We had a great turn out for the Mobility group, but had a rocky start.  It was a cold winter day, ok so it wasn’t winter and it wasn’t really cold, but Matt and Michael were not able to make it.  They both had circumstances beyond their control, so I went ahead and ran the show. 

 

We had a great time learning about Mobility development for Pocket PC and had some great hands on demos.  The first presentation was a great introduction to the problems of the current CF.NET Framework and some of the “missing” features.  Venkat showed us how to add context menus for Cut and Paste to TextBoxes.  He showed how OpenNETCF has implemented a lot of the “missing” features for Compact Framework.  After a quick demo and showing the code required to make this work, we had our second presenter Kirk Evans come up.  He claimed he was going to show the new “missing” features that CF.NET 2.0 will be adding and the enhancements that will make it worth checking out.  If you are a mobility programmer and want to know what is coming in the next version you should have been at this meeting, I think they will post the slides on the Mobility site.  Kirk went over what is coming in Visual Studio 2005 and showed some of new IDE features like being able to skin your app for the device you are using (cool).  Even though Kirk was not feeling well he managed to give a great presentation that he claims he could do in his sleep.  My guess is that he is that smart and probably could. 

 

Once all the questions had finished we gave away some great prizes that Kirk had brought for us.  Also we had someone announce a position for a Mobility programmer and if you are interested send the Mobility leaders an email and they will put you in contact with him.

--Brendon Schwartz

 

 

update ******

Great post about the first presentation and source code

http://vpolisetti.blogspirit.com/archive/2005/03/24/enable_contextmenus_automatically_for_opennetcf_textboxex_co.html

My job involves working with lots of config data, conveniently stored in the system registry.  Now, there are all kinds of ways to get at the registry.  You can:

• use regedit and a .reg file.  To silently import a registry file use the /s switch.  To remove a key, prepend the registry key name with a ‘-‘.  This is really great for large amounts of data and works well with batch files
• use VBScript or JavaScript and the Windows Scripting Host or WMI for full access to the registry (and the rest of your system
• use the REG command line interface.  Check out this list of options: 

Before today I didn’t even know this tool existed for me.  I’ve used the other two methods frequently for unattended installs on remote machines, but this new tool looks very promising.  I learned about it from this post by Scott Hanselman (note the first comment)

— Matt Ranlett

New Scientist magazine recently published an article of 13 things that do not make sense.  These are 13 things which so dramatically violate the laws of physics and chemistry as we know them that we might find ourselves reconsidering the universe.  For example, does cold fusion work?  In 1989 an experiment said it did.  200 US Navy experiments later and we’re not sure one way or the other.  What about Dark Matter – the stuff that supposedly makes up 90% of the mass of the Universe and is the only thing that prevents galaxies from spinning apart.  According to our understanding of physics, it MUST exists, but no probe or telescope has EVER seen a single sign of it, aside from the fact that it MUST exist!

My personal favorite is from the medical field, concerning the placebo effect:

“DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.”

This means we might be able to make real medicine from nothing!  Also consider this one:

“Belfast homeopathy results

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.”

This means we might make water think that it is some kind of medicine!

Check out the entire article: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg18524911.600

— Matt Ranlett

Remember a while back I talked about what is required to increase your rank in Google?  I found this interesting article in Wired Magazine where a Search Engine Optimizer is interviewed.  In the article, Greg Boser talks about how his company, WebGuerrilla manipulates Google’s PageRank software – the software responsible for ordering the list of search results.

Per Google, "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'"

The gist of the article is this – if you want your site to rank really really high, get lots and lots of people to link to you.  Link exchanges DO work, but you need lots of them.

— Matt Ranlett 

Michael Hyatt writes a working smart blog with all kinds of helpful time management and productivity tips.  I like to read them even if I don’t implement most of them.  But this particular tip, with regard to presenting using PowerPoint, is very cool:

“display your slides through the projector as usual while simultaneously viewing the slide on the projector, your upcoming slides, your notes, and a timer—all on your laptop. It took about 60 seconds to setup.”

http://michaelhyatt.blogs.com/workingsmart/2005/01/powerpoints_pre.html#more

— Matt Ranlett

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

At the book club meeting tonight there was a short discussion about being a Microsoft MVP.  This got me to thinking… do we all know our MVPs?  Do we even know what an MVP is?  For those of us who don’t know, an MVP is an outstanding member of the technical community.  These outstanding people are recognized by Microsoft for their willingness to participate and help other community members.  These are the smart people around the world who write the interesting articles, newsgroup postings, and websites that we all read when we need help.  *MVPs are not tested for their technical skills, this award recognizes only their community service efforts.

