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Official Press Release from INETA NorAm

On October 12, 2007

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For Immediate Release

INETA North America Membership Division Announces: New Membership Mentor — IL, IN, WI
Scott Isaacs, Milwaukee, WI, USA
From INETA User Group: Wisconsin .NET Users Group

Bellevue, WA — October 12, 2007 — INETA North America Vice President in charge of the Membership Division, Chris Wallace, announced today the new Membership Mentor for the territory Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin — Scott Isaacs.

“INETA is proud to announce that Scott Isaacs is now our Membership Mentor for Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin” Wallace said. “Scott comes highly recommended by those who know and recognize him for his tremendous work with our developer community. We are proud to call Scott one of our Membership Mentors.”

Isaacs is now taking over the important INETA volunteer position of Membership Mentor and the duties that have been the responsibility of Scott Spradlin. “We thank Scott Spradlin for the volunteer service to INETA as one of our Membership Mentors” Wallace continued. Spradlin will remain an active participant in our user group world in his other capacities. “We thank our former Membership Mentors for their volunteer activities with us and wish them well. Spradlin has taken the position of INETA Sponsorship Director.”

“Please welcome Scott Spradlin to this new position and extend every courtesy in working to succeed in our challenges ahead as we work together to build a stronger developer community. Good luck, Scott!” Wallace said.

About Scott Isaacs — Born and raised a stone’s throw from California’s Silicon Valley, Scott Isaacs discovered an early interest in computers. As with many other 30-somethings in IT and software development, it started off with the Commodore 64 and BASIC. Having gone to college for Applied Mathematics, software was primarily a hobby for Scott until the late 90s. That’s when Scott took his first software development job at the Department of Education. Since then, Scott has developed software for dot com companies, news/media corporations and financial institutions, as well as a number of other businesses on a consulting basis. Currently, he is working at another startup, building an RFID-based security system. As the first version of the .NET Framework was released in early 2002, a new users group was being formed in Wisconsin. Scott attended the first few meetings, and when a call for volunteers was made, he signed up to help out however he could. In 2005, Scott became the president of the WI .NET Users Group (www.wi-ineta.org). Since that time, membership has grown by about 50% to over 2500 total members, and average meeting attendance has nearly doubled. Additionally, a second, independently-run group (Madison .NET Users Group) was formed out of the WI .NET Users Group to better serve the growing number of members in the region. Scott moved to Wisconsin in 1999, and now lives in a Milwaukee suburb with his wife and daughter. He blogs at www.tapmymind.com, and can be contacted from that site.

About INETA — INETA is a not-for-profit volunteer led organization whose mission is to provide services, resources, and networking opportunities to user groups and individual member’s interest in .NET technologies. The INETA focus is on face-to-face interaction through local user group meetings as well as larger regional, national, and worldwide events.

The INETA worldwide team is a collection of five regions working together to foster the global goals of INETA through independently operated locally focused culturally personalized organizations under the INETA name. Currently, INETA supports more than 250 user groups that represent more than 150,000 developers in the United States and Canada, plus about four times that many in total worldwide.

The INETA NorAm Membership Division is the exclusive internal organization that provides complete membership services to the INETA NorAm association members plus internal and external entities to the association. Membership Mentors act as advisor, counselor, guide, tutor, teacher, and guru of Membership to INETA member user group leadership and user groups.

Supported by Microsoft Corporation and other sponsors, INETA is an independent volunteer organization run by user group leaders and developers, http://www.ineta.org.

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Exploits of a Mom

By Scott

On October 10, 2007

In Uncategorized

This comic reminds me of a friend who taught his grade school daughter to count in hexadecimal. At that moment, he was my hero.

Exploits of a Mom

First Steps

By Scott

On October 8, 2007

In Uncategorized

Today Charlie took her first steps.

She’s been standing and walking along things for a while, but took a handful of steps today while Kelly was working from home. I can’t wait to get home and see if she’ll take more steps for Daddy tonight.

