App categories are Microsoft’s way of organizing applications so that users can more easily find what they are looking for. For Windows Phone 7, there are 41 categories and sub-categories to help organize applications for users. When you submit your app to Marketplace you can choose from one of the categories below to help users find your app. Apps can only be placed in one category.

1. Books & Reference
   - eReader
   - Fiction
   - Non-fiction
   - Reference
2. Business
3. Entertainment
4. Finance
5. Games
   - Action & Adventure
   - Board & Classic
   - Card & Casino
   - Family
   - Music
   - Puzzle & Trivia
   - Shooter
   - Sports & Racing
   - Strategy
   - Xbox Companion
6. Health & Fitness
   - Diet & Nutrition
   - Fitness
   - Health
7. Lifestyle
   - Community
   - Food & Dining
   - Out & About
   - Shopping
8. Music & Video
9. Navigation
10. News & Weather
11. Photo
12. Productivity
13. Social
14. Sports
15. Tools
16. Travel
    - City Guides
    - Language
    - Planning
    - Travel Tools

(Obviously you can see which category is of the most interest to me…)

Playing with the emulator: 

The WP7 emulator actually does a lot more than just run your games from VS 2010. If you want to make use of some of the “hidden” features of the emulator, you need to run it separately from VS 2010 and use some of the command line options.

If you open up a command line window and navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft XDE\1.0 you will find a program called XDE.exe.

Run that and you will get the this popup showing the available Command Line Options.

This by itself is not enough to run the emulator though. You need to provide a path to the ROM, which is located in a different folder. To just get the basic emulator running from the command line, you need to point it at a file called WM70C1.bin.

As of the most recent beta of XNA 4.0, you can find the ROM file in this location: c:\program files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\WindowsPhone\v7.0\Emulation\Images\WM70C1.bin

Starting the emulator is as simple as providing this path, like so:

xde.exe “c:\program files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\WindowsPhone\v7.0\Emulation\Images\WM70C1.bin”

Make sure you run XDE from it’s home folder and use the double quotes or your path won’t resolve properly.

At this point you should have the emulator up and running.

If you take a look at some of the options, you can see some pretty interesting stuff like loading different skin files, emulating RAM size, simulating battery power and emulating the internal flash memory (and saving it out to disk)

Try a few and see what you think.

At some point, instead of dropping out to a command line, you may want to make a more permanent shortcut. You can either create a batch file in notepad that handles changing directories and running XDE with the proper parameters, or you can create a Shortcut that does the same thing. Either of these options will allow you to tweak the command line options you pass into the emulator.

I’m going home.

By home, I mean the south in general and South Carolina specifically. I’m moving back to Greenville, SC in a few weeks and will be working out of the Magenic – Atlanta office.

I’ve been in Minnesota for 3 years and while it was definitely a great move for me personally and professionally, it’s also been hard in some ways.

I grew up in the south. I love the south. I miss the south. I lived there for the first 37 years of my life and would like to remain there for the next 37 years (or however many I have left.)

Why Greenville?

Greenville is an awesome place to live, with some extremely cool features. If you like mountains, four seasons and trees that actually change color… you can’t go wrong with Greenville. It’s also very close to family and some great friends. I lived there before moving to Minnesota, so in a lot of ways it really is like coming home.

Very excited.

Jump start your development of Windows Phone 7 applications by attending Windows Phone 7 JumpStart.

This free virtual live class, comprised of four instructor-led 3 hour sessions, will guide you in developing applications for the Windows Phone 7 platform using Silverlight and XNA.

Register today by visiting: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032455932&EventCategory=2&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US.

Course sessions:
July 20 – 8am: Session One: Getting Started with Microsoft Windows Phone and Silverlight
July 20 – 1pm: Session Two: Programming Game Applications with XNA
July 22 – 8am: Session Three:  Programming Applications with Silverlight
July 22 – 1pm: Session Four:  Review and Wrap Up

Tools:
Download the Windows Phone Developer tools beta to get started creating Windows Phone 7 applications today. This download includes: Visual Studio 2010 Expression For Windows Phone beta; Windows Phone Emulator beta; Silverlight for Windows Phone beta; Expression Blend for Windows beta; and XNA Game Studio 4.0 beta.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c8496c2a-54d9-4b11-9491-a1bfaf32f2e3&displaylang=en

Since the new issue of Code Magazine is hitting the stands any day now, I'll go ahead and post my article on Give Camps from the previous issue.

GiveCamps

Chris Williams

This month I’m going to take a brief departure and talk about the growing phenomenon in the developer community known as GiveCamps. If you’ve never heard of these, keep reading (you better keep reading either way, bub).

What Exactly Is a GiveCamp?

GiveCamps are the brainchild of Microsoft Central Region Developer Evangelist Chris Koenig. A quick trip to the GiveCamp.org FAQ says that GiveCamps are “a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations.” This sounded like a pretty cool idea to me, so I reached out to a few of the folks that have organized GiveCamps recently and got their take on the how and why behind their events.

How Do You Host a GiveCamp?

There are three key factors to hosting a GiveCamp. You need one or more charities in need of help, a group of volunteers (this includes developers, DBAs, designers and possibly more depending on what you’re making) and you need a place to host the event. Sponsors are nice too, but not absolutely essential.

Some of you may cry foul on this last comment, and say sponsors are absolutely essential. That’s fine if you can get them, but don’t let lack of sponsorship keep you from moving forward. People can always come up with their own lunch, just like they do every other day of the week.

Let me go into a little more detail on the three factors I just mentioned:

1. Charities Surprisingly, finding a charity to benefit from your efforts isn’t as easy as you might think. Not everyone understands what you’re trying to accomplish or has a need that can be addressed in three days. Still, with persistence and a lot of legwork you can usually find at least one charity that is excited to work with you. For those of you who like numbers, here’s an interesting one: in Dallas alone, nearly 60 charities over three years have been served with new Web applications. If you look at all the GiveCamps across the U.S. that number jumps to over 200!
2. Volunteers You’re going to need a lot of people to pull this off successfully. Not just IT folks either. An event like this takes a lot of coordination and it’s definitely not a one person show. You need someone to contact the charities, someone to coordinate the volunteer effort, someone to locate a place to have the event and all the logistics that go with that. You need people to promote the event and of course you need lots and lots of people to do the actual project development work.As I mentioned above, you’re going to need designers, DBAs and (please forgive me) developers, developers, developers! You might also benefit from a business analyst or two to make sure you are actually building something that resembles what the charity expects.Also, and this is important, remember you are dealing with volunteers. Sometimes work life or even good weather can wreck the best of plans. You’re going to have some people drop off at the last minute, so aim for more people than you need and you just might end up with enough. (Extra people can always find SOMETHING to do.)
3. Location You can have charities coming out of the woodwork and volunteers lined up around the block, but if you don’t have a place to hold your event then it’s a bust. When looking for a location, there are a handful of things to keep in mind. You need a place where people can work comfortably for long hours (remember this is often a three day - all day event) so proper lighting, ventilation, decent chairs, etc., are a must. White boards are also handy. If you are fortunate enough to have multiple teams working on projects for different charities, then you may also need separate spaces. Finding all of these requirements for free can be difficult!Try your local training centers, colleges, consulting companies and of course Microsoft. If at all possible, this should be one of the first details you nail down, before even approaching the charities and volunteers.

Why Host a GiveCamp?

If you’re looking for something to do that potentially has a huge impact on other people, you really can’t go wrong with hosting or supporting a GiveCamp.

By making it easier for charities to help other people, you’re really getting a maximum return on your efforts. Not only do you get a chance to do something good for your community, but the charities are also immensely grateful as well. (Let’s be honest, charity work doesn’t look bad on the old resume either, no matter whether you’re organizing or volunteering.)

I’d like to thank Chris Koenig, Chris Woodruff and Donn Felker for their invaluable insights into GiveCamps, which made writing this article possible.

For more information on GiveCamps, please visit http://www.givecamp.org

A few weeks ago I decide to experiment with moving a portion of my inventory from the online store (www.realitycheckgames.com) to Amazon to "see how it would do."

Well, I'm happy to report that experiment has been a huge success.

In < 2 weeks, I have moved more product on Amazon than in > 6 months on our own website.

Granted, Amazon gets their pound of flesh for each transaction, but when you add up hosting costs, merchant account fees, and Paypal fees, the difference is negligible and the increased volume of sales more than makes up for the slightly higher overhead of Amazon.

At this point, I'm nearly ready to move all online operations to Amazon although I'm going to continue my current experiment until the end of July before closing the online store on our site, just to see if the sales continue at the same pace or increase further.

If you're interested, the Amazon store is here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?me=A2OJELSF1DZR5R

If you're in the NYC area, please consider donating to or participating in Devs For Wendy. (http://devsforwendy.com) 

If you aren't in the NYC area, please consider donating anyway to this good cause.

Last week I spent some time hanging out with Jeff Brand on his Spaghetti Code Podcast talking about Windows Phone 7, XNA, Gaming and whatever else came to mind.

Check it out:

http://tinyurl.com/2544ajc

I’ve spent the last 3 days sitting in a Starbucks for 4-8 hours at a time. As a result, I’ve observed a lot of interesting behavior and people (most of whom were uninteresting themselves.)

One of the things I’ve noticed is that most people don’t sit down. They come in, get their drink and go. The ones that do sit down, stay much longer than it takes to consume their drink. The drink is just an incidental purchase. Certainly not the reason they are here.

Most of the people who sit also have laptops. Probably around 75%.

Only a few have kids (with them) but the ones that do, have very small kids. Toddlers or younger.

Of all the “campers” only a small percentage are wearing headphone, presumably because A) external noise doesn’t bother them or B) they aren’t working on anything important.

My buddy George falls into category A, but he grew up in a house full of people. Silence freaks him out far more than noise.

My brother and I, on the other hand, were both only children and don’t handle noisy distractions well.

He needs it quiet (like a tomb) and I need music. Go figure… I can listen to Britney Spears mixed with Apoptygma Berzerk and Anthrax and crank out 30 pages, but if your toddler is banging his spoon on the table, you’re getting a dirty look… unless I have music, then all is right with the world.

Anyway, enough about me.

Most of the people who come in as a group are smiling when they enter. Half as many are smiling when they leave. People who come in alone typically aren’t smiling at all.

The average age, over the last three days seems to be early 30s… with a couple of senior citizens and teenagers at either end of the curve. The teenagers almost never stay. They have better stuff to do on a nice day. The senior citizens are split nearly evenly between campers and in&outs.

Most of the non-solo campers have 1 person with a laptop, while the other reads the paper or a book. Some campers bring multiple laptops… but only really look at one of them.

This Starbucks has a drive through. The line is almost never more than 2-3 cars long but apparently a lot of the in&out people would rather come in and stand in line behind (up to) 5 people.

The music in here sucks. My musical tastes can best be described as eclectic to bad, but I can still get work done (see above.) I find the music in this particular Starbucks to be discordant and jarring.

At this Starbucks, the coffee lingo is apparently something that is meant to occur between employees only. The nice lady at the counter can handle orders in plain English and translate them to Baristaspeak (Baristese?) quite efficiently. If you order in Baristaspeak however, she will look confused and repeat your order back to you in plain English to confirm you actually meant what you said. Then she will say it in Baristaspeak to the lady making your drink.

Nobody in this Starbucks (other than the Baristas) makes eye-contact… at least not with me. Of course that may be indicative of a separate issue. ;)

It was a nice day to be outside (and trust me, those aren't words you'll hear from me often.)

I got to the site around 7:45, hit the pre-reg table and got my number along with a goody bag full of coupons for racing gear, a water bottle and a tshirt. Oh and a map.

Stashed all that stuff in the jeep, emptied my pockets of everything but my iPhone and my jeep key, and proceeded to walk around for a bit as people started showing up and signing in. It was fairly breezy, and there was definitely a storm coming... but it was anyone's guess on when it would actually arrive.

It was interesting to see everyone who was participating. If I had to guess, I would say the event was 60-70% women, with a pretty broad distribution of age... as young as 13 to well over 60 (in both genders.) I don't know exactly how many folks were there, but it was well over 300.

Eventually it was time to kick things off, and everyone made their way to the start line. All of the 5k and 10k runners were mixed together, starting at the same time. All the walkers and the people with strollers or dogs were in the back.

It was pretty chaotic at first, once things started, but it thinned out fairly quickly. The 10k people and the hardcore runners sped ahead of everyone else and the walkers gradually lagged behind.

