Recently I have been reading some really great tutorials on the Validation Application Block by David Hayden on his blog. For those that do not already know David Hayden is one of the few great bloggers out there that actually create well crafted blog posts that actually help us out. He certainly makes me look bad that is for sure, I have to work much harder to get to his level. Perhaps that is osmething I can work on next year? Perhaps, my friends.

This is what he has written about so far.

Validation Application Block in Enterprise Library 3.0 - Using Validation Facade Class - Part I

Validation Application Block in Enterprise Library 3.0 - ValidationFactory Class - Part II

Validation Application Block Ruleset in Enterprise Library 3.0 - Enterprise Library 3.0 Tutorials - Part III

Validation Application Block - Rules in External XML Configuration File - App.Config Web.Config - Enterprise Library 3.0 - Part IV

Validation Application Block - Business Layer and Data Access Layer Integration - Part V

If it were not for David Hayden's efforts I am sure many would be blind as to how to proceed in utilizing this tool that Microsoft has provided. Good work as always David!

Recently my Mom has had some serious issue with the Best Buy Customer Service here in Sarasota, Florida. It has gotten so bad that I have decided to blog about it so maybe it will catch their attention. We will see if they follow Robert Scoble’s advice and listen to the bloggers out there. With this being a holiday season I would expect better service from such a well known and respected company.

Here is the issue my Mom ordered a washer and dryer set from the Best Buy appliance department and they scheduled for delivery a whole nine days ahead. Since the house is run on gas she needed to call a plumber in to disconnect the old dryer. As it approached the time for the delivery she was told that the Sarasota store would call ahead to schedule a time for the delivery drivers to come. No one called the night before. She called the store at 6 P.M. and did not get through until 9 P.M. that is three hours for them not to answer the phone. Talk about poor customer service! As it became apparent that the washer and dryer was not going to be delivered she decided she was just too upset with the whole situation and decided to cancel the entire order. Now every time that my Mom tries to cancel this one order of over two thousand dollars she is told she cannot because the washer and dryer is scheduled to be delivered for whatever day she comes in to cancel the order. What a runaround! Basically Best Buy has taken two thousand dollars from my Mom and not delivered anything. The washer and dryer were charged to her account without actual delivery. I did not think that was possible in this day and age but I guess it is.

Hopefully Best Buy will straighten this out sometime soon before we need to go to small claims court about it. Perhaps the local news stations here in the Tampa Bay would like to broadcast this story on their channel. Maybe that is the only way for someone down here to get the work done! I think Best Buy has lost some customers!

Just a quick reminder to those that read my blog that we here in Sarasota will be having another meeting for our small but rapidly growing .Net Developer Group. The details are as follows:

November 2006 Meeting:

Introduction to WCF - Windows Communication Framework - by Jeff Barnes (Microsoft) 

Just a quick reminder for us all living down here in Sarasota that there is another Sarasotadev meeting this September 12th. The details are as follows:

2007 Office System as a Solutions Platform by Microsoft's David McNamee

This meeting will be on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 6pm. Location: Sarasota Community Foundation, located at 2635 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota, FL 34237 (just west of Tuttle on the north side of Fruitville).

The release of Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 is quickly approaching.  Come learn what is available for developers in these new releases and how Office System can become an integral part of your custom solutions.  We will also demonstrate building an end-to-end solution using Office and SharePoint.

David brings his experience as an enterprise developer, architect, and trainer to helping customers unlock their business information by using the Office System as a rich developer platform. There is nothing that cannot be solved with the creative application of the .NET Framework, Office System, and Windows Mobile! Find David's blog here.

It seems like to be a good meeting and since Sharepoint and the 2007 Office system seems to be where Microsoft is headed it might be a good idea for all software developers to attend this meeting. The community foundation is always a good place to meet as they have by far one of the best meeting facilities in the area and the staff is very friendly and welcoming. If you are a not for profit organization then I would highly recommend using this resource in the area.

Just as a friendly reminder to all those here in Sarasota that we have an upcoming Sarasotadev meeting sponsored by INETA. I recently received a reminder from Stan Schultes reminding the group that Tim Huckaby is coming to give a presentation on Architecting and Building Workflow Solutions and Smart Client Development. It should be an interesting event.

The details I received were the following:

August 2006 SarasotaDev meeting:
Architecting and Building Workflow Solutions and Smart Client Development - by Tim Huckaby

This meeting will be on Thursday, August 17, 2006 at 6pm. Location: Sarasota Community Foundation, located at 2635 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota, FL 34237 (just west of Tuttle on the north side of Fruitville).

This two hour session will overview Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and then Tim shows off his bag of tricks for developing smart client apps. This is a must-see session - Tim is immensely entertaining and knows his stuff like no other...

Architecting and Building Workflow Solutions with InfoPath, WF and SPS V3
In this session you will learn how to build custom workflow solutions with Visual Studio 2005.  You’ll learn how to integrate those workflows into SharePoint, and how to interact with workflows using InfoPath.  This session focuses on the power and developer productivity of workflow solutions built on WF.  WF is a powerful technology and this session will delve into the tips and tricks, positives and negatives when designing and building workflow solutions with WF.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), a platform component and part of the Windows plumbing included with the WinFx runtime, has an extensible programming model and runtime components to make powerful workflow solutions.  Couple WF with the latest version of SharePoint Portal Server (v3.0) Infrastructure and InfoPath Forms backed by managed code and you have quite a powerful set of tools, plumbing and infrastructure to build powerful and scalable workflow solutions with ease. 

This combination of technologies addresses one of the biggest challenges that .NET solution developers face today – workflow.

Smart Client Development
In the second hour, Tim will highlight smart client development by showing a bunch of demos from his developer bag of tricks.

Tim Huckaby is a Microsoft Regional Director and well-known international speaker.

On Tuesday, September 12, 2006 we've got a visit lined up by Microsoft's David McNamee of Tampa, who will talk about the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007 Server System (MOSS).

On Wed, October 11, 2006, we've got another superstar lined up in Miguel Castro, an author, speaker, and independent consultant in the NY/NJ metro area who specializes in building web server controls and .NET applications.

Also from Stan Schultes is a note that Russ Fustino our local Developer Community Champion is going to present. Be sure to attend this one as our low attendence in the past has forced Microsoft to cancel regular meetings in this area. We need to show them that there is a market here for these MSDN presentations. The details is as follows:

Coming on May 9: Russ Fustino, our Microsoft Developer Community Champion, returns with an MSDN session in his famous Russ' Tool Shed series. Please make an effort to attend this (and the morning TechNet session). If our attendance is high, they come back. If they don't get enough audience, well, you know what happens :)

The MSDN session (for developers) from 1-5pm (event code: 1032291809) has the following topics:

• Create customizable user interfaces with web parts and ASP.NET 2.0
• Language enhancements in .NET Framework 2.0
• Exploring Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 2.0

The TechNet session (for IT pros) from 8am-noon (event code: 1032291919) has the following topics:

• Implementing security for wireless networks
• Responding to computer attacks
• What's next for Microsoft security?

Since both subjects should be of an interest to a developer you could make a whole day out of this!

I got a note from Stan Schultes that our next Sarasotadev meeting will be April 17th, 2006. The meeting details is as follows:

Note the choice of next Monday for our April meeting - it's a bit unusual for us (although we don't have a set day of the month for our regular meetings). Turns out this is the only day the facility is available at no cost to us in the middle two weeks of April (thanks to the Sarasota Community Foundation, and Van & Jody Vangor!).

April 2006 SarasotaDev meeting:

Hands-on sessions - by our own Dave Hayden. Dave's a top-notch, hands-on kind of guy, so these are very practical talks. I've seen both - and they really kick:

• SQL 2005 - native web services, SQL SMO, CLR integration, new XML datatype
• Enterprise Library 2.0 - Applying the Data and Logging Application Blocks

This meeting will be on Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 6pm. Location: Sarasota Community Foundation, located at 2635 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota, FL 34237 (just west of Tuttle on the north side of Fruitville).

