The first presentation of the night was from John Crawford. John maintains http://www.gasports.com. He went over how send mail from a site that has many users and gave some pointers on what you might want to look out for. He demonstrated how you want to check for valid email address to log into a website. He pointed out that you want to have people register for the site and only send them email that they want or that you really must send them. Like the reminders for passwords. John took us farther into the world of running a large web server that requires many users that are on the internet. He gave us the low down on how to send email for many purposes from a large site to the end user. He uses class for .NET from OpenSMTP.NET, which is an open source free class for SMTP mail. You can use this open source class to send SMTP mail, but he added locking to make sure no errors occurred. For mass email he uses another webservice, which can handle large amounts of email in order to send out broadcast emails.

Jim gave a follow up presentation using the System.Web.Mail class in Visual Studio 2005, but said it could be done just the same in Visual Studio 2003. He did a quick on the spot demo of how to code a simple email application for either winforms or webforms.

The second half of the presentation was about how to create an application to manage Excel with Late Binding vs. Early Binding. I was the presenter so this post might be bias towards me a little bit. I showed how you can open excel, create a file, close excel, and read each line cell by cell. I had a bunch of questions so I am pretty sure everyone stayed awake. The point that really made a big difference was how much better VB.NET is for late binding than C#. I showed that to write an application using late binging in VB.NET all you have to do is change the variables from strong types into variables of type object. If you want to do the same thing in C# you have to re-write the entire application.

Check out the presentation material

--Brendon Schwartz

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

"A picture is worth a thousand word"

Do you believe that?  Can a picture truly tell a story that would take a thousand words?  Sometimes I feel that is very true - some pictures can tell you things that no amount of words can convey.  Take the news, for example.  A print story about the horrors of the tsunami just can not convey the devastation like a photo or video can.

For people who think an picture is worth a thousand words, Internet news sites like Google News must seem very dry - a thousand words and three images (does that equal four thousand words?).  Enter a new way to look at the world.  10x10.  100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale.  http://www.tenbyten.org

Rather than attempt to tell you in my own words, let me link you to the Wired article about 10x10.

-- Matt Ranlett

PS - Another fascinating site by the same people is WordCount - an interactive ranking of all of the words in the English language as found in a sample of "100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written"  I learned from this site that my name "Matthew" appears more frequently than "Microsoft", which appears more frequently than "Matt".  Those Brits sure are silly people!

OMFG!  I just read the funniest article!  The article basically states that rappers and bloggers have a lot in common with each other.  While not coming out and saying that Scoble is Eminem and Lotka is Snoop-Dog, Levin talks about rappers as a social group and bloggers as another very similar social group.  I have to give you my favorite quote from the article:

"...[R]appers' and bloggers' self-importance also has something to do with the supremely annoying righteousness that rides along with those who believe they're overturned the archaic forms of expression favored by The Man—that is, whitey and/or the mainstream media. Ninety percent of rap lyrics are self-congratulatory rhymes about how great the rapper is at rapping, the towering difficulties of succeeding in the rap game, or the lameness of wanksta rivals. Blogging is a circle jerk that never stops circling: links to posts by other bloggers, following links to newspaper stories about bloggers, following wonderment at the corruptions and complacency of old-fashioned, credentialed journalism."

http://slate.msn.com/id/2113913/

-- Matt Ranlett

PS:  In case you want to know how I found this awesome article, I was reading Wired Magazine.  Wired Magazine has this great info graphic in every issue where they take some phenomenon like the emerging market for pollution credits (this month's issue) and charts it out in some really slick way.  I just noticed that the title of this great feature is "Infoporn".  Awesome title!  So I went looking for it on Google - surely there is more of this stuff out there.  I came across Paul Boutin's blog - he's one of the writers who works for Wired and occasionally creates Infoporn.  You'll definitely want to check his blog out.  Not always technical, but funny!http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/2005/02/24#a1137

If you are interested in BizTalk there is a FREE training session that you can attend.  Thanks to Kirk for putting up the link.

http://blogs.msdn.com/kaevans/archive/2005/02/16/374511.aspx

--Brendon Schwartz

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

Brendon covered this interview for me, as I was once again struck down by the plague.  This time I went to the doctor’s office for a quick once over and some meds.  With all the antibiotics rampaging through me by now, I’ll be healthy as an ox.  Or at least as healthy as I was before I got the plague.

 

Chris Wallace is the star of the inaugural publication of “Tales from the Trenches” brought to you by the Atlanta .Net Regular Guys.  Chris met with Brendon at the Visual Basic.Net UG meeting and hung out afterwards for the traditional pilgrimage to Chili’s for food, beer, and more talk.  I want to thank both of them for braving the terrible weather and adjusting to the fluctuating schedules of everyone involved.

