From the monthly archives:

August 2007

SBTUG: Winning new business, Enterprise Search, Prizes and Facebook

August 23, 2007Community

Next Wednesday 29 August we’ve got a jam packed Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) meeting all lined up.
The meeting kicks off at 6:30pm with free pizza.
Business
Kicking us off will be Steve Herzberg (http://steveherzberg.blogspot.com) from NRG Solutions (http://www.nrgsolutions.com.au/) with an detailed session on ‘Winning New Business’.
Steve is a sales and marketing guru who specialises [...]

Read the full article →

VFP: Importing VFP data into SQL Server

August 15, 2007Visual FoxPro

I’ve written an article outlining How to use SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) to import Visual FoxPro data into SQL Server.
The article is reasonably basic and covers:

Using SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio to create the package and manage errors
Using SQL Server Management Studio to create the Integration Service
Using SQL Agent job to schedule [...]

Read the full article →

SIMPLE: Rocket science

August 12, 2007TechEd

Not wanting to pick on anyone in particular, but I’ve heard the expression “it’s not rocket science” all week at TechEd, usually in the context of how easy it is now (as compared to previous versions of products) to build wonderful, enabling, awe-inspiring solutions to enterprise problems.
I have to admit I wasn’t exactly sure what [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why attend the locknote?

August 11, 2007TechEd

I’ve held off talking about the TechEd keynote from Wednesday (because it was extremely disappointing), but thankfully the locknote was slightly (but only slightly) better.
It was good because it was a chance for us developers to say goodbye to Frank Arrigo (he’s heading over to Redmond). Frank has had an amazing impact on the [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why Computer Forensics?

August 11, 2007TechEd

I popped into the end of a session delivered by some of the AFP (Australian Federal Police) Computer Forensic experts. The surprising discovery for me was how under-resourced they are. Sure, they know how to recover data ‘deleted’ from a hard drive, and they also get pretty good at finding incriminating stuff, but overall my [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why Online/Offline Gadgets?

August 11, 2007TechEd

More out of interest than any compelling business need I dropped into Neil Roodyn’s session on Vista Gadgets.
And I have to say I found it quite thought provoking. Neil went through some simple examples but most importantly stressed some of the design considerations to be employed. Designing for Offline (or worse, unexpected disconnection scenarios) from [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why SharePoint Branding and Customization?

August 11, 2007SharePoint

Why SharePoint Branding?Answer: Because we can. Finally.
Yes, the customization ‘features’ of SharePoint have been well criticised for a while, so it is good to see that branding and formatting is now a simple combination of master page changes and CSS.
Not that it is trivial, but as Kathy Hughes covered (extremely well I might add) in [...]

Read the full article →

VFP: Visual FoxPro posts of interest

August 11, 2007Visual FoxPro

I’ve been a little behind on my blog reading of late, so here’s a quick list of links I’ve enjoyed (many of which you no doubt read weeks ago

Vienna will support 32-bit: Even longer life for FoxPro applications
Another great new site for learning FoxPro (for free!)
Embed II – The Smart VFP Treeview Class
One month [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why Silverlight?

August 9, 2007Silverlight

What an awesome end to the day. I’m already sold on the whole Silverlight concept, but this session was an eye opener. Joe Stegman impressed, with a slickly crafted presentation, perfectly delivered. No woffle or hype, just demo after demo of Silverlight goodness.Part of the attraction of Silverlight is how it opens up the programming [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why WPF?

August 9, 2007TechEd

The old joke about WPF being the answer to a question that hasn’t been asked is still around I guess, and thus a session on WPF is treated by some with a little bit of skepticism. Although only a mini-session, Paul Stovell did a great job of explaining why WPF is now relevant. Actually I [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why LOLCODE?

August 9, 2007TechEd

INSERT INTO cheek (tongue)
This was a great mini-session, with the remarkable Nick Hodge covering the all-too-important science of LOLCODE.I’m with Nick on this, in believing it to be the single most important technology initiative in years.The benefits are countless, but include the long lost art of ensuring maintenance coders are amused long into the future, [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why ForeFront Server Security?

August 9, 2007TechEd

Developers (like me) often can’t comprehend the overhead of installing security tools across a large server count. Afterall, we are usually only dealing with a handful of servers. So how do the people looking after large numbers of servers (eg hundreds) cope?This is a difficult problem and a number of vendors are targetting applications at [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why BizTalk and BAM?

August 9, 2007BizTalk

Business Activity Management (BAM) is an important area for growing businesses to embrace. IT is basically the act of observing key processes in a business and being able to proactively respond to issues.
In this session Mick Badran (local BizTalk guru and MVP) along with Rahul Garg (Microsoft Technical Specialist) took us through an introduction to [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO)?

August 8, 2007General Tech

Rounding out a solid day of excellent sessions was Australia’s favourite son Andrew Coates (OK, so I might have hyped that a little bit).
Office Business Applications (OBA) will be getting increasing focus from Microsoft in the coming year and it is no wonder why.VSTO, now in its third version, allows developers to easily build functionality [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why SharePoint?

August 8, 2007General Tech

This session was my pick of the day. Perfectly presented by Jon Barrett and Ian Palangio, the content covered an immense amount of material, complemented by excellent demos.
SharePoint is of course a mammoth platform, so any session on it is only going to cover a small chunk. This sessions’s chunk was document management.
Covering Document [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why Windows Server 2008 Web edition?

August 8, 2007General Tech

I’ve decided to cover a lot of areas this year (not just Developer sessions). This includes Server and Security sessions.
This session blew me away. Eric Deily gave an excellent overview of the Web Server edition of Windows Server 2008.
IT Pros who’ve been following Server 2008 will be well aware of the details of course, but [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why Web 2.0?

August 8, 2007General Tech

I missed the start of the blogger’s lunch, but managed to catch the panel answering the whole Web 2.0 question.
The panel: Phil Sim, Michael Platt, Darren Neimke, Jane O’Connell and Des Walsh were guided by Frank Arrigo.
Highlights included hearing them each give their view of what the hell Web 2.0 is. My favourite was [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why Visual Studio Team System 2008?

August 8, 2007General Tech

Always entertaining, and sometimes even informative , Adam Cogan walked us through Visual Studio’s history, and then looked at the future of the Team editions of the product.
Many of the benefits are already shipped (in part at least) via the recently released Power Tools for TFS. Team Foundation Server incorporates and builds on these.
A few warrant [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why Visual Studio 2008?

August 8, 2007General Tech

In the first session of the day I stepped into Tony Goodhew’s overview of Visual Studio 2008 (previously Orcas).
The session covered VS2008 Pro (as opposed to the Team editions) and was a slick high level flight over the product.
Answering the question of WHY?, Tony gave three reasons:

Tools for Office 2007 and Vista
Improvements for Web developers
Language [...]

Read the full article →

TECHED: Why SoftGrid?

August 7, 2007General Tech

At the TechEd Technology Showcase booth tonight I was blown away by a very cool technology called SoftGrid. Microsoft acquired this recently.
SoftGrid is a virtualisation technology allows applications (as opposed to operating systems) to be delivered to the desktop (ie they are never installed on the desktop – rather it is almost like they are ’streamed’ [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries