New year, New user group … Newcastle.

Thankfully the snow is beginning to recede, and looking at the last blog post I made makes me realise just how much it has disrupted my schedule.

Next week I’m off to Newcastle. Jonathan and Andrew got in touch to say the were launching a new user group North East Bytes

We are pleased to announce a new User Group in the North East of England, based around Microsoft Technologies, North East Bytes (NEBytes).  We have decided to start this group in order to help Developers and IT Pros in the community with the constant battle to learn, stay current and broaden their knowledge.

We run monthly meetings every third Wednesday of the month (except on the second Wednesday in December – to allow time for Christmas parties and shopping!) at Newcastle University.  Each meeting consists of two one hour presentations (one Developer topic and one IT Pro topic) and we have refreshments, food, giveaways and prizes.

Attendance at our meetings is completely FREE!! The venue is provided kindly by the University, our Speakers kindly provide their time for free, and we as organisers provide our time for free to organise the events.  We will provide refreshments and we also provide hot food, all we ask is if you would like to partake in the the hot food, please make a small donation towards the cost via the open contribution box at each meeting.

Their Launch event is Wednesday 20th January 2010, I’m going, to cover Hyper-V, and my developer colleague Mike Taulty is going too – he’ll cover Silverlight. 

We tend to skulk about in the South East of England and not get to other corners of the country, but when we have been to Newcastle the audiences have always been great – I heard from Jonathan that early sign-up for this is looking good too, but if you’re based in that part of the world and haven’t signed up you’ve got a few days to do so. I’m looking forward to it.

Update. Oops linked to Andrew but not Jonathan. No favouritism intended – I’ve put it right