Mar meeting of St. Louis .NET User Group

I saw Randy Walker (blog | twitter | company) give a good talk on soft skills for developers. He stressed humility, confidence, setting level of expectations, performance, gaining respect; all of which lead to leadership.

It was good.

At the end of the night, they raffled off some prizes. My number was called about 4th. I could have chosen a month worth of free Pluralsight online training videos [which Kevin Grossnicklaus spoke very highly of] or the Microsoft Press 70-515 book. I chose the former, but was very tempted by the latter.

February meeting of St. Louis .NET User Group

I attended the February 2011 meeting of the St. Louis .NET User Group (website|twitter).
Brian Blanchard (website|twitter) gave a good presentation on Microsoft Azure. He shared a lot of information he gained while at Microsoft PDC 2010.

Among the other things he presented, I liked the SQLAzure Connect -- allowing cloud-hosted apps to reach back into on-site systems (SQLServer). And the integration of BIDS and SQL Azure Reporting was good.

As it relates to SharePoint 2010:
Steve Fox (blog) gave this good presentation at PDC 2010:
Integrating #SharePoint w Windows Azure'

I won a Microsoft LifeCam Cinema webcam as door prize.