The 5K course was pretty nice, winding around a lake down in Eden Prairie. The 10K course overlapped most of ours, but branched off a couple times too.

I didn't run the whole time, but I started the race running and I ended it running, and did a mix of walking and running along the way. I met my goals, which were a) don't ever stop and b) don't be last.

The weather managed to hold out for the entire race. It never got too hot, there was a nice breeze and it was mostly overcast. Pretty much perfect in my book. About 20-30 minutes after I left, the rain came down pretty hard.

I had a good time, and will most likely do more of them. We'll see.

Twitter moves fast, and if you don’t stay on top of it, you can miss a lot. I don’t follow a ton of people, but I combine it with topic searches. Here are a few things I’ve found that are worth your time and attention, especially if you’re into video games… development or playing:

• The 15 Greatest Sci-Fi/Horror Games for the Commodore 64 - http://moe.vg/bovATG 
  (via @jlist) 
  
• Practical Tactics for Dealing with Haters! - http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/05/18/tim-ferriss-scam-practical-tactics-for-dealing-with-haters/
  (via @The_Zman)
  
• Assassin’s Creed 2 + $10 Video Game Credit + $5 MP3 Credit - $24.99 on Amazon.com – http://amzn.to/bvRI9h
  (via @Assassin10k)
  
• Make Small Good – A design article about not trying to compete with ginormous AAA multimillion dollar titles. - http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AlexanderBrandon/20100518/5067/Make_Small_Good.php
  (via @Kei_tchan)
  
• (CW: Excellent article, I do this a lot in my roguelike games!) Purposes for Randomization in Game Design – http://bit.ly/cAH7PG 
  (via @gamasutra)

So… yesterday I registered for my first 5K event. It’s in Eden Prairie this weekend. It’s a pretty major milestone for me, especially since I absolutely hate running with a passion. Still, I have to admit I’m rather excited about it.

Given that this is my first event, I have no illusions about winning. My immediate goal is simple… don’t come in last.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

I just put the finishing touches on another article for my Code Magazine column: Embracing Community. You won't see this one until around July, but it focuses on a subject near and dear to my heart: Code Camps!

At the end of the article, I mention that I'm interested in hearing some of your war stories about community and what you do to be a part of it. I'll be talking to people at Tech Ed 2010 and Codestock, but I would also like to hear from some of you that read this blog.

If you have an interesting story to share, drop me a line (via this blog) and tell me about it. You never know, it just might end up in my column.

Scanning my Twitter feed almost always proves to be fruitful when looking for cool/interesting links to share. Here are a few of the highlights:

I read this blog post from Justin Angel today, pretty interesting stuff: Windows Phone 7 – Unlocked ROMs  Looks like there’s a lot of good stuff floating just under the surface in the latest build of the WP7 Emulator. (Courtesy of @JustinAngel)

Next up is this video titled Game Design Tutorials: From Seconds to Hours of Gameplay. If you’re into Indie Game Development, or just like watching videos… this one is pretty short at 5 minutes, but contains some good information about increasing the duration of fun gameplay in your game. (Courtesy of @Kei_tchan)

If you are a Firefly (or Castle, or Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog) fan, check out this Facebook campaign to get Nathan Fillion to host SNL: http://tinyurl.com/2dh5m67  It worked for Betty White, so why not, right? (Courtesy of @DGalloway42)

I’ve had a few months of not much traveling, but now that the weather is improving… conference season is starting up again. That means it’s time for me to start hitting the road.

In June, I have Tech Ed 2010 in New Orleans, LA. I lived in New Orleans for several years, both as military and civilian and I have a few friends still down there. I haven’t been there since before Hurricane Katrina, so I have mixed feelings about returning… but I am still looking forward to it.

Also in June, I have Codestock in Knoxville, TN. Codestock is one of my favorite events, primarily because of the excellent people that speak there and also attend sessions. It’s a great mix of people and technologies.

Sometime in July or August, I’m headed to Austin, TX for a couple days. I don’t know the exact date yet, but if you have an event down there in that timeframe, let me know and maybe we can sort something out.

In September, I’m heading to Seattle for my first PAX (Penny Arcade Expo.)  I’m going strictly as an attendee and it looks like a LOT of fun. Really excited to check it out.

