Last night was the second Seattle.Net user group meeting.  The meeting went well and the new smaller room seemed to fit the size of the group better than last time (no round tables this time).

Charles and the Microsoft group were showed up before I did (sad since I live right across the street from the building), the rest of the people started coming in around 5:45pm or so.  The total count ended up around 15 people.  Thanks again to the sponsor for the meeting’s refreshments – Red-Gate.

Before the meeting started, I borrowed an idea from Julie Lerman (or at least I think it was her idea) – which was to put together a powerpoint slide deck with things like the agenda, news, topics of interest, etc. and set the presentation up to scroll through the deck while people mingle and enjoy the pizza (sort of like the trivia questions and ads before a movie). 

I started the meeting a little late and more or less reiterated what had been scrolling on the slide show before 6pm.  Some of the items discussed were:  Ideas on topics to see, free books available for review copies, call for volunteers to help out with the group, the meeting location, blogs of members and a call for anyone looking for work or hiring.

Charles Sterling, did the introduction for the speakers – setting the stage for the talk.

John Nierenberg, started with a talk walking us through TFS 2010 and some of the new features – highlighting the tie in with Excel and Project.

Ben Amodio, presented second on TFS 2010 and focused on how to quickly create some nice dashboards using the data stores available (and excel exports). 

Their team’s blog site has a lot of useful stuff: http://blogs.msdn.com/teams_wit_tools/  Another blog to check out is: http://blogs.msdn.com/team_foundation/

We had a few items for a raffling/giving out (I think everyone got something) – stuff from Red-Gate, a free license of SmartInspect, packages of golf balls donated from modis (dropped off by Sara Seabourne).

Thanks to all those who attended and I hope to see you next month!

Other news

We now have some books available for review (currently 1 copy of each):

If any members are interested in reviewing these books contact me at: info@seattledotnet.org … first come first served.