Last night saw the first birthday of The .NET Developer Network. A year ago on St. George’s Day Mike Taulty came down to Bristol for the first ever DotNetDevNet meeting and gave us A (Very Excellent) Evening Of LINQ. 13 meetings later Gary Short travels all the way from Scotland (and then travels all the way back again the next day) to deliver an equally excellent evening of Basic and Advanced Design Patterns (with an excellent "really live" demo of what a pattern is). Thanks to Mike, Gary, all of the other speakers who have given up their time this last year and in particular thanks to everyone who has turned up at events and made this activity thoroughly rewarding for me and everyone else. (And we had birthday cake too!).

And because I like stats here are a few to celebrate the last 12 months:-

• 13 meetings
• 8 grok talks
• 1 C# training evening
• 1 day of WPF training
• 1 geek dinner
• 1 video
• 2 community nights
• 2 venues
• Over 1000 emails
• Thousands of pounds of swag
• 494 sign ups
• 431 attendances
• Highest attendance: 62
• Lowest attendance: 22
• 260 members

In particular I would like to thank Microsoft, the Fabulous Developer Evangelist Team and especially Clare Burgess for the great support she extends to us and everyone else in the community. Also thanks go to Rob Williams and UWE for being excellent hosts since October.

Here’s to the next year (starting with Silverlight 2.0 with Chris Hay on Tuesday 13th May 2008).

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