By the way, if you or anyone you know has little girls, Kelly has started a small side business making accessories for little girls. You can see a few photos of what she has here, plus she does a lot of special requests, so if you want something in a certain color (style, size, etc.) just let her know.

Well, I guess it’s finally time to go buy a baby gate for the steps…

Issue Tracking and Help Desk

By Scott

On October 3, 2007

In Uncategorized

What software do you use for issue tracking (feature requests, bugs, etc.) and help desk? I’m looking for something here at work. Has anyone used Axosoft OnTime? I don’t want something hosted as a service (I want to install it here). Also, I don’t want something that costs a fortune, but I don’t necessarily have to have a free/OSS piece of software either. Just looking for something good and easy to use, preferably built on MS stack, but that’s not required.

Contact me with any suggestions or leave a comment here.

Microsoft To Make .NET Framework Source Code Available

By Scott

On October 3, 2007

In Uncategorized

Dave Bost just e-mailed and posted about this — Microsoft is making the source code to the .NET Framework available. From Scott Guthrie’s blog:

We’ll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows). We’ll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

I think this is a big step for Microsoft and for Microsoft developers like myself. It could be a great learning tool, letting us see how things are happening behind the scenes (without having to make use of something like Reflector). I also like the fact that we can step into the code when debugging (see ScottGu’s post for more about this).

Sure, it’s not “open source” in that we can’t make changes to the code, but I’m not so sure I would want that anyway. I’m looking forward to it.

Sunday Afternoon Reading

By Scott

On September 30, 2007

In Uncategorized

Work has been killing me lately (the last several months), but things are starting to calm down and I think I only worked about 45-50 hours last week.

I spent yesterday with the family at the zoo. Charlie has been to the zoo more times in her 12 months of life than I had been in the 31 years before she was born. She likes any animal that is moving, and she absolutely loves the carousel. Kelly’s sister has a zoo pass and the three of them (Kelly, Charlie and Aunt Katie) have gone many times over the past spring and summer.

So anyway, today I thought I’d take some time to either work on some side projects or try to pick up some knowledge on some newer bit of tech that I haven’t been able to use yet. I decided to finally try (again) to play around with some WPF stuff. I don’t have an immediate use for it, but there is some upcoming stuff at work that I might like to create with WPF.

Previously I’ve played around a little with it in VS and Blend, just to sort of get a feel for it. Today, though, I thought I’d read and have a little more structured learning. Fortunately, I had a copy of Charles Petzold’s WPF book in the home office (Applications = Code + Markup), so I grabbed it and started flipping through it — structured flipping, of course. I read a few pages and then started scanning through the book to see if there were any topics that seemed to particularly interest me. That’s when I finally got to page 611.

As you can see, Mr. Petzold must have been busy with other things at the moment he was writing this page. Maybe he was thinking, “Hmm, 611. That’s the number I call to connect directly to my phone company.” Or maybe he knows someone born on June 11? I don’t know what it was, but he forgot to include part of the page.

Or maybe it’s not his fault at all, and some rogue employee at the publisher decided to sabotage the book?

The strangest part of all of this is that there is also part of page 612 missing. Coincidence? Unlikely.

I’m not sure what to do. This is very discouraging.

Maybe I should give up on reading and go outside or something.

The Best Spam Comment Yet (Matt Berther)

By Scott

On September 5, 2007

In Uncategorized

Saw this today in my feeds. Matt posts about one of the comments his blog has received. Here’s a snip:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site…

That’s a pretty clever business model. I should look into it… [;)]

New Tool: Folder Finder

By Scott

On August 31, 2007

In Uncategorized

I’m on a roll here with the little utilities…

My dad called the other day as he was leaving his office (in California). Due to the nature of his business and the way their network is setup, he and his team work with a large number of folders on a network share. Each of these folders contains information about a particular project or potential project, and they are all contained within a single parent folder. For example, the parent folder might be P:\Projects, and there may be hundreds of project folders such as P:\Projects\Project 023A, P:\Projects\Project 023B. I don’t really know the names of the folders (I just made those up), but the names mean something to him and his team.

