Brian H. Prince

The new Zune's are out. The tv ads are quite 'abstract'. You should check them out on YouTube (or wherever). The famous pink bunny one is my favorite.   Video: Zune TV Spot There are some great new features. I like the new zunePad interface (since I still have a v1, I looked at the V2 hardware in the store). But my favorite feature is the new wireless syncing. I have been asking for this feature for years. I want to leave the Zune in my car, and when I pull into the garage, have it connect to my computer over wifi to sync. That's just awesome! And there is awesome support for podcasting. A great feature there is that you can unsubscribe form a pod cast on the device. When you go into the marketplace, there are hundreds of podcast series available, most for free. You can also provide your own URL if you want. You can change some settings for each series. Such as how many of the shows to keep (from just the newest one, to all of them), what order they should be played ...

CodeMash v2.0.0.8 is coming quicker than you know. The Early Bird pricing is going to close on November 15th. After that, the price will rise form $125 to $175. Alumni will still be able to register for $110 until December 15th. If you haven't received your alumni code, please let us know. The final session list has been published as well. We will soon announce the keynoters (big drum roll) over the next few weeks. Go register already! http://www.codemash.org

The launch event in Columbus was yesterday. I think it went very well. I was excited to see the room packed, and we had a lot of great conversations around BTS, SOA, and WCF. Several people asked for the decks. I believe MS will be sending them out to the attendees, but I will post them here (at least the ones I used) here as well. And congratulations to William for winning the Xbox 360 Halo 3 Special Edition! 

No, I am not taking a trip to here , here , or here . Oslo is the codeword (gosh, I love code words for products. I still think of VS2005 as Whidbey.) for the next generation of SOA enabling products and technologies from Microsoft. Oslo was recently announced at the SOA conference in Seattle, WA this week. Oslo is a very small word for something so big. I have been fortunate to be involved in some groups that get to provide feedback and input into the shaping of this strategy. And it has been killing me not being able to even talk a little bit about it. I have to be careful and only talk about what MS has been public about. Parts of Oslo are the next versions of BizTalk, WCF, WF, Visual Studio, and a whole raft of other technologies that CSD are trying to bring into alignment. The MS platform provides a bunch of great techs today to do SOA, and build ESBs. The current problem is that the toolset is rich, but not well aligned. These investments will make these solutions that much e...

Jeff Blankenburg, the Dev Evangelist for the Microsoft Heartland District has launched a new screencast series titled JUXtaposed . JUX stands for Jeff on User Experience. Or Jeff Unglues Xylophones. His first screencast is a quick 10 minute walk through of some simple animation in XAML using Expression. What I like about his 'cast is that it isn't perfect. Smooth demos are nice, but when there are small mistakes, the speaker gets to show you how to debug and fix things. That is a very handy skill when you are trying to learn something new. I hear he is going to do 25 of these.   The best part? He chose to pimp CodeMash by animating our logo! And it only took him 10 minutes. Thanks Jeff.

Ding Ding! The content group for CodeMash has released another set of speaker confirmations. We have some rocking content this year. I know the content team is working hard to have a diverse set of talks, that really spans across all of the platforms we are targeting. They even have a special view in their database to monitor the distribution of talks across platforms. So, without further ado: ============ Leah Culver: "Getting Started with Django" ============ Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as a way of sending messages, links, files and events to each other. Leah is the lead developer for the site, which has become one of the largest sites using the Django framework Leah loves the challenge of developing a web application from scratch and writes about her experiences as a software developer at leahculver.com. ============ Kevin Dangoor: "Overview of the Dojo JavaScript Toolkit" ============ Kevin is the product manager a...

If you are running 2004 or 2006, then you need to apply this patch to deal with the upcoming time change as a result of the recent legislation. http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2007/10/04/required-biztalk-patches-for-daylight-savings-time.aspx

I read Ted Newards blog, because he is smarter than I am. You should read his blog too. Here is one of his recent posts . Before you change the channel thinking "Oh, I hate link posts.", consider that I don't really like posts that are just links that say "hey, I just read this." I do like link posts that link to a post, and then discuss the topic. I am linking because I want to add to the conversation. This conversation extends the first ArcReady meeting we had about six or nine months ago with Josh Homes (MS Architect Evangelist). That first event was about what an architect is, and what they do. It was a great talk, and dovetails into Ted's post. To summarize Ted's post: Ted is responding to a reader who had a HORRIFYING interview and sent in an email about his experience. This experience drives the reader to have a crisis of faith when it comes to being an architect. Ted then answers some of the reader's questions. The first thing this archi...

