We were planning on conducting the Utah .NET User Group meeting tonight for our regular monthly meeting, but due to a variety of circumstances, we are needing to postpone our user group meeting to next Tuesday.  This is the email sent out to the group:

We sincerely apologize for the extreme lateness of this notice, but due to a variety of circumstances beyond our control we are needing to postpone our regularly scheduled Utah .NET User Group meeting to this coming Tuesday, May 13th.

We hope that this doesn't disrupt your plans and/or schedules too much and that we can convene at our regularly scheduled time.

Thank you for your understanding.

Please pass the word along to anyone who you may know that was planning on attending the meeting tonight so that we might all be informed of the change

Topic: Windows Server 2008
Date: Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Time: 6:00 PM
Place: Digital Draw Network - Suite 300 (10897 South River Front Parkway, South Jordan, UT)

I'm adding this simply for future reference, so please ignore if you'd like.

You may have user accounts on your system (XP or Vista) that will never be used to login to your machine.  These may represent accounts created specifically for services or are simply logons for remote users to access otherwise secured resources.  It bugs me that through the Windows GUI you can't determine whether the account should show up on the Welcome Screen.  At least you can't do it intuitively; I hear you can do it through group membership.  Maybe I'll try creating a 'Hidden Users' group and adding users to it, removing them from the 'Users' group.  I don't know if that will work yet.

But you can remove a user from the Vista Welcome Screen simply do the following:

1. Open the registry (regedit.exe) to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList, creating keys as necessary.  For example, I needed to create both the SpecialAccounts and the UserList key.
2. Create a DWORD value for each user you want to omit/remove from the Welcome Screen where the name of the value is the user name.
3. Assign it a value of '0'.
4. Reboot.

This same technique works in Windows XP, though I'd always used tools like TweakUi to accomplish this.  It's nice to know the manual way.

Sticking with the tradition established over the past few years, we have another great opportunity to touch base with developers across the valley at our bi-annual Utah Code Camp.  The Spring Code Camp will be held this coming Saturday (April 26th from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM) at Neumont University.

These events have been getting better and better each time.  There is a great group of speakers this time as well (not that we didn't have a good group in years past :), but it seems that the Code Camp is diversifying as well - which is great!  We have talks on Scrum, CakePHP, Developing on Windows Vista, TSQL, Windows Services, XNA development, Silverlight, Mac OSX programming, and much more!  Personally, I'll be sharing my thoughts on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

So, come on out and join the vibrant Salt Lake community of developers and have a great time!

What: Utah Spring Code Camp
When: April 26th, 2008, 9:00-5:00
Where: Neumont University (10701 South River Front Parkway, South Jordan, UT 84095)
Registration: http://utcodecamp.com/event/

That's right, folks, we have the distinct opportunity to once again gather as a community of developers and share our insights and thoughts on the world of .NET.  The time has come once again to convene for our monthly .NET User Group Meeting!

This month's meeting is sure to be an exciting one as we're hosting a Heroes Community Launch! With this particular event we have volunteers from the group willing to share on three distinct topics: Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008. You won't want to miss it!

In the coming months we'll take the various topics and do some additional deep dives into each one.

Come on out, invite your friends and co-workers and be among the first to receive technical demos, readiness kits, and much more. We have several Not-For-Resale copies of each product to be given out as well to some lucky winners!

Time: 6:00 PM
Date: Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Place: Digital Draw Network (10897 South River Front Parkway, South Jordan, Suite 300)

Today I set out to create a TextBox that would provide the user with a built-in prompt.  I didn't want a TextBox control that included a Label.  Instead, I wanted something akin to the password field in Windows Vista's logon screen; the field has the prompt built-into the TextBox in a faint, perhaps italic font when the control is empty.  Once the user performs an action that causes text to appear (i.e., typing, pasting, etc) the faint prompt disappears to accommodate the text.

