Wally McClure interviewed me for his first ever podcast.  I think I blathered on for a bit about nothing in particular, but I really enjoyed talking to him.  For those of you who didn't get to meet Wally, you're the poorer for it.  He's a great guy - really easy to talk to and fun to be around.  Wally, thanks for the opporitunity to put another bullet in my holster!

The Atlanta Code Camp was great because I got to meet and talk to some great people, like Wally, Jose Fuentes, and Tammy Pettway.  It was great meeting everyone and putting faces to names you hear at various UG meetings.

-- Matt Ranlett

I got up really early in the morning, so early in fact that I had to sit and wait for Starbucks to open at 7:00am.  Then I showed up and hung out with everyone.  I spent most of the morning talking to the other staff members – speakers and volunteers.  Everyone seems pretty excited and ready to learn something.  I hope the people looking to learn don’t come to my session!

After a few announcements from Doug Turnure (including interactive book giveaways), Todd Fine – Regional Director Extraordinaire gave the keynote presentation.  For those of you who don’t know what a regional director is, Todd explained that an RD is essentially an unpaid extension of the Microsoft marketing department.  Send Todd all your MS related questions and he’ll get you answers. 

I was the room proctor for the Mobile track, so I got to watch all the mobile topics, which was totally cool because I’m interested in the mobile lifestyle.  So interested that I co-founded the Atlanta Mobility User Group with Paul Lockwood.  Brendon Schwartz and I gave the very first presentation on Mobile ASP.Net applications.  Brendon covered the current version of the .Net Framework and ASP.Net while took a look ahead at ASP.Net 2.0.  Brendon and I tag-teamed on questions throughout the entire presentation of slides and demo code.  I won’t write much about my own presentation – download the slideshow and code if you’re interested.

Rob Zelt gave the second presentation – programming Ink-enabled applications for the Tablet PC.  What was really impressive was the ability to add Ink functionality to a form with only two lines of code and a Using statement.  Suddenly he was drawing with his pen on the form.  Add a button and call the Ink.Strokes.ToString function and Presto – the Ink he’d scrawled on the form was translated into text on a label.  Rob had this great demo showing off the built in functionalities of the Ink SDK – he had a map you could draw on and save information about the strokes to a SQL Server database.  We talked a lot about maps – the ability of Ink to recognize changes in directions in a line.  So, for example, draw directions on a map and hit the MapPoint webservice to get road names and nearby points of interest.  Check out the www.tabletpcdeveloper.com MSDN site for some great documentation and code samples. 

Don Hinds gave the third presentation – mobile device configuration management and enforcement.  The difference between management and enforcement is setting up a configuration (management) and not letting the users change the configuration (enforcement).  According to Don, when it comes to device configuration, there is no substitute for testing on the actual devices.  Device configuration is controlled through an XML file that is delivered either via a C++ API call, a .Net namespace, or an external tool running over ActiveSync.  Configuration gets complicated b/c different devices have different supported configuration values.  Configuration gets even more complicated b/c you have to have signed, certified code to run on different networks (TMobile, Verizon, etc).  Once you have the configurations you want loaded into the system, there is a namespace that handles monitoring the system for configuration changes (Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Status)

Bill Ryan gave the fourth presentation – Speech server SDK.  His presentation was actually going to be on a different topic, but his external USB hard drive died this morning so he used something else that he had on his laptop.  Bill covered QA components, semantic maps, embedding wav files, and more.  The sample application we were working with is a fictional bank’s website complete with call management.  He was able to demonstrate building conversations, complete with custom recorded prompts and responses.

Glen Gordon gave the fifth presentation – .Net Compact Framework 2.0.  Windows Mobile 5 and the .Net Framework Beta 2 have both recently been released, so this was an exciting look ahead.  There is also a new version of the SQL Server CE (now called SQL Server Mobile Edition).  The Compact Framework 2.0 is a superset of the CF 1.0.  A lot of enhancements – improved string building, XML handling is much improved (including XPath queries and XMLReaders), and ADO.Net is much easier with the new version of SQL Server Mobile Edition.  CF 2.0 also includes keyboard support, programmatic access to the clipboard, and some new methods and properties.  Screen rotation is now a feature of Windows Mobile 2003 Second edition and the CF 2.0 gives programmatic access to the orientation changes.  One of the nicest enhancements for the SmartPhone edition is the InputMethodEntry properties on textboxes – specifying that a textbox only accepts numbers or letters (to speed input).  Glen showed us some really slick demos of the new components and namespaces, including the web browser control and the XML handling and XPath.