We have a ton of these folks in the Atlanta/Georgia area.  I wanted to try to list a few of them out, but this is going to be an incomplete list as this information is not necessarily easy to come by.  My apologies in advance for anyone who got left out or mistakenly credited for living in Atlanta.  If you know something is off in this list, please comment on this post and I’ll update the main list.

Jim Behning – Small Business Server

Dave Bernard – Visual Foxpro

Tom Bishop – Tablet PC

Dana Coffey - ASP/ASP.Net

Thomas Divine – Windows Embedded

Mark Dunn – Visual Basic.Net

James Hambleton – Windows Embedded

Geoff Hiten – SQL Server

Teo Lachev – SQL Reporting Services

Dennis Rice – Tablet PC

Michael Sanford  – Windows Server SDK

Jerold Schulman – Windows 2000

James Shaw – ASP/ASP.NET

Shawn Wildermuth – C#

Paul Wilson – ASP/ASP.NET

— Matt Ranlett

The Atlanta .Net Book Club got together at 5 Seasons Brew pub tonight for the last time.  Not the last time that the book club will meet, it’s just that we’re not going back to 5 Seasons.  Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the place, it is just time we find a new home nearer the other UG meeting locations.

Tonight we doubled our membership when SIX people showed up.  That may not sound like a lot, but it’s actually a fantastic start.  We made sure that everyone who came had a copy of Dino Esposito’s Introducing ASP.Net 2.0 book and we planned out our schedule of how quickly to read it.  We all want to read about half or more of the book by the next meeting.  We hope to have some interesting questions and maybe even some sample code to look at.  The meeting in May (2 months from now) will be our final discussion of the book and the prep for the next book.

— 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

Everyone has something to complain about with their various RSS aggregators, so it is a really good thing that there are so many of them out there.  Should we add Microsoft to the list?

— Matt Ranlett

Doug gave the announcements and talked to the group about SQL Connections and PASS – upcoming SQL conferences.  Lots of jokes, a little bit of complaining about how salesy the last presentation was, and some thanks to our sponsors from Lumigent.

Harvey Parnell from Lumigent gave us a presentation on database auditing – an “essential business practice for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance”.  Did you know that SOX compliance requirements within organizations have actually changed from the first year to the second year?  In the first year of government regulated auditing, a lot of companies scrambled to meet the requirements.  Frequently those requirements just couldn’t be met easily because there aren’t any products on the market which meet the needs.  Basically, the Sarbanes-Oxley act dramatically changed financial reporting rules for public companies.  In the second year (this year) there is a lot of focus on forcing accuracy of data down to the individual database level through automated tools and manual processes.  The goal is to avoid future Enrons and Worldcoms (accounting scandals).  As far as databases are concerned, the data contained inside of the financial applications are critical to the public organizations.  Auditing attempts to prevent unauthorized access from both external and internal threats from happening, and if they happen they need to be monitored.  Basically there are many auditing controls which are either violated or deficient.  For example, development staff can run transactions in the production system.  This brings to light the need to apply database auditing to all types of data access.  That way, if something goes wrong, you know what the data was before the problem, what it is after the problem, and how to prevent the problems in the future.  While tonight’s presentation focused on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, there are other legislative requirements for auditing including the HIPAA (medical patient records), Graham Leach Billey Act and Basel II (personal financial records), and other regulations which require data retention for periods of time, such as seven years.  After showing us how difficult it really is to monitor a database system as completely as one needs to be monitored, Lumigent’s staff told us how their application, the Entegra Auditing System meets as many of these needs as possible, with more features on the way.

