Hello everyone!

In case you haven't heard, the time is upon us for the next quarterly installment of MSDN Events. Glen is planning to present a series of talks on ASP.Net 2.0 which promise to be good stuff. All of the MSDN events are full of good information, but there's something missing. That something is the local fingerprint - the stamp of the local community. So at this MSDN event, we're going to try something new. We want to put together a series of chalk talks with some of the most skilled and well known developers and architects in the local community. We want to get three individuals to come to the MSDN event at 9am and stand around, eating muffins and plumbing the depths of your .Net knowledge for the benefit of the community.

Are you interested and available on Thursday, August 25th from 9am to noon? We'd love to have you be one of the feature "chalkers"!

— Matt Ranlett

Time for everyone to update your RSS readers.  The Atlanta .NET Regular Guys will not be posting to www.devcow.com/weblogs anymore.  We've moved to www.devcow.com/blogs.

Why?

Because the new blogging engine we're using will allow us to host other people's blogs.  We have recruited a few select individuals to blog with us:

• Todd Fine - RDA consultant/Microsoft Regional Director
• Mark Dunn - .Net Rocks co-founder/VB.Net MVP/Training guru
• Eric Thompson - all around bright guy who got in b/c he and Brendon are good friends (I suppose now I'll have to be his friend too)
• Dan Attis - co-leader of the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals User Group and part of the team designing the content for the SharePoint 1, 2, 3! event

Of course, you can continue to expect the same quality content from Brendon and myself, posting together as the Atlanta .Net Regular Guys. Feel free to read the blog's aggregate post or jump directly to the ADNRG blog.

-- Matt Ranlett

That is right, it is 1:03AM, but registration is up and running.  Please let all of your friends know and tell them to start signing up for the SharePoint 1,2,3! sessions.  If you sign up for the Hands on labs please try to make it to the sessions so you can see how to do the HOL.  Also if you would like to use one of the computers on site please email us ahead of time so we can try to set one up for you.  

Update *** Here is the location information for the SharePoint 1,2,3! Events.  Keep the questions coming.

http://www.atlantamspros.com/Events/tabid/53/Default.aspx

—Brendon Schwartz

Posted with BlogJet

I guess I'm not any more famous today than I was the Friday before.  Still - Scoble did link to me - twice!

-- Matt Ranlett

$99 gets you a full day of training from DevelopMentor (former home of Don Box and Chris Sells and our very own Doug Turnure).  It's at the Cobb Galleria and you're a sucker if you don't go.  Sign up via the banner on the SQL Server User Group - www.atlantamdf.com and you'll help earn the group a donation.  You'll also get a kickback of your very own.  If you sign up through AtlantaMDF, you'll get a $25 Amex cash card.  Of course, you don't have to tell the people reimbursing you that you'll be getting some cash back...

-- Matt Ranlett

PS - you won't see this even on the calendar b/c it's not free.

Brendon and I hyped the SharePoint 1, 2, 3! event to the INETA board and they loved the idea.  So much so that they want us to give them the content and they'll spread it around the community.  They all had some useful and constructive advice for us as well.

Check out www.SharePoint123.com and learn about the event being hosted by the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals - a new user group in town.  Sign up for the newsletter on www.atlantamspros.com and be among the first to know when registration for the SharePoint event opens.

-- Matt Ranlett

Bill Baker is visiting Atlanta this week for the Microsoft Global Business conference, and he graciously volunteered to come speak before the SQL Server User Group for the second year in a row, although this is the first time I’ve seen him speak.  Bill Baker is the program manager for the SQL Server Business Intelligence products, including Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Integration Services (DTS), and more. 

 

Bill is an extremely entertaining person to watch – complete with Steve Ballmer imitations.  We talked about SQL Server 2005 in general and how the new release is going to really help everyone out with some really cool new features.  We talked about the new licensing SKUs – Enterprise, Standard, WorkGroup (a new SKU), and Express (MSDN).  The cost has gone up a bit, from $20,000 to $25,000 for the Enterprise Edition.  Standard now costs $6000, Workgroup costs $3,500, and Express is free.  Special note – the Developer Edition, which is the Enterprise Edition with a single connection license, costs a mere $49!

 

I can’t really tell you what Bill talked about because he was all over the map – the presentation was entirely question and answer.  This was the first technology presentation I’ve been to in years where the speaker didn’t even use a computer.  Not even a projected My Name Is slide!  No props at all.  We did cover lots of cool ground.  For example, did you know that the most requested feature from the community (submitted through the Ladybug system) was a bell at the completion of a query?  Who thinks of that stuff?  Did you know that when Beta 1 of SQL 2005 came out, that the favorite feature of the community was the new SQL Management Console tool that replaces Enterprise Manager?  Can you guess what the least favorite feature was?  That’s right – the new SQL Management Console!  Talk about a schizophrenic user community!  We apparently will not be getting hashed indexes.  We ARE able to run SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 side by side.  Database mirroring is a great cool new technology that requires three computers – a primary, a mirror, and a monitor that votes which system is the primary and which is the mirror.  Did you know that you could potentially have all three systems in the same box?  Sure, why not?  Hardware is way more dependable these days than software.  That’s job security for us!  We covered so many topics – ETS, OLTP, building cubes as a background process, etc, that I can’t even remember everything we talked about.

 

We had some great sponsors – Microsoft, Unisys, ProClarity, and Doug McDowell himself (or whomever reimburses him) – who brought in some incredible barbeque for the meeting.  Thanks guys!

 

Quick note #1 – when you have SQL or technology questions, be sure to post them to the MSN groups.  Doug was telling me that before the meeting he was hit with 10 technical questions and he didn’t have the time to sit and really think about the answers.  By posting to the MSN groups, you have a much wider community than just Doug looking at the questions and suggesting answers.

 

Quick note #2 – There is a SQL Server Road show $99 one day training event occurring at the Cobb Galleria hosted by Windows IT Pro magazine and the SQL Pass organization.  There will be three tracks – DBA, Dev, and BI.  Register through the www.AtlantaMDF.com banner and you’ll get a free $25 AMEX gift card.  If 25 people register through the AtlantaMDF banner, the AtlantaMDF organization will receive a donation that will help us continue to provide pizza and beverages to the members.

 

-- Matt Ranlett

 

Last night was the first time I’ve ever attended one of the Atlanta SPIN meetings.  This group seems to be targeted at project managers and seems to cover topics like Scrum and CMMI.  These are great topics, but outside of my personal area of interest so I probably won’t be going back unless they get another headline speaker like Mr Randy “Granville” Miller.  I will say this about the group – they had the most formal meeting and leadership structure I’ve ever seen in a community user group!  We had about 35 people in attendance, which one of the SPIN leaders said was extremely good turnout for their groups.

 

Randy Miller has an impressive pedigree in the Agile development community – he’s worked for years at Borland and Microsoft to bring eXtreme Programming and Agile techniques to the masses.  He’s written several books, including an upcoming book soon to be released.  Randy came to the SPIN meeting to talk about his work with Microsoft and the Microsoft Solutions Framework (he actually got “yelled” at for starting his talk too early!).

