History of BSDG

BSDG actually pre-dates my (Jim McKeeth - DavinciUnltd.com & McKeeth.org) involvement. As far as I know Steve Dahlin started the group as a Clipper users group, but I am not sure when that was. Rich Hundausen took over in 1995 or 1996 and changed it to a Delphi users group (registering the famous Delphi.org domain name!) Steve Garland (of AstaTech) took over from Rich, and after a few years it became the Boise Visual Developers (or BVD like the underware) group to expand its focus now that in addition to Delphi, Visual Studio was a viable development tool . In 2000 I took over and changed the name to Boise Software Developers Group (although debated going back to the Delphi users group), but it is still frequently referred to as the Boise Delphi group. Chris Brandsma (Programmers on Fire and Elegant Code) took over in October of this year - 2007. Hopefully it will continue on for many more years and many more leaders.

Hopefully the others will help me flush this out with some more dates or anything I may have missed. Stay tuned!

Steve Dahlin added:

Actually, the group started as a completely separate Delphi group which I organized. I hosted for the first few months and then others took over after I had suffered complete burnout. The first meeting was held on the 2nd floor of the Central Plaza bldg which is part of the WGI [Washington Group International] complex [where it currently meets].

Richard Hundhausen added:

Wow, very cool. I had forgotten about the lineage myself.

Jim forgot to tell you that during the Clipper user group days, each week we would hassle Steve Dahlin on his choice of screen colors.

(I've heard about Steve's color choices.)

Doug Reece added (and I was negligent in not including him in the history. Sorry Doug!)

I just read your post about the history of BSDG and found it interesting. I also thought that I'd add a bit more info. I was at the meeting where Rich nominated Steve Garland to take over the group. Steve seemed a bit reluctant to take on the job by himself. By this time, Steve and I had become well acquainted and that same evening, he asked me if I'd co-lead the group with him, which I agreed to. I eventually ran many of the meetings myself (Steve's participation became less frequent). I was the one that suggested to Steve that we ask [Jim] to consider taking over leadership of the group, and it was I who actually communicated with you about that.

While Rich was leading the group, we met at (the place he worked, which was some government agency I can't remember). During the time Steven and I ran the group, we met at Executrain at its old location on Executive Drive by HP. It wasn't uncommon to lock people out at that location since the doors were automatically locked after 7:00 pm. I believe that we were still meeting there when [Jim] took over, but then quickly relocated to the place [Jim was] working.

December 6th 2007 Visual Studio 2008 Install Fest

Registration link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032360765&Culture=en-US
Thursday, December 06, 2007 1:00 PM - Thursday, December 06, 2007 5:00 PM
Overland Park Cinemas
7051 Overland Road
Boise, Idaho 83709
United States
Audience: Developer.
Event Overview ATTENTION DEVELOPERS! Are you ready to be one of the first to get their hands on Visual Studio 2008? Join Microsoft, the Boise .NET Developers User Group (NETDUG), and the Boise Software Developers Group (BSDG) for a Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest and Holiday Party on December 6th, 2007 at the Overland Park Cinemas in Boise. Visual Studio 2008 is HERE and this event is your opportunity to get your hands on the released version before anyone else. Every person that installs Visual Studio 2008 on their computer at the event will receive a FREE fully licensed copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional in the mail shortly after public release. Don't miss out a great evening of food, fun, and your very own copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional! Space is limited so register today.

Silverlight Training

Mithun Dhar is hosting a Silverlight event in Seattle called Silverlight Fire Starter for those of you who want some more Silverlight training.  Read the details below.

