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| | In This Issue | |
|  New INETA Offerings
| | European Silverlight Challenge | | News from the Speakers Bureau | | INETA volunteers needed | | [C2C] .NET conference - Poland | | | | | |
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| | New INETA Offerings Coming Your Way |
INETA Europe currently serves 289 user groups, representing more than 75000 developers in Europe!
One of the cool things about being an INETA volunteer is being involved in all kinds of community activities. Everything from helping out in a smaller user group to helping plan TechEd Developers, which was really giving us an opportunity to put everybody together – board members, volunteers, the speakers, users who would actually go to meetings, user group leaders – and to relate with Microsoft and vendors as well.
Our TechEd booth was based next to the MVP and RD booths completing the "TechEd Community Lounge" and allowing us to network with a majority of MVP and RD representatives and program members. In this year ALL members of the board were attending the TechEd. It was also the place to meet members of INETA speakers bureau and negotiate some dates for a meeting.
For me personally it was also a lot of fun. I really enjoyed getting the chance to meet people from all European countries and speak about topics of interests to all of us. Traditionally as every year we had a "Community Volunteer Dinner" for INETA volunteers from Spain, Italy, Greece, Romania, Germany and many other countries. Something between 30 and 40 volunteers joined us in Shoko Restaurant in Barcelona. Some of them missed the restaurant (Barca is too big...) and we were forced to wait for another 45 minutes. But as you may have heard - Barcelona never sleeps!
In past months INETA Europe board members were heavily involved in the development of new programs and services that will provide great value to our members and improve the communication and information sharing that takes place between user group leaders, members and community experts.
I would like to mention just two of them:
We already started with the biggest competition in INETA Europe history - "1st European Silverlight Challenge". This competition is taking place in different European countries at the same time. The winners of all national competitions will get the chance to compete against each other on a European level and win one of our 3 master prizes – paid trip to MIX 08 in Las Vegas including conference passes and some more goodies! Read more below about this astonishing competition.
Next big initiative is "The Heroes Community Launch" - an exclusive opportunity to work directly with Microsoft and INETA to host your own launch event around Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008 Microsoft products. The program will give you and 2 additional members of your user group the technical training and launch support resources to showcase some of the technical features of these products within your local community. More details on this initative will be provided shortly.
What about you?
Is your user group doing something special for the holidays? A special meeting format? An organized event? Something charitable? Let us know so that we can include it in an article in our next newsletter. Send your user group name, url and a short description of what your group did for the holidays and we will create a list to share with all. Pictures are always fun too!
If you think your group did something extra special, please share it with the rest of the INETA community and send Miguel, our VP Marketing, an article.
There are so many other interesting topics to talk about but there is not enough space in this newsletter :-).
I would like to wish you a happy holidays and a great and successful new year!!
Sincerely yours,
Damir Tomicic
President INETA Europe | |
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| | European Silverlight Challenge | |
| | Believe in your talent! Take part in the “European Silverlight Challenge” Competition – Dare to participate in the European Silverlight Development Competition. Win the recognition that goes with first place and, of course, fabulous prizes! (or 'swag' as our UK friends would say). The total worth is more then $200.000!
INETA EUROPE, in collaboration with Microsoft, is running the “European Silverlight Challenge”, a development competition starting in November and running until the end of January.
This competition is all about the development of a web component or application with a User Interface (UI) written in Silverlight. The only condition is that it must be published as Open Source (license MS-PL) component and to be freely available for use on User Group web sites and on online technical communities. The competition is organized on a country basis and there will be a European Final featuring the winners of each country.
The competition is already open, keep visiting to see the new applications.
Get ready for participating at your local competition, if your country doesn't manage the competition please contact us ASAP as the possibility of participating will be closed at 31th of December.
More info.... | | |
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| | News from the INETA Europe Speakers Bureau | | | We are delighted that we can announce that two new speakers joined the International Speaker Bureau: Lorenzo Barbieri and Ciprian Jichici.
Lorenzo Barbieri
Lorenzo Barbieri is a Senior Trainer and Consultant based in Milan, Italy. He is specialized in Visual Studio Team System, Team Foundation Server, Microsoft Solutions Framework, .NET development with SQL Server and in Microsoft Virtual PC/Virtual Server/Hyper-V. Lorenzo works for ObjectWay, a leading Italian training and consulting company, where he leads the Microsoft division. He is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Visual Developer – Team System, and previously he was a Microsoft MVP Windows – Virtual Machines. Microsoft Certified Trainer from 2001, he has many other Microsoft certifications, including MCPD (Win,Web,EA), MCITP DBA and MCTS. He writes articles for Italian IT magazines and for the Italian MSDN Web Site. He regularly speaks at Microsoft conferences and user group meetings.
Ciprian Jichici
Ciprian is participating in the Microsoft Regional Directors Program as a Regional Director for Romania and has been involved since 2003 in many Business Intelligence-related projects, workshops and presentations. Ciprian is also a Solutions Architect MVP focusing on Business Intelligence-related architectural problems and distributed applications built on Microsoft’s Application Platform. He splits his time between delivering workshops and presentations on BI technologies and platforms such as SQL Server, SharePoint, and PerformancePoint Server and doing academic research in the field of data mining in preparation of his PhD thesis. Ciprian is the general manager of Genisoft, a Business Intelligence training and services company based in Timisoara, Romania. | |
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| | INETA volunteers needed! | |
| | As a growing organization, we are continuously looking for new team members to help deliver on our various programs and projects. Understanding that availability for volunteer work may vary amongst many of you, we appreciate all levels of involvement. For some this might include a permanent role in one of our teams such as Marketing, Technology or Community Activities. For others, it may be writing a short article for our newsletter or website covering an important topic or exciting event in your area.
To learn more about how you can get involved with our various divisions, teams and programs, please email [email protected].
We would love to hear from you! | | |
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| | First [C2C] .NET Conference in Poland | |
| | On 5th April 2008 the first Polish [C2C] .NET conference will be a fact. With this 'Communities to Communities' event, INETA liaison Daniel Arak hopes to target all .NET user groups in Poland. One speaker can already be announced: we are proud we are able to send INETA Europe speaker Dino Esposito to Poland!
Key points about the conference:
- 5th April 2008 - one day conference
- audience: polish community >200 attendants
- two tracks: .NET and SQL
- first such event in Poland - communities to communities
- sessions chosen by community - call for papers
- great opportunity to connect people and technology together
More info: Daniel Arak | | |
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| | Featured INETA Speaking Engagements | |
| | Speaker | Group | Date | | Christian Weyer | .NET Developer Group Ulm | 24 Januar 2008 | | Christian Weyer | .NET Developer Group Braunschweig | 18 Februar 2008 | | Alex Homer | NxtGenUg - Southampton | 21 Februar 2008 | | Dino Esposito | [C2C] .NET Conference - Warshaw Poland | 5 April 2008 | | | |
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| | Visual Studio 2008 - Community Launch Events | Currently we are working hard to organize many exciting VS2008 Community Launch events all around Europe. We will keep you informed when some concrete news is available, so stay tuned... | |
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| | Upcoming events | |
| | 5 April 2008 - [C2C] .NET Conference - Warshaw - Poland | | |
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