.NET Users Group

I went to the April meeting of the local .NET users group tonight. It was held at Centriq University. I ran into Marlin, Richard, Galen, and Ovace who are some former co-workers of mine.

Highlights from the meeting:

• There's a new .NET Book Club.


• SQL Server Reporting Services lets you design reports in Visual Studio.NET 2003 and is free if you have an SQL Server license. It uses Report Definition Language, an XML-based schema for defining reports.


• The presenters recommended that we visit the MSDN XML Developer Center because XML development is changing radically and we'll probably have to rewrite all our XML code in the near future.


• The main presentation was a demonstration of Whidbey (Visual Studio.NET 2005) by Steve Loethen, the Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the MidAmerica District. It was pretty interesting although it was fairly similar to the demo I saw at DevDays. Whidbey has some very cool features that I'm looking forward to using. The Virtual PC software he was using also looked interesting although it seemed to be having some problems with XP service pack 2.