As usual a topic like this gets all kinds of comments, that are all based on the individuals experience.

I would suppose this comment will start a hugh war here, but there's something else I noticed in attending .net vs vfp events. I remember noticing when I used to attend LA Fox monthly the dress of the majority of the attendees. There was an odd mixture. Back then I had a corporate type jobs wear the dress code was business casual or required a tie. Most of the attendees at the user group were substantially dressed down from this style. And i could gather from the converstation that most if not all of these folks worked for themselves serving small to medium companies.

The dress at .net events I've attended is much closer to the business casual. And the more I think about it, when I've gone around to get some feedback on what folks are doing, the vast majority have corporate jobs or work for small consulting firms doing work for corporations.

This might account for some differences in the vibe at the different meetings. Just the nature of the beast.

But I definitly found a larger thirst for knowledge at the .net events. I think a reason for this might be the larger breadth of knowledge that you should have to be truly successful with .net. At the LA .net group meeting, 3 people stood up to talk about their sigs, 1) SQL Server 2) UML, focusing on the Rational toolkit 3) User Group followup - to practice the coding techniques learned in the main meeting.

I just don't remember ever seeing this level of outside meeting when I attended the Foxpro meetings around LA.

>>I went to the LA .net user group meeting 2 weeks ago. There were closer to 40 attendies. It was held in a lecture hall at UCLA. I believe one of the main organizers of the group is a professor there. At this meeting Robert Half was there to drum up business. I believe that means they paid for drinks and pizza.
>
>We had around 200-300 at our peak in NJ (about the time FP2.0), dwindling to about the usual "hardcore" attendees of around a dozen. And this was when VFP 3 debuted. VFP3 may have done more harm than good at the time, between the bugs and the people that just couldn't fathom OOP.
>
>>
>>As far as your comments, I didn't find anything different about the tone of this group compared to VFP user groups. Also this meeting is a blip on the list of .net meeting in LA.
>>
>>A SQL Server sig has sprung from this group. Something I've never seen from VFP groups, but thought was a fantastic idea, is that a group meets one week after the user group meeting to review what was discussed and attempt to practice what was learned.
>
>I've been to SQL Server, .NET, and other SIGs and have always found them to be sterile, even with average attendence larger than VFP meetings. There just wasn't the "willingness to pitch in". With Fox, it was always "what could I do to help" from day one with most attendees. In my experience, most of the other SIG attendees were there because they were required to be, not because they wanted to be.
>