August Conferences

There are three major conferences coming up in August you should know about, two in Tennessee and one in Alabama.

First up, August 9th is CodeStock. This event will be held in Knoxville TN on the campus of Pellissippi State. They also have a Twitter account you can follow to get the latest news. Looks like quite an event, I counted at least two authors and ten MVPs among the speakers!

Next up is TechMixer University. It will be held Tuesday, August 19th in Birmingham Alabama. The speaker list will be published shortly, but trust me it’s a good line up including several MVPs. And it’s free!

Finally, devLINK will be held August 22nd and 23rd on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University, just outside Nashville. This one looks to be an awesome event, some really big name speakers will be here including the dotNetRocks guys!

And you know what the best part is? Yours truly the Arcane Coder will be attending all three conferences! Best of all a lot of the guys and gals I’ve gotten to know on Twitter will be there as well, and I’ll finally get a chance to meet them face to face. To say I’m stoked would be be an understatement.

So what are you waiting for? Go sign up today, none of the conferences are that expensive, and TechMixer U Is even free! Don’t pass up your opportunity to see the Arcane Coder live and in person.

Good Reads

Thanks to Tekzilla, I found an interesting website called Good Reads. Good Reads allows you to quickly and easily enter the books you own into the site so others can see what you are reading, want to read, etc. It also makes it handy when you are a book lover like me, and have a hard time remembering which books you own and don’t own.

You can organize your books into bookshelves. It comes with three built in shelves: read, currently-reading, and to-read. You can create your own shelves, and a book can be on multiple shelves. I’ve organized my bookshelves by topic, so far I have shelves like sql-server, powershell, c-sharp, f-sharp, to name a few. You can find my list at:

http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1268221

I like this concept, in the past I’ve always used an on-line bookseller when suggesting a book. Now this gives me a way of sharing my book list without looking like I’m a marketer. Another valuable feature, the site lets you create reviews for each book and give it a one to five star rating.

Right now I have added my most recent books. The ones on the bookshelf in my office in easy reach (or that have spilled onto a stack on my desk due to lack of bookshelf space) that get used a lot. I love books as a learning medium, so wind up buying a lot. Eventually I will add more of my current computer book collection. Also right now I’m focusing on my computer books, but will eventually add some of my recreational, self improvement, and business books.

Check out Good Reads and my list when you can. It’s free, and pretty quick to add your book list to. If you create a list feel free to leave a comment with a link so we can see what you are reading!

Interview with Andy Warren on his Birmingham Visit

After the SQL Saturday event Inbetween the TechEds I had a moment to interview SQL Server guru Andy Warren about his upcoming trip to Birmingham Alabama. Andy will be speaking at the Steel City SQL group on June 17th and holding an all day class on on Performance Tuning on June 18th. You can find my interview with him, in MP3 format, here:

Andy Warren Interview

Note the audio is raw and uncut, but will give you all of the information you need.

The TechEd Day 1 Report

Wow, what a day. It was go go go all day long. I even attended sessions during lunch, so as to get every last bit of knowledge I could. I went to a lot of good sessions today, but by far my favorite was the session Kimberly Tripp did on Indexing Strategies. She was able to take a boring subject like indexing and not only make it understandable but entertaining. When you find yourself excited about the thought of spending time looking at your indexes, you know you’ve been trained by a master!

After the session she stayed and answered questions, and again from the floor she and her husband Paul were there again sharing their brain power. I enjoyed the session so much I’ve just spent 20 minutes juggling my schedule for the rest of the week so I can squeeze in another session they are doing later in the week. If you ever get a chance to see them speak, I would highly recommend it. If you cannot in person, at least check out their blogs at SQL Skills. She also did a series of webcasts, you can find links at http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/kimberly/2005/11/05/MSDNWebcastSeriesWrapupResources.aspx.

Enough fun for today, need some rest for tomorrow is another day of geeking out.

I went to the Inbetween TechEd Conference and All I Got Was This Lousy XBox 360 Elite!

