On Saturday 6/5 before TechEd 2010 there is an opportunity to volunteer with fellow techies to work on a local Habitat for Humanity project. Check out the details at http://bit.ly/bh71l0 on this worthwhile project.

Google demonstrated their Chrome OS again this past week where they indicated the OS will be essentially a gateway to the "cloud". For example, your files would be stored remotely in the cloud, not on a local hard disk.

If you think in terms of our current world where access to the Internet is done through an application on our computers, i.e., the browser, the Google concept for Chrome OS is somewhat foreign. However, projecting forward to Internet access being ubiquitous through many devices independent of a separate application like a browser, the Google OS approach makes sense.

Apple's success with the iPhone stems in large part from it being a consumer focused device rather than something made by techies with an engineering bent. Currently, the PC is still a techie device not a consumer device. The inner workings are too exposed to the user of the device. The Apple Mac computers are a step closer to a consumer device, but still too techie.

If we no longer think about computers as necessary for Internet access, i.e., we just use the services, the Chrome OS starts to make more sense. Is it premature in relation to the current mindset? Maybe, but the thought process behind it is definitely in the right direction.

The 12th edition of the Boston area Code Camp will be on Saturday 10/17/2009. Speaker abstract submission will end on Wed 10/7/2009 so submit an abstract if you want to do a presentation. Also, please register so we can get an accurate count for food. Details are at www.thedevcommunity.org.

Join us for a discussion on ASP.NET MVC the next two Wednesday evening (7/20, 7/29) as well as prior to our August meeting on 8/12. Details on the Boston .NET User Group web site www.bostondotnet.org.

The first Vermont Code Camp http://bit.ly/U1Ut will be held on Saturday 9/12/2009 at the University of Vermont Business School in Burlington, VT. Speaker abstract submission is now open through 8/15/2009. This is a great chance to share what you know w/ fellow developers. It's also a great time of year to visit Vermont and enjoy the beautiful City of Burlington.

While implementing an ASP.NET MVC site which was hosted by an ISP I followed this information from MSFT since the server is running IIS6 and I could not access the web server to configure it for MVC.

This resulted in the following route maps in Global.asax.cs

//Hosted Configuration: Uses .aspx in IIS.
//If MVC installed can map directly.
routes.MapRoute(
"aspx",
"{controller}.aspx/{action}/{id}",
new { action = "Index", id = "" }
);

routes.MapRoute(
"Default",
"{controller}/{action}/{id}"
);

routes.MapRoute(
"Root",
"",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }
);

I then implemented FormsAuthentication using the

[Authorize(Roles = "User")]

attribute on my actions.

However, when the user visited a "page" w/o sufficient permissions the standard loginUrl attribute of the element in web.config did not work.

loginUrl="~/Account/LogOn"

After some thought I realized the loginUrl value needed to follow the mapped routes and changed it to

loginUrl="/Account.aspx/LogOn"

which works nicely.

Miguel de Icaza will return to the featured speaker at the April 8th meeting of the Boston .NET User Group at the Microsoft Waltham MA Office. This will be a great evening for anyone working with the .NET Framework whether it's on Linux or Windows. Few people know more about the Framework than Miguel and he's a great speaker. So bring your ?s. Hope to see you Wednesday.

John Resig, the creator and lead developer of jQuery will be the featured speaker at this Wednesday's 2/11 meeting of the Boston .NET User Group. Check out the details a www.bostondotnet.org.

The next edition of the always popular New England Code Camp will be held on Saturday March 28th. We're holding a one-day mega event which should be packed with lots of great material. Submission of speaker abstracts and registration is now open at www.thedevcommunity.org. Chris Bowen has a detailed description of the event post on his blog.

Miguel de Icaza, founder of the Mono Project will be the featured speaker at the 4/8/2009 meeting of the Boston .NET User Group meeting in Waltham, MA at the Microsoft office from 6-8 pm. Miguel will be giving a tour of Mono 2.2. Previous visits to the group have been very informative and entertaining. If you are in the area, this is a meeting not to be missed!

