Brian H. Prince

I have had time now to get some sleep, and dial back into normal life, and decompress from CodeMash v1. Wow, what a ride! There isn't much more I can say about CodeMash that other people haven't already said. Our sponsors were awesome. Both Pillar and MS stepped up at the last minute to make sure that drinks were available the whole time. The QSI attendee party was a lot of fun, and I got to spend time catching up with people I don't get to see very often. Organizing CodeMash was a huge effort, and it wouldn't have happened without everyone involved. Jason F, Jason G, Jim, Dianne, Josh, and Drew. We have gotten a lot of great feedback on how it went, and we are already digesting that to make CodeMash v2 an even better experience! Our biggest issue right now is timing. Do we keep it in January? The problem we had this year is that the holidays really killed our planning and registration momentum. On the other hand, if we move it to November, our sponsors and attendee...

DevCares is a series of sessions aimed at the enterprise developer that is put on by Microsoft and sponsored by different training partners in each region. If you want to learn more, check out the site . The slides from the event should be located there shortly. The DevCares events in Cincinnati, Ohio are sponsored by MaxTrain . MaxTrain is an excellent training partner. I have spoken there many times, and even taken a few classes. They have a new facility that is one of the nicest I have ever seen. If you are in the area, you should drop by and check it out. The session went very well, and we got a lot of good questions, which I really like. We even got Mike (thanks!) from the audience up to be my code monkey. He did a great job, and showed how easy ASP.NET Ajax can be. We had over 65 people there! What a great turnout for a free event. I spoke about ASP.NET Ajax, and how easy it is to use. We covered why UX is important, and the two main models of using Atlas ASP.NET Ajax. The f...

Barnes and Noble has setup a special page for BizTalk books where Microsoft customers can get a 25% discount. Just another reason I prefer B&N over Amazon. http://btob.barnesandnoble.com/index.asp?r=1&btob=Y

This is a very old rule of thumb. It was one of the first things I learned when I started my first job out of college. You always want to plan on getting where you are going, whether it is a meeting two floors up, or across town, at LEAST ten minutes early. If there is risk in the travel, for example when driving downtown, and parking spaces is a constrained resource, you might want to pad the time even more. If you need to setup (for a demo, a projector, etc.) then make sure you are at least an hour early. Something always happens to need that time. Such as: Weird traffic People who don't know how to move through a metal detector line at the airport Don't know where you are going "Annoying guy in office who never stops talking, regardless if you are on your way to a meeting" Finding the conference room Settling into the room (getting out laptop, etc.) I knew a PM that would always walk around with his cell phone to his ear when he was busy trying to get to ...

One of the three mystical PM's (a reference to rule 1) taught me this years ago telling me a story. A person was entering an office building for an interview. On the way in, he paused, and held the door for someone. That someone went straight to the elevator and on with their day as usual. The person went to the receptionist and asked to meet with their contact for the interview. The candidate was asked to take a seat. A few minutes later, the same someone he held the door open for came down and started the interview. It turns out that holding the door open was a factor in the decision. This is a corollary to the "Never burn bridges, no matter how much fun it might sound like" rule. Always be on your best manners. You never know when 'that person' might be someone you run into later. Not a week or two after hearing the above story I ran into a chance to put it into action. I was out of town on business, and was staying at a hotel for the week. This was in the...

We have several open positions on my team (located in central Ohio). We are looking for passionate, thinking developers with good experience in C#, Smart Clients, and SOA. If you are interested please send me your contact information. Also, we are adding a person to our Connected System Team. You have to love SOA/ESB, able to travel a bit, have good consulting skills, and experience (at least some) with BizTalk, XML, XSLT,  and .NET. Your fist six months to a year will be in a apprentice role because we find it very hard to find it easier to groom and train the right person. We do a lot of work with Microsoft, and it is a lot of fun! In the past year we have been building a lot of ESBs, but there is the fair amount of traditional integration work. Many projects are POC in nature. You should already have a good sense of what we look for if you have read this blog recently. Check out my profile for my email address.

Sure, a PM wants you to think that is their job, to manage the project. That is their title after all. And that is what they study, especially to get their PMP certification. A lot of developers don't like PM's, and it is a shame. Probably because they have had bad experiences in the past. PM's are like any technology. They can be used for good or evil. I am hear to say that while they do manage the budget, and timeline, and lots of other things, that is not their job. Any sound person can use MS Project (or other tools) to do this, and for most projects, do alright. (Don't think I am dismissing these activities, because they are critical as well.) No, the most important job of a PM is to manage the client. What? Yes, manage the client. The client is the one resource on a project that requires the most care, and is the absolute most critical to the success of the project. And part of this client management is to manage the expectations of the client. Both of the pro...

Ted Neward has posted his predictions for 2007 . I thought I would list them here, and add my responses to each. Please go read the original post. My comments will be in red. General: Analysts will call 2007 the Year of the {Something} , where I bet that {Something} will be either "ESB" or "SOA". They will predict that companies adopting {Something} will save millions, if not billions, if only they rush to implement it now. They will tag this with a probability of .8 in order to CYA in case {Something} doesn't pan out. (Yes, I've read far too many of these reports--I'm personally convinced that each of the analyst companies has a template buried away in their basement that they pull out each time they need a new one, and they just do a global search-and-replace of "{Something}" with whatever the technology du jour happens to be.) I couldn't agree more. Analyst companies don't provide any value besides providing a way for a bad excuse ...