Code camps are a completely developer oriented endeavor organized and hosted by the local .Net community. There are some fantastic speakers and sessions scheduled that I am really looking foward to. I attended the last Alabama code camp that was held in Birmingham, AL and gave a presentation on the WiX Toolkit and had a great time.

I highly recommend attending if you want to further your skills and expand your knowledge of Microsoft’s .Net framework and SQL Server DBMS. It is also a great networking opportunity to meet your fellow developers in the community (plus to sweeten the deal, they usually have tons of giveaways at the end of the day).

If you are planning on attending, be sure and register so that they can correctly estimate how much food to have on hand for lunch.

Just got word today from Dave Fish with Sybase, Inc. that the Beta for DataWindow.Net 2.0 has just opened. Here is the text of the message and link that Dave posted to the Sybase Newsgroups:

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The Beta program for DataWindow .NET 2.0 is now open. Please visit http://www.sybase.com/detail?id=1038007 to register and download the software. The Beta web site contains information on how to access the Beta newsgroup.

Regards,
Dave Fish
Sybase
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If you are a current or former PowerBuilder developer working in the .Net world, then you already know all of the amazing things the DataWindow brings to the table. The 2.0 release includes some incredible new features including: support for using DataWindow.Net with WebForms and the ability to bind datawindows to .Net datasets

If you are not familiar with the DataWindow and have looked at competing controls such as the ones available from Infragistics or the new and improved .Net DataGrid, you really should give DataWindow.Net a try. It is a fantastic product.

Also, if you are going to be in the Birmingham, AL area this weekend, you can come see Dave Avera, one of the programmers that works on DataWindow.Net, give a presentation at the Alabama .Net Code Camp on this very subject.

(Shameless Plug: I’ll also be at the Code Camp giving a presentation on the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset).

I just got word yesterday that I have been accepted to speak at the upcoming Alabama .Net Code Camp in Birmingham, AL on Saturday, October 29, 2005.

The topic I’ll be presenting is: Introduction to Creating Installation Packages with Microsoft’s Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolset

WiX is an open source toolkit (yes Microsoft is an open source company) for building MSI files that was written by Rob Mensching. It is being used internally by Microsoft on many of their products and also has been adopted by some in the open source community as well (MySQL being one of the bigger ones).

Installation packages are one of those things that tend to get pushed off until the end of a product’s development cycle. This is unfortunate since they really are an integral part of the finished product. Also how many of us have tried to install versions of our own products during development and been forced to track down developers to find all of the undocumented things that must be done to get the product running. WiX can help make all of that pain go away.

WiX allows you to define XML configuration files that detail the installation process. These files are then analyzed and coalesced into an MSI installation file of the product. One of the really beautiful parts of this system is that it is fully scriptable since it relies on command line calls to executables.

Thus you can add the creation of an MSI into your build process so that at every step of development there is always a nice installation file that can be used to install the product. This can help you embody Continuous Integration end to end.

I am a huge believer in the Continuous Integration ideology and try to constantly preach the gospel of source control, unit testing, and nightly (at least) builds to any in the unwashed masses that will listen. These concepts can save so much time in the long run and alleviate many of the common issues that cause us headaches as developers.

If you will be attending or in the area, come check out my presentation or at least say hi. I will be out and about in Birmingham throughout the weekend so feel free to give me a call (my cell is listed in the top right corner on my blog’s webpage) if you want to meet up.

The Code Camp’s session list is posted Here. If you look closely, you will see that my friend Dave Avera from Sybase will be speaking. He is based in Auburn, AL and is one of the guys that is doing amazing things with the DataWindow.Net product.

Hope to see you there.

Update: I had incorrectly spelled “Hear” in the title of the post using “Here” instead. Oops, my mistake got it corrected now. Where is that context sensitive spellchecker when I need it.

The first meeting of LANUG (the moniker given to the Lower Alabama .Net Users Group) was a great success with around 27 in attendance. There were some new faces and quite a few friends and acquaintances I have met over the years. Some of the companies that had employees in attendance were: ACO, STI, Morrison’s, Dawson Engineering, and of course yours truly from DailyAccess Corporation.

Microsoft’s Developer Evangelist for the South East region, Joe Healy, was on hand to give a presentation of some of the new features in Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. I must say that the upcoming features are very exciting. ASP.Net 2.0 is an incredible language and platform and definitely is well ahead of the other technologies out there.

Visual Studio 2005 brings some great new features for VB.Net and C# developers including Edit and Continue (allows one to alter variables and add code during execution in Debug mode), incredible refactoring support (very similar to what exists for Java in Eclipse), and Click Once deployment (adds smart client capabilities to apps to allow them to update themselves to the latest version via the internet seamlessly for the user).

SQL Server 2005 has an incredible number of new features, we were able to only cover a few but they were awesome. The new version adds incredible XML support right into the database (very similar to what Oracle 9i and up have with SQLX and the XML SDK’s in PL/SQL). There is also the ability to call .Net managed code functions inside stored procedures and standard SQL queries. This allows one to have the option of writing functions in a .Net language versus T-SQL which depending on what is needed can make things much easier (have you tried to split a string in T-SQL based on a delimiter??? It’s one line in C#). The example that Joe gave of this feature was the Great Circle algorithm with GPS coordinates. (Something I also saw this week, is that IBM’s DB2 and Oracle’s 10gR2 on Windows have support for this type of functionality)

I have to say that Joe Healy is one of the best presenters I have seen in awhile. He had great energy, was comfortable in front of a crowd, and had great contents (more code than powerpoint which is a big plus). I would highly recommend checking him out if you have the opportunity to hear him speak. He also gave out some great books as door prizes (unfortunately I was not a winner of any of the texts, but Casey won a VB.Net book)

Here are links to the code samples that Joe used from his site DevFish.Net.

What’s new and cool in VS2005 – Powerpoint, SQL2005 GPS functions for bearing and Great Circle Distance, stored procedure and view definitions. Visual Studio 2005 Beta2 project using Virtual Earth.

Upcoming .Net Events
October 29, 2005 – Birmingham, AL – Alabama Code Camp 2005

November 25, 2005 – Atlanta, GA – Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Launch Event

November 25, 2005 – Mobile, AL – LANUG Meeting Two – Speakers TBD

December 13, 2005 – Birmingham, AL – Satellite Launch Event for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005