Now there may be tons of implementations of a similar control out there; I didn't look.  Instead I wanted to 'reinvent the wheel' as it were and figure it out for myself.  Fortunately it only cost me between 5 to 10 minutes and I had something up and working.  The code I've included below is very raw and doesn't include many customizations (you're on your own there

public sealed class PromptingTextBox : TextBox {
  public PromptingTextBox() {
     userPaint(true);
  }

  private Font _promptFont = new Font("Arial", 9.0F, FontStyle.Italic);
  private string _promptText = "Enter text here...";

  ///

  /// Sets or returns the text to display when the TextBox is empty.
  ///

  public string PromptText {
     get { return _promptText; }
     set { _promptText = value; }
  }

  protected override void Dispose(bool disposing) {
     if ( disposing )
        _promptFont.Dispose();
     base.Dispose(disposing);
  }

  protected override void OnTextChanged(EventArgs e) {
     base.OnTextChanged(e);
     userPaint(0 == TextLength);
  }

  private void userPaint(bool enabled) {
     if ( enabled != GetStyle(ControlStyles.UserPaint) ) {
        SetStyle(ControlStyles.UserPaint, enabled);
        Refresh();
     }
  }

  protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e) {
     Graphics g = e.Graphics;
     g.TextRenderingHint = TextRenderingHint.ClearTypeGridFit;
     g.DrawString(_promptText, _promptFont, SystemBrushes.ControlLight, 0.0F, 0.0F);
  }
}

That's all there is to it - at least for a simple start. Enjoy!

Customer Dynamics, a local Microsoft partner that focuses exclusively on Microsoft CRM, is hosting a special Microsoft CRM 4.0 Open House today (03/19/2008).  The event takes place at our local Microsoft offices and runs from 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM.  Customer Dynamics has invited us (Experlogix) to come share in the event.

It's my privilege, therefore, to attend the event and provide a short presentation on Experlogix's Product Configurator solution for CRM and interact with customers.  I'm very excited as I look forward to this event.  If you haven't already registered and your company uses (or is investigating the usage of) Microsoft CRM, please sign up and we'll see you there!

Microsoft Corporation
123 Wright Brothers Dr. Suite 100
Salt Lake City, UT 84116

In the world of AJAX and JavaScript, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is ubiquitous; that is, it's everywhere.  JSON is, in a nutshell, a terse, convenient mechanism for representing objects and their property values in a manner that the browser (via JavaScript itself) can reconstruct as an object.  I'm not going to go into the details of JSON and its intracacies here as there are plenty of other discussions on the topic online elsewhere.

I just wanted to point out that there is some first-class support for JSON serialization in the .NET framework v3.5.  I bring this up because a while back I was about to create my own attribute-based JSON serializer but I figured there had to be something already in place for it.  I'm glad I looked.

Using the [DataContractAttribute] and [DataMemberAttribute] which are usually associated with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) you can easily serialize your objects to/from JSON form.  The object that provides this support (not coincidentally named DataContractJsonSerializer) is found after referencing the System.ServiceModel.Web assembly in the System.Runtime.Serialization.Json namespace.  When (de)serializing your objects, you do so against a stream.

Say, for purposes of the discussion, that you wanted to create an HTTP Handler that returned product information to the caller.  You could very easily serialize your product set in the following manner:

void IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) {
  HttpResponse res = context.Response;
  res.ContentType = "application/json";
  DataContractJsonSerializer jsSer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof ( Product[] ));
  jsSer.WriteObject(res.OutputStream, getProducts());
}

The JavaScript client could then parse the result and do with it as it sees fit.  Pretty handy!

This past week I've been in Orlando, Florida attending the Microsoft Convergence 2008 conference.  This marks my fourth such conference and they keep getting better and better!  My primary responsibilities at this conference (and the MS Partner Conference for that matter) revolve around the booth that we have in the Expo hall.  Five of my team and co-workers were in attendance, manning the booth (Christian, Jeff, Gwyn, David, and myself) as well as an associate, Scott.  It was a good thing all five of us were there because we hardly had a moment to breathe what with the traffic our booth brought in.  It was awesome.

Not only was the week full of activity in the conference proper, we had the opportunity to witness the Space Shuttle Endeavour launch on Monday evening/Tuesday morning, hang out with partners and customers, and all-in-all have a great time.  We keep hearing how much our customers and partners LOVE our product; that sure makes a developer such as myself feel even better about what I do.

I already look forward to the next conference.