Craig Bailey on Microsoft

The Live team released a new beta of Windows Live Writer a month or so ago (they are calling this one a Preview in some places, an Update in others) and I give it the thumbs up.

I’ve always been impressed with LiveWriter – in fact I think it’s one of the better tools Microsoft has put out (World Wide Telescope is another - download it here – but more on that in another post).

This version adds some nice little touches to an already great product. The most obvious is the tabs at the bottom of the screen – you can now easily switch between Preview and Edit the HTML (previously you did this via the View menu or View drop down in the toolbar).

Oh, and I like how LiveWriter thinks that LiveWriter is a spelling mistake.

(Yep, Liverwort would be a better name)

There’s a bunch of other stuff in this release, including the revamped SDK.

(via Al Nyveldt)

There's a nice little interview with Bill Gates up on Channel 9. The first 8 minutes are the best as Bill covers what a Chief Software Architect should do (summary: ensure different teams work together), and his thoughts on Ray Ozzie (note to self: perhaps I need to give Ray a second chance - I've been completely unimpressed with him to date, but if Bill thinks so highly of him then I've obviously missed something).

He goes on to the future of Windows (mildly interesting, but have your woffle filter on), and then many-core computing (an important re-confirmation that parallel computing is the future). Software composition and Search are covered as well.

My favourite line is when Bill talks about the complexity of their data-centre plans with millions of servers, and he sums it up by saying: 'It's a fun software problem to solve'. At the 23:34 mark he must have mentioned some Mesh related top secret code word, because it was bleeped out! Oh, and he plays Bridge. The interview concludes with a call to action: give your time, expertise and money to a good cause.

As always, Bill is definitely worth watching.

(And I'm impressed with Charles? who conducted the interview - nicely done.)

Here's the video on C9 (and here's the link in case you can't see the embed below - there's a Download link at the bottom of it)

Bill Gates: Transitioning into the Future

This Wed at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) we're lucky enough to have Bob McGilvray and Tatham Oddie presenting.

When: This Wed 25 June 2008

• Time: 6pm (until approx 8:30pm)
• Where: Microsoft, North Ryde
• Contact: Craig Bailey : 0413 489 388
• Cost: Free (Pizza all provided)

Plus:

• Prize: Full version of Visual Studio 2008 Standard & Windows Server 2008 Enterprise
• Details: full details on the SBTUG site

Details of presentations

How to manage Outsourcing by Bob McGilvray
In this presentation Bob covers his experiences with outsourcing large software projects to overseas development teams. Bob will be covering the benefits, problems and techniques for managing an outsourced development.
Bob will present some basic facts about Outsourcing of development staff worldwide, and will give you some insight into the advantages and pitfalls of using overseas development staff, based on his own experiences to date.

About Bob
Bob left the British Army in 1986 and set up as a one man band developing database systems in the UK for HIV and Drug & Alcohol Treatment Clinics. Working in Clipper then Foxbase, Bob's very limited technical and programming experience resulted in an offer of help from  Bulgarian IT firm JEI being readily accepted. 6 months later, JEI attempted to double its charging rates overnight and was was promptly fired - and Bob's firm then individually hired the developers from JEI, all of who work for Bob's firm Coomasis Ltd.
Coomasis has a support base in England, its development team based throughout Bulgaria, and is managed from Batemans Bay. It is on the UK's major suppliers of systems for Drug & Alcohol agencies with over 200 agencies using its products.

Overview of ASP.NET MVC by Tatham Oddie
MVC Framework In this session Tatham introduces the MVC design pattern and then explains Microsoft's ASP.NET implementation. The presentation will be high level, covering where MVC is beneficial, where it is inappropriate, and why you would consider it in your business.
Here's the full description: The release of Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC framework is rapidly approaching, and now is the time for businesses to start evaluating how it can be applied in their organisations. Come along for an interactive discussion around the benefits that MVC brings to the table, the differences between MVC and Web Forms and the ongoing roadmap for each.

About Tatham
Based in Sydney, Australia, Tatham divides his time between his role as a Senior Consultant with Readify, and working on his own businesses.

Facebook

Don’t forget, if you haven't already, you can join the SBTUG group on Facebook.

And please RSVP for Wed night’s event here. This helps us know how many people are coming (for catering).

Twitter

Last but not least, you can always follow us on Twitter here.

One of the problems we often encounter is information overload. There's no shortage of great articles, examples, podcasts and webcasts on every conceivable technology. Microsoft's products are no different.

