I updated the CAPAREA website from DNN 4.0 to 4.92.

I found a very good guide for steps to take to implement an upgrade from such an old version of DNN here by Brian Swanson. As he says in his guid -- BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!

Also, based on Antonio Chagoury's recommendation, I implemented the upgrade with this approach:

1. Upgrade DNN site with aliases to run on local computer
2. Download DNN files from website to local computer
3. Setup local IIS to run DNN site locally - but using the production database (make sure it runs locally)
4. Get copy of DNN Upgrade and copy into local directory overwriting older DNN files
5. Modify the release.config and rename it web.config (see Brian's guide above)
6. Execute the upgrade locally
7. If upgrade worked, then copy all files to product web server, overwriting older files.

Special note: Check the bin folder for older DNN files (particularly HttpModule DLLs) that are no longer needed. If DNN executes reflection against these deprecated DLLs, it may cause problems. I had a problem getting to the Host menu pages.

Special thanks to Steve Raddich who runs BIT Shop hosting .

Vishwas Lele gave an excellent presentation at CAPAREA last night on bringing together Windows Communication Framework and Workflow Framework. Vishwas is the CTO at AIS and also the Microsoft Regional Director for the Washington, DC, area.

One of the interesting suggestions for why you would want to do this is that the technology lets you chain together web services in a workflow so that the service calls occur in a proper order. Web services by themselves are inherently stateless - unless you build the infrastructure to manage state in them. But with WCF and WF, combining these two technologies together you get that infrastructure right out of the box.

On Saturday, March 29th, software developers from around the Metro DC area met to listen to presentations by over a dozen software experts. The presentations included a range of topics from new technologies being released by Microsoft to practices to improve quality and delivery management.

This event was free to the public and was hosted by Strayer University in Woodbridge, Virginia. Attendance was over 80, with some attendees coming from as far away as York County.

John Morales at Nova CodeCamp Event discussing AJAX Development

Jeff Schoolcraft and I coordinated this event, but it was the volunteers and speakers that donated their time that made this event a success. We were fortunate to receive sponsorship from several companies and organizations.

You can find out more about Nova CodeCamp at www.novacodecamp.org.

First, let me congratulate our fearless leader, Scott Lock on being selected as a Microsoft MVP. This is a wonderful accomplish and it is about time Microsoft got around to recognizing all the people who organize events and connect developers together. Scott's recognition is long overdue. He's not only a technologist, but a community leader.

On most nights there is a user group somewhere in the Washington DC metro area with someone presenting technical content that would typically cost significant monies in travel, lodging, and registration fees to see the same content at a conference or training scenario. Without a doubt, the CAPAREA user group has had a stellar list of presenters and topics. Without people like Scott, who work tirelessly to make these presentations happen - and for no compensation - the developer community would not have access to these wonderful resources. Thanks Scott - and kudos for a job well done.

Scott is giving a presentation tonight at the Capital Area .NET User Group (CAPAREA) on VSTO - Automation and Customizing Excel 2003.

Here's the summary:

Tuesday, July 24, 2007 at 7:00 PM

Building office applications has never been better.  You've heard all of the hype about Office 2007, Ribbons, etc.  This session is based on what the majority of us are in today...Office 2003.  Customizing and automating Excel 2003 is a great way to build dynamic workbooks that solve some cool problems.  This presentation is an overview of what Visual Studio Tools for office is about and how it applies to Excel 2003 and Office 2003.

CAPAREA was visited by none other than Mr. VB, himself, Paul Vick. He is the Microsoft VB language architect on Tuesday, September 26th.

Paul's topic was "Visual Basic 9.0: Language Integrated Query (LINQ), XML integration and beyond...". Paul is also author of The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language.

The speaker was a huge draw for our group. We had over 65 people in attendance last night.   

In case  you missed it, Sahil Malik stopped by CAPAREA to make a presentation on Transactions (SQL Server 2005 and ADO.NET 2.0).

Sahil will be speaking at TechEd. You can find out more at his blog.

Below are a few shots from the meeting.

Here is Sahil presenting.

