Re: Atlanta .NET User Group and DataGrid Girl

Marcie mentioned that GridView is going to be the successor to the DataGrid control in the next version of .NET.  Does this mean that she will soon be known as "GridView Girl"? (I see that she has already snagged up the name GridviewGirl.com...) 

Great presentation Marcie!

[Paul Wilson's .NET Blog]

I made it to last night's Atlanta .NET User Group meeting, as well as having dinner with Marcie (aka DataGrid Girl).  I don't get to these things very often -- I think this was my third total and second in the last year or so.  I was impressed with the size of the group (96) and the interaction that actually occurred amongst all us geeks.  Marcie did a great job -- I learned how to use the datagrid without enabling its viewstate!  Steven Heckler also gave a short talk on Regular Expressions which had to be the best explanation I've ever heard or seen.  There were also a good number of job announcements, which appeared to interest many attendees.  I was also pleasantly surprised at the number of people that knew who I was and wanted to talk to me -- and all I did was sit quietly in the back.  Anyhow, if last night was typical, then I would recommend attending if you are in Atlanta, although I still prefer going home to be with my family.

Great add-in for Reflector!

I have been using this great add-in for Lutz Roeder's Reflector.  It is written by Jason Bock and it allows you to generate the source files from an assembly and save them to your hard drive!  Unfortunately, it only works with version 3.2.5.0 of Reflector.   (I think Reflector is now up to 3.3.1.0)  Jason was kind enough to provide the source code but it looks like Reflector has gone through a lot of changes since 3.2.5.0. 

My question is, has anyone else written an add-in like this or does anyone know what has changed since 3.2.5.0 so I could modify Jason's add-in?  Thanks!

[Rant] Intel is giving away free wireless - YMMV!

Well, after reading Scoble's post about Intel giving away free wireless, I thought I would check it out.  I had to run to Border's during lunch to buy a copy of Chris Sells' new book: Windows Forms Programming in C#  (which looks great BTW...) and I thought I would take my pocket pc with to try it out.  I get there and their system is down so I can't check on a couple of other books I wanted to find so I decided to get online! 

First,  All I can get is T-Mobile's login page.  I go back to the information desk and ask them how I can get online with Unwired Day.  "Yea, they told us that something like that was going to happen today, but I don't have any details" and then proceeds to hand me the T-Mobile brochure. 

I did not want to have to pay in order to get online so I asked someone else and they called T-Mobile and got them on the phone for me.  They decided to give me a promo code that would allow me to create an account without having to give them my credit card (very key here!)

I tried their code, but it was reported to be an invalid code by their login screen and prompted me for my credit card number.

Although I am positive I will shop at borders again in the future, I seriously doubt that I will EVER get T-Mobile wireless service.  They should have made this much easier for people to try out on this day!  Oh well!  I guess "Unwired Day" is like those emails you get where everyone is not supposed to buy gas for their cars on a certain day in order to protest the inflated prices of gas.  Nice idea but it really doesn't pan out...

[OT] Court blocks Do Not Call Registry.

Court blocks Do Not Call Registry:  Sept 24 —  A federal judge has ruled that the Federal Trade Commission overstepped its authority in creating a national do-not-call list against telemarketers. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by telemarketers who challenged the list, comprised of names of people who do not want to receive business solicitation calls. The immediate impact of Tuesday’s ruling was not clear."

Welcome to the Future "Longhorn" Development Center...

[Microsoft's Longhorn Development Center]

Welcome to the Future "Longhorn" Developer Center

Get ready to develop applications for Microsoft Windows Code-Named "Longhorn". Sign up for the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2003 (PDC), where you will get your first chance to look under the hood. "Longhorn" has to be seen to be believed.

But don’t stop there. On October 27, the day after the PDC starts, we will launch the "Longhorn" Developer Center on MSDN. Come here for feature articles and discussion groups to help you take full advantage of the next wave of the Windows operating system.

Chris Sells
Editor, MSDN Longhorn Developer Center

SnippetManager + SnippetCompiler ??

I saw SnippetManager on The Daily Grind 178 and there is Code Library for .NET and of course everyone by now has seen SnippetCompiler by Jeff Key.

I wonder how long before someone combines those two features...

*Free* Utilities I Use!

following in the footsteps of Scott Hanselman who posted his list of Power Tools that he uses, I decided to post a partial list of the ones I use.  How mine probably will differ is that mine will be all *free* utilities.  They are broken down into command line, .NET Utils, and windows utils.   I will populate the list with more stuff as I get free time. 

** Added some more utilities that I use **  (and people wonder why I run out of hard disk space...)
This will end up being a living document so I have added “new“ and “updated“ icons to entries and well as last updated date.
 - dotnetboy

Finally got my *free* Viewsonic V37 Pocket PC!

I finally got my Viewsonic V37 Pocket PC that was free with my MSDN subscription.  They said it would take 8-12 weeks and it was 12 weeks to the day!  I only wish that they would have put Pocket PC 2003 (or whatever it is called now) instead of Pocket PC 2002.  But from what I hear there isn't a whole lot of differences.  Maybe this weekend I will have some time to try it out!

I was reminded of my love for free stuff by a reader...

Data Access Layer stuff

I have been working on a Data Access Layer for work and I came across this DAL written by Deyan Petrov on CodeProject.  It does almost everything that we are trying to do here and it is pretty cool!   The idea is to be able to define the following in your xml config files:

dataproviders  (sqlclient, oledb, etc)
datasources  (myaccessdb, mysqlserverdb, etc)
commands  (getalluserbyid, updateuser, etc.)

Now, the only thing else that I needed it to be able to do is connect to any datasource, not just a database.  Well I figure that I can either tweak the code a little to support this or build a Managed Data Provider for whatever datasource I want to connect to.  I was excited to see that I can connect to a CSV file and I am busy looking to see what other unusual formats I can connect to with already existing managed data providers.