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

I've been looking around on the web and have seen loads of people criticize Microsoft for announcing that they were "moving quickly" with the Internet Explorer 7 announcement.  Don't be too quick to knock Microsoft - they sat back on the IE front after they totally killed Netscape and concentrated on other areas.  Now that Google and FireFox showed Microsoft that there are still growth areas out there on the internet where consumers are concerned, expect to see lots of action on that front.  We've recently had mention of a new version of IE (the focus will be security - think phishing), a new search tool, a new version of their mapping software which kicks MapQuest's butt, and more.  Microsoft is a big company but it's competing on a hundred fronts at once.  Even the US Army prefers fewer battlefronts!

-- Matt Ranlett

Shawn W rants about the new HHGTTG trailer in his blog post.  I think this movie has great geek potential.  Anyone up for a social geek gathering to go watch this?  I think Chris Sells is planning something like this out on the west coast.  If he can do it, so can we!

-- Matt Ranlett

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.

I guess I'll have to start editing the images when I am ready to post them to the website.  Oh well.  I'm not going to bother with my existing images.

I received a web project to help make some changes.  When I tried to open the project, I got an error that the web project could not be opened.  IIS couldn't open my project and I got the following error message: "unable to open web project 'ProjectName;.  The file path 'C:\blah\blah\blah' does not correspond to the URL 'http://localhost:/projectname'.  The two need to map to the same server location.  HTTP Error 404: Object not Found."

 

The problem was that the virtual directory was not set up in the IIS Administration tool.  I had to create a new virtual directory with the correct name, path, and permissions (see the next three images)

 

 

 

Finally, once I got the virtual directory all set up, Visual Studio 2003 allowed me to open the project but I got the following error when I tried to open the form in the designer.  "The file could not be loaded into the Web Forms designer.  Please correct the following error and then try loading it again:  The designer could not shown for this file because none of the classes within it can be designed.  The designer inspected the following classes in the file:  _Defulat --- The base class 'Project.Form' could not be loaded.  Ensure the assembly has been referenced or built if it is part of the project.  Make sure all of the classes used in the page are built or referenced in the project.  Click help for more information".

I rebuilt the solution and everything was fine.  I was able to make my tiny change and post the change to the website.

-- Matt Ranlett

 

Nothing kills my productivity at work more than interruptions, from both people and computer based interruptions.  Sometimes those interruptions are warranted but frequently they're not.  One of the main killers is Outlook - it keeps popping up those cool e-mail notifications.  I think they're neat but I tend to pay too much attention to them.  43Folders.com has a set of 5 e-mail productivity tips that I'm going to start following tomorrow.

http://www.43folders.com/2005/02/five_fast_email.html

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

Update2****

Check out Don's site, I told you he would agree that COM is not going away.  Look at Project E - Essential COM, 2nd Edition

EndUpdate2***

Actually I can't look at OLEView because I only have Visual Studio .NET 2003 installed on my machine.  So why do you think that OLEView is not shipped with Visual Studio anymore?  Is it because we don't need to use COM anymore, or is it because the Visual Studio package was too large already.  A lot of people will argue that COM is dead and that we don't need these silly tools anymore, but I think Don Box would agree that it is still around if not in person than in sprit.  He might even tell you COM is love, but I think he was really trying to tell you that the ideas of COM are love not the implementation.

I hope they do ship something that will do the same thing, but I have not been able to find anything yet.  If anyone knows what I can use without having to go download OLEView from a machine that already has it please let me know.

The reason I am looking into this is for two reasons.
1) I am doing a presentation on COM interop and Excel
2) I have been working with Microsoft Office, which is still written in unmanaged code.

Both of these reasons are making me think that Microsoft is not just dropping support for COM as we know it; they are helping us move away from it and not use it.

Update****

Matt pointed me to a great page that shows what tools are installed, and even though it says OLEView should be there it was not.  It seems my install did not go right, but that I was never told about the problems.  You don't really need COM tools anyways. =)  So I found that under the Visual C++.NET section there is a place for Win32 tools.  I am going to have to check out what happens if you just install C# or VB.NET, do you still get the COM tools you don't need. ;)

--Brendon Schwartz

At my workplace, we have machines out in the field which were having problems that caused them to require frequent reboots.  The problem turned out to be SQL Server seg-faulting, but that's not what this entry is about.  What I wanted to talk about here were some free tools you have already or can get easily that can tell you all about your system.  One of the great features of these tools is that they are command line tools which can have their output piped to a file.  Once you have a file on disk, what you do with it is your business.  We tend to FTP and e-mail them around.

You already have these!
SystemInfo - go to a DOS Prompt and type 'systeminfo' to get a huge amount of valuable information, including processor types, physical and virtual memory, and a list of OS hotfixes which have been applied.  Have you got two "identical" machines behaving differently?  Compare the systeminfo output from both to ensure they are actually identical.  NOTE: hyperthreaded processors show up as two processors

Net statistics server/workstation - see how much network traffic your server and workstation services are dealing with, including sessions started and print jobs spooled!  Just go to a DOS prompt and type 'net statistics server' or 'net statistics workstation'

Netstat - run 'netstat -a' from a DOS prompt to see what TCP ports are opened and listening.  This was useful for a problem with an antivirus program blocking all network traffic to and from a machine due to an over-abundance of opened ports.

