- Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

It's an exciting time in the IT world these days. We're seeing major trending towards Cloud Computing, Mobile phones are becoming the dominate software innovation focus for a lot of companies and the infamous Pad devices are becoming preferred over laptops for the casual consumer. What an great time to be a developer! As a group we are going to continue to focus on these new trends and keep in tune with the ever changing IT world.

I'd like to introduce myself, Eric Pahl as leader of this group for 2011. I have over 20 years in the professional IT industry working as a consultant and employee for several companies in the Hartford and Springfield area. I've recently been focusing on Silverlight and Jquery websites being developed for handheld and desktop/laptop devices. This group has been run successfully by Dan Caron for the last 6 years and I'd like to continue that success and thank Dan for all his hard work. I am very excited to pick up the ball from Dan this year and to continue to attract speakers and IT professionals to present topics that are interesting and relevant. We have a few presentations lined up for the 1st half of the year with Chris Bowen & Jim O'Neil from Microsoft, Craig Pikenton for SharePoint, Michael Bluestein for Monotouch development, Benjamin Day for TFS ... amongst others. If you'd like to present on a topic please let me know and I will find a spot to schedule you in.

We'll continue to define meetings by two general topics IT Pro meetings and Developer meetings if that helps people decide on content. However I believe there will be a lot of cross-over between these categories going forward. Generally, for the IT Pro meetings, the topics you can expect to find are: SharePoint, PowerShell, SQL Server, Windows Server, and more. For the Developer meetings, the topics you can expect to find are: .NET, Silverlight, ASP.NET, AJAX, WPF, WCF, DotNetNuke and more.

Western Mass Microsoft Technology Users Group

We have an exciting announcement regarding the the Western Mass .NET Users Group. Historically, we have focused primarily on Microsoft .NET Software Developers. Over the past year we have seen an increasing need to broaden our focus beyond developers and into the IT Pro world. To embrace this emerging need, we are going to rename and rebrand the Western Mass .NET Users Group to broaden the technologies that we support, and also to attract more users to our group.

The new name for this group is the Western Mass Microsoft Technology Users Group. Our new URL is http://mstech.org.  As part of this rebranding, I have built a new website (using DotNetNuke) which is a major improvement over the last site.   You do not need to re-register on the new website - your existing credentials will work and you will continue to receive meeting updates via email as you have in the past.

How will this benefit you? You will have more opportunities to learn about more Microsoft technologies. We will be adding more presentations to the calendar (have no fear, we are not replacing Developer events with IT Pro events...instead, we are adding IT Pro events!). You will also have more opportunities to meet interesting people with more diversity in their technology interests.

As part of this announcement, I would like to welcome Craig Pilkenton as a co-leader of this group. Craig will lead the IT Pro side of the group, and Dan Caron will continue to lead the Developer side of the group. We expect the Developer meetings to be held on the same schedule (1st Tuesday of each month) and the IT Pro meetings will be held on the 3rd Tuesday of each month.

For the IT Pro meetings, the topics you can expect to find are: Sharepoint, PowerShell, SQL Server, Windows Server, and more.

For the Developer meetings, the topics you can expect to find are: .NET, Silverlight, ASP.NET, AJAX, WPF, WCF, DotNetNuke and more.