Scott Lock holding an impromptu discussion during the meeting. Looks like he's trying to figure out how to get more money for CAPAREA. Go, Scott, Go

Attendees watching the presentation.

Great show by Carl and Richard, of the .NET Rocks Show.

Carl showed some great features in VB.NET for VS2005, including asynchronous programming. Richard concentrated on Mobility Development including a great overview of the technology currently available and soon to be released stuff, and how Microsoft's .NET plays in that arena for developing applications.

Their presentation was hosted by CAPAREA and Microsoft in Reston.

Kudos to Scott Lock, CAPAREA President, for getting Jasper Johansson , Microsoft Security Expert, as a presenter on December 13th.

The presentation that he will give is still being discussed, but needless to say, his "How To Get Your Network Hacked in 10 Easy Steps" and other presentations were SRO (standing room only) at recent Microsoft TechEd conferences. Not only are his topics critically important to IT developers and administrators, but he is one of the best presenters I have seen (and I have seen a few).

See you there!

Clyde Barretto, TMA Resources, presented at CAPAREA on Tuesday, August 23, 2005, on Building Custom Windows Forms Controls.

Very cool. His presentation not only went into the "how" but also the why of building customer form controls. I will paraphrase his concept..."A custom control can encapsulate presentation logic for a particular use-case that can be used on multiple forms. The advantage to doing this is that should the presentation logic/interface need to change, you can change it in one place and have the changes ripple through out the forms on which the user control is placed."

Tim Huckaby gave a great presentation on Tuesday, 28 June, at CAPAREA.NET on Smart Clients.

I thought the highlight was an application that presented traffic conditions and actual traffic video in a smart device, like a PDA or smart phone. While even the best of information would be inconsequential in the overloaded traffic in the DC metro area, it was nonetheless impressive!

Tim touched on many of the features of the Whidbey release (.NET Framework 2.0) that will really be a pleasant surprise for developers building WinForm-based applications. Tim expressed a strong preference for WinForm (vice Web/browser-based) applications, where users can take advantage of rich-client interfaces.

Picture of me, Andrew Duthie and Sahil Malik at a recent CAPAREA.NET meeting.

Andrew Duthie, Microsoft, put on a great show. There are Code Camps being organized all over, and this one last Saturday was hosted at Microsoft's Reston offices. 

This wasn't a marketing session, it was about developers talking to developers. We had some top-flight folks presenting. Brian Noyes, Sahil Malik, Vishwas Lele, Julie Lerman, Jonathan Cogley, to name a few. We also had many local developers give presentations, so it was a good mix of top flight presenters/MVPs and local or first time presenters.

This whole event was free. Similar type conferences cost about $400 per day, so those that attended in the developer community really made out. There is talk of doing more of these, and also doing them in other locations (like Roanoke).

User group representatives were out in force, too. We had members and representatives from Roanoke, Richmond, Hampton, Baltimore, Vermont, and nearly every .NET group in the DC area (NovaSQL, CAPAREA.Net were well represented). We even had Cold Fusion folks attend. And INETA was well represented with Julie Lerman (congratulations on being named to the INETA board) and Scott Lock, Regional INETA director for the Mid-Atlantic region in attendance. 

I gave a presentation on XQuery for the Data track (we had 5 different tracks). Good group of presenters: Sreedhar Koganti, Carney Clegg, Julie Lerman, Sahil Malik, and Jeff Schoolcraft in our group. Carney and I should have switched the order of our presentations because he showed some good stuff on how to consume XML and make it show up in a grid. Using XQuery, I showed how to extract data out in an XML format. It would have really been interesting to show me pulling data from SQL Server 2005 in XQuery, and Carney's demonstration showing how it could be consumed and presented at the interface level.

I gave away a red-handled crescent wrench to an attendee that could name the two types of XQuery calls that can be made in SQL Server 2005 (XPath and FLOWR) similar to the one in my first blog entry.

Anyway, hats off to Andrew Duthiefor putting on the Code Camp. I think he maxed out his expected attendance goals. Over 300 signed up and over 200 attended (not bad for the Saturday before Mother's Day).