Whenever you do something it's always great to get feedback, but here's one I definitely didn't expect -

Talking Chicken Reviews Toronto SharePoint Camp (YouTube video).

Thanks again to all our volunteers and speakers for making this happen, and to all the people who spent a beautiful Fall day with us at the Manulife building. Early signs would indicate that yes, Toronto's fantastic community of SharePointers will make this happen again next year!

We want your feedback! How can we make TSP Camp better? Whether through the comments below or your own hand-puppet videos: if you say it, we will hear it, so go ahead and say it. Be like the chicken.

Silverlight Presentation Rescheduled Nov. 21: For everyone who was looking forward to the Silverlight presentation, Josef had an unfortunate but unavoidable emergency en route. He's fine, sends his deep regrets, and will be delivering his session to the Toronto SharePoint Users Group in February this month!.

TSP Camp Home: http://TorontoSharePointCamp.com/

The Chicken Test: http://www.youtube.com/user/thechickentest

TSP Camp Google Search: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22toronto+sharepoint+camp%22

 

The ASP.NET AJAX Showcase demonstrates how businesses are using ASP.NET AJAX to add functionality and provide greater user experiences in their Web-based applications. The three exciting new additions include Foonance, Lottery Post and RoundPegs. If you too have created a cool Web site leveraging ASP.NET AJAX, please let us know.

With .NET 3.5 being released about the end of the year at the same time as Visual Studio 2008 it's a good time to look around for any remaining .NET 1.0 or .NET 1.1 applications and consider upgrading them. How do you do it? Does it seem overwhelming?...(read more)

This article discusses how to create an HTML Editor server control for use within an ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 environment.

We are having Code camp on November 11 again. If you have not registerd, please register @ https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=120968

 This time I am presenting two sessions.

1. Silverlight for beginners (Alpha) :
    Silverlight is a cross platform, cross browser .NET plug-in that enables designers and developers to build rich media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. This session is targeted to beginners in Sliverlight. Come to this session and learn fundamentals, architecture of Silverlight with real times examples.

2. It’s all about ListView control (ASP.NET 3.5/VS 2008):
    Meet ListView control by coming to this session. You will definitely say thanks to ASP.NET 3.5 for introducing this ListView control. ListView control is a sort of hybrid between a DataGrid and Repeater. It combines the free form templating of Repeater and the editing features of the DataGrid. In this session we will examine basics of ListView and then we will discuss ListView control in detail with real time examples. By keeping real time need of a day to day developer, the examples and explanation will be provided. Come to the session, learn use of ListView control and say thanks to ASP.NET 3.5 for providing this new beautiful life saver control for developers!

see you all at Camp!!!

  

SqlTeam.com portal is preparing a contest in the forum for awarding people for there participation. I find this idea very cool, because people are cutting down their time to help others. It's nice, that other notice that and give them something back.

Thank you is great,but to get a gift is better :) You know that other appriciate your knowledge and Will to help.

Found via Spirit1 blog. Details about Contest can be found here. 

You can win Apex's Sql Developer Studio.

A wrapper for using MAPI on the Pocket PC and Smartphone written 99% in .NET, resulting in a fast and easy-to-maintain library

If you need to detect whether a given application is installed (i.e. you're writing a plugin, or depend on an existing framework/toolkit to be installed), you have a couple options:

1. Search for a registry key
2. Search for a Windows Installer component

The first is the easiest, but it's not without problems. For example, I was creating a Windows Live Writer (WLW) plugin and followed the instructions on MSDN on how to deploy it...

Read full article

Posting code to your blog - check out these links to a Visual Studio Add-In to let you Cut  and Paste code as HTML.

http://www.jtleigh.com/people/colin/blog/archives/2005/11/copysourceashtm_8.html

http://www.jtleigh.com/people/colin/software/CopySourceAsHtml/

The Article will guide you with complete knowledge of how to add a google map in your webpage with knowledge of JAVASCRIPT, Use of Geocoder, Use of InfoWindow, Use of Marker, Tabbed Markers, Maximising marker, Creating context menu in your map

Using CSS, Javascript to Fixed Gridview's Header and Footer

I have been keeping an extensive set of technology notes since 1999 which I used to keep organized in a compiled help file. Being a web developer, I liked to write my notes as web pages rather than use a word processor. I could even include sample code and functional examples in my notes if the topic was JavaScript or anything that runs client-side in the browser. I liked a compiled help file because it provides a navigation structure, searchable indexing, and reduced everything to one file which I could easily copy to other computers and thumb drives.

