Let’s do a quick fun exercise and test the results of the study: Do you consider yourself someone who is happy 51% of the time or greater on average?

Meeting starts at 6:30pm the 1st Wed of the month.  Pizza showed up prompt at 6:20pm.  Bring $7 for pizza ($5 if register online before noon the day of) and 1 raffle ticket.  Additional tickets are on sale 8 for $5.  Meeting info here.

The building can be found off the 5 & 91.  Can always go west onto the 91 from the 5 and go North, or right, on Knott.  Towards the end of the block, on the right hand side will be Village drive.  Turn East, or right, and find the third building on your left hand side.  Look for:

Partners Consulting’s 2d building
7101 Village Dr.
Buena Park, CA 90621  Map here.

http://www.partnersconsulting.com/

The meeting had 24 RSVPs and probably 30 by the end.  From the questions, it appeared there was an equal balance of VB and C# folks.    There was a balance of older and younger but overwhelmingly male developers in the audience.  (Sorry, that’s what a political science degree gets you)

Apparently, a blue tooth device can be used as a microphone for voice recognition and telephony applications and listening to music played on the computer.  See Scott Hanselman’s post here.

MSFT San Diego User Group SIG Asp.Net

… no matter where you are, you can always find one.  I travel quite a bit through Southern California.  Tonight, I ended up in San Diego after my meetings were done but kind of in the middle of the traffic window.  So, bing up a .Net user group meeting by going to INETA and there’s one  sitting 1/4 of the way between me and home.

I’m glad I stopped in as Woody Pewitt, Microsoft Evangelist, gave a great talk for the San Diego .Net User Group SIG Asp.Net at the San Diego Microsoft office.  He gave a preview for the Visual Studio 2010 upcoming release – Vegas anyone?

5 takeaways  that excited me . . .:

1)  ZOOM ZOOM –  Arrow over, Ctrl [+] MouseWheel, and you can zoom in or out on the IDE workspace – real smoothly.

2)  Ctrl [+] Alt [+] K over a method shows everything that calls it in your code.

3)  Ctrl[+]something[+]spacebar and you can change your intellisense reader to a new version which allows you to use a search box within your intellisense.  The original and the new listbox/searchable reader mode can be toggled.

4)  Azure is built on .Net 4.0 which will sport a new CLR.  You can run .Net 3.5 and 4.0 concurrently, but not interchangeably on the same code.  I think he said that the VM will determine and control your CLR with that choice being abstracted away from the developer anyway.   I think…  He indicated that the new 4.0 .Net framework is similar to the jump from 1.1 to 2.0.  Definitely not an add-on, but a rebuild.

5)  Silverlight update:  Silverlight Streaming is dead.  Nope, nothing there to replace it.   As Kip Kniskern, wrote on LiveSide.net, http://bit.ly/3Rx7yO,  “Silverlight Streaming, a Windows Live beta service for hosting Silverlight audio and video content, is being discontinued.”   Okay, back to S3.   But Silverlight is advancing forward quickly.  With full support in 5.0+, Silverlight and DNN may provide small business with a great solution for managing their outside messaging and executing the inside stuff, better, faster and quicker.

http://www.ipcalifornia.com
https://ipcalifornia.wordpress.com
http://www.twitter.com/ipcalifornia

This is a great new project!  This is a DNN 5.1.4 CE install.  I uploaded Michael Washington’s great Silverlight module and then followed his tutorial here.   It took me a bit to get my arms around how the module was interacting with DNN.  I’ve listened to Michael give amazing talks on Silverlight.  After I played around with Expression Blend and VS2008, I realized that it’s just like inserting a CSS file inside of an html page.  DNN does the heavy lifting and Silverlight can sit on top in it’s own sandbox. Very cool indeed.

MSFT CEO Ballmer Oct 2009

Project:  www.serrapreschool.org

MSFT and the .net platfom are a great development platform for projects with lots of energy & enthusiasm, but not so much by way of resources.  A living, breathing, i.e. dynamic, portal was up for the school with 4 nights worth of work.  Yes, it does need to get cleaned up a bit.  Part of the charm is that the school participants can clean up the page while learning how to interact with the portal, thus allowing a more granular experience for the user.

One thing I wanted to share was a cool host with a cool program for organizations new to DNN.  www.dnn4less.com has a great starter program for newbies who can receive 6 months free hosting with a full access subscription.  One note is that the db is limited to 150MB.  Fair enough, free for 150MB, this a great option for those looking to quickly get a site up for a new organization.  I did end up upgrading within the 4 days because I exceeded the 150MB limit.  Even so, $9.99, 1GB, with no contract, nor portal, subportal or bandwith limitations is a great start.

So far I’ve chatted with support many times and they’ve been very quick, 1 min average, in responding.  They’ve taken care of my requests quickly and efficiently.  www.dnn4less.com.

One other note, be careful to specificy which version of DNN you want installed.  I didn’t clarify and ended up with a 5.1.x install.  I’ve planned on moving up as the platform appears stable but hadn’t quite made the commitment.  Well, let’s just say, part of the reason it took 4 nights was the small upgrade learning curve involved.  I’m glad I made the change and will start upgrading my other projects soon.  Love the Google Analytics tracking and can’t wait to start playing with JQuery which was still a tad futzy in 4.9.

In order to protect the innocent, I’ve changed the names.  Lucinda is someone who spends 50 hours a week at her desk and on her computer helping other people do their work.  Our friend, Lucinda, is a new forced convert to a cloud based CRM solution.

I asked her how it was going.  She replied that it was alright, but what was the need for the big change?  We discussed how her old CRM system was a “disconnected” database and her new one was “connected” or directly tied into the server.  She was now going to be able to directly talk with the home office computer which was located in the data center.

She looked at me and said, “I don’t like the datacenter.”

Having described what I thought was the Scott McNealy (SUNW) dream of the 90’s, I asked her why?   I described how it will save on IT costs and allow the field to be in synch with the home office and allow her organization to be quicker, nimbler, leaner and generate real time dashboards.

Based upon the look on her face, I tried to bring the concept to her world, “Remember the annoying 3-5 minute synch upon logging into the corporate network and how you would manually hit the synch button for someone in the home office to see your data changes?”

She looked at me and said “Great, now it takes 2x as long to get work done because every time I hit enter, it takes 5 minutes to get the screen to refresh.”  She admitted it wasn’t that long in reality but “it sure felt like it.”

My takeaway is that SAAS, Software As A Solution, will continue to march forward.  The end user should be kept in mind because the Lucindas of the world are entering the data business is trying to accurately capture.

We risk trading the rigors of manual synching for click-and-wait apathy.   Before the Lucindas of the world may have suffered periodic annoyance waiting for a full data synch once or twice during the average work day, but now we risk a decrease in the amount of data captured where we force people to wait too long  to enter it.

http://www.ipcalifornia.com