Paul Lockwood
Paul Lockwood is a hands on .Net Team Lead/ Architect based in Atlanta, USA. He also performs short term performance tuning/ debugging engagements with a 'no solution, no charge' policy. His career spans over two decades including Accenture, EDS, 3M, London Stock Exchange, SwissRe, Philips.com and UBS Investment Bank. Education includes Bachelors/Masters in Software Engineering and a Masters in AI and Robotics. http://www.linkedin.com/in/paullockwood
Posts by Paul Lockwood
Atlanta User Groups I recommend
Feb 2nd
A friend just asked me what .Net groups are good these days. Atlanta is the Software Capital of the South which means we have many great groups in town and I watch them all for interesting topics, but these are the three I personally attend most often:
http://www.meetup.com/AtlAltDotNet/ this is great for new ideas and decent technical depth. It is a fairly new group still finding its feet
http://www.iasahome.org/web/atlanta Atlanta’s IASA chapter – always has super-smart people in attendance. Most meetings end up being a discussion (or argument!) with few punches pulled. The best part? BS artists are shot down very quickly and most never come back 
http://www.atldotnet.org this is the ‘main’ .Net User Group in town and excellent at delivering high level introductions to topics. Networking is very good here too as local MVPs etc are at most meetings
Other .Net focused groups are http://www.atlantamspros.com and http://ggmug.com. A good attempt to list all relevant groups is http://www.devcow.com/usergroups but I don’t believe it is currently maintained.
Hopefully that helps a few people looking to learn more and network
Jan 2009 ASP.Net MVC Slides
Jan 27th
Update: The Release Candidate has been released. The demo below works fine with it too.
>> Click here to download the slides and second demo. <<
Wow! We had a fantastic turn-out last night, interest in MVC must high! Not having presented for almost a year I tried not to publicize the the talk; but still instead of the expected twenty to thirty people there must have been close to a hundred and we had to expand the room! Couple this with the Microsoft building now almost impossible to find with that road closure flummoxing us coming from the south-side – who knows how many found Old Roswell gone and went back home at that point. For those that missed last night this talk will be repeated at all local code camps that happen in the next few months, the Atlanta one is in March and 2009 details will soon appear at http://www.atlantacodecamp.com/.
Obviously that presentation covered only some of the very basics and there is a lot more to working with MVC. Watch this space for more MVC tips and if people request it, I’ll put together a deeper presentation for Code Camps etc.
Also, I was not kidding about the free presentation/ training at your company. Totally free, no creepy sales people will call afterwards either – it will keep my hand in while taking a few months out from real work and with luck one of them might lead to my next gig (which will use MVC). So if you have at three or more devs drop me a line via the ‘Email Me’ page on this blog – don’t worry if you are a small or large shop, I just want to spread the word and try to ensure there are a selection of MVC Contracts out there when I get bored of goofing off
TurboTax vs TaxCut 2008
Jan 5th
TurboTax has been wonderful over the years but the 2008 price totally made me baulk. An eye popping $229.80 this year for my needs:
$49.95 Premier inc Rental Properties + $34.95 Per State
$109.95 Business including S Corporations
H&R Block Home & Business 2008 promises the same functionality for $67.96 (Google for a discount coupon code). This was enough of a saving to try it, worst case I waste a few hours and buy TurboTax.
Since the IRS have not finalized rules for 2008 a few areas are not yet available including what seemed to be almost all the s-corp filing. Still I entered our W2s, a dummy 1099 and all the details on my rental properties with no issue. Everything was as easy as it was with TurboTax. There are still all the detailed sections to ensure you are aware of what can be deducted without reading 17,000 pages of IRS publications or trying to get a comptent accountant to talk to you. As for problems so far, non are worth mentioning being just very minor niggles. Before buying I read online that H&R does not even let one print PDFs – well I just saved my 2008 draft with no problem (File -> Save As PDF…).
Here are a few samples screens, please don’t laugh at the repairs on the rental – it has barely an issue for five years and last year seemingly everything broke:
Looks a lot like TurboTax right? Go ahead save the money, you’ll feel amost right at home
As with Turbo Tax this Rental screen maps straight to the tax form field – ah this is soo simple