Space Coast .Net User Group

Sorry I missed last night's presentation, I am very curious about the Amazon Web Services.

BizTalk Bug

Still waiting on Microsoft to see if this blocking bug can be fixed with their patch.  It's taking longer than they expected for the hot fix.

New Data Warehouse project

Got to give have a technical proposal review with Harris' CIO this morning.  Went pretty well.  Had some excellent feedback and am looking forward to diving into my new HR Data Warehouse project!

SSIS Training in NY

Going to New York to get SSIS training on ETL for dimensional models.  The class is called Data Warehousing with SSIS (SQL Server 2005 Integration Services) and is offered by Symphic.  It promises to be a good class and I get to visit my brother in NYC at the same time.  I've brought my daughters Pablo stuffed animal with me and he'll be posing for pictures while Daddy's away on his trip.  Stay tuned....

I generally and very fond of webhost4life.  However, every once in a while, something just changes by itself.  Most recently, I had several permisssions change on my directories that brok DasBlog.  I didn't notice this untilI wrote a bunch of posts and didn't verify they were actaully posted after hitting save.  Lesson Learned.  Verify all posts.

I offered to give my VAB presentation to the Harris .Net Focus Group for both the experience and to encourage others to present.  It turns out that the engineering manager who sponsors the gorup had some money to get it catered.  And oh... they are also going to do it in conjunction with the knowledge transfer group.  40+ people to hear me speak.  I must modestly admit that it may have been the free food that brought out the attendees and not just the drawing power of my name alone.  It was a great experience and I trimmed the presentation down to 45 minutes which I think was perfect.  I had the uncomfortable expereince of fileding questions from a ventriliquist.  This guy kept asking questions and I could get not get a beed on his face to make eye contact.  It was crazy!  Thanks to all of those who attended and those who asked questions.  My next goal is to present at the Orlando.Net Code Camp.  Maybe a Data Warheousing primer.

We've been having a heck of a time lately with the BizTalk working queues filling up with ghost messages.  The level of blocking in the Database had become unbearable at certain times.  We had no idea where it was coming from as our activity levels have remained relatively constant (we hadn't found out about the queues yet).  We worked with MS support to do some cleanup of our produciton environment.  This seemed to help but then the queues kept filling up again.  After some focuse digging, we managed to stear ourselves and MS support to the solution.  A new hotfix just off the presses - KB936536.  We've applied it today and will see if it works.  I will post a more complete write up in a few days.

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!

The meeting was a success.  Before leaving work to go to the meeting I checked the clicktoattend roster.  14 people signed up.  I was hoping for a smaller group for my first presentation but was none the less suprised and delighted by the interest.  The actual turnout was solid and all went fairly well.  Lots of good questions and even got corrected on one or two points.  The presentation went for an hour and a half and I only counted a few people dozing off.  Here is the slide deck for those who are interested.

The User Group has had strong turn out the last two meetings and I think we will be having a strong next meeting with Cory Foy on Ruby for C# Developers.  Used to be a half dozen folks sitting in the room.  I am hopeful a combination of good technical content and community are really driving the groups success.  I made a strong push to have more members deliver content and try to trim down on the Microsoft bleeding edge speakers.  Not that I don't enjoy the Microsoft bleeding edge content, but most people won't get to implement Silverlight or LINQ for a while.  The talks on subjects like WCF, Enterprise Library, Ruby, Extensibility Patterns, etc. seem to generate more genuine interest and leave attendees with value.

One more word of thanks for all who attended.  If you have any feedback, please feel free to email me!