Brian H. Prince

Today we are packing for the big move. Quick Solutions is moving to some new swanky office space, with an awesome new delivery center. The new center has wall to wall whiteboards, network projectors for group programming (pair programming is so 20th century), a game room, new open seating (shared workspace is the key to productivity), and lots of other new goodies. It is an amazing investment by the company, and shows their commitment to building the best team on the block. As we are packing, we started joking around (not that joking around is rare, and would have occurred regardless of the packing state). How does and architect pack? An architect doesn't pack anymore. He did that ten years ago. He goes to plenty of packing conferences, and has read a lot of books on packing. An architect will map out how the whole enterprise should pack, and even dictate what (clearly out of date) packing supplies and processes should be used. These processes will be the perfect match for some ...

I don't often explicitly state that I work for Quick Solutions when I post to my blog. Others that work with me talk about QSI all the time. I do this because I want the articles to be what 'I' have to say about technology, not what QSI has to say. I started working for QSI in June of 2003. I was about to start my own consulting company, and they asked me to come in to help them start their solutions business (having built a high quality technical staffing business). I thought, why not? Getting to build what I want to build on someone else's dime definitely reduces my personal risk, and if it didn't work out, I could just pick back up the 'start my own company' thing. Nearly five years have passed, and we have built a great team. A team that is considered one of the leading development shops in our region. Each, and EVERY person on this team would be considered a rock star at any company. We have a great culture for the team, and a deep seated ownership...

Big Sigh of Relief! I just got home with my family. We have finally unpacked, and caught our breath. The past nine months have been a lot of work. And not just for me, but for the whole CodeMash planning team. Just some of the volunteers that put this year together: Jim Holmes , Jason Gilmore , Jason Follas , Jeff Blankenburg , Josh Holmes , Dianne Marsh , John Hopkins , Brian Sherwin , and Chris Woodruff . There are plenty of others that helped out, and I want to thank you folks as well. How do I even begin to capture the energy that was at CodeMash this year? The keynoters were FANTASTIC. Each brought a different something to the conference. Neal Ford did a great job setting the tone of the conference. Scott Hanselman really livened things up after lunch, and showed that cross platform is in the real world with his demo of PHP on IIS (with huge performance improvements). Then Brian Goetz showed that there were still some great challenges left for us to solve. Our speaker...

Scott Hanselman and I were up on stage, really grooving with what we were doing. The crowd was going crazy. Then Scott just lost his rhythm, the worst nightmare for anyone on any stage. He couldn't keep up, and I felt like I was loosing him. Three times I had to distract the crowd from his mistakes, until he could get back on track. Fortunately, it worked, and we made it to the end, without too many embarrassing moments. ... Of course, I am talking about Rock Band at CodeMash. Scott checked in at CodeMash fairly late on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008. I was packing away the TV and Rock Band setup we had at the QSI booth, when he walked up and asked if I could reconnect it so he could see what it was like. I wheeled it into the grand ballroom, and set it back up. Of course a crowd started to assemble around us. We started up a game, with Scott on drums, and myself on the guitar. Scott admitted he didn't know how to play drums, and it showed. :) In the game, if you mak...

So, I am a little late in posting about the CONDG December meeting. This December, like usual, we had joined out November and December meeting into one, and chose a light topic, with an XBOX party afterwards. I presented a quick lap around all of Visual Studio 2008, and .NET Framework 3.5. Jeff supplied me with a bunch or slide decks about all of the new features, and I Frankensteined a deck together. Jeff announced that he had a limited number of FREE copied of VS2008 to give out, if people pre-registered. We normally get about 50-60 attendees at each meeting. That night, there were 120! It was very crowded, with people sitting on the floor, and out in the hall. I have to say, it was one of the most fun speaking engagements I have ever done. After the meeting we played Guitar Hero III and Rock Band. Everyone had a great time!

Jeff and Josh invited me to attend the Heartland Influencer Summit in Detroit, MI, on Dec 7. There were a lot of great people there, many I know from the user group and MVP communities. Josh and Jeff wanted to get us together to discuss how we can work better together as community leaders, and what MS could do to help support us better. There was some great idea swapping. For example, other groups use a session called 'lightening talks' I want to do in our group ( CONDG ). For lightening talks, members sign up with any topic they want, and speak for ten minutes. The audience votes for best presentation. The winners get the swag. The lightening talks keeps the pace moving fast, and short, so the 'new' speaker doesn't have much to prepare or stress about. I think this is a great way to start grooming new community leaders and speakers. Coming out of this meeting was a few other action items. Josh/Jeff are going to put together a MOSS portal for the Heartl...

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.