The Importance of a Good User Interface

Sure, everyone would like a good UI, but most developers simply have not had the training to implement a usable user interface. I’m not necessarily talking about something dazzling and good looking, no I’m talking about USABLE. Think user interfaces aren’t that important?

Last night on Twitter, @djuggler mentioned John Denver. My wife is a huge John Denver fan. Right after we got married, I took her to a John Denver concert. We got all dressed up, did the nice dinner then I surprised her with some great seats. We were on the front row, if you exclude the seats that were down in the orchestra pit. I was especially glad I spent the extra bucks as it turned out to be his last concert in Birmingham before he passed away.

@djuggler ‘s tweet made me curious what year he’d passed away. In reading the Wikipedia article I found an interesting link to an article on ASK TOG. It was titled “When Interfaces Kill: What Really Happened to John Denver”. I’ll let you read the article for the full details, but the short version is the fuel tank toggle switch was poorly designed, and in a location that forced the pilot to remove his hands from the controls. Doing so caused John Denver to lose control and, well, that was that.

I hope this brings to light how important a good UI can be. At the risk of this sounding like a lame lead in to a commercial, I will mention tonight’s BSDA meeting. Shannon Brooks-Hamilton is coming to speak to give us a User Experience Overview. From her extract:

“User Experience” is a person’s overall experience and satisfaction when using a product or service. This presentation will give an overview of the practices, methods, and outcomes of User Experience with an emphasis on tips for great interface designs. The benefits of User Experience include increased product usage, increased e-commerce sales, increased user productivity, decreased support costs, decreased training costs, and fanatical customer loyalty. Google, Apple, and IDEO are examples of companies that embrace User Experience.

We’ll be meeting at 6:30 pm on August 14^th at the New Horizons Training Center in Homewood, hope you can make it!

Getting Started with SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5

Tonight I will be presenting “Getting Started with SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5” at the Bug.Net users group. If you go to my Arcane Lessons page and scroll down just a little, you will find a section called “Getting Started with SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition”. The subjects referenced there are still valid under Visual Studio 2008 / SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5.

However, there are some new features that make it worth our while to give SSCE 3.5 a second look. For example, did you know you can access Compact Edition using LINQ to SQL? My updated presentation and code demo will show you how.

Speaking of which, you can find my PowerPoint slides and Code Demos at the new Microsoft Code Gallery site I’ve setup:

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

Over the coming days I will also be adding blog posts to talk about the new features in version 3.5, and how to access SSCE from LINQ to SQL.

CodeStock

I was at CodeStock in Knoxville over this previous weekend. Great conference. It was run very well, everything went quite smoothly. I attended some really great sessions, and got to meet a ton of great folks.

The twitter get together the night before at the hotel was awesome. It was sort of weird, a lot of the folks I have known on twitter for several months now, but this was the first time we got to meet face to face. As I told my wife, “I got to see a lot of old friends for the very first time and catch up on old times.” We got into some really interesting discussions on development topics, user group activities, and just had a lot of fun in general.

I attended a lot of good sessions during the day, but want to point out a few in particular. The first was put on by Amanda Launcher and Joe O’Brien. They talked about alternative languages such as Ruby and F#, and why learning them was important. They pointed out that alternative languages help you think about different approaches to problem solving. Gave us a lot to think about, and has me eager to dive into those F# books I bought.

The other two sessions were on LINQ. Joe Kunk did a LINQ to SQL session. His stated goal was to give us enough info to return to the office and write our first LINQ app. This combined with Jim Wooley’s session on LINQ Migration Strategies did just that, I sat down Sunday and, I admit with the help of a few books, in a few hours had written my first LINQ code to talk to SQL Server Compact Edition.

I thought CodeStock was a great investment of my time, and am looking forward to returning next year.

Presenting Getting Started with SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 at BUG.NET Meeting

Just wanted to let everyone know I’ll be doing a presentation this coming Tuesday night, August the 12th for the Birmingham .Net Users Group (BUG.NET). My topic, as you may have guessed from the title, will be using SQL Server Compact Edition.

While I will be using Visual Studio 2008, I will point out which pieces are 2005 compatible. I will also cover the use of both traditional coding techniques as well as how to use LinqToSQL to talk to the Compact Edition.

The meeting takes place at 6:30 pm at New Horizons Training Center in Homewood.

I also plan a new series of blog posts to start later this week on the subject, and will be creating a new Code Gallery site to hold my examples.

Also, don’t forget the regular BSDA meeting this coming Thursday night, the 14th. Also starting at 6:30 pm at New Horizons, Shannon Brooks-Hamilton, a software usability expert, will be there to talk about user interface design. Lots of good thought material on how we can make better UIs for our users.

devLink Almost Sold Out

I mentioned a few weeks ago I was looking forward to attending devLink. If you haven’t heard of it, devLink is a conference being held in Murfreesboro TN, just south of Nashville. It started out small but has turned into a pretty big deal. I went last year, and will be returning again this year.

I just got an e-mail, the conference is almost sold out! Less than 30 spots remain. If you want your chance to see me live and in person (and who wouldn’t?) then rush now to their site and pick up your pass. At only 75 bucks it’s a bargain you can’t afford to pass up.

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.

Arcane Code, MVP

Just a few minutes ago I received an e-mail. “Dear Robert Cain,” it began, “Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way to say thank you for promoting the spirit of community and improving people’s lives and the industry’s success every day.”

Wow.

I admit it’s a goal I’ve had for the last year and a half, and have worked hard to achieve, but I still have a hard time believing it’s finally happened. For those who are unfamiliar with the award, MVP stands for Most Valuable Professional. Microsoft gives the award for work in the user group communities. My award was given in the SQL area. I am humbled to be joining an elite crowd, worldwide the website shows only 223 people in this category. Even though the award is for my efforts, those efforts were in the community and I had a lot of help from the community. Thus there are some folks I’d like to publicly thank.

The first is Doug Turnure, who up until Monday was the Developer Evangelist (DE) for AL/MS/GA. Doug mentored me, and gave me a lot of practical, valuable advice. I’d also like to thank the new DE for the area, Glen Gordon, who also gave me aid. Two other DE’s, Joe Healy and Brian Hitney also deserve a word of thanks. Even though I lived out of their normal operating areas they still took time to answer my questions and let me know of speaking opportunities.

There are also some 2007 MVPs who took time to give me advice and guidance. Todd Miranda, Jeff Barnes, Wally McClure, Kevin Boles and Keith Elder deserve a big thank you.

Next I’d like to thank all my co-workers, too numerous to mention, who tolerated my constant e-mails about user group meetings, events, and suffered as I practiced my presentations on them.

I would also be neglectful if I failed to say thanks to everyone in the various user groups I attend. BSDA, BUG.Net, Steel City SQL, SOA Society, TechBirmingham and others opened their doors to me and gave me chances to give back to the community. I should also say thanks to the various user groups across the south east, such as Atlanta, Orlando, Tallahassee, and Huntsville (to name a few) who opened their doors to me.

To all the readers of my blog I also need to give thanks. Your participation via comments and e-mail feedback helped keep my blog alive as a source of ongoing information for the community.

Next I want to thank my daughters, Raven and Anna, for putting up with Daddy being gone weekly to user groups, having his nose constantly in a book or laptop, or having to travel and spend time in hotel rooms while Daddy was in code camps. (Don’t worry, they didn’t suffer too much, they invented popcorn and “chick flick” night to compensate, and with Mommy’s help easily found the shopping malls.)

Finally, and most importantly I need to thank my wonderful wife ‘Ammie’, for taking care of the household while I was giving presentations, for bringing me dinner at my computer while I worked on blog posts, and for putting up with all the late nights I’d crawl in bed after getting immersed with some fascinating new technology and losing all track of time. Thanks honey!

TechEd 2008 Wrap Up

Whew. I’m finally home from TechEd 2008. It was an incredible week. First off, it was quite lucky for me in terms of swag. I came home with: XBox 360 Elite; Office 2007 Ultimate; Book on Sharepoint Web Part Programming; 2 games for the XBox; 8 Gig Zune; and more extra large t-shirts than I could carry.

I also got to meet a lot of great people, and find some speakers to add to my favorites list. Having heard them on Dot Net Rocks I knew Kimberly Trip and Paul Randall were good speakers, and just as friendly off stage as on. Matthew Roche, Buck Woody, Dan Jones, Donald Farmer, Peter Ward, Allen White, Maciej Pilecki, well I could go on with the list of great speakers but these were among the ones that stand out.

The InBetween weekend event was outstanding. The user groups really did a great job in a short amount of time putting together an awesome weekend. In addition to presenting my own session I also enjoyed attending ones by Barry Ralston, Andy Warren, Brian Knight, well there I go again. It is well worth staying over, or arriving early and getting in on the weekend event if you are going to TechEd.

By far though, the most important thing I came home with was knowledge. I learned an incredible amount. That knowledge will make me more valuable to my employer, who invested their money to send me. It will also make me more valuable to my coworkers, as I share the knowledge and have more answers to their questions. I’m also more valuable to the community, as I go back to user groups and share what I’ve learned there in presentations.

All in all I’d say TechEd was a great investment of time, money, and brain power.

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.

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

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!)

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.

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!