 

For those unfamiliar with MSF, you can learn a lot on the Team Systems MSF homepage.  Essentially, MSF is a set of software tools which help you stick to a software development process.  For example, you have a business analyst talk to a customer and write up a list of requirements.  The list of requirements is broken down into small tasks by project managers.  The developers estimate how long each task will take and hand the task list back to the PMs.  The PMs schedule the development cycles and turn the tasks back over to the development team.  The devs work like mad getting quality stuff (including automated test (we hope) out to the test team and finally everything is built for the customer.  In this development process, there are some tools helping you get through the process.  The business analyst might use Excel spreadsheets.  PMs might use MS Project.  Devs and Tests might use Visual Studio.  Visual Studio Team Systems can actually link all of these tools together with the built in issue tracking and reporting system so the experience of managing the software development process is seamless.  MSF for Agile is one type of software development process.  There are countless other methods which can be used with VSTS – Scrum, CMMI, Iterative, Rational, Waterfall, etc.  That’s actually the coolest part of MSF – it can be completely customized to your particular method of development.  MSF for Agile, out of the box, is simply a set of recommendations and process guidance for Agile development.

 

Randy spent 99% of his time showing us the tools, only resorting to PowerPoint to display a graphic and web links.  We watched as he started a brand new project and talked us through adding requirements, planning out iterative cycles, breaking larger tasks into smaller tasks, reporting on the status of those tasks, etc.  The “business analyst” persona created a spreadsheet of requirements, which was checked into a SharePoint work area.  The spreadsheet was imported to Project, which automatically populated the VSTS work items.  We did some fake scheduling and prioritizing and we were ready to develop.  We looked at several reports showing our status and what things would look like as they went wrong.

Randy was a great presenter and I’m sorry that he only had an hour to talk to us.  I felt that he had more to say if only he had the time.  Oh well.  If you were unable to make it to the presentation, I hope that my blog entry piques your interest and you start to learn more about the extraordinarily flexible toolset that Visual Studio Team Systems offers.

 

-- Matt Ranlett

The next Atlanta MSDN event takes place on August 28th.  Check out the topics Glen is planning on covering:

• Developing Compelling User Interfaces with Ease in ASP.NET 2.0
• Data Access with ADO.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0
• Building High Performance Applications with ASP.NET 2.0

 

 Be sure to register early as we've been hearing about 400+ people registering for these events.

-- Matt Ranlett

This is just an alert for those of you who are not keeping up with the calendar:

Tonight: the SPIN group is hosting Randy Miller from the VSTS team at the Microsoft offices

Tomorrow: the SQL Server UG is hosting Bill Baker from the SQL Server Business Intelligence team at the Microsoft offices

Monday: the main .Net UG looks into application platform migration with Mike Sorrentino from BrightStrategy Inc.

-- Matt Ranlett

With the help of people in the user group community we loaded the initial website for SharePoint 1,2,3!  We will get the registration set up this week so check back and make sure you register for the events.

If you do not know about the SharePoint 1,2,3 event it is part of our new user group, the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals. 

Thanks to Jake Dan Attis, Keith Rome, Chris Wallace and Matt Ranlett,  who are the other guys that are helping to put this event together.  Make sure and thank them for giving up their weekends and nights to help out with the event.

We have many more ideas and events that we want to try to plan, so we will keep you posted on what is to come.

—Brendon Schwartz

Posted with BlogJet

I am glad to see there is a good response to our new group; the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals.  As you can see we are going to start off with SharePoint for our first topic area for three months.  Thanks to Glen Gordon for the suggestion of covering a topic for a couple months! 

For follow up topics we are going to do BizTalk and Visual Studio Team Systems (VSTS).  Please let me know what topics everyone is interested in so we can also cover those.

Fill out the Weekly Survey if you get a chance.  These are just online check boxes and shouldn’t take more than 3 seconds to do.

Right now we have a lot going on and a lot of work to do.  If anyone is interested in helping out please let us know.  Thanks for your patience in advance and we will get the content up as fast as we can.

—Brendon Schwartz

Posted with BlogJet

I’ve recently blogged about SharePoint123 – the upcoming series of SharePoint training hosted by the Atlanta Community.  The Atlanta Community organizing the SharePoint123 sessions has decided the best way to keep things organized is to form a new user group – the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals.  The mission of the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals is to study in depth some of Microsoft’s tools, including SharePoint. 

We’ve finally gotten a rough web presence online for the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals User Group at www.atlantamspros.com.  We will be putting up a site for the SharePoint123 events very soon, but the user group site at www.atlantamspros.com will be the central point for membership registration.  Register with the site to receive all future newsletters and e-mail communications.

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

We had a mid-sized group at the meeting tonight – 13 people in attendance.

Sandy Roach began our meeting with the second part of his presentation on Delegates and Events.  This time we focused on Events and how Visual Basic syntax looks different for events as opposed to delegates.  Where a delegate is essentially a function pointer, events are the Visual Basic implementation of the Observer pattern.  An event publisher defines an event and maintains a list of objects interested in receiving messages about that event.  When the event is raised, each of the interested objects, or subscribers, is notified and their event handling code is executed.  Multiple subscribers can register interest in an event, and the object actually defining and registering the event is not notified whether or not any subscriber actually receives the event.  Sandy showed us several demos illustrating events – two console events and one familiar GUI app showing button clicks raising events.

 After Sandy, I took the floor and showed off a 100 level view of DotNetNuke.  We looked at what web portals are in general as well as what kinds of functionality you get out of the box with DotNetNuke.  We examined several of the modules, their edit pages and their admin pages.  We looked at how DotNetNuke supported multiple portals from a single install.  After talking about DotNetNuke in general, we discussed the upcoming DotNetNuke project, where we are going to build a working module in the VB.Net group and turn it over to the open source community.  After we talked about DotNetNuke, we took a quick look at Windows SharePoint Services and how that differs from DotNetNuke.

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

Introducing a new concept in Atlanta User Groups – SharePoint123! (website coming soon!)

 

I’m pleased to be the first to introduce a new concept in User Groups here in Atlanta – SharePoint123!  Organized like one of those expensive training classes, complete with syllabus and hands on labs, SharePoint123! is designed to rapidly introduce developers to Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and the intricacies of developing for this relatively new groupware product.

Windows SharePoint Services is a free product that integrates with Microsoft Office XP and 2003 to give users an excellent team-based approach to work.  Have you ever had to work with someone further away than the next cube, and wanted to let that person or group of people know when you make changes to task lists, documents, slide shows, and spreadsheets?  Sometimes storing these documents in a public location like Outlook’s Public Folders or VSS isn’t enough.  Sometimes you need more.  What if you want to ask someone who previously worked on a document a question – wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do that directly from Word?  Windows SharePoint Services addresses these needs and many more!  SharePoint technologies encompass the highly scalable and extensible Windows SharePoint Services and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server to offer web-based portals ranging from individual sites and team sites to entire corporate intranets and even extranets.