Event: Silverlight Fire Starter Course – 1 full day free training for designers and developers who are interested in working with Silverlight 1.0

Venue: Microsoft Redmond Campus – Microsoft Conference Center (Kodiak Room)

Date & Time: November – 29^th – 2007  (Thursday) between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM (Breakfast and lunch provided)

Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032359153&Culture=en-US
or by calling 1-877-673-8368 and referencing Event ID 1032359153

Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 due this month

This has been making the rounds for about a week now, but Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.4 is expected to be released this month (November 2007).
More info below:
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/11/05/teched-developer-in-europe.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/default.aspx
Also there is a rumor that the Microsoft ASP.Net MVC framework will also be released REAL SOON (meaning: when they feel like it, but probably after the Visual Studio 2008 launch -- and they will probably change the name).
For those of you who don't know: the Asp.Net MVC Framework is a MonoRail/Ruby On Rails-esk web development framework for Asp.Net.  It does not use WinForms at all.  This actually has a lot of people really excited right now.  Phil Haack and Rob Conery both left their current jobs for Microsoft just so they could help work on this. 
Haack must be the single greatest last name for a developer....
Scott Hanselman (now a blue badge Microsofty) has two videos from the ALT.NET conference last month with Scott Guthrie and himself.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottGuMVCPresentationAndScottHaScreencastFromALTNETConference.aspx

CodeRage II Virtual Developer Conference - November 26-30, 2007

Be sure you are registered to attend CodeRage II. This is CodeGear's second virtual developers conference. Being virtual it is a whole lot cheaper and easier to attend. The key is to actually schedule time to watch sessions and be sure you are not working or otherwise distracted. If you are overseas that gets even more interesting.

You can always catch the replays later, but then you miss out on the live chat and Q&A session. I must admit, as a presenter it is odd being in the chat room with the attendees while you are presenting - you are both the presenter and the "peanut gallery" at the same time.

You'll see sessions on Delphi, Ruby, Java, PHP, C++, Databases, .NET, Win32 and all the latest CodeGear tools and technologies.

I'll be attending and presenting both. I hope to see you there, virtually of course!

November Meeting: GIS

If you are in town (Boise) on Thursday, Nov 1 at 7:00 PM ,BSDG is having our monthly meeting.

Topic for this month: GIS.
Presenter: Will Jenson

What is GIS and why would you ever want to program it?

A high level discussion of core GIS concepts and API's that will be focused on ESRI's ArcGIS suite of software products. Topics will include:

• The Map - Cartography and Spatial Analysis
• The Data - Geodatabases, Topology and Editing
• Geoprocessing - Spatial manipulation and post processing
• The API's - ArcObjects, .NET and Python.
• The Web - ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS and the Web ADF

See more details on time at location at http://bsdg.org/2004/12/meeting-location.shtml

Boise MSDN Event on Oct 4

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032346939

Thursday, October 04, 2007 1:00 PM - Thursday, October 04, 2007 5:00 PM Mountain Time (US & Canada)
Welcome Time: 12:00 PM

Theater - Edwards Boise Stadium 21

7701 Overland Road
Boise Idaho 83709
United States

Language(s):
English.

Product(s):
ASP.NET, Office, Visual Studio and Windows Vista.

Audience(s):
Developer.

Event Overview

MSDN Events are free, live sessions designed to enhance your coding skills and make your life a little easier. By attending you’ll get up –to-the-minute technology delivered by seasoned developers and have lots of time to network and ask questions. Chat with your fellow developers get the latest coding tools and tips and learn how to create rich new applications. Register today for a free live event in your area and get the hands on knowledge you need. For more information visit: http://www.msdnevents.com.

Meeting Post-Mortem

We had a nice meeting last night (on this opening day of the NFL season -- let no one be confused about where my priorities lay, I was at the meeting). 

Jake Munson showed off the shiny new Adobe ColdFusion.  It seems to be a nice tool for creating web pages quickly and easily.  There are some features that ColdFusion gives you with a single tag that would take a bit of work in ASP.NET or a 3rd party component.  But it is hard to cover an entire application framework in a 1 hour talk.  Some of the Flash based tags were pretty cool (charts, grids, calendars).

The one point against it though: I pretty hefty price tag on the server software.

There was one point that did come up in all of this:  there are some niches emerging in the web development space. 