Thus, the following is comprised of numerous sources easy to find online - there's no special insight here. Rather, I've just simply tried to distill a product to its highest level overview. Hope it helps, and as usual it's covered by my 'well duh' disclaimer.

Anyway, on to today's topic: SQL Server 2008

History of SQL Server

SQL Server has been around for a while, with version 6 coming along in the early '90s.

Version 6.5 and 7.0 followed. SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 are the most common versions in use now.

SQL Server 2008 has just entered its Release Candidate cycle, which means it may be released in the next few months.

Editions

There's a number of editions, the main ones being:

SQL Server Standard, Enterprise & Developer

SQL Server Web & Workgroup

SQL Express (available Free)

SQL Compact Edition (available Free)

(These support a variety of operating systems and chip sets)

Components

You may have seen the following helpful diagram at some point - it is a good overview of the main components in SQL Server 2008: 

Database Engine

The main storage and query engine, supporting security, tables, views, stored procedures, replication and general management of data. SQL Agent also hangs off the database engine, allowing jobs or tasks to be scheduled.

Analysis Services

As the name implies, Analysis services are about providing in depth functions for analysing data.

There's two main parts to Analysis Services. Multi-dimensional data is where structures are built that package up data, often from multiple sources, into a single aggregated model. Often referred to as 'cubes' due to their multi-dimensional format. These structures are then also used in other packages (eg PerformancePoint) and reporting tools.

Data Mining is about interrogating vast volumes of data, often to provide predictive models and trends.

Reporting Services

Reporting services provide presentation and programming tools for delivering reports. Various formats, scheduling and exporting options are provided.

Integration Services

Integration services provide a platform for efficiently moving data in and out of SQL Server. Numerous formats and conversions between them can be managed. The integration tasks are coded as 'packages', and GUI tools are provided to help build them.

Service Broker

Provides the database engine with the capability to build messaging and queuing applications. Allows distributed applications to be built easily (since it supports transactions).

Replication

Replication facilitates data being distributed between different databases, and synchronised at regular intervals (sometimes close to real time). Replication can function over LANs, WANS, and the internet.

What about Notification Services?

Notifications services was a component of SQL Server 2005 that allowed messages to be sent to subscribers. It was a way of deploying apps that could send notifications in huge volumes. However it was dropped from SQL Server 2008.

Tools

SQL Server Management Studio

Key function: Managing

This is the main application for managing and administering the servers & services, databases,  stored procedures, security, replication, resource governor and more.

Business Intelligence Development Studio

Key function: Developing

This is where you build applications (ie think Solutions and Projects) for any of the main services, including Analysis, Reporting and Integration Services. For example, you'd use this for building Analysis cubes, or an Integration Services package (eg here's one I did earlier :-))

SQL Server Profiler

Key function: Debugging

This is used for capturing and analysing activity. The tool allows almost any communication item in SQL Server to be captured, everything from queries, stored procedures, result sets, handshaking, and more. This is usually the first port of call when debugging SQL performance for example.

Other tools

There's also various command line tools as well as configuration tools (although apparently not the Surface Area Configuration tool I mentioned recently).

Other important stuff

Microsoft has an overall vision for providing data everywhere, whether that's on the desktop, web, mobile device or in the data centre. Here's a nice little piccy that puts it in context ->

Microsoft Sync Framework

Part of the strategy for making data available anywhere, is having the means to synchronise it back with the main data store. This is where the Microsoft Sync Framework fits in. It's not yet released (currently CTP2) and handles more than just database synchronisation ( but we are only interested in the database part for now).

The diagrams below show two manifestations of this. The first uses the internet for connecting back to a main storage server. The second adds to this by allowing the devices to synchronise between themselves as well as the main server (again over the internet).

The main point is that this supports an 'occasionally connected' architecture.

SQL Server Data Services

Plus Microsoft has a SQL Server Data Services concept coming (it's currently in limited Beta), which provides on-demand data storage, all hosted by Microsoft.

Closing comment

Yet again Microsoft marketing has chosen to hit us with the 'actionable' adjective. I still smile every time I see it - here's why.

Last week we started seeing some of the TechEd Australia tracks being announced. Web is the first.

There was a little bit of Twitter backlash and the odd blog post noting that the track might be missing an important topic or two. (I've deliberately not linked to any of the blogs or Twitter feeds in case I misrepresent people, but they are easy to find).

Whether the track could be better (and how that might be achieved) is not my concern in this post.

Here's why its a good thing

My thinking is this: Microsoft has come so far in the last 12 months that there is just way too much stuff to adequately cover.

