The Philly Office Geeks hosted their second meeting last night. The meeting was held at the Microsoft office in Malvern, PA. I had the honor to give the keynote on Open XML Formats, a topic I have been following for over a year now. I am a huge fan of the Open XML Formats. I have worked on some pretty cool Office projects so I can attest to the good news this is for Office developers.
It was perfect timing to talk about this topic as I think every Office developer should be at the very least familiar with Open XML. This being the second meeting, it made perfect sense to introduce the group to it.
The presentation itself went ok. There was a lot to cover so I was not able go too deep on the content. I purposely wanted to give an overview because all three topics I talked about (and more) are covered on these excellent free training videos from Microsoft . They are really great and highly recommended. More information about Open XML can be found here.
Ashin did the fifteen minutes of code session (I will try to video tape them from now on). Ashin is an extremely talented developer/architect. I have not seem him give a bad presentation yet. Now I just got to get him to start blogging. I can only imagine the gems that will come out of there.
Speaking about blogging, check out Dave Mann's blog. And since you are at it buy a copy or two of his book. The man has to eat. Dave is the brain behind Philly Office Geeks and an all round nice guy. Oh did I forget to say that he is also a SharePoint MVP? Well he is. Congrats Dave you deserve it.
I am really excited about Office Geeks. The first two meeting have been pretty interactive. We get some great questions and some great answers by the group. There were about 30 people in attendance last night which is pretty good considering we sent the meeting reminder pretty late.
I also want to thank K2, the sponsor for last night's event. Bill Nagle gave a good developer friendly overview of their product. It did not feel like a sales talk at all.
Thanks again to the Philly Office Geeks leadership for organizing the event.