I had a really great experience last week. I attended my first IT conference.  The conference was held at Sinclair Community Collegehere in fabulous Dayton.  The conference was held by an organization called We are IT.  Here is the website for anyone who might be interested.  I think they have plans to post information for next years conference at the same link: 

http://www.weareitatscc.com/

The conference was held with the intent of helping young girls (9^th and10^th graders) to find an interest in the IT world.  This is an awesome idea.  As a woman who currently works in the IT field, I love it!  I’m actually very lucky.  I work at a great place where there are actually 3 women.  I and one other woman build web applications, and it is great to work with her.  (We are 2 of only 3 developers in the shop).  The other woman works with infrastructure.  I am well aware that this is not the norm.  There are only 2 female developers at the actual consulting company I work for.  That’s out of like 30 developers.  

Every woman who works in IT would like to see more women in the field.  I don’t think that it has anything to do with not wanting to work with men, or that the men we work with are hard to work with or difficult in any way.  It’s just nice to see other women who do the same thing you do throughout the day.  

Back to the conference though; I attended as a lunch buddy.  Lunch buddy’s sat at a table of  5 to 8 girls, either by themselves or with another female who works in IT.  I sat with 5 girls and a computer science major from Wright State University who was interning at a company called Terra Data.  The girls were cute, but not one of them was interested in a career in IT.  One actually said she wanted to be a chef.  I think they may have attended to get out of class?  It was fun to talk to them, and who knows maybe one of them will go home and think I want to be just like that cool nerdy girl with the glasses.  (Not likely, but I can dream right?)  I did get in on some good high school gossip, which was interesting as I haven’t hung out with high schoolers since I was in high school.  At the lunch they had a raffle for some cool stuff like iPods and giftcards.  They then had an essay contest and the top prize was a laptop.  The topic of the essay contest was how to use information technology to improve the world and people’s lives.  This was a great topic. 

I had some pizza for lunch and found out that the generation under mygeneration (Y) is going to surprise us all by producing some great female ITworkers.  Some of the essay topics were far above what I was thinking about when I was that age. 

I really can’t wait to see some of these girls in the IT department in the future.  We need you there…. 

Other than that, I’m working with Crystal Reports. I’m planning on writing a tutorial on how to programmatically populate a CrystalReportViewer control using VB.NET. I had a hard time finding this information as most of the tutorials outthere are written in C#.  Coming Soon!  

I know it's been a while since I've posted a blog entry, but I've been involved in my first big .NET project for work and I come home exhausted.  It's funny to find out how little they teach you in college.  You really do learn the more complicated in's and out's on the job.  So what have I learned?  A ton about the GridView control.  When I get time, I'm planning on writing a tutorial about adding a save button to the footer.  It took me forever to find good instructions on how to do this.  Very annoying.  I ended up spending days in the Asp.net forum.  

I also learned a cute little trick when creating a DataSet file.  In .Net, you can add a DataSet file to your project and then work with it programmatically.  It's a really nice option, but there is only an option to add one existing database table to the file.  Then you can add new tables.  What if you have 10 tables you will be working with and don't want to clutter your project with 10 dataset files and then try and remember which one contains which information?  I found in my search that many people were asking this question, and getting little answers.  There may be a better way to do this, but I found that if you create a second DataSet file with an existing table, you can then right click ont he table and click on cut.  You then switch to the DataSet file where you would like it to reside, right click and click paste.  Voila!  You now have two existing tables in the same DataSet.  Just delete the new DataSet file you created and that is that.  Very simple, maybe obvious to others, but not to me.   

Have a very happy day! 

I wanted to add a post today about Google Chrome (I know obsessed much?).  I installed it today on my old PC that I use for checking my email, and surfing the web when I'm drinking coffee.  It's old, slow and pretty much lives up to the stereotypical idea of a senior citizen.  It really doesn't like change.  I was a little concerned about changing the browser as it's still running on the install of IE 6 that it came with, but it seems to be working beautifully.  I've still got one thing I need to witness in order for me to be completely devoted to Chrome.  If I come back after an hour, move my mouse to end the screen saver, and it takes less than 10 minutes to load a page in Chrome, I'll ask Chrome to marry me.

I think that Chrome will be a much better match for me on this computer, as I don't use it for programming anymore.  Let's keep our fingers crossed. 

