Atlanta .NET Regular Guys

Random movies recently watched

I paid my $17 and watched X-Men 3 on the opening weekend.  Liked it.  I know all the critics hate the "let's throw more special effects at it" style of sequels, but I happened to like all the new mutants.  My favorites?  Iceman/Bobby Drake (finally makes a real appearance) and Juggernaut/Cain Marko.  Don't get the wrong idea - I'm not a comic book reader (not that there is anything wrong with that).  I learned everything from the Saturday morning cartoon when I was a kid.  That and the Internet.

I also watched Steamboy - an interesting Anime movie about a young inventor caught between the power struggles of his own deranged relatives in 1860's England.  Watch it if you can find it, if only for the breath-taking hand-drawn animation.  Features the voices of Patrick Stewart and Anna Paquin.

Friends of mine make national TV debut tomorrow morning.

A pair of friends of mine, Dara and Russ Arouh, are making their national TV debut tomorrow morning on Good Morning America.  Here's the fun story:

Dara and Russ make this truly excellent grilled vegetable pizza.  I last sampled it in February, and trust me, it's good.  Anyway, they heard that this wine company (Cavit Collection) was sponsoring a pizza recipe contest, they decided to enter.  They then, of course, promptly forgot all about it.  Just before midnight on the final day of the contest's entry period, Dara remembered about the contest, got herself out of bed and typed the recipe into the online form.

They found out a few weeks later that they were one of the three finalists.  As a finalist, they are being flown up to New York City to appear live on Good Morning America on Wednesday, May 31st (that's tomorrow)!

Ready for the even better part?  Originally the trip up to New York was the prize, but apparently this wine company decided that wasn't good enough so now the grand prize winner gets an all expense paid trip to Italy!  Even better than that?  This trip to New York happens to coincide with their wedding anniversary, so even if they don't win they got a free anniversary trip to New York.

Check out their pizza recipe here.

On second thought, since the URL for the recipe has already changed once on the Cavit Collection site, here is the recipe in its entirety:

1.	Heat grill to medium.
2.	Grill mushroom, eggplant and peppers. When cooked, remove from heat (leaving grill on). Cut vegetables into thin slices and set aside.
3.	Unroll dough onto lightly floured cutting board, and pull gently into rectangular shape. Brush lightly with pesto sauce.
4.	Brush grill grates with olive oil and turn pizza dough onto grill, pesto-coated surface face down. Close grill and heat dough 3-5 minutes, or until underside is cooked and no longer sticks to grill.
5.	Lightly brush top surface of dough with remaining olive oil, then flip dough carefully, using tongs and grill spatula. Brush with additional pesto sauce, if desired.
6.	Spoon on generous helping of chopped tomatoes, as desired. Add sliced vegetables and garlic. Top with mozzarella cheese. Close the lid again, reduce heat slightly and let toppings heat through 5-7 minutes.
7.	Turn off heat. Slide pizza onto a cutting board.
8.	Garnish with fresh basil leaves, if desired. Slice and serve with a glass of your favorite Cavit Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir or Cabernet Sauvignon!

Mexico attacks Canada!

Totally unprovoked, Mexico launched an assault against Canada by way of the North Pole!  This and other ficticious stories from the mind of Dan Attis, coming soon to his blog...

Float to Int conversions by Greg Young

Greg Young pinged me via IM to show me a problem he's run into - a bug in the C# compiler.  Open up Visual Studio and start a C# console app.  Paste the following code into the Main routine:

float low = 7f;
float high = 100f;
low = ((high + low) / 2f);
low = ((high + low) / 2f);
low = ((int)(low * 100f)) / 100f;
low = ((high + low) / 2f);
low = ((int)(low * 100f)) / 100f;
low = ((high + low) / 2f);
low = ((int)(low * 100f)) / 100f;
low = ((high + low) / 2f);
low = ((int)(low * 100f)) / 100f;
Console.WriteLine(low);
Console.ReadLine();

Press F5 to run with the debugger.  Get a result.  Press CTRL+F5 to run without the debugger.  Get a different result.  Here is Greg's writeup of the problem.

Greg's already submitted this to Microsoft.

Does anyone do web presentations or conferencing?

If you're interested, Adobe is presenting a free seminar about its Macromedia Breeze product helps you get web conferencing working right.  The seminar is on June 1 at the Westin Atlanta North (the one at the Perimeter on Concourse Pkwy).  Registration is required. 

