In an effort to better support User Groups worldwide, Microsoft is rolling out UGSS User Group Support Services. We at INETA have been, and will continue to be, working closely with this team to better serve the user group community…

Consistency and scale in the services we provide to User Group Communities has been a challenge and a source of consternation for all of us over the past years.

Microsoft is pleased to announce that as of last month's User Group Leadership Summit and based on global feedback, we have a model that delivers progress that can be universally appreciated and used by your local User Group Communities.  Our pilot, User Group Support Services, launches today May 8!

The pilot emerged from community feedback, efforts from UC and Windows and from work led over the past 2 years by the US Subsidiary with their rollout of Codezone in the US.  Thanks to their work and bolstered by the great feedback from the community, we have taken on the commit to build and sustain UGSS as a part of our global offering.  The pilot is available at this time for English speaking regions – but stay tuned as in early H1 FY09 we will have additional language offerings. If you wish to be among the first to pilot this program in your region, please contact mfleming.

WHAT IS USER GROUP SUPPORT SERVICES?

First of all, User Group Support Services (UGSS) does not replace local engagement and local investment. These tools enhance corp-to-user group engagement and have the capability to enhance your engagement with your local Microsoft field. UGGS is a  platform with an underlying framework which drives consistency in how we engage UGs across our Technical Audiences and enables the community to participate in a direct dialog with Microsoft.  The focus of this platform is on providing a process and a portal that helps improve the quality of content available to User Group Leaders for their events and tools that help them manage their groups.

This platform has two distinct offerings:

1. Access to content built specifically for User Group events by Microsoft Product teams
   UGSS has partnered with Microsoft product teams to provide content built specifically for User Group events (demos, discussion presentations and other content). This content will be free to User Group Leaders and available through the UGSS Connect portal. In the future, User Group Leaders can access community led launch event content as well as explore other Beta Connect program opportunities .

• How do I know what's available to me? A user group specific content editorial calendar is available through two interfaces:
  • Public planning interface for Developer through Codezone
  • Public planning interface for ITPRO Culminis – JUNE 2008
• Where can I go to download the content? UGSS Connect portal (user group content download center) is accessible from:
  • MSDN
  • TechNet
  • Codezone
  • Culminis (ITPRO) – planned release for JUNE 2008

• Online user group tools wrapped in a consistent UI
  UGSS framework offers a free set of tools specific to user group management. In the pilot, these services continue to be surfaced through: Codezone (Developer & INETAsupported), and for ITPRO will be released through Culminis – planned for JUNE 2008. These services include:
  • Speaker's repository
  • Sponsorship Repository
  • Event management & attendance tracking
  • Member management and communication
  • Consolidated User Group Management Interface
  • User Group Kits: Available in supported regions
  • Study Groups

ADDITIONAL USER GROUP BENEFIT

• Free Live Meeting Accounts for User Group Leaders (contact Culminis, INETAor your local Microsoft evangelist for more details)

Some asks of you..

Because this is a new program from a global perspective, we are looking for your help.

• Evangelize these services in your region.  This includes: Event content, Speaker's Bureau, Sponsorship Repository, and UG Leaders resources
• Help to localize User Group Event Content for your region and offer this for download through the UGSS Connect portal.
• Help to localize the regional feedback into English for Corp to consume and act on

We will…

• Advance the tools/framework based on your feedback
• Provide new content from Product Groups based/impacted by your feedback
• Aggregate your feedback from the interface to participating subsidiaries and product groups
• Maintain UGSS as the one place from which to access all Microsoft content for Community Led Launch Events

FY09 Corporate Deliverables (planning)

• Community Led Launch event kits/cycles:
  • Virtualization Deep Technical / H1/H2
  • SQL Deep Technical- H1/H2
• Days to produce localized versions based on field commitments (plan in place July 15, 2008)
• Editorial calendar detailing content to be delivered (see above)
• New features, to include reporting functionality for User Group leaders, among others. The full set to be communicated in JUNE 2008.

THANK YOU!

We'd like to say a huge "THANK YOU" to you all for moving this effort forward, especially the following User Group Leaders:

• Graham Jones
• Lee Benjamin
• Kaliyan selvaraj
• Bill Wolff
• Brendon Schwartz
• James Johnson
• Eric Selje
• Matt Rigling
• Michael Steinberg
• Robin Edwards
• Shawn Weisfeld
• Stephen Swienton
• Tim Rayburn
• Mike Wells
• Christopher Reed

We are hosting a FREE day-long event at the Microsoft Irvine,CA office all around SQL Server 2008.  We are trying something a bit new in that we'll be providing content for both Developers and for ITPros.  If you are interested in attending, please register at http://www.firestarterevents.com/ as we have limited enrollment capacity.  Also, pass this along to your DBA and ITPro friends who are interested in learning technical information about SQL Server 2008.  We are adding session information to the FireStarterEvents sites daily, so check back for frequent updates!

Depending on the success of this event, we are considering future events like this - that is around a product or technology, with both ITPro and Dev content provided.  If you have time, take the super-short survey on the FireStarterEvents site to tell us which topics you are most interested in.

Fire Starter Events > Home

If you are looking for good overview of LINQ and how to implement it in an ASP.Net application you can check out my LINQ presentation which was recorded at a User Group meeting in Florida. Follow the Link (pun intended) below to watch the video on INETA LIVE. A new interactive companion website to the new main INETA website.

