Wednesday (July 28th) saw our inaurgral meeting, which was kindly hosted by EMC Consulting.
On arrival, everyone was greeted with a beer or soft drink (again courtesy of EMC) and donuts:
And here’s a disappointingly blurry picture of a room full of people
We started the evening with a presentation by Rob Fonseca-Ensor on XNA development in WP7.
A copy of the code from his demo is also available.
Between the longer presentations 5 people got up to give 5 minute demonstrations of applicaitons that they are developing.
First was Dave Hawes who showed a client to his Skillbook product:
Second was Hosain who demonstrated his London Tube application:
Third was Apurva (who also goes by the name keyboardp) with the ICE Alert app:
Fourthly was Tristan & Neil who showed their CryoDefense game:
Finally, Mike Hole & Howard Scott of Sequence demonstrated an application they are developing for Snow and Rock. Unfortunately we have no video of this.
To help encourage people to demonstrate their applications Micorsoft provided an Xbox to award as aprize to the application deemed the best. The audience voted for the ICE application by Apruva as the most deserving of the Xbox.
In addition to the Xbox prize, everyone who demonstrates an application in meetings up until the end of the year will go in to a draw to win a “special” prize.
To finish the formal part of the evening, Paul Foster gave an overview of the Marketplace and held an open Q & A session.
After Paul’s presentation we continued the discussions at a nearby pub and we are very grateful to Microsoft who kindly being picked up the bar tab.
The hope and intention is that future meetings will have the same format. We’re going to try and look at alternative, larger, venues though as with very little promotion we had many more people wish to come than the room could accomodate and we want as many of those who wish to to to be able to attend.
Other blog posts about the event can be found at:
http://mikehole.com/2010/07/28/windows-phone-7-starting-out/
http://blog.davehawes.com/post/2010/07/29/Going-to-the-first-Windows-Phone-7-(WP7)-user-group.aspx
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsphone7series/thread/5382336f-ffc1-4cee-aa33-39535b901706
http://phone7.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/the-first-windows-phone-7-user-group/
http://consultingblogs.emc.com/michelleflynn/archive/2010/07/29/windows-phone-user-group.aspx
Here’s a small selection of the feedback we had via twitter too:
“Some really slick apps shown at @wpug, very exciting times ahead”
“Congrats to the @wpug organisers on a great event!”
“Good first meeting of #wpug Really liked the meeting format with plenty of variety and great interaction.”
“Congrats! That was a great evening.”
“great job with tonight’s group more of the same please”
“thanks for a great first ug, nice to finally play with the hardware. Gr8 job by all involved”
“enjoyed @wpug, great crowd, great device…”
“Great bunch at #wpug event tonight. Got to see some apps folks are building and answer lots of qs”
“Just got back from the inaugural @wpug and really enjoyed it. Impressed!”
“Format worked great.”
“Great first #wpug some nice demo apps a real device plus thx for free beer :D”
“A Windows Phone 7 device, great presenters, exciting demos, a full house, beer and donuts… The perfect user group.”
“Thanks for great meeting last night. And to EMC for the hospitality.”
“Thanks for organising a great first #wpug meeting. Look forward to the next!”
“Congrats to the @wpug organisers on a great event!”
We hope to announce details of our next meeting shortly.
Details will be announced here on this site, on twitter and anywhere else we can to help spread the word.