I am in the process of starting a new developer group in Tampa specifically for developers who want to learn about the new ASP.NET MVC Framework being released by Microsoft in March. I am also looking for developers who have experience with the MVC Framework to speak at the group.

The developer group will meet each month. Meetings will be at the Microsoft Office in Tampa. However, different from most developer groups, the goal is that each meeting will build upon the previous one and continue to grow the knowledge and skills of each member. Anyone can jump in and join anytime, but the content will get more advanced and focused each month to provide more depth and knowledge on each topic. Although the topics will primarily be focused around the MVC framework, we will be looking at professional end-to-end development of MVC web applications from the UI to the database so many related technologies, libraries, and frameworks will be discussed.

The first 3 meetings have been scheduled. Meetings are from 6:30 - 8:30pm

Thursday, April 16, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009

Meetings will consist of a combination of:

Presentations - Two hour presentations covering a wide variety of topics related to the ASP.NET MVC Framework. These presentations will get more and more advanced / focused as the year goes on.

Code Reviews - Two hour code reviews of sample applications and architectures built using the ASP.NET MVC Framework. These are deep-dive talks picking apart existing applications explaining the who, what, and why's to help understand the anatomy and architecture of existing applications.

MVC Quick Hits / Lightning Talks - 3 to 4 shorter presentations in a single evening with each presentation covering a specific aspect of the MVC Framework.


My goal is to get at least 30 regular attendees and a list of speakers who can help present on a variety of MVC topics.

You can learn more by joining the Windows Live Group:

http://tampamvc.groups.live.com/

I will have a website up in about a week, too.

Anyone interested or know of someone who may be interested in presenting?

Best Regards,

Dave

Hi Dave,

This is great. I'm very interested in attending, but will probably miss the first meeting April 16 due to a scheduling conflict. Will you be creating the website using MVC?

Have a great day!

Thanks!
L

Hi Lilly,

I will be creating the website in MVC over the weekend and the source code for the website will be made available to the group. I was considering making our second meeting a walk-thru of the website code as a simple example of using MVC to build database-driven web applications.

I look forward to seeing you at the meetings.

Best Regards,

Dave

We officially have a website now at:

http://www.tampadev.org/

The website itself will be the subject of the second meeting as it shows off building a simple database-driven website using various features of the MVC Framework:

* Depedency Injection via StructureMap
* Data Access via LightSpeed
* Custom Model Binders handing validation and optimistic concurrency.
* Custom ActionResults
* Various ActionFilters and AuthorizationFilters
* Databinding
* Typed Views
* Partial Rendering
* etc...


Best Regards,

Dave