Dave Noderer, Jason Beres and I will be doing an INETA Live webcast this Wednesday, May 31st at 3:30 EST, about Starting a User Group.

Dave started and runs one of the larger groups (a consortium of groups, actually) in the U.S., Florida .NET, which Jason helped start. I started and run Vermont.NET, one of the smaller groups in the U.S. With our involvement in INETA oer the years, Dave and I have talked with many many user group leaders and done lots of hand holding to groups that were just getting going. So we bring a lot to the table

You can register for the Live Meeting at live.ineta.org.

IDEP is the organizaton that I worked closely with after the devastating tsunami in Dec 2004. As a local organization, they were able to respond immedately and effectively to the worst affected area - Aceh Province. They continue their steady work in Aceh and the organization has grown. As soon as I read about the earthquake yesterday, the first thing I did was go look at their site to see if there was any news.

This morning, I received this email.

Dear friends of IDEP,
 
On Saturday the 27th of May at 5:55 am an Earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale hit Central Java with the epicenter in the sea south of the city of Jogyakarta. The earthquake lasted for over 57 seconds with a second smaller earthquake occurring at 10.15 am. It appears that Bantul area south of Jogyakarta bore the brunt of the damage with almost all buildings being flattened and deaths numbering in the hundreds also Klaten has been badly affected. In Jogyakarta the quake caused serious structural damage to many of the cities buildings.



The current death toll is close to 5,000 and expected to rise, injured 20,000, and countless people are still buried in the rubble. Over 200,000 people are currently displaced, many of whom lost everything when their houses collapsed.

Through our partners in the area IDEP has received reports of many people not having eaten since the quake struck. Stockpiles of food, medicines and shelter prepared for the impending volcanic eruption of mount Merapi, which is in the same area are being exhausted.

IDEP is responding to the crisis.

Today, IDEP sent a team of 6 volunteers, with a truck full of medicine and emergency relief supplies, to the affected area. They will assist with search and rescue, deliver much needed emergency supplies and offer assistance to the local teams that are already on the ground – who have been working around the clock since the disaster struck. The experienced team of volunteers from Bali are expected to arrive tomorrow midday, road conditions permitting.

Today, IDEP also emptied its bank account’s emergency reserve fund to initiate the purchasing of Aid Buckets and other Emergency supplies through two of our trusted local partners in the area:

• Yayasan IBU / Rakata – key partners in the delivery of aid in 2005 to the Tsunami struck Calang, and
• Kelompok Peduli Bencana / KAPPALA – A group of local volunteers headed up by Eko Teguh (expert advisor to IDEP’s Community Based Crisis response Program)
  

As with our Tsunami appeal, where IDEP channeled over US$ 1,000,000 of funds donated by people like you to help victims, we are again calling for donations to help victims of the Java Quake. IDEP will continue to collect funds and channel assistance to victims of the Java Earthquake over the next few weeks and continue to asses the needs on the ground as the situation unfolds. We will be sending out regular updates about progress on the ground.



If you are able to help

Please visit our website for complete donation details :www.idepfoundation.org/idep_donate.php

More information about IDEP’s activates in Jogyakarta will be posted on our website www.idepfoundation.org as of tomorrow.

For information about making donations contact : info@idepfoundation.org

Thank you so much for any help you are able to provide.

Michael Kaplan.

In my blog feed aggregator where I have MANY blogs feeding in, I can always identify posts Michael wrote by their very clever and witty titles.

Someone give that man a prize! (Sorry but I'm 3,000 miles away...)

It always makes me smile!

ClickOnce won't do desktop shortcuts. Here's a post about why that is and how I got my app to do it for me anyway. [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

MSDN has added another female Developer Community Champion to it's ranks.

Meet  Lindsay Rutter:

Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Southern California, Virginia, West Virginia
http://blogs.msdn.com/lindsay

How many Microsoft presenters can claim they were “locked in” at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with Mira Sorvino? Lindsay, for one. It’s a story you’ll have to get straight from the source. She has also produced content for a high traffic television network site and the internet division of one of America's largest banks, where she helped to choose and implement a deployment tool for multiple data centers. Lindsay enjoys coding in C++, but admits that C# is quickly vying for her affections. She’s also proficient in Unix, Visual Studio 2005, OOD concepts, HTML/CSS, XML, Java, JavaScript, Perl, .NET, relational database concepts, and computer security and forensics tools including Autopsy and Encase 5.0. Lindsay graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, where she was part of a team that researched how to implement an Internet-capable computer lab in a school in N’Djili in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – an area that has no telephone services and receives electricity only three days per week. As a developer, Lindsay loves solving technical problems and formulating solutions that are precisely tailored to her clients’ needs.

MSDN DCC (and our local Burlington, VT based pride and joy) Susan Wisowaty started her 6 part Reporting Services series this month. If you missed the first three, there are 3 more to go in June!

A beautiful summer-like afternoon. As I took a few minutes to laze in the hammock, I thought of all my poor city dwelling friends around the world and ran indoors to get my digital camera. For the very short (but 22MB video) click here.

