Tag: linkedin

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Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

#sqlpass Summit General Thoughts

Was at #sqlpass last week. Great conference/trainings, and people. Hopefully I will go next year (I am planning on it!) General thoughts/overview..

1. Should have done pre/post cons
2. Drink more water (funny thing is, no water during refreshment breaks? just juice/coffee/soda)
3. Leave room in your luggage for schwag
4. Bring more business cards.
5. Introduce yourself to more people
6. Realize that the level #’s on the courses aren’t always indicative of the content.
7. Go to sessions with ambiguous titles, they are usually the new stuff/undercover stuff
8. The Daily Grill (restaurant attached to the Sheraton) is the most expensive place in the world
9. Plan flights with more time in between if connecting. We missed our connecting flight because of delays.
10. Put the thing on your door from Sheraton to not upkeep your room, you get 5 $ coupon a day
11. Wifi sucks, use your 3G or EVFO/Mifi or whatever
12. They keynotes each day can be hit or miss, but still make sure to go to all of them.
13. Leave sessions 2 min early if you want to get a good seat at a highly anticipated next session
14. Take the back stairs from level 6 to level 4 instead of the escalator for a shortcut
15. “game” gameworks – my team knows what I mean 🙂
16. Bush Garden is small. But you can still rock #sqlkaraoke . Just don’t sit on the couch in the bathroom.
17. You can walk pretty much anywhere (Pike St, Space Needle, etc)
18. Go talk to vendors, but don’t let them suck you in. Stick mainly to the PASS area and Microsoft area (at least that is what I think)
19. Try to take advantage of the games and contests held throughout (Foursquare, Vendor check ins, Wheel of SQL) but don’t let it consume you.
20. If you go into a session that you find boring or not relevant, don’t feel afraid to leave and go to another – the sooner the better.
21. Order the DVD’s
22. Take advantage of BOF luncheon.
23. Follow the twitter stream .. #sqlpass
24. Tweet your encounters and info
25. Blog about it after 🙂

So much more to talk about, I will try to decompress it all and throw up a few posts, but yeah, well worth it, so much information and people and just thinking outside the box, and it just gets you to think and become motivated. Great time!


Categories
Geeky/Programming

Thoughts on the Future of Microsoft Development #pdc2010

The PDC was last week. I have never been (was scheduled once but didn’t end up going), but I try to keep up with everything that they have online, and now even more the blogs and tweets. Here are my thoughts after digesting everything I could.

Strategy

I’m not sure this much of one.. but Microsoft is still trying to figure out and find their development strategy. From back in the 90’s when it was Win32 then MFC and ASP Classic with VBScript + Office/VBA, to then Managed code (.NET C#/VB.NET, and ASP.NET Stacks).. and then WPF/Silverlight, they still and always will keep changing so that developers have to keep learning new things and looking at the next shiny object. There hasn’t been much of a convergence or steady path though. It seems once a developer or team picks up a technology it is already outdated, and I am guessing this will never change.

Anyways, after watching the videos and seeing discussion, this is what I think..

1. HTML5

The web! Ahh, the web. The one place there are no restrictions. Apple is saying, develop under our restrictions, or go out to the web with HTML5, and Microsoft is going to follow suit. If it was ASP Classic, or ASP.NET WebForms, and then MVC, and now HTML5, the web will be around for a while and Microsoft doesn’t want to get left behind. For a while they were touting Silverlight as the “new web” or whatever, but that seems to have changed.

Web applications are good for some things – well, a ton, but not everything. You can’t do some of the richer things you can do on a client on the web, deeper integrations. You can’t really run a web app offline either, no matter what people say, it just won’t be the same as a fat client. Anything I hear from MSFT that says, it does “X” if you use IE9 and I just cringe. Forget IE, let’s make it work for all browsers.

2. Silverlight

If you are developing for the WP7 Phone (who has one? yeah – I thought so), you use Silverlight, other than that, not 100% sure where they are going with this. Use it for video streaming? Games? Flash killer? Basic RIA application that needs a little more integration with the desktop than a standard web app, but less than a fat client. The problem is, what you can and cannot do in Silverlight changes every release – In my opinion they should open it up more, let you do more things with the desktop. Let devs focus on just one set of rules. I have a feeling that Silverlight might just be used as a “glue” technology instead of a “main” technology. The glue between Web and Windows?

3. WPF

Unknown here. Not much at PDC, but some talks. Winforms (like Webforms) is a forgotten technology at MSFT, so to all the people who jumped on those trains, sorry, you need to hurry up and get on the new trains. I have read some places that WPF is the future for desktop/fat client apps at MSFT, and other places where there is no Product Manager, there is barely a team, no support, they are letting it die (ala Winforms), but who knows for sure. What should a developer do? Enterprise and Line of Business applications that need desktop integrations can’t be created in Web or Silverlight, and .NET developers really don’t want to fall back to C++ (although Evernote did – and saw a huge performance gain). Microsoft needs to instill some confidence in developers that a technology they would choose isn’t neglected – to me that is just piss poor business practices. On one hand let’s market the hell out of it (which with WPF really hasn’t been the case, but marketed way more than Win32 or Winforms) and get everyone on the bandwagon, and then let it die, and 2 years later say “X” is the brand new toy you need to focus on. They finally are doing some things at MSFT in WPF, but to what extent? Black magic embedding WPF controls in Winforms or Win32 apps? To me, seeing the pretty awesome data binding stuff with WPF makes it a no brainer. Why not extend the enhanced data binding to Winforms? Why make devs switch?

 

Like I said, more convergence of tools. Use expression blend for front ends? Yes! – but it should be for everything, Windows/Web/RIA, not just Windows/RIA. Language constructs getting to the same level no matter where you code? Yes – sounds like a good thing to me, so why is it so tough?

The new Async framework looks sweet, what else for Windows devs on the .NET side? Can we get some more detailed strategy from Microsoft on where things are going? What to focus on? Companies and developers are stuck making a leap of faith when choosing which technology to use – to make sure they aren’t left in the dust. On the Apple side, it is pretty clear – use Objective C and you can code for Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc. use HTML5 for the web. Should we all be using Java? or C++? Why have .NET devs struggle to figure out what technology to use? So bottom line..

 

1. Web – HTML5/ASP.NET MVC, WCF services, etc

2. Mobile – Silverlight (aside: what ever happened to the .NET CF?)

3. Windows – WPF, WPF, WPF (but don’t forget about console apps and windows services!)

It would be interesting to go to Microsoft dev shops around the globe and do surveys..

“Hey there – what are most of your websites and web services written in?”

    Answer: “Webforms and ASMX services -  we are looking at MVC”

“Hello, what are you doing for mobile development?”

    Answer: “Well, since WP7 phone just came out and who knows if it will take off, we do everything in Objective C for iOS devices or just have a mobile website in ASP.NET webforms, or we have some Java based Android app, and some crappy Blackberry apps or something..”

“Hola, what are you doing for your LOB desktop apps, etc?”

    Answer: “Well we have a few legacy VB6 apps, some Win32 apps, and we have poured tons of time into Winforms over the last 7-8 years, but we want to start looking at WPF”

I bet a majority of the answers would be similar to the ones above. Who the hell is doing anything in Silverlight? Niche apps/markets? What about WPF? A few, and some proof of concepts, but yeah, even the MVC stuff is probably on a slower adoption rate then MSFT would like. Not sure how they solve this problem. One way would be to STOP CHANGING THINGS EVERY TWO YEARS so that dev shops can focus and incrementally move to the new technologies, but I don’t see that happening.

Where do we go from here? Well, I am pretty excited to see what .NET 5 brings. 🙂

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Visual Studio 2010: Console App, Where is my System.Web?

If you create a new Console App in Visual Studio 2010, and you want to reference System.Web, you might start scratching you head. Why?

Looks like Visual Studio 2010 creates new Console Apps targeting the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile instead of the .NET Framework 4. Why? No idea, but you can change it and then reference System.Web

You can change the setting by going to Properties on your project, then the Application tab, and changing the drop down of the Target Framework to .NET Framework 4

image

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Visual Studio 2010: Adding a Web Reference

In previous versions of Visual Studio, you could just right click on a project and choose “Add Web Reference” to add a reference to a asmx web service. In Visual Studio 2010, when you right click, you will see “Add Service Reference”… similar, but not the same. If you reference an asmx you will get some weird objects back in your proxy web service object, each method with Request/Response at the end. You may want this, you may not. If you want to get the legacy web reference back, here is what you need to do.

Right Click on a project, Add Service Reference, then click on Advanced, the Add Web Reference. Then you will be able to add your good old asmx reference like you used to in earlier versions of Visual Studio.

image

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Work

Looking to Hire…

I have been managing two different groups @ Trek -  (Business Intelligence and .NET Software Development) for a while now, and we have some openings we are trying to file, so that is why I am putting this out here.

First role, looking to hire a Microsoft .NET Windows Forms developer, or someone with web experience looking to get into Windows Forms and eventually WPF/Silverlight, and also Windows Services. C# is the language.

