Brian H. Prince

All through my life, especially my career, I have run into rules that make no sense. Once I was given a 'beat down' by the IT department of a former employer for not following a specific rule. When I asked how I was to have known about the rule, they said it wasn't documented or published. I then asked if there is a list of other undocumented/secret rules I should know about. They didn't laugh. Too many times a rule or guideline is drawn up and rolled out to the masses. Then time goes on, and if things are going well, the business changes. [Side note: If your company doesn't change, then get a new job, because that company won't be around for long.] After the change, the rule is still blindly followed, doesn't make any sense, and people are still following it. Also, after this business change, the rule might need to be updated or removed entirely. If you don't remember the reason for the rule, then you won't know when it needs to be updated. This fo...

I love being a consultant. I love managing a consulting team. I can't think of something more fun to do. Over the years, I have learned a lot! I try to codify these lessons, so that our team can move farther and faster from all of our experiences. I will start posting some of my 'rules of thumb' here. These are not scientific. NONE of them are 100% strict or prefect, which is why they aren't just called 'Rules'. There is always a lot of gray area in consulting, and communication and truth will guide you in the gray areas. But until you get the experience, and comfort with clients, these should help you through some situations. Truth be told, most of these have come from me, or people I know, putting my foot in my mouth. I am sure these have all been covered on other web sites and blogs. But, since blogs are about conversion, I thought I would put some down here, and see what people have to say. What is a consultant? Well, that is a very ambiguous term, as mu...

The past 48 hours has seen a huge spike in registrations! The Early Bird discount of $50 (from $149 to $99) just expired about half an hour ago. I guess there are a lot of procrastinators out there. We have received word that the hotel still has some rooms left at the $88/night rate. So while the CodeMash registration fee is now $149, the hotel room is still a great value. We can't guarantee this hotel rate for long, because when they run out of rooms in our block, then you will have to get a normal room at the normal rate of around $150 or so (I don't know the real rate off the top of my head, but it is up there!).   So, act now! http://www.codemash.org/

Part of my job is to build an awesome application development team. A team involves a lot of different skill sets of course. This includes the developer, but also the architect, PM, BA, QA, DBA, etc. There are certain qualities that we look for when we are trying to find a new person to add to the team. These qualities are in addition to the certain skills and attitudes a specific position might require. I think all of these are things that you learn as you are young, and may be complimented by a certain amount of inborn talent. The following three qualities are the baseline to get started. These are qualities that can be hard to see in a person in interviews. We usually go through 3-5 rounds of interviews, which culminate in an 'audition' in front of the team. More on this later. So, what are these wonderful, Zen like qualities? 0. Learn Quickly, and Unlearn Quicker I used to say 'Everything you know today will be worthless in two years.' I was corrected by a tea...

There was a time when I had a lot more free time. I had time to go check the mail. The real mail I mean. To go get a drink. Perhaps to quickly read a blog post or two. Skim a tv show. Hug the kids. Lots of small activities I could fit into my day. Vista has ruined that. Damn you Microsoft! Now, the laptop boots quicker, hibernates/sleeps quicker (with one button or icon Mr. too many icons guy), runs quicker, loads quicker, searches quicker. I even upgraded my display driver from a standard Vista one to an ATI driver (I have a long hatred for ATI drivers, they always seemed to have problems, not like the nVidia drivers) without rebooting. What happened? It used to be : 1. download new driver 2. uninstall old diver. 3. reboot. 4. install new driver. 5. reboot. 6. waste 20 minutes reconfiguring the new driver to the settings I like. New Way: 1. Click 'update'. It was an optional update for the new ATI driver. 2. Wait a few minutes while it is download, and checkpoint created and i...

I have been running Vista for a while now. Not once have I had a real crash. A few applications have crashed here and there, and that is going to happen on any OS/platform. Applications have problems at times. It's no big deal. Each release of Vista during the RC/beta process was better and better. It was faster, and more cohesive. I really love the search in the control panel. Ever since Windows 3.1, I could never find the right icon for what I needed to do. The control panel was always the worst designed aspect of the system. Just a giant switchboard interface, with no real guidance, or rhyme or reason. It lacked any sense of Information Architecture. It was a firehose of options. Windows XP tried to fix that, with the groupings, and what not, but I always clicked it back to 'classic view' when I setup my profile because I had become comfortable with the dysfunctional menu, and didn't like the menu aimed for 'everyday' people. Vista has even more items in the ...

So, want to win a Zune ? Register for CodeMash here : www.codemash.org Put the blog badge on your blog, and blog about CodeMash. Then send an email with your blog link to contest@codemash.org . Don't have a blog? Just start one. There are plenty of places to start one. What? You're still reading? Go do it. Now, while you are thinking of it.

I just received confirmation from the content coordinator, Jason, over at CodeMash.org, that I have been selected to present my "Networking for Nerds" topic. Many of you are rolling your eyes. Why Brian, you ask, how could you be surprised and excited? You are after all one of the many co-founders. That is a very good question. The CodeMash tribe has set the bar so high for the quality of the content and speakers that we didn't want to assume that the planners would have be good enough. After all, what makes a good planner, doesn't neccesarily make a good speaker. So, go register while you still can, and come check out the best tech event there is.

Alexei is a long time friend of mine. We also happen to be co-workers. He is an egineer's engineer. Around our office, when referring to the skill set of a candidate for an opening, we use the term 'Alexei level' as a measuring stick. He is also one of the smartest guys I know. He takes every challenge head on, and beats it soundly, or nags me to death until he does. So I threw down the gauntlet. Alexei, I said, share some of that there know how. Alexei , welcome to the blogosphere (gosh I hate that term.)

Told you I had a lot of free time today. Dave Donaldson just published his NHibernateRepository assembly. Go read about it. I normally don't like 'link to something else' posts, but this is really cool, and I know we will get some great use out of it, since we use NHibernate quite often on our projects. Since I am linking to other posts, check out Jeff's post on 'Please advise...' . He and I share the same derision for this 'line'. - bhp

Wow! CodeMash is coming soon! We finally have registration up. Go forth and attend. -bhp

No, this isn't about CodeMash , but there is big news for that as well right now. I am at a local conference today. It is usually an OK conference, but it's not for developers, but for project managers. Usually, when I am at a conference, I write or talk about what sessions I am going to, and what I am learning, etc. Not today. Today I paid $15 so I could get on the wifi , and use some free time to either play NWN 2, or blog, of something. I will listed with an ear or two, but there are only two sessions I am really excited about. One of the biggest barriers I have seen to the adoption of agile practices is the PM's who think that they lose a job/control. In my experience, there is ten times as much planning on the project. It's that outside view (especially by PMs) that agile/ xp is about cowboy programming. That it's just a revolt of developers against structure and process. That is so wrong on so many levels. At this PM conference, there are several sessions on...

A book from Apress just came out called Pro BizTalk 2006 by George Dunphy and Ahmed Metwally. I don't know them, but I know Marty , who wrote the forward This is not a book review. I don't do that. I don't have the patience to think deep enough about a book, to reflect on it, and comment on it with the depth a potential would expect. Jim does a great job doing that, so I will leave it to him. But, I do categorize books on a simple continuum, and it goes something like this: 0 - what? you killed a tree for this? 1 - well thanks for the effort, I guess I wasn't the right audience 2 - learned a lot, will keep for reference reasons, and loan it generously 3 - my eyes are so wide open now they hurt in full sunlight 4 - I will make whoever I can read this, even if it is against their will. I will buy them a copy and ship it to them without telling them. This book is squarely in category four, if you are a BizTalk developer/architect. I am continually amazed at the quality of...

In a lot of BizTalk Server environments, performance is critical. It is not uncommon to hear for a client that they need to be able to process a specific level of transactions in a certain time window. Unfortunately, it is usually followed by the question: "So, how much hardware do I need?" There isn't anyway to answer that question because there are too many unknowns. How big are the messages? How complex are the pipelines and maps? What about the orchestrations, if any? What other systems or adapters will be involved? There are several strategies for finding out how much hardware you need. The first is a 'grow as you can' model. You deploy your system on a good foundation. A good SQL Server and a good single or pair of BizTalk servers. Once in production, slowly increase the traffic or consumers of the business process. As limits are reached, add more servers to the BizTalk group. This is a very organic model, and allows you to add only what you need. This mo...