 Glen Gordon wins the quote of the day – “I’m rarely wrong, and when I am it’s usually a small thing”

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

I swear I’m not a paid endorser, but I have to mention BlogJet again.  I just found out a new feature (well, new to me anyway) that I thought I’d share with the world.  I was browsing through the BlogJet website looking to see the status of my feature request when I decided to look through the screenshots.  I’d been having trouble with the properties tab – I can’t seem to get it to let me add TrackBack URLs through the tool.  Anyway, I was flipping through the screenshots when I saw this unfamiliar view: 

Recent Posts. 

You can look through your recent posts and edit any one you want to!  That’s pretty cool for making corrections to old posts (like I did for this one).  I knew that I could get and edit the last post, but I didn’t know I could flip through all the old ones (complete with previews).  I like it!

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

I was reading a post from Steve Vore where he asked for recommendations about RSS tools – readers and writers.  I couldn’t help but tell him about my favorite tools (which I’ve mentioned on here before, but I’ll mention them on here again)

“I went on a quest similar to yours a while back - looking for a good reader and a good editor.  Here's what I like.  In the reader category, I can't say enough good things about JetBrains Omea Reader (www.jetbrains.com).  It's free if you get it quickly - they're going to charge soon.  It has offline reading - indexed in a database so searches are lightning fast.  It goes beyond simple folder organization of feeds with a workspace concept - where you can group feeds together and only see the ones you're interested in.  For example, I have 60 feeds total, but I have a .Net workspace with only 25 feeds in it.  I have a News workspace with 4 feeds in it.  I can look at these workspaces to focus my blog reading energies.  Omea reader is also great b/c it does more than just RSS.  It is also a NewsReader, so if you want to follow newsgroups, you can subscribe to them and see them in the same window with your blogs.  You can even sort them into workspaces.  For example, I've subscribed to the two Microsoft Tablet news groups.  Omea will also keep up with bookmarks for you, so if you have a favorite website that hasn't caught on to the RSS phenomenon yet, you can keep yourself up to date here as well.  If you shell out the cash for the Pro version of the Omea product, it will also receive e-mail.  I haven't done this for the exact reason you want to get your RSS out of Outlook.  Time management.

On the editor side of things, I wholeheartedly recommend BlogJet (www.blogjet.com).  It works really well - allows Rich text editing of posts with a tab to edit HTML when the occasion warrents it.  Spellchecking in multiple languages.  It integrates into IE so you can open it when reading an interesting page and blog about it while it's fresh in your mind.  User profile controls allow you to connect to many different blogs, with over 20 different blog engines supported.  Drafts are supported (and I use that all the time) and the developer(s) are pretty responsive to change requests.  I use this tool almost as much as I use Outlook.”

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

I don't know about the other speakers, but Brendon and I are coming up with a brand new presentation for Code Camp.  This involves us coming up with a topic (done), an outline for the presentation (done - thanks Brendon), a slide show to keep us on track (mostly done - fine tuning still going on), some canned demos in case time gets to us (we're still working on these - more comments below), and practice some other demos so we can do some live coding but not look like morons when stuff doesn't work (still doing these as well).  We've been working/watching webcast/reading books and MSDN articles for a while now.  We've been shuffling the slide deck back and forth between us for additions and subtractions.  We even got together last night (not easy to do b/c we both work a lot and Brendon lives in northern BFE where I live in Atlanta) and worked from 7pm to midnight.  I'd like to say we're ready except for some last minute demo coding and a bit more polish on the slide show (take a few slides out and add a few new ones).  We're mostly there and if I had to drop everything and give the presentation right now, I wouldn't be embarrassed for myself.

One thing - has anyone had problems with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and the SQL Express product?  I can't seem to connect to my SQL Server, so I can't create or attach a database.  This means I am not going to be able to demo any kind of data binding (except from XML).  I installed everything on the CD except the J# stuff (personally no interest in Java syntax) and got no errors during the install.  I did notice that there are no useful GUI SQL tools that came with the Express edition (no management studio or query analyzer tool) but I'm comfortable with OSQL so that's not a problem.  But I can't get any tool (OSQL, VS2005 Datbase Explorer, etc) to connect without timing out.  Thoughts?  Help!

-- Matt Ranlett

UPDATE - Brendon found the problem.  SQL Express installs a named instance of SQL Server, so you can't just connect to the (local) server.  You need to connect to (local)\SQLExpress or .\SQLExpress.  Once you do that, everything works.

Microsoft releases a new version of Windows Mobile (version 5) with more reliability, more hardware, and more features.  Designed to compete with the Symbian OS (Nokia’s favorite OS) and Palm OS (like the Treo 650).  Microsoft Mobile now supports some great features like wireless LAN support in Smartphones and Media Player 10 Mobile.  We should be seeing some great new devices on the market soon!

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

Enter this contest hosted by Microsoft and compete for the chance to win $50,000.  The Microsoft Connected Systems 2005 Developer Competition is a global, skill based competition intended to highlight and reward creativity and programming excellence using SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk 2004/2006.  There are 15 categories for the competition, including a SmartPhone app category, a Visual Studio PowerToy category, and more.  Entries are accepted up to August 30th.  The contest ends September 15th.

Thanks to Martin Crimes for bringing this to my attention.

-- Matt Ranlett

Thank you to Unisys and Melanie Marks for providing the pizza and prizes for the evening.

Doug kicked off the meeting with a quick demo of the DTS Integration Services Data Flow interface in the new 2005 Reporting Services Reports Builder UI (part of Whidbey’s 2005 Visual Studio interface).  In Doug’s quick demo, he showed how easy it would be to take a flat file, pipe the input from the flat file to a pair of tables using Data Flow sources (flat file), transformations (to pipe the raw input to one table and the summarization of the raw input to another table), and destinations (database tables in this example).  One of the really neat things about the demo was how the drag and drop tool turned from the design environment to a graphic representation of the progress of the DTS program in the debugger.  During this quick preview of SSIS data integration, a question came up about the differences between SSIS and BizTalk.  The results of the discussion were that BizTalk is assured delivery across a heterogeneous environment where SSIS is called integration services but usually functions as a data movement engine.

The main presentation was an introduction to SQL Server 2005’s Reporting Services Report Builder.  The core changes to RS 2005 include some tighter integration with Sharepoint and the end to end BI.  Rich Client printing has been added to RS. The Expression editor has been enhanced with VB.Net functions complete with Intellisense.  Multi-Valued parameters have been added – the report processing will create SQL.  the ASP.Net date picker has been included.  Interactive sorting has been added so sorting can occur without requerying the data.  Floating header (like Excel) so you don’t have to build paged tables with header rows.  Custom report items allow the API to be exposed, so that 3rd party vendors can provide charts, maps, etc.  Analysis Services support now integrates MDX parameter support and data mining query builders.  Management Studio integration functions as a single point of management for all SQL Server components, a supersert of Report Manager functions.  SharePoint Web Parts have been added – now you can integrate your reports into Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint portal server.  Visual Studio’s integration is better.  The Report Controls in Visual Studio make it easier to embed reporting functionality into applications (both web and winform).

The Report Builder fills the need between the report manger (for report consumers) and the report designer (for power users and developers).  The business users would be using the report builder.  Caution – report builder requires SQL Server Enterprise Edition.  Report Builder is an ad-hoc report design tool for SQL Server RS.  This is targeted at business users who want to find and share answers.  This is not an analytical client or a replacement for pivot tables.  Report builder doesn’t query SQL objects, but rather queries a semantic model of the data making is so that the business users don’t need to know SQL to write the reports.  The report builder is a smart client application downloaded directly from the Report Manager web application.  To build a report, you pick a template (chart, matrix, table) and drag table fields onto the design surface.  When you build the report, you can page through the report and click on any detail to look in more detail (infinite drill).

Next we took a look at the semantic modeling tool.  We used Visual Studio to build a report model for the Northwind database.  You would use this to build a semantic model the business user would use to generate Report Builder reports.  You start out with a Data Source View – use the wizard to create one if one’s not already been created to meet your needs.  Once you have a data source view, the report modeling wizard makes some assumptions about the data (you can override these assumptions, but the wizard is pretty powerful) and generates a set of metadata in 2 passes.  Once your model is completely processed and you have an SMDL (semantic model definition language) file, you can publish it to the reports server, or you can add expressions and calculations to the report model.  Now that the SMDL file has been published, and you have your new report model, you can build new reports with the Report Builder tool.

My personal impression of the tool is this – this is a great tool which has great potential.  I can easily see savvy business users creating their own reports to explore details that are smaller and less sophisticated than full RS or Analysis Services reports.  I especially like the infinite drill capabilities and the ability to save any drilled down view to the report server as a stand-alone report.  However, currently you can’t reverse-engineer the data connections of a report builder report in Visual Studio, so you’ll have a hard time taking a report builder report (also RDL like Visual Studio’s Report Designer’s reports) and turning them into true Report Designer reports (with true SQL as the data source, rather than the semantic model of the SQL objects).  Another problem is the enterprise edition requirement – drastically increasing the price of the tool for small shops.

I asked a couple of people at the UG meeting what they thought of the presentation and our presenter.  Based on the questions I heard from the group during the presentation, there seemed to be a good deal of excitement around the possibility of granting the users the ability to generate their own reports via infinite drill, but there seemed to be several questions concerning the underlying technology.  I got the feeling that a lot of the developers/DBAs were uncomfortable with the semantic model’s removal of SQL – perhaps the feeling of a loss of control?  Otherwise, people were very positive about both the presenter and presentation.  Great job Doug!

— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet

Thanks to our omnipresent sponsor, Microsoft (personified by Doug Turnure), the Atlanta .Net Regular Guys have some t-shirts with the ADNRG logos to give away.  Start showing up to the user groups regularly and you’ll get a t-shirt of your very own.  Remember – Brendon and I aren’t the only .Net Regular Guys in Atlanta – anyone who shows up regularly to two or more meetings a month is eligible to receive a shirt.

Don’t forget to sign up on the www.devcow.com site to be an Atlanta .Net Regular Guy!

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

This is just a reminder – the May 19th meeting of the .Net Book Club has been cancelled due to the MSDN Event and Pub Club.  Be sure to sign up for the MSDN Event on www.microsoft.com/events!

The Pub Club will be held immediately after the MSDN Event at a nearby location, but you need to attend the MSDN Event or any user group between now and the 19th (the Mobility UG and the VB UG both have meetings scheduled)

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

I flipped through the Microsoft Events site and thought I’d report my findings

Management and Operations of .NET Applications Workshop – $165 – Monday, May 09, 2005 9:00 AM - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 5:00 PM

SQL Server 2005: New Features for Developers – $175 –  Monday, May 16, 2005 9:00 AM - Tuesday, May 17, 2005 5:00 PM

I got to spend 2 days with the folks from the Microsoft CLR team, but I don’t feel like I learned enough from them.  Heck, I think you could lock me in a room with them for a year and I’d still come out feeling like a mushroom on the underside of a log.  However, I was scanning through Kirk Allen Evans’ blog post about a conversation with the CLR team (great questions and answers, btw) when I got to the bottom.  A collection of links to other people’s blog postings about their times with the CLR team.  Since I’m big on writing what I think, I had to go read what other people had to say.  My two favorite posts are:

• Michael Earls – funny, funny!
• Tobin Titus – wins for shear over-the-top-ness

But I was jealous when I got to read Joseph DeCarlo’s post about what the team talked about while they spent time with the fine development staff of Turner Broadcasting.  I’d have loved to hear Jason Z. really explain generics to me (and why they’re different from C++ templates).  I wanted to leave a comment on Joseph’s post asking him to give the blow-by-blow, but he appears to have comments turned off.  So I’m sending him an e-mail instead.

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

We had a few new faces at the VB.Net meeting tonight.  After a bit of social chatting, Jim Wooley started the meeting with a presentation of the FileSystemWatcher done in VS2005 Beta 2.  For the sake of simplicity, we went with a Windows Forms applications.  Take a form, drop on a ListBox and a FileSystemWatcher control.  A FileSystemWatcher component basically does what it sounds like – it watches the file system for some file and some event.  You can filter by file type (ex. *.txt) and you can filter by event (changed, created, deleted, etc.).  With this really simple demo, we were able to see that the operating system raising events to our code.  Something we did notice is that the OS throws several events where we might only expect one event.  For example, open Notepad, type some text, and save it into your monitored directory.  You’ll see that you get CREATED, DELETED, CREATED, CHANGED, and CHANGED events.  So you’ll want to do error handling to prevent yourself from acting on the wrong one of those events.  Extremely simple, but a great demo to show how useful the FileSystemWatcher can be.

The next presenter was Harrell Perlman, showing us Avalon.  If you plan on taking a look at Avalon, you need to have XP service pack 2.  Longhorn’s betas are not supported yet.  You’ll also need a beta copy of VS2005 to work with it.  Harrell had a heck of a time getting his Virtual PC installed with the WinFX and Avalon, so he spent a good deal of time making sure that we’d understand the installation procedure.  WinFX is an extension of the .Net Framework that is utilized by Avalon (meaning that Avalon runs entirely on managed code).  Avalon uses XAML (a flavor of XML) to describe the layout and ties to code behind classes for event wiring.  We’re really early in the Avalon lifecycle (still Alpha) but there are already a wealth of articles discussing Avalon concepts.  Download the Avalon, WinFX, and (possibly) the LongHorn SDKs, install them in a Virtual PC or Virtual Machine, and go!  We took a quick look at a demo or two to see what the XAML markup language looks like.  The general reaction of the group was that we didn’t really know where we were going with XAML.  To me personally, it looks like the ASP.Net seperation of the presentation layer and the UI Process Layer.

Dan Bredy was presenting an article from Mike Gold (VBHeaven.com), recreating the W2 tax form.  The program uses GDI+ to render the content of some textboxes and place them directly onto an image of an actual W2 form.  Basically, set the background of a form to an image.  Place a bunch of textboxes and checkboxes on the form.  Then use the DrawString function to render the text directly onto the image (you basically can’t see the textboxes).  This takes place during the print preview portion of the application.  This makes use of the System.Draw.Graphics namespace to render the image and to draw the text from the various textboxes onto the image based on the location of the actual control.

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet