Atlanta .NET Regular Guys

SQLFight goes live, bring on the pain

For all of you Database guys out there, a new web site just released called SQL Fight http://sqlfight.com/ which will talk about controversial database topics of the day.  If you have something to say about database design or technology you can "fight" it out over at their forums.

Signed Photo of Jamal Anderson and ME!

This is the Jamal Anderson signed item I got at the Vista Launch party.  Jamal seemed like a nice guy and was going his best to seem excited about something he probably couldn't care less about. 

Truly bizarre Vista marketing websites

I forgot to blog about these a while back when I initially saw them.  First up there is the Institue for Advanced Personhood.  "You're a person.  So am I."  This hilarious sendup of New Age meditation and self actualization centers is funded by grants from "International Handles, Microsoft Corporation, Indisposable Camera Company, ... and Eric".  They also make up a small portion of their budget with money they find around (like in the cushions of the sofa).

Part of the process for realizing Advanced Personhood is called "Clearification".  This one is actually going on tour and expects to be in Atlanta on Oct 19th.

Now, neither one of these is part of the Vanishing Point.  Unfortunately, this tiny blog didn't warrent a piece of that puzzle.  Oh well.  It would have been exciting...

Heidi Schwartz cleans up at Best Buy Vista Launch party

Being a Dot Net Regular Guy must make us lucky.  I've been pretty lucky in the past.  I've won a Portable Media Center (TechEd 2005), earned a PSP and an Xbox 360 (hooking up a software sale), AND won an Xbox 360 and $400 in Amazon gift certificates (TechEd 2006).  However, tonight at the Microsoft Windows Vista and Office 2007 launch event held in Atlanta at the NorthPoint Best Buy, the Schwartz family trumped all of my winnings in one fell swoop.  Heidi Schwartz shrieked with joy when her name was called out as the grand prize winner.  Heidi goes home with a brand spanking new HP laptop which retails for over $2,000!  Congrats to Heidi and Brendon (who now doesn't have to buy her a new computer)!

While I didn't win a grand prize, I did come away with a Red Bull, hamburger, pen, sticky pad, free access to TMobile hotspots through April 30th, a Vista logo button, a green rubber bracelet thing, and 2 Vista-branded 256Mb USB thumb drives.  Not too bad for a free event.

I also got a photo taken with Jamal Anderson of the Atlanta Falcons (retired).  I'll stick that up in my famous people photos section when I get a chance to scan it.  My buddy Mike even go Jamal to sign a mini Falcon's helmet for his 8 month old son.  Not too shabby.

P.S. - Be sure to ask Lewis and Kelly about the time there was very nearly some I/O in the backplane!

Web 2.0 hits Atlanta at SoCon07

Looks like I missed the news that a conference on Blogging, PodCasts, Web 2.0 is going to be FREE in Atlanta.   It is on a Friday night and Saturday so stop by if you are interested.

http://www.socon07.com/

3rd Annual Atlanta Code Camp a smash hit

290 attendees.

$270,000 in prizes given away from over a dozen contributors.  

6 tracks * 5 time slots = 30 presentations.

Lunch from Justix was so well orchestrated that all 290 people were feed in less than 15 minutes!  Meat (and tofu) on a stick with custom sauces...delicious!

Yes, this year's Atlanta Code Camp was a record breaker on many fronts.  We drew the largest crowd to date.  370 people registered and 290 attended.  This marks the lowest rate (21% drop-off) of no-shows for any of the non-Microsoft organized .NET community events.  Crowds were so large we almost had too many people for our venue!

Raffle prizes were so numerous that no one walked away without at least picking up a shirt or pen.  Of course, this doesn't include the $700 worth of free software from Cizer which EVERY attendee received simply for showing up!

I personally want to say "Thank You" to Jim Wooley for spearheading the planning and organization of the 3rd annual Atlanta Code Camp.  The reason this event went off as well as it did was because Jim poured himself into the event. 

