Microsoft Architecht Evangelist Jeff barnes will be presenting Siverlight 2.0 on Wednesday May 21st for the SCDNUG.  We last saw Jeff with Joe Healy on the Tiki Hut Tour.  Jeff is a great presenter and I am looking forward to getting up to speed on Silverlight 2!  More Info Here.

I got the word today that my manager would sign off on me attending TechEd this year!  Very excited!  I've attended VS Live in the past and am anxious to see how Tech Ed compares.  Just looking at the conference agenda makes me think I will be burning out by Day 4.  If anybody from the Space Coast .Net User Group is going, drop me a line so we can hook up.  I am on the Tech Ed community site as well.

If you came to the Visual Studio 2008 Install fest, then come to the Intro class.  Joe will be giving the guided tour.  If you already know the product, wait until the end of the presentation and hit Joe with the hard questions... he can take it.

Introduction to Visual Studio 2008

Presenter: Joe Healy, Microsoft Developer Evanglist

Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 delivers on Microsoft’s vision of smart client applications by enabling developers to rapidly create connected applications that deliver the highest quality, rich user experiences. With Visual Studio 2008, organizations will find it easier than ever before to capture and analyze information to help them make effective business decisions. Visual Studio 2008 enables organizations of every size to rapidly create more secure, manageable, and reliable applications that take advantage of Windows Vista™ and the 2007 Office system.

Where:
Charlie and Jakes Brewery Grill
6300 N Wickham Rd
Melbourne, FL 32940
USA
driving directions

When:
1/22/2008
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Welcome Time:
1/22/2008 6:15 PM Eastern Time

I am in the middle of a medium size BI project where we chose Microsoft for ETL with the SSIS component of SQL Server 2005.  For various factors, we decided on Cognos 8 for the Cube and Presentation layers.  As part of the analysis we took in to account things like cost, Gartner, In-House skill sets and so on.  It was a pretty even race for Cognos & MS Performance Point Server (PPS) and we ended up going with Cognos.

Some background information on our Cognos implementation.  It came in-house with a product called Agile.  So since we were licensed, we went with it for basic reporting needs.  Now we're at the point we're we are really looking at BI - time analysis of data, ad hoc analysis, KPIs, and so on.  We made an assumption that we could leverage our existing Cognos skill sets into the world of Cognos 8 BI.  It wasn't a great bet.  We sent some people to training and they took away what most take away from a week long course based on a vendor curriculum (This is not just a Cognos issue, we have a real challenge finding solid training for the Microsoft stuff too).

Now, I was in the same position our Cognos talent was in when I went to work on BizTalk.  I had a strong background in the fundamentals of .Net languages and Web development.  I went off to take the one week training course (much love to Mark Berry at Dunn Training) and came away with a strong set of basic tools.  When I went up against the kind of problems we're hitting in Cognos right now, there was a difference.

Searching for help on Cognos technical issues is really difficult.  There is very little out there in the way of web based community.  And a lot of what you do find refers to Cognos' KB which is protected by password.  I am not sure what the hurdle is to getting the password setup... a call to our account representative and some paperwork.  When you're slugging out a technical issue this is not the best customer experience to have. 

On the other hand, Microsoft's community is unbelievably rich and returns many hits when searching for answers.  BizTalk is a pricy tool and is seldom afforded by those outside of serious enterprise grade businesses – which makes is developer base quite small compared to C#, SQL, ASP.Net, etc.  Never the less, there is a rich and vibrant community of users who post and share tremendous amounts of technical insight and know how.  I have become truly active in my local developer community in the pas couple of years and I see now why Microsoft pours so much effort into these folks.  As a direct result, I typically can solve most of my technical glitches or unknowns with a minimal amount of time on Google or Live Search.

I am not saying Microsoft is perfect.  I have my issues when I call in for Technical Support and deal with some of the first line folks.  I here the same frustrations form my Cognos counterparts.  The nice thing is that there is such a wealth of Microsoft product knowledge living both outside and inside Microsoft, that it’s one of those intangibles that is rarely given due weight in a product study.  It certainly keeps the number of calls I’ve made to Microsoft to a minimum.  As for which is the best product… another time and another blog post. 

Comment:  If anyone ever wants to experience the Microsoft community in full force – go to a local Code Camp.  I’ve never gotten so many professional contacts in one place.  And if there aren’t any near you, call you Microsoft Developer Evangelist and ask nicely for some help.  You’d really be amazed.

Wes is putting on a mini-conference that is focusing on SQL Server technologies.  $99 and on a Friday - A Training day from work and doesn't cost $1200.  Serioously thinking about attending.  http://dayofdata.com/default.aspx

The training with Symphic was a good experience.  The SSIS course was excellent and based on the Project REAL implementation.  It was an end to end trip through an SSIS Project designed to buld and maintain a data warehouse / star schema.  It was just what I needed to jump start my efforts at work. 

The evenings were also fine with some opportunities to spend time with my Brother and his girlfriend Tracy.  Thursday Night was ane awesome dinner at Singe Vert - Striped bass served over asparaus rissoto with lobster bisque. The lava cake was almost the source of an international incident.  The gooey center was not so gooey on cake #1 or cake #2.  A skilled application of champagne by our waitress averted an incident.