Surely this is a good thing!

Whereas in years gone by we've been forced to sit through sessions hyping up technology that is ages away from being released, this year we have so much new (and released!) stuff that it can't all be shown.

Conferences

Conferences are always a juggling act, with so many planning decisions to make, topics to choose from, and speakers to accommodate. You'll never get the mix exactly right. And with Australia only having capacity for 2,000 or so attendees (the US can service 14,000+) there's gonna be tough calls all along the way. Perhaps there should be 2 web tracks, or more sessions, or shorter sessions, or whatever... I'm sure there'll be some careful analysis post event. But don't let that get in the way of your attending...

See you there

For me , I reckon this year's TechEd is likely to be the best I've attended (it'll be my fourth). Microsoft, please don't disappoint me.

Will you be there?

Disclaimer

This post is covered under my 'well duh' disclaimer, and I fully realise I've had the odd whinge myself in the past (here and here for example).

The Techies at Elcom completely reformatted my machine a few weeks back and installed Vista 64bit. This has been great because I can now access all 4GB of RAM (woo hoo!). But there's been another unexpected benefit...

It turns out that there's no printer drivers for our Elcom printers that work on Vista 64. So, for the last 4 weeks I've been unable to print anything.

Here's the thing: For the first few days I found it really annoying - I'd lost a part of my normal daily processes. But after that I didn't notice it all. In fact, I haven't printed a single thing for almost a month. And I don't miss it.

I tend to take my notebook to more meetings (since I use it to pull up meeting agendas etc) and that in itself has been a bonus - I spend far too much time in meetings these days, and being able to check email, intranet articles, etc has been a productivity boost.

So Microsoft, whilst I may have started this post tongue-in-cheek, I finish it with thanks. Seriously.

(I've told the Techies NOT to tell me if they find any drivers that work...)

This Wed at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) we're lucky enough to have Aaron Saikovski along to bring us up to speed on all things Microsoft Groove related. Oh, and check out the prizes...

When: This Wed 28 May 2008

• Time: 6pm (until approx 8:30pm)
• Where: Microsoft, North Ryde
• Contact: Craig Bailey : 0413 489 388
• Cost: Free (Pizza all provided)

Plus:

• Prize: Full version of Visual Studio 2008 Standard & Windows Server 2008 Enterprise
• Guest: Special guest appearance by a little rubber version of the Channel 9 guy
• Details: full details on the SBTUG site

Details of presentations

Aaron Saikovski (Senior Solutions Specialist with Strategic Data Management) will introduce Microsoft Office Groove 2007.
Groove is a way of allowing collaboration in your enterprise without having to rely on SharePoint. In this presentation we talk about how to integrate Groove into your enterprise and what is needed and how it can be used effectively for both connected, disconnected and even remote users. We discuss the architecture, security and the business benefits of the product.

Catherine Eibner will be giving a 10 minute demo of her favourite Microsoft 2008 stack feature during our Member Spot.

If you are still happy to continue on after our pizza break then :-)

Craig Bailey (Technical Director at Elcom) will be giving part 2 of a high level overview of the Microsoft 2008 Stack including Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. He will be outlining the business benefits of each product (as opposed to just a feature review) including examples of how Elcom has gained from using them.

Facebook

Don’t forget, if you haven't already, you can join the SBTUG group on Facebook.

And please RSVP for Wed night’s event here. This helps us know how many people are coming (for catering).

Twitter

Last but not least, you can always follow us on Twitter here.

There's been some interesting articles about data centres lately. This one from ComputerWorld questions Microsoft's plan to use container based data centres (yep, as in you stick a bunch of servers in a 40 foot container). There's further follow up from Michael Manos here.

And don't miss the forest for the trees - they are talking about housing up to 440,000 servers on a single floor in a facility. Incredible. Facebook pales by comparison.

I continue to be impressed with how Microsoft is organising and presenting their online help. The Visual Basic site is a case in point. Beth Massi highlights some of the new features coming whereby you can create your own dynamic lists - ie tailor help to just your area of interest. Neat. But even in its current format it is useful and manageable.

Being interested in more of the VSTO and Office development side of things it was nice to see how that area is coming along.

Mads Kristensen (creator of the most excellent BlogEngine.NET) has put the call out to Wake up ASP.NET developers.

Whether you agree with him or not, his post is an important read, if for no other reason than to use the list of fun-fact links at the end.

The following quote will give you a taste:

You’re participating in the stagnation of the World Wide Web and you hold the human race hostage...