What's going on with WPUG?

Short of time? Here's the skinny:
WPUG is 2 years old. It's been awesome, helped loads of people build loads of great apps and is gonna continue.




Really?

Windows Phone?

Still beating that old horse?

Isn't it dead yet?





Not quite.
There's still lots of opportunities for enterprising ideas and with the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 announcements there are some exciting times ahead.


How did we get here?

We've picked up 1900+ followers on Twitter as we tweet lots of Windows Phone development related tips, techniques and news articles. (Yeah, it's been a bit quiet recently but will pick up again soon.)

We've had over 70 talks and demos, at 22 meetings, with over 650 different attendees.

I know of at least six people who've got jobs as a result of contacts they've made at the group.

We've spawned a couple of spin-off groups in Cardiff and Manchester.

And according to our recent survey:
We're directly responsible for helping over 200 people create and release their first app.
40% of the developers who've attended have released more apps as a direct result of attending meetings.
76% of attendees claim to have been able to release better apps as a result of attending meetings.



Moving forward

Our next meeting is next week and I'll be talking about how the announcements at the recent Windows Phone Summit provide some exciting opportunities for designing and developing for Windows Phone in the future.

Register via eventbrite or on meetup.

Longer term, we'll be meeting again in August and have plans to keep growing and having more meetings later in the year as we look towards Windows Phone 8 and partnering with other groups to learn and share about Win8 development too.

We hope this will be helpful as 91% of developers who've attended are planning on upgrading their apps to WP8 and 96% of attendees are interested in learning about developing apps for Win8 as well as WP8.

Plus more.....


As part of the survey we also asked people what they enjoyed about our meetings so far. Here are a few quotes:

"I enjoy the social aspect of it"

"The breadth of topics discussed is great." 

"The demos and talks have been great" 

"The networking, the helpful advices, the motivation that you are not the only one who develop for Windows Phone." 

"I have enjoyed talks about the design considerations, techical architecture design that gets round specific problems and how people have monetised their apps"

We'll have some more feedback from the survey on the WPUG blog soon.