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Helping User Group Members with Whidbey

Last night I had dinner with a couple of MS Developer evangalists and three of our local user group members. During dinner we discussed some of the possibilities for Whidbey-related group meetings and how we might ensure that we remove barriers of entry and get the maximum number of our members playing with the publicly available bits.

One idea that came up was to have a sort of "install-fest" where members (and non-members as well) could bring along a machine and we would install the May Whidbey preview onto trial versions of Virtual PC. I think that this could be a cool idea because I'm sure that one of the reasons that people don't adopt technologies early is the fear that:

  1. It's all too hard
  2. Not enough time
  3. Might not know what to do if something goes wrong during the install

Therefore having a group of "experts" on hand to assist with the install and doing it at a time already reserved for learning should effectively remove those barriers.

I'm really keen to have as many people in our group use the bits now because, realistically, Whidbey is fast approaching us; in fact this time next year we could be designing and selling Whidbey applications!

So, if you are in Adelaide and you'd be interested in a Whidbey "install-fest", drop me a line and I'll mention it to the committee.

Also, if you are a member of a user group and your group has done something Whidbey-related which worked well, I'd be interested to know about that also.

3 Comments

  • Hi Darren,



    That sounds like a really great idea. One of the problems though that I foresee is licensing issues with Windows.



    The user will have to have additional Windows licenses.



    Although, another option is to do what I'm doing and use one of those Windows 2003 Server Trial CDs they keep handing out at events :)



    One issue though, the Server Trial is longer than the VPC 2004 trial!



    Better than nothing though! :D

  • Whoa Darren, what a great idea, I'm hoping to get beta bits at some stage at the Melbourne SQL Server SIG but I don't have any idea where to put 'em.



    Good luck with the installs!

  • what do we do if a key board dose not work

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