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The North of Toronto .NET user group was founded in early 2007 by Paul Birkbeck, Bill Dunlop and Jason Montgomery (JMo). The focus of our group is the .NET Framework as well as other Microsoft development tools and technologies. The group is currently sponsored by Multiplied Media, a leading local search company, who has been our platinum sponsor since day one. Multiplied Media assists the group both financially and administratively. Due to their assistance we are able to hold our meetings in an excellent facility as well as eat the occasional pizza.
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It has been a long time in the making. We started the creation of the North of Toronto .NET User Group (NOT.NET as we like to call it :) back in February 2007. The driving force behind it was that there were so many Toronto ex-pats that were making the pilgramage to the Toronto and East of Toronto user groups that we thought, hey, we should have something for us up north.
We don't think we're the only .NET propeller heads up here (well, we know we aren't) so we really hope this is a group that grows and is able to help service the .NET community up north and, hopefully, be compelling enough to have people drive up from time to time for an event.
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We (Paul, Billy and JMo) all live in the Barrie area and are all senior .NET professionals. We're all married and looking for cool ready built excuses to leave the house and play with technology. What we don't like is sacrificing home time to spend with our wives and children. So, having something close will help up achieve that. We have a lot of experience and are looking to share that experience through the community of developers up here.
Paul Birkbeck, MCSD.NET
I am the Senior Architect and Director of Software Development for a company called Multiplied Media. Multiplied Media is a local search company building a next generation search engine that does location based searching through MSN Instant Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger (with more delivery channels to come). The search engine delivers a rich set of content from text to video and incorporates extensive use of Virtual Earth.
I have been a consultant specializing in Microsoft technologies for 15 years, specializing in .NET for the past 5 years. Leading the team at Multiplied Media has allowed me to implement the best of breed in .NET technologies both in the development environment and as part of the architecture of the systems being designed. We use VSTS, have instrumented our code to have the unit tests built in, we are dedicated to the proper documentation of our source code and have automated builds going nightly which compiles, tests and builds documentation. We are in the process of implementing Continuous Integration into our development process. I am proud to say that I think we have the best development team and environment that I have had the pleasure of being involved with.
On a personal note, I am married to a wonderful woman, Krista. She is my rock. We have three beautiful boys, 10 (Derek), 2 (Parker) and almost 1 (Blaine). I'm very lucky, she is a fantastic mom and wife. I play hockey for a couple of hockey teams, as the goalie for The Rock and on defense for the Bexxus Bears.
Billy Dunlop, MCAD.NET
I am a .net developer also working at Multiplied Media (See Paul's stuff above). After 10 years of working with Lotus Domino, I jumped ship to the wonderful world of .net and have only missed Domino a little..... I am married with (6) children, but still find the time to play hockey and enjoy the occasional game of Darts (if you like darts, find me at one of the meetings so we can hookup for a game or two).
Jason Montgomery
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