It has been almost a year since a bunch of us had met at a Japanese restaurant last winter to discuss a new type of event. We had all delivered one day conferences before, and had success. But we wanted more, and we thought attendees did as well. We wanted something that spoke to technology a little further up the though chain. Instead of a whole day on how to do .NET, we wanted sessions on topics that affect all developers. Better architecture. Better development practices. Better guidance. We also wanted to learn more about our own platforms by learning about other platforms. To that end, we have formed an Ohio Non Profit organization whose goal is to put on technical education conferences. The first conference will be CodeMash Conference 2007. It will be held at the Kalahari, in Sandusky, Ohio on January 18th and 19th, 2007. We have arranged some major sponsors, and even more importantly, some GREAT speakers. Great Speakers? YES! Bruce Eckel, Neal Ford, and Scott Guthrie! Chec...

  This post was going to be a daily post about the SOA conference, as it was happening. Unfortunately, I had been on the road for weeks during that period, and then my stay at the conference was cut short for personal reasons. Here are some of my notes, and I will probably blog about some the topics in more depth as time permits.   The annual SOA conference at MS has just kicked off. We are expecting some major announcements pertaining the future of the BizTalk platform. I have some ideas about what they will say, but I will hold out for the keynotes to see for sure. A lot of well known speakers will be here this week, and I look forward to talking about SOA and what advances there are in helping driving business value. David Chappell is giving the first keynote right now. He defines some fundamental aspects of SOA (which is universally difficult to put a good definition on) as: - Standardize on SO communication protocol (SOAP is what made this 20 years long overnig...

We have an internal discussion going on at my job about how Ruby is eating into the Java ecology. It seems that the Java community has become VERY interested in Ruby. The .NET crowd is too, but it seems the Java tribe picked it up quicker, and began running with it faster. I made a half-intended remark in that discussion that it seemed Ruby was eating Java's lunch. Easier to use, developers like the tools and language better, and they feel more productive. Our Java team lead fired back that Ruby is eating .NET's lunch as well. And he may be be right. I hope it is. But this post isn't really about whether Ruby will dominate in 12 months (my prediction is it won't, not in the classic sense.) This post is about what does the effect of Ruby (and it's ilk like Python) have on our ecologies, both Java and .NET. By ecology, I mean the community strength and presence, thought leadership, toolsets, open source projects and modern development practices. I think that the R...

I have the honor of speaking at the Cincinnati Programmers Guild on August 29th, 2006. It's a Tuesday, at 6:30pm. It will be my first formalized presentation on 'Networking for Deveopers'. The topic does not cover how to meet people in your industry, but rather what you need to know as a developer about networks. Troy wrote a great abstract: The talk is aimed at giving developers some useful insight into how our computers get hooked together, talk to each other and ultimately make our applications work. If you've ever spent too much time trying to track down a bug in your program that turned out to be a firewall issue or something else networking-related, then this discussion is for you. And if you don't know much about computer networks, it's a great time to learn before you're expected to know all about them for your next project. If you are in the area, see if you can drop by and say hi!

A friend of mine, Greg Finzer, who is also a great developer, has launched a company to sell components for developers. Greg has a great way of distilling complex needs down to simple to use components. Check them out at www.kellermansoftware.com . Why am I posting this? I like to support my friends. I also like to support people that have an idea, and take risks to at least try to make them a reality. There is nothing worse than forever wondering wether your idea would have worked or not.

I just finished my mini-tour of Ohio with the talk about BizTalk Server and WF. The sessions went well, although I ran out of time in Toledo, and wasn't able to complete a more complex demo. The goal of the session is to introduce workflow and the two major platforms to do it with, so I think I at least accomplished that goal. I want to thank NWNUG and the Dayton .NET Developers Group for having me. As usual, it was a lot of fun. I think the funniest part was in Dayton. They were reading off names for the the swag, and the announcer couldn't pronounce the last name of the winner and the first name had been abbreviated to just T. The announcer started spelling it, and a women (I actually should say THE woman, as she was the only one) stood up and said that it was her, and pronounced a name that most likely used every letter in the alphabet. Someone in the audience ( James from work) said "Why didn't you just say 'The Girl'?". Everyone laughed. James is f...