As you know from my previous entries, I am in Orlando attending TechEd, at the IT Pro week. In the weekend between the Dev and Pro conferences Microsoft turned over the Orange County Convention Center to the Florida User Groups. Spearheaded by the ONETUG group, this event was made possible through the cooperation of many user groups. I attended the SQL Saturday sessions that were held on both Saturday and Sunday, and they even let me hog the stage for an hour on Saturday and give my presentation on Full Text Searching in SQL Server 2005 and 2008.

I had a blast, and met a lot of great people. I have to admit I was surprised at how many folks were there just for the Inbetween conference and not TechEd. Out of the 45 folks who were in my session, all but 2 said they were local folks there for just the Inbetween conference.

As you can tell from the title of this post, I did indeed win something. Bear with me, as it’s a great story. At the Saturday night party they were giving away 3 XBoxes, two of which were randomly drawn for. Well the young lady who won one of them did not wish to keep it for whatever reason, and asked if she could draw another name, which she did.

Well the guy who won that night had his name drawn during Sunday’s giveaway of 7 XBoxes. He came up and told the story, and said he wanted to do the same thing, even though no one would have said a word had he decided to keep it. Well he drew and it was my name he pulled out of the box! I wish I could remember his name so I could say thanks again.

I’ve always wanted an XBox, but could never quite justify the expenditure. Now I have a new toy, and my kids are very excited over the prospect of playing some games with daddy. I think this will be a great gizmo for some daddy/kids together time.

Let me get serious for one moment, and give a big thanks to all the groups who came together at the last minute, and to Joe Healy, Florida Developer Evangelist, for giving the user groups the chance to show what they can do. It seems almost fashionable to bash Microsoft these days, but how many other companies would bear the expense of something as costly as the convention center and give it away to the user community?

Thanks to all for a great time, I hope the Inbetween conference becomes a regular feature at all future TechEd.

Presenting SQL Server 2005 2008 Full Text Searching at the TechEd 2008 InBetween conference

On June 7th, 2008 I am presenting “Getting Started with SQL Server 2005/2008” at the InBetween SQL Saturday conference that is taking place between the two weeks of Microsoft TechEd. This post will have all the links relevant to my talk.

Detailed descriptive material can be found on my blog, ArcaneCode.com, with links to specific posts below.

First off, the slides and sample code can be located at the Code Gallery site I setup specifically for Full Text Searching with SQL Server:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SqlServerFTS

Look on the downloads page to see various projects around SQL Server Full Text Searching. I’ve created one “release” for each of the projects around FTS. Be sure to look on the right side at the various releases in order to see the various projects.

Next, you can get started with the basics by reading these entries on my blog:

Lesson 0 – Getting the Bits to do Full Text Searching in SQL Server 2005
Lesson 1 – The Catalog
Lesson 2 – The Indexes
Lesson 3 – Using SQL
Lesson 4 – Valid Data Types
Lesson 5 – Advanced Searching

After that you’ll be ready for some advanced topics.

Can you hear me now? Checking to see if FTS is installed.
Exploring SQL Servers FullTextCatalogProperty Function
Using the ObjectPropertyEx Function
Using FORMSOF in SQL Server Full Text Searching
Creating Custom Thesaurus Entries in SQL Server 2005 and 2008 Full Text Search
Creating and Customizing Noise Words in SQL Server 2005 Full Text Search
Creating and Customizing Noise Words / StopWords in SQL Server 2008 Full Text Search
Advanced Queries for Using SQL Server 2008 Full Text Search StopWords / StopLists

Boy Howdy Those Deep Fried Bytes Are Yummy

Long time readers of my blog or Twitter posts will know I am a big fan of podcasts. There’s a new one worth taking a listen to:

Deep Fried Bytes

Deep Fried Bytes is a new podcast hosted by Mississippi MVP Keith Elder and Chris “Woody” Woodruff. I listened to their inaugural episode on the way to the office this morning and quite enjoyed it. While they will cover all aspects of technology, they will have a heavy focus on .Net development.

The audio quality was superb, it may have been a first episode but their production quality and format made it sound like they’d been podcasting for years. I’ve already added the show to my Zune as a subscription, and recommended it to the Zune Marketplace. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next episode!

I’m Speaking At the TechEd ]InBetwen[ SQL Saturday Conference

TechEd is Microsoft’s annual developer conference, the really big one. This year it returns to the Orlando Convention Center, only this year they have decided to split it into two weeks. The first week is for developers, the second week is for the IT Professionals. My manager is generously sending two of us this year, my co-worker will be there the first week, I’ll be attending the second week to focus on the SQL Server information.

The two week split left Microsoft in an odd position, what to do with the convention center over the weekend? In their long standing tradition of working closely with the developer community, Microsoft turned the place over to the Florida user groups. They are hosting the first “]InBetween[“ conference. There is an incredible amount of content being offered, for free: .Net Code Camps, Day of Agile, Day of Silverlight, .Net University, DotNetNuke University, Exam Crams, IT Pro Camps, Office Communication Server, The ToolShed, Train the Trainer, VSTS University, and SQL Saturday and SQL University (on Sunday).

You can find out more, including links and a complete schedule at:

http://www.devfish.net/articles/inbetween/

Of special interest to me though, and the reason for this post is SQL Saturday. Either through divine intervention or a cosmic prank, I will be presenting at the SQL Saturday doing a session on Full Text Searching. You can register and get more info here:

http://www.sqlsaturday.com/eventhome.aspx?eventid=5

And see the full schedule here:

http://www.sqlsaturday.com/schedule.aspx

It’s quite an honor, there are some big names speaking there such as Andy Warren and Brian Knight. I also see that another Birminghamian, Barry Ralston will be speaking.

So if you will be in Orlando for TechEd, plan on staying late or arriving early and attend one of the many InBetween conferences. This promises to be a great event, and best of all it’s FREE. That’s right, you don’t even have to be a TechEd attendee to come, just show up and pick your event. (Of course, the event organizers would appreciate it if you would register!)

Dunn Training coming to Montgomery

I just noticed that Dunn Training’s new schedule has them doing several classes in Montgomery. For those of you who don’t know the name, Mark Dunn was the original co-host of Dot Net Rocks. You can check out the current schedule at:

http://www.dunntraining.com/training/schedule.htm

I took a BizTalk Server training class from them earlier this year, and can only describe it with one word: Outstanding. The debugging tips alone were worth it, but the entire class was chock full of info. I heartily endorse the training and highly recommend it for your educational needs.

Announcing Alabama Tech Events

Just do it. So goes the old marketing made popular some 20 plus years ago by an unnamed shoe company.

For some time I have heard, over and over, that we in the state of Alabama really need some centralized location to announce tech events. You know, user group meetings, code camps, events, and the like. The events don’t even have to be held in the state, just close enough to be of interest to folks here in Alabama. So this week instead of dutifully updating my blog, I’ve instead been hard at work on a new creation. After hearing “someone ought to…” I was either foolish or brave and decided to be that someone and “just did it”. Without further ado, I am happy to announce:

Alabama Tech Events

http://altechevents.com

The purpose of the site is to post all upcoming meetings, events, and other articles of interest to the IT community in the state of Alabama. The site will be platform agnostic. I don’t care if your event is Microsoft, Linux, Apple, or based around some other platform. But let me make it clear, this is far from a solo effort.

I need the help of user group leaders throughout the southeast. If you have a group, are having regular meetings or a one time special IT event, let me know. I will give you the ability to create and edit your own posts as you need to. And that goes for groups / events in neighboring states as well. Alabama’s central location in the South East makes it ideal for easy commutes into adjoining states. If you are in Georgia, Florida, Tennessee or Mississippi by all means contact me and we’ll get you adding your events as well.

This isn’t limited to just user groups either, we will welcome business to post their events, as long as it is indeed an event of appeal to at least a segment of the IT community. About the only thing I’d say no to right now is job postings / resumes, there are plenty of other places built to handle that kind of thing.

One question I’ve already been asked, why a site for the whole state? Why not do one for each major city? Several reasons.

First, people do travel, so if I know there is going to be a user group meeting in a city I’ll be visiting, I’ll be sure to attend. Second, in some areas of the state there are user groups within a reasonable driving distance of each other. I live in Birmingham, so if a really major speaker were coming to say Montgomery, it would be an easy drive down that I would do in a heartbeat, as I’m sure many others would.