Come to the sessions to learn more about using and developing for SharePoint!

 

-- Matt Ranlett

 

 

Wednesday, July 20^th, Randy Miller from Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 Team Systems group is coming to the Microsoft Offices to talk to the SPIN process User Group about the newest features of Visual Studio Team Systems and MSF Agile.  For more information, visit www.atlantaspin.org.  To prevent us from having three User Group meetings in a single week, we have elected to cancel the Monday meeting of the Atlanta Mobility User Group.

 

-- Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

Bill Baker, program manager of the SQL Server Business Intelligence team, is coming to town on July 21^st to speak to the SQL Server User Group.  To accommodate Mr. Baker’s busy schedule, the SQL Server group will be meeting in the Microsoft Offices off of Mansell Rd instead of their normal meeting location in the Concourse buildings.  Be sure to visit www.atlantamdf.com to register for the meeting.  Registration is used to calculate how much pizza should be purchased.

 

-- Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

Top announcement of the day: the mini Code Camp in Charlotte on August 20th.  Brendon and I are already registered.  Keep an eye on Maxim’s blog at www.ipattern.com for more details as they become available.

In other news, we had four companies looking to hire developers, including Magenic and Avanade.  This does not include the recruiter who showed up for the first part of the evening.

After a bit of fun with the projectors and laptops, the presentations got underway.  Doug Turnure filled in for Marty Mathis (unable to make it) and gave a brief look into how Reflection can expose your innermost private values.  Just to review, reflection works by reading the .Net metadata to dynamically discover methods and fields.  Doug began the presentation with a simple base class that he used as the object of reflection:

Then we took a tour through reflection with the following code (I’m not bothering to write everything out)

The reason this scary stuff works is because the runtime needs to know about your code, so everything is exposed.  The only way to prevent someone from hacking your assembly is not to give it to them.  Use web services.  Or partially trusted permissions.

Doug finished his presentation and received polite applause as most people in the room looked around at each other in shock that their private data wasn’t actually private.  Similar to the SPIDynamics presentation on SQL Injection and cross site scripting – there were several panicky looks…

Up next after Don was Steven Tynes from Avanade to present the Enterprise Library.  For those who don’t know, Avanade is a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft.  They’re looking for bright people, so if you want a traveling job….

The Enterprise Library is the next logical growth after patterns (atomic solutions to common programming problems) and application blocks (subsystem level guidance for common services).  The Enterprise Library helps to make the app blocks more consistent, easier to configure, and work together better than they did previously.  Entlib is actually part of the patterns and practices guidance library and is a growth from Avanade’s original Application Connected Architecture for .Net (ACA.Net).  The entlib is entirely free and is used as part of the framework for hundreds of software projects.  Avanade has actually integrated the Enterprise Library into their new version of ACA.Net and is using it in over 30 clients’ projects.

We listened to Steven talk about the entlib configuration tool and the Data Access block for the majority of the time.  There were so many questions from the group that the presentation quickly and frequently wandered away from the core material.  Rather than try to cover what actually was said (the continuous questions were so distracting I stopped paying attention), I’m going to paste in a review of the Entlib I wrote several weeks ago when I saw Richard Weeks from Avanade presents the Enterprise Library:

The Enterprise Library wraps several of the PAP application blocks (Data, Config, Crypto, Security, Exception, Logging, etc).  The goal of the enterprise library is to simplify the use of these blocks.  For example, the extremely slick Configuration tool (add to the Tools menu by customizing the menu) will create all the XML in the App.config file based on a user friendly GUI as opposed to writing the XML on hand.  The Database block allows you to connect to a DB, execute a stored proc, and bind the results to a grid in three lines of code.  The logging component makes logging so easy it’s almost hard to believe.  One line of code – Logger.Write(“text here”) – that’s it!  Based on the config, we were logging to two places at the same time with independently configurable levels of detail.  The exception component allows “exception policies” to be defined and log, wrapping an exception with another exception, replacing an exception with another, or create your own action.  The exception policy tool was really sweet – complete with a list of potential exceptions (reflection, anyone?) you can select from.   Dan and I both enjoyed this presentation – it looks like something really useful.

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

The GrokTalks are uploaded and ready to be downloaded and watched. http://www.groktalk.net/blog/

—Brendon Schwartz

Posted By BlogJet

I am not sure if every noticed that we have a geek dinner tonight!  I just wanted to remind everyone and make sure everyone knows they are invited.  All you other Atlanta bloggers make sure you inform the community too.  Here is where we are going to meet.

http://nerddinner.com/blogs/atlanta/

Sage Woodfire Tavern

11405 Haynes Bridge Rd
Alpharetta, GA 30004  
(770) 569-9199

Also make sure you let Shawn know if you are going to make it so we have enough room for everyone. Email Shawn

— Brendon Schwartz

Posted with BlogJet

If you have not seen Glen Gordon present you are really missing out.  Every time I see one of his MSDN Events they are always better than the one before it.  This time the parking lot was full because right after the MSDN event Star Wars 3 was showing.  Glen really showed his love for Star Wars when he got there at 7 something AM to protect his space runner from being over taken.
 
This was a very interesting MSDN and the topics were intriguing considering I had just heard the Indigo presentation from David Chappell that morning.  The reason I found it intriguing is because the first topic was on Web services and WSE 2.0.  Glen did a great job of showing how to create and consume the services.  Next Glen showed us how you can WSE 2.0 for your web services to make them more secure, trace their output, and many other options just by clicking the options from the WSE 2.0 screen.  You still ask what was so intriguing about David Chappell with Indigo and WSE 2.0 by Glen.  Well it appears that Indigo will only support WSE 3.0 so you will have to rewrite your applications that are WSE 1.0 and WSE 2.0.  I wouldn’t think that Microsoft would make an MSDN event focused on pushing these technologies without making the point of best practices for moving forward.

After a short break and the popcorn people running out of popcorn temporarily we headed back into the theater for the next presentation.  Glen started out telling us it was SQL 2005 so I was interested in that, but then he showed us so really cool features of SQL 2005 like creating a web service from inside SQL.  This was a really cool feature if you just want to expose some data without writing a wrapper class.  He also showed us how to use Reporting Services to create a URL that you can call from a browser.  Once he had the URL he created an application that called the Reporting Service (SSRS) web service.  He used the Render method of the web service and put tiff files of the report in a Winforms application.  Really cool idea!

The last topic Glen talked about was Click Once deployment; it had the most amount of questions.  It was Click Once deployment.  This was a neat feature to see, but nothing really new from the App Updater Block.  He showed us how you can easily deploy your project with a few settings for another person to download.  You have the option of creating the application to put a Start Menu item in the Start Menu or just running from the web.  He changed the background of the main form and downloaded it with the options.  To do the coding demos Glen showed off some of the capabilities of Snippets.
I really enjoyed the sessions and hope everyone there had a great time.  The content was given out in DVD format and so was VS 2005 Beta 2.  Check out both of these resources for the code shown and the tools to build them with.  See you at the next MSDN Event for ASP.NET 2.0.

