GANG (Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group) is helping to host the .NET To Go Mobility Roadshow on Wed., Oct 20, 2004 at the Microsoft Offices in Southfield.

The .NET To Go Mobility Roadshow will provide you with the answers to your mobile development questions. Digging into the details, using more code and fewer slides, these technical sessions will show you how to develop and implement mobile solutions using the .NET Compact Framework and languages you are already familiar with. To register for this FREE event or to learn more, go to www.msmobilitytour.com.

Registration is required to make sure that you can get in. You can register at the MS Events page - http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032259728&Culture=en-US.

Thursday, October 14, 2004 12:59:22 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Bill Wagner (Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group President, Regional Director and author of the C# Core Language Little Black Book and Effective C#) is going to be doing a webcast on how to install and configure Data Driven Web Applications.

If you've faced the frustration deploying a data-driven Web application to a server, or tried moving applications from one server to another, you need to attend this webcast. Learn how to create installations for your Web application as easily as a desktop application. By attending this webcast you will learn:

• Why your Web application needs an installer
• What problems you will face deploying manually
• How to create multiple Web sites and virtual directories in the same installation
• How to connect to and configure SQL Server databases
• How to manage security for your application
• How to edit web.config to customize your installation

Join Wise Solutions and Bill Wagner of SRT Solutions as we cover the process of creating an easy installation for a complex Web application.

Thursday, September 30 @ 8:30 a.m. EST

For Registration go to http://www.wise.com/wfwi_webcasts.asp.

Wednesday, September 29, 2004 2:21:46 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Patrick Steele (http://weblogs.asp.net/psteele/archive/2004/09/16/230473.aspx?Pending=true) and Scoble have been talking about using descriptive titles on your blog posts to make it easier to scan and triage what posts you read. That’s actually a great point. I know that I scan 150+ blogs and Patrick is in the same ballpark. That’s an average of 80-120 posts a day and some days are more intense than that. The good news is that NewsGator (http://www.NewsGator.com), SharpReader (http://www.sharpreader.net/) and RSS Bandit (http://www.rssbandit.org/) all make scanning new posts.

Patrick went on to post about the number of pictures that are on blogs and how frustrating that is when you are offline. One the one hand, I agree with that. It’s really frustrating that when you are offline and the major portion of a given blog with an interesting headline is a picture. On the other hand, I really like the pictures that are on some of the blogs that I read. Some examples of this are:
http://bucsfishingreport.com/pMachine/weblog.php

http://weblogs.asp.net/jrule/Rss.aspx

I’m not saying that the pictures make the post but it does help the item. Some other blogs just add pictures for the fun of it and they don’t really add anything to the post.

There are few things that I’d like to suggest about pictures.

First, be judicial in your use of pictures. That is, make sure that they add something to the post.

Second, in the short term, make sure that you provide alternative text for all of the pictures on your blog.

Third, I’d love it if one on the readers (or all of them for that matter) would have an option to download pictures and the like with the posts.

Friday, September 17, 2004 1:47:23 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

Last night Eric Maino (http://www.meeteric.net) gave a talk at GANG (http://www.migang.org) about Test Driven Development (TDD). It was a very good talk that touched on a lot of the important issues involved in testing. It was a good overview of NUnit (http://www.nunit.org) and how TDD works. The slides will be up on the GANG web site soon.

One of the questions that came up was how GUI testing works with NUnit. I happened to attend a talk at SD West (http://www.SDExpo.com) by Elisabeth Hendrickson from Quality Tree (http://www.qualitytree.com) on that exact topic. She has been working on a test harness for GUI testing that’s built on NUnit. You can learn more about it here - http://www.qualitytree.com/autotest/dotnetgui.htm.

Thursday, September 16, 2004 8:58:14 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I’ve found this little tool invaluable. I use it to test out RegEx expressions, String Formatting and tons of other useful little bits of code.

I used to keep a dummy project around for this purpose, but it’s a pain to load VS.NET every time that you want to test a quick string formatting and it’s too painful to test to that location in your real application just to see if it worked and see what it does.

I hope that you enjoy it as much as I do.

Friday, June 25, 2004 1:56:05 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I thought that this was an interesting item. It’s the history of programming languages back to the mid-50s. There are a few things that I saw that were interesting – such as the fact that Fortran will be 50 this November and is the ancestor to a number of programming languages. There were a few inaccuracies, such as the fact that they skipped from VB 1.0 to VB 6.0 and completely missed all of the releases between.

Oh well, it’s an interesting thing anyways…

Thursday, June 17, 2004 7:54:38 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

There are a number of reasons that you might want to host a native windows control on the Compact Framework and now there’s a way using the OpenNetCF framework.

Wednesday, June 02, 2004 9:32:12 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

The Windows Mobile Team just published a white paper on migrating from eVB to VB.NET on the Compact Framework. This is a really good thing and is worth a read.

Wednesday, June 02, 2004 9:22:58 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I know that it's not a really big deal to many authors, but I got my first article published on the Fawcette Reports web site.

I didn't know that it was actually published until I started getting emails about it - but it's linked below.

Thursday, April 22, 2004 1:53:43 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0]