STL ALT.NET sponsorships

I am excited to announce that STL ALT.NET has some new official sponsorships, and you know what that means: SWAG. First, our meetup group has become part of the user group programs for APress and Manning Publications. These publishers both offer excellent technical books related to .NET development, and members of STL ALT.NET will receive the following discounts when purchasing books through the meetup group:

  • APress - 35% off printed books, 50% off eBooks
  • Manning - 36% discount on all books

In addition, Manning will occasionally provide books to be used as raffle prices, and both publishers allow meetup members to obtain free copies of their books for review purposes, subject to certain conditions (meetup members can ask me more about these programs if they are interested). EDIT: I just received confirmation that APress will be sending two copies of their new book Pro .NET 4 Parallel Programming in C# by Adam Freeman to be raffled at our April meeting. This book is an awesome follow up to our March presentation, Threading in C#. Second, Ayende Rahien at Hibernating Rhinos has provided our meetup group with three raffle licenses for his .NET profiling products. I use NHProf all the time when I develop with NHibernate – it has become an indispensable tool for me! These licenses will be raffled in the following order:

Trial downloads of each product are available on their respective websites, if you want to give them a spin and see how amazing they are! Finally, Hadi Hariri at JetBrains will be providing a few licenses for their .NET products that will be made available at various times throughout the year. Our first JetBrains raffle will be:

Rules for Winning (Sheen Style)

If you want to be a winner (and who doesn’t?) in one of our raffles, there are a few rules you have to follow:

  1. You have to be a member of the STL ALT.NET group
  2. You have to be present at the meetup when a given item is raffled

The raffles will happen towards the end of the evening, so for those of you who saunter in at 7:15 (you know who you are…), you’ll still have a chance. If you would like an additional chance to win, come prepared to give a 5-10 minute “lightning talk“ on a technical topic of your choice. Please let me know at least two weeks in advance if you plan to present, so I can adjust the schedule accordingly. If you plan to use PowerPoint or have materials to show, please either bring your own laptop or put your materials on a thumb drive, and you can just use my laptop. I want to extend a big thank-you to our sponsors! Shit is getting real now, folks!