By Doug Mullis, for Secretary Peggy Pulliam
dmullis@tampabay.rr.com

Mary Sheridan kicked off our usual half-hour Windows SIG at 6:30 PM. Mary was impressed with the Firefox Mozilla Internet browser she saw demonstrated at the FACUG Fall Conference in Clearwater and suggested we try it.

Mary reminded us that 2005 TPCUG officers will be elected in December, so we need a slate of officer nominees by the November meeting. It seems all current officers except secretary Peggy Pulliam are able to remain in office, but remember, they did this last year as well. We need members to step forward to relieve those who have served so well. Treasurer Mike Hodges, although willing to serve, is now teaching evenings and will miss our regular monthly meetings. It is hoped volunteers William LaMartin, Larry Anders, Mary Sheridan and Mike Hodges will continue as Newsletter Editor, Librarian, Program Chairperson and Membership Chairperson, respectively.

At 7:00 PM, president Kevan Sheridan began our regular meeting. He distributed CD's of Microsoft's Service Pack 2, reminding members to first uninstall firewalls and make sure all programs are current. After installing, make sure everything is working, including your firewall.

At this point, our guest speaker, Randall Nagy, president of Soft9000.com, was introduced to tell us about Microsoft's .NET system. If you have Windows XP, you're probably using .NET for system updates which was designed to simplify distributed application development. Microsoft Machine Independent Language (MSIL) relieves the programmer from having to learn another program language to install new applications. Common Language Runtime (CLR) allows different languages to share information. Mr. Nagy says ".NET" is known as the "Virtual Execution System".

After a short break, several attendees won T-shirts displaying "I'M DRAWING THE LINE," targeting hacker viruses and worms, with Microsoft's Service Pack 2 being our protector. The meeting was adjourned about 8:40 PM. u