I’ve fallen behind a little on sharing SQLSaturday news, so I’ll try to catch up on the latest. First, we’re off to a good start for 2010 with 9 events already set up (listed below), and I’m expecting that we’ll have repeats in Orlando, Jacksonville, South Florida, and Atlanta…at least! Plenty of room for more (and there are more in the discussion stages in a few places), drop me a note if you’re interested in doing one. I still think that the US can generate a 100 of these events a year.

I set aside a day this week for bug fixes and minor upgrades, just housekeeping stuff that you log as it comes in and try to whack-a-mole back into submission once in a while. Out of those changes, maybe two are worth talking about. The first was I changed the URL scheme to include the ‘saturday number’, an example would be http://www.sqlsaturday.com/28/eventhome.aspx, rather than http://www.sqlsaturday.com/eventhome.aspx?eventid=33 (as I have mentioned before, not having eventid equal the saturday number….big mistake). In theory everything should work the same, I’m the coder and the tester, so I’ll hope for the best. The other change is that I finally published the first cut at an online request form (www.sqlsaturday.com/eventrequest.aspx). Having the event leaders enter the information will save me a little time and also makes it easy for them to understand what information they need to provide.

Tons more ideas, but of them there are two I hope to get to sometime in the next few months. The first is to change the way we create sponsorship plans. Right now each event leader is responsible for building a sponsorship plan and uploading as a PDF. They can copy from existing ones, but it remains a pain point, so I’m going to offer them a template that will plug in the fees they enter, and then they can edit it if they want (most probably won’t would be my guess). The other is to set up a way for the event leads to enter tasks for volunteers, and then let volunteers see those tasks on a schedule, sign up for what they want to do during a part of the day that makes sense for them.

As a sidebar to this, I’d like to say that having a project like this is a good way to drive incremental learning. For example, as part of these changes I loaded the DevExpress grid and HTML editor controls into the admin project, and used them to replace one instance of the asp.net grid and a freeware HTML editor. Had to figure out to find/deploy the dll’s for it, reasonably impressed with the databinding on the grid, had to go around in a couple places I couldn’t figure out. Go build something – your own blog software, bookmark catalog, find something that will take you beyond the database, you might be surprised how what you learn will help later on.