As a huge fan of the Sims, I am terribly interested in getting my hands on a copy of Spore.  I just can't decide if it is going to worth $50.  As someone who just graduated college I have to really think about how much a game costs, and do my research to see if it is going to be worth the price.  With student loans looming, every penny counts.  I'm afraid, that Spore, like the Sims may fizzle out after a week or so of play.  The Sims is a great game, someone I know once compared it to playing dolls, and Iguess in a way it is.  The thing about the Sims, and I think anyone who played would  agree with me, that there was no plot, no real goal, and no motivation to keep playing.  Even with the expansion packs, it still lacked the goal momentum that other games, like Eternal Sonata or Bioshock have.  I think I stillenjoyed it much better than others I know.  I mean it's still fun to build your dream house, create a couple of gay lovers and see how they tend their garden and play with their children and pets.

 I kind of get the feeling that Spore might have the same problem.  This New York Times article suggests that it might: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/arts/television/05spor.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1 

Although NYT calls it amusing, but claim that it is not intellectually stimulating enough and that adults playing spore will lose interest. Here's a quote to give an idea of the authors feelings: 

 "Spore does not have that magic, at least not at the world-beating level it so clearly could have.  People who are more interested in playing Spore than in playing with Spore —that is, people who are more interested in a game than a toy — are likely to come away feeling a bit let down."  

 Cnet on the other hand is much more generous: 

http://reviews.cnet.com/pc-games/spore-pc/4505-9696_7-31484467.html 

The reviewer gives the game a 4 out of 5 review.  Users on the other hand are not so generous giving the game a 1 1/2 stars out of 5. I think that this may have little to do with the game itself and much, much more to do with the DRM.  Business times claims that internet users are outraged and are lashing out via reviews.  Here's a little more info:  

http://www.bizjournals.com/eastbay/stories/2008/09/08/daily92.html  

So, should I, or shouldn't I buy Spore?  I'll let you know what I decide.  But, I do know that it was my birthday a few days ago, and I didn't buy me a present.  Maybe it's about time I did that.  

So, I think I’m in love. His name is Google Chrome BETA and he’s the sleekest, sexiest thing out there.  But, after only one day of use, Ihad to back off.  Google Chrome, just didn’t meet my needs.  I mean don’t get me wrong, there any many, many things I like about Chrome.  First off, I love that when I open a new tab he knows what I want the most.  A most visited list will be displayed each time the browser, or a new tab is opened.  The site name as well as a thumbnail of each page is shown.  It’s a more visual favorites, or short book mark list. It’s probably the second best feature of Chrome, in my opinion.  So what is the best feature you ask?  It has to be how each tab runs as its own process.  This means that if one tab crashes, you don’t lose everything you were working on.  Having tabs as separate processes, also makes Chrome super fast.  Neither Firefox nor IE can compete with the speed of Chrome. I think in time, this will make Chrome very popular.  Other nice features include the sleek, simplistic, almost non-existent quality of Chrome.  It is truly just a bar across the top  of the screen.  Chrome makes the web look big, real big.  It’s almost like looking at the sky in a very flat part of the country.   Chrome is certainly no-frills and I was able to find everything I was looking for and move on with my browsing within several minutes. 

So, why am I so disappointed in Chrome?  It really isn’t Chrome, it’s me.  As a Microsoft programmer, it’s almost completely useless to me.  Most Microsoft sites don’t want to accept Chrome as a browser. It tends to think that I’m using some really old browser from 1995 and asks me to update to the latest version of IE. Well I own IE 7, and it just doesn’t stand up to the new love of my life.  Things may change for me and Chrome as he gets out of his BETA stages and has some patches applied.  When he grows up a bit, who knows what could happen?  For now, I’ll stick with my same old same old at work, and then get a little frisky when I get home.  My nights will now include a glass of redwine, Google Chrome and my internets.

For now, why don't you check out Google Chrome for yourself and see what you think:

http://www.google.com/chrome 

Welcome to my blog and my first blog entry.  I have the day off work for some doctors appointments, and in between appointments decided to start things off.  I am currently working on becoming proficient with SharePoint Designer and I'm also tackling user controls and web parts.  I've been working on our WSS 3.0 intranet site at work, and I'm really very shocked by how easy SharePoint sites are to work with.  I'm thinking that it has to get more complicated at some point.  Another consultant at work told me that it gets most complicated when you get to custom web parts, so as someone has presented me with a challenge that's where I'll move next. 

 I also am currently working on a calculator web part.  I looked everywhere for a calculator that you could use on the web, and all I could find were windows applications.  I just thought it would be nice to be able to do calculations right from your web site, so I started working on it.  All the code is working, and they are pretty much ready to go, except I want to fancy them up a bit and maybe add a few more functions.  I'll post them as soon as I'm done. 

Al Nyveldt BlogEngine.NET: Creating Themes Webcast

Although I really dig BlogEngine so far, I can't stand any of the themes that are available, especially that Girly Geek pink butterfly crap.