General

INETA Community Champions

Scott Dorman — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 03:52:43 GMT

If you are a user group leader in the worldwide community of Microsoft® .NET user groups, you probably already know about INETA. Don’t know about INETA? Then you should definitely take a look and become an INETA member group.

Are you already involved with an INETA member group? Be sure to check out the new Community Champions program. This is just one of the ways INETA recognizes and rewards those who contribute to the user group community and help it grow.

The Champs program was specifically designed to help recognize what it takes (and provide a little bit more insight for those that aren’t involved) to run a successful user group community by giving you a way to record all of those tasks. In exchange for taking a few minutes to record your tasks, you become eligible for a quarterly Community Champions Award.

The Community Champions Award lasts for 12 months and offers a letter of commendation and certificate of achievement from INETA, recognition on the INETA website, and a few great prizes like an MSDN Subscription or an Xbox 360.

If you have anything to do with helping to run a user group, be sure to check it out and start submitting your tasks today. The first award period is coming up, so you might be one of the first people to win. Right now the INETA Community Champions program is only available to user groups in North America, but the Champs team is going to be working on international launches soon.

Technorati Tags: INETA, Champs

Visual Studio Feature Request – Statement Outlining

Scott Dorman — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 03:32:48 GMT

If you write .NET code using Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, you’ve probably noticed the automatic outlining the IDE makes available to you. This automatically creates collapsible sections in your code for comments, regions, functions, properties, namespaces, classes, and the using block.

While this is a great feature and one that I use on a daily basis, it would be great if this extended to automatically outlining control structures, such as if/then, while loops, for/foreach loops, try/catch blocks, etc.

The purists out there might argue that if you need this collapsibility then your code is too long…and they are probably right. However, the purist point of view is not always a pragmatic one. There are numerous times where being able to collapse a long try/catch block or a large case statement would have been very helpful.

If you want to see this feature added to an upcoming release of Visual Studio, be sure to vote for the feature request on Microsoft Connect.

Windows Live Writer CTP

Scott Dorman — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:03:00 GMT

I have been a big fan of Windows Live Writer since it was first available, and that continues with the latest CTP release. There have been a lot of changes between the last beta and this CTP, including some much needed UI improvements and new features, including:

Upload videos to Soapbox
Image cropping and tilting
Additional border styles
Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
Support for centering images
Auto Linking
Smart quotes/typographic characters
Word count
Tabs for view switching
Improved category control with search/filtering

There are also some SDK updates that will provide a lot of flexibility for plug-ins, including a new set of experimental API hooks for pre- and post-publish events. For more details about the SDK, check out the blog post on Windows Live Dev.

I’ll be updating my XFN Link Editor shortly to work with the new SDK.

Racing Balloon

Scott Dorman — Sun, 25 May 2008 23:00:01 GMT

My friend and fellow MVP Richard has a unique project that he started to help raise money for one of his local primary school's swimming pool repair fund, which needs to raise £40K.

He's running a balloon race, which is being combined with Microsoft Virtual Earth to allow people to record and track where the balloons are found. Prizes are being offered (courtesy of Microsoft) for the finder of the balloon that has traveled the farthest and the person who launched that balloon.

If you are interested in helping donate, please buy a balloon race ticket (£1 each, minimum order 2) and make sure you check back on July 5th when the race starts and all of the balloons are launched.

This looks like it will be a lot of fun for all who participate and should be a great way to raise some money for a good cause. It would be great if they are able to raise all of the money needed from just one balloon race.

Hiking for the stout hearted

Scott Dorman — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 22:16:50 GMT

It's amazing how small our world can be sometimes. I just found this video from a tweet by ScottHa, who was referring to a blog post by Roy Osherove. The views are absolutely incredible (check out the view at about 00:40 and then again at 2:55), but there is no way I would ever do a hiking trip like this. Just watching this makes me feel afraid of heights (especially at 4:46), and I'm not!

Florida Technical Communities

Scott Dorman — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 00:26:52 GMT

Florida, particularly the Tampa Bay area, has a very active developer community. The biggest problem we seem to have is that all of these different groups usually don't know about each and there hasn't been a "centralized clearinghouse" listing all of the technical communities. Joe Healy, one of our Florida Microsoft Developer Evangelists, recently starting making efforts to change that and has started putting together one-page flyers for each of the main areas in Florida.

Taking what he has started on paper, I have started to recreate it as an online version. I think the eventual plan is that Joe will be updating his site to take advantage of the newer version of Live Maps and be able to show all of these communities overlaid on the Florida map. Until then, here is an expanded list that covers all of the technical communities that I know of.

If you are part of a technical user group community and don't see it listed (or need to change anything about a group that is listed), please let me know so I can add it to my list. I'll also forward the information on to Joe so he can keep his list in sync as well.

.NET Developer Groups

Florida .NET Developers Group - http://www.fladotnet.net

Boca Raton
Miramar User Group
Tampa .NET Developers

Gold Coast Users Group (Boca Raton) - http://www.gcdotnet.com
Gulf Coast .NET Developer Group (Ft. Walton) - http://www.gulfcoastdotnet.org
Gainesville .NET - http://www.gatormug.org
Jacksonville Developers User Group - http://www.jaxdug.com
Space Coast Dot Net User Group (Melbourne) - http://www.scdnug.org/
Miami User Group - http://www.miamiusersgroup.org
Naples .NET - http://www.naplesdot.net
Orlando .NET User Group - http://www.onetug.org
Sarasota .NET Developers Group - http://www.sarasotadev.net
Tallahassee .NET UG - http://www.tlhdotnet.net
Lakeland .NET Developer Group - http://www.cfdotnet.org

Java Developer Groups (JUGs)

SQL Server Groups

Tampa Bay SQL Server Group - http://www.tampasql.com
Tampa Bay SQL Server Business Intelligence Group - http://tampasqlbi.sqlservercentral.com
Sarasota SQL Server Group - http://www.sarasotasql.net
Orlando SQL Server Group - http://orlando.sqlservercentral.com
Jacksonville SQL Server Users Group - http://jacksonville.sqlservercentral.com

Office/SharePoint Groups

Tampa Bay Office Geeks Association (TOGA) - http://floridaofficegeeks.org/TOGA/default.aspx
Orlando SharePoint Users Group - http://www.mossmosis.com/orlando
Orlando Office Professional Special Interest Group - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cfcs-msoffice

Speciality Groups

Tampa Bay International Association of Software Architects - http://tampabayiasa.eventbrite.com/
Tampa Agile Development Group - http://agiletampa.spaces.live.com/

General User Groups

Boca Raton Computer Society - http://www.brcs.org

Organize your travel with TripIt

Scott Dorman — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:06:25 GMT

A lot of people have been talking lately about TripIt, a web-based travel organizer website created by some of the same people that brought you Hotwire. TripIt, however, isn't your ordinary travel site.

With the ever increasing use of online services to make travel plans, organizing the details scattered across multiple emails and varying formats can be difficult and sometimes downright frustrating. TripIt simplifies all of that by knowing how to read the confirmation email formats of most of the major airlines, hotels, and travel sites. You simply forward the email to TripIt and let their services take care of the rest.

Once TripIt has processed your trip details, you get a very nice summary and detailed view of your trip. The best thing is that you can get maps and driving directions from the airport to the hotel, your hotel to your various destinations, weather reports, travel guides, and a whole lot more. It keeps everything very nicely organized and easy to read.

You can even use TripIt to share your trip with family and friends, or if you are traveling with a group you can all collaborate on the same trip.

Up until recently, I never had a need to use a service like TripIt so I simply filed the information away for safe keeping. That all changed when I started planning my travel arrangements for my upcoming trip to Seattle. After booking my airfare, I decided to give TripIt a try. I forwarded the email from Southwest and added my hotel stay (I didn't have a confirmation email for the hotel stay but I was able to add the details by hand). Everything has worked seamlessly and so far I have been very impressed with the quality of the site and the ease of use.

Party with Palermo: 2008 MVP Summit Edition

Scott Dorman — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:45:54 GMT

So I was supposed to go to Party with Palermo for Tech·Ed 2007 but didn't manage to make it to town in time. Now that I know I'm going to the MVP Summit this year, I'm planning to go to the MVP Summit edition.

As always, the cover charge is one business card, which will get you in the door and registered for the grand prize drawings. This is free to attend, with free food, drink, and swag.

April 13, 2008 @ 7:00PM - 10:00PM

Jillian's: http://www.jilliansbilliards.com/
731 Westlake Ave N, Seattle, EA
Ph: 206-223-0300

Windows Live SkyDrive Feature Requests

Scott Dorman — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:08:46 GMT

I have been a big fan of SkyDrive since it was first available as a beta release. Now that it has been officially released, it has continued to get better. Just recently, the SkyDrive team announced the top list of feature requests that they are looking to implement. The list so far is:

Allowing multiple downloads at once.
Displaying how many times a file has been downloaded.
Supporting file synchronization from the desktop.
Providing an API for storing and retrieving files.
Adding SkyDrive access from Windows Explorer.

The best thing about this list is that it covers all of the features that I have been requesting and wanting to see in SkyDrive. For me, the killer features for SkyDrive will be:

Providing an API for storing and retrieving files.
Allowing multiple downloads at once.
Supporting file synchronization from the desktop.
Adding SkyDrive access from Windows Explorer.
Tighter integration with Windows Live FolderShare.

As you can see, 4 of my top 5 are also on the SkyDrive team's top 5. While there is no guarantee that these features will get implemented, they are asked about frequently enough to be "highly likely"...hopefully in the next few months as well.

Technorati Tags: Windows Live, SkyDrive

Windows Live FolderShare Beta

Scott Dorman — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:11:46 GMT

A while ago I talked about Windows Live FolderShare. As a reminder, for those of you who don't know:

FolderShare allows you to synchronize files across multiple computers and access or share files with colleagues and friends. You no longer need to send large files via email, burn them to CDs/DVDs and mail them, or upload them to a website. FolderShare allows you to share and sync important information instantly with anyone you invite, making it the perfect solution for personal or small business use. FolderShare allows you to share with other people, sync folders between your own computers, and remotely access your files via a web browser.

In that post, I talked about the similarities between FolderShare and Windows Live SkyDrive and said that

I would really love to see FolderShare and SkyDrive merged together where I can have a single sign-on experience (right now you still have to register on FolderShare separately) using my Windows Live ID and have the Personal folders in SkyDrive actually use the FolderShare Satellite services. Then, if I share a folder I have the ability to share it securely (the SkyDrive Shared folders) or publicly (SkyDrive Public folders). Additionally, since FolderShare already requires a client component it would be great to have some additional options in the Windows File Sharing dialog box. While we're at it, the default public folder that is created when you setup your SkyDrive account should mirror the Windows Public folder by default as well.

The FolderShare team released an update today that accomplishes some of those goals. The user interface brings FolderShare in line with the "Wave 2" feel of most of the other Windows Live services; in fact it looks a lot like SkyDrive.

There is also a new client application that features a better setup experience, a better system tray menu and better performance on Windows Vista.

While there isn't integration with Windows Live ID, I'm sure it won't be far off. That integration should also provide integration with SkyDrive as well. I think this is a great start at a whole new wave of features that will be coming from both the FolderShare and SkyDrive teams.