However, I eventually got fed up with the Microsoft Help Workshop which is the buggiest software Microsoft has ever produced. As my help project grew to include hundreds of files, it would frequently crash whenever I moved a topic in my table of contents. Since I update my notes every day this became very frustrating.

Finally I learned how to convert my HTML Help 1.x compiled help file into a new MS Help 2.x help collection which requires the Microsoft Document Explorer to view. Now all of my personal notes are available alongside the MSDN documentation.

To integrate your personal help files into The Visual Studio .NET Combined Help Collection you first need to download the  Visual Studio .NET Help Integration Kit 2003 at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ce1b26dc-d6af-42a1-a9a4-88c4eb456d87&DisplayLang=en You will also need far42_inst660.exe from http://helpware.net/ The process is actually quite long and rather involved but the FAR Collection Wizard found in Far-V4.2.0 is the key to doing this.

My help collection now has 912 topics and I maintain it in Visual Studio 2003 rather than use the awful Microsoft Help Workshop. Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2003 frequently chokes on this huge project so I've learned to directly edit the HxF include file, the HWProj project file, and the HxT table of contents file. Today I learned how to use the hxcomp.exe command line compiler to build my help project without opening it in Visual Studio 2003. This will save me a lot of time!

Below you can see my help collection of personal notes integrated into the Visual Studio 2003 help collection. This is the only time you will ever see RPG II help topics appearing in a Visual Studio environment!

My help collection also integrates into the Microsoft Document Explorer. Here you can see that I have a lot of personal topic files covering ASP.NET 2.0 which I am still studying. 

 

Reuters - Web search leader Google Inc has signed on MySpace, the world's largest social network, to its platform allowing outside software developers to write programs for social Web sites, the companies said on Thursday.

A solution for loading user controls asynchronously via AJAX with no custom JavaScript required.

In this week's videos you will learn how to use the ASP.NET validation controls for both server-side and client-side validation and the basics of building a custom user control that can be reused across multiple pages.

Lori asked:

I’m seeing results with VB’s StrComp function that I would not expect.  For example:

    StrComp("Lee-P", "Leema", vbTextCompare)

Returns 1, but

    StrComp("Lee-P", "Leema", vbBinaryCompare)

Returns -1 as I would expect.

Why does this first return a 1 rather than -1? 

PS: I see the same behavior in VB6 as well as VB.NET.

This may look familiar to regular readers, especially people who have seen Punctuation... now, isn't that SPECIAL [weights]? or the more recent A&P of Sort Keys, part 9 (aka Not always transitive, but punctual and punctuating)....

Yes, it is good old word sorting -- VB does it too! :-)

(The vbBinaryCompare constant is what it sounds like, and the vbTextCompare one is the default user locale)

Expected really is in the eye of the beholder, ain't it?

Now, we are sitting on the opposite side of an implementation that was first written over 15 years ago, though I wonder whether in retrospect it would be more intuitive to make SORT_STRINGSORT the default behavior and only do word sorting when it was explicitly asked for. There would be fewer complaints about cases that are not as intuitive since they aren't as straightforward as the co-op vs. coop case, but at the cost of a lot of less than ideal results.

I have gone back and forth on this one a whole bunch -- trying to make it easier on confused developers, trying to make it better for ordinary users who just wouldn't be expecting punctuation symbols to be weighed so heavily.

Kind of a time waster, but every time this issue comes up I walk through the alternatives again....

Which is better? If it were up to you, what would you have suggested as the default a decade and a half ago?

 

This post brought to you by - (U+002d, a.k.a. HYPHEN-MINUS)

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) unveiled Tuesday what is sure to become known as its Oslo vision: a simpler, cheaper service-oriented architecture that can be implemented by the Windows platform both inside and outside the enterprise firewall. For Microsoft, it's a major departure. Instead of talking up the virtues of vertically integrated layers of Windows software, it is instead boasting of its future ability to cross heterogeneous systems, generate composite applications, and even link different organizations. Read more at InformationWeek.com

This article provides a way to use RSA public key encryption in scripts running on a webserver hosted by a shared hosting company. It also demonstrates how to use RSA in .Net to solve the 'real world' problem of signing license codes so that they cannot be forged.

This article describes a class to manage animated and color cursors and make them available for use in .NET applications. The cursors may derive from embedded resources, from standard cursors, or from files read from disk.