— Brendon Schwartz

Posted with BlogJet

What’s left in the month of May?

• This Wednesday, the 18th – the VB Group is hosting David Chappell and the Indigo Roadshow in the Microsoft Offices.  Show up early for guaranteed seating – space might be tight as there is HUGE interest in this topic.  This is TOMORROW!
• This Thursday, the 19th – MSDN Event with Glen Gordon at the Chamblee Regal Cinemas.  Three great topics followed by a Pub Club.  Show up to the MSDN event to learn the location of the Pub Club.
• The .Net Book Club meeting is cancelled in favor of the MSDN Event and the Pub Club.  We’ll pick up where we left off next month.
• There are no other meetings this month – the main .Net UG is not meeting in May due to Memorial Day.

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

Michael Earls, Brendon Schwartz, and I went out for snacks and beer (mostly beer) after the Mobility UG tonight and sat there chatting until after midnight.  While most of the talk hovered around career paths and war stories, one of the topics of conversation might be interesting to the rest of the Atlanta .Net User Group attending public.  We were talking about what kinds of topics we wanted to see in the near future.  We sat there brainstorming and blurting out ideas.  I thought I'd list a few that we mentioned and then open the comments up to the general (blog-reading) public to see what interests the community at large.

Here are a few of the topic ideas we discussed:

• Biztalk - Microsoft is on the verge of releasing Biztalk 2006.  Do we all understand the value of Biztalk in general?
• Sharepoint - this communication and collaboration tool has helped to shape ASP.Net (webparts)
• Analysis Services - what good is having data in a database if you can't understand what it's telling you?
• WMI scripting - system administrators understand the value of this tool.  Do developers?
• Typed Datasets verses Objects and abstracted data - an architectural decision you can't make until you understand both concepts

What technology topics (not just development topics) do you want to see?  Do we want to get ever deeper into code like we have with the CLR team and our recent discussion in the Atlanta Mobility User Group about delegates or do we want to learn more about some of the tools that Microsoft is providing to make coding easier?  Don't be silent - let your voice be heard!  This is about all user groups in general and not a single user group specifically.

-- Matt Ranlett

Wally McClure interviewed me for his first ever podcast.  I think I blathered on for a bit about nothing in particular, but I really enjoyed talking to him.  For those of you who didn't get to meet Wally, you're the poorer for it.  He's a great guy - really easy to talk to and fun to be around.  Wally, thanks for the opporitunity to put another bullet in my holster!

The Atlanta Code Camp was great because I got to meet and talk to some great people, like Wally, Jose Fuentes, and Tammy Pettway.  It was great meeting everyone and putting faces to names you hear at various UG meetings.

-- Matt Ranlett

I don't know about the other speakers, but Brendon and I are coming up with a brand new presentation for Code Camp.  This involves us coming up with a topic (done), an outline for the presentation (done - thanks Brendon), a slide show to keep us on track (mostly done - fine tuning still going on), some canned demos in case time gets to us (we're still working on these - more comments below), and practice some other demos so we can do some live coding but not look like morons when stuff doesn't work (still doing these as well).  We've been working/watching webcast/reading books and MSDN articles for a while now.  We've been shuffling the slide deck back and forth between us for additions and subtractions.  We even got together last night (not easy to do b/c we both work a lot and Brendon lives in northern BFE where I live in Atlanta) and worked from 7pm to midnight.  I'd like to say we're ready except for some last minute demo coding and a bit more polish on the slide show (take a few slides out and add a few new ones).  We're mostly there and if I had to drop everything and give the presentation right now, I wouldn't be embarrassed for myself.

One thing - has anyone had problems with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and the SQL Express product?  I can't seem to connect to my SQL Server, so I can't create or attach a database.  This means I am not going to be able to demo any kind of data binding (except from XML).  I installed everything on the CD except the J# stuff (personally no interest in Java syntax) and got no errors during the install.  I did notice that there are no useful GUI SQL tools that came with the Express edition (no management studio or query analyzer tool) but I'm comfortable with OSQL so that's not a problem.  But I can't get any tool (OSQL, VS2005 Datbase Explorer, etc) to connect without timing out.  Thoughts?  Help!

-- Matt Ranlett

 

UPDATE - Brendon found the problem.  SQL Express installs a named instance of SQL Server, so you can't just connect to the (local) server.  You need to connect to (local)\SQLExpress or .\SQLExpress.  Once you do that, everything works.

I feel like a lucky guy - I've been able to go out to dinner with the CLR team (Brad, Claudio, Kit, and Jason) twice now. Each time it's been three or four of them and about ten or so of us. We sat around and discussed their recent presentations, the future directions of the industry and random bits of trivia. It makes for an entertaining and instructive evening all the way around, adding depth to the people behind the CLR. These guys are out traveling the country (Atlanta and Arizona count as the country, right?) trawling for feedback from the users of their products, and we try to give them what they ask for. What do we like about the .Net Framework? It's easy to work with and it genuinely makes your job of developing applications easier. What don't we like about it? It's memory intensive and it doesn't go far enough - Brendon specifically asked Claudio for the Psychic Friends namespace. I'll do a bad job of explaining his idea, but Brendon has this theory about creating a low level eventing system where the CLR or OS pushes the events to registered software. The catch is, with Brendon's design, he wants the registering software to define the event, not the event server. So you would essentially be telling the event server what events it should create and serve. Like I said - the Psychic Friends component.

One of the topics that came up was the upcoming Professional Developers Conference, or PDC. Some of the folks on the CLR team have input to the PDC content, and they want to hear from us what we want to learn about. Do we want this PDC to focus on the here and now of VS2003? Do we want to look at the near future with Whidbey and Yukon? Should we be looking 2 or more years down the road at LongHorn? *I am not saying that LongHorn won't deliver inside of 2 years - let's not start that rumor.* Beyond the topics covered at the PDC, what kind of presentations do we want to see? Of course, there will be plenty of lectures with slides and code demos, but what kind of code demos and slides do we want to see? Do we want to see the low down nitty gritty stuff where you need conceptual diagrams of memory stacks or do we want higher level application logic. Do we want to see more easy to follow tutorials or do we like larger, more involved examples of best practices? What kinds of hands on labs do we want to see? Should those be the tutorials or best practices? Should they show us how to use the Enterprise Library and BizTalk or should we be looking at the effects of memory pressure on the GC and how we can add graphical monitoring to our own applications? Would you guys like the opportunity to bring your own applications to a booth and sit with a MS developer for 30 minutes (or an hour? Two?), letting him or her give you advice on how to improve performance or security? I'm actually soliciting feedback on behalf of Microsoft now. What do you guys want to see? Jim Wooley and I blue-skied for a while with Brad and we came up with the idea of taking a non-trivial application written in VS2003 and learning how to correctly profile the app with freely available tools and simple instrumentation. Then improve the program in VS2003 based on the information we've just learned. Then take that exact same application and migrate it to VS2005 (without making any code changes). Check the profiling and see what improvements we get with just the new CLR. Now take advantage of the new features offered in 2.0 like generics to speed things up and simplify the code. Look at the profiling again to see what kind of performance improvements we have gained. Maybe next we could migrate the UI of this same app to Avalon. Finally we could talk theory about the changes coming up for LongHorn and the next version of the .Net Framework. But the basic idea is that we take an app and work it through several generations of code review and performance monitoring until we've gone from currently in production code to the theoretical future of our applications. This sounds to me like a fantastic lab and I'd love to see it. If nothing else, maybe it should be turned into an article for MSDN or something. *I am not volunteering to write this - it sounds like it might require a book!* These were a great bunch of guys to hang out with and I really enjoyed meeting them. I'll bee keeping up with them via their available blogs and I urge everyone else to do the same.