I just thought to check again to see if there was a chance the "Elite DSL" 4mbps (vs. 1.2mbps or so that I'm currently getting) was actually available to my remote location. Downloading things like 3GB vista builds takes about 20 hours right now. So this will make a big difference to me.

Congratulations! Elite DSL upgrade, which provides speeds up to 4Mbps / 1Mbps is available at your location.

Click here to order Elite DSL upgrade online, or call our Customer Service

For only $5/month more.

When I was at the VTBusiness Expo on Wednesday I happened to walk by the booth for my provider (www.gmavt.net) and stopped to say "I'm a really happy customer and I just wanted to say hi!". I wonder if they rewarded my small kindness with this?

We'll see if it's for real. I'm signing up and maybe finish my beta2 download next week (it hung after 40% and I never went backto complete it.)

Interesting comments from Rocky Lhotka ... [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

I had a user complain (in a very nice way) that the following password requirement was too much work:

Minimum 7 characters

Must include one non-alphanumeric key

Sheesh.

This has always been a big point of confusion, both for developers (like me) and admins.

SSL Certificates are misnamed. They are not for SSL only. I wish all of the CA's would just call them "Web Server Certificates". How and where you install them determines whether or not they are used for SSL.

I remember my first conversation with tech support at Verisign trying to find out how much one cost. This was when I was playing with WSE 1.0. I was extremely clueless. The conversation went something like this:

me: I'm trying to find a server certificate to use for Web Service Enhancements

them: huh?

me: I think it's just called a "web server certificate". You have SSL certificates, but I don't want SSL. I'm not doing SSL.

them: huh?

It went on for a while.

I finally learned that the trick was just to buy an SSL cert, install it on the server and don't bother with the IIS intallation of it. That's what I do.

I couldn't figure out how to explain this to an i.t. person who is used to SSL. They were very wary of installing it on the web server because I wanted to do something wierd with it.

With WS-Security picking up more steam and WCF around the corner, I think thre are going to be many conversations like this in the future. If they just called them Web Server Certificates, it would prevent a lot of frustration out there in the world of web service developers.

I remember Steven Smith sitting right here in my office over in the LazyBoy chair behind me a few winters ago suddenly saying "wow, look at this cool effect" and showed me a website that had pages fade in and out of each other. By the next day ASPAlliance had the same effect!

You see it a lot on sites now. Leon Bambrick wrote a funny post showing how the use of this can eliminate most of the awful page refresh flashes. He called it FAJAX (as in Fake AJAX), since it accomplishes in two lines of html much of what AJAX is aiming for.

I have spent a lot of time fiddling with the new VTdotNET v.2 site's caching and performance. Not that I expect Amazon.com-like usage, but it's my learning playground. But in the end I still had those godawful flashes with the entire screen, even what should look static between pages, blanking out when I went from one page to another.

So I just went over to Leon's site, googled AJAX and found that post quickly.

After implementing FAJAX, it made a 100% difference!

I seem to be getting this question through my blog and elsewhere often enough to justify a post about it even though there are many great (and more detailed) articles on this topic.

How do you use your own SQL database for ASP.NET 2.0 Membership instead of the default SQLExpress database.

The default db is configured under the covers as a membership provider. What you need to do is override this in web.config. Note that you will have to do this for roles and personalization as well if you are using that.

Start by ensuring that your connection string is set up in web.config.

    <connectionStrings>
        <add name="MySQLConnection" connectionString="server=MyServer;Trusted_Connection=true;database=myDB"/>
    </connectionStrings>

Inside of the <system.web> section, you need a membership provider section. I am using code from this msdn document as a base. The membership section is told to use the provider named SqlProvider as the default. This provider is defined inside of the inner section "providers". The "remove name" element gets rid of the that AspNetSqlProvider that is set up by default when you start configuring membership in the ASPNet Web Site Tool. Then the provider with the name SqlProvider is created. You can create many providers if you like. 

Drilling further in, notice hat this provider is pointing to the System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider class. That tells the provider what implemenation to follow. That is where everything abou memebership happens such as logging in, getting users, etc. You can even extend the existing providers or just write your own. In that case, you would have your own class as the value of the type for the provider.

Next you will see a ConnectionStringName parameter. This is where you plug in the name of the ConnectionString that you created above.

        <membership
             defaultProvider="SqlProvider"
             userIsOnlineTimeWindow="20">
             <providers>
                <remove name="AspNetSqlProvider" />
                <add name="SqlProvider"
                    type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider"
                    connectionStringName="MySQLConnection"
                    enablePasswordRetrieval="false"
                    enablePasswordReset="true"
                    requiresQuestionAndAnswer="true"
                    passwordFormat="Hashed"
                    applicationName="/" />
            </providers>
        </membership>
    </system.web>
</configuration>

Note that if you are using roles or personalization in your site and you want that to be tied to your database as well, you will need to similarly configure

<roleManager>
  <providers ...>
</roles>

and

<webParts>
  <personalization>
     <providers ...>
  </personalization>
</webParts>

That should get you started!

