Big news announcements up-front:
CLR Team coming to C# Group – Monday, May 2nd
David Chappell coming to present the Indigo Roadshow at MS Building (instead of New Horizons) – May 18th
MSDN Event – May 19th

The job market really seems to be picking up – we had several people with job openings, including Microsoft itself!

The first presenter – Shawn Wildermuth was running late so Michael Earls stalled for time by showing us site maps and tab controls in ASP.Net 2.0 (both taking advantage of MasterPages).  A sitemap is an xml file which defines the layout of a website.  A cool feature of sitemaps is a new feature called security trimming – the ability to hide tabs or parts of a site based on a user’s security role.  As far as the tab control itself, just include the new Asp:Menu control and you’re pretty much good to go!  Michael showed us a quick live demo (complete with demo gremlin) of a three page site using a tab control.  By setting the SiteMapDataSource control, you can tie your MasterPage to the sitemap.

Shawn Wildermuth showed up about twenty minutes late but he brought food so everyone forgave him. Shawn elected to give up his time slot to Alan Griver – the group manager for Visual Studio Data.  Alan’s group is in charge of data views, designer connections to data, the SQL query tool, XML tools, Visual FoxPro, the Reporting Services report writer, SQL CLR integration, and more.

Last Thursday the VB team announced that VB is going to support refactoring in Visual Studio 2005.  Alan’s first demo showed off a very simple VB app.  VB Refactoring supports creating a constant, creating a local variable, creating a method, reordering parameters, inline temps (removing local variables).  Not available with the latest Beta 2 download, you can download and install the refactoring support from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic.  The quick little demo (a tiny little app that calculates the area of a cylinder) was actually very impressive, complete with animations during the refactoring process.  The slick refactoring capabilities are courtesy of Refactor! for Visual Studio 1.0.  The out of the box VB.Net 2005 capabilities can be purchased for Visual Studio 2002, 2003, and C# 2002 – 2005 from Refactor!

The next demo Alan showed us involved the benefits of the background compilation.  The example was the creation of a property with get and set methods.  When the property was changed to a readonly property, the background compiler was able to symmantically check the code and show that the readonly property should have a set method.  A smart tag showed up informing us of two methods for fixing the problem – removing the readonly attribute or removing the set method.  Very nice.

The snippets demo was very nice as well – small amounts of code prewritten and insertable, complete with editable fields you can tab through.  The example shown was the creation of an HTML e-mail.  The fields were the TO, FROM, BODY, SUBJECT, and SMTPSERVER attributes.  A snippet editor will be available but Alan wasn’t sure if the editor would be included in the package or if it would be a download from the new 2005 community site.  An important point about snippets is that they can include comments

A tangential conversation covered the Ladybug project – a community bug tracking and submission initiative where the community at large can contribute enhancement and bug reports (and vote on them) which are fed directly into Microsoft’s internal bug tracking system.  Another method of submitting feedback to Microsoft and the Microsoft user community is the Community menu option built directly into Visual Studio.  There are links directly into Ladybug and into the Microsoft forums/newsgroups.

The next demo focused on a few neat Winforms tricks. 

• The first nice thing was the addition of the ability to specify a default data source type – once you pick SQL Server you don’t have to pick it again unless you need to change to something else. 
• Another nice addition is the ability to change views in the server explorer.  This means you can change the default view to see an object view (tables, views, stored procedures, functions), a schema view, and more.  This is to give you the same views you’d get in the datasource tools themselves.  You can, for the first time, see Oracle packages. 
• When you use the wizard to create a new datasource, the connection string you specify is automatically saved to the app.config file. 
• The ALT+SHIFT+ENTER key combo gives you a full screen view
• The Data Sources window allows you to pick columns and tables.  New to Beta 2 is the ability for the Data Sources window to autodetect relationships within the data (ex. Customers -> Orders table relationship) and render them as such
• The databinding example (complete with a demo of the winform layout enhancements) was really impressive.  By dragging a few fields and an entire table (child relationship) onto the form, the text boxes, labels, and data grid view were all generated automatically.  Even more impressive, a manually created text box can be data bound simply by dragging a data field onto the control.
• The neat ability to data bind a combo box was really impressive – dragging a foreign key field from the parent child relationship onto the form creates a record bound to the parent record.  By dragging the foreign key table onto the control causes a new binding source to be created – automatically binding the combobox to the table.
• Windows projects can be made into single instance applications (preventing multiple copies from running at the same time) by simply checking a box in the project properties dialog
• Application Events allow VB projects to be aware of app events like NetworkStatusChanged, StartupNextInstance (when the second or beyond instance of a program is started), and UnhandledException (an exception of last resort)
• The new XSD data designer is really slick – strongly typed and complete with the ability to get to user data or create new stored procedures.
• The XML editor is also really slick – if you specify a schema file (XSD or DTD) VS2005 will automatically create snippets for you.  This way, if you open a node with 10 required child nodes and several attributes, simply by specifying the parent node you’ll automatically get an auto-generated snippet inserted into the code with tabbable fields.
• XSLT can now be debugged from within projects.  Microsoft has hooked XSL into the debugger by having it generate IL.  This enables you to step from a C# debug session to an XSLT session back to a C# debug session.

The MY keyword works like a “speed dial” into the framework.  For example, to play a song in the background (different thread) all you have to do for the thread generation is use the MY keyword with the Computer.Audio namespace.  To get to configuration values saved in App.Config, just use the My.Settings namespace to have Intellisense access to the elements of the config files.  Eventlogging is now built into the VB framework using the My.Application.Log namespace.  You can easily see how the My keyword has the potential to greatly speed the development process.  In fact, the MY namespace is actually extensible so companies can extend the MY keyword with their own business objects.

 The final demo was of Object binding.  Alan opened a new instance of Visual Studio and created a pair of classes using the new Class Designer (anyone remember WhiteHorse?).  The Class Designer allows for a drag and drop GUI that allows quick class outlines.  Drop a blue box on the screen to represent a class and use the simple list editor below to add methods and properties.  Drag associations between the classes and “foreign keys” are created for you.  The code is automatically generated.  Back to the demo –> the new ClassLibrary was compiled and then included in the original data binding demo.  From that point forward, the Intellisense and data binding worked exactly like the database data binding worked.  Also, changing the code will automatically update the drawing.

Alan was a great presenter, willing to redirect his demos to answer everyone’s questions.  The presentation was a quick overview of a tremendous amount of stuff, and there was no slideshow presentation for the .Net UG to post on their website.

We had great turnout tonight – 78 people came to hear Alan’s presentation.  A familiar face at the UGs – Marcy the DataGrid girl is back in town.  Everyone say “Hi!”  I’m sure some of them showed up to hear Shawn too, but he’s a local boy now and doesn’t have the same mystique he once had.  I wonder if Shawn’s still a Red Sox fan?  Isn’t that a requirement of living in Boston?

— Matt Ranlett
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VB.NET re-cap from 4/20/05.  We checked out how to put scripting code into an Windows Form application.  Stephen had a great test harness for using a function to perform a task based on the two variables he put in.  He would change the script in the Windows Form and then take the script from the textbox and put that into the application.  You could compare this to writing C#, VB.NET, or any other language on the fly.  Something very similar that we talked about was using the CodeDom class to write code on the fly.  Once we finished up with our discussions of how to use this in a business case we moved on to the new features of VB.NET 2.0 and VS2005.  Dan gave an overview of some of the great new features like operator overloading.  He demonstrated some of the features with demos and fielded questions about the new features that he had been looking at.  

—Brendon Schwartz

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May 2nd Brad Abrams and some of the CLR team are going to be at the C# user group.  I have just received a wonderful package from Addison Wesley that has a couple small gifts.  This is nothing big, but it was very nice of them to send something for the group.  I don’t think I will have enough for everyone so if you would like a gift put a comment/trackback on this post with your name and I will make sure you get one at the meeting.

Fine print:  You must put your name in a comment on this post or a track back to a blog post about the C# meeting with Brad Abrams and you must be at the meeting to get the gift.

Update***** In response to a request from the UG leaders, we will be giving out the gift packs as raffle prizes like normal.  The people who have already signed up on the blog for gifts will get ones as promised (after the meeting), but the rest will be given away as part of the C# meeting.  The ADNRG want to thank the C# group for their hard work in getting great speakers and would like to continue to help them in any way they see fit.

—Brendon Schwartz

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With the recent release of VS2005 Beta 2, a lot of people are playing around and experimenting with things like CLR queries in SQL Server 2005, membership websites, etc.  Some of these people are thinking about writing their experiences down in an article format so it can be published and shared with the world.  It takes time to write an article, especially if you’ve never done it before.  Take a look at this set of author guidelines from MSDN (the Mecca of technical publications as far as Microsoft technologies is concerned).