Download this for free!
Uptime.exe - download this tool and run it with the /s command to get some really great statistics, including a history of shutdown and boot times over a period of months.  You'll see how many times that machine has bluescreened as well as an availablility statistic.  Here is a sample of the output analysis AFTER a huge list of reboot times:
                  Since 1/12/2005:

                             System Availability: 99.9930%
                                    Total Uptime: 34d 22h:2m:17s
                                  Total Downtime: 0d 0h:3m:31s
                                   Total Reboots: 4
                       Mean Time Between Reboots: 8.73 days
                               Total Bluescreens: 0

                     Notes:
                     1/12/2005 is the earliest date in the event log where
                     sufficient information is recorded to calculate availability.

I wanted to put a referral to Deepak Sharma's blog entry about this same topic.

-- Matt Ranlett

So I am trying out OneNote today in an attempt to try and use all of the Microsoft products I can. Hopefully this will allow me to become more efficient in my daily activities. At the moment I am trying to put my thoughts down, so I thought, "Oh, a program that helps me collect my notes would be great". I have tried out OneNote before and didn’t like it when I couldn’t figure out how to make it change my voice into notes, then I remembered "Matt figured out how to make it work when he bought his Tablet PC". So I ask Matt, "Matt, how do you get OneNote to work correctly?" Here is where the problem comes in. He responded "You don’t and You can’t you have Windows XP, hahahahahaha (evil laugh)". It turns out that the voice to text feature of OneNote, as far as he knows, is only part of the Tablet PC OS. This seems to be crazy to me and I cannot for the life of me figure out why Microsoft wouldn’t put the voice to speech features in the XP OS. Maybe I missing something here, but are you telling me I have to buy the Tablet OS to get some of the features I want, but buy XP Pro if I want other features? Hopefully someone that either works on XP or Tablet PC will read this and help straighten things up because I can’t believe that I am going to have to buy and install another operating system just to get OneNote to "work".

--Brendon Schwartz

Aren't we cute?  This is who I've been dating since Dec. 27th.  We just spent our Valentine's day eating at Savu - an excellent French/Asian fusion restaurant inside of the W Hotel on Ashford Dunwoody.  The food there was absolutely FANTASTIC!  Be sure to bring your wallet though - it's a tad bit pricy!

-- Matt Ranlett

I was just asked this question and I didn't know the answer:

When you're working on a Winform project in C# (and probably VB) you have the ability to modify the form through the GUI editor and modify the code behind the form through the IDE.  However, there is also generated code hidden inside the form which some people like to be able to modify.  The only way I know of to edit this generated code is to open the form file in Notepad, make your changes, and save it.  Is there a way to modify this code inside of the IDE?

Here is the reason I ask:  Say you are creating a form.  You want to set some of the property values based on constants rather than having to modify the properties via the IDE.  Let's say you want to set the Visible property to FALSE.  I don't really want to accept the default values then reset them in the form load or constructor.  That just leads to a larger code base for no reason.  It would be cleaner to have the code just use the constant value.

Thoughts?

My fear was that if you modify the generated code with Notepad or any other tool, that this code would be regenerated by Visual Studio and any changes would be lost.  My initial recommendation was to modify the code in the form's constructor but my questioner wasn't convinced this wasn't just resetting the value after it defaulted to something else.

-- Matt Ranlett

Are you one of those people who has to manage a large number of documents in various assorted places on your hard drive?  Maybe you have dozens of folders inside of your My Documents directory or somewhere else, easier to get to with VSS.  Have you ever been frustrated by the Open dialog in MS Word or Excel – you keep having to drill down to your various different directories starting from your My Documents directory?  This can especially be a pain in the neck when you have networked drives mapped on your machine – that seems to make your machine slow to a crawl when using the location pull down.

Finally some help – Microsoft has built in a My Places list of shortcuts you can use in your Open and Save dialogs.  I’m sure you’ve seen it before:

You can add to the My Places shortcut list.  First you want to set the current list to display with small icons.  Then you use the Open dialog to drill down to your preferred folder.  Once you’re inside of the folder you want to see in your shortcut list, use the Tools menu to add to My Places.  Finally, by right-clicking on the new entry, you can move it to the position you want it in the list.  Simple stuff like this is what I love about Windows!

 

-- Matt Ranlett

Someone at work found this great article:  http://www.minasi.com/thismonth.htm

"And I quote…:

__

Server 2003's TCP Stack Can Be Too Slow

Sometimes an old tip becomes useful again...

Techie instructor Roger Grimes passed along this tip about Server 2003's FTP server from KB article 891371. Apparently they set the TCPWindowSize -- an important TCP tuning parameter that I discuss in my Tuning CD and talk -- to a too-small value, with the result that downloading something from a 2003-based FTP server would be slower than you'd expect. (In fact, it appears to me that any TCP-based downloads would be affected by this parameter, including HTTP file transfers.)

