Karls Blog

Well, TechEd 06 in Sydney was a great event! Lots of people have had their opinions, but some of the highlights for me were:

- Scotts presentaiton on ASP.NET 2.0 tips and tricks (that many people may not know about). Its the little things like returning to the page position on a post and managing the tab order / grouping that help bring the Web UI up to scratch with many WinForms UIs.

- Steve Riley was entertaining as always!

- Franky did a great job opening and closing the show

- Seeing the NAP (Network Access Protection) stuff on Longhorn was was kewl!

Slowly catching up on the news from around the Net, but here are some very kewl bits that caught my eye today:

- Google does Office (and here)

- Vista Release Candidate 1 is out (which a few people at TechEd like Scott were running and looked WAY NICE :)

- Some more Zune details

- And my favorite piece of Open Source, Umbraco, released version 2.1.5 (svn)and updated their donations page so feel free to donate :)

My MeeGo and I are joining Al and Brad from WDG and heading up to Sydney for TechEd 06. We packed the LinkSys wireless router and latest Sveasoft firmware, so if net access is available up there, we'll find it :) We are leaving this arvo and doing a 10 hour Sprint tomorrow for the core SMSi tools - inbound SMS queue engine, outbound SMS processing engine (instant winner, valid codes, fuzzy logic for string matching etc) and the Web UI. Dave calls it a SWAT team - I call it '4 smart guys in a small room = great results' :) We have a small meeting room with net access (so we can get to our TFS server) and a list of things we want to achieve ranked by priority. Will be interesting to see how many features and improvements we can get done from our list- will blog more on that when I get a chance...

For those that are heading to TechEd, I will be hanging out at the DevGarten stand. Check it out!

I read on Darrens blog about his tinkering with Blinq. I had downloaded the CTP a few weeks ago, but it had just sat there in my c:\Downloads folder ever since. Since I was having a performance problems with CodeSmith + NetTiers on large DB tables (over 50k rows) on an internal projects for SMSi I decided to install and have a play.

Quick summary of the 'requirements' of this part of the app was a 'web GUI for the production DB'. Oh, it also has to be usable by sales guys and gals so usability is important This is pretty standard stuff, and something we do at WDG quite often, so as always, I was keen to reuse whatever I could instead of reinventing the wheel.

The install was easy - install Linq May CTP, then Blinq - no problemo there. I then literally ran the same command (except for the obvious cmd args) as Darren:

Blinq /t:c:\Projects\smsi\blinq /database:SMSiData /server:. /sprocs

I created a vdir under IIS and opened the site but it was blank! Strange.

So I jumped on the Blinq forums and saw this post about PKs (primary keys) being mandatory. I had created a new DB and copied the data from the exsisting live DB using the SQL 05 Import / Export wizard. That process hadn't created my PKs / FKs so I just backed up / restored the live DB onto my local box, reran the blinq cmd and BAM - I had a web UI to my DB.

It uses master pages / ASP.NET 2.0 templates so a quick email to the creative guys and the new GUI looks even sweeter!

After playing around for bit, I've grown to love this! In literally 90 seconds, I had a FAST, intuative UI for all my DB data. Running SQL Profiler, I checked out some of the cmds being passed to SQL server and they are very neat! Big kudos to the Blinq team! For us, this thing has a lot of merit! Anything that can reduce repetition and have coders working on the 'fun' stuff rather than the 'mundane' stuff is a 'good thing'! I, for one, will be keeping a close eye on Blinqs progress :)

PS - I know there is no Go Live license for Blinq (yet!) so I would class this as a 'internal test production' app ;)

Alright alright - lots of people going to TechEd (and even ppls that aren't - Michael ;) are knocking up their TechEd MeeGo - so I have to jump on the badwagon :)

I also wanted to a) see how Live Writer handled pics (not very well - had to edit online!) and b) add my belated Technorati Profile link ;)

Been following this for a few days now, but Dana Epp is pushing forward on a very kewl but extremely ambitious crusaide to develop Anvil in only 30 days ... from scratch! And he is going to blog every step of the way!

Its extremely interesting read the processes he goes through and openly shares with the audience. Using a number of existing and new tools (like the MS Threat Analysis and Modeling Tool) Dana explains why each step is important, the benefits and how he goes about creating Mind Maps and Threat Models.

For anyone thats new to developing secure, robust, production software, its a very interesting journey! Good luck Dana :)

Many other people have mentioned it, but SP1 for VS 03 is out. First SP comes out after 3 years - shows VS 03 is a pretty solid product! Installing now!

We still use VS 03 for old projects. Looking to migrate them all to VS 05 + TFS + MSBee but that takes time (hey, with over 4000 projects in almost 10 years, thats a lot of code - our VSS DB is almost 10GB and thats only (mostly) active projects!).

Test from live writer :)

In a VERY kewl move by Microsoft, I read first yesterday on Splatts blog, and this morning on MSDN that MS will start to allow anyone to create Xbox titles!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/faq/

This is great news - I know a tonne of guys and gals at WDG that will definately get into this! In my opinion, very smart move - this should yield some very interesting projects!

Always interesting to see what the main stream media thinks are the coolest sites around, so here is Times latest list:

http://www.time.com/time/2006/50coolest/index.html

Definately a US biased there :)

Funny! Just downloaded the NetTiers Beta 2 templates this morning to do a refresh of an existing project. These fantastic templates have saved us MANY hours of hand coding! These templates, peared with CodeSmith, generate our CRUD layer for all our .NET 2.0 projects. WDG have built our own .NET 1.1 code gen tool, but given the 'head cost' of migrating and maintaining these to .NET 2.0, we thought the CodeSmith / NetTiers combo would be more cost effective.

Anyways, I decided to also check that I had the latest CodeSmith bits (big sucker for new stuff :) and in the About screen saw this:

SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!! :D

I'm sure they haved saved me, let alone the team, a lot of time, but $16 mill? That said, if this is true, please feel free to email me for bank details :D

Saw this thru Mitch Dennys blog, but Jesper Johansson is leaving Microsoft! I saw Jesper present 2 years ago at the Canberra TechEd in Aus and Jesper was an absolutely inspirational speaker! I'm in a unique position of being responsible for ALL IT at WDG, from what the coders churn out to how our large data centre runs to what we allow on our desktops. I LOVE keeping involved in ALL areas of technology. Of course I have a great crew to do the builk of the leg work, and with the help of these guys we plot WDGs movements forward. I can honestly say that MANY of the company wide attributes to running IT systems AND coding have come from presentations, articles and blog posts Jesper has delivered.

The only thing I can say is that I am wrapped to be one of the honored last few people who will see him present as he heads to TechEd Oz in late August. Dave Lemphers wrote a kewl blog post the other day which I read and believe strongly in (well, most of it ;). But I did catch myself thinking "Hey, what about people like Jesper who deliver an excellent presentation, that is geared to 'inform' managers, and give the hardcore dev / infrastructure guys a great insight into how things are done elsewhere". Jesper leaving will be a HUGE loss to Microsoft, and as Mitch mentioned, I hope he doesn't go the way of Pat Helland - that would be a loss for us all...