I will be speaking about BizTalk Server and WF at NWNUG July 25th (Tuesday). They have a really interesting UG format. The first portion is meant to be easier content (level 100 type stuff). They then break for pizza, and then the second session is related to the first, but of a high level. A great way to help people ease into the water! Jim has graciously invited me to speak at the Dayton .NET Developers Group again. That will be this Wednesday (July 26th). The topic will be very similar to the NWNUG session. With BizTalk Server close to my hear, and knowing where MS is taking the product, workflow is near and dear to my heart. Mark my words, the lanscape for WF/BizTalk/middleware will be dreastically different in two years. There are major mind shifts happening, and I think it is very exciting. BizTalk server skills have always been a niche need, much like HIPAA, X.12, etc. Soon most developers will have at least basic skills in workflow and related technolgies, just like SQL serv...

I have recently finished a project for a client that used the IBS model. Infopath -> BizTalk -> Sharepoint. In this application the Infopath client used several web services. Some were hosted in IIS, and some in BizTalk. When the user submitted the form, it was sent to a BizTalk orchestration exposed as a web service for processing before being stored in a WSS doclib. [In IP you have to send only the data, not the entire form, to the web service.] The orchestration was nicknamed the router. It did some server side validation (you should never rely on client side validation, that is just there for the user's UX benefit). It also dynamically configured the WSS send port, and did some other housecleaning tasks. Each form was for a different business unit (more than fifty options). The router determined which site (based on audit year) and doc lib (based on business unit) the form should be sent to. While doing this project we learned a bit about the WSS adapter that we hadn'...

Well, it's Father's Day, and I have finally recovered from TechEd. I think I slept most of Saturday just trying to regain from the exhaustion. Out session on designing BizTalk solutions on Thursday morning went much better than I had hoped. I expected ten people to show up because it as was at 8:00am, which is a hard time to get up on the Thursday of TechEd. About 100 people showed up, and our score was 8.5 on a scale of 1-9! We were in the top ten of all 1,006 sessions until later that day. We got bumped to #11. Still a great showing. Personally, I think I have done better before, but the crowd seemed to have liked it. I ended up going to several IIS7 sessions, a session on DSL's and frameworks, and went to some other great sessions/chalk talks. The new architecture for IIS7 is really awesome. I can see how it will really help in the future. The first major step they did was to take the core functionality that supplied authentication, caching, dir browsing, static file ser...

Wow! What a day. I needed some time off from going to sessions so I hung out in the architectre TLC area. I got to watch an arcCast be recorded. The topic was about the new service library GAT tools for patterns and practices. It was really intersting to see them talk about these new features. You should check out the kit. They have a CTP now, and will release at the end of July. The best talk so far, at all of TechEd was the SOA architecture talk by Beat Schwegler. He was a great speaker, very calm but very engaging. His slide deck was definitely outside what the content owners have been forcing us speakers to follow. I think that is cool. I have been toying with swapping to a serperate deck at the last minute. We shall see. I do want good scores, but I also want to be asked to come back next year. One of his points was that services should be designed around the What of business, not the how. Developers tend to immediately think of how, when an architect should always focus on the wh...

The 'blogosphere' (always hated that term) is a glow once more with a daily flood of TechEd updates. So, Yet Another Tech Ed Conference Update. I had a depressing start to the day. My first session was terrible, and the speaker was bad. The last ten minutes were what I thought the whole session was going to be about. I need to learn more about the new Office Scorecard Manager so that I can use it on a few upcoming projects (both internal and external). The speaker spent most of the time demoing and talking about BizTalk BAM. BAM is awesome, don't get me wrong, but the topic was supposed to be about scorecards. I learned my lesson, and should of bailed as soon as it was proving to be sucky. My second session was to be on building Finanical system with BizTalk and human components. Brian L and I thought maybe they were going Borg on us. But then decided that a human heart was likely NOT at the center of any financial system. James pointed out this was possible, if that heart...

So, day zero is nearly complete. Today is Sunday. I arrived yesterday after completely missing my plane. I thought my flight was on Sunday, and when I went to print out my itinerary Sat afternoon I made the connection that 6/10 was indeed not Sunday, but that someone had rudely moved it to Saturday. This would have been ok had I noticed this incovenient change before my flight. But I noticed this at 1:30, and my flight left at 11:00. I called up the travel people, and they re-booked me for a flight later that day. Got to the Hilton just fine thanks to them. While on the shuttle from the hotel I hooked up with Brian Loesgen, a fellow MVP and VTS'er. I spent the day registering for the event, and doing my initial check in at the speaker lounge. Registering was quick and painless, and instead of a normal laptop bag this year, we get Man-Purses. They are actually quite nice bags, your laptop goes in vertically however. The speaker lounge was less 'lounge-y' than I expected and ...

I have been asked by some friends at the user group to post the slide deck for the agile talk. I put them up at my new site on officelive. www.brianhprince.com . Lower right hand side. The editing tools for office live aren't even close to what SharePoint can do, and I am starting to see some of the limitations. Anyway, enjor the deck. I also included all of the hand outs, etc. Let me know if you have questions. -bhp

There will finally be HOAP in Columbus. I will be doing Hands on Agile Practices this Thursday (5/25/2006) at CONDG.org. It is at the Microsoft building in the Polaris area. There have been plenty of great talks on Agile/xp, and what it means. They explain the why really well. The beliefs, etc. After those though I have always wondered about the how. This talk will focus on those things that WE do. HOAPfully this will help you adapt your practices. Then, as usual, it's hoggy's afterward. -bhp

I have the pleasure of presenting my BizTalk 101 talk to the Findlay, Oh area .NET users group on 5/24/2006. I really like driving up there and working with them. They always have great questions. If you are in the area, you should drop by and say hi. I will cover what this thing does, and how you can use it in your enterprise, your application, and how it can make your life better. :) -bhp

‘Where do I put my business rules and logic? Where does validation fit in?’ I don’t know how often I hear this from clients. It is always asked in one or another during most coaching or development engagements. Sometimes it is because of BizTalk, and other times it is because of Atlas (or some other front end framework). Our first rule of validation: ‘All validation is done on the server side.’ The business layer is responsible for validating its input. We never trust input coming from outside the business layer. This is a fundamental guideline for application security. Any validation on the web client is purely to support a great user experience. It should definitely be there, but it is just for the user’s needs, not for the system’s needs. So, where do you put your business rules? As with many things with BizTalk, it depends. The first aspect to consider is how you are using BizTalk in your system. If you are using it as middleware to integrate several different systems (sort of an E...

I have setup a site for myself at www.brianhprince.com . I am keeping my blog here. I setup the site with MS Office Live. I wanted to get the domain name for free, and have an easy place to host files or stuff that I reference in my blog. I also wanted to try out the new service. It isn't bad for a beta. There are some significant features missing though. I can't get rid of the lame border around linked images, nor can I use custom HTML/CSS to place my own content. Even the content web part for Sharepoint can do that. -bhp

I am getting very excited about going to TechEd 2006. Not only do I get to go, but I get to present. This will be great. I will be attending the second half of the MVP Engagement Event Sunday afternoon, and the influencer's party on Wednesday. Keith and I were just told that our session has been booked for that Thursday (6/15) at 8:00am! So, it looks like I won't be partying too much at the Influencer's Ball. Our session is : CON329 - BizTalk Server Solution Lifecycle: Planning and Design (Part 1) Level: 300 Part one of a three-part series of sessions covering the design, implementation and management of a BizTalk Server solution. The first session covers the common scenarios where BizTalk is an appropriate solution and what questions you should be asking to develop appropriate timelines, resource plans and deliverables. This session provides experienced IT project managers, who may not have previously worked with BizTalk Server, the background needed to successful launch a...

I am a big fan of simplicity, which is an unusual trait for us architects. But sometimes, it can waste some of your time. In BizTalk 2004, while using VS2003, if you wanted to push up your solution to the server to test it, you had to (chant with me now) RE-build, RE-GAC, RE-start [the host]. This can be a huge hassle, and slows down your momentum during development. To the point that you almost avoid it as long as you can. This always caused problems for me, since I would be tempted to break the 'change one thing at a time rule.' This just led to more frustration on my part. With the new BizTalk 2006 developer tools that plug into VS2005 they made this so much more simpler. You now right click the project, and choose 'deploy.' And that's it. It's all handled for you under the covers. VS will rebuild (if needed), upload, regac, etc. to get you new code running. Very cool. It made huge increases in my productivity, and has made it easier for new BizTalk developer...

