SQL Saturday #28 Twitter Referral Contest

Here's the official rules for the twitter referral registration contest for SQL Saturday #28 in Baton Rouge, LA on August 14, 2010 on the campus of Louisiana State University.
 
In case you haven't heard, SQL Saturday Baton Rouge has over 400 registrants as of early July.  We're in Taylor Hall (formerly known as CEBA) on LSU campus.  This isn't no community college, all of the rooms for SQL Saturday #28 feature stadium seating and mounted projectors, and seating for no fewer than 60+ in each room.  We have nine tracks, including SQL admin and development, BI, .net programming, infrastructure and more.  And its all free: free breakfast, free lunch, free goodies and giveaways, free training from local and national experts in their fields, including many Microsoft MVP's.

1. Refer people to register for SQL Saturday #28.  This doesn't have to be via Twitter, how you encourage them to attend SQL Saturday is up to you!
2. After they register, tell them to tweet a message in this format: @(Your_twitter_name) referred me to #SQLSat28!  We will be monitoring that hash tag for referrals, so its important they use "#SQLSat28".
3. When they sign-in at the event we will mark that person under your name. Yes, they must attend (and so must you!) for you to get credit.  No, you can't refer yourself. This is only for registrants that sign up beginning 7/12/2010, the day we announced these rules.
4. The person with the most referrals who shows up will win a one-year MSDN subscription, to be awarded in the closing event of SQL Saturday.  You must be present to win!  In the case of a tie, we'll flip a coin or something.

FYI- the official twitter account of SQL Saturday 28 is @SQLSatBR and the hashtag for the event is #SQLSat28. 

Questions? Tweet them to @SQLSatBR, comment on this blog post or email SQL Saturday 28's organizers at sqlsaturday28@sqlsaturday.com.

Spare the switch, fix the WinMerge

Are you like me and you prefer the open-source WinMerge as your text comparison/merge tool?

And are you like me, annoyed when you compare and get the "Cannot open file C:\Documents and Settings\....\TFSTemp\......  The system cannot find the file specified." error?

The easy workaround is that you have to close WinMerge before calling it again from Visual Studio.

This is because the really popular string of switches out there (just google "winmerge visual studio") includes the /s switch.

The /s "limits WinMerge windows to a single instance," apparently by bringing up that annoying error.  Not the most graceful way to do that.

Anyway, drop that /s switch.  Visual Studio will be able to open multiple compare windows up for you.  This might have other implications, but at least educate yourself as to what it does, and why that error above isn't really an error.

Here's the switch list I use: 

/e /x /dl %6 /dr %7 %1 %2

 Reference this online manual doc for explanations on the switches.


"There is no off position on the genius switch. " -David Letterman