On December 4th, the first inaugural MSDN Express event was a resounding success.  We had around 17 in attendance and learned a lot about some of Microsoft’s new technologies.  A big thank you goes out to Zain Naboulsi, our MSDN Developer Evangelist.  Zain, on his own initiative is helping put Northwest Arkansas on the roadmap for Microsoft’s Evangelism team.  It’s been a long time coming that our region has seen some focus and the ability to draw in such high level talent.

A big thanks to Jay Smith for creating a .Net app which randomly selected a winner of the door prizes.  The door prizes given away were:

Visual Studio 2008 Professional (Donated by me)
Microsoft Office (courtesy of Zain)
Microsoft Mouse & other goodies I can’t remember (courtesy of Zain)
Visual Studio 2008 T-Shirt (every attendee received one, thx to the Tulsa InstallFest)

I hope more of you will in the area will get the word out and participate in such great events.

Here are some important links:
Zain Naboulsi’s Blog Posting on the event: http://blogs.msdn.com/zainnab/archive/2007/12/05/msdn-express-is-a-success.aspx
Northwest Arkansas .Net User Group: http://www.nwadnug.org
Jay Smith’s Blog Posting: http://www.jaysmith.us
A big thanks goes out to New Horizons for providing the meeting place: http://www.nhark.com