Brian H. Prince

I will return to blogging once I have recovered from all of my recent travel. To keep the masses appeased, I present a video I saw on a Zune blog.

I just got back from the MVP Global Summit. It was a lot of fun, but as usual, very tiring. I met a lot of new people (some really cool DirectX guys out of the UK), and of course hooked up with the regulars (Brian, John, Josh, Jeff, etc.) A lot of what was covered is un-blogable, but I like the directions things are headed. One thing I will say, is learn WCF, and learn it well. Everything will use it extensively. Same goes for WF. A lot of common products have already launched with support for it, but it seemed like every other product team was embedding WF into their product. Got to sit down with some people from the BizTalk documentation team. It is amazing how much effort they put into their work (and it shows, I kept going on about how good the docs are). I stayed at the Hilton. While they did have signs about the remodeling, it was probably the worst Hilton I have ever stayed at. The elevators alone were scary, and VERY slow. Don't get me wrong. As for hotels, it was nice, ...

I was fortunate enough to receive a Zune from Microsoft as a gift because of my support of the community and work on CodeMash . I chose a brown one. I didn't want white, because heaven forbid it was seen as copying an iPod. And while Black would fit the 'Darth Vader' image I seem to cultivate (long, inside story; I don't force choke people or anything), I just didn't like the look. The brown I think has a real nice look to it. I have to preface this with a statement on my views on music. I love music. I enjoy music. I appreciate all that music, and it's history means to our global culture. I love Techno, electronica, and other similar stuff. That means I love KMFDM, Rage against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, Lords of Acid, etc. I just don't listen to music. I would if I could, but I just don't have the opportunity too often. I drive six miles to work, and typically listen to talk radio in the car (conservative in the morning, and liberal in the evening...

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 ...

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.)