I found out the other day that the Chippewa Valley .Net Users Group has been up and running for several months in the Eau Claire, WI area. Having grown up in the Chippewa Falls area, I was pleasantly surprised to hear this. I live 50 miles from their location so I think I’ll be taking in some of their upcoming meetings. They have a good speaker schedule from the looks of it and the smaller group size will be fun. I’ve exchanged a few emails with Dan Krueger and Doug Rhoten who established the group and they are excited about their development work and what this group means to the area. It sounds like a great combination and I'm looking forward to it.
The Eau Claire area has a reputation as a retail-only market, but with the history of Cray Research and Steve Chen's SSI back in the 70's, 80's and 90's it has a decent engineering base with a lower cost of living. Chen was a Cray engineer who knabbed a few cray people to start up his company. I'll be curious to see what type of work is being done in .Net in the area. I'll blog more when I'm getting ready to attend the meeting - perhaps a few more people from around the Saint Paul/Minneapolis area would be interested as well.
- Interesting Note: Steve Chen is now in China launching a supercomputer company (via Tom Arneberg's Chippewa Valley Page).