The only shadow over the success of the event is that a laptop went missing.  In the off chance that someone associated with the event mistakenly took the wrong laptop home, please send me a note so we can get it returned to it's rightful owner.

Thanks so much to every attendee, speaker, volunteer, and Microsoft who all contributed to make this such a memorable experience.  Photos will be up on the Code Camp site soon...

Dan and I are now Microsoft Certified Technology Specialists

We both took a few hours off of work back on November 20th last year and took a beta version of the upcoming 71-631 Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Configuring exam.  Well, turns out our scores just got posted and we both passed.  Now he's an MCP and an MCTS (congrats man) and I'm an MCP, MCTS, and MCAD!

Awesome!

My face hissed at me

I've been fighting the same cold off and on for a month now.  It's cost me two sick days at work already.  This Saturday, I woke up in the morning feeling much better.   I could almost breathe normally!  So Kim and I popped up and started running some errands.  We were driving around when suddenly my face started to hurt.  Now, I've experience sinus headaches before, but this was different.  It started with about 1/4th of my teeth going numb then spread into pain from just over my right eye down to my teeth.  It hurt quite a bit and was so unsual that we cut our errands short, picked up some Advil and Sudafed from the nearest drugstore, and went home.  I tried laying down for an hour to see if I could sleep it off.  Things got worse rather than better so by 1:40 we were in a doctor's office.  The doctor looked at me for about 30 seconds before declaring that I had a sinus infection which based on my described medical history might not have been cleared up last year!  The doc gave me a perscription for a strong decongestant and some antibiotics and sent me home.

My face still hurt pretty badly (going on several hours now) so Kim dropped me off at home and ran over to the local CVS.  The oddest thing happened when I went inside.  I was trying to wrangle our three dogs, who were happily jumping up on me.  Suddenly there was this loud sounding hissing noise.  I started to look around to find the source of the noise when I realized it was coming from my face!  After what seemed like 10 seconds of this hissing/whistling noise, my nose started to run and all the pain went away.  All of the pressure was gone and I instantly felt better.

Now I am going to schedule an appointment with my normal doctor and see if I can't work with them to figure out why I keep getting sinus infections that knock me out for so long.

30 day price match guarantee

Did you know that Amazon.com has a 30 day price-match money-back guarantee?  They don't match other retailers, but if you buy an item on Amazon and then notice within 30 days that the price of the has dropped, Amazon will refund you the difference in cost?

I didn't know about it until Matt Cutts linked me to Neil Gaiman who linked to a Slate article about Amazon's secret price guarantee.

Use a free service like this one or this one to automatically notify you if the price drops.

Not bad.  The anecdote in the Slate article references a guy who saved $20 with this.

Learning about limits

Calculus defines the concept of a limit as the behavior of a function as it's argument get close to a point, or as it becomes arbitrarily large.  Well, the past two months I've been learning about my behavior as a function of the amount of work I pile on to myself.  I've been increasing the workload to an arbitrarily large amount.  These past two months I've written the first draft of two chapters on SharePoint, passed two Microsoft Certifications to achieve MCAD, and worked more than 50 hours/week at my full time job.  Combine this with all the social activities required by the holiday season and I figure I've been killing myself.   I look at my time sheets where I've attempted to track my Professional Development activities (which include my studying and book writing) and I found that I've crammed more than 180 hours in - that's more than 4 weeks worth of full time effort!  And, given my small financial reward for these activities, I've been working for half my normal rate (what I earn at Intellinet)

OMG - I'm really tired and looking forward to getting some sleep!

BTW - Code Camp is coming up on the 20th!

Virtual machine troubles totally blow

I've wasted like 3 or 4 days now on virtual machine issues of one sort or another.  Crappy!

Atlanta Code Camp registration is now open

Fellow Code Campers,

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year.

Registration for the 3rd annual Atlanta Code Camp is now open. Please register on the Click to Attend website to guarantee your spot at the Code Camp.