 

Chris is a .Net developer and the brains behind the Tamasii.com blog which was, until recently, hosted by DotNetJunkies.  Working for the Gwinnett Hospital Systems as a senior systems analyst, Chris has helped his department tremendously with his knowledge of .Net development.  Read on for a synopsis of Brendon’s interview.

 

“Do all programmers watch CSI and Without a Trace or is it just that me?  Chris and I are that cool and we have a lot in common.  It appears he works on computers all the time (like 18 hours a day) and still enjoys learning – file this fact under “What Brendon and Chris have in common”.  Yes I know you work more than 18 hours a day on the computer; put your name in the comments and maybe I will talk with you next.  =)

Let me tell you, this guy is a one man shop.  We talked about how he has control of the servers that he works on and how this is both a blessing and a curse.  It’s a curse because he has to maintain them, but he has the ability to change whatever he needs for his applications. 

We were talking about how he used to be hosted on DotNetJunkies and would blog there, but changed over to his new site (www.tasamii.com) where he has made some modifications (or mods, for those cool people) to his version of .Text.  He switched his web host over to http://www.webhost4life.com which really looks like a great deal for unlimited bandwidth.  He said since his switch he has seen a little bit of drop off in the number people that read his blog, but he is hoping that people just haven’t totally moved over yet.  Move People! Move!

I was going to ask the standard questions that people wanted us to ask, but he was such a nice guy and kept the conversation moving so well that he answered those things without me having to ask.  You wanted to know things like, “Why did he pick .NET?”  Well, he had been working on HTML, ASP, and VB and it was simply the logical next step.  Actually one reason he moved to it is that he has a web app that hits the server about once every minute or so.  Now this started out with a client size of about 10, but then grew to be a ton of people so he need a performance boost.  .NET gave him that boost by cutting his CPU performance from 80% utilization to under 45%.  He can comment on the actual numbers if I got them wrong. 

Chris’s current project is a scheduling app that uses colored buttons to tell different type of information.  Something cool that he is working on now is reading about GDI+ and he is going to come up with a way to create the button from different colors on the fly and different text from the database so he doesn’t have to create a graphic every time there is a need for a new button color.   I had asked him if he worked on any mobility or tablet pc or anything and unfortunately he hadn’t, but he said he is going to buy one at the beginning of March and he did have a cool Blackberry phone that he showed me my website from at the restaurant.  After seeing that, I guess Matt and I better work on making it more mobility friendly.”

 

— Matt Ranlett

It looks like they have added a new edition to make sure that you smart guys have something new to learn for your MCP tests and now you the prices are about the same, anywhere from FREE-over $25,000.  Here is the link to read more about it.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/feb05/02-24ExpandedProductSuitePR.asp

The SQL Server 2005 product line will consist of the following:

• SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition , a complete data and analysis platform for large mission-critical business applications
• SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition , a complete data and analysis platform designed for medium-sized businesses
• SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition , an affordable, easy-to-use and simple-to-manage database solution for small to medium-sized organizations
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition , a no-cost, easy-to-use version of SQL Server 2005 designed for building simple data-driven applications

Along with the SQL Server 2005 product line, Microsoft announced it would immediately make available SQL Server 2000 Workgroup Edition. This version will have the same focus as SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition, but will be based on SQL Server 2000 functionality.

Recognizing the advantages of delivering Workgroup and Standard Editions for small to medium-sized companies, Dell Inc. today announced it will be the first vendor to agree to offer Workgroup Edition and Standard Edition for both SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 prepackaged with Dell PowerEdge servers. Delivering a proof point of the enhanced value of SQL Server on Dell servers, Dell today made available results of a new record-breaking price/performance benchmark for TPC-C* using SQL Server 2000 Workgroup Edition on Dell PowerEdge servers at $1.40/tpmC.

-- Brendon Schwartz

The Connected Systems Business Kit is something from Microsoft that does not cost any money. Even shipping is free. All you have to do is fill out the standard name and address information and they will send you the DVD. I just ordered mine so hurry and get yours!

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/overview/benefits/cstrial.mspx

--Brendon Schwartz

This is a dump of ideas just so I won’t forget them, if you want to wait for Matt to clean it up that should come tomorrow.

