It’s a tough choice – Pablo Casto (if you read my blog, then by now you should know that Pablo is the PM on the ADO.NET Team) explains…

http://www.AcehAid.org

Microsoft has put SQL Server 2005 on their virtual labs site. YOu can actually go play with it without having to find an extra computer to install it on!

http://msdn.demoservers.com/login.aspx?group=sql2005

http://www.AcehAid.org

Our next Vermont.NET meeting is Monday, April 11th. Robert Hurlbut is driving up from New Hampshire to teach us about Test Driven Development, Unit Testing and NUnit. I am really looking forward to this. I also managed to get a few copies of Dr. Neil Roodyn’s Extreme.NET to give away at the meeting. Also, even though it’s not exactly on topic, I can’t help but raffle off copies of James Avery’s new Visual Studio Hacks that arrived a few days back. Darn right I’m keeping a copy for myself. A quick look through left me really impressed. I will write about that later. We also have some swag from the last INETA mailing – Dundas Gauge for .NET.

So this will be a great meeting, very informative and excellent resources and tools to share. Thanks to O’Reilly, Addison Wesley, INETA, Dundas and Robert!!

stay tuned for details but mark your calendars.

Time: 6:30
Place: NECI Commons, 25 Church St. Burlington

Note that if there are too many of us to get a table quickly, we will just go elsewhere on Church Street or environs. So try not to be late!!

Richard Hale Shaw will be in town so we thought it would be fun to do a geek dinner on Thursday night.

I’ll think up a place (probably downtown or maybe So. Burlington) where we don’t need reservations, can walk in with a group of undetermined size and has something on the menu besides pizza.

SQL Server Reporting Services and Crystal Reports:
A Competitive Analysis

Thanks for pointing this out, Mike. I have still not touched Reporting Services and continue my “can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em” relationship with Crystal, so I definitely need to read it.. It is written by Brian Bischof who has a self-published book on Crystal Reports.NET that I have talked about before.

http://www.AcehAid.org

What does it mean to Sponsor a Vermont.NET meeting?

What you do: Pay for the pizza and soda

What you get:

• Get your company logo on the homepage of our website (www.vtdotnet.org) during the time of promoting the meeting (and afterwards sometimes if I don’t update for the next meeting right away)
• Get your company  logo and thanks to you in all emails that go out to our lists that are geared towards promoting the meetings. We have a member list of 200 members, as well as a meeting announcement list that is those 200 + 100 more. That’s 300 people who have explicitly asked to receive these emails!
• Get your logo on our THANK YOU slide that is in the powerpoint deck that plays during the meeting “warm up” and that I review at the beginning of my meeting. More info on this…
• If you would like, we can have literature about your products available to attendees.
• Our undying gratitude.

Take a look at the upcoming meeting schedule. Where there is not an INETA Sponsored event (note the logo below the speaker’s name), we can use a pizza/soda sponsor. Our meetings can have anywhere from 20 – 40 attendees though we have had 50 on a few occasions, so the cost of sponsorship varies.

I can’t believe it took me three years to think of blogging for pizza for my user group!! 🙂

Reading Jerry Delany’s post about attending the Atlanta.NET meeting and a comment he made at the end about attending the Atlanta C# meetings because they are more advanced made me think of a problem I have been pondering lately with my user group , Vermont.NET, that is not uncommon.

We have been meeting for 3 years now – since Feb 2002. There are plenty of pepole in the group who have come frequently to meetings since the beginning and they are many who are pretty advanced. Yet we still have new people coming into the meeting all of the time. Of course, this is a microcosm of the whole programming community and not a new problem. I don’t want to have to choose between sating the more advanced .NET programmers and ignoring the needs of those who are just moving to .NET.

What we are talking about (and I am waiting for someone in the group to grab this project and run with it…) is having a pre-meeting presentation that is more for beginners and then let the regular presentation continue to engage those who are interested in more advanced topics. There are many groups who do this so we can certainly learn from them. My idea is to have the beginner talks be done by user group members, which has so many advantages.

How is your user group dealing with the widening gap between .NET newbies and .NET pros?

Beth Massi points to a xml data visualizer on GotDotNet that you can use today in VS2003. Since she is speaking at DevTeach, I hope she’ll get to come to my session on Customized Debugging in VS2005 so I can show her the debugger visualizers. Of course she may not be able to wait so in that case, I bet anything she subscribes to CoDe Magazine and can read my article in the current issue! hee hee

http://www.AcehAid.org

I don’t remember seeing this in the past, but the Feb CTP bits have a hissy fit if you change the name of a control on a web form or windows form. Web Forms want to refactor your code behind for you. Sometiems it hangs. WinForms throws a whole lot of compile time errors to the Error reporting system, but then gives control back with nothing lost. Beware… 🙂

I’m fiddling around with nullable types in Whidbey and just discovered a DataRow property that is not even new, but I had never known was there (or maybe it flew by me once but it didn’t stick in my brain):

DataRow.IsNull(“mycolumnname”)

Obviously invaluable when dealing with value types.

I guess in the 3 years I have been doing .NET, I just hadn’t needed it. My main production app has a sql server database that started out being used by VB5 then VB6, so I was used to not creating DateTime columns as nullable, or dealing with nulls directly in the stored procedures. Well, I’ll be!