ONETUG February Meeting

I attended the February ONETUG(Orlando .NET Users Group) meeting on Thursday, February 19th, with a couple of co-workers from NTM, Dave Mateer and Nathan Whatley. While I have been a regular attender of the OPASS meetings, this was my first ONETUG meeting. There was the usual pizza and soda/water available and announcements with an emphasis on the upcoming Orlando .NET Code Camp upcoming on March 28th. Attendance seemed to be pretty good with about 40 people there. I didn't network as well as I probably should have, but I did meet Troy Wolbrink who is the main developer behind TntMPD, a donor relationship management software that NTM recommends. I had done some work with the NTM financial system to provide a file for download by NTM members that can be loaded into TntMPD automatically. It was pretty cool to meet him. He invited me to come visit him at work (Campus Crusade for Christ) and I probably will take him up on it.

The main speaker was Gary Ewell from XCLR8 Software and the topic was WPF with a Real World Perspective. I have to say that I did not come away with the urge to adopt WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) at work. To me it was a lot like ASP.NET, but with a cleaner separation of the Presentation Layer from the Business Layer. I'm sure that if I really understood it better I'd be more impressed by it. It definitely gives you more control over the appearance of the UI. Overall I would say the presentation was average and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to take away from it.

The night ended with a raffle and I did come away with what I hope is a good book, Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5 by Dino Espisito.