Oh sorry that was William, but I had a great time either way talking with Chris who is the first person to do the “Tale of Trenches” aka “Atlanta RockStar Lounge” not that I support anybody being a RockStar I just liked the name. While re-reading that last sentence I thought that might have a chance for longest run-on sentence ever. Any, we had a great time and I am very glad he made it out to the VB.NET Study Group first with me and then talked to me at chilies afterwards. I am not really sure how we are going to do the posts for this segment, but I am just posting my ideas for tonight so I will not forget them. I don’t want to do a poor job because Chris made the effort of coming out for the night even though I think we had a flash flood. You can tell this is a little choppier than so of our usual posts because Matt was sick and could not make it out to the User Group meeting or the talk with Chris. Now that I have you caught up on what happened up to this point I will move on with the Tale. Ohhhhhhh

Do all programmers watch CSI and without a trace or is it just that me and Chris are that cool and have a lot in common. It appears he works on computers all the time (like 18 hours a day) and still enjoys learning. Yes I know you work more than 18 hours a day on the computer, put your name in the comments and maybe I will talk with you next. =). I am a little tired so don’t take my jokes the wrong way please. In fact we might not have this post up tomorrow, just depends on the format. Back to our story.

Let me tell you this guy is a one man shop. We talked about how he has control of the servers that he works on and how this is a blessing and a curse all at the same time. This is because he has to maintain them, but he has the ability to change what he needs for his applications. We were talking about how he used to be on DotNetJunkies and would blog there, but changed over to his new site where he has made some modifications (mods for those cool people) to his version of .Text that he has running. He switched over to http://www.webhost4life.com which really looks like a great deal. He said since his switch he has had a little bit of drop off in the people that read his blog, but he is hoping that people just haven’t totally moved over yet. Move People Move. I was going to ask the standard questions that people wanted us to ask, but he was such a nice guy and kept the conversation moving well that he answered things without me having to ask. You wanted to know things like why did he pick .NET, well he had been working on HTML, ASP, and VB and it was the next step. Actually one reason he moved to it is that he has a web app that hits the server about once every minute or so. Now this started out with a client size of about 10, but then grew to be a ton of people so he need a performance boost. .NET gave him that boost by cutting his CPU performance from 80% utilization to under 45%. He can comment on the actual numbers if I got them wrong. This app he has worked on is a scheduling app that uses colored buttons to tell different type of information. Something cool that he is working on now is reading about GDI+ and he is going to come up with a way to create the button from different colors on the fly and different text from the database so he doesn’t have to create a graphic every time there is a need for a new button color. I had asked him if he worked on any mobility or tablet pc or anything and unfortunately he hadn’t, but he said he is going to buy one at the beginning of March and he did have a cool Blackberry phone that he showed me my website from at the restaurant. I guess matt and I better work on making it mobility friendly. Matt might go have some lunch with him and get more info, but for now at 12:15AM that is all I have. We will clean this up and come up with a format to let you know about him in a more organized way, but thanks for reading. Have fun and let us know if you have a good story to tell.

--Brendon Schwartz

Unfortunatly, due to scheduling conflicts both Brendon and I missed the SQL Server meeting (they chose to move their meeting back a week rather than cancel for Valentine's Day.  That meant they met the same day as the Mobility group).  Since we couldn't be there I got this review of the meeting from David Rodriguez - the Microsoft guy at all of the SQL Server UG meetings.

"The presentation focused on SQL Server backup and system monitoring best practices.  Part of the presentation included details on how Idera’s products support these best practices above the capabilities of SQL Server integrated tools. The slides for the presentation should be available on the web site for Atlanta.mdf

DRR"

Thanks David!

-- Matt Ranlett

The dangerous thing about learning more about something is that you usually learn that you don't really know anything about it at all.  Here's a great pair of blog entries talking about interview questions which MIGHT be asked of prospective developers in general and .Net developers in particular.  Now, I've been a professional developer (ok - amateur masquerading as a pro) for nearly six years and I can't answer a lot of these questions.  Like I said, I've got a lot to learn:

Chris Sells posted some "fun" interview questions - http://www.sellsbrothers.com/fun/msiview/.  Actually, this page is a bunch of links to interview sites, but the bottom of the page has a link to the questions - divided into 4 categories.  Great stuff that brings you back to your early CS classes (implement a linked list...)

Scott Hanselman has posted some interview questions divided into experience levels - if you're a guru you should be able to answer everything where entry level should be good with the top set.  There are also some targeted questions for ASP.Net and XML developers.  Check Scott Hanselman's post (and a previous post about ASP.Net questions) out at http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WhatAGreatNETDevelopersOughtToKnowMoreNETInterviewQuestions.aspx

Thanks guys, for reminding me that I need to spend more time with my nose in books!

