To me PowerShell is the Black Flag of anything that touches .NET.  It's so unassumingly powerful that you almost feel like you've been in a gang fight and won after you get the hang of it.  It's very addicting.  You can solve so many problems, so simply and quickly, it's almost like your writing in Perl and C# and Python and PHP all at the same time.  You almost begin to feel like your playing with the .NET framework like a cat's toy.  This is not in any way to minimize the .NET Framework which will go down in history as the code achievement of our age (in my opinion), it's simply to point out the Power of Powershell.
 
I love the name Powershell it's perfect, I also love the name Silverlight as well, man someone is doing their job in naming these technologies.  Just think of something like SharePoint.  Perfect name for a huge beautiful monster of a technology that is changing the world! 

I'll keep you posted on when the course goes live but it will be a fantastic dive into the world of Powershell.

I would like to thank everyone who attended my presentation and as promised, here are my powerpoint slides and code files.

You should simply be able to open the folder codecamp2007 as a website.  The default.aspx page is the one with the master page attached.  You will have to go into the web.config and remove the entry which says: <pages styleSheetTheme="codecamp" /> if you want the theme disabled, then go ahead and re enter it in the same spot when you want to enable the theme.

This page has not been tested in FireFox yet so there might be some display things that come up, but it should be minor.

The text file is what I use to keep a running html if statement, it's not part of the web application, I just find it to be a useful way of doing it.

Many people have asked me about a book which I would reccomend and the absolute best book to be published as far as really helping you to learn is this one from Wrox:

Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design, 2nd Edition
by Richard York 

  The format is amazing with full color which really shows off some of the examples with astute clarity not available in a black and white book.  I especially like the sections on psuedo classes and selectors and he does a stellar job of pointing out which features of CSS are supported by which browsers.  He even has a section about referring to expressions right from within your CSS.  The book is noted as beginning, and i understand why since it starts at the beginning, however I must say that if you are a CSS expert you will also LOVE this book so it might just as well have been called beginning through advanced.  If you work through this book you will know CSS cold.  I highly reccomend this book.

Well that's it for now.  So many great sessions, Dan Wahlin's Silverlight, Mike Palermo's Code to not write code...my brain was hurting but in a good way.  I also attended an e commerce security session which made me want to get a job unloading trucks, but only for a couple of hours until I got to do some more code!

Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Design: CSS, Themes, and Master Pages
by Jacob J. Sanford

This book even includes a very helpful guide to Photoshop which can definitley get you started.  The book provides in depth explanations of setting up layouts and design using CSS for Master Pages and Themes.  The info in this book is awesome and I would reccomend it as a staple in any ASP.NET 2.0 and up's developer library.  If it seems like I'm super pro Wrox books, it's because  I am.  They rule.

Enjoy! 

It's a great thing to see the advancement of Web Standards throughout the internet as we are moving into a greater variety of devices on which to display our xhtml.  Interface Technical Training has several presenters including:

• Integrating Silverlight with ASP.NET AJAX and Web Services (Dan Wahlin)
• Writing Code to Avoid Code in ASP.NET 2.0 (Michael Palermo)
• SQL Server 2005 CLR - Dev vs DBA - The Showdown (Jennifer Campion and Jeff Jones)

I must say that sadly missing from this year's big event is a presentation by our very own Simon Allardice.  If you have not gotten the chance to see his code camp presentations, they are legendary. It's one of the only times when you will see the entire room stand up and scream and break into a long applause at the end, his presentations really are spectacular. He had to go out of town on a trip so we will miss him. 

Here is a screen shot of the schedule:

http://blogs.interfacett.com/michael-palermo/tonight-will-be-fun.html

Awesome job Mike!

I had a fantastic time and you had some awesome questions!  As promised here is a copy of the project folder,.  You should be able to just uncompress it and open it via Visual Studio or Visual Web Devveloper Express as a website, make sure to open the folder Tucson that will be nested within the folder Tucson if that's how your file uncompressor ('technical term') works.

Here is a copy of my power point presentation.  It was created with the magnificent Office 2007!

Here is a link to the N-Layer application video on Dan Wahlin's blog i was talking about.  Like I said, I've gone through it no less than 12 times and if you were to ask me if I'd rather go have dinner with Pamela Anderson or go through this video for the 13th time, I can tell you that Pamela will just have to wait.  It's that good to me.

Here is a link to find out more about 'LINQ'  that we spent a little time chatting about, it would have been very easy to make the entire session about LINQ!

