Depending on who’s at the meeting, and who’s presenting you may get to meet some excellent contacts like your local Microsoft evangelist, or your local vendor evangelist.  For example at a .NET user group meeting I was at in July, our local Microsoft MSDN evangelist was there, as well as evangelist from three .NET software vendors.  All of which are fantastic contacts for the .NET programmers that were there.

There is also another little incentive for people who attend these user group meetings; free stuff.  User groups will also have lots of great stuff to give away.  The free stuff to give away will vary from group to group, meeting to meeting, and speaker to speaker (some speakers will bring their own swag to the user group on top of what the user group already has to give away).  The give away could be books, 3rd party software, free training, mice, keyboards, MSDN subscriptions, Windows licenses, or other varieties of goodies.  I’ve personally seen thousands of dollars worth of stuff be given away.

The .NET user group meeting I attended in July was their Most Valuable Member awards meeting where they announced their Most Valuable Member award winner for the year.  The winner for this is the user group member who gives back to the community the most over the last year (the meeting is held on the birthday of the user group).  During this one meeting there was over $60,000 worth of software, and books given away.  Every single person who attended the meeting received something (myself and a few other people opted to not take anything because we already have access to everything that was being given away, so better that other people that don’t have access to the software and books already get them).

Most user groups meet after work, and usually provide dinner of some sort (usually pizza, sometimes not).  Some groups charge a few dollar cover to go to the meeting, some don’t.  It all depends on if the group was able to get sponsors to cover the cost of the room, the food, etc.

If you’ve never been able to go to a user group meeting, I’d highly recommend making it something that you try at least a couple of times.  You’ll make a few new friends, probably pick up a few new pieces of SWAG, and hopefully learn something new.  And all this for a few bucks in gas, a few bucks to get in the door and a few hours a month of your time.  I can all but guarantee it’ll be worth it.

If you don’t know where you local user group is a good place to start is the INETA website.  INETA is a group which helps user groups get speakers and resources, and they have a pretty good directory of user groups.  If you are more IT Pro focused (INETA’s focus is developers) then you might want to check out Culminis.  If you work with SQL Server then the SQLPASS website is the place for you.  There’s a few other places you can look at, which are shown on the Microsoft User Groups Communities web page.

I hope you’ll make it to a local user group meeting, and go there often.

Denny

He’s got a great idea for a project, so now it’s on us to make sure that he builds it.  Here’s what he submitted as his idea.

Talk about a step up in difficulty from finding out your email address! haha

I would leverage an MSDN ultimate license to attempt to build a kick ass SQL Server DBA repository. I’m not talking about a single table holding a list of all the SQL Server instances you manage either. The ultimate goal would be an automated process that gathers information about all of the instances in the environment daily. This information can be viewed on demand from reporting services or web pages. There would be configurable alerting rules that would email the DBA distribution list. An example would be for databases without a backup in x amount of days. The features would be selectable so you can get a basic amount of information without any changes on the production instances.
There are similar programs / scripts that get you comparable information but I have found most of them either only gets some of the information DBA’s need or require configuration on each instance. I’m hoping to setup something that provides all the information with minimal footprint. This would be a great tool in troubleshooting issues as you can easily identify any login changes, sudden database file growth, or schema changes regardless of the SQL Server instance version.

Darn forgot to add that my app and source code would be available freely to the SQL Server community. Hopefully people would contribute and make the application even more useful for everyone!

Later this week I’ll announce what I’m doing with the third license.

Denny

Put together a quick blog post (or feel free to put it in a comment here) about what really kick ass software you are thinking you could develop with this free MSDN license.  (If you do a blog post be sure to do a ping back to this post so I can find your post.)

I’m not going to hold you to it, but hopefully you’ll actually make the software.

This is for a full blown MSDN Ultimate license.  It comes with everything that a paid for MSDN license comes with except: No MSDN Magazine, no support calls, no free Office 2010 license.  You get the rest of the Microsoft software suite for development and testing.

I’ll take the people who respond and put the names into a hat and pick one at random.

All comments and blog posts need to be posted by 6pm Pacific time today (winner will be announced shortly after that on my blog and twitter).  Be sure that I know how to get a hold of you, or that your contact info is in your about page on your blog or something.

Good luck,

Denny

PS. If you’ve already won a license from me, no you can’t win a second one.