Microsoft is holding a virtual 24-hr TechDay on April 1st where any and all individuals are welcome to submit a proposal. For more information visit http://www.msfttechdays.com/modules/cft/default.aspx.

jQuery creator and lead developer John Resig will be the featured speaker at the Wed 2/11/2009 meeting of the Boston .NET User Group. This will be a great opportunity to hear from the source about this fantastic Ajax Javascript library.

Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions are open discussion topics of mutual interest to Tech·Ed attendees. They give developers and IT professionals the opportunity to meet with people who have similar interests and challenges in an open-forum environment that promotes discussion and interaction.

If you are going to TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles, 5/11-15/2009 you can propose a topic at https://www.msteched.com/modules/bof/submit.aspx.

Richard Hale Shaw will be speaking on Parallel Extensions in the upcoming .NET 4.0 at the 1/14/2009 Boston .NET User Group meeting (6-8 pm) at the Microsoft Waltham, MA office. Details on www.bostondotnet.org.

Dave Spraigg is organinzing the next installment of the Boston area Geek Dinner on Wednesday, 10/29/2008 5:30 p.m. at the Boston Beerworks to toss down a pint or three, hit some munchies and perhaps event shoot some pool.

This is the Beerworks location across from the BankNorth Garden where Geek Diners have mostly been held since the inception:http://www.beerworks.net/

Registration and the call for speakers at Code Camp: V10.0 in Waltham, MA on the weekend of 9/20-21/2008 is now open at http://www.thedevcommunity.org/. This is the 10th Anniversary of the original Code Camp, right here in New England.

This is a great opportunity for anyone to share their work and ideas with fellow developers in a casual setting. There is everything from small conference rooms presentations to large lecture rooms. If you've never presented before this is a great place to start!

Dan Mezick will be speaking on Reflection with Custom Attributes at this Wednesday's meeting of the Boston .NET User Group in Waltham, MA. Details can be found at http://www.bostondotnet.org/.

Several of my new ASP.NET videos are featured on the home page of the ASP.NET web site.


Check out the rest of the videos I've created for ASP.NET on the videos page of the iDevTech
web site.

I was talking with Scott Hanselman at TechEd about a presentation he did to a Microsoft group at Mix '08 where he mentioned a nice screen capture utility called "Window Clippings" by Kenny Kerr. I've been using Window Clippings for a while now and it is very useful.

Dan Mezick will be giving a presentation on "Reflection with Custom Attributes" at the August 13, 2008 meeting of the Boston .NET User Group in Waltham, MA.

Hartford area developers are holding their first Code Camp on Saturday, August 16th from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the New Horizons Computer Learning Center (Bloomfield CT).

They are accepting abstracts for presentations from all .NET developers. Each session should be about 90mins in duration and the content should be on developer topics that would be of interest to attending developers. Just about anything in .NET and other Microsoft technologies.

Choose a .NET topic of interest and send a brief abstract or outline, your developer experience, expected audience level, etc or any other questions to ctdotnet@gmail.com

The New Hampshire .NET User Group (www.nhdn.com) is hosting renowned speaker and author John Papa for LINQ, Entities and a touch of SilverLight on July 24th at Daniel Webster College, Nashua NH.

Save the dates of September 20-21, 2008 for Code Camp 10 at the Microsoft Offices in Waltham, MA. It's hard to believe this will be the 10th Code Camp since Thom Robbins et. al. started the Code Camp concept in 2004.

This will be a special edition of Code Camp with a few new items in addition to the popular presentations by community members. Details on submitting speaker abstracts and registration available in the next few weeks. Check back.

Chris Bowen, Developer Evangelist for the Microsoft Northeast District will be speaking on Introduction to Game Development with XNA at the Wednesday, July 9th meeting of the Boston .NET User Group in Waltham, MA. Details are available at http://www.bostondotnet.org/.