And of course I want to point to the  ASP.NET Pro Magazine  article we spoke about today.  You have to get a membership or subscription but I can tell you that this magazine is worth it!  (With or without this article)

Remember to use stylesheettheme not just theme and here is a version of the html if statement in case you need it:

<!--[if IE 5]>
<style>

</style>
<![endif]-->

<!--[if IE 6]>
<style>

</style>
<![endif]-->

Put your styles between the <style> and </style> tags.

Thanks Again for a great time!

Spike

You still have to work on an account having permissions to perform the tasks on the database which your application requires but if you get the NT Authority Service blah blah blah error that's what it's talking about.

Click here for a link to Scott's blog post.

I love PowerShell.

Simple as that.  This is the first in a series of blogs which will explore the amazing technology PowerShell.  This 'command' language works with the .NET framework to allow for just about anything a .NET programmer can think of.  I am going to start at the very beginning since that is where I am at right now!  If you don't have any .NET programming experience you will still be able to follow along with these examples but as I progress in my understanding of the language and these blogs get more advanced you will be in the dark on a lot of the power in PowerShell.  It's not too late, the .NET framework is only getting better, release by release!  The best way I know of to learn the .NET framework and how to use it is via Instructor Led Training, you may as well go to the best school in the country (in my and several others opinion). 
Once you get a class or two under your belt I suggest involvement with a local user group.  I was so lucky to begin here in Phoenix where we have the AZGroups run by Scott Cate and Lorin Thwaits it's free and fun and EXTREMELEY informative!

Last but definitely not least you can take FREE online Training via Microsoft Learning.  It's an unbelievable resource and it's free.  If you come from a php or Java background you can learn ASP.NET very quickly with the above mentioned steps.

Check out the Microsoft Learning Site Here!!  In this case there is a such thing as a free lunch and you should definitely get it while it hot!!!

Well here goes.

Lesson 1:  Creating A File and Writing Text To It.

Step 1: Create a folder on your C drive named PowerShellTesting.

Step 2: Open up PowerShell.  (you can download it here).

Start > All Programs > Windows PowerShell 1.0 > Windows PowerShell

Step 3: In the Command Window, Change Directory to the PowerShellTesting Folder (from the C drive) with the following command: cd PowerShellTesting

Step 4: Use the write-output command to write 'Hello World!' out to a file which will be created with this command called foo.txt:

  Type in this command: write-output Hello World! > foo.txt

Step 5: Open up the folder PowerShellTesting and verify that a file 'foo.txt' now exists.

Step 6: Open up the foo.txt file and look inside!

That's it!

It's that easy.

We are just getting started, check back soon or subscribe I will be posting at least bi-weekly.  There will be a lot of PowerShell related suprises here over the next few years!

His question was regarding the correct format for directing styles to links nested in specific tables with a class of mytable.
To be honest I always have to check on where to put the period, is it mytable.a, or a.mytable etc.. in any case I went ahead and put together a page to point out one way of doing it which works well for me.  I have commented the code as well and included a couple of screen shots of the rendered page to illustrate the true power of pseudo classes and child elements.

Figure 1 - illustrates the differences in the link properties.



Figure 2 - illustrates the difference in the hover properties.

Here's The Code:

Click Here to go to the W3C spec on selectors.

<Attention: I just read this incredible related piece of news on Brian McCann's Blog click this link and see what you miss if you miss this event!- Holy Shnikees!>
The only thing bigger and more important in the world of I.T. than these launches would be if Aliens landed and told us that we were not alone, and asked if we could show them how to install Vista!  If you have anything to do with a computer you will want to be there.  I will try to help put this into perspective:

• If you love NASCAR this is the equivalent to a day in a car on the track! 
• If you love Aerosmith, this is as if the band sent you back stage VIP passes at their biggest show.
• If you love football this is the equivalent of being asked to be the quarterback, with the assurance that no one will tackle you , unless you specifically asked to be tackled! 
• If you love boxing this is like getting a chance to spar with the champ and knock him out!
• If you love painting, this is like a chance to try some painting with Picasso!
• If you love I.T. this is a free invitation to the most important launch event of the last 10 years!

Don't Miss Out! This is going to be awesome!

• Phoenix Main Launch event (Developer and IT Professionals): Jan 17 - register here
• Las Vegas Developer: Jan 30 - register here
• Las Vegas IT Professional: Jan 30 - register here
• Albuquerque Developer: Feb 13 - register here
• Albuquerque IT Professional: Feb 13 - register here
• Denver Developer: Feb 15 - register here
• Denver IT Professional: Feb 15 - register here

You can view the video by clicking Here.

This is a screen shot of what the console looks like when you are done (I have my console background white and font color navy):

Here is the code: