If you live in or around Central Illinois, my company, Integrity Technology Solutions, has posted a job for a full-time .NET developer position on contract for at minimum of 6 months. Here’s the summary:

We are seeking a developer with 2-5 years experience and the following skills: VB Visual Basic 6--Visual Basic .NET, SQL 6.5, SQL 2000, .NET. This is a temporary position. The initial engagement is 6 months with the possibility of an extension. Work will be completed at our client site in Bloomington. Candidates must be U.S. citizens or Green Card holders.

So, if you’re interested, hop on over to our Human Resources Portal, sign up and submit your resume!

In a surprising upturn of events, FogBugz 4.0 was released a week earlier than project by Joel, though it does line up with his first statement saying today. Now that the cat is out of the bag, I can finally talk about it, phew!

I’ve been beta testing 4.0 for quite some time, and I have to say, wow…what a product. It has been significantly improved over 3.0, and just viewing their “movie” will give you a sense of everything.

My favorite features of 4.0 include:

1. The ability to add release notes to a case once it has been resolved. This allows you to provide a more user friendly explanation that can later be used in websites, changelog documents, or readmes. (Note: I’ve created a small app that I can now finally wrap up and release that allows you to create your own XSL scripts to change the release notes XML to any format you wish…more on this later).

2. The ability to have “clients” or “departments” assigned to projects, so that users can have the roles of viewing, editing, or none at all. The only limitation here is that a project can’t have both a client or department assigned, only one or the other.

3. Full email integration. Yes, I said FULL. You can completely run your customer service stuff through FogBugz now. Its supremely better over 3.0, and not to mention the spam filtering & bayesian filter is great!

4. Discussion Groups. Oh yeah, screw forums…use Discussion Groups! Well, maybe not entirely, but still it allows your team members or you with customers to have conversations between staff and other people just like you can with FogBugz support discussions.

So yeah, thats my fab4 list to go with the 4.0 release. I have to say that FogCreek has out done themselves on this version. There are so many goodies and jewels that I found or was pointed to that it just makes a great product the best. Get on over and upgrade or try it out now!

BTW – Only the windows version of 4.0 is released, the Unix and Mac versions are now being beta tested.

I have just a single phrase for this, it’s about time. While I’ve only used MySQL in limited fashion several years back, but one of the limiting factors that I wish it had were triggers and stored procedures. Because of that I dropped using MySQL for my home stuff and switched to Microsoft SQL Server, and never looked back. Now, its only in Beta and probably not available to the public, but its about time.

This was just posted, so I quickly went over to their site to check it out. I was a bit skeptical, only because we all know that indexing and searching your (or your company’s) website is a daunting task usually left to using Google, but with several lines of code, EasySearchASP.NET provides an out-of-the-box experience, so to speak. Right out of the box, searching works. Its that simple. It uses in-memory storage, which doesn’t require you to store it to a database, flat file, or any other method…making it fast, fast, Google fast. Sure, it probably isn’t as powerful as Google, but for a $99 fee, I don’t think you can go wrong. I’m going to plop this control on over to my boss to see what he thinks…I know my company has always wanted to do searching.

So my thoughts then were, well what if IIS is restarted? Well, they thought of that, and that is the great ability of being able to store the easy search index to file. This makes initial startup searching faster.

Here’s another cool thing – there’s a programmatic API exposed by Web Services, so you can tap into your search database from anywhere – how fricking cool is that!

TheServerSide.net has just posted a blip on free training from MSDN on ASP.NET 2.0. The first in the series of 6 CDs is now available. So, if you’ve had little time to play with the next versions, I think this CD will become invaluable to you, as it probably will for me.

So I’m working on a .NET Web app at work where I’m utilizing CSS and my Collapsable Panel control. The CSS that I’m applying is a border surrounding the entire page content via a DIV tag. The problem that I’m experiencing is a redraw problem with FireFox…great!

Here’s a shot right after it has been expanded:

Here’s a shot after I “touch” FireFox (ie, I set focus to a textbox):

Note, no refresh of the page has been done, and it is merely a redraw bug in FireFox. Internet Explorer 6 works as expected. Sometimes FireFox is better than IE, but issues like this make me wonder why I use FireFox for better “support” of web standards. Note, I put support in quotes because FireFox actually does abide by web standards, whereas IE has created their own. Its just the small things that irk me…

Update: I’ve started a thread over at the FireFox forums, if you have any ideas or suggestions, post em there.