Also in September, I’m headed to Omaha for the Heartland Developers Conference. This is a FANTASTIC event, and certainly one of my local favorites. (I guess local is relative, it’s about a 6 hour drive.) In addition to speaking on WP7, I’ll be doing a series of hands on labs on XNA they day before the conference starts, so that should be a lot of fun as well.

In addition to all this stuff, I have my own XNA User Group to take care of. In August, Andy “The Z-Man” Dunn is coming to speak and check out the various food on a stick offerings at the Minnesota State Fair!

If you're in the Twin Cities and play Halo 3 ODST, or like to watch other people play, or enjoy smack talk, or pizza, or just have nothing better to do... well then you're in luck!!

The Twin Cities XNA User Group (www.twincitiesxnausergroup.com) is hosting the 2nd (slightly longer than annual)  Charity Fragathon!! This time around we're doing a Food Drive for Second Harvest, so you have your choice of paying cash or bringing food.

The event is Saturday April 17, 2010 and the doors open at 5pm.

For more details, and to register, please visit www.CharityFragathon.com today!

Soon, the U.S. Supreme Court may decide whether to hear a case that could have a lasting impact on computer and video games.

The case before the Court involves a law passed by the state of California attempting to criminalize the sale of certain computer and video games. Two previous courts rejected the California law as unconstitutional, but soon the Supreme Court could have the final say.

Whatever the Court's ruling, we must be prepared to continue defending our rights now and in the future. To do so, we need a large, powerful movement of gamers to speak with one voice and show that we won't sit back while lawmakers try to score political points by scapegoating video games and treating them differently than books, movies, and music.

If the Court decides to hear the case, we're going to need thousands of activists like you who can help defend computer and video games by writing letters to editors, calling into talk radio stations, and educating Americans about our passion for and appreciation of computer and video games.

You can help build this movement right now by inviting all your friends and fellow gamers to join the Video Game Voters Network.

Use our simple tool to send an email to everyone you know asking them to stand up for gaming rights:

http://videogamevoters.org/movement

You can also help spread the word through Facebook and Twitter, or you can simply forward this email to everyone you know and ask them to sign up at videogamevoters.org.

Time after time, courts continue to reject politicians' efforts to restrict the sale of computer and video games. But that doesn't mean the politicians will stop trying anytime soon -- in fact, it means they're likely to ramp up their efforts even more.

To stop them, we must make it clear that gamers will continue to stand up for free speech -- and that the numbers are on our side.

Help make sure we're ready and able to keep fighting for our gaming rights. Spread the word about the Video Game Voters Network right now:

http://videogamevoters.org/movement

Thank you.

-- Video Game Voters Network

from www.slickthought.net:

Spaghetti Code Podcast: Recapping the MIX Conference

Spaghetti Code (Jeff Brand) is joined by Mike Hodnic, Jason Bock, Adam Grocholski and Chris Williams to share their thoughts and impressions from the Microsoft MIX Conference and their thoughts on Windows Phone, Silverlight 4, and more.

I have a talk submitted to the Heartland Developers Conference. It's called:

Developing For Windows Phone 7 Series with XNA 4.0

Here's a description:

Forget Droid, Windows Phone 7 Series is the iPhone killer. If you want to learn to build killer touch-based apps for this next generation mobile device then this is the session for you. We’ll go over phone specific features and how to leverage those features with XNA 4.0 and C#

I need your votes in order to give this talk. Please go here: http://www.heartlanddc.com/?p=273 and give the talk a nice high rating to indicate interest.

Thanks a bunch!!

Yep, Twin Cities Code Camp EIGHT is just around the corner (11 days from this writing.)

We've got some great sessions lined up, and a mini-mountain of swag to give away.

If you haven't registered yet, we're ALMOST at capacity... so don't delay.

See you there...

Yeah, it's been a while since the last one. But this one is worth the wait.

NINE Questions with Michelle Juett

I'm working on a 2d tilemapped RPG. I've actually made quite a fair amount of progress, but I'm at a point where I need to make a UI decision. I have the overland world completely mapped out, and I have several towns and special areas. I'm on the fence about how to integrate the two.

Scenario 1:

I have one ginormous map, where everything is the same scale. This means you can walk in and out of towns without having to load or wait and transition in any way. With everything the same scale, movement costs the same no matter where you are (in terms of time/turns/energy/hunger/whatever/etc...)  The potential downside to this is that it could take quite a long time to get anywhere on foot.

