This End Up

I wish you were here! 

Today we hosted day #1 of the developer roundtable which was a blast as much as it was inspiring.  With Alfred's opening speech and Mark 'state of the union' address, I once again realized this ship is on the right course.  Even though this community is barely six months old and this is only our second gathering, it is really beginning to take root and sprout.

Mark, Caleb and Jeff talked about or demonstrated several new features in the "2007.2" build of Arena such as new security capabilities, field level control of the person details module, new person-centric data views, and embedded MS AJAX which is key for community developers wanting to do more AJAX in their modules.  Then each of the community developers got the new SDK on a new 1GB flash drive!

the new Arena SDK 

Caleb used the new SDK to give an excellent How-To workshop on building custom modules in order to help ramp up the newer developers.

Caleb gives a workshop on developing custom modules.

After lunch, I shared my "Glimpse of the Future" by looking at the history of DotNetNuke - a huge success story in the world of .NET open source applications.  Next I reviewed the benefits for using a functional specification document template I was proposing.  Since many of us will eventually be creating mid-sized custom modules it makes sense to standardize on a single template -- and that will also help us communicate among one another the features of our planned modules. Last, I gave a demonstration of the new Arena podcast module that I finished this weekend.  As I said at the roundtable, I'll be packaging that module for everyone later this week or early next week.

Scott Miller shares a story with part of the group during a break

To conclude day #1 Mark unveiled some new (very cool and needed) utility features for the community site.  But the day was not over yet. Some of the best conversation happened during dinner as we each shared a bit of our own stories and had the chance to learn more about each other.  I loved hearing what Jeremy Hoff (Shepherd of the Hills), Timothy Isaac (New Song Community Church), Scott Miller (Watermark) and Austin Spooner (New Covenant Bible Church) had to say about the way the use their old and new ChMS systems.  (I hope each of you guys that are not yet blogging start sharing your Church IT experiences with the larger community!)

I can't wait to see day #2 brings as Jon and David from CCV demo some stuff and everyone shares their ideas during the open discussion portion of the roundtable.