In a prior post I had mentioned that I was to present at the CTAUG group meeting (on March 10th @ Microsoft Farmington CT) - entitled: Microsoft Office Groove (In Stereo). It went very well - I was awaiting CTAUG's response and here it is -
Main Presentation: Microsoft's Peer-to-Peer Office collaboration product, 'Groove'.
Microsoft MVP 'SB' Chatterjee (who is acting Director of the Connecticut .NET Developers Group) was our main speaker. SB has been instrumental in bringing Groove to it's current state of development (sic: not quite true albeit I did do some beta testing over the years). Groove makes it easy for teams to work together, communicating peer-to-peer (primarily) over the Internet, no matter their location, time zone, or work hours. A Groove collaboration can be set up quickly and is highly encrypted, making the product ideal for use whenever such features are valuable, for example in natural disaster situations (think FEMA). Groove's peer-to-peer architecture can be more robust than central-server products such as Lotus Notes and SharePoint.
SB's demo was visually stunning. He had two clients/servers running, each separately connected to the internet (using the WiFi capability now provided by Microsoft at our meetings), and with both their screens visible to the audience through the use of side by side projectors. He demonstrated Groove's ability to create and update documents (sketches, pictures, notepad, etc) on one machine and see the changes appear almost instantly on the other machine. Groove uses peer-to-peer communication to keep one or more clients in the workspace synchronized. SB demoed workspace setup, Forms, the SDK, the central role played by the Windows registry, and coordinated everything with a PowerPoint presentation.
Lot's of questions during the entire session.
Our own Aaron Junod (part of the CTDOTNET crew) is teaming up with Rob Bazinet to write 'Professional IronRuby' (for Wrox publishing). This should be a good piece of work.
I have know Aaron for quite a few years and he is one talented developer and this book should be a good one.
Now we should get him to present IronRuby at the Connecticut .NET Developers Group.
Free download of a sample chapter that covers C# 3.0 fundamentals, and provides a full grounding in C# 3.0 Query Expressions.
Download here...
Jeff Monnette gives a good overview of the SharePoint Conference 2008 highlights in his blog here..
My first Groove MVP public presentation on Groove! I'll be presenting at the Connecticut Access User Group on March 10th (Monday) at the Microsoft Farmington CT office.
The topic is 'Microsoft Office Groove 101' - an introduction to Groove and Collaborative Application Development.