Scott Spradlin

In October, I received the Microsoft MVP Award.  The award is given based on past performance over the previous year.  Each year, the renewal is re-evaluated – again based on past performance.  I am thankful for everyone that nominated me and helped make this happen. Let me make a shout out to my friend Randy Walker from the great neighboring state of Arkansas.  It was at his urging and his persistence that finally made this happen.  Randy is pretty active in the community in this region so many of you probably already know him.  If you don’t, I urge you to introduce yourself to him. I’ve had the opportunity to meet PJ Forgione, my MVP lead, a few times in person.  Another great guy that’s keeping the MVP program filled with wonderful passion and excitement.  I’m looking forward to seeing him again in person sometime next year. Thanks also to the local Microsoft guys that had input in the approval process.  Many of you know Clint Edmonson – a great guy that truly has a heart for us lowly architects and developers.  Keep an eye on his blog and you’ll be in touch with the pulse of the local development community.

For years, one of the popular parts of TechEd has been the Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions hosted by INETA.  A BOF session is a conversation among a community of peers around a topic about which the participants are passionate. There may be some participants who are more knowledgeable than others, or have more experience; some who have less. Some folks will be well known, some will not. Some folks may want to just listen.

The point of a BOF session is to bring together people who share an interest in the topic so they can express their ideas and experiences, questions and insights, and hear what others have to say.

If you are attending PDC09, I encourage you to submit a topic for discussion and attend some of the sessions!  Check out the web site for all the details on what a BOF session is and how to submit an idea.

To help developers and architects better understand how to leverage the cloud, Microsoft is offering two "train-the-trainer" sessions for user group leaders and influentials. Here's a great opportunity to learn more and present back to your user groups.

Sessions are:

• Wednesday, September 9, 2009 5:00 PM-6:00 PM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)
• Tuesday, September 15, 2009 8:00 AM-9:00 AM (UTC-8:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)

Here's What You'll Learn

• Development tools for Visual Studio
• Local debugging
• Data storage services
• Security
• Running your ASP.NET applications in the cloud
• Service hosting
• Interfacing Non Microsoft applications such as PHP

You'll get demo code and PowerPoint content ready for presentation delivery.

Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers.

Windows Azure is currently in Community Technology Preview. Commercial availability for Windows Azure will likely be at the end of calendar year 2009.

Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.

Ask any .NET developer and I bet the vast majority will tell you that PDC is the MUST attend conference of the year.  At INETA, we realize that times are tough and thought now would be a good time to give away two trips to PDC.  Each trip includes air, hotel and conference pass.  All we ask is you take some time to build an application using some third party components. This could be something new or even something that you have been working on for a while.  It could even be something you are doing at work. All you have to do is take a 5 minute video telling us why your application is so cool and you are in the running.  The judges will be evaluating submissions on many different criteria so even if you are new to a component, you still have a good chance to win. So what are you waiting for? Get busy, the deadline to get submissions in is August 25th.  Get all of the details at http://www.ineta.org/codechallenge.

You’ve probably heard about the St. Louis Day of .NET – which is actually TWO days this year.  Again we’ve had a huge response for speakers and the list of sessions is pretty balanced.  I’m only officially on the agenda for one session entitled “The Search for Work-Life Balance” which I’m co-presenting with my friend Robert Fischer. There’s still time for you to register for this event and get two great days for one low price. Come to this session – leave your stress at the door, relax.

The St. Louis .NET User Group is excited to bring Rachel Appel, a new member of the INETA Speaker Bureau to St. Louis.

Rachel will present “Web UI Warfare: Choosing Between ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC” to an anxious crowd of developers.  Everyone is welcome to attend.  Details at http://www.stlnet.org

Rachel has been quite active in the community recently.  Be sure to check out her web site and don’t miss her on Twitter.

Perhaps you've seen the nice glossy print magazine done by the nice folks at DevConnections entitled MyDevConnections. It's very nice quality production and has some great content -- much of which is supplied by INETA Speakers!

Check out the article I submitted on page 53 and see if you recognize any of the user group leaders mentioned.

You can find Rob Zelt, current president of INETA NorAm, on pages 22 and 71.

Speaking of DevConnections... user group leaders and members can get some great discounts. Talk to your INETA Membership Mentor for details.

So it finally came!  The big St. Louis Day of .NET event.  Man was I tired afterwards.  We had it at CAIT and we reached our limit of the number of bodies that were supposed to fit into that facility.  We had to finally shut off registrations because we were afraid there would not be enough room for everyone to sit!  CAIT is a teaching facility so the rooms were laid out with workstations and plenty of desktop space.  We rented chairs to fill in the blanks.  Some rooms were VERY tight.  Next year, we'll limit the number of chairs.  As we topped 250 registrations, we were worried where we'd fit everyone.  Eventually, we had to turn off the registration site because the names just kept pouring in!  I'm sure we would have registered well over 300 if we let it go up until the last day.

Not only did we close registration because of the numbers, we had to stop it for financial reasons.  Ordering breakfast/lunch/snack for 250 of your closest friends takes money up front and lead time to order.  Not to mention ordering attendee shirts (which turned out awesome I thought!) and the cool flash drives that we included in the attendee bag.  I guess we could have had a last minute registration price that didn't include the food or cool stuff, but we chose not to.

Our registration was handled by BusyEvent.com and it went pretty smoothly.  Airline style check-in with badges on lanyards.  (No event is official without badges.)  Their staff was on site to help facilitate the process but it went pretty smoothly -- thanks to their software and work done ahead of time.  A big thanks to them for handling that part of the conference.

We had a super bunch of sponsors -- which allowed us to pay for things that would have made the conference impossible if we didn't have.  The attendee cost didn't quite cover all the expenses we had -- we tried to lower the attendee cost such that we'd just break even after everything was paid.  it worked out pretty close too!  (Who knew that renting a few chairs would be almost $500?)

Last but not least let me mention our speakers.  What a great group of people.  We threw them in tiny rooms packed full of people and told them they needed to do their presentations multiple times -- and they gave some outstanding talks.  We heard great feedback from the attendees.  We certainly could not have pulled this off without their generosity.  We had so many speakers (24) that there was no way someone could hear them all -- even with them presenting twice during the day.

So, next time -- what'll be different?

Apparently people can't go full blast from 8:00am to 5:00pm without a break.  (We didn't have a lunch break -- grab your food and move to the next session.)  I think next time we'll build in some more breaks or fun things.  Maybe have some Xbox play rooms?  How about a nap room with big comfy lazy boy chairs?  Something, anything for a break.

We'll probably close registration earlier next time just to facilitate ordering supplies.

Anyway, it was a fun day.  I had no idea how much work it would be to cover all the details of the day.  (Paper coffee cups vs styrofoam ... blue shirts vs beige shirts ... signs, portrait or landscape ... "Future of C#, big room or small room)

I'd be happy to listen to any suggestions you might have about this event or conference planning in general.  I hope to post a few photos soon.  (Mental note, next time, assign someone to take photos!)

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.