Brian H. Prince

We just finished our clinics in this area. We did one in Columbus on the 7th, and one in Detroit on the 8th. A friend and colleague was going to conduct the Detroit clinic, but he was held over in India, so I got to do it. I had a great time. The clinics were well attended, and I could tell that most people were into them. If you would like the 'books' that were handed out, please let me know. I can send you the PDFs. Half way through the morning in Columbus, I spilled some orange juice on my laptop's keyboard. It stopped working (go figure!), and I became trapped in a Virtual PC, so I couldn't jump out and move on with the slide deck. I had to do some fancy dance moves while someone went out back to rummage up a USB keyboard. That fixed the problem. The keyboard has since been replaced. I will NEVER EVER again mock a fellow speaker when their demos go awry! Drew, I have learned my lesson. Of course the mocking was always in good humor. I have also just helped a client ...

Response to Dave's thoughts on the Creating Passionate User's blog entry ..... One of you must be a zealot. :) I have been reading that blog for a bit now. Boy oh boy. Where do I start? First, obviously these are extremes of the continuum. I have worked for tiny startups, and I have worked for medium sized corp companies. I have always wanted to stay away from major corps, mostly because I felt like I would not be in direct contact with the customer, or that I would be such a small part of the company that I wouldn't be able to impact how it is run, and what it does. That is an ego thing, but thats what makes me happy, so there. I used the same strategy to pick which college I went to, and that worked out just fine. I think some of these line items are ridiculous. I know alot of startups today are using OSS stuff to get off the ground. I don't think that is becuase it is better, I think it is mostly due to the backlash against VC companies. With OSS they can get farther...

Dave Donaldson tagged me. Four Jobs I've Had: 1. Dishwasher 2. CTO for a .com 3. Developer 4. Prep Cook Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over: 1. The Day the Earth Stood Still 2. Stargate 3. Office Space 4. 12 Monkeys Four TV Shows I Love to Watch: 1. Stargate SG1 2. Starget Atlantis 3. Battle Star Galactica 4. Apprentice Four Places I've Been on Vacation: 1. Berlin, Germany 2. Italy 3. Sanibel Island, FL 4. Santa's Village, NH (in August!) Four Favorite Dishes: 1. Chicken Fingers 2. Jaeger Schnitzel 3. Chicken Parm 4. Rib Eye Steak Four Web Sites I Visit Daily: 1. Google 2. MSDN 3. Blogger 4. Netflix Four Places I'd Rather Be: 1. Barnes & Noble 2. In front of an xbox 360 3. PDC 4. The Rhein -bhp

Microsoft is putting on clinic's to support the release of BizTalk through the county. As part of the VTS program, I will be delivering the clinic in Columbus, Ohio on March 7th, and in Nashville, TN on March 14th. You can sign up for this free event at www.biztalkclinic.com . The morning sessions will focus on deployment and management. The afternoon sessions will focus on development and integration. The content is mostly level 200, so prior experience is defintely not needed. Just a general grasp of development and/or server administration. Great way to see the product, and get a feeling how it can help you in your organization. Please let me know if you have any questions. -bhp

This is in response to my buddy's post about his struggles with CSS. You should read Dave's post first. Some might call me a zealot. And yes, I am screaming. The benefit to css layouts is that you can seperate your content and document structure and behavior. Not doing that is like putting all of your business and data code in your asp.net code behind; because you can do that quicker than defining some interfaces, seperate assemblies, and architecting your code. Don't be so lazy. :) The hardest part is getting over the thought pattern that tables put you in, and start thinking in a rules way. If you try to implement a table layout with CSS directly, you will struggle. Embrace the CSS way, and it will become so much faster to develop, easier to maintain, and trivial to debug. To me it is like the curve that most people struggle with when they first try TDD. It takes some hard work and coaching to stop doing things that bad way. Some think it's a waste (before they trans...

I have been working on some demos that use the WSS adapter. The demo was to monitor a document library for any new documents, and based on some content, change their status to either approved or denied, and then resubmit them into the same library. I was able to add a custom field to the library in Sharepoint, and then leverage that in the send port subscriptions. Be careful though. Not all fields that show up in the filter fields are actually promoted from the WSS adapter. Some are in there and aren't actually promoted. The adapter worked very well, and I plan on exploring it even more. -bhp

