Below is the current list of charities that will be receiving free software implementations at the 3rd Annual Coders4Charities event on March 26-28, 2010 at Centriq Training in Leawood, KS. 1st Breath 1st Breath is committed to providing education, advocacy, and public awareness of stillbirth in addition to assisting families and medical professionals dealing with the death of a baby. Needs: 1st Breath would like C4C to update their website to allow for interactive forms and the ability to accept...
Coders4Charities 2010 planning is well underway! For those of you not familiar with the event, C4C is an event where developers, DBAs, graphic designers, business analysts and other geeks come together to provide free software implementations for local non-profit organizations over the course of one weekend. This is the 3rd year for C4C, and it will be taking place Friday through Sunday, March 26-28, 2010 at Centriq Training in Leawood, KS. We’re still looking for geeks willing to volunteer for this...
I was IM’ing with a co-worker recently, and both of us were working on writing Unit Tests for code we had just completed. He was saying that his car was having trouble, was in the shop, and that they really didn’t know what was wrong with it. I was going to tell him to not take any excuses from the mechanic, when the RhinoMocks IgnoreArguments()option popped into my head. I said something like “'tell him ‘FixMyCar.IgnoreArguments()’”, and it was a downward spiral of geek humor from there. Below is...
Just stumbled across some pretty cool functionality with Jet Brains ReSharper 4.0 (you may already be familiar with it, but who cares, it’s still cool!) Basically, ReSharper has a Surround With tool that allows you to surround a selection of code with… more code. It comes with a bunch of predefined templates, like if..else, using, while, try..catch blocks, but you can edit existing templates and also create and organize your own custom templates. To get to the Templates Explorer, select ReSharper...
I was trying to regenerate a Silverlight proxy, but I kept getting this error: Turns out, Win 7 sometimes adds an <extendedProtectionPolicy policyEnforcement="Never" /> element to your Web.config. Here’s the workaround according to the Silverlight Web Services team: On Windows 7, when you use the Silverlight-enabled WCF Service item template, an <extendedProtectionPolicy /> element may be generated in Web.config. This element is not supported by Silverlight. Simply remove the element...
Just a quick post to talk about the Smart DJ feature in the latest release (Version: 4.0.740.0) of the Zune software. There are several web sites that read from a database of music-listening user preferences, and display music maps based on an artist or song (music-map.com, for one). Zune has taken that one step further with their Smart DJ feature, which allows you to select an artist, album, or a song, and have the Smart DJ create a playlist based on similar songs, artists, genres, or whatever black...
I bought a Dell Studio 17 a few months ago, and as much as I love it, the TouchPad is like crazy-annoying sometimes. Not too long ago, touchpads starting allowing scrolling functionality by sliding your finger up and down the right-most side of the touchpad. Cool feature, but it forced me to stay more to the left side of the touchpad. The wonderful folks at Dell decided that the left side of the touchpad should not be a scrolling feature, but a zoom instead. Nothing like browsing a web page and have...
Just a quick post to show my appreciation for the KCDesignCore user group support tonight. I'm sitting here at Johnson County Community College, Reigner Center, Room 255, to be exact, and I'm witnessing the magic of over 20 Kansas City graphic designers working on a flyer for the event. The KCDesignCore group meets the first Thursday of every month, and this month is a "lab" to design the best PDF flyer to be used to promote the Coders4Charities event April 24-26, 2009. Special thanks to Buck Sommerkamp...
What a lot of fun today was. The last session is going on right now, and there are still a lot of attendees hanging around. We had about 190 registered, and a little over 100 actually showed up. A little more drop off than we would have hoped, but still a great turnout. I would have thought some sessions would be more popular than others, but there seemed to be a fair balance of session attendees, which was awesome. Sounds like Lee Brandt and Becky Isserman picked the right blend of tracks. Many...
The Kansas City .NET User Group will be hosting a Day of .NET on Saturday, December 6th from 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. It will be held at the Centriq Training Center in Leawood, KS (map). The day's training will consist of three main tracks: Developer Architect SharePoint Feel free to mix and match, attend half a session, or whatever suits you. Breakfast and Lunch will be provided during the day, and door prizes will be awarded following the last session. The cost of a day of .NET training? Absolutely...
Clint Edmonson called me out on this trip down memory lane and, since I want to use up as much of his Google juice as I can, I thought I would jump in.Initially, this very much reminded me of those "Surveys" that go around in chain e-mails and (gasp!) MySpace pages, but this idea quickly caught my interest. Here is the current link(ed) list: Michael Eaton (post) —> Sarah Dutkiewicz (post) —> Jeff Blankenburg (post) —> Josh Holmes (post) —> Larry Clarkin (post) —> Brian Moore (post)...
Very happy to announce that the KC .Net User Group site is live! The site is intended to announce upcoming meetings and presenters at the User Group, and to promote the adoption and use of the Microsoft .NET framework and related technologies to the Kansas City community. It will be evolving as future needs arise, but I think it's a great starting point for keeping local developers in touch with all things .NET! So... what are you waiting for? Check it out now! Register! Post a thread on the forum!...
