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

Apress – suggestions for writing a review

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

O’Reilly – suggestions for writing reviews

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

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

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

Jeong Moon
APress – Pro SQL Server Reporting Services

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

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

Trent Whiteley
APress – Advanced .NET Remoting, Second Edition

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

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

—Brendon Schwartz

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Brendon Schwartz

 This blog posted with BlogJet

I spent a large part of the last two days installing the newest Visual Studio 2005 Beta.  This was quite a long process! 

• First of all, I’m using Virtual Machines (VMWare’s equivalent to Microsoft’s Virtual PC) so I had to get an XP VM image working. 
• Then I had to spend several hours getting my XP image upgraded with Service Pack 2 (required for VS2005) and all the latest security fixes. 
• Then I had to install and format a new hard drive in the VM because VS2005 requires 2.6 GB free and my XP VM had far less than that available on its C: drive (SQL Server 2000 is also installed).  Oddly enough, VS2005 required free space on my C: drive even through I was installing onto the E: drive.  In fact, VS2005 Beta 2 required 870 MB free on C: and 1.7 Gb on E: – and this is without MSDN!
• Once I had enough free space on the C: drive, I ran the install program and let it go for hours unattended.  When I came back, one component I had selected failed to install – SQL Server 2005 CTP.  I’d run out of disk space with 122 Mb still free!  Since I’ve got SQL Server 2000 installed, I’m not worried about that just yet.

Now I’m ready to do some ASP.Net 2.0 work!  I’m fairly excited.  I’ve got my Dino Esposito ASP.Net 2.0 book ready and I’m looking forward to creating my first website that uses a membership database.  I’m going to base my work off of Michael’s recent presentation.

I also wanted to give credit where credit is due – I’m using a piece of software called Alcohol 52% to mount ISO disk images as usable DVD-ROMs.  My laptop doesn’t have a DVD burner and I can’t really be bothered to copy the 2.85 Gb disk image file I downloaded from MSDN to the machine that does.  I don’t really need a physical copy of beta software.  What Alcohol 52% (free 30 day trial) allows me to do is use the ISO disk image file as if it were a real CD or DVD.  I can even share it and use it inside of my Virtual Machine.  That’s a nice bit of functionality and it really cuts down on the amount of disks I need to carry with me from place to place.

— Matt Ranlett

I have been super busy at work these last several weeks.  After a long period of development with a defined schedule (I was on loan to the development team – I’m officially part of the “customer team”), I’ve entered that hectic mode where I’ve been preparing demos, testing and tightening up code releases, travelling to the customer site to ensure they feel as warm and fuzzy about our new version as we do, etc.  All of this has meant lots of late nights, phone calls, and general craziness.  I’m hoping that once we get the final code drop to the customers (bug fixes repairing issues discovered in the client’s labs) things will calm down again and I’ll have time to breathe.  As it is, last night I ended up missing the VB meeting b/c I stayed at work until 8pm then had to rush to a local FedEx shipping facility to drop off a demo system that needed to be in the UK overnight.  I was running so late that I had to call the FedEx 800 number, get them to transfer me to the local office, and pretend to be lost so they’d stay on the phone with me and stay open!  It worked and I made it by the skin of my teeth.  Once I was out of there, I was going to head over to the VB group, but they’d pretty much finished up so I just went home to visit my poor, neglected doggies.

Work, work, work.  I’m tired of work – I want time at home so I can study up on some of my .Net stuff.  Different work!  Work with no deadlines feels different from work where people actually expect things from you.  But seriously, it is a statement about us, those of us who work all day then go home to do more work, isn’t it?  Is it a good statement?  I hope so!

— Matt Ranlett

It’s recently been a very busy couple of weeks for me, causing me to miss several user group meetings.  I also forgot to update the Mobility website for an entire month!  I’m really sorry about that.  I’ve also been having Exchange problems – the server ended up having hardware problems that required complete replacement (replacing the motherboard and both hard drives didn’t fix it).  All of this trauma aside, we managed to have a very successful UG meeting.

Michael Earls presented a topic totally unrelated to Mobility programming, membership services with ASP.Net 2.0.  Beginning with a few slides to introduce the basic concepts of Members, Roles, and Profiles, Michael quickly dove into a demo where he built an entire website with a membership database and login capabilities right in front of the group.  The demo went extremely well; even when Michael couldn’t get a tool to work, he was able to show off the depth of his knowledge by attacking the problems in different directions.  All this while fielding questions from the group!  Extending the scope of the discussion a bit, Michael also showed off Master Pages and some of the new Beta 2 capabilities.  Refactoring, Intellisense support of custom types, generics, etc.  I hope he’s ready to represent this discussion (again – Atlanta isn’t the first group to see this particular presentation).

Following the meeting and the traditional raffle of prizes provided by our sponsor (everyone say “Thanks” to Doug Turnure at Microsoft for both the continuously available meeting space and the incredible wealth of swag), the Mobility UG leaders got together to discuss the future of the group.  We talked about widing the scope of our meetings to include more presentations on other .Net topics.  The general feeling of the group leadership is that we seem to be running out of mobility topics due to a lack of presenters in the area.  So if anyone wants to present mobility topics, feel free to contact us and get yourself scheduled!

— Matt Ranlett

When learning .NET I find it useful to have a couple different methods of learning.  Here are some of the learning resources that I use.

First, I find that if I want to learn a topic thoroughly I turn to books or SDK documentation.  I find that books give a more straightforward approach to many topics than just trying to find article to read on the web.  Next I go to training classes, which could include anything from webcasts to in person training such as Dunn Training or Developmentor.  These classes can help get you up to speed on a topic in fractions of the time it would take you to learn them on your own or to ask your friend in the cubical next to yours.  Then to stay up to date or to learn new topics I attend user groups or free events.  These are such thing as the C# User Group or MSDN Events.  These are a great way to talk with other developers and to learn about a topic that you find interesting.

Here is my list of how I would rank these training materials based on Content per dollar:
1) Books – Best return on the amount of money they cost and if you have time to read it you will probably know more about the topic than listening to someone tell you about it.
2) Training classes – Even though it costs a little more than a book, these are well worth the cost and are life savers if you have to learn something very quickly.  These are also great if you are not directly paying for them because the content per dollor goes up considerably.  Also you have the opportunity to ask the instructors questions on topics you don’t understand, which will make learning much faster and more in depth.
3) User Groups – Well I bet most of you thought I would put this as the number 1 bang for the buck deal, but in most cases I feel that the books and training are more in depth on topics.  I think that user groups are great if you want training that is low cost and you have time to go to them.  Don’t get me wrong even at number 3 it is still a very important part of being a developer.

Based on cost:
1) User Groups – These are the best way to learn current and new topics without having to spend any money and they are usually after hours, which make them easy to get to.  Also you might win prizes that make them an even better deal.
2) Books – If you are willing to put in the effort to read the book you will have a great return on the money.  What I have found is that most people actually don’t read the entire book they skim through chapters they don’t find interesting.  I feel those people are missing out a little bit because it always happens that I find something I didn’t know about in those chapters I wasn’t interested in reading about.
3) Training classes – Aside from Microsoft Webcasts which could be consider under user groups, training classes usually cost more money and are held for a limited amount of time.  If you don’t think of your questions during the event, people tend to usually shy away from emailing the instructor to ask how to accomplish something.

Overall summary:
1) Books – 1.5 Ranking
2) User Groups – 2 Ranking
3) Training – 2.5 Ranking

Like I said in the beginning, I use all of these resources.  Just because I list them on how I use them doesn’t mean that is how you have to use them.  Actually, let me know what you think, tell me how you would rank these learning resources or if you have others that I didn’t talk about.

--Brendon Schwartz

Check out the Guide to buying Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. We need to recommend that Microsoft put a calculator on the webpage just like buying a house.

Now it gets better.  Here is the way I see it.  If you already have an MSDN subscription then you are ok, but if don’t now is your chance to spend $2,000 dollars to become ok.  You must act quickly though to give Microsoft your $2,000 dollars now this way your subscription will run out sooner, but you will be able to have VS2005 at a discounted cost of $2,000 dollars a year.

So now if you are an MSDN Universal subscriber you must pick what type of developer you are: Developer, Architect, or Tester.  With this model, MSDN subscriptions now fall in line with the Visual Studio product.  So my question is why are we still calling it an MSDN subscription, isn’t it just a Visual Studio subscription? 

Do you own a Standard edition of VS2003?  There do not appear to be any upgrade options for you today from what I can find.  You will most likely need to either get or purchase a copy of the express edition or move up to the professional edition of VS2005.

So how much does all of this really cost?  Well I don’t think they are going to say, but here is what I can tell from Microsoft’s web pages.  These are my guesses and might not be accurate when the final release comes out.

VS2005 purchased by itself:
Visual Studio 2005 Professional has an estimated retail price of $799.
Visual Studio 2005 Team Editions for Software Developers, Architects, or Testers has an estimated retail price of $5,469/year each
Team Foundation Client Access License has an estimated retail price of $499

MSDN purchased by itself (these are all 1 year subscriptions):
MSDN Universal – upgrade $2,299 full version Estimated Price $2,799
MSDN Enterprise – upgrade $1,599 full version Estimated Price $2,199
MSDN Professional – upgrade $899 full version Estimated Price $1,199

After the release of VS2005 MSDN pricing: Unknown at this point.

So if you want to know how much it costs for VS2005, I guess it depends on how many years you are going to use it for.

Don’t get me wrong I think the tools are great that Microsoft is coming out with.  I just think it is tough to figure out how much money you are going to pay anymore to create Windows applications.  I think that the unknown might start turning more people off from developing Windows based applications unless they do it as a job.  Tell me what you think and if the prices are too high or just right.

One last note not to forget you also have these costs.  Your guess is as good as mine on the cost.

"The Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server is sold separately on a Server/CAL basis. Each of the Visual Studio 2005 Team Editions for Software Developers, Architects, and Testers includes a CAL for the Team Foundation Server. To learn more about Team Foundation Server, click here."

--Brendon Schwartz

I’m out to dinner with 2 coworkers and several of the client’s IT staff.  We’re talking about all kinds of stuff that people talk about after work (OK, mostly complaining about the coworkers who aren’t present) when we get to the subject of travelling for work.  I won’t bore you with the details of the conversation except for the part where my potential travel to foreign ports of call were discussed.  Specifically Paris and Hong Kong.  I would love to travel to those places like you wouldn’t believe.  Even if some of the time there was for work, I’d love to go. I’ve been overseas to London as a teenager, but as an adult I’ve never been further out of country than the Caribbean.

Let’s go into story swapping mode.  Tell me about the coolest place you’ve ever visited (and let’s stick to the places you go for work related purposes – I don’t want to hear about how your vacations are better than mine).

I’ve been to several decent American cities for work, including Nashville (Gibson cafe = cool) but the best place I went to was Chicago.  I was consulting for Amoco Oil and got to go to all kinds of great restaurants and whatnot while I was there.  I even got to sit near Jerry Springer at dinner once (while he was there with some girl who absolutely had to be a stripper).  The work was decent, the pizza was good, the beer was better, and I got to be friends with a guy born on leap year.  Every leap year I get an e-mail about the other (famous) people born on leap year from my 36 year old friend celebrating his 9th birthday.  I had fun in Nashville (the work environment sucked but the fun I had after work was great – I saw a bunch of bands and hung out talking to the lead singer of once of them (hot chick) for a while) but I have to rate my time in Chicago as tops while at that job.  I’ve also spent a lot of time down in Orlando working for a client who could get me into Disney World for free.  While the people were nice and Disney World is Disney World, I think I spent so much time down there that it kind of lost the magic.  But of all the places I’ve travelled, I’ve never gotten to/had to travel internationally for work.