So there you go, a new site for the folks in the great state of Alabama to learn about tech events. I’ll say it one more time, if you are the leader of a user group, or an event planner or are somehow otherwise involved in tech events please contact me and let’s get you posting on Alabama Tech Events.

Twitter, Arcane Style

Twitter. You’ve probably heard it described a million ways. A micro blogging tool. Group instant messaging. Social networking. Keith Elder even described like “being in the speaker’s lounge at a code camp”. There are as many ways to use Twitter as there are reasons to use it. Of course, you can go right to http://twitter.com and use the web interface. There are many desktop clients available too, my personal favorite is Witty. There are even ways to update your Twitter account from your cell phone or smart client mobile device.

There are two keys to making Twitter work for you. First, is to decide what sort of content you are looking for on Twitter, the second is to then follow people who will deliver that kind of content to you. Many people use Twitter to keep others updated on what’s going on in their lives. Where they are hanging out, who they saw that day, what their day was like, etc. Mostly (IMHO) stuff your Mom wants to know.

The next reason to Twitter is to receive information from companies. Places like http://woot.com keep you informed of their deal of the day, which means the info is pushed to me instead of me having to go hunt it down. One of our local TV stations also Twitters to let us know of bad weather events that may be coming.

The final reason I’ll mention is the reason I Twitter, for good technical content. I’ve chosen a mixture of people who Tweet a steady stream of links and tips that I can learn from. I also try to provide relevant posts with useful info.

So, you’ve decided you want to get on Twitter. You’ve gone to Twitter.com and signed up for an account. Now what? Well, you need to decide who you want to follow. There are several ways to do this. First, you can find someone you already know about. I’m assuming you’ve logged into Twitter, and are staring at your home page. Up in the text box next to the Twitter logo where it says “Name or location” type in my Twitter name, arcanecode (all one word) and press enter. You will get a result with me in it, just click on the “Follow” link and you’ll begin to see my Tweets when you refresh the page.

Now you can look at my profile, and look at the list of folks that either I’m following or are following me. (I’d suggest the following page, since it’s more discriminating). You can then choose to follow those folks.

Another way is to search for people in or near the town where you live. Back on your Twitter home page, in the Name or Location box type in the City, ST where you want to look for and press enter. This will produce a list of people who have identified themselves as being in your town. Look over the list, click on their profiles. See how frequently they post, when their last post was, and most important are their posts of interest to you.

I’ll mention one other thing, a common convention when you see someone’s twitter name is to use an @ sign in front, for example @arcanecode. When using an @ sign, Twitter will automatically route that message to the person so they can see it.

To get you started, here is a short list of technical folks I follow for one reason or another. If you want to see my full list, just look at my Twitter profile and click on Following.

Birmingham Twitterers

@arcanecode – That’s me!

@jeff_barnes – MVP for Connected Systems (WCF)

@tmiranda – MVP for UI (WPF guru)

@KV4S – Fellow ham and software developer

Southeast Twitterers

@keithelder – MVP from Mississippi and the person who got me hooked on Twitter

@dougt – Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the Southeast and all around swell guy, no matter what Glen says.

@glengordon – Host of “GeekSpeak” on Channel 9

@TheADOGuy – Co-author of many of the .Net training books and magazine articles, recently into Silverlight

@vinull – Speaker out of Knoxville TN and .Net Developer

@dougal – One of the authors of WordPress, one time room mate of @glengordon, and my brother in law.

Nationally Known Twitterers

@shanselman – Host of Hanselminutes and nationally known speaker

@carlfranklin – Host of DotNetRocks

@codinghorror – If you don’t know who this guy is, you should

@twitlive – Leo Laporte’s information stream for his new http://twitlive.tv website.

@leolaporte – Host of the Twit.TV network, former TechTV star

@patricknorton – Host of Tekzilla, former TechTV star

@saraford – Famous for her Visual Studio tip of the day blog

I’ll wrap this up to an apology with all the folks I couldn’t mention, there were just too many. I follow a lot of really great folks and you’ve all provided me with some great information. Thanks!

Now, to the rest of you go out and start Twittering!

Birmingham Tech News and Events

There are some big doings going on in the event community over the next few weeks.

First off, this Thursday May 8th at 6:30 pm the Birmingham Software Developers Association (BSDA) will be having “The Variety Show”. Join us for a variety of 15 minute presentations by various club members on what they’ve been working on lately–there should be something for everyone and the floor is open for anyone who’d like to do a short presentation.

On Friday, May 9th the IPSA group will meet during lunch at the McWane center, the topic will be The Social Media Toolbox.

Next week, the Birmingham .Net User Group (Bug.Net) will be having it’s regular meeting on May 13th at 6:30 pm. Stay tuned to their website for speaker and details.

Then, on Wednesday, May 14th at 6:30 pm the BSDA and Bug.Net are pleased to co-present a special event. Regional speaker Michael Neel will be here to talk on DataSets:

DataSets are Evil. They will hog your CPU, steal your RAM, and rob your home. This is the story surrounding DataSets, but what is fact and what is myth? In this session we will look at DataSets and the tools that go with them to see how they can save you development time while not crashing the server. We’ll also dive into DataSets in 2008 with LINQ to DataSets and Unit Testing with DataSets.

Learn more about Michael at vinull.com/profile

Finally, beginning at 5:30 pm on May 20th the Steel City SQL Group will meet. MVP Kevin Bowles will be here to talk about SQL Server 2008 Development. Kevin is a great speaker, his sessions are always loaded with useful information.

With the exception of the IPSA meeting, all of the other events will be held at the New Horizons training center in Homewood. A special thanks to the folks at New Horizons for making their facilities open to the Birmingham user group community!

BarCamp Birmingham 2 Presentations

At last Saturday’s BarCamp Birmingham, I gave three presentations. The first was on Virtual PC 2007. For more info on it just look to my previous post, which has the first video on VPC. I’m currently working on the other videos in the series and should have them up this week.

My second presentation was “The Developer’s Experience”. As promised in the session, here’s the complete PDF of my slides: The Developer Experience. This has hyperlinks to all of the tools I presented.

My final presentation was on Full Text Searching on SQL Server 2005. First, here is a PDF of the PowerPoint slides: Full Text Search Power Points

Next, most of the demos used SQL statements. This PDF file has all of the SQL plus some associated notes. Full Text Search Demo Scripts

Finally, I didn’t get to demo this at BarCamp due to time, but I do have a WPF project that demonstrated how to call a full text search query from a WPF Windows application. Annoyingly enough WordPress (who hosts my blog) won’t let me upload ZIP files, so I renamed the extension to pdf. After you download the file to your drive, remove the .pdf and put the zip extension back on, then it should expand all the source for you correctly. (Yes, I know, I really need to get a host server for binaries, one of these days I’ll get around to it, but for today…) Source for WPF Demo

See you at the next BarCamp!

BarCampBirmingham2

Just thought I’d pass along information about BarCampBirmingham2 – April 11 & 12. The unconference conference.

What is BarCampBirmingham?

BarCampBirmingham is a user generated conference created around an open, participatory workshop-event, with content provided by participants. Those participating choose the session topics for the day and then present to each other. It’s free. It’s fun. It’s a great way to meet the local technology community.

What topics are being presented?

That is up to you. You can visit the BarCampBirmingham2 website (which is a wiki) and add any idea you have to the list of topics. If you have one in mind that you would like to speak on, put your name by it.

Where do I sign up?

Visit the BarCampBirmingham2 website and add your name as a Camper. You can also subscribe to the BarCampBirmingham Google Group to stay in the loop on the planning efforts.

How Can I Help?

Participate. Publicize. Present. This is an event by the people, for the people. An un-conference that takes direction from those who participate, not the other way around.

You can also:

Join the BarCampBirmingham Google Group
Blog about BarCampBirmingham2
Join the BarCampBirmingham Flickr Group
Join the BarCampBirmingham Facebook Group
Tell your friends
Follow BarCampBirmingham on Twitter
Propose sessions