St. Paul College in St. Paul, Minnesota has recently switched over to the NetBeans IDE for teaching Java courses. They apparently teach Java to quite a few students because they consistently produce large numbers of graduates who have passed the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam.

The chairman of the Department of Computer Sciences is a dynamo named Warren Sheaffer. I first met Warren last year at JavaOne when Charlie Hunt and I tagged along for a meeting that Warren had with James Gosling.

Warren is one of the ring leaders for the Minnesota Java Open Source Users Group (JOSUG) and was kind enough to invite me to speak at their meeting on March 12. Their meetings attract a wide cross-section of folks: students and faculty from St. Paul College and professionals who are employed at state agencies and local companies.

So I tried to cover a spectrum of topics. I mostly did demos of features in NetBeans IDE 5.5: the database explorer, some of the code wizards, Java EE 5 support, the HTTP monitor, the GUI builder, etc. Since the meeting took place in a lab that had plenty of Sun Ultra 20 workstations with the NetBeans IDE already loaded, we spent most of the second hour working through one of the Hands On Labs that is available out on the excellent javapassion.com web site, which is run by Sang Shin.

The varying experience levels of the attendees led to a wide range of questions. The Hands On Lab included usage of the IDE's debugger and there was more than one person who asked: "What is a breakpoint?" At the other end of the spectrum, during a demo I did on web services someone wanted to see the SOAP envelope that was used (since I was using the web service tester in GlassFish, it was easy to display it). So it was a divergent crowd, which made it more interesting. Charlie was there to help answer questions during the Hands On Lab, so I think we were able to cover all the questions.

Also in attendance was Tom Marble, Sun's Ambassador for the OpenJDK. I had never met Tom before and I unfortunately did not have much time to chat with him. But he seems like a good guy. I have added his blog to my feed reader.

Everyone at the meeting got a NetBeans 5.5 t-shirt thanks to the heroic efforts of Rob Demmer, who shipped them all the way from Prague to Minnesota. Thanks Rob! :-)

After the JOSUG meeting we went to the University of St. Thomas where Charlie did a presentation on the history of Java and the NetBeans IDE. This was setup by John Mahowald who is one of Sun's Campus Ambassadors. These folks are student interns who work part-time for Sun during the school year. I munched on pizza while Charlie did most of the talking. Once again, everyone got a t-shirt (and free pizza), so it was a success.

To wrap up the day we went back to St. Paul College for an abbreviated rerun of the presentation I had done that morning. There were a few JOSUG members who were not able to attend the morning session so we chatted with them in the afternoon. It was a very small crowd so I rushed through the formal presentation and spent most of the time doing custom-crafted demos to address their specific areas of interest. This included building a small application on the NetBeans Platform and using the NetBeans Profiler. Both of those seemed to go over well, especially the profiler.

So all in all, a very productive and enjoyable trip. Special thanks goes to Robert Reagan for coordinating all of these activites. A few photos below - click for full size.

	The weather was great - but there is still lots of snow on the ground
	Warren shows off his new NetBeans t-shirt
	John and Charlie