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

We have given out a couple of books for review by our members.  I would like to thank APress and Addison-Wesley for sending us the books for review.  I would also like to thank the people doing the reivew and give them some links that might help in the review.  If you have already read a book or are reading a book now and want to help us out by writing a review please send them to me and we will make sure to post them.

Apress – suggestions for writing a review

Addison-Wesley / Prentice Hall – suggestions for writing a review

O’Reilly – suggestions for writing reviews

Denver User Group is one of the best places to see how this is done right. They also have some good regulations on how to review a book that we are going to try to follow also.

Here are our first set of reviews, thanks for the help and I hope everyone enjoys the books.  All we are asking is that they send us a review with in 60 days.

Sean Hayes
Addison-Wesley – .NET Compact Framework Programming with Visual Basic .NET

Jeong Moon
APress – Pro SQL Server Reporting Services

Dan Bredy
Addison-Wesley – The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language

Eric Engler
Addison-Wesley – Maximizing ASP.NET: Real World, Object-Oriented Development

Trent Whiteley
APress – Advanced .NET Remoting, Second Edition

Sandy Roach
Addison-Wesley – Building Intelligent .NET Applications: Agents, Data Mining, Rule-Based Systems, and Speech Processing

If you are interested in reviewing a book please let us know which book so we can request it from the correct company.

—Brendon Schwartz

Posted with BlogJet

It seems you can actually say a lot with out really saying anything.  As many of you might have noticed both Matt and I became really busy at the same time.  I have been working on a bunch of technical projects such as BizTalk, SharePoint, ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005 TS and Mobility, so I ran out time to blog (not that I really blog that much).  Due to the fact that Matt became busy at the same time we didn't put much on the website, didn't change much on the blog and as it seemed to the world didn't put much effort into the community.  I just wanted to let everyone know that we are still working as hard as ever to figure out what the .NET community needs and what we can do to improve the Atlanta community.  There are a bunch of good events coming up soon so make sure you don’t miss out.  If this month and next month got any better we would be in trouble.

Atlanta .NET User Group April 25th (Wow)
Shawn Wildermuth – Author of a great book Pragmatic ADO.NET
Alan Griver – Group Manager for the Visual Studio Data group

Atlanta C# User Group (Wow Wow)
Brad Abrams and the .NET CLR Team – The CLR team that is all I have to say

Atlanta VB.NET and Atlanta .NET User Groups (Wow Wow Wow)
David Chappell on Indigo
David Chappell will be in town to discuss the next version of services and remoting codenamed Indigo. The presentation is scheduled on our regular meeting date so we will likely just use this presentation as a substitute for our regular meeting.

Atlanta Code Camp (Too much excitement for one month, but we will take it WoooooooooooooW!)

So as you can see we have a lot of planning and work coming up for the user groups in May.  Thanks to Doug for getting this done for us. I can’t believe how many great speakers we have coming to all of our groups.

—Brendon Schwartz

 This blog posted with BlogJet

In case you didn’t know last night at the C# user group there was an announcement that Brad Abrams and the CLR Team would be in town in May and will be the speakers of the May C# user group meeting.  You can bet the size of the group will be a little larger than usual.  Tell all of your friends that program to come out and meet some of the Microsoft team that works on the actual .NET runtime you are building your applications for.

--Brendon Schwartz

Check out the picture from last nights C# user group

http://www.cyanbane.com/2005/04/atlantas-c-user-group-20050404.asp

--Brendon Schwartz

I would like to try to get a session together where developers or architects in the community could come together and come up with some best practices and hands on approaches for designing systems.  Here is my idea below.

Meetings would occur on a Saturday from 11:30 until 3:30.  The cost of the event would be $5 dollars, unless I can find someone to sponsor the event.  The $5 dollars would cover lunch from somewhere like the Atlanta bread company.  The environment would be a round table atmosphere with a white board to write on.  I would like every to give their input and suggestions so we can come up with the best solutions.  And finally we would have one or more people at the event that would take notes on what is talked about and we could put this information into a document for the users of the group.

A topic idea for the first meeting could be something like: “How to create an ASP.NET Enterprise website from the ground up”

We could also follow along with the Patterns and Practices or the Guidelines from Microsoft. .

Let me know if anyone is interested.  I was thinking about a group of 12 would be the right size, but I wanted to see if anyone else was interested in this.

-- Brendon Schwartz

I heard about one of these in an e-mail and that drove me to look around the web a bit.  Check out the following conferences and training events happening in Atlanta:

Designing and Developing Integrated Portal Solutions – March 21

Lotus Notes Migration Workshop – March 24 and April 21

Understand and Uncover value with Microsoft Portals, Business Intelligence, and .Net Solutions – March 25th

Build Mobile Apps with the .Net Compact Framework – April 4

American Society for Quality Annual ISO 9000 Summit – April 4–5

ASP.Net 2.0 First Look – April 15

Connected System Development with .Net – April 18

Building a Manageable and Reliable Infrastructure on Windows 2003 Workshop – April 25

Business Agility and IT Diffusion IFIP International Working Conference – May 8–11

Management and Operations of .Net Applications – May 9

Atlanta Code Camp – May 14

MSDN Event – May 19

28th Annual ICCA National Conference – June 10–12

Lucent VOIP Technology Tour – June 14

Developing Biztalk 2004 Applications Bootcamp – June 27

No Fluff, Just Stuff Symposium – October 21-23, 2005

— Matt Ranlett

If you get this before it's too late, we hope to see everyone out at the 5 Seasons brew pub on Roswell Rd (just inside the Perimeter) at 6:30 for the Atlanta .Net Book Club

The speaker list is finally up on our site.  Sorry it took so long to get it there.  We have the tracks and speakers up and we will make them all easy to get to by this weekend.  For the time being check out the tabs we have if you want to know who is speaking or what the presentations are.

Speaker List

Presentation List

We still have a lot of work to do, but I thought you would rather have the content as soon as possible.

--Brendon Schwartz

A P R E S S . C O M | Books for Professionals, by Professionals ...

Suggestions for Writing Apress Book Reviews

Apress encourages user group members to write book reviews that are comfortable and fun to write. We realize that time may be limited for working professionals, so we appreciate any thoughtful and constructive reviews of our books.

