The GL.net is looking for speakers for 2012. If you can and want to give us a talk you are the person we need. The list of the most desired topics is here but any topic is welcome.

Meetings are usually held on the second Wednesday of each month. It can be changed but Wednesday is by far the most popular day for most of our members.

Please contact me if you are interested either by commenting to this post or by any other way you can imagine, such as twitter @_jimmys.

Jimmy

We had our first, after the break, meeting and I tell you, it was simply amazing. I haven’t expected to see so many familiar faces again. When I arrived to the venue and started setting up the room I expected a few people. But then you started showing up one after another and that was amazing. You made me proud of the group and showed me that there is need and value in in my work here. Thank you all for that!

Your voice

Almost all of you voted to keep meetings at Wednesdays so we will stay as we are. Someone mentioned that the first Wednesday of each month is not convenient so I will try to avoid it if possible. My aim will be to keep meetings on the second Wednesday of each month.

There was a plenty of subjects you asked for. In no particular order

• ASP.NET MVC
• LINQ
• MVVM
• PRISM
• Entity Framework
• Async
• Both SQL Server and NoSQL databases
• Functional programming, F#
• Business, non-technical topics
• Java Script
• Metro applications
• Interface design
• Windows Phone
• XNA
• Windows 8
• .NET 4.5
• Silverlight
• HTML 5
• Reactive Extensions
• Azure
• Amazon web services
• WCF, REST
• Continuous integration
• Dependency Injection

You also asked for a handful of specific speakers

• Mark Rendle
• Paul Stack
• Jon Skeet
• Gary Short
• Steve Sanderson

That gives me nice base to work on.  Gary is on his way here and you will see him next month. I’m now starting building schedule for 2012 so watch out this space for further announcements.

Thank you again and see you soon. There will be more pizza next time.

I'm delighted to announce that GL.net is back. It's been a very long time but I finally managed to pull all pieces together and restart it again. I hope all our members will be back and we will have great time again. Over last year we lost a lot of interesting topics so we will have a plenty to catch up. I'm really excited.

New Location

I've managed to find us a new location to try out. The next three meetings will be in Maxima Forum in Cheltenham, Lansdown Road, GL50 2JA. The building, for those who don't know Cheltenham, looks like on the picture below

And  here is the map:

Meetings

Meeting dates till end of the year are

• 5th October
• 16nd November
• 14th December

Put those in your calendar. Topics and speakers will be announced in the next couple of days.

The meeting format will be as usual. Dorr will be open from 6pm and talk will start at 6.30pm. Somewhere about 7.30pm we will have pizza so don't worry, you will not leave us hungry. Refreshments in form of tea and coffee will be provided to keep you awake. The meeting will end about 9pm, and we can retreat to the nearby bar afterwards to do more geeky stuff.

New Site

As you can see, we have a brand new website. It's based on excellent BlogEngine.NET that has been modified to use LiveID. Once you log in, using LiveID, you will be asked to fill short registration form and that's it. Registration is so simple and quick that you should not feel any discomfort.

The site will be slowly changing over next few months until I will be happy with it.

Sponsors

I wouldn't be able to run the group without amazing sponsorship from organisations such as Symantec.cloud, Telerik and DevExpress. It saddens me however that only one local business see value in the group. If you are member, please ask around in your company if they could sponsor us. The more help the better group. With more sponsors we could do really great stuff that would not only benefit all members but also your organisation. It's all in your hands.