Pablo came to training and enjoyed the labs.  NYC was quite balmy for October and he had to coll down in the mini-fridge.

Went out and had dinner with my brother and his girlfriend at Tenga.  An interesting Japanese Resatuarant of my brother's typical style.  Very odd, very low end but some delicious street food style cuisine.

Pablo arrived safely in the luggage and enjoyed a down day on Wednesday.  He mainly slept and watched TV.

The first day of training went well.  We got past the preliminary stuff that I already knew and started digging into the details.  Lokking forward tomorrow.  The facility is on 71 West 23rd and is pretty cool.  It's on the 5th floor of a Free Mason building.  The class size is very small so I am getting to really have a great dialogue with the instructor.  I think Pablo will be ocming to class with me tomorrow.

The Jeff Barnes & Joe Healy travelling MSDN Quarterly Briefing Redux will be in Melbourne tomorrow at the Space Coat Credit Union Headquarters building. Link. I was hopeful to ba able to attend the full day, but despite the time savings, the meetings keep piling up.  I am sure I will be able to stop in for a bit, but not the whole day.  Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

It was wort the early morning drive to Seminole Community College from Melbourne.  The directions provided on the flyer made it slightly challenging to find but all went well.  The key note from Carl Franklin was a humorous retrospective on his career and the progression of Microsoft Technologies from earlier days.  However due to technical difficulties with his guitar, we were not treated to a live performance (nor was there a live performance from old man Paul later that evening either).

I attended several good talks.  My favorites:

• Wes Dumey - Great primer on EDW and SSIS.  Looking forward to spending some time with SSIS, this was a good start.
• Richard Campbell - SQL Tips presentation.  I understand this is one of his regular presentations and I understand why.  Lot's of practical advice and an intro to some of SQL 2005's new features.  Very Technical and very humorous... this is one session that went by in a flash and left me wanting another hour. 
• Miguel Castro - Great Great presentation on extensibility patterns.  Lots of practical information with backing code samples.  I have never seen Miguel in person and was not disappointed.  Top notch speaker.

Overall, it was a great way to spend a Saturday.  Got to catchup with some developer friends I have not seen in a while.  I also got to make some new friends in the 'There's no more pizza, just wait for the next delivery' forced networking session with my starving co-attendees.  Lot's of thanks to ONetUg for a job well done!

We recently had some Microsoft PFE's (Premier Field Engineers) in to Harris Corporate to give us the crash cource in Team Foundation Server.  Apparantly Microsoft has a whole department (Premier Field Engineering) dedicated to customer's like Harris who back up a truck full on money to Redmond each year for licensing.  And what a department it is.  We traded in some of our support hours for the class as it has been a pretty good year for things not going too wrong.  The class was taught by Hamid Safi who was being shadowed by Cory Foy from the Tampa office.  Both guys were incredibly knowledgeable about TFS and almost any other Microsoft product we aksed about.  The class size was quite small and we got the opportunity to go off on some tangents when the in depth TFS discussion was beating our attention spans into submission.

Cory gave the presentation on the Testing portion of TFS / Visual Studio Team Edition where he used a great little Bowling Score class to demonstrate testing.  The discussion then worked its way down to the Agile / TDD.  His initial class was rudimentry and simply added scores.  Test cases were written for several of the simpler scenarios like frames of all zeroes and frames that did not include strikes or spares.  Youc an actually read about this in Cory's Blog entry here: http://www.cornetdesign.com/2006/11/bowling-revisted.html#links.  The demonstration and interactive portion of the talk began when we started covering the spare and strike cases.  Cory went into covering the spare scenarios and we quickly came up with a solution.  But while designing the solution, it became clear to me that the way we were implementing it was not very 'friendly' for implementing the upcoming strike cases.  And this is where the fun began... Cory preached the Agile / TDD gospel here: solve the problem you are workin on and then move on.  I was a bit resistant to his at first but also see its wisdom.  More time than I care to admit, I get bogged down in trying to design out the entire solution for eevery possible case before I get heavy into coding.  And I consequently do not start coding soon enough, do not have prototypes ready on time, and generally cut down on the time I have available to code.

Looking at the world with Agile / TDD glasses on is kind of nice.  I don't necessarily need to have the weight of the whole app or system on my shoulders at once.  I concentrate on getting done what needs to be done now and adding or refactoring in the next features that come down the pipe.  I shouldn't be afraid to write code that I will be throwing away in a few weeks.  The important thing is not the code but an understanding of the system that is being built and its rules.  Well written code will be adaptable to a degree, but when there is a signicant change to the system's requirements, we can't be afraid to throw that code away while retaining its tests and wisdom.

I am going to put an Agile / TDD book on the Christmas list.

So I signed up for BizTalk Server 2006 training with Dunn Training at the end of August.  I am somewhat familiar with the concepts behind BizTalk but have never really touched it.  Since we are currently using BizTalk 2004 in-house currently (upgrading to 2006 shortly), I wanted to familiarize myself.  I poked around the BizTalk developer center and found the BizTalk Virtual Labs.  This is the first time I tried these and found it to be a great introduction.  Microsoft actually hosts a Virtual PC they preconfigure for the lab that you access over the internet.  The development environment is loaded and so is BizTalk.  You just log on, run a script and follow the lab.  When I get some free time, I want to browse the rest of the Virtual Labs.