I've participated in the local Memphis .Net User's Group on and off for the past couple of years...More off than on to be completely honest.  I always have the best of intentions of going to the meetings, but then something comes up and I don't end up making it.  Last month I made a concerted effort to attend as I had contacted the current president of the group, Colin Neller, about running a food drive for the Memphis/Mid-South Food Bank, an idea that came from Steve Andrews and GeekFoodDrive.com.  During the break at the meeting last month, I introduced myself to Collin, and we discussed a few things about the food drive and potentially starting a "geek lunch" in the Memphis area. 

After the meeting, I started thinking more and more about the User's Group, and how I could contribute to it.  If you don't know me very well, let me go ahead and tell you that I am EXTREMELY shy, unless we are talking about a subject I am confident about.  For the past 18 months I have lived and breathed DotNetNuke in the projects I have worked on for clients (I've tried half-heartedly to start a DotNetNuke User's Group in the Memphis Area).  So, I began convincing myself that I could give a presentation on DotNetNuke to the group. Well lo and behold if Colin didn't contact me right around New Years and ask me if I wanted to present to the group.  He didn't specify the topic, but just asked if I was interested and wanted too.  We went back and forth via Twitter a few times, but I finally agreed to do the presentation at the January 22nd meeting for the group. 

I am honestly nervous as hell about this, but know that I am capable of doing a good job on the presentation.  Colin has tried to ease my anxiety by letting me know that January is usually a "light" month for attendance, so it'll be a good time for me to get my feet wet, but that hasn't really helped me much.

The topic we agreed on?  An Introduction to DotNetNuke, and enhancements in version 5.  The following is the summary for the discussion:

DotNetNuke is an open-source Web Application Framework/Content Management System idea for creating and deploying projects such as commercial web sites, corporate intranets and extranets, online publishing portals, and custom vertical applications.  As the leading open source web application framework based on Microsoft ASP.NET (VB.Net) platform, it has been downloaded and installed hundreds of thousands of times.  In this presentation, we will go through the basic features and functionality of DotNetNuke, and then discuss the enhancements in the recent release of version 5.0.

So if you don't have anything to do, and are interested in hearing about DotNetNuke, and the latest release, come on out on January 22nd...But please, try not to laugh and point too much during the presentation...