Robert Scoble has done an amazing thing in sharing one of the most personal experiences of his life on his weblog that is read by tens of thousands of people. Over the past few weeks he has blogged through his mother having a stroke, the experience of being with her in the hospital and of her passing. When he got the call that she had died, he blogged about it before even calling his brothers. That may sound harsh to some, but I definitely understand the outlet.

Robert has worn his heart on his sleeve in his blog for many years. When I first met his wife Maryam, I felt like I was meeting an old friend from reading so much about her in Robert's blog.

So these posts over the last few weeks seemed very natural, though horribly sad, to read from him. I am very close to both of my parents and I very selfishly want to put off experiencing this pain until I have to. And these posts were scattered in the midst of his usual gazillion “what's going on in the world“ posts. It was all Robert, all the time, as always.

Something he wrote that I will never forget is this:

At some point in the afternoon I started crying. She must have heard because she put her hand on my face and carressed it like all mothers do when their children are in pain.

She was trying to make me feel better. And she was communicating with me that it's all OK. That she's OK. That she isn't in pain, even as her body is laboring to make another breath. That it's time. That there is still a mom left inside her broken body that won't last her very much longer.

Robert and Maryam [who likely have the largest support network in the world], because I am so incapable of standing in front of a wall of sympathy cards that I once sent a friend a funny birthday card instead when her mother passed away (and she understood and was very grateful for the laugh), here's one more hug for each of you.

Now that the initial madness has subsided and people are saying "wow it's really fast to download now!" it's time for not-so-fast broadband users like me (hey, I live in the boonies) to try to get the bits. Here's the current promise of the downloader

I was at the Vermont Business Expo yesterday and spent a good part of the day yesterday with a Linux guy who kept bringing up how much we hate each other, even though we don't. What's up with the non-stop hatred for Microsoft? [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

.......................................................................................................................................

I decided not to leave the last two paragraphs on that blog so here it is:

The politicians were there doing some booth by booth campaigning.

I had nice chats with Martha Rainville, who, up until she decided to run for congress was (I'm copy/pasting to be sure I get my facts straight) "the first woman in the 370-year history of the country’s National Guard to serve as a state Adjutant General.". She was the head of Vermont's National Guard from 1997 to earlier this year. Like everything Vermont (our syrup, our cheese, our leaves, our rock bands), Vermont is extremely proud of  it's National Guard and I believe we have the highest proportion of guardsman deployed in Iraq and environs per capita than any other state. Martha's actually pretty cool. We were so disappointed when she decided to go on the Republican ticket. I'd love to have a strong woman representing Vermont (we only have one congressional seat), but I fear she'll get swept up with the party line. It's going to be a hard vote in November.

Rich Tarrant was there too. He recently sold his software company, IDX, to GE  for $1.2 billion (to be fair, I believe there were 8 partners) and decided to run for senate against Bernie Sanders. A sad way to throw all that hard earned money away. Rich spoke at a VTSDA meeting recently. We were hoping to get a glimpse of what it took to build a billion dollar softare business from scratch (he started it with one partner in the early 70's). We heard a little about that and a lot about how he was going to change the healthcare system in the U.S. He smiles a lot. Hey, I would too if I someone bought my business for $1.2 billion.

If you are a user group leader in New England or a user group leader going to TechEd, you won't want to miss the User Group Leadership meeting on June 11th.

The meeting will be in Microsoft's Waltham Office, just north of Boston. If you need to get from Boston to Waltham, let INETA know!

You’re invited to join us at the at the Northeast Regional User Group Leadership Summit on Sunday 6/11/2006 at the Microsoft Waltham, MA office.

User Group Leaders today face many challenges such as promoting your group, financing, engaging existing members, recruiting speakers, finding new sources of content, leveraging local Microsoft relationships; etc. The New England INETA user groups along with INETA, in hopes of building a more close knit community, invites you all to join us on Sunday June 11^th, prior to the start of TechEd 2006 in Boston.

The agenda for the summit will includes peer to peer sessions to address some of the key concerns and issues related to running a user group.  As a follow-up to last year’s hugely successful INETA User Group Leadership Summit, the New England INETA User Groups will host this event in the hope of that we can all learn from one another to improve the user group experience for our attendees as well as ourselves.  The sessions are open to all leaders, both local and afar.  

If you are currently involved with a user group, in a leadership role, want to get involved, or even looking to start one then you will get powerful direction in the course of the sessions. If you read this far, you know this is for you. 

To reserve your seat please visit: http://www.wedevelop.net/leadershipsummit.aspx

For more information please contact LeadershipSummit@Ineta.org

Has only INETA done TechEd flairs this year?

From Joe Stagner's blog:

There is a Micosoft Career Connections Event in the Waltham MA district office on Thursday May, 25.

Here is the info from the TechExpo Website.

Microsoft Career Connections – New England- May 25, 2006

You can [ CLICK HERE ] for the website.

If you get a job at Microsoft and email Joe that you found out about the Career event on my blog – he’ll buy you dinner after your start date !