I wouldn't ordinarily post a notice about a non-Microsoft product but this is free and Macromedia products are usually fairly decent.  I've got no experience with Breeze, but the concept of web presentations/web video conferencing intrigues me as a possible evolution in web-casting.

Matt's concrete dreams

The Atlanta Microsoft Professionals are working on putting together some more training material, this time we are working on ASP.NET 1,2,3!  Well in our weekly meeting Dan left the country, Keith had pictures of his new house, and Matt told us his dream of building a house of concrete.  A house out of concrete, are you serious? Yeah I know he is crazy and I have no idea what he is thinking with a concrete house, but hey he doesn’t question my weird problems.  Either way he found a website and tried to convince Keith and me that a concrete house is the way to go.  Amazing we didn't stay on track right after dinner and checked out Junk Yard willy.com.   Any way we made it around to our new level 100 presentation and made some good progress.  Just thought I would give you a night in the life of a busy community night.

Atlanta Code Camp Speaker Evals done

Just to let everyone know we have completed putting the speaker evals together for both the speakers and the event.  If you have any more feedback to help us with future events, just leave a comment for us here.

A big Thank You to my wife Heidi who did all of the work of putting the 300 evals with 6 sessions into excel.

I hope everyone had a great time at the event and enjoyed it as much as we did.

Atlanta Code Camp Pictures and Presentations, HOT guy picture 77

Here they are:

Pictures: http://devcow.com/photos/atlanta_code_camp/default.aspx

Presentations: http://www.atlantamspros.com/codecamp/Downloads/tabid/121/Default.aspx

I finally have uploaded some of the pictures from the Atlanta Code Camp and the presentations we have recieved from the speakers.

If you know the speakers that haven't sent us their presentations let them know we would like to have them or a link to their site. =)

No seriously the guy in picture 77 was hot at the event, it was like 85 degrees outside.

Visual Studio 2005 Build Configurations

This was frustrating me for a bit until I found the answer, so I thought I'd put it online to help save others the same headache.

I've got a project I'm working on here at work that one other developer is working on with me.  For some reason, on my machine, I was unable to change the build version from Release to Debug.  The other developer had no such problem.  I tried everything I could think of - downloading the source from VSS again, even wiping out the entire directory on disk to be sure I didn't have some bizarre setting.  No clue what was wrong.  I did not have this problem in any other project, just this one.  When I pulled down the Build menu in VS2005, the Configuration Manager was greyed out.  When I modified the Build toolbar to include the Solution Configurations and Solution Platforms dropdowns, those were greyed out as well. Very annoying!

Turns out that there is an option in the Visual Studio options that was getting me.  I have no idea why this was only a problem on a single solution and not with any other solution and not on anyone else’s machine, but this did solve my problem.  I didn’t realize that building Release vs. Debug was an advanced build configuration, but checking this “Show advanced build configurations” enabled me to chose between Release and Debug builds.

Medieval and Renaissance Engineering

While I was in Italy, I was completely fascinated by all of the amazing architecture around me.  I mean, I've seen castles before.  You can sort of understand a castle - big bricks on top of other big bricks make a big wall.  However, when it came to the churches - enormous arches and domes, perfectly smooth and fitted marble sheets, etc.  The engineering astounded me.  I wanted to learn how they did all that amazing stuff.  While I was over there, I saw a book with a blue cover titled Medieval Engineering or Renaissance Engineering full of descriptions of the machinery and technology used to design and build some of the most beautiful buildings standing in the world today.  Unfortunately they wanted 60 Euros for the book, and after the exchange rate that would have been an $85 book.  So I figured I would just get the book on Amazon.com when I got home.  Of course, now I can't find it.  I can find these books and I wondered if anyone had read anything on this subject and had any recommendations.

- this one looks more like a story than a general "How'd they do it" book, but it covers one of the most impressive buildings I've ever seen
- written by an actual engineer, this might be too technical
- a set of essays rather than a single book, this covers topics all around the actual technology and might prove to be fascinating too (although it receives poor reviews)

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Code Monkey like you

This is too good not to share.



Jonathan Coulton is a singer/songwriter releasing stuff to the public via his blog.  He's releasing his music under the Creative Commons license, which enables people to take his work and include it in their own work, as long as they don't change his work and give him credit for his work.

I've not had a chance to listen to all of his stuff, but some of it is really funny.  Check out the new DevCow theme song (unofficial)
Code Monkey


If you like the song - check out the VIDEO!