So let’s share some stories.  Here’s mine.  While in Chicago I met a guy who worked for Amoco.  He was part of the lab team responsible for wiring the network cables and whatnot.  I don’t know if you guys are aware of this, but that job can be filled with union people in large companies.  This is the case at Amoco – I would get in trouble if I plugged a machine into the hub right next to it if I didn’t call a union guy to do it for me.  Anyway, this guy was part of the union.  Great guy personally, I don’t know how he kept his job.  He shared a story about how he went on vacation one time for two or three weeks without telling the company that he was going.  He paid for the entire $15,000 trip with the company card.  This was three years before I met him.  He STILL had his job!!!!  Amazing!

— Matt Ranlett

Note – this post was written at 12:30 am after 3 beers and 4 glasses of whiskey.  Aaaah, there’s no travel like business on the road!

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

--Brendon Schwartz

So I’m now down here at the client site, and I’ve just recently been introduced to a new contractor down here.  Keep in mind that I’m out of state.  The new contractor knows me from the Atlanta User Groups – he remembers me from when I was “instructing” the VB user group back in November.  Apparently the topic was a Windows Mobility topic.

I thought that was a fascinating event – running into someone I know so far from home.  I mean, the last time I was ‘introduced’ to someone I already knew, I was just hanging out in Barnes & Noble in Alpharetta.  Now I can’t even escape you guys when I leave the state!   Seriously though, it’s nice to see a friendly face, and it’s nice to see that people keep their skills sharp via the user groups and that translates into real job opportunities.

— Matt Ranlett

Howdy folks!  I’m back from my blogging vacation (I hope).  The past few weeks haven’t really been a lot of fun for me – first I was sick with both the flu and strep throat at the same time.  Follow that up with a week or two of intense “get it done” pressure at work so we can make a major delivery to our largest client including a weekend where I put in 30 hours this past Saturday and Sunday alone (16 hours on Saturday, 14 on Sunday).  Of course, since we managed to get our delivery out the door in time, but with some potential instability (after so much last minute work, confidences weren’t as high as we’d hoped they’d be).  So that meant someone has to travel with the delivery down to the client site so we could hold their hand.  Included in the “someone” is yours truly!  I’m writing this entry in the airport lobby, watching my plane pull up to the terminal listening to the Garden State soundtrack on my Creative MuVo MP3 player.  Of course, last minute air travel for work wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t bump up against some personal travel, so I’m flying back into the Atlanta airport exactly 8 hours before I’m supposed to fly back out again.  This time I’m headed out for a quick jaunt to Las Vegas.

All of this work and illness has left me feeling a little bit out of touch.  I’m missing or have missed 5 user group meetings.  Brendon has been doing an excellent job of covering for me, and I appreciate it.  It’s good to be part of a team that works.

OK – plane is boarding soon.  I’m putting the laptop away for the evening.  I’m looking forward to some well earned sleep.

