The Lead a study group! signup was recently given a Holiday Makeover.  We figured that maybe the old theme was driving many of you away.  Stupid teapot.

Thanks to everyone who recently signed up to lead a study group in our Winter/Spring term - Jay Harris, Brian Genisio, Anne Marsan, Mike Smithson, and Darrell Hawley.  Also, thanks to those who recently committed to lead, but haven't yet gotten a chance to visit Lead a study group! and sign-up - Dennis Burton!

We hope to have a schedule and a set of topics out in time for CodeMash.  One way or the other we will be trying to spread the word about Study Group at CodeMash to our other software development friends with the hope of starting more study groups in the surrounding communities or even more in the Ann Arbor area.

We do need more leaders for our Winter/Spring term, so please take the time to visit Lead a study group! with your topic.  Past leaders have gone on to fame and fortune, so don't miss this rare opportunity.

We're going to have a Study Group format Workshop post CodeMash, on January 26th from 5:30-6:30 at SRT Solutions.  If you have the time and you want to give feedback, please join us.  We'll talk about what formats have worked best with us so far.  In general this is to get feedback from previous attendees and previous leaders and to help the Winter/Spring leaders figure out how they want to lead on their topics.  

If you came to Study Group, but stopped coming, we would love to hear from you.  Please send an email or visit I haven't been able to make it to Study Group. Be nice though, we're trying really hard.

Happy Holidays!

We've added Google Wave to our capabilities.  Right now super secret Study Group discussions are being done using Google Wave.  So far Wave is proving to be useful.  It's pretty simple.  It just allows for two or more people to explore topics and ideas in a very straight forward conversational mode, very much like email.  Then Wave adds the ability to easily split off just one topic and continue to explore that.  Unlike email everything is editable, so you can actually go back and make changes to clarify or modify content.  At the end you have a fairly good recording of how the conversation developed and flowed.  Something that new participants should be able to follow no matter when they join the conversation. 

Don't forget to visit Lead a study group! for your chance to become one of the great and legendary Leaders of Study Group.

Well it's been a fun year for Study group.  We started out 2009 working our butts off to become .Net certified.  After everyone passed their test (scores are unimportant, the point is that we all passed), we took a nice long summer break.  At the end of the summer things were switched up a bit and this fall we tested out a new idea.  We opened up study group to any topic, with a very interactive format.  The result really couldn't have been better.  Study group is a heads down coding experience in a very social, knowledge sharing environment.

Last night's study group on WPF was a really a good time.  Anne gave a short presentation using power point.  Then she let us loose on coding using the following exercise attached to her WPF Jam PreReqs .  It was both easy to do and informative.  The really cool part is there was a lot of WPF experience in the room.  While we were coding Anne's exercise, we got hear about the ins and outs of WPF, the tools, and the future of WPF.  Really Brian Genisio and Mike Woelmer (who didn't ever sit down) had the most to say about WPF, but there was just a whole lot of Microsoft junkies in the room participating in all kinds of knowledge sharing.

Thanks everyone, see you next week for WPF Part II with Anne Marsan.

Also, I thanked Jay Harris personally for signing up to lead on topics next year using Lead a study group!.  I really would like to personally thank more of you.

After the next two study groups, we're going to stop Study Group for 2009 and start back up February 2nd, 2010. 

We're stopping so early because so many of us are busy on year end projects at this time of year.  We not starting up until February 2nd because of Code Mash.  Many of the study group members not only attend Code Mash, many of them actively work on it, including writing talks,  helping to organize the conference, and actively helping out during the conference.   Since Code Mash takes place the week of the 10th, we decided to just start back up in February giving everyone a nice long break.

Having said all that, we have 11 study groups scheduled from February until late April.  We've received some really good topic ideas and volunteers to lead them on these topics.  If you are interested in leading a study group, please go to our Lead a study group page and sign up.

thanks!

I wrote a blog post recently about Chris's F# Jam from last week. If you're interested in my impressions on our study groups sessions, take a look at it.

Because of Study group I was able to read and understand Chris's post:  http://srtsolutions.com/blogs/chrismarinos/archive/2009/11/23/designing-f-functions-for-currying-and-the-gt-operator.aspx

Because Study group is a weekly event, cancellations tend to leave us scrambling.  Well, to be honest, me scrambling.  The first cancellation, Bill Wagner, was for our first study group, so I simply filled in for him, given that I hadn't committed to anything.  The second cancellation, Darrell Hawley, I tried to find an alternate and I did, almost, but at the last minute he was unable to commit so I scrambled and lead on JEE. 

This time I think I got a little smarter and Dianne also gave me a little extra time.  Posting that we needed a leader got an immediate response, so maybe that's the best way to handle it.  Either that or maybe we could simply have a couple of alternates ready.  I know that next years schedule is filling up quick, so it certainly doesn't seem like we either have a lack of leaders or lack of topics. 

Please give me your thoughts on this when you have time.

thanks!

Even though I was the leader last night, I learned quite a few things.  First apparently when you're logged into google it returns "your" top searches, not necessarily "The" top searches.  Thanks to Jay Harris for that.