For the past few months myself and a few other Local Developer Event Activists (hey, I like the sound of that title!) have been secretly working on some interesting new ideas.

Well, the proverbial cat is now out of the bag as we have opened up registration to the Sharepoint 1, 2, 3! series of events. These are a totally new concept in regional developer events. Inspired by the recent popularity of the many "Code Camp" events that have been popping up all over the east coast, we wondered "well, instead of a huge swathe of topics, how about we try delivering very tightly focused training events on hot but neglected subjects?". Well, Sharepoint is definately one of those HOT topics - just ask any recruiter these days, or surf over to Monster.com or ComputerJobs.com. EVERYONE wants to hire Sharepoint experts, but NOBODY is helping developers to learn those skills. Same thing goes for BizTalk, and various other hot technologies.

With these ideas in mind, myself, Matt Ranlett, Dan Attis, and Brendon Schwartz have teamed up and formed the Atlanta MS Professionals User Group. This "User Group" is unlike any other. We plan on providing high-quality training sessions to the community, with a 3-month focus on each technology. By concentrating on specific technology areas over several consecutive months, we feel that a superior level of learning and understanding can be accomplished. And this is how the Sharepoint 1, 2, 3! series came about.

So by now if you are still reading, you probably want to know what this is all about. You want details such as topic coverage, number of events and dates, target audiences, difficulty level, and cost. You might even be wondering how to go about reserving your spot...

• Topic Coverage: Sharepoint from a user's perspective, Installing configuring and deploying, basic portal concepts, site customization, enterprise integration, and webpart development.
• Number of Events: 3 Seminars (Level 100, 200, and 300), and 3 follow-up Hands-On Labs, spread over the course of three months.
• Target Audiences: Primarily web developers who are curious about the whole "sharepoint thing". But also administrators, end users, and IT managers might find value as well from the level 100 session.
• Difficulty Level: We are trying our best to make the difficulty level progressive - this is to encourage individual attendee's growth as the series progresses. The first session is Level 100, and is intended for technically-savvy people who are just getting their feet wet with Sharepoint. Level 200 builds upon the core concepts, and adds Customization and simple Webpart Development among other things. Level 300 goes deeper into complex Webparts, and touches on more advanced issues such as deployment and recovery.
• Cost: FREE! Totally, completely FREE!! We are doing this as an INVESTMENT into the local developer community, hoping to build up a stronger skillbase here.
• How to reserve a place: Please use on of the registration links on the event's website at http://www.sharepoint123.com. PLEASE do not sign up your entire development staff! We have limited space (especially for the HOLs), so be thoughtful of your peers and only register places for folks on your team who are truly interested in learning these skills.

Please refer to the event's website via any of the above hyperlinks for even more details about this fantastic series.

We are really excited to be providing this kind of event to the Atlanta developer community. This is something we had been talking about doing for a very long time - and now we have finally gotten off our tails and put it all together!

I ran into a nice fellow, Burr Sutter from BravePoint, at last monday's .NET User Group meeting. I seems he is forming an Atlanta chapter of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA). This is a platform-agnostic group that is interested in moving this emerging field forward - and they don't care if you are J2EE, .NET, or WebSphere, or any other platform advocate. The basic concepts and issues are the same, and we can all share the many flavors of kool-aid without any name-calling. At least thats the idea...

I for one plan on attending these meetings as often as I can. The kick-off meeting announcement goes something like this:

======================

International Association of Software Architects - IASA announces the opening of the Atlanta Chapter.

IASA Atlanta has an established network of Atlanta's most elite software engineers, executives and architects.  Please join us on August 10,
2005 for our
first public meeting for a discussion on Enterprise Architecture.

Topic: Enterprise Architecture
Speaker: Angela Yochem, Vice President, Portfolio Architecture - SunTrust Banks, Inc.
Description:
Angela Yochem will talk about the responsibilities, complexities and significant challenges of Enterprise Architecture in today's enterprise. A facilitated panel discussion will follow, featuring some of the industry's notably impactful enterprise architects.

Whether you consider Enterprise Architecture to be an effort, a team, a diagram of systems, a method of governance or otherwise, this event provides an excellent forum for discussion and examination of the field of Enterprise Architecture.

Panelists:
Les Phillips, Enterprise Architect - UPS Supply Chain Solutions
Jason Chambers, Principal Architect - Delta Air Lines
Patrick McClellen, Senior Technical Architect - SunTrust Banks
Andrew McSherry, Vice President of Technology Services - Fujitsu

Location: MATRIX Resources
115 Perimeter Center Place, NE
Suite 250
Atlanta, GA 30346
Directions:
- I-285 Exit 29 Ashford-Dunwoody Road (East of 400)
- Pass Perimeter Mall on your left
- Turn left at the 4th traffic light onto Perimeter Center West.
- The 3rd driveway on right will be marked SOUTH TERRACES and 115 Perimeter

Center Place.
- Turn right into the curving driveway and enter parking garage.
- Feel free to park in any unmarked space on any floor. Visitor
parking is also available on the 2nd level, but is limited to a
maximum of 2 hours.

Time: 6:30 to 8:30 PM

Contact:
Burr Sutter - burrsutter@gmail.com
Phone: 770-714-3292
Website: www.iasarchitects.org

IASA Atlanta is open to all professional software architects regardless of
development platform.

