I attended the Cincinnati Business Intelligence (CincyBI) meeting on May 13, 2008. The topic was Advanced Data Modeling: Simultaneous Type 1 - Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimensions and the guest speaker was Tommy Adams. Tommy went over Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3 SCD's and gave a good explaination of when to use each. He then went gave an introduction to Hybrid Type 2 / Type 3. This was a short presentation but I was still able to get a good understanding of when you would use these differnent types of SCD's. The demo was in Microsoft Access to simplify the demo but I would have enjoyed seeing this applied on a larger scale.

When the meeting was over it was still early but I still planned to go home. The first Cincinnati Software Architecture (CinArc) meeting was in the next room and they were having a panel discussion with Joe Wirtley, Leon Gersing, and Mike Levy. I really wanted to attend that meeting too but since I had to make a choice I went with Business Intelligence. I saw Mike Wood, the director of CINNUG, in the lobby because CinArc was on break too. Mike was nice enough to allow me to attend the second half of the CinArc meeting. 

During the break I was able to chat with Andy Erickson. I was able to stand there and have a really nice talk. Enjoyable versus feeling so stressed out. This is one of the reasons I'm really trying to attend as many meetings possible. The more I come around the more comfortable I feel talking to people. Right before the second half started I was able to meet one of the tweeps, Matt Brewer, face to face.

The second half of the meeting was a FishBowl. Very interesting. There were four chairs and three people in the middle of the room and the rest of us sat around the outside in a circle. The group was defining "What Is An Architect?". If you wanted speak about the topic you had to go sit in the empty chair, the catch, someone had to get up. There always had to be an empty chair. 

I really enjoyed this meeting. This looks like an exciting and passionate group. I am not an architect and don't see myself in that role in the near future but perhaps one day. In the meantime, I do want to know how they think, what they do, and how it relates to someone like me. I will attend these meeting in the future on a regular basis.

CincyBI meets every two months but they will not meet again until September, 2008. You can find more information about CincyBI at http://cincysql.org. CinArc meets every two months and the next meeting is in July, 2008. For more information on CinAr please visit http://cinnug.org. 

I attended the April CincySQL Meeting on April 22, 2008. I will be my last.

This meeting held on April 15, 2008 was the Hereos Happen Here Community Launch. I know I'm a bit late with this update however, I also attend the Central Ohio Day of .Net that same week.  Two great events. In regards to the local launch, this was one meeting you had to register for and the place was packed. There were three presentations that night.

The first presentation, by Kirk Wilson representative of MAX Technical Training, was on the new features in VS2008. Some of the new features include Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Team Foundation Server (TFS), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), and SharePoint Server. Even though this was a quick presentation I was able to learn about many of the new features.

The second presentation, by Stefan Kyntchev, was on LINQ. This was a great presentation. I really want to try a project or two using LINQ. It just looks fun. You need to think "what you want you want to search for, modify, etc. Stefan's approach to this presentation went over big with the audience. He shared his thoughts on the creation of LINQ in a very witty way. He also had some great code examples. 

The last presentation by Dan Hounshell was on the new features of ASP.NET 3.5. Most of the questions that I had about 3.5 were answered that night. Even though Dan had some technical difficulties the overall message was there. He gave a demo on the new features of CSS and I found the overall concept a great time saver. I used to have a heavy focus on CSS but after watching this presentation I see I can let that take a back seat and focus on LINQ a bit more. I also like the concept of the nested master pages and plan to check into that further.

I also wanted to mention that this meeting included a hands-on lab that we were able to use during the break. CINNUG is really a great user group that I found recently with some really great people. I can see they're serious about their group in regards to helping the community grow and I really appreciate all their time and efforts.