We suggest posting book reviews wherever relevant: Amazon, Slashdot, your blog, your buddy's blog, Barnes and Noble, JavaRanch, or your user group's site—just to name a few.

Whenever possible, a review should mention chapter features, describing one or several chapters at a time. Additional topics might include:

• How will this book help you with your work (or hobbies)?
• What sets it apart from other books you've read?
• Would you recommend it? To whom?
• What was your favorite chapter or section?

Many reviewers enjoy sharing what worked (or didn't work so well) for them in our books. And review length is up to the writer—we typically see reviews that range from a paragraph to a few pages. Here are a few examples:

If you want to challenge yourself, take a look at some examples of Slashdot reviews:

• Web Standards Solutions
• Beginning PHP and MySQL

If you're limited on time, follow the example of some Amazon customer reviews:

• Cross-Platform .NET Development: Using Mono, Portable.NET and Microsoft .NET
• Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional

Here are some fine examples of reviews posted on user group sites:

• Denver Visual Studio User Group
• Maine Bytes
• Oakland.pm
• Denver Java Users Group

And here are some blogs that feature book reviews:

• Code Generation Network
• adboyd.com
• Nolan's Pop Culture Review
• Bill's House O Insomnia

— Matt Ranlett

Check out the farewell editorial from Richard Grimes from Dr Dobbs Journal.  Regardless of whether or not you agree with Mr. Grimes, he has written some excellent columns over the last three years as a contributor to the DDJ and he'll be missed.

While you're wandering around in the DDJ site, be sure to check out the columns written by Dino Esposito on ASP.Net.  I wanted to bring up Dino Esposito because he's the author of the Introducing ASP.Net 2.0 book that the Atlanta .Net Book Club will be following for the next three meetings.  Speaking of the book club, I wanted to announce the time and location of the next meeting.  We will meet on March 17th (Thursday) at 6:30pm at the 5 Seasons brew pub.  They have wireless internet access and great beer.  Show up and you might be luck enough to receive one of the three copies we've received (courtesy of Doug Turnure) for free. 

-- Matt Ranlett

We’ve got a contact with a discount to Books24x7.com.  Their library is the full text of all the technical books anywhere and is fully searchable.  The problem is that the subscription costs $500 a year.  Well, I’ve just made a contact that can get you this subscription for nearly half the cost.  So if you are interested in a library subscription that is more expansive than just computer language books, send me an e-mail and I’ll get you the information you need.

This sounds like a great deal because it gets you all the latest books for a single subscription fee.  If you don’t mind reading off the screen or killing lots of trees and printing the books you will have a great resource at your fingertips.

— Matt Ranlett

Are you wondering what I did this past weekend? Probably not, but you know I am going to tell you anyways.  I created a new calendar for the ADNRG (Atlanta .NET Regular Guys) website and create a page to let you join the ADNRG.  I will list the features I added this weekend later in the blog.  All of the code is on the devcow web site, but I still consider it beta until it has been tested a little more.  Please let us know if you have any trouble using anything or if you would like any new features.

Calendar Features Addition: www.devcow.com/calendar2
1) Created calendar to use same data as all other calendar and notification systems
2) Added vCalendar functionality to let you click an event and let you add it to Outlook or any system that supports vCalendar
3) Added an RSS feed of all the events for this year on the calendar

Join the Group Feature Addition: www.devcow.com/regularguys  
1) You can now sign up to let us know who you are and join our group
2) The ability to view all users that want to show their name as being one of the Atlanta .NET Regular Guys

On top of these features I worked on the site in general to make it better.  In the long term we will try to make the site easier and better to use for anyone trying to keep up with what is going on with .NET in the Atlanta area.  Please let us know if we are missing anything or can change anything to help you keep organized.

Thanks,
--Brendon Schwartz

Shawn Wildermuth has announced the next Geek Dinner event here in the Atlanta area.  The blog post has not made it online yet, but keep your eyes on http://nerddinner.com/blogs/atlanta so you’ll know when to RSVP.

March 24th at 5 Seasons in Roswell’s Prado shopping center

— Matt Ranlett

Did you miss out on your chance to register for the Atlanta Code Camp, this May 14th?  That’s understandable, the code camp “sold out” inside of FIVE days!  We have people from ten states coming to attend and present at our local code camp!

If you missed out on registration, this is your last chance to get into the code camp.  We are looking for ten volunteers to help us run this thing.  You will have to show up early to help set up.  You will have to stay late to help clean up and tear down.  You will be proctoring a room or monitoring people as they are admitted.  Please be serious about this, there are some real responsibilities involved with volunteering.  If you are serious and you want to volunteer, send me an e-mail (check the Code Camp website).  On a first come, first serve basis, we will be admitting ten volunteers.

— Matt Ranlett

I'm posting this as a barometer to measure interest in articles about Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) and .Net 2.0.  I'm just looking to see if anyone out there is interested in a whole blog devoted to these topics or if you'd rather just see those posts in here with the rest of the .Net Regular Guys postings.

Please leave comments, especially if you DON'T want to have to add another blog to your RSS reader

-- Matt Ranlett

Since Michael Earls and I both work in the same area, and since Michael is currently on the bench (for those who are not used to “consultant-speak”, “on the bench” is the same thing as not working.  Well, not working directly for a client, that is) we decided to get together for lunch.  We sat there talking about all kinds of stuff, most of which doesn’t belong in a blog.  One thing he said to me did strike me as pertinent to the rest of the .Net community and it ties in nicely with something that I wanted to bring up anyway.

Whidbey Beta 2 is expected to be released soon!  The Release team says that they are in the Ask phase of the release – the final stage before the release.  This is significant, because the news on the net is that the Beta 2 will include a GoLive license.  This means that anything you develop with Whidbey Beta 2 will be supported by Microsoft!  The tools might not be 100%, but the Framework is finished!  Speculation puts the release of Beta 2 at the end of March.  This means that you can finally develop real applications with .Net 2.0!

Significant among the .Net 2.0 changes are the new things that are available for use in ASP.Net applications.  Imagine developing an entire membership driven website, complete with user database, in just 20 minutes!  Master Pages and Generics!  All kinds of cool stuff are right around the corner.  How do you find out more about ASP.Net 2.0?  How about a great book written by Dino Esposito?  This is the book that the Atlanta .Net Book Club will be focusing on for the next two months.  Did I mention that we might even have some copies of this book to give away to people who show up to the book club meeting?  The next meeting of the book club is on March 17th.

— Matt Ranlett

Make sure you don't miss Glen's webcast on SQL Mobile and .NET Compact Framework 2.0.  This would be a great follow up to the mobility user group if you were there.

--Brendon Schwartz

I've updated the previous post as well.  Now the MSDN Photostory Brendon put together is hosted on two sites:

Chris Wallace - http://tamasii.com/dotnet/feb2005msdnevent.wmv

Glen Gordon - http://www.msdn.tv/glengordon/feb2005msdnevent.wmv

Thanks guys!

-- Matt Ranlett

If you want to present to the community during the Atlanta Code Camp this May 14th, you need to download this form, fill it out, and mail it to Mark Dunn – mark AT NOSPAM dunntraining.com (sorry you can’t just click on the link – I’m doing my part to fight spam).  This is true even if you have previously announced your intention to present.  Your name doesn’t make it onto the final speaker listing without this form being in Mark’s hands.

— Matt Ranlett

I wonder if anyone else is obsessed with planning and organizing as much as I am. I have set up the calendar for people to download from our site for the Atlanta .NET events, but is that enough? Heck NO! There needs to be more options and more connections for people to be able to use the calendar in the way they want to, not the way I tell them they need to. That is the way I would feel if I was the person using the calendar.

Well I was signing up for a BizTalk event for tomorrow and they had a link to add it to my calendar. Now I know everyone has seen the little link you can make from Outlook to create an event file (.cvs), but I wanted to know how to really create one of these events. So I downloaded the file and opened it with Notepad. As expected I found text in the file and without hesitation I wanted to know what the specification of this file was. Luckily I found out that it is an open standard so I downloaded the developer reference and I am on my way to making a way for the website to allow people to add Calendar appointments to Outlook or any other program that uses vCalendar. I will be getting with Kirk who is the first person that told me that he had already looked into doing this with enclosures for RSS feeds, so I will hopefully get something going soon for people to have choices.  I will post any of the code if it is good enough on www.devcow.com/projects when we are done with that section.

--Brendon Schwartz

A little while ago Brendon, the local vocal community, and I came up with an idea to help bring us all closer together.  Brendon and I, your humble Atlanta .Net Regular Guys, would invite some local member of the community out to lunch or dinner and chat with them about their personal experiences with .Net development.  We'd then summarize and paraphrase that interview and post it to this blog for everyone to read.  No one is sure about what will come of this, but we're hopeful that some helpful information might leak out.  It might be interesting to hear what people around you but outside of your own development teams are doing, succeeding at, and struggling with.

               "Tales from the Trenches" - beginning Thursday, Feb 24th.

Our inaugural interview will be Chris Wallace, a VB.Net developer who works as a one man development shop in the medical field.  Expect the first post to be Thursday night or Friday.  We are not sure yet if this will be a weekly or semi-weekly feature, but we intend to have some fun with this.  If anyone has any interview topic requests, start sending them in!

-- Matt Ranlett

I was reading though my blogs and came across this entry from Scott Watermasysk discussing INETA Academic and his personal drive to get students involved in the local community.

http://scottwater.com/blog/archive/2004/12/22/INETA_Academic_And_You#Feedback

This got me to thinking about what Brendon and I have been doing with this blog and our other activities as "Atlanta .Net Regular Guys".  The two of us have been working hard to bring the local developer community closer together.  We've been providing User Group recaps so those who can't make it to the meetings aren't left out of the loop.  We've worked to... blah blah blah.  I'll just paste the comment I wrote to Scott into this entry rather than paraphrasing myself.  I'm not sure that my comment will make it to his blog b/c I was looking at a post nearly 2 months old.

"Here in the Atlanta community, we've begun to consolidate our local user groups and online gurus through the blogsphere.  One concept that I'm particularly proud to be a part of is the "Atlanta .Net Regular Guys".  I and my partner Brendon Schwartz attend all of the .Net user group meetings in town (that's seven meetings a month, baby!) and blog about the content (http://www.devcow.com/weblogs).  We are integral parts of the planning and advertising for the upcoming May 14th Atlanta Code Camp (www.atlantacodecamp.com).  We are beginning a new (to Atlanta anyway) weekly or semi-weekly column - "Tales from the Trenches".  This column will include the personal war stories of local area developers, including several area Microsoft MVPs.

All of these efforts and more are all directed at one major goal - to create a vibrant local community of developers who can turn to each other for friendship and advice.  We've created a centralized calendar.  We've helped solicit for resumes and passed those resumes we've received to those who need them most.  We've organized social outings and are now involved in the leadership of several of the user groups.

We do all of this for free.  I don't want personal fame, I just want to be part of the incredible group of people that make up the Atlanta area development community and I'm doing everything I can to bring everyone closer together.  I was lucky enough to find a friend who challanged me to keep this going, and together Brendon and I have, in my opinion, added something to the local community that was previously missing."

-- Matt Ranlett

If you missed the MSDN Event we have tried to bring it to you in a new format I wanted to try out.  I took pictures of the event and used Photo Story 3 to put it all together.   With the help of Chris Wallace and Glen Gordon we are getting it hosted on the web.  It is 7.5MB so you might want to download it before you watch it, but I tried to make it tell the story of the day.  Let me know if you like it and if you would like me to do this for other events.  Have fun!

Here is the link http://tamasii.com/blog/archive/2005/02/18/48807.aspx

I will post Glen's link when he puts it up.  Thanks to both of you guys, any help is always appreciated.

--Brendon Schwartz

PS - the photostory is also being hosted by Glen Gordon - http://www.msdn.tv/glengordon/feb2005msdnevent.wmv

The winter MSDN event was a great success. Thanks to Glen and Michael for putting on such a great show. It was funny how this event started out. First I emailed Glen to get a head count so I would know how many flyers to print out about the local user group community. He told me 400 people were registered, which I thought was a large number. The next day Michael calls me on up and said “You should try to get here early if you can, if everyone shows up there won’t be enough seats”. So I left a couple minutes early and had no trouble getting in, actually I don’t think they would really turn people away unless it became really crowded, but I appreciate Michael looking out for me.

The presentations were excellent; it is amazing how much information you can learn from such an event, unless you are Keith and you know everything already, just kidding ;). The first presentation was about DataBinding. Actually have you ever wanted to write your own MediaPlayer and be able to change the look of your application? Well if you do you should have been at this presentation. Glen showed how to add some life to your products with new looks and the drag and drop functionality.

Next up was our local friend Michael Earls. It appears, or as the story goes, Glen changed some of the content on Michael so it was an exciting beginning. Luckily Michael can think on his feet quick and made it seem like it was part of the presentation. Good job on the presentation Michael. We learned some cool tips and tricks on debugging like how to break into a running ASP.NET application and how to use trace. I think trace is a great tool for everyone to use and if you don’t already know how to use check out the MSDN event content DVD. Keith who I was sitting next to said the funniest thing joking around while we were there, he said, “Trace is for the weak, real men use Response.Write for debugging”. This was a joke that Michael brought up in his presentation about the old way of doing trace in ASP applications.

The last presentation was a great intro and overview of what is soon to come with VS 2005. People are still waiting to see what the final release will have in it, but he did show the modeling tools and how to generate code from an architect’s point of view. It seems to me that .Net is really going to take off with VS2005 because they have so many features that help in the entire development cycle. This is really going to be a good area to watch for in the coming year for how to articles and what is good practice.