So the craze in the last few years has been to setup a website for your wedding so you can post information. Well, following my geek tradition, and a fiance (heh, thats the first time I’ve used that in writing) that was like “HELL YEAH” to a website, I’ve set one up. If you’re inclined to visit and check our information out (or lack there of right now), visit us at http://wedding.eworldui.net

Ohh, btw – if you’re a little confused, check out my engagement announcement last night.

Just a bit of some good news from my personal life, I got engaged this evening! Wahoo!

Check out Joel’s latest post, it mentions that FogBugz 4.0 will be available on March 1st February 23rd. Thats the first mention of the release date aside from the beta forums mentioning “a few weeks more.” I have to say, I’ve been beta testing 4.0 for quite some time now, and it is a major overhaul, and definately worth the 4.0 status.

As an aside, and straight from Joel’s post, Mike Gunderloy’s new book “Painless Project Management with FogBugz” will be released sometime soon, and FogCreek will be selling it on their online store.

A few weeks back my girlfriend and I were looking to start sharing our calendars. Mostly because I didn’t know when she had to work (department stores, yuk!) and I constantly had to ask her what we were doing on the alternating weekends she didn’t have to work. So, being a developer, my first thoughts were – hey, I could build a calendar sharing app. Ohh, but the daunting task was ahead of me, and I really didn’t feel like taking my personal time to do this. Next thought? Well, that was to setup a VPC with Exchange Server – and after 3 hours I realized that this was overkill for just sharing calendars. So, I tabled the idea for the time being.

Then, a few days back, Sunbird 0.2 was released from the Mozilla organization. I thought, hmm…this could possibly work. And after installing it on my work machine to check it out, I realized this was perfect for what we needed. If you’ve never heard of Sunbird, its, obviously, a calendaring application that is standalone from any of the other Mozilla applications. It allows you to store and share your calendar much like Outlook (well, sharing is a lot easier). The ability to have many calendars open at once was exactly what we needed.

So, last night I installed it on my home machine, and had my girlfriend install it on hers (she’s THAT tech-savvy). Now, to actually share our calendars, I had to do a little bit of custom configuration, which I’ll describe below.

1. Create a shared folder that both (or all) users can access. I used my server, and created a share allowing anyone to read/write to it. I later back this share up in my nightly backup routine.
2. Open up Windows Explorer, and browse to C:\documents and settings\<UserName>\ApplicationData\Mozilla\Sunbird\Profiles\<DEFAULTPROFILE>\Calendar
3. Copy the CalendarDataFile.ics to your shared directory, renaming it to whatever you wish so that its easier to locate for other users. I used Matt.ics for mine and Heather.ics for my girlfriend’s.
4. Open CalendarManager.rdf in Notepad.
5. Find the “My Calendar” RDF:Description element, and change the NC:path attribute’s value to point to the new location of your .ics file on your shared drive.
6. Save and close the .rdf file.
7. Launch Sunbird, and you’re ready to add other calendars.
8. Click the “Calendars” tab.
9. Right click, and choose to add a new calendar. Give it a name, and use the “Browse” button to point to whatever calendar you wish to use. Note, do not pick up your own calendar, but the other person’s calendar.

From there on out, you’re able to see your and the other persons calendar at the same time. It is important to note why my above instructions are so important. Due to (my guess) a bug, trying to edit “My Calendar” to point its location to the shared directory never saves. It’ll revert to the local .ics file that we moved, and modifying the .rdf file manually was the only way to get around this. Also, if you should happen to be entering events in your calendar at the same time that the other person is, it doesn’t dynamically update the calendar. You must close and re-open Sunbird. Same if you change the color of the calendar.

I also realize that there’s an option to “Publish” your calendar to a remote site, but that requires WebDAV to be installed on your destination server. Supposedly, you can use FTP, but I was never able to get that working. A great thing about publishing your calendar, is that it can theoretically live on your website, and anyone can consume that calendar. However, until this gets finalized and working properly, the sharing methods I described above are the best methods.

So, if you’ve been looking for this type of functionality, and didn’t know where to turn, try out Sunbird…it gets the job done.