Scenario 2:

I have an overland map, a set of town maps, overland tactical maps, dungeon maps & special area maps. The overland map is at a different scale than the other maps. This means that time/turns/energy/hunger/whatever/etc is calculated at a different rate than on the other maps, which have a 1:1 scale. When entering a town, dungeon, special area or having a random encounter, you would effectively zoom in from the overland scale to the tactical scale. When you are done with combat, or exit a dungeon or town, it would zoom back out to the overland map. The downside to this is that at the zoomed out scale, the overland map isn't all that big (comparitively) and you can traverse it fairly quickly (in real time, not game world time.)

Options:

1) Go with scenario 1, as is.

2) Go with scenario 1 and introduce a slightly speedier version of overland travel, such as a horse.

3) Go with scenario 1 and introduce "instant" travel, via portals or some kind of "click the big map" mechanism. This would only work with places you've already been, or somehow unlocked (perhaps via a quest.)

4) Go with Scenario 2, as is.

Thoughts, opinions, suggestions?  Feedback appreciated.

as long as we're talking about VB... I figured I would share this as well.

Hi everyone,

I'm about to express a sentiment that might ruffle a few feathers, but I think most of you know me well enough to know I love like accept VB for what it is and that what I'm about to say is with good intentions. (The rest of you, who don't know me, please take my word for it.)

The world is full of VB developers, I was one of them for a long time. I think it's safe to assume that none of us are ignorant people who require handholding. We're working professionals, making a living by using our skills as developers. I'm also willing to bet that quite a few of us are fluent in C# as well as VB. It may not be your preferred language, but many of you can do it and you prove that nearly every day.

Honestly, I don't know ANY developers or consultants that have only known ONE language ever.

So it pains me greatly when I see the word "CAN'T" being tossed around like a crutch... as in "we CAN'T develop for the windows phone or we CAN'T develop XNA games." At MIX, Microsoft hath decreed that C# is the language of choice for developing for the Windows Phone 7. I think it's a safe bet that you won't see VB support if it isn't there already. (Just like XNA... which is up to version 4.0 by now.) 

So what? (Yeah... I said it.)

I think everyone here can agree that actual coding is only one part of software design and development. There is nothing stopping ANY of you from beginning the process of designing your killer phone app, writing up specs, requirements, doing UI design, workflow, mockups, storyboards, art, etc.... None of these things are language dependent.

IF by the time you've got that stuff out of the way, and there's still no VB support, then start doing some rapid prototyping of your app in C# (I know, I know... heresy!)  You still have to spend time learning how the phone does things, what UI tricks do what, what paradigms make sense, how to use to accelerometer and the tilt and the multitouch functionality. I can guarantee you that time spent doing this is a great investment, no matter WHAT extension your code files have. Eventually, you may have a working prototype.

IF by this time, there's STILL no VB support... fret not, you've made significant progress on your app. You've designed it, prototyped it, figured out how to use the phone specific features... so you might as well finish it and pat yourself on the back for learning something new... and possibly being first to market with your new app.

I'll be happy to argue any and all of these points online or off with anyone who cares to do so, but there is one undeniable point that you simply can't argue: 

Your potential customers do not care AT ALL what programming language you used to write the app they are about to purchase. They care that it works. If your biggest concern is being first to market, than stop complaining and get busy because you're running out of time and the 3000+ people who were at MIX certainly aren't waiting for you.

They've already started working on their apps.

From the "is this really news?" department...

From looking at the currently available versions of 2010, there is no direct upgrade path from VB6 to VS2010. Anyone still using VB6 and wishing to upgrade to VS2010 has two options:  Use the upgrade tool from an earlier version of VS (like 2005 or 2008) and then run the upgrade in VS2010 to get the rest of the way... or rewrite your code.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader which is the better option.

I'd like to take a moment to point out the obvious:

A) If you're still using VB6 at this point, you probably don't care about VS2010 compatibility.

B) Running your code through 2 upgrade wizards isn't going to result in anything resembling best practices.

C) Bemoaning the lack of support in 2010 for a 12 year old version of an extinct programming language helps nobody.