On that note look for Me and Matt to put out some posts on VS2005 over the next year we might start looking deeper into it and the new features that will help in your daily work. Also Microsoft has released “Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) for Agile Software Development, Beta” so check it out and let us know what you think about it and VS2005 in general.

P.S. – I will be working on getting the pictures and Photo Story to Glen who will post it for us somewhere because we don’t have the bandwidth for it. If you have suggestions for a back ground song let me know. An interesting guy I met at the MSDN event was Boris. He wrote a tool called Regmagik. Let me know if anyone else is using this. http://www.regmagik.com

--Brendon Schwartz

If you didn't already register for the May 14th Atlanta Code Camp, you are now too late.  In just 17 days since the official announcement at January's Atlanta Dot Net User Group meeting, all of the spaces have been taken.

ATTENTION PRESENTERS:  If you would like to present at the Atlanta Code Camp, we are still looking for you.  You may request a space by doing one of the following things:

1. Add a comment to this blog requesting a speaker's berth
2. Send an e-mail to Mark Dunn (mark AT NOSPAM dunntraining.com) or Michael Earls (mearls AT NOSPAM hotmail.com) requesting a speaker's berth

ATTENTION PEOPLE WHO DID NOT REGISTER IN TIME:  There is a waiting list that is already so long we'll never get through it.  You have missed this code camp.  I apologize from the bottom of my heart, but our venue has serious space limits which prevent us from opening more spaces.  However, we are still looking for the following (which might get you entry to the code camp sessions)

1. volunteers to help set up before the event, manage the crowd during the event, and clean up after the event.  If you are interested in volunteering, post a comment to this blog entry stating such.  I do NOT guarantee entry to the code camp.

While we're still tremendously early in the process, I want to thank everyone for helping to spread the word and make this as successful as an event still three months away can be!  If our successes continue in this vein, there will be more code camps in the future.

-- Matt Ranlett

450 people signed up for the MSDN Event at Phipps Plaza today!  That number is well over capacity at the theater, but several people didn't show up so there was still room to sit.  Still, all the publicity seems to be working for Glen - more people are learning about his FREE developer training events and planning to show up.

Unfortunately I was not one of the people who could show up.  My evil boss required me to be at work today so I could only attend the after-party.  I, and about 50 of my closest friends, congregated at the American Cafe underneath the AMC theater in Phipps Plaza.  Microsoft was kind enough to purchase some free appetizers for us (Thanks Glen!) and give away some prizes.  Everyone at my table won something except me!  That's what I get for not showing up to the event, bad karma.

Brendon will be posting a blog entry to cover the actual MSDN Event content as well as some photos he took.  He'll probably get those up in the next day or so - he's actually visiting with his Grandmother tonight.  Hello, Brendon's Grandma!

Upcoming meeting reminders!
Monday the 21st - Atlanta Mobility Group.  Shawn Wildermuth presents ADO and the Compact Framework.
Wednesday the 23rd - Atlanta Visual Basic.Net Study Group.  Brendon and I tag-team the group with presentations.
Monday the 28th - the main Atlanta Dot Net User Group meeting, featuring Dennis Hurst teaching you how to hack (ok, maybe not)
May 14th - Atlanta Code Camp - sorry, already filled up!
May 18th - newly announced Wednesday visit from David Chappell to discuss Indigo.  This will be a great session and takes the place of the end of the month Atlanta Dot Net User Group meeting (May 30th is now a free Monday night).

-- Matt Ranlett

 

Does anyone think I went a little too far with all the links in this post?  Aside from me, that is?

Seventeen days after the official announcement of the Atlanta Code Camp, all the spaces have been filled.  We had 200 spaces available and those are now gone!  We actually have a waiting list!  I think that's totally awesome!  Way to go, Atlanta!

Another planning meeting happens next week and we'll begin sorting speakers into the tracks and deciding who presents what and where.  Look to www.AtlantaCodeCamp.com for these details as soon as they become available.  I'll also be posting that information to this blog.

-- Matt Ranlett

Check out what Keith Rome learned about SQL 2005 in his two posts:

Post #1: http://www.mindfusioncorp.com/weblog/PermaLink,guid,2e0f3720-20c3-4766-8917-5e1d3069b8eb.aspx

and

Post #2: http://www.mindfusioncorp.com/weblog/PermaLink,guid,082d98a6-8586-4f6a-b359-968a08f08e51.aspx

I'm really jealous that I didn't get to go.  Ah, the joys of being your own boss.

-- Matt Ranlett

 

PS - click on the BOSS link - MarkTAW did some hilarious analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers.

The calendar of Atlanta .Net user groups and events has been updated at www.devcow.com/calendar.  The calendar now is complete through to December and should be accurate.

New to the calendar - the Atlanta Code Camp and a May 18th visit from David Chappell for a talk about Indigo.

Note:  the downloadable calendar is not quite as complete yet.  Stay tuned for more updates.

-- Matt Ranlett

Brendon's stirring of the pot with his Rockstars post lead to a great idea buried deep in the comments.  How about this:

"Tales from the Trenches"
A series of interviews, in person, online, or via the phone, with user group community members.  The focus of the interviews will be the current and past projects that individual is working on (no trade secrets please).  We'll focus on that particular user's challenges and triumphs.  The resulting blog posting will provide the community at large with an insite to what's happening in the Dot Net world around them.  This might also result in an e-mail exchange between our interviewee and community members at large who might be facing the same challenges.

What do you guys think?  Here we'd have the opporitunity to interview independent contractors, consultants, on man shops buried inside of large organizations, and developers working with large .Net development teams.  We'd pay no attention to any sort of "Who's who" list - just start with our blogroll and branch out from there.

-- Matt Ranlett

Part of the Atlanta .NET Regular Guys mission is to get more community activity in Atlanta.  We have been working on spreading the word about user groups and trying to get more people involved.  In fact, There is a strong base of people that always show up to the user groups, but there is something missing when it comes to the expert community in Atlanta.  By expert community I mean the people that are well known that live in Atlanta and the MVPs of Atlanta.  The problem is that these people are usually pretty busy and we don’t have any money to offer them to bring them out.  What I have come up with, and what I will call the Atlanta RockStars posts (better name pending), is as follows. Matt and I take a person out to dinner who is well versed in .NET or a current Microsoft technology and talk to them about what they are working on and then post what we find out from the person on our blog.  This way there will be an entire section about people you may want to know more about or people whose blog you read.  Actually you may not even know how many great people we have in Atlanta and this will be a way to find out about them.  It will also hopefully give the well known members of the community a chance to hear about community activities from the Regular Guys and we might even be able to take questions from regular joe’s like yourself along to ask them.  Really what I am looking for right now is a name to give the idea and any further ideas people have.  The two names I came up with are Atlanta RockStars or Atlanta RockStar Lounge.  Give me your ideas for names that you think of.  We will probably start out asking MVPs that are willing to pay for their own dinner first or something to doesn’t cost me too much.  Maybe we can talk Paul Wilson or Mark Dunn into giving us the honor of the first trial run.

— Brendon Schwartz