The Atlas team has pushed a refresh of the December Atlas bits. The version is called the M1 refresh. Never heard the M1 moniker before. Go get them at atlas.asp.net . There is mostly bug fixes, and some minor enhancements to the update panel and script manager. Now I have to go upgrade all of my demos and slide decks. The drag and drop behavior still leaves something to leave desired, but I am sure it will rock before the final bits are released. Some people on my team at the shop are overhauling our 'open positions check out' page to make it 100% callback based. So far it looks neat. The scriptaculous stuff clashes with the Atlas script manager though, so it isn't using Atlas yet. We will have to upgrade it this summer. Anyway, fresh bits, get them while they are hot! -bhp

What a fast start to the year. It's Feburary already! Started off the year with a presentation at the Cinci/Dayton Code Camp. That went pretty well. Jim and James did a great job putting it together. I did a session on BizTalk 101. Very entry level stuff. I just thought a session like that was needed since most of the questions I got at the launch event were of the 'What is BizTalk?' variety. It wasn't the most fascinating topic, but I think it helped alot of people figure it out. It was also the first presentation I have ever done with the Takahashi(sp?) method. I read about that on Guy's blog. Few words, big font, little actual content on the slide. Although this matches how I like to speak, I wasn't sure it would work for a training session. I think it went well though. I did add some visuals, like a graph of how basic message flow works in BTS. The code camp was on a Saturday. The following Wednesday I presented HOAP at the Dayton .NET users group. HOAP is t...

Nikhil and the Atlas team have pushed some new bits at http://atlas.asp.net. They have made an amazing jump forward with their platform. Some of the big changes: - Partial updates with the update panel control. This lets a trigger action on the client do a virtual post back using callbacks. On the server side you have the rich event and stateful object model you are used to. The server then renders only the part of the page that maps to the update panel in question. This could potentially lead to a postback-less web app. That wouldn't necessarily be my goal, but I would like to get rid of past backs that are on the same page. - ScriptManager upgrade: The SM has had a major upgrade. You can run it in a new 'runtime' mode that provides the OOP features, without all of the atlas controls and other stuff. That is awesome, because one of my favorite features of Atlas is how they turn JavaScript into a real OO language. The SM can also be used to create references to services, so...

The Thursday night presentation to CONDG went really well. The only slow part was where we (Michael and myself) relied on too much typing during the code demos. We are presenting the same talk at CINNUG this Tuesay, and plan to modify how much code we write on the fly. I have found this great Atlas resource on the net. Wilco Bauwer has posted a tool that uses to reflection to help document the framework. This has been a great help to me in trying to learn Atlas, and get it to do what I want. It also helps in findig the holes in the current bits. For example, there isn't a server side service manager component yet. You still have to use the client side control. Wilco also some great Atlas postings on his blog as well. I will soon publish the slide deck, code, and resource URLs on the related user group sites soon. When I send them out to the UG owners, I will post them here as well. I have found some conflicts when you put a hyphen in the ID attribute of the atlas:panel server con...

I will be speaking at CONDG (Central Ohio .NET Developers Group) on 12/8/2005, from 6-8p. We will be going over Atlas, and looking at some code. I will be bringing along Michael from my team, who is an amazing young developer, to be my code monkey. Drop by if you have time. -bhp

TDD is the hot new topic. Actually, it has been around in one form or another for several years. With the release of Visual Studio 2005, I expect to become even more of a hot topic. When I introduce TDD to professional developers in my shop, they tend to think of it as a drag at first. This is when I usually ask them how they developed their last personal project. They always talk about how they wrote on feature, and made sure that worked, and then moved onto the next piece in a very organic way. They grew the architecture as needed, and refactored to streamline the code. They didn't sit down and write 50 pages of technical documentation (although they may have drawn some big boxes and arrows.) TDD is merely writing tests to validate the features you want to implement, before you write the code. The green light of TDD is what tells you when you are done. Which is hard for some developers to know. We call them 'gold-platers' around these parts. Test Driven Design is a great ...

Brian is a great guy I met through the VTS program. The funny thing is, I have been reading his blog for a while, and then didn't put two and two together until several days after I first met him in LA. Since I don't like other people who blog about blogs, I will summarize his article a little. Brian puts forth a pattern that loosely couples related orchestrations together using a state machine driven message subscription process. The state machine is driven from a status field of the state of the message that is promoted so you can route on it. His article is written very well, with a good example.

Here is a list of resources the VTS team tries to keep up to date. Let me know if you have any other needs, and I will dig out what I can find. White Papers · Enterprise Integration Vision for BizTalk Server 2004 Discover how XML and Web services are implemented within BizTalk Server 2004, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, and Microsoft Office 2003 and how they interact with each other to create a process-centric computing infrastructure. · Choose a Business Process Automation Solution Read this in-depth analysis of how BizTalk Server 2004 delivers a more integrated business process automation (BPA) solution than the WebSphere Business Integration system from IBM. · Developing a BizTalk Server Solution for BizTalk Server 2004 See how BizTalk Server 2004 enables developers and system architects to use the same development methodology and components to create workflow processes, application integration interfaces, and trading partner interactions. · Architecture for BizTalk Server 2004 Learn...

