This month's speaker at the Newcastle Coder's Group, Tatham Oddie, spoke on Atlas - looks very impressive, giving ASP.NET 2.0 apps a much more responsive UI. The official site is http://atlas.asp.net.

 

Also - check out this month's PC PowerPlay for my review on a FoxConn case.

With Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005 editions now out its time to think about updating certifications.

 

I'm going to go for the two Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist (MCTS) certs in SQL Server 2005 and the .NET Framework v2.0.

 

Anyone interested in forming a study group, whether virtual or real world?

Write code? Check out this guy - he's brilliant.

 

Adam Cogan, our guest speaker for March, brought along a surprise visitor, Billy Hollis, from the U.S.

 

Billy gave a fascinating and inspiring talk. We are absolutely delighted and grateful to have had a speaker of his calibre at our humble Newcastle group.

We now have a domain and website for the Newcastle Coder's Group.

 

Check out http://www.ncg.asn.au and feast on its HTML glory

I'm pleased to announce that the Newcastle Coders Group now has a home. For the foreseeable future our meetings will be held at the University of Newcastle, in room EF122. That's in the "Engineering F – Theatre and Teaching" building. Parking is available nearby. If you haven't been to the uni before, you can find it at H6 on the map at http://www.newcastle.edu.au/service/maps/mapview.jpg. Meetings will be held monthly on the second Wednesday of every month.

 

Our next meeting will be at 6pm on Wednesday 8th February 2006 and there will be a demonstration of Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 by Andrew Coates. We also have a number of Books and DVDs to giveaway on the night. Food and drink will be supplied so it will be helpful to have some idea of numbers. All RSVPs will go into a draw and the first one drawn in attendance will win a Mouse. The more the merrier, so bring your friends and colleagues or anyone you know with an interest in coding.

 

Andrew Coates is a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft. He speaks regularly to a variety of developers and application architects on Microsoft's development tools and integration techniques. Prior to joining Microsoft, Andrew was an independent consultant, developer and mentor specialising in database applications including Geographic Information Systems. His blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/acoat

 

Almost every developer has users or customers who spend most, if not all, of their working day in one of the three main Office applications - Word, Excel and Outlook. Providing these users with customised application solutions has traditionally meant a difficult to maintain and less than secure VBA-based solution or a separate .NET application the user has to switch to and from.

 

Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System 2003 went some of the way to addressing these problems with the introduction of .NET document-centric applications hosted within Word and Excel. VSTO 2005 takes this several steps further with .NET enhancements to application objects such as named ranges and bookmarks, hosting managed controls within Office documents, simplified access to the actions pane and many other enhancements. In addition, VSTO2005 introduces support for Outlook add-ins, greatly enhancing the number of users who can take advantage of the entire .NET framework from within a familiar environment. In this session, we will explore the new features of VSTO2005 and look at how you can leverage VSTO2005 to create powerful Microsoft Office smart client applications quickly and easily.

 

We're looking for speakers at future meetings.  If you have an interesting project that you would like to tell us about let me know.

 

See you there!