Jeremy Coenen

I recently found out that there is in fact a .Net users group in the area. The Fox Valley .Net Users Group meets the 3rd Wednesday of each month at Fox Valley Technical College room F108 from 6-9pm. I have never been to a .Net users group before last Wednesday, but from what I have have read and heard about .net users groups are usually a pretty good time. So I was pretty excited to find that one met just a few miles from my house.

I’ve only been to the one meeting, but here is the general gist of how a meeting normally goes. 6:00 pm people show up at enjoy FREE pizza and soda, 6:30ish the meeting starts and there is usually a speaker who comes in to talk about specific topic. The speaker can be a member of the .net users group, a local technology expert, or a professional INETA speaker (from what I heard I believe we get 3 INETA speakers from Microsoft each year), I’m sure sometime before or after the speaker there is some administrative stuff and listening to one of the podcasts of a previous meeting I heard door prize give aways.

The FVNUG (Fox Valley .Net Users Group) doesn’t sound like its been around all that long (less than a year?) so that’s probably why I hadn’t heard of them until now, but they usually have roughly 30-40 people at a meeting (last weeks meeting was a little light due to some communication problems). Seems like a great networking opportunity as well as change to learn from some pretty smart dudes.

You can get pretty much all the information you need to know from their website http://fvnug.wi-ineta.org/ including next meeting topics, podcasts of each meeting, meeting notes provided by the speakers, etc.

Well here’s a list of things that I learned in attending my first .Net users group.

1. In SQL Server Enterprise Manager you can insert a null into a column by pressing the control key & 0 (zero)
2. You can get the mouse scroll button to work in Visual Basic 6.0 - see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 837910
3. I brought up that you can ctrl & C any object in enterprise manager and paste it into notepad and get the script (thanks to Paul Wilson for making me sound smart)
4. Ctrl K & D will autoformat your aspx code in VS (knew this one but a very good tip for anyone that doesn’t know)
5. Very detailed demo on How to setup a project on SourceForge.net - thanks to Joe Wetzel
6. CSS vs table based layout of web pages (see CSSZenGarden )
7. Microsoft is coming out with Microsoft Expressions product for the more GUI inclined CSS developers
8. You can embed IIF statements within IIF statements - a horrible idea unless you really want to make sure no one else can maintain your code (increased job security).

I’m sure I’m forgetting quite a few good tips, but at least these are the ones that I took away from the meeting. Anyway next meeting is November 15th and the speaker is Chris Fleming from Skyline Technologies to talk about SQL Server 2005. Did I mention there will be FREE pizza?