November 2004 - Posts - ShowUsYour<Blog>

Poetry: Unravelling layers

Read this great piece of prose by English poet Jonathon Swift today which reminded me of the almost endless possibilities for drilling down into layers of complexity...

"So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum."

Posted: Nov 29 2004, 08:43 PM by digory | with 4 comment(s)

Filed under: Rants

Last week Will behooved me to check out the IE2OneNote powertoy. Today I needed to save some pages for quick, offline viewing so I thought that I'd give it a whirl. It's very useful. It installs as a button on the main IE toolbar and scrapes the page into a new top level category named WebClippings. All of the styles and images are perfectly preserved.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/assistance/HA011408961033.aspx

Posted: Nov 28 2004, 09:03 AM by digory | with 1 comment(s)

Filed under: Tools

Some great tools to check out

During the week I was introduced to Serena Yeoh by William Luu. Serena's tagline is: I'm a little ant working in a big-big colony.

Based on what I've seen, Serena may be anything but a little ant as she already has 2 really cool applications

Stickies .NET - allows you to create little notes and reminders to stick on your desktop.
Paladin - a generic, feature-rich object persistent framework.

I've installed the Stickes.NET application and have found that it has some really useful features for posting reminders. The thing that got me about this application was how professionally it has been done. There has been not skimping on UI and features. I'm hoping to play with Paladin during the week.

Posted: Nov 28 2004, 07:03 AM by digory | with 1 comment(s)

Filed under: Community, Tools

Creating knowledge from information

Over the next few months I intend to do some intensive blog'ging on the topic of using tools such as InfoPath, Office 2003, Sharepoint and the Information Bridge Framework and how you can wire them together to create smart applications which add value to existing information systems.

I've created a new category named "Knowledge and Collaboration" which will house these entries.

[ Currently Playing : King's Crossing - Elliott Smith - From a Basement on the Hill (04:58) ]

Posted: Nov 27 2004, 07:52 PM by digory | with no comments

Filed under: Knowledge and Collaboration

A couple of Windows Services resources

I've had a couple of Windows Services snippets that I've been meaning to "rip-to-blog" for a while now...

Advanced Installer... a free, advanced MSI creation tool
http://www.advancedinstaller.com/

Code snippet to add a description to your Windows Services (note that, in Whidbey this is all exposed via the API)...


1Public Overrides Sub Install(ByVal stateSaver As System.Collections.IDictionary)

2	MyBase.Install(stateSaver)

3	

4	Dim serviceDescription As Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey = Microsoft.Win32.Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey("System\CurrentControlSet\Services\" & yourInstaller.ServiceName, True)

5	

6	serviceDescription.SetValue("Description", "This is the FileMonitorService.")

7	serviceDescription.Close()

8End Sub

9

[ Currently Playing : Let's Get Lost - Elliott Smith - From a Basement on the Hill (02:27) ]

Posted: Nov 27 2004, 07:47 PM by digory | with no comments

Filed under: Bookmarks, Code Snippets, Tools

Some ideas about User Groups for 2005

I've been thinking about ways to increase the visibility of UG's in 2005 with the idea that, through increased visibility we will be able to increase membership numbers. Much of this comes from my exposure to both the Adelaide and Brisbane UG's. I thought that I'd take this opportunity to jot down some of my thoughts.

Partnering

I think that, at a grass roots level, we should look toward "partnering" with organisations that we gain synergistic benefits from. The industry which springs immediately to mind is the recruiting industry. I've spent the past week in discussions with a recruitment firm in Adelaide - ChoiceIT - about the opportunity for them to foster a more retentive climate by pushing their clients towards our group. It will show that they are interested in the skills and knowledge development of their candidates. I also suggested that ChoiceIT could gain exposure by having a delegate attend the meeting to meet'n'mingle.

This idea was very well received. ChoiceIT currently have approximately 50 current dev's on their books - over half of which are VB and C# users.

It would be good to also have some cards - like business cards - which outline our Groups details:

Group Name:

Adelaide .NET User Group

Meeting Location:

...

Meeting Dates:

every N Wednesday of the month

Meeting Format:

pizza + drinks : cost x

Group Contacts

Group President

...

Website

...

Email

...

We could leave decks of these cards at various recruitment agencies for them to hand out to their .NET clients.

More Options

An emerging community activity is "Geek Dinners". I think that it would be good to explore new options such as these in the hope that the variety will help with the "richness" of community.

My experience has been that there are 2 types of users which would embrace this idea:

1) The member who is already attending meetings but has a yearning for deeper discussion of topics and ideas.

2) The non-member who doesn't attend group meetings because either, a) a perception that nothing interesting happens at UG meetings; b) time is inconvenient.

Member Numbers

Now, this might be a bit of a left-field idea but... I think that we could look to increase the visibility of our successes both between UG's and also internally at Microsoft. I wonder how UG's will feel about exposing "member activity data" on a regular basis?

NOTE: this might ultimately get covered by the MsdnConnection program anyways???

Member Boards

As per my previous blog entry about member boards I think that this will be a great "ice-breaker" feature which will give members some insight into what other people in the room get up to.

Posted: Nov 27 2004, 07:40 PM by digory | with 3 comment(s)

Filed under: User Groups