May 27, 2009
by Adil Mughal
As it was brought to notice earlier, On 26th May, we had a great user group meeting held at Microsoft Innovation Center. This post is to summarize the overall meeting and the activities that took place.
First of all, I would like to thank you every single person, who attended the meeting, for their time, interest and support. I’m pretty excited to see the gradual increase in group members and attendees.
The Agenda of the meeting was as follows:
- Group Progress Report
- Discount Coupons for the attendees (Sponsored)
- Distribution of Mix ‘09 Videos’ collection (DVD)
- Workshops in Summer Vacations in different universities
- Domain and website
- Technical Discussion on ASP.NET MVC
- General Discussion
We started the meeting with introduction among group members as there were number of new faces, so it really helps in increasing interaction among them.
Then I shared the progress of our group as I have number of good news for them. Following slide taken from presentation depicts the overall progress:
Discount Coupons and Discussion:
As we got some discount coupons from our sponsors, most of them were publishers, they offer 30-35% discount on purchase from their website. Also Pearson, OReilly and Wrox offers free review copies to our user group members.
After distribution of Mix 09 DVDs, we discussed about the workshops Emerging .NET Devs would like to arrange and members really showed their interest and concluded that all workshops either held at MIC or Universities must be well coordinated and organized in order to get attention from the targeted audience.
ASP.NET MVC Framework:
Here comes the most interesting part of the meeting i.e. Technical Discussion on ASP.NET MVC Framework. For encouragement of group members and to increase their interest I decided that Technical discussion should be given by some group member so I asked Salman Aziz for that. Salman introduced the new ASP.NET MVC Framework, its folder hierarchy, page routing and adding a simple page.
Lucky Draw:
With JetBrains – ReSharper sponsoring our UG meetings, we will be distributing one ReSharper personal license (worth $199) in each meeting via lucky draw 
So we started from this time and we did lucky draw as well. Mr Fahad Abbas won the prize (Personal License of ReSharper), so Congratulations Fahad on winning ReSharper license. ReSharper is most intelligent plug-in for Visual Studio 2008.
Finally, we did some general discussion mostly mentoring some new group members, those are final year students from FAST- National University regarding their Final Year Project etc.
The meeting last around 2 hours starting from Group Progress Report to General Discussion. Once again, I would like to thank everyone who attended the meeting. I will look forward for further participation by group members in future.
If you are not a member of our user group, remember that you can join the group any time. It’s Free and it’s Open. Here I would also like to thanks our sponsors specially Microsoft for supporting our User Group activities and enabling us to serve the community.