Next Month – Shawn Wildermuth talking about CLR integration between Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) and SQL Server 2005 (Yukon).  After several DBA-centric presentations, I personally will be happy to see something which speaks a little more to the concerns of the developers in the audience.  Those who have seen Shawn present at the main .Net User Group or the Atlanta Mobility User Group know he is an engaging speaker.  Come refresh your understanding of how the CLR integrates with the new Yukon database engine.

— Matt Ranlett

The date and location are up for the Atlanta Geek Dinner this month. March 24th @ Harps Irish Pub.

Check out details.

Also the organizer Shawn has a post too.

--Brendon Schwartz

In case you haven't heard Chris is going to do something that I am very interested in.  It is what most of us developers do, but never really package together.  He is going to do something like community server, but using DotNetNuke as the front end.  I look forward to it and would love to use it when he gets it up and running.

http://tamasii.com/blog/archive/2005/03/11/48830.aspx

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

Brendan Tompkins just posted a blog about random number generation within .Net.  I felt it was topical since we just saw Keith Rome do some random number generation in his AppCenter Test demo for the C# User Group.

Brendan’s post starts off with, “If you want a true random number generator, you will want to look beyond System.Random, to the RNGCryptoServiceProvider in the .NET Framework”.

— Matt Ranlett

The VB group is one of the only groups which is not meeting in the Microsoft offices.  They get together in the New Horizons training center off of LaVista Road.  Tonight’s meeting had a smaller group than usual.  I’m assuming everyone is as busy as I am recently at work and just can’t spare the time.  I know that we’re not talking about a lack of advertising – Brendon and I have been getting up in front of every single user group announcing all the upcoming meetings for the month.  But I’m not discouraged by low turnout – quite the opposite.  Every group has been experiencing record-breaking turnout recently.

Tonight’s meeting had three speakers scheduled but only two managed to turn out.  And of the two that turned out, only one really had a presentation ready for display.  That completely disorganized, unprepared presenter was me!  But that’s a different story for a different day.

I was signed up to talk about the FileSystemObject how it differs from the System.IO namespace.  The gist of my presentation was this – the FileSystemObject is actually part of the Windows Scripting Host.  This is useful because it means that you can use the FileSystemObject outside of .Net applications.  I showed an example of a VBScript file and a JavaScript program, both using the FileSystemObject to work with disks, directories, and files.  The System.IO namespace offers more power and flexibility than the FSO does.  For example, with the System.IO namespace you can get the extension of a file with the .GetExtension method.  With the FSO you’ll have to search the file name string for the ‘.’  I didn’t have time to get a proper VB.Net sample project ready for everyone to see, so Jim came to my rescue.  He had an application he uses to read in some bizarre custom format text files.  He showed us how he could do the job with the FSO, a System.IO StreamReader, and a System.IO FileStream.  We didn’t have a good way to measure performance, but the general feeling of the group is that the System.IO namespace would be faster than the FSO.  If for no other reason, the FSO seems to require a COM Interop layer.  For those of you who might be interested in how to use the FileSystemObject in JavaScript or VBScript, check out DevGuru.com – they have the entire object model of both scripting languages and more.  Also, you should take a look at the Scriptomatic.

Brendon was the second speaker, presenting an interesting technique he found on the web to add custom properties to an enumeration.  For example, he was able to create an enumeration of integers which had associated descriptions.  This could be really valuable in cases like binary bit masking or error codes.  With this technique you can have a meaningful description associated with otherwise bizarre enumeration values.  I don’t have any links for examples of Brendon’s code yet, but he’ll be putting them up on the VB.Net site soon enough.

After the meeting we made our traditional pilgrimage to Chili’s for some food, drink, and talk.

— Matt Ranlett

I’ve seen cheaper, but you know you have some excellent people backing you up if you need help…

http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/products/online/wh/detail.mspx

— Matt Ranlett

Williem Odendaal posted some helpful Google tips a while ago.  I thought I’d share them with you.

1. After the search phrase, type site:microsoft.com. This will return only results from the microsoft.com domain.
2. To find out what a word means, type define insane. With define being the keyword and insane the word I'm unsure of.
3. To do conversions, type 12 pounds in kilograms. Very nice. Obviously this works for a lot of other conversions as well.
4. And I just read about this this morning - to search for a word and all it's synonyms, use the tilde key. For example - ~food ~facts.

— Matt Ranlett