Mitch Ruebush is starting a new User Group for Software Architects - The Philadelphia Chapter of IASA.  This is a great opportunity to learn and share with other Software Architects.  Everyone is welcome, so check it out. 

Here's the text from an email he sent me:

You are invited to IASA - Philadelphia's first meeting on February 6th,
2008 at the Microsoft Malvern office. We have set up an official IASA
Web site at http://www.iasahome.org/web/Philadelphia/home to provide
more information on IASA and the Philly chapter. Please use this site to
keep up with the Philadelphia IASA community.

Agenda:
Refreshments & Network
Introductions
What do you want from an architecture professional group?
How do you want to help?

Topic:
What is Architecture?
Join us for a moderated discussion on the practicalities of what IT
architecture is. We will discuss what is the meaning of IT architecture,
roles and responsibilities, approaches to IT architecture, common
architecture processes and artifacts and what should be in the
architecture toolkit.

Moderator:
Mitch Ruebush is the Architecture Team Leader at ING DIRECT, fsb. He is
responsible for defining and coordinating the architecture for the
applications and infrastructure at ING DIRECT. He has written a number
of books and articles on .Net and enjoys spending his time as a father
of two great kids, a hobbyist film maker, playing piano and saxophone
and trying to write a video game.
Date: Feb. 6th, 2008
Time: 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Location:
Microsoft
Great Valley Corporate Center
45 Liberty Blvd., Suite 210
Malvern, PA 19355

IASA (International Association of Software Architects) is the premier
association focused on the IT architecture profession through education,
advocacy, events, and the development of best practices.

Code Camp 2008.1 on January 12, 2008 was, in my opinion, the best Code Camp Philly.Net has ever had. This is supported by the comments of many of our attendees. We are very grateful to DeVry University in Fort Washington, PA for hosting this event. Their top-notch facility really made the day special for the crowd of around 350 people. Not only did DeVry generously allow us to use their campus for Code Camp, but they had staff on hand to help out and make the day great. It was really nice working with them.  Also a special thanks to all of the Philly.Net members who helped out setting up Code Camp! Too long a blog post?  Click to read about Partners, Prizes, Sessions, Feedback  Our Partners:  Code Camp is only possible thanks to our many partners. Special thanks to our local Microsoft Developer Evangelist , Dani Diaz, for year round support. And we definitely appreciate the support of our other Partners: ComponentOne, Infragistics, Neudesic, RDA, RedGate, CodeBreeze, Spherion and Solid Quality Mentors. It was great working with them all to make this such a successful event.  It was especially fun meeting some of our partners that were on hand for Code Camp.  If you enjoyed Code Camp, I hope you’ll support all our Partners. Click on their logos for more information.                         Prizes:  I’d also like to thank our Prize Contributors. While we all attend Code Camp for the great sessions, everyone loves the prizes and giveaways that our partners provide.  Of course, the XBOX-360 from Red-Gate was a big hit. Plus we gave away a ton of other prizes including books and software.  We've continued our tradition of spreading out the prizes throughout the day.  Each speaker gets a bag of stuff including a book, a shirt, and a water bottle to give away during each session.

Platinum Partners   Gold Partners     Silver Partners

Company Prizes Provided Addison Wesley/Sams Lots of Books Apress Lots of Books ASP.Net Pro Magazine A copy for everyone Code magazine A copy for everyone CodeSmith CodeSmith Licenses ComponentArt WebUI Licenses ComponentOne Studio Enterprise Licenses Dundas Dundas Licenses JetBrains ReSharper Licenses O'reilly Lots of Books Microsoft Lots of Software Red Gate Software plus an XBOX 360 SQL Server Magazine A discount subscription offer SteelBlue Solutions CodeBreeze Wrox Lots of Books Ndepend Software

Sessions:

We had an unprecedented 50 sessions at Code Camp!  That included a wide variety of presentation topics split into 8  tracks: Alt.Net, BI, Database, Toolbox, Architecture, Collaboration, Frameworks, and UI.  With presenters with names from Andrews to Ziss presenting a huge variety of topics including:  ASP.Net, Silverlight, Databinding, LINQ, TDD, AJAX, SQL Server, MVC, Katmai, Spring.Net, BizTalk, WCF, IIS 7, Visual Studio, Powershell, Sharepoint, Continuous Integration, Refactoring, Dependency Injection, Reporting Services, T-SQL, Mobile, InfoPath, SubSonic, Exception Handling and more. 

