Category: Education

I’m Honored

Tonight I was given an honor. My fellow developers elected me President of the Birmingham Software Developer’s Association. I’m grateful for the confidence they placed in me, and will work hard not to disappoint. I have some big shoes to fill, my predecessor Wallace did a tremendous job for the last five years. A big public thanks to Wallace for his dedication to the BSDA.

Everyone has a vision of what they’d like to see done when they are elected to office, and I’m no different. Specifically, I’d like to double the regular attendance at club meetings. Further, I’d like to do at least one boot camp, and one .Net University session this year. With the release of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 this year and the recent release of Visual Studio 2008 I’d like to see a lot of great presentations around these new technologies.

Finally, let me make it clear this is YOUR club. I’m just the guy who gets up and welcomes everyone. It’s the members who make the club work, and who I want to serve. If you have ideas for meetings, activities, special events, whatever I’m open and willing so let’s hear them.

Again, let me say thanks to everyone who attended tonight. I look forward to working with my fellow officers and club members to do some exciting things. I deeply appreciate the honor, and will work hard to make sure it’s deserved.

Alabama Code Camp

The sixth Alabama Code Camp is coming up February 23rd, 2008. Registration is now open, as is the call for speakers. Many, including myself have submitted, you can see them by going to the Alabama Code Camp site and clicking on the speakers link. The list of speakers is very impressive, no less than eight MVPs, and at least two authors. I’m humbled to be amongst such distinguished company!

Here’s the synopsis for my two sessions, in case you are curious:

Introduction to SQL Server Integration Services

Whether you are creating a full blown data warehouse, doing a data conversion from an old system to a new one, or integrating applications together SQL Server Integration Services can help. Get an overview of this powerful tool built into SQL Server.

The Developer Experience

Learn about tips and tricks to enhance your experience as a developer both in the physical world and the virtual world. See hardware that can make your life easier, software additions for Windows and Visual Studio, even how just a few tweaks in the Visual Studio options can make your experience as a developer more pleasant and productive.

This is shaping up to be an impressive code camp, so don’t hesitate and get registered today!

Birmingham User Groups

Birmingham is blessed with a wide variety of user groups. I’m doing a brief presentation today at our internal company user group. Do you have a lot of developers that work for your company? Maybe you should start your own user group. It’s a great place to meet with other developers in your organization, make new friends, and learn a few new techniques. But enough on that, here’s a list of just a few of the user groups in this area. The last link goes to the TechBirmingham site which has a comprehensive list of user groups in the Birmingham area.

Steel City SQL – SQL Server User Group http://steelcitysql.org/default.aspx

Birmingham Software Developers Association http://www.bsda.info/

Birmingham .Net User Group (BUG.NET) http://www.bugdotnet.com/

Internet Professional Society of Alabama (IPSA) http://ipsaonline.org/

Birmingham UX Group (User Experience) http://groups.google.com/group/bhamux?hl=en

SOA Society (Service Oriented Architecture) http://soasociety.com/

Birmingham Microsoft Management Users Group http://www.myitforum.com/groups/group81/

RubyHam – Birmingham Ruby Users Group http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rubyham/

TechBirmingham Listing of Technology User Groups http://techbirmingham.com/default.aspx?id=117&linkAction=showcat&catid=1&cat=Technology%20Association%20/%20User%20Group

Upcoming Events

Just thought I’d fill you in on some of the upcoming user events in the Birmingham area. February is shaping up to be an active month for tech in Birmingham! Follow the links for more info on any of these events you are interested in.

VS2008 Seminar / Geek Dinner – Feb 4, 2008 – Doug Turnure and Chad Brooks will be doing a VS2008 seminar in Jackson MS, then a Geek Dinner in Hattiesburg MS.

BSDA – Feb 7, 2008 6:30 pm – Doug Turnure of Microsoft will be speaking on Visual Studio 2008. Geek dinner afterward!

