Jonathan Cassar, president and founding member of new INETA Europe User Group in Malta: Tech-Spark UG wrote follwing article for the INETA NewsFLASH:
Tech-Spark is a Microsoft user group in Malta, with the aim contribute towards the growth of the local ICT industry through networking and education, and to foster an active community of technology professionals in Malta, providing members unique opportunities to enhance their skills and value.
The need has been felt to also cater for the IT professional audience such as system administrators, network engineers and operations staff. Tech-Spark plans to have a number of events throughout the year, and the speakers will be selected from different local and foreign companies.
So far it had presentations on UX design, Windows 2008 R2, Hyper-V, Windows Azure, IIS7 and Developing for Windows 7, as well as a general chalk and talk session with domain experts.
The latest event, MSDevDays www.msdevdays.com was organised in conjunction with MS Malta.
Developer Days 2010 was an event for all developers, architects and other IT specialists that wanted to more about the Microsoft development platform. During the day a holistic overview of the technologies, products and approaches was provided, effectivley launching VS2010 for the community.
Topics included products such as .NET Framework, C++, Silverlight, Windows Azure platform and services, IE8, Windows 7, Visual Studio 2010, and Expression Tools, data access and web development. For the project managers and team leaders there was a dive deep into Application Lifecycle Management and Team Foundation Server.
The event also featured short breakout sessions run by community members, where attendees could focus more on the language and smart client enhancements for VS2010 or more on the User Experience for delivering the next generation of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).
Recently Tech-Spark also organised a Speaker Idol competition, an exciting and challenging event where developers and IT pros speak on topics of interest to them. The purpose of the competition was to enable lesser-known members of the technical community to be recognised for their talents and speaking abilities. The goal was to find "diamonds in the rough" and future thought leaders and speakers that can enhance the local technical community. Daniel D'Agostino was our winner, and apart from gifts he also got the chance to present at MS Devdays.
Anyone wishing to join can visit the group's website http://www.tech-spark.com/ or search for the Facebook group or subscribe to the Twitter feed 'techsparkug'
Web: http://www.tech-spark.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=121230801218
Twitter: https://twitter.com/techsparkug
Posted
Mar 29 2010, 09:49 PM
by
Tomislav Bronzin