AZGroups (formerly AZ.NET User Group) had their yearly 'big event' yesterday. The following is a brief digest of the event...

Eric Sink, original creator of Internet Explorer and founder of SourceGear, gave the first presentation (which I missed) on mistakes made with version control. His second topic was marketing mistakes. Surprisingly, Eric's presentation was both interesting and enlightening. I think these principles can be applied to many other domains -- including rolling out a "program" in your church whether it be software or a new thing/service/event.

Here are a few of my favorite points from his discussion.

Mistake #6 - Trying to target too many people. I think many of us have used software that suffered from feature bloat. This is software that has lost its niche. In attempting to become all things to all people, this software looses its identity and no longer does its core well. When this happens you will find new competing products pop up to deal with this problem. Do you have any "programs" in place that are trying to be all things to all people?

Mistake #8 - Forgetting about the stages. Each stage has an associated group: early adopters, pragmatists, conservatives, and laggards. When you fail to identify the stage that your product is in you will not be able to serve the group that is vital to move you to the next stage. Are you trying to please conservatives when in fact you should be finding early adopters who will spread the word because they love your program? Eric also says "forget the laggards".

Axosoft founder, Hamid Shojaee, gave a great presentation (9/18: watch it on youtube) and demo on feature, defect and bug tracking using their OnTime 2006 software. If you're in a single developer shop, you can get a free license of OnTime 2006!

Scott Guthrie gave another great demo using Windows Vista, IIS7.0, ASP.NET 2.0 and Atlas. It's impossible to summarize all the tips Scott gave during his talk so I won't try. Just read his blog -- it is an amazing source of information.

Scott's second presentation was on LINQ. While I knew a bit about LINQ, I was happy to think this was just another technology that I need not consider (After all, every year there are tons of things to learn but time and energy are a limited quantity. It's an information survival tactic we all tend to use.) I can now see that would be a mistake. In a nutshell, LINQ is putting the "query language" into our coding language (C# and VB for starters) For us developers, LINQ is going to change the way we access data and make getting complex data much easier. Scott did some amazing demos with 1 line of LINQ which, as he said, "I would not even know how to get this data using SQL". Very impressive. This is on my list of technology to dig into.

Lastly, what would an AZGroup meeting be without a chaotic prize give away? The picture shows how the winner selection process worked.