Last day of 2008, Predictions for 2009

I have to post before the new year is out, just to say HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!!!. It was a wonderful year. I started this blog, I learned alot of cool stuff, I went to a conference for the first time and hopefully it will not be my last. I really enjoyed doing this blog because I have alot of opinions about things and I really needed a plcae to vent. Now before I leave I have to tell you about an article I read in ComputerWorld. The title was "The 9 hottest skills for '09". The list was:

1. Programming/Application Development - The article basically said SAP and .NET are HOT! Which is true. If both of them were not the reason for this I would have ranked it #2.

2. Helpdesk/Technical Support - Why? Is it because of Vista or Windows 7? This should not be #2. If the Mac had 98% market share this would not be on the list.
(Disclosure: I do not own a Mac or any Apple stock)

3. Project Management - The reason for this is because project management is more of an art than a skill. The good ones are hard to find.

4. Networking - Due to email, video and instant messaging and other communications systems, network specialist will be in demand according to the article. Beside email and the internet in my opinion their is little need for a network guy. At my company the Network Admin probably does 10% network stuff and 90% helpdesk/support stuff. Why is it #4? Because their are people who actually believe that communication methods will change sometime soon in the corporate world. My CEO does not IM.

5. Business Intelligence - This is #5 because people do not understand this enough to see the value in this. Will that change in 09? Maybe. This should be higher and if you understand it enough you can make a boat load of money.

6. Security - This should be #2 or even #1a. You want know something about IT security in the future. I read an article the other day that quoted a congress man that said "The US is not ready for a cyber attack". When our 9/11 comes in cyber space (God forbid) you will be glad you took alittle time to learn about this.

7. Web 2.0 - This is nice but do I see it being implemented in the corporate world to make it worthwhile, it depends on the company. The article mentioned a hospital implementing a portal for its remote doctors. Is that Web 2.0? I don't think so but if that is what they mean everybody needs to go learn SharePoint (which is HOT, HOT, HOT!).

8. Data Center - Can you say virtualization? This is not a skill but it will be something common in about 2-3 years. There will be no more Windows 8 DVDs and boxes, you will be able to download it via the internet as a single virtual OS file, you will mount it, and use it. Your company network will consist of 1 physical server and 10 virtual ones. Believe me that day is coming. Hardware companies will be going out of business.

Last but not least...

9. Telecommunications - Wifi, City WANs and hotspots will be common in 2009. You will be able to go anywhere and get internet access. That might just save the industry.


Predictions of 2009

1. The stock market will rebound in the fourth quarter of 2009 along with the housing market. Why? Because Obama won't fail and it will take alittle longer for his plan to work.

2. The Celtics will repeat.

3. The Giants will repeat.

4. The Yankees will get to the World Series.

5. IT security will get more attention.

6. F# would have came and gone like J#

7. Yahoo will get brought for under $10/share

8. I would have went to another conference. (I have to make sure I get one prediction)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!

Until Next Time...

Day 4 at VSLive Dallas - Final Day

Last Day

Well today I thought I would wake up and make sure I eat breakfast on my company dime. As I was eating breakfast, in walked in a speaker who was a Microsoft Evangelist, Josh Holmes. We struck up a conversation lasted about an hour. It caused me to miss my the first session of the day. It was not a keynote today. We talked about IronRuby and Silverlight which he did a session on yesterday that I did not go to. He made me more curious in Silverlight 2. In the Silverlight 2 SDK there are these sample that contain themes. You can design a web form and apply these themes and get a half way get looking site. I will do this over the weekend. Good tip.

First Session - Visual Studio Reporting Technology and SQL Server 2008

I was busy trying to catch up on updating the blog so I was barely paying attention. But basically nothing has really changed in reporting services. My notes were blank.

Second Session - Panel Discussion, Bill Vaughn, Ken Getz, and Scott Belware

The three oldest guys in the conference in a panel. This was a treat. Bill Vaughn holds none of his words and Scott is an activist and Ken is a apologist.

Out of the questions and the discussion I picked up that:

Bill loves VB
Scott loves OOP
Ken does not want to put alot of the blame on Microsoft for all the problems in the industry.

Also everyone feels that the Entity Framework is not as nearly as good as it can be. But everyone agrees it's a good start.

End of Session.

Lunch was great. Cafeteria style!

Next Session - Sync Services for ADO.NET

Sync Services I think is very useful. We have a in-house made CRM app that is a good candidate for this because it is an Online/Offline app like Outlook. It stores CRM data in a local Access database when Offline and when Online it syncs-up with a remote SQL Service database on the network. The terrible thing about this CRM app is that you have to VPN into the network in order the sync the data. It's crazy. I did not design it. The one problem I was hoping this could solve was high transaction concurrancy, making it easier to sync data conflicts. But it does not I was told by the speaker. Too bad. NEXT!!!.

Next Session - Custom Client-Side Extenders with ASP.NET AJAX and VS 2008

Basically he picked off where he left off. He is a good speaker but I felt cheated he basically show us the AJAX Toolkit samples and told us to examine the code to learn how to create custom extenders. He must have been ready to leave. NEXT!!!

Those controls are very useful. I will use.

Last Session of VSLive - Leveraging the CLR in SQL Server 2008

What was Microsoft think when they created this functionality? I really doubt if anyone is using this stuff. Bill wrote a whole 150 page chapter in his book trying to figure out a use for this crap and all he could find is a currency converter. If anyone reading this that has ever even seen CLR code used in SQL Server, please let me know. There is no reason to use the crap. There is little or no performance gain. No need to use. Forget about it.

