At both CNUG meetings this month, I presented a discussion on the .NET Community. One of the .NET Community points of interest I pointed out was the growing trend of blogging. A number of attendees asked me for some recomendations on cheap hosting plans. I recently set up my family’s domain with www.discountasp.net at $10/month for .NET 1.1 hosting seemed pretty reasonable. One of the downsides of www.discountasp.net is the cost of running a MSSQL 2000 database will cost you an additional $10/month. Not worth the cost for a simple family web site (to me anyways).

Well today I ran across a hosting plan from www.webhost4life.com that offers a cheaper hosting plan in addition to offering more services. At $4.95/month you can get a site up and running with ASP. If you want your site running on ASP.NET (and who doesn’t) you can go with the $9.95/month plan. Slightly cheaper than www.discountasp.netbut look at what it includes: 150MB of disk space, 100 email boxes, 150MBfor MSSQL 2000 and Sharepoint Team Services!

I think I’ll be moving the Bost Family web site on over to www.webhost4life.com.

I think the talk at CNUG yesterday went really well. Everyone seemed to enjoy the discussion on some of our past dealings with ADO.NET and some of our implementations for it’s limitations. A few people asked me how they could get their hands on the DataHelper code I showed. Unfortunately, that code was written during a client project and from what I understand with our contracts, they own the rights to it. I’d be more than happy to discuss the implementation and maybe starta GotDotNet workspace for a new implementation. That’s if enough people are interested in utilizing it. For everyone that doesn’t know what I’m talking about, let me know and I’ll blog it. If not, than I want waste my time or yours.
Once again, I gave a short talk on the .NET Community and some of it’s offerings. And once again, I was surprised at how many people didn’t know this whole blogging thing (either that or they didn’t want to speak up when I asked who knew about the blogging phenomenon). Hopefully I persuaded some of the folks to jump on in to the blogging world.
Don’t forget, you can get the slides and demos from Monday’s and Wednesday’s talk here:
ADO.NET Slides
ADO.NET Demos
.NET Communities – Slides
If you have any additional links you’d like to add to the Communities slides, post your comments here and I’ll add them in. I’ll also add them to my blog’s link list.
The meeting started off with people who were interested in lending a hand with CNUG to break off in to various groups based on what area you wanted to volunteer in (website, meetings, marketing/events, and SIG planning). I started off wanting to get involved with the meeting planning, but that just included Keith Franklin and myself and our discussion only required about 10 minutes. I than ventured over to the website group. We had some ideas to start off with and hopefully we can see great things coming to the CNUG website. If you have any ideas, post a comment.
[Now Playing: Tears for Fears - Closest Thing To Heaven (1:11)]

Last nights talk at DePaul CTI went very well. DePaul’s curriculum includes a number of Java courses. Unfortunately the .NET classes are few, if any. It was nice to bring some Microsoft development topics to the fine folks at DePaul CTI.
I started off with a discussion of .NET communities which included an impromptu discussion about blogs. Hopefully I was able to entice a few new people into the world of blogging. If so, let me know.
My main presentation was topics in ADO.NET. We concentrated quite a bit of time to typed datasets and how ADO.NET does (or doesn’t) handle batch updates. A number of attendees wanted a link to the slides and demo code, so here you go:
ADO.NET – Slides
ADO.NET – Demo Code
.NET Communities – Slides

Chris Garty had some questions regarding the timeframe of the Whidbey beta. So Chris decided to email Scott Guthrie and ‘lo and behold he Scott responded to his inquiry! Imagine that, someone in Redmond actually responding to an email. Bravo, Mr. Guthrie.

As a teaser, look for something in the June timeframe.

I’ll be speaking at this month’s CNUG meeting. The past few meetings have featured the “what’s coming” topics so this meeting we’ll be talking about the “what can I use today”. I’ll be talking about Advanced Topics on ADO.NET. I haven’t put my outline together yet (hey, I have a whole 5 days still), but I plan on discussing how we’ve implemented ADO.NET in some of our “real world” implementations. Including a discussion on how we implemented our own ADO.NET batch handler (that’s a blog for a different day, if you’re interested). Not to worry though, I plan on throwing in some ADO.NET 2.0 content. I have to keep it interesting for me you know.

I’ll also host an open discussion on the .NET community movement. If you have some favorite .NET community sites (online and off), let me know and I’ll pass them on.

I hope to see you at one of the meetings. Be sure to stop by and say “Hi”.