In the SQL 2005 session:

• Learn how to expose and consume your stored procedures as XML web services without using IIS.
• Understand the basics of creating and deploying CLR database objects, like stored procedures, user defined functions, and triggers.
• Use SQL Server Management Objects with C# to create database objects, script objects, and transfer database schema and data.
• Leverage schemas and XQuery with the new XML Datatype for validating and querying XML.

In the Enterprise Library session:
Leverage the application blocks in Enterprise Library 2.0 to more quickly create patterns-based, extensible applications in a consistent manner. Learn about the most popular application blocks (Data Access and Logging) in Enterprise Library 2.0 and how to use them in your applications.

Dave is a Sarasota-based consultant and a Microsoft MVP in C#. Find his excellent tech blog here:  http://davidhayden.com/blog/dave.

Seems like it is going to be a fairly good meeting. Be sure to attend if you have the time.

This is also another meeting announcement from the sarasotadev website for the March 16th, 2006 meeting.

Ensure A Seamless Upgrade Path to WCF with ASMX 2 and WSE 3 - by Tom Fuller

This meeting will be on Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 6pm. Location: Sarasota Community Foundation, located at 2635 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota, FL 34237 (just west of Tuttle on the north side of Fruitville).

The WinFx components are sure to have a significant impact on how we develop applications that target the .NET framework. In this session I will focus in on Windows Communication Foundation and how to ensure forward compatibility with the services you are deploying today. You will certainly walk away from this session understanding what types of limitations exist and what you are able to embrace immediately. If the next generation of web services interests you this session is a must see!

About Tom Fuller:

Tom is an SOA Architect with Publix corporate in Lakeland, FL. He's also an author and the founder of the SOApitstop site.

Here is the details for the next upcoming Sarasota Developers Group meeting this Feburary 15th. from the sarasotadev.net website.

Windows Vista, and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) - by Russ Fustino

This meeting will be on Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 6pm. Location: Sarasota Community Foundation, located at 2635 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota, FL 34237 (just west of Tuttle on the north side of Fruitville).

In this two part talk, Russ will give an overview of Vista - the next-generation Windows platform. He'll also give a technical overview of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) development.

About Russ Fustino:

Russ is the Microsoft Developer Community Champion for the eastern region. He delivers MSDN sessions, user group talks, and other developer events throughout Florida. He also hosts Pub Clubs after many of his meetings that give developers a chance to socialize with their peers.

Data Binding in Windows Forms 2.0 - by Brian Noyes

This meeting will be on Tue, Jan 17, 206 at 6pm. Location: Sarasota Community Foundation, located at 2635 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota, FL 34237 (just west of Tuttle on the north side of Fruitville).

Windows Forms 2.0 introduces a host of new capabilities for managing data binding scenarios. The BindingSources component allows you to easily bind to almost any kind of data source, and the Data Sources window in Visual Studio 2005 makes it easy to generate the code to hook up BindingSources to controls. This session will demonstrate the use of BindingSources and the Data Sources window to handle a variety of complex data binding scenarios including Master-Details, data bound custom controls, and keeping multiple sets of data bound controls synchronized.

About Brian Noyes:

Brian Noyes is a Microsoft MVP and an international speaker, trainer, writer and consultant with IDesign (www.idesign.net). He speaks at Microsoft TechEd US, Europe, and Malaysia, Visual Studio Connections, SDC Netherlands, DevTeach Montreal, VSLive!, DevEssentials, and other conferences, and is a top rated speaker on the INETA Speakers Bureau. He has published numerous articles on .NET development for MSDN Magazine, CoDe Magazine, The Server Side .NET, and other publications. Brian latest book, Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0, part of the Addison-Wesley .NET Development Series, will hit the shelves in the January 2006, and his next book, Smart Client Deployment with ClickOnce will follow in the summer of 2006. Brian’s blog can be found at http://www.softinsight.com/bnoyes/.

Please be sure to register on our website in order to get updated information about all meetings and any other up coming events in the Sarasota area. Also if you are interested in sponsoring our little but growing local developer community please e-mail me.