It was suggested that I publish our meeting minutes which I thought was a great idea. So here's what went on.
We had a good turnout. Went around the room introducing ourselves and discovered one person who is new to Progress has a real mess on his hands. We spent a good portion of the meeting listening to his problems and offering suggestions, as well as sympathy - we could all feel his pain.
Several people are still running character clients instead of gui, and no one was on OE10. Three people have old v6-style code that includes editing blocks.
I talked about Exchange and provided a handout (pdf) with links to various Exchange information on PSDN, information about the new products, some quick tips on DB Performance from Adam Backman and Gus's presentations, and highlights from Tom Bascom's Highly Parallel Dump and Load presentation. Exchange 06 was very good with a lot of great information. We talked a little about how the big buzz is still about SOA and web services.
The other hot topic (at least hot for me because of our companies desires) was AJAX. There were two sessions at Exchange showing what you can do with AJAX, and I included Tom Bascom's ProJAX in the handout as another great example of what you can do. If you've used Google's Gmail, Google Maps, or Flickr, you've used an application using the AJAX concepts. Basically it's a way to refresh the web page without reloading the entire page. With this you can create web app's that are more feature rich and closer to the experience users expect from applications on their desktop. Progress will continue investigating this.
Overall I thought it was a very good meeting. Later this year and next year Progress is going to put together some Road Show's like the Tech Peak's they had in the past. They are trying to set these up to work with Users Groups, so we'd have a morning show, lunch, then a Users Group meeting in the afternoon. I'll send out all the details when I have them.
Thanks to everyone who showed up, especially Dan Foreman and Mark Bloomberg!
Next meeting will be Thursday September 21st, 3pm - 5pm, place TBD. On Thursday July 20th we'll have another little get-together at a local pub, 4:3opm - ???, place TBD.
Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Remember, this is YOUR Users Group. I am here to make it run how you would like and get you what you'd like to see. If there is a topic you would like see covered, let me know. If there is someone you would like to see as a guest speaker, let me know. Later!
