information on the IDDOTNETUG (don't you love acronyms?) at http://www.iedotnetug.org/UG/.