Other writing aids:

• The Elements of Style by Strunk and White – required reading on using the English language in written form
• A random How To Write a How-To on www.evolt.org
• For those of you with loftier goals, check out Prentice Hall’s guide to writing a technical book.
• Suggestions for writing a book review from www.Apress.com

Share your thoughts with the world, even if you do nothing more than write a few humble blog posts.  You never know when your experiences might prove valuable to someone else.

— Matt Ranlett

In the Perimeter Mall, over by Bloomingdales, there are several seating areas with sofas, coffee tables, and comfortable chairs.  These are great spots to hold a small group meeting, as the Book Club found out.  Several people can easily sit around a coffee table and hold an interesting conversation without having to move any of the chairs around.

Like all the previous book club meetings, the discussions were very free-ranging and open, covering large areas of subject matter.  While not specifically discussing the chapters of the ASP.Net 2.0 book by Dino Esposito everyone is reading, we did talk about website design including 2.0 components such as membership services.  The conversation started out of a discussion between Brendon and Keith – they are talking about their plans to build an events server that helps keep several user group websites up to date.  The design discussions of this events server turned to web services and ownership of data.  The question became, is it ‘better’ to have a central events server which gets directly updated by UG leaders and then sends down to the UG website a self updating calendar, or is it better for each site to be individually maintained and have the events server be nothing more than a central calendar that gets notified of updates by autonomous user group websites.  The basic question here is, who should own the data, the UG website or the central server?  Brendon and Keith (and I, for that matter) feel that UG leaders don’t really want to worry about maintaining their websites – there is so much to do when running a UG, and no one is getting paid to do it.  So offloading a task like the website management (or a portion of the website) to a central server which handles data storage is preferable to each web site being responsible for maintaining their own data store.  There was some dissent in the group initially, but I think we managed to sway everyone to our side.  Look to Keith and Brendon for upcoming implementation details.

We also talked about notification services, or the lack thereof.  One of the group members was complaining that he didn’t know when the new VS2005 Beta was released until several days after it happened.  He was wishing he could have signed up for an e-mail from MS to alert him when this specific event occurred.  A comparison was drawn to the Saturn car company.  Saturn announced months or years ahead of time that it would be developing an SUV and people could sign up for an e-mail when the SUV was released.  Why, the question was asked, couldn’t Microsoft do the same thing.  After some initial bickering over which implementation method was better (e-mail or RSS) we all finally seemed to agree that the difficulty lies in getting an announcement for an event that is not yet defined.  With both e-mail and RSS, unless someone at the company has the forethought to create a subscription point for that particular event, the only option you have as a consumer is to subscribe to a mass mailing list or general RSS feed.  The analogy here is like looking to fill a small bottle of water from a fire hose.  You end up with a listening service and some kind of keyword based raw text search.  No one could think of a way to subscribe to an event that hadn’t been defined yet.  Well, almost no one.  Brendon actually has an idea about this and he’s writing a white paper he plans on submitting to Microsoft.

All in all, this was one of the better book club meetings because we not only discussed technology, but we discussed the technology from the book we were all supposed to be reading.  We all hung around until about 9:00 when we noticed the mall closing around us.  Check back with the book club website, a map of the mall with the meeting location will be posted soon.  We enjoyed the location enough that we’re heading back there next time.

— Matt Ranlett

note – a comment was made in the book club meeting that some of Dino’s examples from the book wouldn’t work with the new Beta 2 due to some framework and tool changes.  Take a look at this post from Shanku Niyogi – the ASP.Net group program manager outlining the Upcoming Changes to ASP.Net 2.0 in Beta 2.

The time has come for us to get rid of the intro to cell phone messages that takes a minute and half.  When I call Matt I really don’t want to hear my options on how to leave a message after the tone, I just want the phone to let me leave the message.  If anyone works for the cell phone companies or knows someone that works for the cell phone companies can you ask if we can make it an option to turn OFF. 

—Brendon Schwartz

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I might be a bit late blogging about this, but better late than never.  Apress is sponsoring a “User Group Puzzler” – the user group members can each individually create a crossword puzzle with 10 different Apress and friends of ED author last names.  The puzzle should have 5 across and 5 down  clues.  One submission per person.  For complete rules and to submit your puzzle, visit www.apress.com by April 30th

— Matt Ranlett

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

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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