For a full list of presentations, check out this list.

It would have been hard to gather this amount of speakers with the help of several other groups in our area: 

PhillyAlt.Net

Philadelphia Area Office Geeks

Philadelphia SQL Server Users’ Group

Northern Delaware .Net User Group

Philadelphia Area SharePoint User Group

Feedback:

I'd like to share some of the feedback that we got from Code Camp.  We got high marks and praises from most of our guests  I've included a very small sample below.  In addition, some people pointed out a few areas for improvement.  I tend to agree with a lot of them.  This was a great event and we'll get it even better next time.

*Thanks to Melanie Wright from DeVry and our own Mark Magliocco for providing the photos.

We had a great Code Camp on Jan 12.  I've got a longer blog post planned to summarize the event.  I'm gonna work on that next.  But I promised Marc that I'd post his slides from his presentation "Building ASP.NET Dynamic Data Web Sites using LINQ for SQL".  And to be fair, he sent me this stuff on Jan 14 and I'm finally posting it today.  Sorry to those of you who were waiting for it.  I sat in on this presentation and it was a lot of fun and full of content.  Thanks Marc!

He was kind enough to create two versions of the slides:

Slide Deck for Power Point 2003 (.ppt)

Slide Deck for Power Point 2007 (.pptx)

From now on I will take my own advice.  I spent a good part Friday afternoon and Monday morning trying to figure out what was wrong with my code and I don't want to do that again!  The problem I was having was that I had an ASP.Net control that would not postback, no matter what I tried.

I have a page with several user controls on it.  One of these user controls includes an asp:Textbox that is hooked to some JavaScript so that when the use clicks "enter" in that control a postback will occur.  The postback is accomplished by some JavaScript that calls the click event on a button that is hidden (style="display:none").  But the postback wouldn't work.  I put a few alerts in the JavaScript and I knew it was getting called, but the postback still never occurred.  The problem was not so easy to see.  That's because I had a second user control on the page.  That second user control has an asp:RequiredFieldValidator in it.  To complicate things, that validation control was tucked in a modal popup (using the Ajax Control Toolkit's Modal Popup Extender).  But, I forgot to include the ValidationGroup property on the validator.  So any control on the page would cause validation to occur which will block the postback if validation fails.  But since the validator was in the popup (which of course, was not currently popped up), I didn't see the error message that was trying to tell me there was a problem.

The problem was easily fixed (if not easily found) by simply adding the ValidationGroup property to the validator and of course, matching it up on the button that is supposed to call that validation group.  Since the hidden button on my other control was not included in the same validation group, it was free to postback any time it wants.

A cool thing happened at work today.  Dean was stuck trying to figure out how to get the EditItem from an asp:Listview.  So he hits his favorite search engine to look for an answer.  Believe it or not, the first item in the search result was a link to a post on my blog!  Dean got his answer.  But I thought that was the coolest thing that he his answer could have come from anywhere in the world but he searched and got a post from the guy sitting right across from him!

Updated on12/19.  Infragistics has joined us as a Gold Partner

Wow, Code Camp 2008.1 is coming up fast.  It seems like we move from planning one Code Camp right into planning the next one.  We are busy lining up sponsors and speakers and I can report that both efforts are going very well.

First, a sponsors update.  Scroll down if you want to see the sessions that are planned.

We now have several levels of sponsorship.  Companies can contribute money to Philly.Net so we can pay for the expenses of running a Code Camp.  In addition, companies provide prizes and swag, and everyone likes that! Of course, this list is changing all the time.   All of these companies have been very generous in their support of Philly.Net.  If you get some time, check out their web sites/products. 