Last Tuesday, Michael and I went to CINNUG to present our Hands on Agile Practices talk. This talk has been received well before, especially in Dayton. Something was in the air this time though. It might of been the Pepsi Michael pushed on me before the session started (I don't normally drink soda.) The group was in a great mood, and we had a ball. The time flew by, and everyone was laughing and hollaring. CINNUG meets at a training center. In the room next door there was a trial session of their PM classes so that potential students could get a taste. I can only imagine that the room was filled with eager PM's to learn what these classes were like, and all they could hear was us carrying on in our room. I am sure many of them signed up for developer's classes that night. It was obvious developers have a lot more fun. It was also good to retain my track record of filling the room at CINNUG as well! :) All kidding aside, it was great to see the lights go on with some people...

I have been struggling to get some 278 (service approval) HIPAA messages in through my BizTalk box (using the accelerator). I was stumped. I received some sample messages from colleagues, and I still couldn't get the messages processed. Then Keith (on the BizTalk team at MS) gave me an idea. I started up Notepad2 to look at the messages, and turned on the encoding/hidden characters. Voila! The line endings were CRLF. Changed them all to LF, and everything started going through! Yeah! In hindsight, it always seems to be the smallest thing that is the hardest to solve. I remember that when I was first using C, I would spend hours to fix an issue, and it turned out to be a missing semi-colon. For future reference, here is a small sample (of course wrapping is all messed up): ISA*00* *00* *ZZ*7654321 *ZZ*1234567 *050101*1200*U*00401*000000054*0*T*:GS*HI*7654321*1234567*20050101*0717*141797357*X*004010X094A1ST*278*0002BHT*0078*11*20030721071727*20030721*071727HL*1**20*1NM1*X3*2*NYSDOH**...

I have occasionaly had to work on HIPAA related projects. I never had to get very deep in the spec (there always seemed to be others around to do that heavy lifting). Recently I have had time to install the accelerator for BizTalk, and work with it. First off, the accelerators are a group of software add-ons for BTS that added new functionality for specific markets. SWIFT, HIPAA, HL7, etc. The HIPAA package adds all of the related schemas from WPC ( THE company that builds and maintains the schemas), and an EDI engine that can process the edi formatted messages. This engine runs as a service on Windows Server, and can be configured to watch a FILE drop or an FTP drop for in/out going edi formed HIPAA messages. It will grab the message, validate it, find the appropriate party from BTS, and then convert it to XML and drop it in the message box. The engine will also handle the functional responses often needed in a HIPAA exchange. These message (997, etc.) are responses back to the sender...

I was nominated for an Microsoft MVP Award (Architect) many weeks ago. I always wanted to be an MVP, but never really thought I would get one. It always seemed like something other people got. Authors, freelancers, etc. And with limited awards to go around, I felt for a long time that my freelancer friends (remember I work for a not so souless corp, I ain't no freelancer) should get them only because MVP awards have a major effect on their personal marketing and visibility. But I was nominated, and I felt honored just for that. Then the weeks started to slowly slide by. I was on pins and needles the whole time. I would obsessively check my email at all hours (even more than normal). There were days when I would check my office snail mail four or more times (even though we only get one delivery per day!) The only thing that helped pass the time was Oblivian ( see dave's post ). Today I got in late (helpng a client deploy a BizTalk application), and finally checked my email. Ther...

It's spring cleaning time! What's different on my blog design? Not only have I been working in the yard, but I ditched the Google Adsense banner today. I only added it because it was a simple check box when setting up blogger. I wanted to go through the process to see how it worked. I got sick of it lurking up there, so out it goes! Second, I changed my stat provider to feedBurner, on Jim Holmes advice. I also added a RSS icon. Never noticed there wasn't one there. I just assumed there was one in the blogger template, but I guess not. Third, and best, I have registered for Tech-Ed 2006! This is going to be awesome. I attended the PDC in LA this past fall, and met a lot of great people. This time I get to not only go to the conference, but also I have been asked to be a speaker! I was totally floored and honored when I was asked. I will be co-presenting with Keith Bauer, the district's Program Manager for BizTalk. Our topic will be "BizTalk Server Solution Lifecycl...