Scott Spradlin

Ever been to a conference?  Any conference.  If not, you really need to attend one to see what it's all about.  DevTeach in Canada is a perfect sized one to attend.  It's not so big  you get lost in the crowds yet it's big enough to have big-name speakers and top-notch sessions.

Sometimes, you want to go but you just can't convince your boss to foot the bill or let you out of work. Jean-René Roy has put together a great page to help with that.  Top ten ways to convince your boss that you need to go to a conference.  Go read it or listen to the audio version!

So I'm sitting in the speaker room at DevConnections ... watching the big named folks work their way through picking up the speaker goodies.  I'm not supposed to drop names, but I've seen several INETA speakers so far.  I flew into town with DotNetNuke expert and INETA speaker Chris Hammond.  Should be a good week.

Every attendee will get Visual Studio 2008 Pro, Expression Web 2 and Tech-Ed DEV set in their bag!

DevTeach believes that all developers need the right tool to be productive. This is why they will give you free software when you register to DevTeach or SQLTeach. Yes that right! They’re pleased to announce that they’re giving over a 1000$ of software when you register to DevTeach. You will find in your conference bag a version of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, ExpressionTM Web 2 and the Tech-Ed Conference DVD Set. Is this a good deal or what? DevTeach and SQLTeach are really the training you can’t get any other way.

 

We've been waiting for this for quite a while and finally it's here! Over 25 presenters coming from from 5 states.  Topics plucked hot off the PDC press just in time for Christmas. Plus, the price is incredibly cheap for a full day of learning.  If you can make it at all, I highly encourage you to do so.  Bring a friend. Oh, and did I mention the prizes?  We have so many prizes I'm not even allowed to tell you about them out loud.  You have to show up to find out. http://www.StLouisDayOfDotNet.com

\I keep forgetting how to do this so I'm blogging it to help me remember.

Back in the days of WSS v2 and SPS 2003, one could use some handy URL parameter passing to edit web pages and browse for or search web parts.

My three favorite parameters for WSS v2 and SPS2003 were:

To Correct or Remove Misbehaving Web Parts
http://server/default.aspx?Contents=1

To Open the Page in Web Part Design Mode
http://server/default.aspx?ToolPaneView=2

To Open the Search Web Part Zone
http://server/default.aspx?ToolPaneView=3

Now in WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 we have the much more practical approach of switching views. Enter the Site Actions Menu, using the menu options we can edit the page, browse to site settings, etc.. But what happens if the Site Actions menu is not visible on the page. Maybe it was missed in the look and feel or has been removed deliberately like I had to do recently for a client. Now why someone would need to remove it and how this can be achieved (in at least two ways) will be covered in a later post.

Here are my favorite parameters to date for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007:

To open the Design Bar - Useful for pages in the Pages Library
http://server/default.aspx?DisplayMode=Design

To turn on Web Part Zone Editing 
http://server/default.aspx?ControlMode=Edit

Note: The Site Actions Menu is rights trimmed and that means not all users can see or use it. Users with limited access or read rights will not be able to make use of the URL\Query String parameters. The parameters are just an alternative to get to the editing\design controls rather then a security bypass.

So there I was -- another day of writing slick AJAXified custom SharePoint web parts.  This was a simple one.  A series of dropdowns that cause subsequent dropdowns to be re-populated with increasingly restrictive data.

• Planet
• Continent
• Country
• etc.

But, when I changed the planet choice to be "Earth" the continent choice DID populate with the continents on earth but it caused a complete page round trip -- not the smooth AJAXified action I expected.  Plus, my UpdateProgress panel wasn't being displayed at all, even though I put a 10 second pause in my event handler.  What's wrong?  I'm comparing my CreateChildControls against previous similar projects that worked in the past and everything appears to be correct.

Can't figure it out so I start randomly moving things around to see what effect that has.  (Highly technical debugging technique.)  I move a button up into the UpdatePanel and THAT WORKS!  It's the dropdown!  AJAX hates my dropdowns!

I start looking into why it's so.  Do I need to specify the <TRIGGER> manually for these controls?  Say it ain't so!  I've never had to do that in the past.  Wait, someone's post says "make sure you give your dynamically created controls an ID or AJAX won't work for them!"  I add a line similar to:

      MyDropdownControl.ID = "_AnIdHere_"

...and by golly now it works.  Moral of the story?  Always give your dynamically created controls a proper ID.  Just like Norm, web parts want to go -- wait for it -- where everybody knows their name.

My friend Todd Kitta and I were having a discussion on GUIDs.  He said that one day he compared the number of possible GUIDs to the number of grains of sand estimated to be on all the beaches on the earth.

Number of GUIDs	340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,770,000,000 *
Grains of sand	75,000,000,000,000,000,000 *

I guess that's why we don't typically put in error checking to detect duplicate GUIDs.  It hasn't yet, but if it can happen, it'll happen to me.

 

---

* Numbers estimated based on the decimal precision of our scientific calculator as provided in Vista.

The June 30th meeting of St. Louis .NET User Group tried something new -- a meeting following the Open Space Technology.  OST is a method of running meetings of groups of any size.  Essentially, it's a self-organizing process where the attendees construct the agenda and schedule DURING the meeting itself.  How can this be?  There's no way this would work.  Chaos I say!

Well, we did it and I think it worked out quite well.  For those new to the idea, here's a quick outline of what we did.

1. Everyone showed up, expecting to enjoy an evening of food, learning, and networking.
2. We ate food.  (We always have food at our user group meetings -- the one common denominator that ties all developers together.)
3. We let our sponsor say a few words to the group.  Kevin Grossnicklaus from SSE spoke on their behalf.  Kevin was one of the original founders of our user group.  We're always excited to have him come back and speak to us.
4. I introduced the concept of Open Spaces to a room of blank stares.  Either they were full of the aforementioned food and unable to respond or were stunned by an apparent lack of planning.  Meetings without PowerPoint?  Say it ain't so!
5. We made a list of topics that people would like to discuss, talk about, or hear about.  We came up with about a dozen topics and wrote them on the white board at the front.  The ones that I can remember were:
6. • MVC Framework
   • Vista vs. W2K8
   • Real-time BI
   • How to stay current
   • Software FAILURES
   • Infrastructure prep
   • Agile
   • SQL throttling and other tricks
7. I told them we'd narrow it down to a couple of groups of four and do two sessions.
8. We did a show of hands to see how many people would be interested in each of the topics.  A couple of the topics got a big vote.  A few topics received only a handful.  The bulk of them received the "average" vote.
9. We decided to do two sessions, one in individual groups and a second one all together to cover the topic with the most votes.  One group went to talk about Agile methodology; one group to talk about Vista vs W2K8 and one group discussed software failures.
10. Coming back together, our local Microsoft Architect Evangelist Clint Edmonson helped lead the discussion on ways to stay current in the industry.  He blogged about the topic and captured most of the content of that session plus photos!  I encourage you to read Clint's post.  We didn't get any photos of Clint because he was our photographer!  (Thanks Clint!)
11. We handed out attendance prizes.  Here's a photo of one of our members, local genius Eric Lynn, winning the coveted MSDN post-it cube.  Wow, was he excited or what?  We should give out more of those apparently.

 

So, that's essentially the way it happened.  The moral of the story is user groups are filled with smart people that have great ideas and love to share them.  I encourage you to try an Open Space night at your user group and see what happens.

An XBox or MSDN Subscription to the 10 Most Active Contributors in the User Group Community each quarter.

How?  By doing what you are doing already, you stand to win:

a) Valuable Prizes: An MSDN Subscription.  And, if you already have one, you can choose an XBox instead.

b) The Fame and Prestige of having an award to hang on your wall that shows that INETA recognizes your contributions to the User Group Community.

c) Official Recognition on the INETA Website  for one year.

All of your peers will be able to see that you stand out above the crowd. If the opportunity presents itself for you to show your dedication to the User Group Community in a public way, there is no better way than to show off your name highlighted on the website of a highly respected organization like INETA.

d) A Badge for your website showing that you are a Community Champion.

When folks visit your website, blog or any other place where you publicly post your work, they will see that you are a Community Champion.

Oooohhhh. Recognition by INETA? Valuable Prizes? An award to hang on my wall? A Badge?  How can I participate?

Well, I am glad that you asked.

INETA has long been known for it's support of User Groups and this year, there are a number of great new programs supporting the User Group Community.  The Community Champs program is one of them.  INETA wants to recognize individuals who are demonstrating their involvement in the User Group community.  The program is aimed at rewarding those that are the most active with the prizes and award mentioned above.  It is INETA's way of recognizing the ones that really bring the community together.  So, in short, if you are the kind of person who helps to run user group meetings, codecamps, or helps out in any number of other ways, you should let INETA know the kind of activities that you are involved in.  If you are very active, you may be recognized by INETA in a very public and spectacular way for the activities that you currently do to help the user group community.

INETA and Community-Credit are making it happen.

Community Credit has been helping to recognize fellow developers for the past number of years for their accomplishments and INETA has been the mainstay of User Groups for many years, so it is no surprise that the two would be working together to make this great program possible.  Best of all, the contributions that you record will also count toward Community Credit prizes, so you may even have a chance to be rewarded with a Geeky, Community Credit prize as an added bonus.

How do I submit my contributions?

Visit the INETA website and go to the Champions section, sign in and let INETA know what you are doing by recording your contributions.  The current quarterly period counts for contributions during period of  June 30th, 2007 to June 30th, 2008.  The final submissions can be made until July 14th.  Keep in mind that the end of this current quarter is coming up pretty soon, so if you have been very active over the last year, be sure to enter them soon so that you don't miss this great opportunity.

What are the benefits of participating?

If you are an individual who is always contributing to the User Group Community, you do it because you like it.  You don't do it because you expect to be rewarded.  At the same time, if you just happen to be rewarded and recognized then that makes it that much better.  Imagine playing on an XBox that you received as a thanks for all of your hard work.  It makes the games just a little bit more fun.  Using your MSDN subscription that you "earned" makes the tools just a little bit better and seeing the award hanging on your wall is a reminder to you and your colleagues just how committed you are.

Can anybody participate?

Unfortunately, the current period (being our first) is for participants in North America only.

File this one under the "yet another useless error" category. I was trying to publish a form that I prevously had succesfully published to my development VPC. Every time I tried to publish it would say "the following url is not valid" when I entered the path to the sharepoint site.

Doing the standard search for the error yielded several potential solutions ranging from re-installing .NET, make sure there's a site at the root "/" and make sure there's a SSP.

Additional searching yielded the other option of stopping the "System Event Notification"  Check out this blog entry.

Don't you just love obscure error messages?

I wrote this series of data entry SharePoint web parts using Infragistics' UltraWebGrid in C#.  Afterwards, the client proclaimed they really wanted everything in VB so I used one of those online converters and it didn't take hardly any time at all.

The project was created with Ted Pattison's STSDEV available on CodePlex.  (I highly recommend this tool ... thanks to my buddy Brendon Schwartz, SharePoint MVP for pointing me to it.)  Unfortunately, the version of STSDEV I used only created C# projects to I had to do some things by hand to get everything converted and building properly within the STSDEV framework.

After everything was built, the solution seemed to install and everything was great up until I tried to add a web part to a page. "Web Part or Web Form Control on this Page cannot be displayed or imported. The type could not be found or it is not registered as safe" -- but alas, the dll is in the GAC, properly signed and is properly identified in the web.config in SafeControls.  What's wrong?

Loading the dll into Lutz Roeder's Reflector just to verify everything looked ok to me.  I brought a second pair of eyes into the situation and had my collegue and author Todd Kitta.  Todd immediately said "your namespace is wrong" and he was right.

Apparently during my by-hand conversion, in the project properties, I set the assembly name and I also set the Root Namespace to the primary namespace I was expecting.  Well, it turns out that if you actually enter something there, it is automatically prefixed to whatever namespace is in your code.  Hence, my namespace was doubling up.

So this year TechEd is divided into two weeks -- one focused on developers and one on IT Pros -- and I'm going as a representative of INETA.  We'll have a spot in the community area.  INETA is also a big force behind the BOF sessions.  If you haven't been to one of those in the past, try to check them out this year.

On Monday, June 2 from 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm we're having an INETA Community Leadership Summit to get the week kicked off right.  If you're on Facebook, go add this event.

So when I started blogging, I assured myself that I wouldn't waste anyone's time by posting socially irrelevant noise that just added to the spam we all have grown to hate.  Without the "Hanselman connection" this post might be considered questionable.

I was in my hotel room, tired and thirsty.  It's a fancy hotel you know, so there are no vending machines on the floors where the rooms filled with people are located.  You must dress yourself and venture down to the lobby and make a legitimate purchase at the store in the lobby.  I'm pulling my warm Diet Coke from the "cooler" and Scott Hanselman is buying some candy.

The candy he is buying for his wife is Cadbury's Flake. He was saying that he always buys them for her when he can find them because they are not sold in the United States.  Apparently they are produced in the UK, Australia, and South Africa.  I'm not sure how they made it into Canada.  I don't think that form I signed at the border prevented me from eating these imported contraband.

As you might expect of a Cadbury product, the chocolate was tasty -- not overly sweet and not waxy. It was incrediby flaky -- no doubt hence the name -- and made a mess in the bed that I felt obligated to clean up.

Interestingly enough, it turns out a Cadbury Flake advertisement was removed from the air in the 1970s in the UK due to complaints about the suggestive manner in which the woman in the ad bit into the bar.

Another good party with Jeffrey Palermo at DevTeach in Toronto.  Always good to meet up with old friends and make new ones.

Jeffrey and I showed up a bit early for the party at Menage.  What a great view on the outside patio overlooking the city street.  Geeks would be arriving in droves momentarily.  Given the typical percentages of male/female attendees at these events and user groups in general, I was surprised when a young woman showed up by herself and sat at a table by herself near the back.

Turns out that her name was Kate and she was there by invitation from a friend that was late.  She was feeling like the "odd man out" since she was only one of two or three females in the room so far.  Kate mentioned she had a friend that is studying gender in the IT field. (Maybe not that generic...I'll have to get the details later.)

But interestingly enough, Kate was getting her PhD by researching young adult's use of facebook.  I thought that was fascinating.  Scott Hanselman was in the area and I introduced the two of them -- I thought he might find her field of study interesting.

Maybe we'll get Kate or her friend in front of some Canada user groups to discuss gender issues. Any volunteers?

 

I am headed to Toronto Canada for DevTeach tomorrow. Scott Hanselman has the keynote first thing Tuesday morning.  Lots of great sessions planned and networking with fellow user group leaders and members from Canada.  What a great country.  Everyone I've met from up there has been incredibly nice.

Monday night is the traditional Party With Palermo. That's always a great place to catch up with a lot of familiar faces at these events.

I'm also looking forward to the .NET Rocks hosted panel discussion on the 14th.  Carl and Richard will be talking with folks who have strong visions of the future of software development and the role that .NET can play in that future.

Plus, there are an incredible number of great sessions at these DevTeach events.  If you are in Canada, you need to try to make it to one of these events.  They happen twice a year.  Check out their web site ... Montreal in December 08

 

As you know from previous posts, I'm currently using Sprint's version of the HTC Mogul called the PPC6800 running Windows Mobile 6.0.

Up to now, the broadband speed has been pretty decent. About 1/2 DSL speeds or better.

The other day HTC announced the upgrade to EVDO Rev A -- the true DSL speed network.  I reflashed my firmware pretty smoothly and the upgrade went well.  Did I get double speed downloads?  Well, it seems snappier, quicker connects, overall a little faster but not 2X.

I just now did a speed test using http://www.dslreports.com and it reported 713 kbit/sec with a 400K file and 664 kbit/sec with a 1MB file.  Not too bad.

Faster than that 1200 baud Hayes modem I bought for $695 in 1983.

 

You've been there.  "It works on my box!"  Our new SharePoint web parts don't work in production!

This project called for a suite of data entry grids inside custom SharePoint web parts.  The customer already owned Infragistics' NetAdvantage for ASP.NET so I used their UltraWebGrid.  Very slick and easy to deploy with your custom web parts.

The primary feature they wanted was the cool Excel-like cut-n-paste functionality but that wasn't working in our production environment.  At the beginning of the project, the client said "Oh, we already have AJAX things running in that environment...it's installed and ready to go."  Silly me, I didn't follow through and verify it.  My solution installed without the infamous "The Web Part you attempted to add no longer exists in the Closed Web Parts Gallery" helpful error message...which means that all the dlls that I'm referencing apparently are there.

After the page loads -- apparently successfully -- and we mouse over the grid, we see the tiny little error message down in the corner of the browser.  Digging deeper I see that JavaScript has encountered a problem and is helping me out by saying "Object Expected".  Even gives me the line where this object is expected.  It's the line that is 65 million characters long that contains all the html for the grid.  So, IE knows the object it's expecting, why can't it share that tidbit?

Well, we know it's event oriented because the error happens when the mouseover should be firing.  Maybe the JavaScript code that's supposed to fire isn't being loaded properly I say to myself. (Infragistics cleverly bundles all the JavaScript support files as embedded resources so there's no additional headache of distributing them, setting permissions, etc.)  So it looks like it's loading them but apparently it's not.

Specifically, one of the changes you're instructed to make to the web.config for AJAX installation supports the callbacks for embedded scripts through ScriptResource.axd.

<add verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" validate="false"/>

Someone had not updated the web.config on the production web front end to include all the changes needed for complete AJAX support.  Thanks buddy.  :)

I made the seven little changes and bingo -- success.

So there I was, thinking about a new blog post, pondering someone else's blog post I'd just read, installing Windows Live Writer so I can post better blog posts, and it just hit me.  Wham!  Of all the people I know, if the universe could have back the total number of hours spent on blogging alone, just imagine the possibilities.  Plus, add in the time for all the people that I DON'T know who blog.  Wow.

Then, I started to enumerate (list) the alternative actions that would be more beneficial to the cosmos.  Before I got three items (the minimum in a list) my Live Writer installation completed.

So I'm off to spend more time playing with yet another tool that I need when I spend time blogging instead of playing outside.

...I can mow the grass another day.

So after the User Group Management Summit was over, a bunch of us also attended ALT.NET.  It's a free conference by developers held in the Open Spaces format.  I never would have believed how successful that format actually is unless I experienced it myself.  I was pretty impressed and enjoyed several of the sessions I was able to attend.  Touched bases with tons of friends, and even met some new ones.

I especially enjoyed Scott Hanselman's session "Are we innovating or just porting?" Check out my buddy D'Arcy's blog post.

 

So, one of my nerdy buddies suggested I join Twitter. So I did. It's a way to send short status messages about your self into the cloud and interested beings can watch your messages. Jeff Atwood calls it the combination of blogging and IM.

There are various way to interact with twitter:

• you can do it with your mobile phone, sending and receiving updates as SMS
• browse to the mobile version of the web page
• you can sent and receive updates using your favorite IM client
• you can use the web UI and the RSS feeds
• or you can a desktop client like Twhirl

So, if you want to know what I'm doing right now, just go to my personal twitter page twitter.com/scotts, and you might even want to add me as friend in order to get my thoughts and "status updates" delivered as soon as I post them.