Announcement: The official email hasn't gone out yet but I'll let the cat out of the bag... Code Camp registration is now open on the Philly.Net site!

Platinum Partners:

Thanks to DeVry in Fort Washington, PA.  They'll be hosting our Code Camp.	We can always count on Microsoft's support throughout the year.

Gold Partners:

Silver Partners:

Other Partners:

Solid Quality Mentors

Other companies have pitched in to provide prizes for Code Camp.  Here's a list of who's signed up to help, so far:

Presentations:

We all come to Code Camp for the presentations.  Here is a list of some of the presentations that you'll get at Code Camp. This list is NOT complete and is subject to change, of course.   Keep an eye on the Code Camp site for the latest information.

Alt.NET
Brian Donahue - Panel Discussion
David Laribee - Fundamental Domain-Driven Design
Jeremy Jarrell - Decoupling Your Design - Dependency Injection with Windsor
Jeff Deville - ASP.NET MVC - A New Way To Build Web Apps 
Steve Eichert - Behavior Driven Development In Action:  The Evolution of TDD
Don Demsak - Design Patterns

Architecture
Mitch Ruebush -
Harish Bidad - BizTalk R2 BAM
Chip Lemmon - Entry Level Event Models
Tim Dodd - IIS 7
Sam Gentile - ESB/SOA

Business Intelligence
Dan Clark - Integrating SQL Server Reporting Service Reports in .NET Applications
Dan Hartshorn - Performance Point
Mark Scott -
Andy Leonard -

User Experience
Andy Schwam - ASP.NET Custom Controls
Jonathan Newell - Databinding ASP.NET
Bill Wolff - Silverlight 2.0 with Expression and Visual Studio 2008
John Juback - Real World Experiences with Silverlight
Eric Pascarello - Investigating JavaScript and Ajax Security
Susan Lennon - Using SharePoint Designer to build a dashboard-type view of lists

Frameworks
Marc Ziss -
Jim Bonnie - SubSonic as a Data Access layer for DotNetNuke
Rachel Appel - Exception Handling & Management Strategies
Kevin Goff - Crash Course on LINQ and VS2008 Language Enhancements

Collaboration
David Mann - Delivering Modular SharePoint Workflow Functionality via Components
Bob Fox - SharePoint Disaster Recovery, Backup and more…
Tony Testa - AJAX in SharePoint
Michael Lotter - InfoPath 2007 with Visual Studio 2008
Russ Basuira - Programming Composite Applications that use the SharePoint Business Data Catalog
Gary Blatt - Using OpenXML to Access Excel and other Office 2007 Files
Database
Sharon Dooley -
Ed Pochinski -
Joshua Lynn - SQL Server 2008 New feature: Change Data Capture
Reed Sutton -
Hilary Cotter -
Chuck Urwiler -
Toolbox
Mark Magliocco - FaceBook Developer Toolkit in .NET
Judy Calla - Visual Studio 2005
Travis LaBorde -
Rob Keiser - Powershell 2.0
Todd Snyder - Using Refactoring to hunt down code smells
Steve Andrews - Visual Studio 2008 Tools and Add-Ins

The new ListView control in ASP.Net is pretty cool.  It is really flexible and often makes life pretty easy for me.  But there is one thing that doesn't make sense to me.

It isn't simple to figure out which item is the "Edit Item" during databinding.  It isn't impossible, but it seems more complicated then I'd expect.  During ItemDataBound() you can test the item's type:

        if (e.Item.ItemType == ListViewItemType.DataItem)
        {
            //do something
        }

Remember that with a ListView, there are no rows, so we refer to Items. 

Unfortunately, the options for ListViewItemType only include DataItem, InsertItem, and EmptyItem.  All of those are helpful, but what about EditItem? So the next logical thing to do is use the ListView's EditIndex.  All I'd have to do is compare the current index to the EditIndex and I'll know if I'm on the edit item.  ListViewItemEventArgs has an Item property but there doesn't seem to be an Index or CurrentIndex property.  So the comparison won't be so easy.  We'll here it is, the way to figure it out:

    protected void ListView1_ItemDataBound(object sender, ListViewItemEventArgs e)
    {
        if (e.Item.ItemType == ListViewItemType.DataItem)
        {
            ListViewDataItem dataItem = (ListViewDataItem)e.Item;

            if (dataItem.DisplayIndex == ListView1.EditIndex)
            {
                //do something
            }
        }
    }

I hope this information is helpful.