I found this originally posted by Tobin Titus.  Tobin liked the song so much he has actually typed up the lyrics


PS - for more Jonathan Coulton video fun, check out this zombie video set to the song "Re: Your Brains"

You read what? But I thought you loved ASP.NET maybe it is just me

During last weeks code camp I walked in on the most surprising thing.  One of my local friends (we won’t mention names) was reading a new book from one of our publishers.  Yes we did get the book for the Atlanta Code Camp and no we don’t know if they knew it was a mostly Microsoft event.  We just appreciate all of the help we can from all of our contributors.  Now don’t get me wrong the other platforms are fine, but those of us in the Microsoft group need to stick together.

Come on Doug! Put the book down.

 

By the way this WAS a staged photo!

Son of SmartPart - A SharePoint lifesaver

So I've just wrapped up a quick little demo of how easy it is to code for SharePoint. Since the focus is on easy, and they're not yet 100% sure if we'd be using SharePoint vs a make-your-own ASP.Net 2.0 site, I decided the best way to go is to use the SmartPart and show off how you can write normal old ASP.Net code and still get it to show up in SharePoint.

Since we're thinking about an ASP.NET 2.0 site and everyone wants to write ASP.NET 2.0 code, I really had to use the Son of SmartPart, which includes the ability to display 2.0 User Controls and 2.0 Web Parts in SharePoint.  Since this is only a demo, I knocked up a quick little user control that replicates a report we have here.  To get SoSmartPart to "see" a user control, all you have to do is drop the .ascx into a UserControl directory on your SharePoint server.  I did that and PRESTO!  My control shows up in the list of available user controls in the SmartPart toolbox area.  I select the desired control and hit Apply.  BAM - error.

It turns out that you can't use the easy drag/drop data access components in a UC and get it to show up in SharePoint - maybe it has something to do with how the page gets rendered.  Whatever.  Change all those components to ones created dynamically in code (what's that, 5 lines?) and everything started working.  I showed this off to my demo audience and everyone is deeply impressed with how easy everything is.

Then I tell them that we can use ASP Web Parts in SharePoint - which gives us the flexibility to move to a ASP.NET 2.0 site if SharePoint gives us unexpected trouble.  And that the next version of SharePoint will be able to use ASP Web Parts natively without this SmartPart layer...  They love it.  I guess development will start soon.

Scary goings on in the state of Maine

I'm not 100% sure how I got to this site - it began as a search for some SharePoint and SmartPart information, linked through Scoble (is everyone aware of the recent family tragedy he's had?), and got to the MaineWebReport.com.

The story I'm about to share is a disturbing example of government employees and private companies trying to suppress an individual's rights (First Amendment, Freedom of Information, etc) through threats and lawsuits.

Lance Dutson is a web developer in Maine who makes his living designing sites for various clients.  In his spare time, Lance examines local politics to see how life in Maine is changing as a result of government spending.  Some time ago, Lance noticed that the online efforts of the Maine Office of Tourism fell below his expectations, especially the extreme cost to the taxpayers which he refers to as Pay-Per-Gate (beginning back in February 2006).  He begain posting his criticisms online in his blog.  His criticisms included an online tourism ad with a phone number that directs callers to a phone sex operator rather than the state's tourism board.

Someone at the MOT (Maine Office of Tourism) noticed the blog entries and began a shameful spiral of communication which resulted in threatening e-mails to Lance, to Lance's wife, and to Lance's wife's employer.  Threatening phone calls were received.  Blatantly vitriolic blog comments were received.  These threats came from officials in the MOT and from private sector subcontractors of the MOT (some hiding behind pseudonyms).  Things came to a head with a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Mr. Dutson for alleged copyright infringement and defamation.

The lawsuit has since been dropped as nationwide and international press picked up the story.  The people making threats have for the most part owned up and apologized.  However, the story isn't over yet as no contracts have been terminated and no public officials have lost their jobs, so keep an eye on the MaineWebReport.com. 

This story should sound somewhat familiar to anyone who keeps even a casual eye on local Georgia politics.  Think about the the new Hartsfield runway dirt bid and other Bill Campbell scandals.  What about Augusta Georgia's own Linda Schrenko?  Public sector corruption and incompetence is something every state has to deal with and I hope that Mr. Dutson's example encourages other individuals to examine the actions of their state and federal governments with a critical eye.

Are you searchable?

Search engines such as MSN, Yahoo, and Google use programs called spiders or bots to automatically read and index web pages for future searches.  If you have a website you'd like to have noticed, you'll want to do everything you can to optimize your site's search engine performance.  Here is a free tool that can help you out - a Search Engine Spider Simulator.  Type your site's URL in to see what kind of meta information you are exposing to the search engine bots.