Microsoft TS2 Event – Feb 7, 2008 1:00 pm – Event showcasing Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

IPSA – Feb 8, 2008 11:30am – Jere Chandler will be speaking on Simplicity in Design.

Huntsville User Group – Feb 12, 2008 – 6:00 pm – Yours truly will be giving the presentation on SQL Server 2005 Full Text Searching

TechMixer Expo – Feb 12, 2008 5:30 pm – Birmingham’s Tech Event – TechMixer Expo is back! Come mingle with IT’s Finest.

Steel City SQL Group Meeting – Feb 19, 2008 – Join the group for it’s first program meeting of the year

Alabama Code Camp – Feb 23, 2008 – This time Huntsville will play host city to the Alabama Code Camp. Registration is now open!

Visual Studio 2008 Loadfest – Birmingham

On Thursday night, January 24th 2008 the BUG.NET group in conjunction with Microsoft is sponsoring a Visual Studio 2008 Loadfest. Bring your laptop or desktop and lets load VS 2008 on it! The first 75 people to register will get a free copy of VS2008. In addition there will be some fun and games, there will be several XBox 360’s and huge TVs to play games on. (Sorry, no give aways of the XBoxes or TVs, but you still get to have fun with them.)

The event will begin at 6:30 pm across from the New Horizons training center,  and will last about 2 hours. (See the link below for more details and directions).

To attend and get your free copy of VS2008 you must register! Go to

https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=124185

No cost, but like I said you must register. See you there!

Feng Shui and the Art of Development

I’m not a big proponent of Feng Shui. For those unfamiliar with it, Feng Shui is a Chinese philosophy that essentially says that the placement of your furniture can have a big affect on your health and prosperity. Like a lot of things, something that starts off as a good idea seems to me to be carried too far. I do however firmly believe that your physical environment can have a dramatic effect on your mental environment. I saw a blog posting by Scott Hanselman describing his new home office layout. It was then that I realized something important: my own home office no longer worked for me.

I’ve been in my house eight years now. Like a lot of folks, I accumulate a lot of things related to my work / hobby. Books, computers, CDs/DVDs, and gadgets galore. It probably doesn’t help that my home office is also my ham radio “shack”, the place that contains all my radios, books and associated gear. For some time now I’ve been pretty unhappy with my basement office, having problems concentrating, etc. It had even gotten to the point where I had no place to even lay a book and reference it while working. After reading Scott’s post I immediately realized what my problem was: my environment.

Unfortunately December and early January were a bit hectic, what with my wife’s health problems and work, I haven’t had much spare time. Well, this weekend good luck finally arrived. My wife is healing very nicely and is much more self sufficient. We had snow, which made going out impractical, so it was the perfect opportunity. I pulled nearly everything out of my office, placed a lot of my “junk” into storage and relaid out the tables I use for working.

I’m typing now from my reconstructed office. A lot of the spare parts I had accumulated are gone, boxed up and placed in the storage area under the stairs. A lot of old catalogs and magazines hit the trash, many of the books I seldom reference were moved to another area of the house that had space. I now have plenty of space for my computer and can finally have all three monitors laid out side by side. I have a workspace now, somewhere to put the book I’m using for learning or reference. In addition, the moving of old books gave me space to put away my new books. I was able to do a little shuffling so the books I currently reference the most were on the lower shelf within arm’s reach, instead of piled on the floor.

Once again my office feels like a safe place to learn. When it comes to your office, whether it be your desk at your employer or your desk at home, don’t overlook your environment. Everyone has their own style. Look around your office right now. Is it comfortable? Quiet? Can you think effectively? Are the tools you need close at hand? If you answered any of these “no”, then start thinking about what you can do to make your home office a refuge, a safe place to work and learn. Then go do it.

Arcane Fun Fridays – Broadcast your Podcast

A little fun tip for today’s post. As long time readers know I love podcasts. They are a great way to capitalize on time, learning while doing other activities. As I was puttering around the house, I wished I had an easy way to listen to my podcasts without having to use my headphones, and also be portable. Then it occurred to me, I did.

When I drive back and forth to work, I use a cassette adapter to plug into my cheapy mp3 player into the my old car’s stereo and listen to my podcasts. Sometimes I travel on business, and these days it’s seldom I get a rental car with a cassette, so I picked up an inexpensive radio transmitter, similar to this one but a heck of a lot cheaper. Well, being an amateur radio operator (often called “ham radio”) I have a wide variety of power supplies lying around. I dug into my box and found one kind of like this. I mated them up, found an unused frequency, and plugged the other end of the transmitter into the speaker jack of my computer and boom I was listening to my podcasts through my various radios. Very nice, and I can see a lot of use.

I was pleased too with the range, I can hear it all over my house and even into my yard a bit. I could probably get a bit more range moving it out of my office basement.

One last hint for today, next time you go to various stores keep an eye out for a “clearance” area. They are usually tucked away in the back corner of the store, often near the restrooms. I know I’ve seen them in Staples, Radio Shack, Office Max and Office Depot to name a few. You can get some really good deals, for example I picked up my transmitter for 10 dollars, marked down from the original 49 bucks. Also check out sites like woot for “deal of the day” specials.

SOA Society Meeting

Just thought I’d let you know of more doings in Birmingham. The SOA Society will hold it’s first meeting of 2008 next Tuesday, the 22nd. SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture, a methodology for integrating IT and Business. That’s a pretty broad simplification, to learn more about SOA you’ll just have to come to the meetings!

See the Society’s website at http://soasociety.com for more info.

VS 2008 Technical Overview

Just thought I’d pass along an upcoming event, on Thursday January 17th 2008 Doug Turnure will be presenting a technical overview of Visual Studio 2008 at the IPSA (Internet Professional Society of Alabama). Doug’s will be talking about new features and designers in VS2008, LINQ, and will even be giving away a couple of copies of VS2008. RSVP ahead of time at the IPSA site, especially if you want to purchase a lunch.

Enjoy!

Does MacGyver Dream of Mark Miller?

For Christmas this year my family gave me a copy of MacGyver, Season 1 and 2 on DVD. My wife’s side of the family gave me a gift card which I used to get seasons 3 & 4. I’m a long time MacGyver fan, but my wife had only seen one or two episodes and my kids had never seen it at all, so we’ve been having a lot of fun watching. My favorite part of the series was the voice-overs, where you’d hear MacGyver’s voice as he explained what he was doing. It always started with some odd thought or story that led you through the thought process of how he came to the conclusion to build whatever wacky life saving device he was constructing.

I’ve come to realize in some ways these blog entries are sort of like the MacGyver voice-overs, my inner thoughts being created for you on the web. So I hope you’ll bear with me a few minutes while I relate a rather bizarre dream I had last night.

In my dream I’m standing on stage, in front of a fully loaded computer. It has all the bells and whistles, VS2008, SQL Server, and so on. On the other side of the stage, Mark Miller is there, in front of a similar computer. For those unfamiliar with Miller, he’s the genius behind CodeRush and RefactorPro, tools to help you write code faster. Some time back, when the product was first released Miller used to challenge the audience to beat him in a code writing contest. His machine had CodeRush, and he would use chopsticks to write code, his competitor could use their fingers but did not have CodeRush on their machine. Of course Mark always won.

So sure enough, in my dream there’s Miller, chopsticks in hand ready to go, and I’m the guy going up against him. Our task is to take data from table A1, create a mirror table and name it table A2, and then move all million rows from A1 into A2. As you might guess, in my dream, I win. How?

Well I didn’t write a program. Instead I first jumped into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and used its script generating capability to produce a create table script. Make a quick search and replace and boom I’ve got table A2 created. I then jump over to the Business Intelligence Developer Studio (BIDS) to create a SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) package to do the data move. (Yes, I probably could have used the script generation of SSMS again to generate an Insert script, but I was showing off.) In about three to four minutes I had accomplished the task and moved all the data while Miller was pecking away at computer with his chopsticks.

I didn’t win because I’m a hot shot coder who is smarter than my competitor. Miller is a (some say mad) genius who can run circles around me in the coding world. As I told the folks in my dream, and I’m telling you now sometimes the best solution to a programming challenge isn’t to program at all! If you read yesterday’s post, Straining at Gnats, you may recall I said “…take some time. Push back from your computer and think for a moment. Think what the true outcome of your application is supposed to be. Not “what will the program do” but “what will the program do for the user???” Think about how best to achieve the user’s goals.”

When you are thinking about solutions, take a minute to look outside of your favorite programming language. Is it possible to achieve the goal without writing any code at all? What tool or tools do you have in your tool box that you can combine to get the job done? Here’s a great example that happened to me just before I took off on my holiday vacation.

As I’ve mentioned before at work we have a Business Intelligence (BI) app I work as the lead on, it imports data to a SQL Server 2005 warehouse via SSIS then uses SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to generate reports. The data is imported from a work order management system we bought many years ago. We also have some engineers who have a tiny little Microsoft Access database. This database has a primary key column; we’ll call it a part number for purposes of this example. There are three more columns, some data they need to know for each part but are not found in our big system. They’d like to add this data to the reports our BI app generates. Two last pieces of information, they only update this data once per quarter. Maybe. The last few years they have only done 3 updates a year. Second, the big system I mentioned is due to be replaced sometime in the next two years with a new system that will have their three fields.

A lot of solutions presented themselves to me. Write an ASP.Net app, with a SQL Server back end then use SSIS to move the data. Elegant, but a lot of work, very time consuming for a developer, especially for something that can go away in the near future. Write an SSIS package to pull data from Access? Risky, since we had no control over the Access database. A user could rename columns or move the database all together, in either case trashing the SSIS. Several other automation solutions were considered and rejected, before the final solution presented itself: not to automate at all.

Once per quarter I’ll simply have the engineers send me their Access database. Microsoft Access has a nice upsizing wizard that will move the table to SQL Server, I’ll use that to push the data onto the SQL Server Express that runs on my workstation. I’ll then use the script generating capability of SSMS to make an Insert script for the data. Add a truncate statement to the top to remove the old data and send it to the DBA to run. When I ran through it the first time my total time invested was less than ten minutes. In a worst case scenario I spend 40 minutes a year updating the data so it’s available for reporting. That’s far, far less time that I would have spent on any other solution.

The next time you have a coding challenge, take a moment to “think like MacGyver”. Look at all the tools you have lying around your PC and see what sort of solutions you can come up with. Once you are willing to step outside the comfort zone of your favorite coding language, you may be able to come up with some creative, MacGyver like solutions to your user’s problems.

 

PS – If you missed the announcement while on vacation, DevExpress just released CodeRush / RefactorPro 3.0. More than 150 refactorings and lots of new CodeRush features! Update yours today.

Straining at Gnats

Here in the south (I live in Alabama) we have a saying “quit straining at gnats”. A gnat, by the way, is a very tiny bug that proliferates during the summer and tends to fly in your face when you walk outdoors. The saying essentially means “you’re working very hard to get rid of something very small”.

In Episode 300 of Dot Net Rocks (a great episode) Richard Campbell tells a great story. The short version is Richard is called in to look at a computer that’s having problems. It’s the mid 80’s or so, and this PC is responsible for downloading financial info. Every hour the computer reboots itself and they have to go start it all back up. He says “I can fix it, but it’ll cost you 3 grand”. Client sputters and says they’ll think about it.

Two weeks later he gets the call “OK, you got the 3 grand, come fix it.” So on the way to the client he stops and spends 1500 bucks on a new PC, puts it in place at the client, copies all the old software over and boom it’s up and running perfectly. As he’s walking out the door, check in hand, he’s asked “what was wrong with it?” “Heck if I know.” Richard replies. “But the problems fixed.”

It’s a great story (and much funnier when you hear Richard tell it), but it illustrates a great point. All too often we obsess over some problem, and lose sight of the desired result. All too often we focus on some piece of code, trying to come up with the most “elegant” solution, or frustrate ourselves over some piece of code instead of tossing it and rewriting.

I’m not saying write bad code, or write sloppy code in a hurry just to get it done. I am saying when you run across a problem, don’t get so invested in it that you don’t see alternatives. Time and again I see a developer getting stuck on a problem, trying to fix some arcane piece of code, or spending hours to get that extra millisecond from a SQL query.

When you run across that road block, take some time. Push back from your computer and think for a moment. Think what the true outcome of your application is supposed to be. Not “what will the program do” but “what will the program do for the user???” Think about how best to achieve the users goals.

As Campbell pointed out several times in the episode, when you are writing software for a business it’s all about making money. Your program should either make or save the company money in some fashion. Whether it’s by crunching numbers in a faster, more efficient way than a human could, by providing information in a more timely fashion, or any of a thousand other scenarios. Never lose sight of the fact your software is to provide a solution, and not being written for artistic purposes.

Don’t get so lost in the code that you wind up straining at gnats.

SQL Server 2005 Learning Resources

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in the SQL Server realm, learning all I can about it as both a database and business intelligence platform. Turns out to be a far more complex, and fascinating subject than I’d first imagined. I thought that you too might find some of the same resources I’ve been using useful. All of these are free, which is a great price.

Rather than putting them all here, I’ve updated my Arcane Links page (https://arcanecode.wordpress.com/arcane-links/ ) with a new section on SQL Server 2005 Resources. Over the holidays I plan to update the links page with fresher links, local user groups, etc. I’m also working on learning SQL Server 2008 as well, so look for those links upcoming shortly.

A timely mention, the RunAsRadio that was released this week (episode 36, see the RunAsRadio link in the links page) has an interview with Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal. Not only was it a great interview, they let it slip they’re actually considering doing a show. If you’d like to see a SQL Server show, please leave a comment over on Carl Franklin’s blog (http://shrinkster.com/sv5 ) and let them know. Personally I’m thrilled, there’s a lot of good shows on Visual Studio but only one good one that I know of for SQL Server, SQL Server Down Under (again see my links page). If you know of other shows let me know by leaving a comment here. I figure there’s plenty of room for more and Kim and Paul would be a great duo.

Over time my posts will catch up with what I’m learning, and I’ll start getting more into SQL Server content as time goes by. Meanwhile check out the links and learn along with me.

ITAC Lunch and Learn – Dec 4th

My friend and co-worker, Jeff W. Barnes, MVP will be speaking on Tuesday December the 4th at the Emmet O’Neal Library during lunch. His topic will be “The Future of .Net Development” which sounds pretty interesting. Come on out, here a good presentation and grab some lunch.

For more info, including registration info, see Jeff’s blog entry at http://jeffbarnes.net/portal/blogs/jeff_barnes/archive/2007/11/27/itac-lunch-and-learn-for-net-on-dec-4th.aspx

See ya’ll there!

The Arcane Coder

For all those of you who have written, yes it was my e-mail that Richard Campbell read on a recent .Net Rocks. Specifically episode 291, http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=291 (the e-mail is read about 6 minutes into it if you are the impatient type).

It’s a really good episode, and I don’t just say that because they read my mail. Kent Alstad gave a great interview in talking about scalability and application development. I highly encourage you to listen all the way through. I have a select group of DNR episodes that I will listen to several times, and this one is going to be added to that list, great stuff.