-- Matt Ranlett

I was flipping through the OldNewThing blog for some reason when I got sidetracked by this post about Power Toys and their history.  The entire blog is fascinating reading, but this one really caught my eye.  Perhaps that's because of the reference to the Mobile Developer's Power Toys.  Included in the power tools are several command line utilities (anyone question how MS developers prefer to work?) and some neat tools to work with ActiveSynch.  I've never tried them out, but they might be helpful.

-- Matt Ranlett

ps - even BizTalk has Power Toys now!

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

Wednesday.  6:30pm.  The New Horizons training center on LaVista Rd.

Or are you chicken?

— Matt Ranlett

keep an eye on the calendar – I’ll soon be updating it with the date, time, and location for the next Atlanta Geek Dinner

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

Before I mention anything else, I want to thank Doug Turnure and Microsoft for hosting us and ordering us pizza!  Thanks!

Despite the truly horrific storm (we actually took a break so people could go move their cars to lower levels of the parking deck in case of hail) we had a great turnout.  Twenty people came and participated in the round table discussion group style of presentation.  We were very relaxed and informal tonight, peppering our presenters with questions in the middle of their presentations.  I don’t know if they enjoyed it, but I sure like that style of presentation – the level of group involvement shows interest and attention.

First up on the big screen was Michael Earls.  He presented an idea that he credits to Keith Rome.  Basically, if you have a PocketPC device and want to watch movies (and with 1Gb compact flash cards, why not?), wouldn’t it be easier to do so with a Media Center type of interface?  So Michael dreamed up the Pocket Media Center and downloaded the OpenNetCF classes from www.OpenNetCF.org.  If you’ve never seen these tools before, you owe it to yourself to check them out, they’re one of the truly invaluable open source developer toolkits out there for anyone working with the .Net Compact Framework.  In the course of his presentation, Michael learned a valuable lesson for all of us – the CE emulators which come with Visual Studio require a network connection or loop-back adaptor for communication and debugging to be successful.  Michael’s short presentation was mostly dominated by people discussing the merits of the emulators and other developer toolkits they had experience with.  The other toolkit I remember being mentioned was the GDI+ wrapper and charting tool set from www.XRossOne.com. 

Our feature presenter for the evening was Shawn Wildermuth.  Shawn is widely recognised for his database programming expertise, and using databases on the .Net Compact Framework was the focus of the talk this evening.  Before delving into the actual methods of data access on the compact framework, Shawn pointed out some differences between the traditional networked PC and the mobile devices.  Aside from the obvious differences - screen real estate and small memory room, there are other differences between the PC and the mobile device.  Low bandwidth and range/access problems force you to think about your apps differently.  Input restrictions (no keyboard/mouse) make you think differently.  How you think about data has to change.  The CF allows access to System.Data (Datasets) and XML, but not serialisation.  The SQLClient requires connectivity. SQL CE allows offline data access but is not supported on the Smartphone platform.  Web services do work on all the platforms.  
Shawn's first demo was of the SqlClient.  While the code looks remarkably similar to what you would write with the full framework.  One caveat - there is no local cache on a mobile device.  Of course, that makes sense when you think about it - you wouldn't want to cache lots of data on a memory restricted device.
Next up was a discussion of SQL Server CE - a database engine that actually runs a database on your mobile device.  The neatest thing about it is that it uses HTTP for communication with SQL Server.  SQL Server CE allows two methodologies when it comes to data access - either remote data access or merger replication.  Remote Data Access is when you execute queries against a remote host.  Merge replication is when you bring some or all of the database to the device and make your changes locally.  SQL Server CE will handle sending changes to the server database.  Something nice about SQL Server CE is that the database engine handles compression for you, making it easier to send larger amounts of data across the "wire"
Web Services as a data access method is really Shawn's preferred method for accessing data.  Shawn really seems to like how much control he gets when he's designing his own web services.  Of course, the trade off for this amount of control is an additional amount of code.
Other topics of conversation included data binding (slow on the CF devices so push this off to another thread!) and some new features promised in SQL Server 2005's SQL Server Mobile Edition.  I won't go into all of the details of these two topics.  Instead, visit www.adoguy.com and look for his presentations section - the presentation and all the code he showed us is available for download.  Also look for his data factory class - he promised us that his magic base class for database work is freely available.

The evening wrapped up with some prize giveaways – no one walked away empty-handed.  We had books, hats, t-shirts, notepads, and more all thanks again to Doug Turnure and his magical swag closet.

Be sure to join us next month for Kirk Evans present the upcoming .Net Compact Framework 2.0.

— 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

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?