A couple of days ago I posted I was presenting at: Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Developer Day Feb 18th 2012 at Hyderabad
This was my first foreign user group since Australia and always find it interesting how different cultures run their user groups. A couple of the big differences:
First of which they run their usergroups only once a month. They also run their user groups on the weekend. They use the fact they have all day and run 3 sessions over 4 hours –giving the attendees the luxury of picking and choosing what content they want to see. Their user group is also BIG with around 200 people normally attending any given meeting. (I think that was the size of the last Seattle Code Camp).
Also found it dichotomous that in general they are very advanced (answering debugging questions with ease) but not using/aware of some of the more recent tools – for instance NOBODY was using intellitrace and ~only 4 people were using Microsoft Test manager also found the questions seemed to come from a waterfall/formal perspective rather than an agile mindset.(note this is a gross generalization as there were clearly members aggressively using Agile development practices). Other difference I noticed was this audience seemed to be less interactive; but much more forthright in their questions. With statements like “Your statements do not agree, can you explain….”.
One big difference that had nothing to do with culture is the fact this user group is really nurtured and supported by the local Microsoft office….Makes me feel guilty about my presence in Redmond!
As far as the sessions. As a typical “Chuck” session mine was a frantic, a touch crazy and a lot of fun. Out of character for me my demos all worked-even the impromptu off roading into CodedUI and Intellitrace(when I say worked – that is eventually<g>). The second presenter Abhijit Jana, did a great job on Inellitrace in Production – I would say actually rivals my buddy Larry Guger on that content!. The presenter Atul Verma did a good job with a tough topic of SQL Server 2012. He was super well prepared and just needed to work on his volume. They were also super understanding that Visual Studio 11 is currently under NDA and most of the content and demos was from the CTP build.