Here's the link:

https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=113135

Just a reminder. The 3rd annual Atlanta Code Camp will take place on January 20th. The event is completely free and lunch is included. Doors open at 7:30am at the Decatur campus of DeVry University

250 North Arcadia Ave

Decatur , GA 30030

If you are coming in from out of town, we have a recommended hotel near the event. Call the Holiday Inn and ask for the DeVry University rate to get a $99/night rate. Parking is extra and costs $7/day

Holiday Inn

130 Clairemont Ave

Decatur, GA 30030

404-372-0204

During the Code Camp, lunch will be provided at no cost to you. After the event, we are planning on gathering in a local eatery to continue any discussions which we were not able to complete by our 5:30 pm end time. Location information will be made available at the event.

Please visit the Atlanta Code Camp website at http://www.atlantacodecamp.com to get more information about speakers and sessions.

The Atlanta Code Camps have historically "sold out" extremely rapidly and we don't expect this time to be any different. Please register quickly to lock in your spot as we are capping registration and attendence due to facility limitations.

SharePoint2007 Forms Authentication Management

I think one of the great features added to SharePoint 2007 is the ability to use forms authentication instead of just Windows authentication.  Unfortunately I don't think the SharePoint team did a great job of thinking about this feature overall and this was just a nice feature due to the use of ASP.NET.  Don't get me wrong, it works well and is easy to set up once you know the steps. 

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/08/16/702010.aspx

Check out the example site http://beta.ineta.org/

So you get the SharePoint site set up, but now the hard part comes.  Managing the users!  This is not part of SharePoint, so you can use Visual Studio to add users, but I don't have VS2005 on most of my servers so this is not an option.  I have heard that IIS7 will have the ASP.NET 2.0 management of membership as part of the Management console, but I can't remote into the server every time I need to manage a user. 

To finish setting up your SharePoint site with forms auth management, there is a two step process:

1. set up the site to allow users to Register and
2. set up a management site to manage the users and roles.

Download code Step 1: http://devcow.com/files/9/sharepoint_forms_auth_management/entry2629.aspx

Step 1: The first step step to getting your forms auth site set up is to add a user to the system.  I did this by adding a folder to SharePoint called members (http://beta.ineta.org/members) and put a single web page that has a single CreateUserWizard control.  I made this folder a .NET application, but I don't remember if you have to do that or not.  I will double check later and take it out if you don't.  I just used a standard theme from the Visual Studio UI to make it look better.  The biggest change you need to make is the ContinueDestinationPageUrl and set it to your base site.  The control is below and how it will look.  Note: you do not need a web.config file because the site's web.config should be configured correctly with forms auth, remember this is the SharePoint web application set up for forms auth.

<asp:CreateUserWizard ID="CreateUserWizard1" runat="server" BackColor="#EFF3FB" BorderColor="#B5C7DE"
BorderStyle="Solid" BorderWidth="1px" Font-Names="Verdana" Font-Size="0.8em" ContinueDestinationPageUrl="http://beta.ineta.org">
<WizardSteps>
<asp:CreateUserWizardStep runat="server">
</asp:CreateUserWizardStep>
<asp:CompleteWizardStep runat="server">
</asp:CompleteWizardStep>
</WizardSteps>
<SideBarStyle BackColor="#507CD1" Font-Size="0.9em" VerticalAlign="Top" />
<TitleTextStyle BackColor="#507CD1" Font-Bold="True" ForeColor="White" />
<SideBarButtonStyle BackColor="#507CD1" Font-Names="Verdana" ForeColor="White" />
<NavigationButtonStyle BackColor="White" BorderColor="#507CD1" BorderStyle="Solid"
BorderWidth="1px" Font-Names="Verdana" ForeColor="#284E98" />
<HeaderStyle BackColor="#284E98" BorderColor="#EFF3FB" BorderStyle="Solid" BorderWidth="2px"
Font-Bold="True" Font-Size="0.9em" ForeColor="White" HorizontalAlign="Center" />
<CreateUserButtonStyle BackColor="White" BorderColor="#507CD1" BorderStyle="Solid"
BorderWidth="1px" Font-Names="Verdana" ForeColor="#284E98" />
<ContinueButtonStyle BackColor="White" BorderColor="#507CD1" BorderStyle="Solid"
BorderWidth="1px" Font-Names="Verdana" ForeColor="#284E98" />
<StepStyle Font-Size="0.8em" />
</asp:CreateUserWizard>

