April 2006 - Posts
Today was my last day at work for a while. I've got family coming in town starting tomorrow so I took off Thursday, April 27th through Tuesday, May 16. For those who count, that's a total of 18 days off of work. The last time I had this much time "off" from work, I was laid off. This vacation will be nice.
Plus - I'm getting married on Sunday. After that, I'm going to Italy on my honeymoon! I promise to post some nice photos when I get back.
It took a few days but I finally got a digital copy of the famous Tony Orlando signing a copy of his autobiography for me. Tony was really nice about signing two copies - one to my mother (where he wrote that I'm a credit to her, although how he knows that is beyond me) and one to Kim. When I told him that Kim and I are getting married soon, he wrote a wise crack in there about how we should "enjoy ourselves
tonight!" Sitting there listening to him reminisce about signing talents like Barry Manilow and James Taylor, working with the Beatles and Jackie Gleason, etc was really fascinating. I'd be willing to bet he could sell tickets to a one man show where he just tells random stories from his past. I am too young to have ever seen his TV show or to really appreciate any of his dozen or more number one billboard hits, but he really was an interesting guy and was a lot of fun to meet.
Check out
this blog posting detailing the name change for Monad. I personally love doing things on the command line and the ability to grant some real flexibility and power to the power users and administrators. Keep track of this new tool at
http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell
May 3rd has officially been dubbed "Speech Server Day" here in Atlanta. Well...OK - not actually "officially". However, if you're interested in applications that you can talk to and can actually understand and talk back, check out the in town event at the Microsoft offices.
Click here to register
Yes, we know. Comments on DevCow are temporarily broken. While we try to figure things out, if you have something important to tell us, feel free to send me (Matt) an e-mail
Tony Orlando is coming to my office for lunch tomorrow. Am I wrong or was he actually on the Love Boat with Charo?
This has to be the coolest new service I've heard of in a while. Lycos is offering a free home phone number that you can answer on your computer. This is awesome. This means that when you finally cut the wires and ditch your home phone and go with broadband and cellphones as your only methods of contact, you can supply this phone number as a number of record on credit applications, etc. I assume this is similar to Skype and whatnot (having never used Skype, I have no idea what it is like) but I know that this one can be called from any phone.
I just finished giving my presentation to 80 people. Not too shabby at all! Despite bizarre audio problems at the beginning and a moment where my phone rang and I got dumped off the call, things went well. I apparently got good reviews and I received lots of good questions. I hope everyone who was able to attend got at least something out of it.
The presentation will be available for download on the
INETA Live site
Today is my first foray into the world of webcasts. I'm basically going to present the SharePoint 1, 2, 3! level 100 content at 3:30 today. The webcast is actually part of the
INETA Live initiative and we're just ramping this up to begin delivering some good content. That means this is probably my last webcast for this group! ;-)
Anyway - I'd really like to post some decent attendance numbers, so if you wouldn't mind dialing into the call, I'd appreciate it. Honestly, you don't even have to listen. Just sign in. Please.
This past Monday was a meeting of the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals, and we featured Karl Rissland, a Microsoft BizTalk technical specialist. Karl was a great presenter and I'm only sorry that I was so late getting the newsletter out because we didn't have a very large crowd.
Another reason we might have had a fairly small crowd is that lots of people don't really understand what BizTalk does or what it can be used for. If you listen to any of the BizTalk technical specialists, including Karl, you'll hear "Business Process Orchestration" mentioned over and over, but what does that really mean? Let's step back and look at this from the perspective of the average mid-sized company developer.
Have you ever written an interface program? Something that takes data from one system and moves it into a different system, possibly requiring some sort of transformation or parsing of data? Perhaps you're moving data from a Point of Sale system into a home office Marketing database, or maybe you're moving data from the HR system to some kind of inventory tracking system. Or there is the classic example of moving data from some kind of sales system into some kind of order fufillment system. Basically, you have data elements in point A that need to move to point B. Who hasn't done this at least once in their careers? It's not terribly hard, you write code to grab data, match it to some sort of data element map, and then put the data somewhere else. If you work at a company with five or six systems, each of which needs to talk to at least one other system, you're talking about a minimum of three of these interfaces. This kind of inter-application wire-up is called EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) and BizTalk can make this easier for you by providing all the hard parts.
Where BizTalk really shines though is when you want to do more than just pass a simple file around. Let's say you have a company policy that when a new person gets hired, they visit HR to get entered into the HR system and the Payroll system. Then they visit IT to get a domain account and to get a workstation and telephone assigned. If you think of this in terms of EAI, you've got at least three connections to make - HR <--> Payroll <--> IT (and IT here is probably 3 different systems or databases - Active Directory, Telephone Directory, and some kind of inventory tracking database). Now, if you think of this in terms of a business process that you're facilitating, the "New Hire" process, you can start to see how you might be able to pull this stuff together. Let's say that the new hire visits HR and they stick him into their system. Now BizTalk could get a message from the HR system saying "I've got a new hire" and it could begin to automatically do the work in the payroll system as well as work in some of the IT systems. Domain accounts could be added (BizTalk can do more than pass database messages around, you can run code or scripts). Telephone assignment notices could be filed with the appropriate IT staffer, who could update the records once the line is connected. There is a lot that can be done here, and this process of encapsulating an entire business process and managing several details and decisions is called Business Process Orchestration.
Now, if you want to hear someone who really knows what they're talking about explain how all of this really works, we need to invite Karl to come back and present a more in-depth view of BizTalk and what it can do for you. This is a tool that every developer should understand. I'm not saying that every developer will use BizTalk or that it's appropriate for every situation, but this is another significant tool in the toolbox. Knowing a wide array of tools (or at least knowing that they exist and what they're for) can never hurt anyone.
Here's a weird one I've just encountered. I've got a user who connects to my 2000 SQL Server with MS Access to run some queries as part of an old program. This user has their ODBC connection set up specifying the 'sa' user. However, this particular user suddenly started getting permissions problems trying to complete this routine task. On this particular SQL Server I'd recently (about a week ago) added a login account for a specific Active Directory Security Group, but this particular user is not in this new Security Group. I do have an old Domain Users login that has 'public' access to the database in question, but this has not changed since I joined the company (to my knowledge)
I ponder and wonder and finally fire up Profiler. What do I see? Why, my user is executing two SQL Batch statements as the domain user and all the rest (hundreds of RPC events) as 'sa'. Now I have to figure out what in this Access application is different about these two statements that they're being executed as SQL Batch statements while the rest are all remote procedure calls. Then I get to figure out why the SQL Batch statements are being executed via integrated authentication while the rest are using SQL authentication.
Much strangeness
I've upgraded MS Exchange 2003 to SP2 and installed a dozen critical security updates, a firmware update to the PERC/3 RAID array controller. Wicked fun! (That means I mostly sat around while little blue bars crawled across the screen, over and over).
I did get to run the ExBPA tool, and I found 4 critical problems. One is expected - we're apparently purposely blocking the SMTP port with our antivirus/firewall solution. One was a simple registry fix to prevent possible memory corruption. The other two errors related to deleted folders which had not been correctly cleared from the folder store object.
This is an amazing little tool and I hope MS releases more of these. This, the security baseline tool, the disaster recovery tool etc. Anything that can make my job easier is a GOOD THING.
The wind up.... The pitch.... It's a triple!
I'm standing on third base right now. I managed to convince the other IT folks here at work that it makes more sense to use SharePoint as the basis for our Intranet rather than to build everything ourselves in ASP.Net 2.0
I've got a demo scheduled where I have to show off a SharePoint installation and a replacement for an exiting Sales vs. Forecast report. If I have a successful demo then I'll be busy replacing all the other parts of our Intranet with SharePoint and some reporting tool (SSRS or DataDynamics ActiveReports)
Woohoo! I've been hoping for this. This puts me in a good spot to get some great Analysis Services work done and then use the Business ScoreCards Manager to build some really great dashboards for the executive team. It's really geeky, but I'm pumped!
Last night was a good evening. Kim and I met with a bunch of friends at Agnes and Muriel's for dinner. Agnes and Muriel's is a great Southern foods restaurant near the intersection of Monroe and Piedmont downtown. I can highly recommend the Coca-Cola ribs, the BBQ Pork ruben (fried onions instead of saurkraut) and especially the Cajun okra. In the dozen or so times I've been, I don't think I've skipped the okra a single time.
After dinner we wandered down the road a bit and had drinks and dessert at Apres Diem. I rounded out the Southern dining experience with a slice of red velvet cake. Some people don't like Red Velvet cake, but I have no idea why. The cream cheese icing is always good and I honestly don't really think all the red makes the cake taste bitter if it's done right. Kim. I'm talking about you!
I polished that out with a nice Belgian beer - Stella Artios. Great stuff, that Stella. It's got to be one of my favorite beers.
Finally Kim and I went home where we watched some Carlos Mencia on TV
After Kim fell asleep I stayed up till 1:30 am playing Ghost Recon Advanced Warrior on Xbox Live. I generally get my butt kicked online but I have a good time playing. It's always easier to have fun when you find people that are fun to play with and last night was great thanks to four or five other guys online with me, goofing around.
It's 7:45am Sunday morning and I'm at work. I don't really mind, I here to help upgrade some of the servers. I think my prime responsibility today is the Exchange server. That should be fun - I get to install Service Pack 2 and run the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer. From there, who knows?
More Posts
Next page »