— Matt Ranlett

The group seemed to grow to a standard “over 25” group; this is the second or third week in a row that all the regular seats were full.  I have to say that says that Paul and Keith are doing a great job.  This group is a great group for people to talk with each other at the beginning and at the break; I guess they have something in common, like computers.  There were a bunch of new faces in the crowd and it was great to meet some of the local Atlanta Bloggers that showed up for the meeting.  Keith and Paul gave the standard introduction and there were a few job announcements.  Keith then jumped into his talk about Threading.  I call it that because he mostly talked about classes in the System.Threading namespace.  From what I heard from people in the audience the section on Locks was one of the best they had ever seen before!  Wow what a compliment (Great job Keith and keep it up).  After that we had a session of make the Microsoft man talk as much as you can and complain about the new products as much as you can.  We asked questions about the next Visual Studio coming out and about how pricing might be structured.  The funny part was we really didn’t have any concrete answer aside from the fact that he said they can’t give away a product that has taken a while to make.  After we had finished announcements for Code Camps and asking the Microsoft Man questions we moved on to Mitch’s presentation on C# 2.0.  Unfortunately we had spent so much time on breaks and other taking that he was not able to give his full presentation.  He was able to cover generics and anonymous method calls both of which he did a wonderful job on.  Hopefully he will be able to finish up the presentation at one of the other user groups.  Make sure if you attend a user group that you go around and at least say hello to other people in the room, they may be interested in talking with you if you are interested in .NET. 

-- Brendon Schwartz

Check out the picture from last nights C# user group

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

--Brendon Schwartz

Q: Is Matt on vacation?
A: No

Q: Is Matt ok or was he in a terrible accident or something?
A: Yes Matt is ok and No he was not in any kind of accident.

Q: Does Matt not like me anymore?
A: Matt still likes you and still enjoys hanging out with you especially at user groups.

Q: Are the user groups just too much for Matt?
A: No, going to 8 to 10 user groups a month is not too much for Matt he loves hanging out with his friends.

Q: Will Matt ever do a good review of the user groups again instead of Brendon’s?
A: We can all only hope!

Q: Does Matt still have access to a computer or did he move to country where they don’t have power?
A: Matt still does own a computer and has running water and electricity; he should be blogging again soon and near a computer any time now.

Q: Will we ever see Matt again?
A: Yes so here is the deal

Matt was sick a couple of weeks ago, in fact he was not able to show up to 1 or two groups because he was sick which is a good thing for the rest of us. (Thanks for think about the group Matt and not getting us sick).  Then Matt had a lot of work he had to do for his actual job since he doesn’t get paid to go to user groups.  And finally Matt had to go out of town and will be on vacation later next week to relax a little.  He should be back on the scene after next week and back in action soon.  See you at the user groups soon Matt.

--Brendon Schwartz

I wanted to get other peps feed back on what book they would recommend if their friend asked them to recommend an excellent C# book. 

Give me your two cents on what a good book would be. 

--Brendon Schwartz

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

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

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

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

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

-- Brendon Schwartz

Over seventy people showed up for the third .Net User Group meeting of the year, the third in the new Microsoft Offices.  There were snacks and drinks for all who attended and we got started after a few short announcements.

Doug Ware, user group leader extraordinaire, was the sole presenter of the evening as circumstances beyond anyone’s control prevented the main speaker for the evening from coming to discuss cryptography.  But Doug was prepared with a free-ranging discussion of using Visual Studio’s Setup projects to create application installers.  Beginning with a quick thirty minute overview and ending with questions from the group on conditional installation behaviors and Windows Management Instrumentation scripting with VBScript and Javascript, Doug managed to fill the entire evening with MSI installer education.  Doug has lots of experience dealing with setup applications and he shared some of his hard earned wisdom.  For example, Doug recommends that you don’t use a bootstrap setup (creates an .exe AND a .msi installer) as you are highly unlikely to find a machine WITH the .Net framework (required by any Visual Studio setup application) but WITHOUT the Windows Installer.  Doug recommends you look into Orca, the MSI editor, so that you can change some behaviors of the MSI that Visual Studio doesn’t expose to you.  Another of Doug’s tips is to pay close attention to the Launch Conditions dialog (because this badly named dialog actually includes 2 dialogs which can be used to help control conditional installer behavior).  One final note – to get at some of the global variables defined within an MSI through script, check the Session.Property(“CustomActionData”) value.  For example, to get the target install directory, you’d check Session.Property(“TARGETDIR”).

Since the main speaker for the evening was unable to show up, everyone went home after Doug finished his presentation and handed out a few prizes.

— Matt Ranlett