This public service announcement is brought to you by the letter C. Thank you.

For those of you that have been waiting patiently (and not so patiently) I'm happy to say that we're very near completion on some changes/enhancements/improvements that will allow us to finally go live with the INETA Regional Speakers Bureau.

I know quite a few of you have already registered, which is great (though some of you may need to come back and update your info) and we've had a few folks submit requests, mostly in a test capacity, but soon we'll be up and live.

Here's how it breaks down. Be sure to read this, because things have changed a bit from when we initially announced it.

1. The majority of our speaker/event funding is going into the Regional Speakers Bureau.  The National Bureau still exists, but it's a good bit smaller than it was before, and it's not an "every group" benefit anymore. We'll be using the National Bureau as more of a strategic task force, targeting high impact events and areas that need some community building love from INETA. These will be identified and handled on a case by case basis, and may include more than just user group events.

2. You're going to get more events per group, per year than you did before. Not only are we focusing more resources on this program, but we're also making a lot of efforts to use it more effectively. With the INETA Regional Speakers Bureau, you should be able to get 2-3 INETA speakers per year, on average. Not every geographical area will have exactly the same experience, but we're doing the best we can.

3. It's not a farm team program for the National Bureau. Unsurprisingly, I managed to offend a number of people when I previously made the comment that the Regional Speakers Bureau program was a farm team or stepping stone to the National Bureau. It was a poor choice of words.  Anyone can participate in the Regional Speakers Bureau, and I look forward to working with all of you.

4. There is assistance for your efforts. I'd love to say these are the "final" amounts, but let's be honest. These numbers are "final" as of this writing. That doesn't mean they will never change. There are a lot of factors that go into funding a program like this, but here's what we have today:

(all distances listed are based on a round trip)

• Distances < 120 miles = $0
• 121 miles - 240 miles = $50 (effectively 1 to 2 hours, each way)
• 241 miles - 360 miles = $100 (effectively 2 to 3 hours, each way)
• 361 miles - 480 miles = $200 (effectively 3 to 4 hours, each way)

EDIT: For distances >480 miles, this is really further than how we perceive "regional" but we recognize that it varies depending on where you live and how far you're willing to go. So we're willing to cover these distances as well, but capped at the max of category 4, which is $200.

For those of you who travel a lot, we're working on a solution to handle group visits when you're away from home. These will (for now) be handled on a case by case basis.

5. We're going to make it as easy as possible to work with the program. In order to do this, we need a few things from you. For speakers, that means your home address. It also means (maybe) filling out a simple 1 line expense report via the INETA website. For user groups, it means making sure your meeting address is up to date as well.

6. Distances will be automatically calculated from your home of record to the user group event and back. We realize that this is not a perfect solution to every instance, but we're not paying you to speak at an event, and you won't be taxed on this money. It's simply some assistance to make your community efforts easier. Our way of saying thanks for everything you do.

7. Sounds good so far, what's the catch? There's always a catch, right? In this case there are two of them:

1) At this time, Microsoft employees are welcome to use the website to line up speaking engagements with user groups, but are not eligible for financial assistance.

2) Anyone can register and use the website to line up speaking engagements with user groups, however you must receive and maintain a net score of 3+ positive ratings (we're implementing a thumbs up / thumbs down system) in order to receive financial assistance. These ratings are provided by the User Group leaders after the meeting has taken place.

8. Involvement by the User Group leaders is a key factor in the success of this program. Your job isn't done once you request a speaker. After you've had your meeting, it's critical that you go back to the website and take a very small survey. Doing this ensures that the speaker gets rated (and compensated if eligible) and also ensures that you can make another request, since you won't be able to make a new request if you have an old one outstanding.

9. What about Canada? We're definitely working on that. We are still encouraging Canadian speakers to register in the Regional Speaker Program. While we do not currently have the funds in place to cover expenses for Canadian events, we are working to do so. There is still benefit in speakers listing themselves, especially if they currently happen to travel to other areas of the country. We are also working to extend special offers and opportunities to speakers registered in the program.

So... this is where things stand currently. We're working very quickly to get this in place and get speakers and groups together. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below and I'll answer them as quickly as possible. If I've forgotten anything, or if things change, I'll update it here.

Thanks,

Chris G. Williams
INETA Board of Directors