Last night (July 22, 2008) I presented on Windows Communication Foundation vs. Web Services at the Kansas City .NET User Group. I talked about Web Services, and how they existed in the .NET 2.0 Framework, and compared them to the new WCF framework in .NET 3.0 and 3.5. There was a turnout of 57 developers, and Modis brought Gates BBQ! I've uploaded the presentation to my SkyDrive here. Many thanks to everyone who showed up to hear me ramble! Technorati Tags: Windows Communication Foundation,WCF,Web...
Well, it was a great weekend! 25 developers showed up to help out 5 charities, and each charity ended up with an awesome implementation. I've already written the main C4C Event Wrap-Up on the C4C site, as well as wrap-ups for each of the charities. The event write-up, as well as the write-ups for each charity can be found on the news page of the C4C site. The 5 charities who were helped this weekend are: Boy Scouts Troop 813 Event Write-up Berean Bible Church Event write-up Metropolitan Organization...
These are the final teams who volunteered this weekend at the Coders4Charities event. Many thanks to all who showed up to help! Charity Name: Boy Scout Troop 813 Needs: A basic website to announce activities, give information, and promote Scouting. We would like to be able to update it remotely by authorized users. We must follow BSA guidelines to ensure we protect the identity of our Scouts. Team Lead: Lee Brandt Team Members: Becky Isserman Blake Theiss Joe Loux Timothy Wright Charity Name: Berean...
It is day one (well, night one) of Coders4Charities, and the teams are off and running. We had a few no-shows, but we managed to do some last-minute re-arranging and load balancing, and it seems that every team is equally loaded. At last check, they were all involved in requirements gathering, and they're trying to determine what solutions will work for them. The charities that are here tonight are: Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault Boy Scout Troop 813 Berean Bible Church Missouri...
I have a stored procedure that I want to call from my VB.net code. The problem is that the stored procedure input parameters may change. Rather than recompiling the stored procedure, and recompiling the assembly that calls the stored procedure, I want my VB.net assembly to query the stored procedure for its parameters, and return them back to me in a list. I've done some blog searches for this, and I couldn't find anything that did anything like this (or my search terms were not explicit enough)....
Software developers! Graphic designers! Database developers! We need you! There is one month left until Coders 4 Charities happens! We've got the charities, we've got the sponsors... we need more developers! We had an excellent turnout at the Microsoft Heroes Happen Here event yesterday, March 25, 2008, and we hope that we reached a lot of developers during the day. If we spoke to you, and you want to accept the challenge, register now for the event!! What is Coders4Charities? It is a 3-day charity...
Calling out to all coders in the Greater Kansas City area! We need you! We're looking for software developers, graphics designers and DBAs in the area who are willing to step up to the challenge by taking on a website, intranet or database implementation. We're hosting an event called Coders For Charities, taking place in late April 2008, that will capitalize on the mad skills and passion of geeks in Kansas City, and focus their efforts to benefit a local KC Charity. We've got the venue. We've got...
We're looking for non-profit organizations in the Kansas City area that we can help during an upcoming event called Coders 4 Charities. This will be a 48-hour coding event (from Friday, April 25 through Sunday, April 27, 2008) that will benefit non-profit and charity organizations in the greater Kansas City area. If you are a non-profit organization looking for a better way to: increase your presence on the internet through a rich website help your volunteers and employees stay in touch and organized...
After a good amount of work (and hurling the laptop across the room several times), the Registration Pages for Developers and Charities are up! It's late. I'm tired. Go look! And sign up!! Coders 4 Charities Technorati Tags: Coders 4 Charities,Developers,Charity...
We're using Graffiti CMS as our CMS for Coders 4 Charities, a site that we built to spread the word about our charity event coming late April 2008. We needed to implement a registration page, so that developers and charities can register for the event. Graffiti is obviously very powerful and easy to use, but I had a hard time figuring out how to get user entry to work. Here is my fundamental understanding of how things kinda work: When you create a post, Graffiti will create a folder for your post,...
Congratulations to the Winners of the We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge Weekend! First Place - Texas Cares - mission and proposal here Second Place - North Park Missionary Baptist Church - mission and proposal here Third Place - Texas Response Unit Search & Rescue - mission and proposal here Technorati Tags: We Are Microsoft,Charity Challenge Weekend,Texas CARES,North Park Missionary Baptist Church,Texas Response Unit Search & Rescue...
We've finally launched all of the podcasts we recorded this weekend at the We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge Event in Dallas, Texas. Many thanks go out to Jeff Julian, Chris Koenig, Toi Wright, Amber Weiss and the folks at BravoTech, the huge team of developers that volunteered their time, and of course, all of the charities, who do the hard work day in and day out. To take a look at all of the podcasts, have a peek at Jeff Julian's blog. Technorati Tags: We Are Microsoft,Charity Challenge Weekend...
We are at mile marker 229 on I35 North, coming home from We Are Microsoft in Dallas, TX. I am using Jeff Julian's MacBook pro via bluetooth, to his SmartPhone, which is connected to the internet. Thought you should know
This weekend, Jeff Julian and I have been given the privilege of recording podcasts at Microsoft's We Are Microsoft event, called the Charity Challenge Weekend. We are in Dallas, TX, the location of many wonderful things (light bulbs and elevators), most notably the extremely delicious Baja Burrito at Baja Fresh Mexican Cantina. I have to admit that I was not too aware of what this event was all about, but after learning, I quickly jumped in with both feet. The Charity Challenge Weekend is all about...
This may be old news for some, but Firefox v2.0 does not support the display style "inline-block". I've read several blogs and articles on the subject, most of them suggesting using "-moz-inline-block" or "-moz-inline-stack" or "-moz-inline-box", none of which worked (and also managed to break IE support, subsequently). Since I tend to fix my own problems (and quickly forget the solution when it creeps up again), I usually post a blog about it to remind myself in the future. In the event this blog...
Just did the November Microsoft DevCares with John Alexander and Jeff Julian yesterday. We presented on the new release of Visual Studio 2008, and all of the new cool features therein. If any of the attendees would like copies of the demos or talking points, feel free to contact me. Doug
Since I'm the one that requested it, I'll be the one to blog the announcement. GeeksWithBlogs now supports mobile devices! Yay! GWB recently added support for Twitter, but browsing the twitter page on GWB required you scrolling through the left nav full of current bloggers. To check it out, go to the mobile page here. Thanks to @jjulian (Jeff) for getting this done so quickly. Doug...
This is an update to my original blog on the WPF / Provider Model presentation. UPDATE: the links to the presentation and demo solution are below. Get the zipped version of the PowerPoint here. Get the zipped version of the WPF Demo solution here. Doug...
Today is Thursday, Oct. 25, 2007. This morning at 9:00 - 11:00am, John Alexander and I did some presentations at a Microsoft DevCares event, on LINQ. The event took place at New Horizons training center in Overland Park, KS. John gave an excellent and very enthusiastic presentation on what LINQ is, from an overview level, and tackled some of the baked-in syntax such as query operators and lambda expressions. Be sure and check out his blog, as he will be sharing his presentation, as well as links...
For those of you who attended my Oct. 23, 2007, 6:00pm presentation (and even those of you who didn't) on Windows Presentation Foundation with a focus on XAML and the Provider Model, I promised to put some links up for your reference. I'm trying to upload the actual PowerPoint presentation , but I don't think the GWB upload tool likes pptx's, or zip files for that matter. To give a brief description of presentation I gave, I talked about WPF, XAML, code-behind (using C#) and the Provider Model. WPF...
My oldest child, Katie, is 3. She absolutely loves playing on the computer, and she's starting to learn her ABC's and 123's. My wife and I get her set up on either Disney's, Sprout's or Noggin's (parents with young children know what I'm talking about) websites, but they just don't seem too navigable for kids, especially at Katie's age. She just wants to point and click, without any real context as to what she is doing. I thought I would take her love of computers (and mine too!), and my desire for...
Incubus was awesome! The concert was on Friday, July 20, 2007 at City Market in Kansas City. Click here for a pic of the show. City Market is a really awesome place to have a concert, because it quickly turns into a mosh pit, which I stayed out of this time around. Be sure to get there early, if you want a decent parking spot. It has a max capacity of 10,000 so, it's not unbelievably crowded (unless, again you get into the pit). Me and my buddy Ross were able to stand on the fringe, and enjoy it...
I'm posting this blog mostly to remind myself how to fix this if ever I run into it again, but if anyone else benefits from it, then awesome. In the Visual Studio IDE, when I set a breakpoint at a line of code, and start debugging, the breakpoint becomes that hollow maroon circle with a warning that says The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document. I've read a bunch of articles about makiing sure you're running in debug versus release mode, and making sure...
WOW. I'm really excited about this. I've been customizing and maintaining a “fat client” membership management system for a few years now. It's essentially a client-side .exe (built in VB6) framework that invokes GOBS of ActiveX dlls as needed (we decided to put GUIs inside DLLs. That is an entirely different topic, altogether. “that is an entirely different topic”). Zucker humor, anyone? Anyway, I found something in John Alexander's blog on VBRun, and there's an MSDN article...
Hi all. I was recommended Vault last night, and I'm looking into the pricing. We are a VSS shop, and we are beginning to have quite a few .NET projects, and VSS just isn't cutting it for us. Is Vault the recommended Source control app out there? If so, is the Gold Support package necessary? Also, is Dragnet useful enough to purchase? Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Hi there! I'm Doug Butscher. I'm currently the Programming Manager for the VFW in Kansas City. I'm your average nerd... I like gadgets, new technology, and other stuff that makes people laugh at me. The skills that I use mostly are VB6, SQL, T-SQL, and Crystal Reports. I've been delving into VB/ASP/.NET quite a bit lately, if only to stay a little behind the leading edge. And also to take ownership of a .NET-based website that we just took live a few days ago. I'm pretty much learning the street...
It's official! VFW Store is now live! Been working on this thing since June '04, but it's finally up. It's a pretty cool .NET based shopping cart where you can buy U.S. Flags, Caps, Jackets, a bunch of stuff from the VFW Supply catalog, and other patriotic items. Check it out sometime