INETA has a great gimmick.  Give someone a award and then recruit them to do volunteer work!  While I am completely joking, I was recently appointed to INETA’s Board of Directors.  Congratulations go out to my fellow Board Members.

Rob Zelt, President
Mike Vincent, Vice President
Scott Spradlin, Secretary
Morgan Baker, Treasurer
Steve Andrews, Director
Lori McKinney, Director
Randy Walker, Director
Shawn Weisfeld, Director
Chris Williams, Director

Our first order of business will be a Board Meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina from April 3rd to April 5th.  I have long recognized many of the problems INETA has had, and I hope to participate and help resolve them.  A majority of the issue revolves around the perception INETA has.  Things such as speaker requests becoming a black hole, requests come in, but no one knows what’s going on.  Many of the older established user groups don’t recognize value in INETA, something which I hope to help remedy.  Lastly, one of my goals is to provide more value to the user groups, such as a free website portal for all user groups.  If we can provide a free website portal/template with hosting and email, I think this will bring tremendous value to all user groups.

If you have ideas on how INETA can be improved, please shoot me an email or leave feedback.  We all want to see INETA improve, and that can only happen with your participation.

I wanted to make sure and draw attention to the effort that Brandon King in Harrison, Arkansas has given towards promoting this event.  There are some major giveaways, and we will be arranging a carpool from Springdale to drive the 1:30 to give a good showing from the NWA DNUG crew.

Details:

Who:                CLAUDIO LASSALA
What:               Details at http://odnug.org
When:              April 2^nd 5:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Where:             North Arkansas College (Center Campus - Durand Center - Old Regions Bank Building), Harrison, AR

Grand Prize

Inspiron 15 (1545) Laptop

• Intel Pentium Dual Core T3400
• (2.16GHz/667Mhz FSB/1MB cache)
• Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium
• 160 GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
• 3 GB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz (2 DIMMs)

Software Prizes

Infragistics NetAdvantage

• NetAdvantage® for .NET is a comprehensive suite of ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WPF and Silverlight controls, components, and tools for the .NET platform.  NetAdvantage for .NET has what you need to add no-touch AJAX to your Web site, awesome power and performance to your Windows Forms application, compelling user experiences leveraging Windows Presentation Foundation, and professionally polished user interfaces (UI).

Nevron Chart for .NET Lite

• Nevron Chart for .NET has been designed from the ground up to be extensible, efficient and feature rich. This allows it to wrap a vast amount of features in an intuitive and straightforward programming model. The component can display virtually any 2D or 3D chart including: Bar, Line, Step Line, Area, Pie, Point, Bubble, Stock, Floating Bar, Radar, Polar, High Low, Mesh Surface, Grid Surface, Shape, Smooth Line, Float Bar, Venn and Error with many variations (like Scatter XY and XYZ Line, Stacked Bars etc.).

ReSharper 4.1 Personal License

• JetBrains ReSharper for Visual Studio redefines the notions of developer productivity and code editing usability as applied to .NET. It provides efficient navigation and search features, industry-leading refactorings, smart code completion, and much more. With customizable live templates and extensive support for ASP.NET, unit tests and build script files, ReSharper maximizes your coding convenience.

dotTrace 3.1 Personal License

• A complete profiling solution for profiling the performance and memory use of your .NET applications.

CodeSmith Standard Edition

• CodeSmith is a software development tool to help you get your job done faster. Technically speaking it is a template driven source code generator that automates the creation of common application source code for any language (C#, Java, VB, PHP, ASP.NET, SQL, etc.).

Book Prizes

O’Reilly Books

· Programming ASP.NET 3.5
· Ajax: The Definitive Guide
· Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5
· Programming WCF Services
· Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2
· RESTful .NET
· iPhone Open Application Development
· Learning C# 3.0
· Head First C#
· Head First Ajax
· Head First Design Patterns
· Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
· Head First Object-Oriented Analysis & Design

Manning Books

• WPF in Action with Visual Studio 2008
• Silverlight 2 in Action
• LINQ in Action
• ASP.NET AJAX in Action
• NHibernate in Action
• C# in Depth

Murach Books

• Murach's C# 2008
• Murach's ASP.NET 3.5 Web Programming with C# 2008
• Murach's SQL Server 2008 for Developers

This is an open invitation to join us in helping form the Northwest Arkansas Technology Council.  The discussion for the inaugural meeting will center on who and what we are and the beginning phases of our purpose.  If you feel you have something to contribute to our pioneering efforts, or know of someone who can, please consider joining us, or forward the following information on.

Thanks,
Randy Walker

You are invited to participate in the formation meeting of the Northwest Arkansas Technology Council (NWA Tech Council), set for March 10th, 2009 from 6-8pm at the Arkansas World Trade Center (3300 Market Street, Suite 400, Rogers Arkansas 72758).  The NWA Tech Council’s purpose is to encourage business growth of the technology sector in Northwest Arkansas.

Originally several of us set out to put on an event called the Northwest Arkansas Technology Summit, a broad based event connecting all aspects of technology that appeal to the larger firms in this area including Wal-Mart, JB Hunt, Tyson, small and medium businesses, and vendor communities. The event was originally scheduled for June 2009 at the John Q. Hammons Center. After further review, it was decided that in order to put on an event of the quality and magnitude that was envisioned, more time and planning would be needed.

The vision for the Northwest Arkansas Information Technology Summit includes the following aspects:
•    To be a nationally recognized event that pulls not only a regional, but national attendance. Goal: 1400+ attendees
•    To be sponsored by national recognized manufacturers (i.e. HP, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Dell, etc.)
•    To focus on new technologies and trends within the IT Community (i.e. Virtualization, Sustainability, etc.) and encourage vendors/manufacturers to showcase their latest and greatest
•    To have breakout sessions with 12 unique tracks. Some of the suggested tracks include: Retail Link, Project Management, Database Management, Software Development, Web Development, Infrastructure, Small Business, Digital Graphics, and Marketing
•    To have keynote speakers that can speak to how technology not only effects but empowers all business, from local small business to large worldwide enterprises

There is an open invitation for the first NWA Tech Council’s meeting March 10th, 2009 from 6-8pm. The purpose of the meeting will be to discuss the overall scope of the Technology Summit and start the process for creating a steering committee.  As you consider coming and joining the Council, please think about how you can help achieve the Council’s goals.  Below are areas of experience we are looking for in Council members.  Please send a confirmation email to nwatechcouncil@gmail.com where we can send you details of the meeting.

Chamber of Commerce
Executive Level Leadership
Civic Committees & Organizations
Convention and Event Planning
Marketing & Advertising
Technology Consulting
Corporate Technology Leadership
Accounting
Leaders within Walmart, Tyson, & JBHunt
Technology Based Businesses
Small Business Leaders