The Southern California launch events for VSTS for Database Professionals is coming...

December 6th in San Diego (register here) and December 7th in Los Angeles (register here) they are both in the local Microsoft offices. The agenda looks great for anyone who wants to lean more about this product.

Please let me know if you are going to come to either event so I can have an excuse to come ;)

A good friend of mine (David McCarter) is going to be teaching a class on the ASP.NET AJAX control toolkit at UCSD. I am looking forward to this class as I am sure it will be digging deep in to AJAX. For more information check out the course class information.

Let me know if you are going to attend.

The Windows Defender team has released the fist fully supported version of Windows Defender. What is Windows Defender? From the products web site:

Windows Defender is a free program that helps protect your computer against pop-ups, slow performance, and security threats caused by spyware and other unwanted software. It features Real-Time Protection, a monitoring system that recommends actions against spyware when it's detected and minimizes interruptions and helps you stay productive. Now with 2 free support incidents for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

This is great for the consumer who some times just dose not understand how dangerous the web can be ;)

For more information see the Windows Defender product page or just Download!

I am not sure how many people who read this blog (all two of you) would be familiar with BarCamp but wow you soul be! The good news is that BarCamp LA version 2 is coming back read the BarCamp LA-2 entry on the BarCamp wiki.

BarCampLA will be happening at Little Radio Warehouse again, this was a good place last time quite quirky/funky place, great for getting you in the BarCamp mood.

The question is what the heck am I going to contribute? Any suggestions? I am thinking something about WCF but last time there were a lot of non-tech related topics so I am going to come up with something non-tech as well.

This will be the third set of Live From Redmond webcasts that have been done, each time I get a lot of good feedback of how good the events are. I hope if you are not familiar with this type of webcast that you check out this set of events for topics that interest you. For all the details check out Simon Muzio blog entry about the announcement.

I don't know if I am going to attend (trying to get the T&E now) but Seattle Code Camp v2.0 will be happening at the end of October on the 28th & 29th at DeVry University in Federal Way (not that I know where that is) but if you are interested check out the web site Seattle Code Camp v2.0. If you are from Southern California and you are planning on going please let me know so I can say hi if I go.

I just got asked a question that comes up quite often when someone starts working with ASP.NET...

 The question was:

"I have an asp.net 2.0 page which all I’m trying to do is populate a label control with the selected text of a dropdownlist control, whenever a button control is clicked.  It always puts the name of the first item in the dropdownlist in the label control, no matter what item I have selected.  Any ideas?"

The Code was:

Partial Class _Default
    Inherits System.Web.UI.Page

    Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, _
      ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
        With Me.DropDownList1.Items
            .Clear()
            .Add("Item 1")
            .Add("Item 2")
            .Add("Item 3")
            .Add("Item 4")
        End With
    End Sub

    Protected Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As Object, _
      ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
        Label1.Text = DropDownList1.SelectedItem.Text
    End Sub
End Class

The issue is that the Page_Load event will fire each time the page gets rendered, this includes on the post back from the button click so the list will be cleared then repopulated and the first item will always be selected once the Button1_Click event fires.

There is a good MSDN article for this ASP.NET Page Life Cycle Overview that covers this and cool diagram by Leon Andrianarivony ASP.NET Page Lifecycle diagram.

To solve this issue all that you need to do is use the Page.IsPostBack property in the Page_Load event like:

    Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, _
      ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
        If Not Page.IsPostBack Then
            With Me.DropDownList1.Items
                .Clear()
                .Add("Item 1")
                .Add("Item 2")
                .Add("Item 3")
                .Add("Item 4")
            End With
        End If
    End Sub

This assumes ViewState is on...

Tonight I will get to talk to a class at San Diego State University about how to use Visual Studio to complete a class assignment.

I will do a in class demonstration but I will also show a lot of the free tanning resources Microsoft has for learning the toolset. I hope others can find this information useful.

First Free software!

There are a set of products Microsoft offers for free that will allow students, and hobbyists program on the windows platform. They can be found at the Visual Studio Express home page. There you can download two different types of Visual Studio, one for doing web development and four different ones for doing Windows development. You can also download SQL Server Express.

For the work in this class students will need one of the Windows Development Express products and SQL Server Express. I also suggest that they get the SQL Server Management Studio Express and the Northwind and Pubs sample database.

Now we have an environment to learn with... How about some lessons?

MSDN Virtual Labs

Some of my favorite things that are available are the MSDN Virtual Labs the Virtual Labs are way cool in that you don't need to install any of the above software locally. You will need to have JavaScript enabled, IE6.0 or higher and the Virtual Server VRMC Advanced Control but that is a small price to pay for free hands on training. I was shocked to see that we have not updated all of the labs to Visual Studio 2005 but you and still learn the basics in 2003 and there are labs what is new for Visual Studio 2005.

Learn Visual Studio

The Learn Visual Studio site on MSDN lists other resources available, these include Learning Plans, E-Learning, Classroom Training, Available Books and Exams.

The Learning Plans are quite cool, you identify what type of development you want to learn and Microsoft will show you resources and let you build a custom learning plan.

More Resources

MSDN
MSDN Flash
Future Versions of Visual Studio
CodeZone
San Diego .NET Developer Group
San Diego .NET User Group

Scott Guthrie has posted details of the changes coming to Atlas!

"Atlas" 1.0 Naming and Roadmap