At any given time, though, there could be a couple hundred folders in the project folder. Some come and some go, but overall the number seems to be increasing. So it is getting harder for them to find the necessary folder when they need to do some work or reporting for that project.

Now, I can imagine that there is plenty of room to engineer some system (or buy something) that will help them better manage this, but what he really needed right away was a faster way to find a folder. So I wrote Folder Finder.

It’s a very simple app to use and I only spent a couple hours on it. Basically, you download the app and place it anywhere you want (.NET 2.0 required). You run it and choose a base folder, which gets saved and re-used each time you run the app (C:\Projects in my example). Then you just start typing a portion of the folder name. Since the names mean something to you, just type the part you know. It doesn’t matter if it is the beginning, middle or end of the folder name. The list filters automatically. At anytime you can double click your folder to open it, or if it is the first in the list you can simply press Enter.

That’s it. All there is to it. It doesn’t do anything super high-tech or magical. It just lets them find their folders faster.

So if you want to download and use it, feel free. As always, use it at your own risk, but I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know if you use it — especially if you have any comments or suggestions. Also, feel free to share it with anyone who might think it is useful. If anyone wants the source for any reason, let me know and I’ll make it available.

Download Application

200

By Scott

On August 26, 2007

In Uncategorized

Well, according to my blog control panel, before this post I’ve posted 199 times. That makes this post #200. As you can see from the table below, my post frequency had suffered for a number of months last fall and winter, but I’ve been making an effort to pick that up again. I think my goal is to average at least 1-2 posts per week.

Post Frequency

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2005		9	14	11	15	13	14	11	6	6	4	5
2006	10	14	6	7	7	4	1	3	4	5	0	2
2007	1	1	1	8	2	4	5	6

One of my plans for blog topics is to look at my site logs and try to choose topics based on traffic and search terms that lead to the site. A quick examination, though, leads me to believe that I should be writing more about Chuck Norris. That can’t be right, can it?

Interop Issue With Winsock

By Scott

On August 25, 2007

In Uncategorized

Error: Method ‘~’ of object ‘~’ failed

So yesterday at work, I was working with a sample app from one of our product vendors. The app was a VB6 Windows EXE showing how to interact with their equipment using sockets — Winsock. Since I’m under some pretty heavy time constraints, I wanted to make use of this code rather than pick through it and see what’s happening and translate to .NET. I was able to quickly turn the VB6 Win EXE into a VB6 COM DLL, and tested it from a VB6 test app, and it worked perfectly. However, when I reference the DLL from my .NET test app, things were not so great.

I had a few methods in the COM DLL that I was calling from my .NET code:

Sub Connect — news up the Winsock object, sets the remote host and port, then connects.
Sub DoSomethingWithWinsock (not the real name, but I don’t have the code here to look up the real name, but rest assured, it was equally as descriptive) — does a bunch of unimportant stuff, and then calls Winsock.Send(…)
Function TestMethod — returns the current date/time as a string for testing
Sub Disconnect — closes Winsock and sets it to nothing

When I call methods 1, 3 or 4 all seems to work well. When I call method 2 I get the error mentioned above: Method ‘~’ of object ‘~’ failed.

So, two questions to anyone that might read this:

Any idea what the problem is and how to resolve it?
Is there some way I can step into the VB6 code while debugging from VS2005?

I’ve already started picking through the code and rewriting with .NET equivalents, but I was hoping to avoid that.

Update: Sarma, a contractor that I’ve worked with recently, e-mailed me this link that has some good info. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds promising. If you’re looking to debug VB6 from VS, I’d definitely check it out. Thanks, Sarma!

By the way, Sarma was recently looking for a new contract. If anyone is hiring, contact me and I’ll connect you.