• ASP.NET seems to be for the more "hard core" developer (the type of person who was doing Windows Forms development and is not being asked to make web pages).  These are the guys/gals that already know VB or C# and are comfortable in them.
• JSP: Same as ASP.NET, just substitute C# and VB for Java. 
• ColdFusion: less of a developer type, more of designer type.  The Flash integration helps with that.
• Ruby/Ruby on Rails: Hard core developer gone a bit nuts.  Doesn't like language constraints, loves code generators.
• PHP: somewhere between ColdFusion and Ruby on Rails.  I imagine that if someone were looking at ColdFusion, but didn't need Flash, they would probably end up here instead.
• ASP/VBScript:  These developers are ... who am I kidding?  The only reason I've found people are still using this is because they don't have the time to convert it to something else.  Legacy code happens.  That is who COBOL is still around.

And that was one of the end questions that wasn't really answered: why would you pick ColdFusion over PHP?  

I know why I would stick to ASP.Net over both of them -- I already know C# and the .Net Framework and I love the versatility they give me.  I would probably say the same thing if I was  Java developer.

So many questions, so little time.

One final note: our beloved leader, Jim McKeeth, has announced that he is leaving Boise and heading to Seattle.  As such he is stepping down from the BSDG board and I (Chris Brandsma) am now taking over.  I promise not to make people sing "Hale to the chief" when the meeting starts.

So, we are looking for a new head lackey -- I mean Vice President.  Must be in the Boise region to apply and willing to present from time to time and willing to share knowledge. 

Orcas is Part of the Delphi Family

So I wanted to look up something on Oracs, the as yet unreleased development tool from Microsoft for Vista. So I went to Firefox and typed Orcas into the Google search box. The first hit that came up was on Wikipedia and it turned out to be on Orca (the singular of Orcas). I actually learned a lot.

I knew Orca where killer whales, and I knew they were related to dolphins. What surprised me was that dolphins and killer whales are both in the Delphinidae family. I thought that was really revealing that Microsoft choose that as the code name for their product, especially now that they are playing catch up with Delphi again. In case you didn't know, CodeGear (FKA Borland) now has two IDE's (Delphi 2007 and C++ Builder 2007) released that support Microsoft's Windows Vista, while Microsoft doesn't have one released yet.

Now someone pointed out that you can use .NET 3.0 with Visual Studio 2005 to get some Vista support, but from my understanding you still don't get Sheet of Glass support on your forms, or some of the other neato Aero effects without writing extra code. And to be fair, CodeGear's 2007 releases don't support .NET 3.0 or much of the specific functionality only exposed through .NET 3.0 - then again, it is a native Win32 development tool, so of course it doesn't support .NET.

The significant fact is that CodeGear has two actual releases for Vista before Microsoft does. There are a number of great innovations in Delphi 2007 that Microsoft is yet to copy.

In related news, CodeGear released their Delphi Roadmap, which shows plans for Highlander to be released this year with support for .NET 2.0 and compatibility with .NET 3.0.

It is nice to see Delphi out in front again.

Score: Development tool releases for Vista

• CodeGear: 2
• Microsoft: 0

Google Gears

Did you hear about Google Gears? It lets you use web based applications while you are offline. So you could use Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Apps. BTW, Gears is Open Source.

I noticed support for it in my Google Reader a while ago. I just read a news article about it. Firefox 3 has plans to support this as well. I read about it a while ago. They were waiting for some provider of web based applications to start supporting the idea, which now Google is doing.

The thing is, I don't see Microsoft supporting this kind of innovation since it competes with Office specifically, and Windows in general. That means no IE support for the latest web innovation. But with Microsoft's push for their Live products maybe they will support it. I guess we will see.

I still think we are within 5 years of seeing a very significant shift with Microsoft's position in the industry. The web and the web browser is becoming the platform Microsoft feared it would be. It is competing with the windows and office offering. Now with their move into patent litigation and Paul Graham's observations on their demise, I believe things have been set in motion. John Dvorak said they are going the way of the IBM years ago. He was especially vocal about it during the Lindows AKA Linspire fiasco.