Second role, looking for a Microsoft Business Intelligence Developer/DBA – SSAS/SSIS/SSRS, DBA experience preferred. Working on cubes, and ETL’s and reports and DBA stuff.

Shoot me an email at steve_novoselac@trekbikes.com with your resume and info.

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Agile

Agile: Epics

So most people are familiar with “projects”. Something you do, have an end goal, usually a budget, resources, plan, etc. Sometimes you have projects within projects. Like a good example may be thinking of the next version of Microsoft Windows as the main project and revamping solitaire for the next version as the “epic”. Your end goal is to keep your main project moving forward, and do stories that apply to that project, but you also might run into mini projects along the way that could cross over numerous sprints, and you want to “group” like/similar stories together to form an “epic”.

What is nice about epics is they still let you do your sprints, and stories as normal,but you have a more higher reaching goal to get a set of stories complete to complete your epic. It also lets you look back and then see how many stories and points you did toward that epic and understand the effort,etc that went to completing it.

Use epics to group stories together to form a common goal for a similar “thing”. It will let you say “let’s focus on the blah epic” and you can make sure you get that piece of functionality done and track it and see all those stories together in the end.

P.S. Blogged from my iPad

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SQLServerPedia Syndication

SQL DBA: Starting Fresh, What do you do?

If you start at a new place, as a SQL Server Database Administrator (DBA), what is one of the first things you should do? In my opinion, after figuring out the key servers and instances running you need to support… is setting up alerts.

By setting up alerts you can start to get an idea of what is not working and start focusing on things that are failing, etc first. All the while you can still check on backups and getting everything else set up and working, but if you don’t have alerts, well, you are blind.

Alerts should tell you..

1) When a physical server is down (network)
2) When backups fail
3) When jobs fail
4) When logins fail
5) I/O issues
6) the “critical” 14, 15, 16, 17
7) crazy cpu and memory issues
8) services going up and down
9) if your SAN is up/down
10) Hard drive getting close to 100%

and that is just the beginning. What other alerts should DBA’s set up *right away* to make sure they are on top of things?


Categories
Product Reviews

BuddyFuse integrates Google Talk and Twitter into Windows Live Messenger

Ran across this today. Setting up a laptop, and one team we use Windows Live Messenger, the other Google Talk. I know there is Trillian, Digsby, etc, but I just wanted to use Windows Live Messenger, but still IM Google Talk contacts

BuddyFuse integrates Google Talk and Twitter into Windows Live Messenger

BuddyFuse to the rescue! Seems to be working well. Why just Windows Live Messenger? I like the presence it brings with Outlook 2010 and TFS, etc. More tightly coupled with the OS. Like using iChat on a Mac.

Categories
Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

PC vs Mac

Microsoft has published a site, PC vs Mac

There is only one thing you have to know, everything else is fluff.

You will never get a blue screen of death on a Mac. Oh, I got one last night on a Windows machine. With an xlsx half way open and not done yet. Lovely.

done. game over. Mac wins.

And I love Windows, for Development and Business Intelligence. It is the hardware and software that have problems working together. Should Microsoft try to build a PC? Hardware? (ala Xbox?) Would it perform better? Maybe. Would they have more control? Of course, the hardware and software could integrate nicely. I would buy a mythical Microsoft computer before buying a regular PC. Just like I would buy a Mac rather than a Hackintosh 🙂

Categories
Business Intelligence

SSRS Report Creation Checklist

You can whip out reports in SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) very quickly with the report builders (2.0 and 3.0 are money).

But what should you remember to do each time, or information to get?

  1. Where does the data come from (GL, Sales, etc) – we could use a cube or datawarehouse, or staging, or Other system, etc.
  2. Report Name (on Report Manager)
  3. Short description of the purpose – to appear under report name on report manager
  4. Should it go into an existing folder, or a new folder, or the user’s folder?
  5. Who should have access?
  6. How should it be consumed? Email (and what, excel, pdf, web archive, etc), To a file share, User Ran?
  7. What parameters should be available? a. What are the defaults?
  8. Can we get a rough mockup of how it should look? a. Can we get an existing report (if avail, crystal, or excel, etc)
  9. Does it need to print on a 8×11 page?
  10. How often are you going to run it? (Hourly,Daily, Weekly, Monthly, ad-hoc)
  11. Is it going to be informational, or used to export data and manipulate? (if export – is there something else we can do?)
  12. If tabular data, does it need to be sortable?
  13. Do snapshots need to be taken? a. How many do we save? b. How often to take them? c. Do you need ability to delete them?

you get the idea, the list could go on and on. So creating that report is simple, but actually getting and doing all the things necessary to get it done “correctly” is more time consuming.

What other things can you think of for the list?