Fix this by going to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Services\ Tcpip\ Parameters, and look for TCPWiindowSize. If it's not already there, then create a REG_DWORD entry named TCPWindowSize. Set that parameter to its maximum value of FFFF hex or decimal 65535. Reboot and you should get better throughput. But there may be a few gotchas...

First, you may see no difference. In Windows 2000, you also needed to create and set another REG_DWORD, "GlobalMaxTCPWindowSize," and give it the same value. I'm not sure that's not still a good idea in 2003. Similarly, 2000 had a problem in that if you set the window to its maximum size -- 65535 -- then 2000 ignored you. According to another KB article, the largest value for TCPWindowSize/GlobalMaxTCPWindowSize that would work is 64240. Try different sizes and see which yield the best transfer speeds. By the way, you want to set these values both on the server and the client system."

So after my last idea, I am going to stick with a little more technical post for the time being.  Let’s start with Microsoft Office.

With .NET, Microsoft has taken a step forward to make it a little more easy to program with office by using the primary interop assemblies (PIAs).  They have even gone through the trouble to give you examples for alot of situations. This is a wonderful start to working with Office.  The problem comes up when you write your application for one version of Office, say Office2003, but someone else has Office XP or even worse Office2000.  So now you are stuck, do you write another application just for Office XP or Office 2000, or do you try to make one application that works for the Office versions you need?  I guess the best approach would be to use late binding for the entire Office interop.

Well I think this is where Microsoft came up short on the programming API you use to program with Office.  And yes I know Office is still written in unmanaged code.  I think Microsoft should have distributed an Interop for Office not for a specific version of office, but to program against Office.  This way you wouldn’t have to write a program for multiple versions of the PIAs.

Here is what my code idea would look like:

public object StartExcel
{
  switch(offieversion)
  {
   case Office2003:
          // Instantiate Excel using PIAs from Office2003.
          objApp = new Excel.Application();
     break;
   case OfficeXP:
          // Instantiate Excel using PIAs from OfficeXP.
          objApp = new Excel.Application();
     break;
   case default:
          // Get the class type and instantiate Excel.
          Type objClassType;
          objClassType = Type.GetTypeFromProgID("Excel.Application");
          _Excel = Activator.CreateInstance(objClassType);
     break;
  }
}

Now you would have to do this for every function that is exposed to office, but then you would have the ability to use any version of office and use the best suggested method to do so.  Why does Microsoft make it so difficult to program against office.  It is not that hard, but it is not always as straightforward as you might think it could be.  If you try to program with LateBinding to office objects you cannot find a good reference to show you the method calls or properties that you need.

Let me know what other people have tried in their applications to get around this problem.

—Brendon Schwartz

 

 

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

There’s a guy here at work who has an office he can close the door to.  He sits in there all day and listens to a radio while he works.  His favorite radio station is 96Rock, one of the Clear Channel stations around town.  As he sits there and listens, he calls in for any radio contest he hears.  He’s won so many prizes that we had to give him a nickname – “Punk Bitch” or PB for short.  He’s not only won tickets and free CD and DVDs, he’s won cash and free trips – including a trip to the Bahamas to see David Bowie!

Anyway, I couldn’t very well let him win everything, so one week after he won a DVD  prize pack AND $200 in two separate contests, I went out and bought a radio to keep at my desk.  My little radio paid for itself in one week.  I’ve now won a $75 gift certificate to buy CDs from Criminal Records, movie tickets to two movies, tickets to the Sinner’s Ball, and just today tickets to the Saturday Gwinnett Gladiators’ game.  My problem is scheduling – every time I win tickets to something I can’t go!  I’ve either got a user group meeting or I’ve got other plans I’ve committed to.  So I’ve been giving them away.  Building the good will.  The only thing I kept is the gift certificate and I haven’t even used it yet!  I was going to use it last weekend but I was sick.  Maybe this weekend I’ll have all kinds of new legal music (Michael).

— Matt Ranlett

Last night’s Geek Dinner did not have many people last night, but the people who did come were all great folks.  Shawn Wildermuth, Atlanta’s resident MVP on ADO.Net, planned the event and came armed with loads of trivia about old TV shows.  Mark Dunn, a Visual Basic.Net MVP, showed up with even more TV trivia.  Keith Rome, Michael Earls, and I made up the rest of the dinner crowd.  We talked about music, TV, programming, and the Atlanta Code Camp.  On the topic of programming, I wanted to point this out to the masses who read my blog (and don’t read Shawn’s b/c he’s already posted this).  Check out the OldNewThing blog on MSDN  for some really cool code and code history.

Back on the topic of the low Geek Dinner attendance.  I’m wondering if we’ve got too much of a good thing going on here.  If memory serves, when we had one or two Geek Dinners a year the attendance was about 25 or 30.  Now that we’ve gone to one a month, attendance has really dropped.  Should we cut back the number of events?  Do we care if people don’t show up?  I, personally don’t much care – I’ll show up every time I can.  What does everyone else think?

— Matt Ranlett