The launch has finally come and gone on Nov 8th. A bunch of my coworks, clients, and friends rented a big van-bus-like thing. We had laptops, xbox, dvd players, internet access, and wifi onboard. And WAY too much redbull! We left at three in the morning, and didn't get back until 10:30p. The launch itself was fun. The sessions weren't groundbreaking if you had been working with the betas in any way. I was surprised at the depth of the new features in SQL Server 2005. I just wasn't really excited about the few features I knew about. I was asked to shoot some footage of our geek oddysea. I got about 30 minutes of it. The best of it was interviewing people in a sub shop on the way home. If I can find a place to post it, I will and then link to it here. I have been asked to show a bit of it at the next usergroup session. Best of all, all of the new tools are finally available, and we can move forward with the projects we have been using the beta's on. Now if we can get RTM...

While in Redmond several weeks ago, Eddie (Sr something or other for developer tools) showed us the bleeding edge research they are doing to really improve the management and development tools for BizTalk tools beyond 2006. Eddie, I must say. is a very entertaining speaker. Some of the stuff I saw I can't talk about (I have to say it is cool to say that). Some of the new features they did show at the PDC, and on videos on channel 9. [links below] Here is a summary: 1. They actually use real world samples when working on the new tools. For example, schema maps with 15,000 fields in them. This forced them to really focus on the scale of work that us users really focus on, instead of trivial amounts of sample work. 2. To fix the 'black map' problem they seriously upgraded the mapping tool. What is the 'black map' problem? When you have a map with a lot of fields, and lines, you eventually only have a large mass of lines, and no whitespace. With auto-mapping using chara...

'THE' launch is finally upon us. Which launch? The launch of Visual Studio 2005 (which includes alot!), BizTalk 2006 (really a paper launch), and SQL Server 2005. This is BIG stuff! These products have already completely reformed how we do .NET development. I think this is a bigger jump than the one from Studio 2000 to Studio 2003, from a tools perspective. What they alone have done to the traditionally opaque and obtuse BizTalk tools is fabulous. The closest launch event to us is in Detroit, MI on Nov 8th. Since so many of us are going, we have arranged for a bus from Columbus. We are leaving around 4:30am, and will be getting back around 9:00pm. There are some seats left, so drop me an email if you would like one. I am not sure if we will have to split costs, or if this will be 'complimentary' from my company. We shall see. What is happening at the launch? Check this out , and don't forget to register. To me, it seems like a mini-TechEd. And the best part (there...

Just spent a week at Microsoft [I will go into why later]. I have noticed that all MS speak follows this expression: "So.... [insert stuff here]...., right?" At first I noticed this months ago with speakers at the local and regional level. But after the PDC and a week in Redmond, I have decided it is pervasive. Now, this is not a negative/beatdown post. This isn't even a grammarian rant. Just an observation. While at Mistral having dinner, Javier Mariscal and I discussed this weird thing. At first I thought it was a result of MS trying to fix it's perceived arrogance, by asking for confirmation in every statement, and by starting with SO, in an attempt to appear passive (or at least not aggressive). I am guessing that it merely spread, as a meme so to speak, to everyone in the MS space. I have found though, that it seems to permeate every said now, to the point that it is obstructing the message. In a 1 hour meeting, I could 27 'rights' from one person. Ju...

Sorry I haven't posted, not that anyone is reading, anyway. I have spent my time: * digging into atlas * writing five proposals in one week * playing as much dungeon seige 2 before age of empires 3 and civilization 4 comes out * finding someplace to pre-order a 360 Biggest news? I have been accepted into the Virtual Technical Specialist program with Microsoft. Big thanks to Keith for the opportunity, and Drew for the support. I am at guerilla training for BizTalk 2006 this week, at Microsoft. This is my first visit to MS, and I am very excited. It is like going to the mother ship for me. This is also my fist guerilla style training, so I think it will be fun, and exhausting. -bhp

FANUG (Findlay Area .NET Users Group) has asked me to speak at their next session. I love getting the chance to speak to groups about technology. This session will start off with a brief slide about what was announced at the PDC, and then dive into some details and code for Atlas. I got to see a lot of Atlas at the PDC, and have played with it since. I am very impressed with it so far. It is still early in development, but I expect it will make huge strides before it is released. If you are going to be in Findlay on Sept 29, 2005, you should drop by. -bhp