Alexei Govorine and I will be presenting at the .NET Technology Briefing in Columbus, OH. Please register if you want to go.   Date: 11/12/2007 Time : 9:00am – 3:00pm Location: Microsoft Office 8800 Lyra Dr., Suite 400 Columbus, OH 43240 .NET Technology Briefing Come join your technology peers to learn about current and future.NET technologies. The focus of this 1 day seminar will be around Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System. You’ll be provided with an overview of each role and the session will wrap up with a preview of Visual Studio 2008 (codenamed Orcas). Agenda   9:00am – 9:45am Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) / Team Foundation Server Overview   9:45am - 10:30am VSTS Project Management and Collaboration Features 10:30am – 10:45am 10:45am - 11:15pm Break VSTS Architect and Developer Features 11:15pm -   12:00pm 12:00pm – 12:30pm Version Control and Build Management Lunch  (Provided) 12:30pm –   1:15pm VSTS Teste...

I have been invited to speak at the November meeting of the local chapter of the local chapter of the Association For Computing Machinery ( oldwww.acm.org/chapters/cocacm/) .  The ACM's home page is www.acm.org . I will be doing a lap around MS BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), how to pick each tool for your needs, and to discuss their common uses. I hope to see you there!

CodeMash is proud to announce the first round of speakers selected for this year's event. We have some great sessions lined up this year. So many, I think they content is going to blow away last year. The content team (led by Jason Gilmore and Dianne Marsch) have been swamped with over one hundred session submissions, with only about 45 slots to fill. I don't envy them at all. I know they are working hard on picking the right topics, with the right mix and blend to really make this year special. So, here goes... Bruce Eckel: "Why I Love Python" Bruce Eckel has given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences. He provides public and private seminars & design consulting in OO Design, Python, Java and C++.   Neal Ford: "Engineering and Polyglot Programming" and "DSLs in Static & Dynamic Languages"...

This is another great book from Wrox. They provided the book free to me in exchange for a (hopefully unbiased) review through the MVP program. The title is " Professional BizTalk Server 2006 ", and was written by Darren Jefford , Kevin B. Smith , Ewan Fairweather . You might recognize Kevin's name as the creator of BizUnit. I have never met any of the authors, but they have great reputations in our niche, and, based on the contents of this book, really know what they are talking about. Let me start by saying there are many good books on BizTalk on the market now. I am really pleasantly surprised by this, as BTS 2004 only had a few books available. This books suffers from a confusing title. If you scroll back in history, Apress has a book on BTS called " Pro BizTalk 2006 ", which is very similar to this book's title. I think these two books actually make a good pair. The Apress book is great for people who just went to training, and are diving in, and are ...

I have been super busy this week (getting CodeMash.org registration live), and didn't have time to let people know that R2 has finally been released. It should be available on MSDN now as well. Go download the bits, and enjoy all of the new goodness. EDI and RFID rock. But for us, WCF is the biggest new feature I am excited about.

John Brockmeyer is the primary author of a new BizTalk performance white paper titled " BizTalk Server Database Optimization ". I have been waiting for this to come out for months now ever since he presented his draft material to us at the annual Virtual TS summit in San Diego. This paper goes into great detail as to what settings and changes can affect the performance of your BTS system. He details each step, links to relevant background information, and even scores each with a difficulty level. I feel the title is misleading, it covers far more than just tuning the SQL database. I consider this mandatory reading for anyone managing or developing any significant BTS application. It is worth your time to read. Go now, read it before you focus shift to something less worthy.

  Just this week I was up in Findlay speaking at their user group about agile practices. I am posting a link to the deck on SkyDrive here. I always have a lot of fun at Findlay. It's amazing how well downtown has recovered from the flood. You can hardly tell now.