Now that you have the create user set up, you can add a user and then add that user to the policy settings for the site.  You need to add a way for your users to know how to create their own users which I did by modifying the default.master page to have a link to that page.  You could add this link anywhere on your site though.

Download code Step 2: http://devcow.com/files/9/sharepoint_forms_auth_management/entry2631.aspx

Step 2: The users will want to change their password eventually so I have created a page that I uploaded to a document library that allows users to change their own password.  Then I added a tab to the top navigation bar to allow the users to get to the page.

Download code Step 3: http://devcow.com/files/9/sharepoint_forms_auth_management/entry2630.aspx

Step 3: To allow me (and you) to manage the users from a remote machine I created a few management pages that I am going to upload to DevCow.  Just put them in a local folder in the secured intranet site and make the folder a .NET web site.  These pages do not handle errors very well yet, but they will give you the ability to have a start.

The pages that have been created are

1. Add a new user, also links to Manage Roles and Manage All Users (default.aspx)
   
2. Add/View/Delete/Manage ASP.NET roles (role_view.aspx)
   
3. Add users to roles, display users in roles, remove users from roles (role_manage.aspx)
   
4. View all users, delete users (ShowAllUsers.aspx)
    

Now you have all the tools you need to get going with the forms authentication on Windows SharePoint Server 2007.  I have been helping Dan on this problem lately and he ran into a problem on Office SharePoint Server 2007 that the user profile doesn't import the users.  You can use the BDC to import the users into the user profile and Dan is going to have a write up on this hopefully.

Sean Deasy almost saves my bacon

Sean Deasy's post about how to expand a VMWare disk without totally blowing it away almost saved my bacon tonight.  I experienced a complete meltdown of my demo SharePoint Virtual Machine this weekend which set me back pretty badly.  I've been rebuilding the thing for quite some time when I realized (too late of course) that I forgot to change the default size of the dynamic disk file to be larger than 8 GB.  Now, Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, SharePoint, Outlook, etc.  The image was full and I'd not even installed Visual Studio yet.  Visual Studio says requires 1.1 Gb on the C: drive even if you tell it to install to another drive (assuming you let it install the default options, this goes down as you remove things like J#).  I'd created a second drive in the VM to handle file installations (too late for SQL Server and Office 2007 doesn't appear to let you pick the install path) and this ended up holding over 2Gb worth of install files.  However, there was still too much on my C: drive and I needed to get more free space on the drive so I wouldn't have to start over.  According to most of the sites I found on the web, you can't do this for the system or boot partition.  However, this is where Sean's post came in - a combo of VMWare tools and Linux to do the job.

According to Sean, you can use a combination of the vmware virtual disk manager command line tool and Knoppix Linux to enlarge the boot partition.  Then your drive is bigger.  This is wonderful, except that it didn't work for me.  I went through all the steps and the W2k3 disk manager tool said I had a 12 Gb C: drive, but Windows Explorer was still only reporting 8 Gb.

I solved my problem a different way - I moved my 1.1 Gb swap file from the C: drive to the E: drive.  Now I've got plenty of space!

The MS Store Rocks

I recently got a new user group shirt from the Microsoft store.  I thought I would show everyone how cool the store is.

If you can read the shirt, it says "First rule of Computer Club: YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT COMPUTER CLUB!"  If you know me you will think this is the funniest thing you have ever seen.

Oh yeah it is a collectors item too because it has Microsoft on the sleeve.