Ok, so yesterday was extremely action packed in Perth with both the .NET and the SQL user groups having their first meetings of the year.

Omar gave a fantastic presentation to the Perth .NEt Community of Practice (www.perthdotnet.org) on Crystal Reports.  Not only was this presentation free to joe public we also served fresh muffins to get the morning of to a flying start.  The presentation was an entry level discussion on how to get started building reports using the Crystal Reports addin for Visual Studio.  Omar covered the basics of creating a report from a database, along with the heart ache of security.  He also covered using a dataset to push data into a report.  The slides and example application should be available at the community website later this week (please not that the database has not been included)

For the first meeting of the revitalised SQL Server group, Chris Kempster gave a fasinating overview of the features packed into the next version of SQL Server (aka Yukon).  Now I've heard many a developer presentation in and around Yukon, but I never realised quite how many new features were coming in the next release.  Although I must admit I'm not quite sure of how and why you would want to use some of the features, it has definitely given me something to look into.  For access to the slides please visit http://www.sqlserver.org.au/meetings/Perth/2005/02%5FFeb%5FChrisKempster%5FSQL05/

For more information regarding the SQL Server groups in Australia visit www.sqlserver.org.au