The End of An Era – INETA Shutting Down

[Update – I will likely continue to update this post periodically to include names and facts that I, in my imperfect memory, did not originally include, as they are brought to my attention or I find them through other posts. Please drop me a note if you know someone who deserves credit here that I missed. Thanks!]

I received an email this morning announcing that INETA, after more than a decade of supporting .NET user groups, sponsoring speakers for those groups, and more, will be ceasing operations at the end of 2015.

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INETA was started back in the early 2000s, at the outset of the .NET developer community, as an organization to foster community-led user groups, and help them grow. It was also instrumental in the career growth of many folks in the community, myself included. The founding board members of INETA were Bill Evjen, Keith Pleas, Dave Noderer, Keith Franklin and Brian Loesgen. [Thanks to Julie Lerman for helping refresh my memory on the history of INETA’s founding]

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Quick Hits Issue #5: Resources for App Developers and User Groups

In this issue, I’ve got some great resources for app developers, as well as for user groups:

Get up to Speed on HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript

If you’ve done some web development, but want to kick your skills up a notch, check out Learn HTML5 with JavaScript & CSS3 Jump Start Training, a course from Microsoft Virtual Academy. The course covers HTML Semantic Markup, CSS3 Selectors, Layout and Animation, JavaScript Core and DOM Interaction, and more.

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Quick Hits Issue #3: New Meetups, Game Development, and more!

New Meetup Group

I’m pleased to announce a new Meetup group for Windows App Developers in the DC area. The group will focus on local workshops, hackathons, office hours, and other events featuring myself and other local technical evangelists.

If you’re not in the DC Area, check out these other meetups, featuring some of my peers in the east region:

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A Knockout in Charlottesville

Just saw the agenda for the next meeting of the Charlottesville .NET User Group, which is tomorrow night (Feb. 16th), and it looks awesome. The title is Knockout.js, MVC with Style & .Net 4.5. They’re doing a triple-header featuring:

  • Joel Cochran talking about the Knockout.js MVVM library for JavaScript
  • Kristy Moon talking about MVC with Style
  • Stuart Leitch talking about async features in VB and C# (and a bit on Windows 8)

That’s quite a lineup, and I’m wishing I could make it for the meeting (Dane Morgridge and I will be recording a new episode of the Community Megaphone Podcast that evening), but if you’re available, I would strongly suggest making it out for this meeting.

image_2And a bit of speaker trivia…Kristy Moon, who was one of the wonderful volunteers for last year’s inaugural MADExpo conference, volunteered her talents this year to give our website a fresh new look for MADExpo 2012. Personally, I think it looks great.


Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from three of the most talented folks I know in the Mid-Atlantic!

Charlottesville .NET meets a the McIntire School of Commerce at UVA. You can find a nice map of the location on the Charlottesville .NET UG website.

CapArea.NET Follow-up: HTML5 Metro apps resources

caparealogoMy thanks to everyone who came out tonight for the Capital Area .NET User Group for my presentation on developing Windows 8 Metro style applications using HTML5 and JavaScript. Great questions and lots of great discussion. Thanks for keeping me on my toes!

As promised, I wanted to share pointers to some additional recorded sessions from BUILD that you may find useful, as well as a link to the sample Canvas Paint app that I used for my demos. If you’re interested in getting the additional tweaks I added to the sample to support persisting the brush color and size, etc. please drop me a note via my contact page, and I will be happy to share it.

Additional Related BUILD Sessions:

and the presentation on which my talk tonight was based:

UPDATE: Nevin House, who attended last night’s talk, got in touch with me via email, and recommended the following two talks on JavaScript, and I heartily agree…both are great talks and are highly recommended for anyone wishing to better understand JavaScript in the context of Metro style apps in Windows 8:

Both presentations feature some of the best presenters from BUILD. Enjoy!

Canvas Paint Sample App

canvasPaintLogo_2The Canvas Paint sample app, along with many other samples and demos, may be downloaded from the Samples area for Windows 8. The direct link to the Canvas Paint sample is:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/CanvasPaint-878fa5d5

Note that you can browse the code directly online, or download the sample and run it locally (if you have installed the Windows 8 developer preview).

Kinect Resources and News

Last week, it was my pleasure to present at the Roanoke .NET User Group on the Kinect SDK for Windows beta. In the presentation, I demonstrated the application I created for last summer’s Mid Atlantic Developer Expo, which used the Kinect to provide both skeletal tracking to move the mouse and select items, and also used speech recognition for easier access to items on the page. The application also demonstrated interoperation between the WPF host application, which handled speech recognition via Kinect, and a client web page, which used a nifty JavaScript library called isotope.js to provide snazzy animations and sorting/filtering. You can read more about that project, and view a video demo here.

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User Group Anniversaries – DC .Net and RockNUG

June is a big month for user group anniversaries, apparently. A couple of local groups are celebrating anniversaries this month, the first being the Rockville .NET User Group, which is kicking off its 5th year. As has become the tradition (I’ve only missed one year), I’m speaking for the 5.0 release, and I’ll be talking about Microsoft WebMatrix and the Razor view engine, and why they’re relevant to you, even if you’re a professional developer.

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