As of 5 PM yesterday, I’m no longer apart of the Central IL Dot Net User Group based out of Bloomington / Normal, IL. Throughout the past year, I did my hardest to bring in the best & brightest speakers, and I succeeded. I wanted to personally thank those that came and spoke. As far as what I’ll be doing next…well, I’ll probably join the other .NET User Group in town and see if that group is any better (which I’m sure it will be). If that doesn’t pan out, I’ll probably start a third group in town.

So this is more of an annoyance than a bug, but you should be aware of the following:

If using SN.EXE to extract your public key information, and you supply an invalid file name or path, SN.EXE just states that your assembly “does not represent a strongly named assembly.”

If you run the same command on a assembly that does exist, but isn’t signed…guess what, you get the same error message. Misleading, very misleading.

Well, its Friday night at about 10:30 PM and what am I doing? Sitting on my leather fold-out couch writing a blog entry on dial-up because I didn’t want to pay $9.95 for high-speed internet.

No matter what, its been a great trip, conference, networking experience. I got the pleasure of meeting a rockstar, nay, legend…Sam Gentile, and of course his counterpart & former co-worker Robert Hurlbut. We three (well, Adam was around for dinner & our trip to Barnes & Noble, but dissapeared when we got the hotel to drive us to Starbucks – which Sam, working his thang, got us the ride – yeah Sam!) got to hang out, chill, drink some coffee, and shoot the s***. If you’ve never met Sam, he’s one of those guys that you expect to be super smart, but not that funny, and he’s quite the contrary (now, I’m not saying he’s not smart, I’m saying he’s super funny AND smart). BTW, I got the pleasure (if you can call it a pleasure) to listen to Rocky & Sam have their nice discussion last night for about an hour or so, and let me tell you…I was lost half the time – both of these guys know their s***. Maybe thats why they speak all over the US and are published.

Anyway, I guess I should mention the conference some…It was great. Joe (does he have a blog, and if not, dude should start one up!) did an awesome job with his team to put on a great conference. The venue wasn’t that great, as we were all crammed in conference rooms big enough for 50 (even though they said it seats 75 or something). However, I would expect that future HDC conferences will be 100 times bigger and better. Great work Joe & your team! It was great meeting you all as well, I hope to frag you many (many, many, many) times in Halo 2. Maybe we’ll get Sam to play (ha!).

Okay, here’s what 330 miles, 3 CDs, a tank of gas, 10 homebaked cookies, and 4.5 hours driving taught me about Iowa:

• There’s some truck driving around with the license plate “BUDDY” that has tail lites that make it look like he’s driving in reverse. I chalk this one up to poor design by Toyota (or whatever company made the car, it was dark and I was going fast).
• Weigh stations for trucks in Iowa state that you have to stop if your truck is over 6000 pounds. In Illinois, you have to stop if your truck is over 8 tons. Now, I don’t know what the conversion is (and I don’t want to find it on dialup right now), but those darn truckers sure have know know how much their truck weighs.
• 3 guys dressed in black hooded sweatshirts standing on a weigh station roof are definately not weighing themselves, or a truck for that matter. My guess is they we’re drinking beer and got stuck up there, or they’re fixing some problem with the roof…you decide.
• The gas station “Kum & Go” is just a bad name (this actually got me to call my girlfriend to share and get a chuckle)
• Driving at 80 MPh 300 some odd miles is boring, but the slight hills and lots of turns make it fun in Iowa. Illinois is flat…I mean, really flat. Ask Kent, he came for a visit, and that was one of the things he mentioned.
• There are a lot of Dodge Neons out there that like to drive 65 MPh in the left lane. Staring at them when you pass them on the right only enrages them to go slower (which is odd since I’m not following them anymore!)
• Cars that like to follow you on your tail going 80 MPh that look like they want to pass you, will only slow down to 65 MPh once you move to the right lane so they can get by. Seriously, this confused me on multiple occasions.
• The Iowa car dealer plates are way cooler than Illinois’ tan pieces of crap that just have “DL” written down the left side.
• Plastering Christmas lights all over your 3 sheds, house, trees and bushes on your farm makes you just an awesome person that my girlfriend would like to meet. Seriously, this one farm looks like it took 2 full days to get Christmas lights all over.

Seriously, all the above statements came from my trip over. It kept me amused, but I mean, come on Iowans (is this the actual term for Iowa people?), use some common sense!

As an aside: You probably realized that I’m now at the Holiday Inn. This place is pretty fricking cool, but my room smells like that “New Rubber Smell” that we all so love. Our Microsoft sponsored get together is starting at 8 PM, and its now 7 PM, so I think I’m going to head down to Damons to grab some chow. If you’re in the building reading this (and didn’t pay the $9.95 fee for high-speed internet until 12 AM Friday morning) come down and eat with me. I’ll be dressed in a gray t-shirt and will probably have a beer in my hand.

Like several others have mentioned, I’ll be taking off later today heading to Iowa for the Heartland Developers Conference. I, however, won’t be presenting but enjoying those that are. If you’re attending, make sure you look for me. I’ll be the geek carrying the laptop bag, hmm…thats not descriptive enough…I’ll be the geek carrying the laptop bag and wearing a Microsoft .NET T-Shirt, hmm….nope, still not enough…I’ll be the geek carrying the laptop bag, wearing a Microsoft .NET T-Shirt, and …. well heck, here’s a picture of me…that will be easier.

BTW, if you’re attending the “get-together” tonight, make sure you look for me. I figure I’ll be arriving between 6–7 PM to the hotel. Otherwise, shoot me an email so we can meet up. I’d like to meet anyone and everyone!

So I decided to bite the bullet this afternoon and purchase 2 gold support licenses from SourceGear to obtain Vault 3.0. The upgrade went really, really smooth (I still have doubts that its properly working, but it looks and acts like v2.0.6 (close)), surprisingly. I always fret major updates to programs I use daily that could corrupt the integrity of my well being, code. I do have to say, it seems to be a loooot faster, and I loooove the new add files dialog.

The only gripe I had, was when upgrading my 1.x and 2.x licenses to 3.x licenses: it upgraded but didn’t send them to me via email! And because I figured they would, I closed my browser. Upon realizing this, I tried resubmitting my licenses and it told me that they’ve already been upgraded. So, after a support email (using my Gold status!) & a few hours, I had my licenses. SourceGear: take my subtle hint and send those bad boy’s out via email, otherwise you’re going to get a flood of support requests just like mine.