Enjoy.

Doc (Daniel N. Egan)

I wanted to thank everyone for attending my talk on the Past, Present, and Future of ASP.Net AJAX. You will find both the PowerPoint slides and the sample code below. If you have any questions be sure to drop me a line.

Happy Programming

Doc (Daniel Egan)

A PDF Version of the Presentation : LaunchVS2008PDF.zip (1.57 MB)

The Main Project website for the presentation : Launch2008MainProject.zip
Required for Project :
Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (FREE)
Downloaded and installed ASP.Net AJAX Control Toolkit

The project showing the Ajax History Injection : History1.zip
Required For project :
ASP.Net Extentions Preview

Don't Miss it!!! Code Trip is coming to your town. I was able to attend both the LA and Irvine Code Trip events and a great time was had by all.

Tim Heuer Woody Pewitt and Jason Mauer (Microsoft DE's) are roaming around the country on a bus to spread the word.

Check out the site and where they will be next at http://thecodetrip.com/

The site is a cool combination of LINQ, Silverlight, Virtual Earth, and other cool MS goodies. If you have time find a location near you and check it out.

Doc

While trying to copy a Virtual Machine onto one of my back-up drives I ran into the "Not enough space on drive" error. Of course the drive I was copying to was 500GB so I knew that I had space.

After a little bit of checking I realized that the drive was still FAT32. I had never converted it to NTFS. FAT32 wont let you copy anything over 4GB.

Anyway, to fix this is pretty easy, you can use the command line tool convert.exe to change the file system from FAT32 to NTFS. 

the following command will do the trick --   convert D: /fs:ntfs (where D is the drive you want to convert)

Now I am able to copy over those 10GB files. :)

I know this is old news to some but..... It is easy to forget what you dont use ;)

Doc

At my last talk I had the following question.

"When returning a LINQ entity using the .Single() extension, what would happen if the result returned more than one row?"

The simple answer of course was that it would throw an exception, but I told him I would elaborate in a blog post. So here it is. Most LINQ queries will return an IEnumerable collection of objects as the result of your LINQ query. In order to only return a single entity, you have a couple of options.

Single – Will return back a single entity
SingleOrDefault– Will return back a single entity or a Default if nothing is found

Both of these will throw an InvalidOperationException if the query returns more than one row.

If you know that your query may return more than one record, you can use the following Extension methods to return a single entity from a collection of entities. (or the OrDefault versions)

ElementAt - return the entity at the given index

First - Returns the first entity of the collection

Last – Returns the last entity in the collection.

Finally, you can also pass a predicate (a condition) as a parameter.

Here we are looking for the first publisher in the pubisher collecdtion that has a country of USA.

Hope that helps.

Happy Programming

Doc

So during my last LINQ talk, I had a couple of people ask me why Partial Method were both implicitly private and must return void. So as to not slow down the presentation (we had a lot to cover) I told them I would blog an answer for them. Here it is.

So first, let's set up our sample program. We created two partial classes. One with the partial methods implemented.

namespace CSharpBlogSample

{

internal partial class Account

{

//Partial Methods (NOT IMPLEMENTED)

partial void OnWithdraw();

partial void OnDeposit();

}

internal partial class Account

{

//Partial Method (IMPLEMENTED)

partial void OnWithdraw()

{

Console.WriteLine("Withdrawing Money...");

}

partial void OnDeposit()

{

Console.WriteLine("Depositing Money.");

}

}

}

If we dig down into the IL we will see the following.

Notice how the OnDeposit and OnWithdraw methods are compiled into the dll.

If we compare that with a implementation where we do not implement the partial methods you will notice that the methods will be missing from the IL code.

namespace CSharpBlogSample

{

internal partial class Account

{

//Partial Methods (NOT IMPLEMENTED)

partial void OnWithdraw();

partial void OnDeposit();

}

}

This is important; if these partial methods were not implicitly private and you tried to access them from another class, you would run into trouble when they don't exist.

This is the same reason that we also need to return void.

Let's say that we wanted to call our private methods from inside our class in a "CallMyMethods" function (shown below)

internal partial class Account

{

//Partial Methods (NOT IMPLEMENTED)

partial void OnWithdraw();

partial void OnDeposit();

void CallMyMethods()

{

OnDeposit();

OnWithdraw();

}

}

Since we are not implementing them in a separate partial class the methods will not be implemented inside of the CallMyMetods function.

If you were allow to return something, and were in turn using that as a return value from your CallMyMethods fuction, you would run into trouble when the partial methods were not implemented.

Hope that helps.

Happy Programming

Docwww.

You know what…. As much as I like Vista, it is really getting on my nerves. Not only have I lost my multi-monitor support ( I used to run four monitors) but I was having the stupidest problem with Visual Studio. I was not able to Debug in Visual Studio. So, of course, I tried to download all the patches and upgrades to fix this seemingly ubiquitous problem. But none of this worked.

Turns out, you have to right click on Visual Studio and "run as administrator" to enable debugging in VS 2005 on Vista. What a crock… not to mention how many hours I spent trying to fix it. I should have Googled it from the beginning.

Doc

As many of you know, Microsoft has decided to name WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere) Microsoft Silverlight. It is a pretty cool name, but what is really cool is that it is named after one of my friends David Silverlight. Microsoft has launched a new campaign to reward community involvement. You can read about David's meeting with Bill and how the name came about here.