We have put a lot of work in refactoring how the registration process works this year. It wasn't 'bad' last year, but we made it a little nicer. We added a section for tracking demographics. This will help us plan the content this year, as well as show our potential sponsors that awesome audience they will have access to. Remember, without sponsors, our registration prices wouldn't be this low. PLEASE REMEMBER TO RESERVER YOUR OWN HOTEL ROOM. Details on how to do this will be included in the receipt email you receive after registering. Thanks to the efforts of the team, especially the volunteer testers, we have just pushed a new build that includes registration. This new build also includes a new title graphic, and an upgraded session submitter form, plus some copy changes here and there. We also just send out the emails with Alumni discount codes. The from address was registration at spammers suck codemash dawt org . Please check your spam filter in case you didn...

We just updated the CodeMash site to include the Sponsor Prospectus . Please pass it around. We had some great sponsors last year, and I appreciate their support. We did lower some of the prices this year for sponsors.   We have also opened the " Submit a Topic " form. If you would like to speak, please submit your session.   We hope to have attendee registration open in a couple of weeks.

Due to some horrible flooding in Findlay over the past week or so, the monthly FANUG  meeting was canceled. My talk was delayed until September 25th. See you there!

On August 31st I spoke at the KY Day of .NET event in Louisville, KY. It was a lot of fun. I think Chad did a great job putting the event together. I was invited to speak on WF. Because the time limit was 45 minutes of presentation, and 15 minutes of q/a I though I would do a level 100 talk on WF. I wanted to give people a feel for how WF might fit into their software projects, and to get the gist of it so diving into a book would be a little easier. I hope everyone liked it. I know I had a great time. I posted the slides on my SkyDrive. As a side note, when you upload files to SkyDrive they display a little bouncy beach ball game to entertain you while the files upload. Funny thing is, it's in Flash, and not Silverlight. Hmmm.

As many of you know I am on the board of CodeMash . We are now working on updating the site for this year's conference.  We just pushed v1 live, and are now working on the attendee registration features. Last year we had a great site. It was ASP.NET, web services built with the service software factory, and SQL Server 2005. It worked great. One of the features for the site was a news channel that was on the homepage, a news page, and an rss feed. In order to manage the news content we also had an admin tool, and some supporting tables and so on. This worked fine. But this year, as I was refactoring, I just didn't want to deal with remote DBs, and upgrading the admin interface. So, one day while I was talking to local WSS bad boy (amongst other things), I came up with the idea of having the news content come from a WSS list that was on our planning portal. Sounded easy to me; wire the news business object to the web services for WSS instead of some EntLib code that I had i...

Last night I delivered my "Applied SOA" talk to developers for the first time. I have given many, many times to technical decision makers (TDMs) before. So it was nice to be in front of a nitty-gritty detail crowd,  instead of 30,000 foot view type people. Not that there's anything wrong with them, of course. I think the session went really well. There were about 40 or so people there. I have posted the slide deck on my skydrive public folder.

I just glanced at my calendar, and noticed I have quite a full schedule coming up. August 21, 2007 - Cincinnati .NET Users Group - I will be speaking on 'Applied Service Oriented Architecture'. I will be discussing the underpinnings of SOA, and how it can be applied to your enterprise.   August 28, 2007 - Findlay .NET Users Group - I will be in Findlay presenting my "Hands on Agile Practices" talk. We will discuss how my company has adopted agile practices. I avoid the theory of agile (since so many talks already do that well), and focus on concrete application. I love giving this talk.   August 31, 2007 - Louisville, KY Day of .NET - Jeremy Sublett came up from KY to speak at the Central Ohio .NET developers group, and he told me they were throwing a Day of .NET event in Louisville. Since I love to speak on almost any topic, anywhere, I kind of invited myself to speak. Jeremy was very gracious in light of my slightly rude behavior, and said he would welcome me...

We have been waiting anxiously for R2 to come out. There are some great features included; features that we could use today on several projects. Most clients are reluctant to start development on the beta, even if the go-live date of the project is after the expected GA date of R2. We have been waiting to find out some final details on those features, as well as a release date, pricing, and edition information. At the Worldwide Partner Conference 2007, MS announced these details to the public, but I haven't seen them discussed anywhere. I checked with the product group, and they said it would be ok for me to write about what was announced. We, and other people, are looking for this information so they can plan for and manage their projects and environments for how R2 might impact them. First, the features: Whole new, revamped EDI stack with AS2 in the box RFID platform BizTalk Adapter Framework 2 Platform alignment (WCF adapters, etc.) This is great news. I have been wai...

We have leased our own dedicated server as part of working on getting the back end tech setup for CodeMash 2008. Last year we used Sharepoint 2003 for the planning portal. This year we will be using WSS v3. There are a lot of great enhancements that will help us a lot. I installed WSS on our server, and then deployed an asp.net application that we are going to use to collect speaker submissions. This app is a simple form, with some validation, that then submits the topic to a list in WSS via the WSS web services. The app worked great on my laptop connecting to our WSS site on our dedicated server. When I deployed the app however, it was failing the authentication into the WSS web services. The first step to troubleshoot this was to log into the portal from my machine. That worked. Then, try to login from the server itself (since that is where the web service is being called from.). That didn't work. The portal was working fine, but wouldn't let you login from the local machi...

We have finally finished the paperwork from last year, and have now made commitments for the next CodeMash. We will have CodeMash 2008 at the same place, the fabulous Kalahari on January 9-11, 2008. We are still working on the details, but it will largely be like last year. Stay tuned for more information. We are also currently reworking the site. Up until now we have been working on all of the behind the scenes tech. Pretty soon a new site will be posted. Keep a look out here or on the Google group for more information.

This is the second Wrox book I agreed to review. You can find the book here . Side Note : I did receive the book as a review copy from Wrox, the publisher. I have no affiliation with Barnes & Noble, beyond being a long time fan and customer. This book covered all of the bases with WCF, and makes both a good first book, as well as providing enough material for the intermediate WCF developer. The book starts with the basic concepts, building on them, adding detail for each part of the stack. Later in the book, there are several thorough chapters on how to create custom WCF components. The writing style was smooth, and easy to read. I think this is a result from Scott being the only author. I always have high expectations for sample code in books. The sample code throughout the book was great. The samples were never a trivial sample. They had meat, and the scenarios made sense. This is usually one of my biggest pet peeves with books. I expect the author to put enough effort i...

I was really looking forward to the PDC this fall. It is my favorite conference, and I love hooking up with all my conference buddies. I never fail to meet 20 new people every time (usually due to Drew and Josh). Don't get me wrong, TechEd is great. But in a year when both are on the schedule, I usually go to just the PDC. I can't take two major conferences that close together. Since the PDC was scheduled for this early fall, I passed on going to TechEd, preferring to wait for the PDC. Microsoft just announced that the PDC will be delayed. The PDC is about giving developers insight into where the platform is going, and what is around the bend. Microsoft felt that the latest wave was so big, that it would be premature to hold a PDC at this time. PDC has never been a regularly scheduled event. It has always been about giving leading edge developers insight into the next wave, and timed to do that, based on when that wave was coming. But with the current wave so big, develope...

   Earlier, I said I don't like to do book reviews. That's because I always had to buy the book, and spend time to do. It was too much like work. But then Wrox asked MVP's if they would like to book reviews in exchange for review copies. Find the book here . I am a sucker for books, so I said why not. I picked four books to start with, and they arrived quite quickly. I chose to start with the WF book, because of all of the new .NET 3.0 stuff, it is what I would be able to related to the best, considering by depth with BizTalk. Let me also say that several of my friends are authors, and I know how MUCH work it is to put together a good book. My hat is off to any author. I have a goal to do at least one book, just for the experience. I have been approached for a title before, but I didn't want to start a book if I didn't know I had the time to finish it. Which I don't. I have liked Wrox titles in the past, only because they were often first to market, which i...

Thanks to Keith Bauer and all of the other smart MS folks who put together the BizTalk resources list. Sometimes it can be overwhelming when you start to dig into the available material. Web casts, articles, books, v-labs, hands on labs, oh my! This is a special post just for my Nashville BizTalk class. -bhp BizTalk Server - Links and Resources Primary Websites BizTalk Product Website BizTalk is a business process management (BPM) server that enables companies to automate and optimize business processes. This includes powerful, familiar tools to design, develop, deploy, and manage those processes. Everything you need for easy installation is included—integrated management tools, support for Web services, and a new business activity monitoring (BAM) portal. In addition, BizTalk Server 2006 includes 23 application and technology adapters in the box for connecting to legacy systems (mainframe and mid-range) and line-of-business applications (SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and JD Edwards...