The kickoff meeting of the newly-formed Western North Carolina .NET Developers Guild, on May 13^th, will feature a presentation on “Building Next Generation Web Applications with VS2008” given by the Carolinas’ Microsoft Developer Evangelist Brian Hitney.

WHAT: WncDotNet is a newly formed developer group dedicated to promoting Microsoft .NET technology and education to the software developer community near Asheville, NC and the surrounding area. Aside from often having great items to give away, monthly meetings will offer refreshments and professional networking and educational programs.

WHEN: Meetings are held on the 2nd Tuesday of every month from 6 to 8:30 PM . Kickoff meeting is May 13^th.

WHERE: At ImageSmith Communications, located near Asheville at 19 Walden Drive in Arden (near the intersection of Sweeten Creek, Hendersonville, and Airport roads). See www.imagesmith.com for a map and directions.

WHO: Anyone interested in .NET software development is invited to join the group. For more details, or to join, please browse the WncDotNet website at www.wncdotnet.com. If you have an interest in helping to steer or sponsor the group or making presentations at meetings, please contact WncDotNet via the website or call Dave Kolb at 828-398-0694.

Via Knoxville twitter user @whodini, we have learned that there will be a Happy Hour Tweetup today at Aubrey’s Peppermill at 5pm.

I know next-to-nothing about Knoxville so I won’t attempt to post a Google Maps link.  However feel free to leave more info in the comments.

Also, make sure you are following @geeksouth on Twitter as we’ll try to keep that current with events.  If you have an event you’d like us to post and twitter about send an e-mail to geeksouth05@gmail.com or direct twitter @geeksouth.

Come out this Thursday, April 17th at 7pm our monthly GeekSouth Dinner.  This month Lee Trout will give a presentation on Flash:

Leveraging Flash as a desktop development platform great for startups and mature businesses who need graphical interactive experiences at a fraction of the cost of custom developments.  I’ll be showcasing the software I managed (computer games for speech language pathologists) and how I helped start the company with accompanying business services including printing and disc manufacturing.

We will be meeting at Fun Expedition in Johnson City.  That’s right.  Fun Expedition.  Batting cages, Go-Carts, the whole works.  Make sure you come ready for some Geek Laser Tag.

Fun Expedition is located at 2805 North Roan Street in Johnson City (Google Map).

Update: Eric McCarty has added a set of photos to Flickr from our time at Fun Expedition.  You can see those here.  It was an awesome presentation and an awesome time.

So I thought from time to time I’d post some info on a new site or other geeky thing that gets my attention.

First installment… Muxtape. The site is best described by its own tagline: “a simple way to create and share mp3 mixtapes”.  Creating an account is dead simple (you are asked for a name, a password, and an e-mail address) and then you are immediately able to create your muxtape by uploading 12 MP3’s.

Your muxtape comes complete with a unique url (mine is austinmoody.muxtape.com), RSS feed, and HUGE fonts (Web 2.0 FTW!).

I love this site, and hope it stays around.  My biggest worry, of course, is how long the record industry will allow it to stay around.  The Muxtape terms in the line that people cannot upload “songs they do not have permission to let Muxtape use” which I figure means just about anything.

Quick!  I need to find some new artists to check out.  Create a Muxtape and slap the url in the comments.

Oh yeah… another bonus for iPhone owners, you can totally listen to music from a Muxtape direct on your device.  Good times.

Don’t forget to join us this Thursday March 20, 2008 for a presentation given by Nathan King. Nathan is the CEO/Chief Architect at JETPAC.tv, LLC.

He will be telling us Geeks all about sites like Quik, Seesmic, and currentTV. I am sure we will also hear a little something about JETPAC!

Topic for this Geek South dinner will be application of video into media companies at large. We will explore Nathan’s thoughts on the future of video and where it’s headed (more mobile, more interactive, desktop oriented, and more niches).

The Geek South Dinner will be held on a THURSDAY this month. Be sure to make note of this as Geeks tend to keep habits and we have been meeting on Tuesdays for the past two years. We will be meeting at StirFry in Johnson City, TN. @ 7pm. Click here if you need directions. Hope to see you all there!!

Big thanks to Kyle (www.digital-fridge.net) for setting up the Zazzle shop and to Jeff (www.jefferyrainey.com) for the logo.

Grab your GeekSouth T-shirts here: http://www.zazzle.com/geeksouth_shirt-235879916788313502

http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/4042263095

We used Eric McCarty (from fellowtip.com) and his cellphone to record a brief podcast using the very cool new API from blogtalkradio.com. Thanks geeksouth - you rock!

Jose

We are already well into 2008, but wanted to go ahead and update everyone on what is coming up this year. The GeekSouth leadership team met last month to try and get a plan together. Following are the dates and tentative locations for our meetings. Please note that some of the dates do not fall on the traditional Thursday.

• March 20th (Thursday)
• April 17th (Thursday)
• May 24th (Saturday)
• June 21st (Saturday)
• July 15th (Tuesday)
• August 19th (Tuesday)
• September 18th (Thursday)
• October 23rd (Thursday)
• November 20th (Thursday)
• December 16th (Tuesday)

Make sure to keep watch here as we fill in the blanks.

I know that we are always in search of the next cool place to meet and eat.  Well,  I believe I have found what may be the coolest place imaginable, though I am not sure what happens if some one needs to use the rest room…

Dinner in the Sky

Twitter has been a favorite of many for some time now. There are several GeekSouth regulars who tweet (see list below).

Today we created an account for GeekSouth on Twitter.

• www.twitter.com/geeksouth

Follow GeekSouth on Twitter if you’d like a different way to keep up to day on meeting announcements and other news.

Here’s a short list of know GeekSouth regulars who are on twitter.  Add yourself in the comments if I’ve missed you (and I know I probably did):

• Jose C.
• Austin M.
• Cam C.
• Ben C.
• Brad E.
• Ryan C.
• Jake H.
• Eric M.
• Jeff R.