Apart from caring for the wonderful St. Petersburg Alt.Net group (my baby), I’ve also been asked (volunteered, however you put it) to help run the St. Petersburg .Net User Group, which is an Ineta-affiliated enterprise. Unlike the Alt.Net group (which has just had its 8^th meeting, with ~20 people attending), the .Net UG has been somewhat quiet, with few meetings and hardly anything extraordinary. That’s about to change.

The idea behind Ineta’s group is rougly this: showing that Microsoft stuff is cool. I mean, that’s why we’re in this business of .Net – because it’s cool. But simply saying ‘it’s cool’ isn’t, in itself, cool enough – we need to show how to get the coolness out of tools like Visual Studio and technologies such as WPF. Great examples, lively demos and lots of fun are ways to guarantee that people who have never programmed .Net would want to move their carreers in this direction.

But what about the competition? Well, honestly, there isn’t much – except for Java, who was the topic of focus at the Sun TechDays here in St. Petersburg. Hundreds of people from St. Petersburg, Moscow and other places around Russia attended. It was a real high-profile show, with foreign speakers extolling the virtues of JavaFX and whatnot. I was there – it was a little crowded but fun overall.

The third developer camp is of course the C++ camp, largely driven by embedded, rather than desktop, development. As far as I know, the C++ people do not have a ‘user group’ of any kind, partly due to the fact that the C++ establishment is by its very nature more conservative and less agile than either C# or Java.

Whatever the case may be, I personally am excited about the new opportunity. We’ll see if I can make something out of it