This coming Monday night would normally be our monthly Atlanta MS Pros / Atlanta Cutting Edge .NET / Atlanta VB.NET user group meeting, but this month we have a special treat lined up...

Microsoft (aka Doug Turnure) will be providing a FREE copy of Visual Studio 2008 (Professional Edition) to the first 150 people that arrive. This is a GREAT way to get an upgrade right away without having to convince your boss to buy a license! Well, technically we will be giving out DVDs with the trial version, but as soon as the Retail Packages are ready, each person that gets a Trial copy on Monday will receive a full Retail Boxed copy.

So bring your laptop. Most folks will be loading it up right there, so you might as well join in and get your upgrade on.

And then, after the LoadFestivities, everyone will be welcome to come join in some XBOX fun... we have 9 (yes, NINE) xbox 360 consoles and 9 matching big-screen TV's, so there should be plenty of room for everyone to have a good time. The name of the game is Halo3, so put on your MJOLNIR armor and get ready to frag your buddies! And if John-117 is too intense for you, we will also have Guitar Hero cranking on some of the consoles... so you can come and rock out to some Hit Me With Your Best Shot on Easy.

I hear the Master Chief himself might be there to take on challengers!

Please register in advance, so that we can have an accurate count of attendees. The registration link is here.

Location:

Microsoft Corporation [Alpharetta]
1125 Sanctuary Pkwy.
Suite 300
Atlanta, GA 30004

See you there!

A few weeks ago, for no obvious reason, I lost the ability to multi-select files in Windows Explorer. Control-Click, Shift-Click, Control-A, none of those hotkeys would work. The mouse "rubber band" selection tool was non-functional, and even the corresponding selection options from the View menu were disabled.

I never realized how dependant I was on the multi-selection feature. Tasks that were normally simple were suddenly monumental. Lucky for me, a little bit of Live Searching helped me find a solution: apparently the per-folder settings that Explorer likes to save can get corrupted. The fix is to delete the folder settings data. For some people, you can simply go to Folder Options under the Tools menu, and click the button to "Reset Folders". That didn't work for me though. I had to manually delete the folder settings data from the registry.

Warning: Messing with the Registry is Bad mmmkay

At this key location, you can find a few sub-keys filled with lots of nasty gobbledy-gook data values and nested sub-keys:

HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\

Deleting the BagMRU and Bags subkeys here (and obviously all of their contents) corrected the problem for me (for now).

Your mileage may vary.