Josh pointed out this cool little Blackberry utility to me today: Berry 411. It's always the simple, elegant tools that are the best.

Well yeah, OK. So I admit I am finally getting the hang of the Blackberry interface. I always said I would never get one because they were so awkward. But I guess walking was also pretty awkward too at first.

Cool - in the Subscriber Downloads section of MSDN there is now a pre-built VPC of beta 2 Visual Studio, with Team System installed.

It's all trial installs (Server 2003, etc), mostly set to expire in 2006... but it's a very easy way to get some exposure to VS2005 and Team System without spending half a day loading up your own system image.

It's not that small (2.85 G) of a download, but at least you don't have to sit through 6 hours of installation prompts.

Please see the post title for details.

Well, I have only been with Intellinet for about 2 weeks now, but already I can tell that this will be a very enjoyable part of my career. The professionalism of everyone here, the positive attitudes, and certainly not least - the high quality of every consultant in the organization... it feels great being a part of that kind of a team.

Before I started, there was the occassional phone call from the recruiter (as well as others inside the organization), and the message was clear - not only was I excited to be joining the company, but the company was also excited that I was coming to join them. That was a great feeling, and one I had not experienced from an employer since... well, never.

And the welcoming attitude definately did not end when I arrived for my first day - a lot of folks seem to make a point to introduce themselves to new hires. Again - this was another first experience for me, having spent the majority of my career until now as an independant contractor.

I was also thrilled to be put out in a client environment literally on day 2 of my employment. Apparently, this is not normal procedure but there just happened to be an immediate need at a client where my particular industry background was of instant value - and I must say, it sure feels good to be useful!

Well, I won't spill any more beans about the hiring process for now - but I would like to point out that Intellinet is still hiring in Atlanta!  Now, getting past the technical and personal screenings may not be a pushover, but it is definately worth it.  We are building our practice on a solid foundation of talented people, and are most definately interested in bringing in more quality developers, BI specialists, portal specialists, and even infrastructure people.  If you are interested, please email me or pull me aside during one of the many Atlanta user group meetings - I would be more than happy to get you in touch with an Intellinet recruiter.

And supposing you do join the team, please remember to write my name down in that little "referred by" section of your application

This question occurred to me today as I sacked through YADAL (yet another data-access layer):

Does anyone else even understand transactional integrity these days?

It used to be that you didn't dare write a bit of code unless it supported at least some rudimentary transactional guarantees. But now it seems that the only transactionally-safe code I ever see "in the wild" anymore is the code I actually put out there. Countless data-access layers, monolithic systems, and even ingenius multi-tiered highly scalable systems.... but none even provide the most basic of consideration to transactions in their architecture.

I see tremendous effort made to encapsulate and abstract away the details of database access... O/R mappers, hand-rolled business classes, custom "code blowers", point-n-clicked typed datasets, pretty much everything under the sun. But pretty much never any love for SqlTransaction.

Come to think of it - this isn't a .NET problem either. I noticed the dreadful lack of transaction support even prior to .NET when I was a Delphi code jockey.

Perhaps nobody else builds applications that need to write to more than one table in a logical work unit? Nah, can't be.

Just please if you happen to run across this weblog one day and reading this,... please find out how (and why) you might need to be using transactions in your application architectures. I would like to one day encounter a custom developed application (other than my own) that actually implements transactions.

And on the other hand, hopefully you don't go to the other extreme and start peppering transaction locks all over your code "just in case"... cuz that can be an even worse situation...

Thanks, getting off the soapbox now...

If so, then you try your best to make it to the FREE Portal Development mini- Code Camp in Charlotte on August 20th.

If you were in Atlanta for the May Code Camp, you might remember Maxim Karpov [you might even have been one of the many who wrote "Maxim ROCKS" in your event survey comments]. Well, Maxim is the host for this mini- Code Camp, and on his agenda are sessions for Portal Design Patterns, Sharepoint, DotNetNuke, and ASP.NET 2.0 Portal Frameworks.

This should be a pretty good event to attend if your schedule is open, and I highly encourage everyone to attend.

Attendance IS limited, so it would be a good idea to register now and reserve your place!!

When my last cellphone died I bought a new smartphone from AT&T Wireless. I paid quite a bit for this phone, and it has worked well enough (awful reception at my home, but reasonable elsewhere). Even since Cingular acquired ATTW, I have never had any billing problems with them before... it is usually roughly $54 a month.

This week I recieved my bill for last month. It was for $257!! It seems that because the Microsoft recruiter was calling me from a land line (as opposed to a mobile line), Cingular counted every minute of those calls last month (over 400 minutes of it) as "overage", and billed me for it at $0.45 a minute.

First of all, I am almost certain that I would never have agreed to $0.45 per minute unless the carrier's policy was to allow a plan with higher limits to be applied retroactively (which is something Cingular will not do). I also do not recall signing a 3 year contract - only a 1 year contract, however I do not have paperwork to back this up so I am now at the mercy of their contract termination fee ($175 by itself). I feel like I am being robbed in broad daylight.

I am also pretty miffed that being recruited by Microsoft ended up costing me a few hundred dollars out of my own pocket.