Wow, Code Camp 2008.1 is coming up fast.  It seems like we move from planning one Code Camp right into planning the next one.  We are busy lining up sponsors and speakers and I can report that both efforts are going very well.

First, a sponsors update.  Scroll down if you want to see the sessions that are planned.

We now have several levels of sponsorship.  Companies can contribute money to Philly.Net so we can pay for the expenses of running a Code Camp.  In addition, companies provide prizes and swag, and everyone likes that! Of course, this list is changing all the time.   All of these companies have been very generous in their support of Philly.Net.  If you get some time, check out their web sites/products. 

Announcement: The official email hasn't gone out yet but I'll let the cat out of the bag... Code Camp registration is now open on the Philly.Net site!

Platinum Partners:

Thanks to DeVry in Fort Washington, PA.  They'll be hosting our Code Camp.	We can always count on Microsoft's support throughout the year.

Gold Partners:

Silver Partners:

Other Partners:

Solid Quality Mentors

Other companies have pitched in to provide prizes for Code Camp.  Here's a list of who's signed up to help, so far:

Presentations:

We all come to Code Camp for the presentations.  Here is a list of some of the presentations that you'll get at Code Camp. This list is NOT complete and is subject to change, of course.   Keep an eye on the Code Camp site for the latest information.

Alt.NET
Brian Donahue - Panel Discussion
David Laribee - Fundamental Domain-Driven Design
Jeremy Jarrell - Decoupling Your Design - Dependency Injection with Windsor
Jeff Deville - ASP.NET MVC - A New Way To Build Web Apps 
Steve Eichert - Behavior Driven Development In Action:  The Evolution of TDD
Don Demsak - Design Patterns

Architecture
Mitch Ruebush -
Harish Bidad - BizTalk R2 BAM
Chip Lemmon - Entry Level Event Models
Tim Dodd - IIS 7
Sam Gentile - ESB/SOA

Business Intelligence
Dan Clark - Integrating SQL Server Reporting Service Reports in .NET Applications
Dan Hartshorn - Performance Point
Mark Scott -
Andy Leonard -

User Experience
Andy Schwam - ASP.NET Custom Controls
Jonathan Newell - Databinding ASP.NET
Bill Wolff - Silverlight 2.0 with Expression and Visual Studio 2008
John Juback - Real World Experiences with Silverlight
Eric Pascarello - Investigating JavaScript and Ajax Security
Susan Lennon - Using SharePoint Designer to build a dashboard-type view of lists

Frameworks
Marc Ziss -
Jim Bonnie - SubSonic as a Data Access layer for DotNetNuke
Rachel Appel - Exception Handling & Management Strategies
Kevin Goff - Crash Course on LINQ and VS2008 Language Enhancements

Collaboration
David Mann - Delivering Modular SharePoint Workflow Functionality via Components
Bob Fox - SharePoint Disaster Recovery, Backup and more…
Tony Testa - AJAX in SharePoint
Michael Lotter - InfoPath 2007 with Visual Studio 2008
Russ Basuira - Programming Composite Applications that use the SharePoint Business Data Catalog
Gary Blatt - Using OpenXML to Access Excel and other Office 2007 Files
Database
Sharon Dooley -
Ed Pochinski -
Joshua Lynn - SQL Server 2008 New feature: Change Data Capture
Reed Sutton -
Hilary Cotter -
Chuck Urwiler -
Toolbox
Mark Magliocco - FaceBook Developer Toolkit in .NET
Judy Calla - Visual Studio 2005
Travis LaBorde -
Rob Keiser - Powershell 2.0
Todd Snyder - Using Refactoring to hunt down code smells
Steve Andrews - Visual Studio 2008 Tools and Add-Ins