Jason Row

The IWK Children’s hospital out of Halifax benefits all of us and is the only true children’s hospital in the Maritimes. 

This year there is a committee in Fredericton that is organizing a playoff hockey pool fundraiser in support of the IWK Hospital Foundation.  Halifax has been running a similar event for the past 16 years and it has been very successful.  The Fredericton event will be held on April 17^th in the Community Rooms at Willie O'Ree Place. They are hoping to raise a modest $5,000 in the first year and build from there.

I’m sure most people in the Maritimes know a child who had a stay at the IWK. For me it’s close to home as my nephew was diagnosed with Leukemia over a year ago and he’s spent plenty of time there. But because of them he has a great chance of beating it.  So find a buddy and come support a great cause. Spots are limited so register soon.

IWK Fredericton Playoff Hockey Pool

All proceeds in support of the:

Date: Friday, April 17, 2009

Time: 7:00pm for 7:30pm

Place: Community Rooms at Willie O’Ree Place

Format: 10 round draft-style NHL playoff hockey pool

Limit: 50 teams (4 pools of 12 or 13 teams per pool)

Entry Fee: $200 per team (2 players per team) – Includes beer & pop, pizza & snacks

Pool Winners Prize: Each of the 4 pool-winning teams will receive a PEI Golf Package (2 rounds with a cart & 1 night accommodations)

Raffle Prize: Return airfare for 2, hotel accommodations and tickets to see an NHL game in Montreal during 2009-10 season

Additional Prizes: Red Sox tickets, Raptors tickets, and more

Registration Forms Available From:

Andy Clark 206-1003 andyclark@rogers.com

Peter Clark 449-3632 peter.clark@growthworks.ca

Dan Sherstenka 449-6454 Danny.Sherstenka@cibc.com

 

On April 1st, 2009, Microsoft is putting on a free 24 hour virtual event covering developer-related topics.

There will be 95 live sessions provided via Live Meeting in the following tracks:

*Windows Development and Frameworks
*Windows Mobile Development
*Office and SharePoint Development
*Developer Tools, Languages & Practices
*Web Development & User Experience

More information on each track can be found here: http://www.msfttechdays.com/public/sessions.aspx

Macro Shaw will be presenting the only session covering Windows PowerShell: "WIN300 Scripting the Microsoft .NET Framework Using Windows PowerShell Now that PowerShell is part of the Microsoft Common Engineering Criteria, expect to see more and more PowerShell in Microsoft server products.

This session looks at how PowerShell can be used to directly access the .NET Framework. Some simple examples are demonstrated, but also more advanced examples of using Windows Presentation Foundation (.NET 3.0) and LINQ (.NET 3.5) are discussed."

This is a FREE event, so you can't possibly go wrong. If you want to learn more about Windows PowerShell and how it can help increase the efficiency of .NET development, you'll like Marco’s session.

What you can get for attending:

*Get a second chance to pass your Microsoft Certification exam
*50% off Microsoft Certification exam
*MSDN Premium Subscriptions (draw)

More information on the prizes is on the site. The sessions will last 60 minutes with levels varying from 200 to 400 and will also be available offline after the event.

I was trying to get SQL Server 2008 express installed and every time I ran the installation program it kept coming up saying that my computer was failing the test that the computer required a restart. 

After a few restarts and the program still saying that my computer required a restart I came across this posting on the MSDN forums.

I believe that my Logitech web cam has an issue with it's installation program since after each reboot the same entries keep appearing in the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager

I used RegEdit to look at the data for the PendingFileRenameOperations value and saw the following being entered:

After deleting the data and re-running the SQL Server installation (without rebooting) I was able to get the installation program to complete.

I flattened my home PC this weekend and started to get "only part of a Readprocessmemory or Writeprocessmemory request was completed" error message when I tried to read any discs with my LG Dvd drive.

Since the solution seemed rather obscure to me I figured I better post the answer that I found for the next time this happens to me.

Go into your device manager->IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Right click on secondary and choose properties. Go to the advanced settings tab and choose PIO only for "transfer mode". I would ensure that your drive is connected to the secondary controller first though.

I found the solution at this web site here

John Sheehan has a few .NET Cheat sheets listed on his site along with links to a number of other ones. Worth a look see.

Well after agreeing to take over managing my local user group I've managed to have 2 meetings in the past couple of months and interest seems to be building back up.   On Wednesday it was my turn to present on some of the new T-SQL features found in SQL Server 2008.  It felt good to be up front and presenting again as it has been a while for me. I was a bit rushed for time since I was the second of two presenters but that was fine with me. I simply cut out some demos.

I know I made some mental notes about my presentation style that I want to work on for next time. First is to S-L-O-W down. I can speak a mile a minute when I'm uber excited about a topic. Second is to really work practice my presentation.  My next one will be in Jan so I have some time again and I want to truely knowledgeable about my subject.  At work I bounce around from one technology to another so quickly I don't get a great chance of becoming an "expert" but I want to be able to answer questions and not just read a canned script.

I think I'm going to be lucky with the user group as the word is getting out and registrations are increasing (50 percent turn out of those that pre-registered for this week's meeting). Next I need to keep looking at increasing the membership and finding some local sponsors.   At least I've got a good list of people who have offered to be speakers, but I still want to develop some more local talent in this area.

I knew it would take a fair bit of my personal time to get things going again and I'm happy with the progress. I just hope that the attendees are finding the meetings useful.  A few people have stepped up to offer their help with the UG which has been great for me as I know I can't do this all by myself.

Here's to seeing big growth for F.NUG in the new year.

Came across this today and it's on my Xmas wish list (or is that the pre-Xmas list).

 

 

The Xbox 360 fanboy web site had a posting about the GoW2 branded Zune that is coming out on November 7th (The GoW2 launch date for those that didn't know).

Engadget has a posting with some images while the Zune Insider talks about the price and who will be offering it. Nice to see that the deal is available in Canada as well. 

Now Amazon.ca, the Source.cs, FutureShop.ca, and BestBuy.ca are all suppose to carry this special edition. When I looked, only Amazon.ca and the Source.ca had them available for pre-order (the source.ca throws in a set of Gnarly earbuds).

I've got a trip to Newfoundland coming up on Nov 15th so a pre-Xmas gift to myself would come in handy.

UPDATE: It's been ordered from Amazon.ca, time to plan what to put on it for my trip

The Igloo Coder is making his way east to present to the 4 atlantic .NET user groups. He'll be in Fredericton on Thursday October 23 to present to F.NUG. Pass the word to anyone you know who's working with .NET.   Here's the details.

Date: Oct-23-2008
Time: Meet and greet @ 6:30 - presentation from 7 - 9pm
Location: UNB Campus, ITC building - room GC127

Topic: Fundamentals of Object Oriented Programming
Presented by: Donald Belcham
Notes:
If you read MSDN, books or attend the average conference, you will be exposed to a world of promised drag and drop goodness and framework APIs.  Once you get to work and begin building and maintaining applications you find that these promises aren’t being realized.  Other programming communities have long touted the use of Object Oriented Programming fundamentals to ensure that and application’s code base exists in a healthy state.  This presentation will look at the fundamentals of OOP that have long been forgotten by mainstream .NET programmers but are making a comeback.  The techniques discussed in this session will be practical and something that each attendee will be able to take to their job the day after attending

Not very amazing or technical but thought I'd post a bit about it anyways. Anyone that gets asked how to show a repeating decimal in Word, for example representing the fraction 1/3 in decimal is 1.33333333  with 3 repeating to infinity.  Normally there would be a line above the last 3 (the line is called a vinculum).  

Now to show the 3 with a line above it in Microsoft Word you need to use a field code that superimposes one character over the other.

Press Ctrl-F9 to insert the field delimiters then within the field code type

EQ \O(3,¯) 

Now the parts of that are:

EQ - creates a scientific equation
\O  - indicates to overstrike each successive element over the previous one
(3,¯)  - the characters in the order to draw/type them on screen. Replace with whatever you want to combine, for example zero and a slash (0,/)

Maybe Prince was playing around with this feature when he changed his name to a symbol?

For a more detailed guide complete with screen grabs see Suzanne's posting in the list below.

Links:
Definition of repeating decimals
How to create overbars by Word MVP Suzanne Barnhill

I was forwarded a link to a CIO.com article where they talk about how Microsoft and CompTIA are employing tools to analyze your behaviours when writing a certification test to determine if you have used any braindumps or illegal test preperation material.

http://www.cio.com/article/446591/IT_Certification_Practice_Exams_Could_Kill_Your_Career

Interesting to see so many negative comments at the end of the article. I'd like to hear if someone passed an exam and was then incorrectly accused of cheating.  From the last few exams I wrote, there's plenty of information to read so even someone who knows their stuff inside and out, I'm sure they won't be able to answer a the majority of questions inside of 5 seconds. To me that would be a one of the "tells" to indicate that the testee had been studying the questions.

Thanks to Wally McClure for sending me one of his ASP.NET podcast t-shirts!  As far as I know I'm the first in Atlantic Canada to have one. Go give his show a listen !

 

Tonight I traveled for 3 hours (roughly 300 kms) to attend the DevEast meeting in Moncton, NB. And in my mind it was worth it.

In the most unusual place I've ever sat and listened to a presentation, I joined 8 others at AJs Pizza Place to listen to Derek Hatchard run through two presentations that's he's planning to give at DevTeach Toronto next week.

Leveraging the Amazon Platform

Covered the various types of services that Amazon has made available. Derek talked about S3 (Simple Storage Service) their file hosting service, mentioned their Simple Queue Service but most of his demos covered EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). If you need virtual environments launched when you want them this is an option for you. Plans start around 10 cents an hour per image (virtual machine) and you can create an instance from the preconfigured images that Google has made available (all flavors of Linux along with apache and mysql from what I saw) but you can also upload your own image to S3 and then create instances based on it.  Derek showed some of the command line utilities that are available as well as how you can create a .NET application to setup your images. One thing that was note, if you're planning to run an image with mysql, if the image is shut down or crashes there's no method of retrieving your data since you cannot simply restart the image from where it left off. So don't use this if you plan to keep your data !

Extending IIS7 with Managed Code

We didn't have much time for this presentation but it was interesting to see how you can extend IIS fairly easily by writing modules. He discussed how to modify the web.config as the application.config (not sure on this one) and how the majority of the IIS settings are now set through these files. At the end he also briefly talked about how to add what I would call property pages for settings that your modules can have but that you need to make these available not only on the server but also to clients since IIS 7 can be administered remotely.

That's the quick overview of things. it's midnight and I've been on the go since 6am. Time for some sleep !!!

I saw Lou Vega's review about this book today and went ahead and ordered it from Amazon.ca (Chapters.Indigo.ca isn't carrying it). Sucks to have to wait 8-12 days but I'm not in that much of a hurry for it at the moment. I've been involved with my local .NET user group and I want to contribute more to the community so I figure there would be some good ideas to draw from.

The Rational Guide to Building Technical User Communities

By Dr. Greg Low

Published by Rational Press 2007

ISBN: 978-1-932577-32-7

It's time to vote for who you think is the top Individual Developer and the top Development Team in this year's MSDN Canada Code Awards.

Honestly, I've been hearing about the contest for months and initially took a look at the site when they were looking for nominations. Not knowing anyone to nominate I only gave it a passing look.

Now that the nominees are named I'm impressed by products that have been created here in Canada.  Will it be the Cancer Specimen Analysis app that takes home the prize for the top individual developer or will it be one of the other 4 nominees including the database automation tool.  From the development team side the top 5 nominees include an Anti-Phishing system, and my personal fav the MeshMinder.com web site that matches hockey teams with Goalies.  What could be more Canadian than that !!

Head on over to  the Code Awards web site to look at all 10 nominees and then cast your votes.

Just wondering if anyone could clarify a SharePoint question for me that relates to the TS: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development exam. One of the objectives being measured is to Configure a target computer for Windows SharePoint Services development and beneath this is a mention of SecurityAdministrator. I'm not sure if they are referring to SharePoint Forefront Server Security Administrator or something different.  

Anyone have some insight?