Our good friend Bill Steele from Microsoft will be coming to town to kick start us with VS 2010 - what's new, what's cool, what's to know and where to go to learn more about the new features in Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0.  

Food is being provided by TEK Systems - thanks!

To whet your appetite: 

Here are some useful links related to the VS2010 launch:

MSDN Visual Studio Developer Center: msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio

VS2010 Comparison of various SKUs: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products

VS2010 Trial Downloads: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/download

Great links from MicrosoftFeed.Com

• VS2010 Wallpapers for the hardcore: 10+ Beautiful Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Wallpapers
• …and a windows theme: Windows 7 Theme – Visual Studio 2010
• VS2010 Keyboard SHortcut cards: Download Visual Studio 2010 Keybinding Cards

Moving to Visual Studio 2010 e-book from Microsoft:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=12A6DE81-C633-4F2C-A35F-CEA6FE772712&displaylang=en

What’s new in VS2010 Video (thanks Paul Harriman for this link) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ee958386.aspx

What’s new in .NET 4 (MSDN Docs): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171868(v=VS.100).aspx

Visual Studio 2010 Launch Keynote and other cool stuff from the launch:http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/watch-it-live

[shamelessly borrowed from http://thedatafarm.com/blog/vtdotnetfeed/some-post-vs2010-launch-resources/]

We had a very good turnout today with about 35 people in attendance. 

Thanks to Tek-Systems for supplying the food for today's meeting! 

As usual, Bill Steele did a bang-up job whizzing through many Microsoft, Windows, and Visual Studio topics.  He managed to touch on:

Windows 7 - updates for app development/deployment on Windows 7

WPF/Silverlight - data binding, VS2010 is WPF app, target platform is now after-thought.

Azure - what is cloud computing and why should you be interested

ASP.Net & MVC - Model-View-Controller is now fully supported as a project type in Visual Studio and provides a pattern for building testable ASP.Net enterprise applications.

Dynamic Data - Data Model + Entity Framework + Dynamic Data ASP.Net app template = fully functional web app for viewing/editing data.

Silverlight - Out of browser installation and execution now supported on all target platforms.

and a whole lot more!  I'll try to get his powerpoint deck and post it in the resources area.

Thanks for coming!