Looking forward to giving my first presentation at a large event.  Come here me talk about using SSIS to handle Slowly Changing Dimensions in a data warehouse.  For more info on the event: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/eventhome.aspx?eventid=32.  I hope to see you there!

Giving a presentation on using SSIS to handle Slowly Changin Dimensions tomorrow night at the Space Coast SQL User Group.  Goto http://spacecoast.sqlpass.org for details.  If you can't make it, then try and catch me at SQL Saturday on the 17th - http://www.sqlsaturday.com/eventhome.aspx?eventid=32

The run this Thursday will be the dry run so come to see me bumble through the presentation.  Come the Saturday to see the polished version.

SQLSaturday is a training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server. This event will be held October 17, 2009 at Seminole Community College, 100 Weldon Boulevard, Sanford, FL 32773. Admittance to this event is free, but to to the challenging nature of fund raising this year there will be a $10 fee due at registration to cover the cost of lunch (a great boxed lunch from Jason's Deli). All other costs are covered by donations and sponsorships. Please register soon as seating is limited, and let friends and colleages know about the event.

More Info: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/eventhome.aspx?eventid=32

Back in early 2002, my company sponsored a bunch of it's developers to get their MCSDs.  These were the days of VB6 and COM+.  After many evenings at a local college and 4 certification tests - we were MCSDs.  PrimMarily a web developer, I didn't get to put much of the COM+ to use, but the SQL Server 2000 Design & Implementation class proved extremely useful.  With my newly minted MCP & MCSD next to my name, I set out to upgrade my career.  Two of my next three jobs were made possible by interviewers who noted my credentials.  Although the credentials didn't get me the job, they got my resume the leg up it needed to get in the door.  For this, I am always grateful for having done the certification.

Over the following years, I passed the .Net solutions architechture certification but didn't do much after this.  Come 2007, I began wokring with BizTalk Server 2006.  Now anyone who has worked with this product knows it is huge.  There are numerous parts to this technology stack and each more complex than the next.  After some training and a book, we were off developing solutions.  I got the opportunity to attend Teched 2008 Developer in Orlando last year and used some of my down time to pass the Biztalk certification test.  I spent many hours in the lab doing test prep and reviewing the online test guide with some books.  I managed to pass on the first try despite the ridiculous number of social events I felt compelled to attend.  Returning to work I not only had a deeper knowledge for the core BizTalk development I was doing, but I also had a stronger understanding of the entire stack from BAM to BAS but also BRE and a few key points about orchestrations that always eluded me.

I am now sadly looking at my VB6 era MCSD and hoping to upgrade it.  I've used the online planner and have a good feel for what I need to do to reach MCPD - lots more tests.  The study room and being locked away from work at a conference center helps get things moving faster.  So regardless of wether I get to join the Bus, more certifications and visits to MS learning are in my future.  They have proven their worth to me both in job seeking and comprehensive study of the technology.

PS - Anybody reading this who doesn't know about the Get On The Bus Contest - Go here: http://blogs.technet.com/mslcommunity/archive/2009/04/09/another-chance-to-get-on-the-bus-or-fly-directly-to-teched.aspx

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

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.