Conference Conclusion

All in All I would go again. This is a good conference because you get an independent view of Microsoft technologies and tools.

I will try and go to this at least once every two years.

The End

Until Next Time...

Day 3 at VSLive Dallas

Sorry for the late posts. My bad.

Keynote

The keynote was great! Some guy (Roger Sessions) who was the CEO of objectwatch.com and very technically decorated. He said he was the first Microsoft MVP in Architecture, he wrote 7 books, is an IASA Fellow, etc, etc. The title of the keynote was "Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises". He I think basically went through a methodology he developed called SIP, which I can't think what it stands for but basically it walks you through a process of partitioning a large application into smaller applications to decrease complexity, which is what SOA intends to do. I enjoyed it because he used a quite bit of mathematics in his presentation which was interesting to me, a math major. He referenced one of my favorite book, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering. You should see it on the right in my book list. His topic was great but a very basic concept if you have experience. In his slides, he partitioned a table of items by item category which I thought was obvious just by looking at the table. The concept and process he presnted was omething I thought is learned through experience. 99% of projects are partitioned by functionality which is to me the same as category, this appears to be nothing new.

First Session - What's new in VS 2008 for ASP.NET Developers

The speaker went over a few new things in VS 2008 like the:

CSS info pane
Javascript Intellisense
ListView control
DataPager control

The CSS stuff to me has not been helpful, but I had problems understanding how to use the CSS panes. The same thing is use in Expressions Web. Now you don't need a designer app like Expressions Web. You can do it all in VS now.

Javascript Intellisense & Debugging is cool but I already knew about it.

The ListView control to me is basically the same as the GridView control. So nothing gained. The DataPager control was cool because you canpage through any data collection.

Things I learned

You can call a web service through Javscript

The DataPager control has AJAX support

The AJAX control toolkit has extender controls you can use with other controls.

I will definitely use them on my next project.

Next Session - Building Workflows with SharePoint

Basically in VS 2008, its alot easier to build custom workflows. It comes with a project template and you can develop, run and test if SharePoint is installed on the same machine. (Which is not good in production). If not, it is still a pain to test because you have to still create the necessary files to install a feature on the server and then activate it. And God help you if there are bugs because you have to keep on running the install.bat file.

I will play with this more. I think workflows are not used as nearly as much as I think they should be.

Next Session - Building Effective Models with the Entity Framework

By far the most crowded session of the conference, it looked like it was a keynote session. The Entity Framework was developed due to an old class design issue. In the old days of OOP, you basically would design your database based on your class structure. So every class maps directly to a table in the database. This works but if you already have a database in place and want to create classes model to model it, how would you do it?

You have to invest in an ORM. Object Relational Mapping.

The Entity Framework is one way to do it. Microsoft felt it needed to get into the ORM space and the Entity Framework is MS ORM.

Additional Note:

ADO.NET Data Services exposes entities over the web (web services). ADO.NET Data Services (Code name : Astoria) is really cool!

Next Session - ASP.NET AJAX in Visual Studio 2008

This was a very introductory session to ASP.NET AJAX which showed you how to used the updatepanel control. The speaker was funny and really informative. One tip I got was to use a script manager proxy for usercontrol development. You might say, "I would have thought you would have already know that.". Well I did not, thank you!

Also as of SP1, there is a history extender object.
Also the speaker said if you are a web developer you must get Firebug for Firefox

Next Session - SQL Server 2008 Enhancements

All I can say that this was a great session. Bill Vaughn is a really really good speaker. He like everyone else, he loved the new Table Value Parameters. Also he talked about the new Object Dependency Tracking. This is really cool! Let's say you you have a function and a million stored procedures. You can find in what stored procedures where the function is being used easily.

Things to note:

Bill Vaughn Blog: www.hitchhikers.net - Check it out!

Bill Vaughn said "It's better to sort on the client or server in code than to use an ORDER BY in the stored procedure." You would not know how many times I have seen people use order by in a stored proc.

Look at ADO.NET Sync Services - Handles syncronization - Think of ActiveSync. Online/Offine syncronization.

Until next time...

Day 2 at VSLive Dallas!

Keynote:

The keynote for the day was done by Rob Howard, the CEO of Telligent(I like the name of the company). He first started off stating his background with Microsoft and how he started off as a developer and moved up to Program Mangager and then left to start Telligent. Then he basically went into his spill on Enterprise Infrastructure 2.0, which was basically a mix of marketing his company products and where he thought where the industry was going which is toward a more social networking, Web 2.0 and that it will be really brought to life when our little kids reach adulthood because they are growing up with things like Webkinz. My kids keep bugging me to get those stuff animals for them!

First Session

The Cloud Computing for .NET session I really wanted to go to was cancelled. So by default I went to a session that I think would help me at my current employer, "So Many Choices, So Little Time, Understanding Your .NET Data Options.

This was a good choice. The speaker briefly went through each of the data access options in .NET 3.5 SP1. As of SP1, you have about multiple choices.

LINQ to SQL
LINQ to ENTITIES
ADO.NET Web Services
Traditional ADO.NET

The speaker, Lenni Lobel did a good job I think. He also added alot of humor to keep you awake. Excellent speaker and session.

Rating: 5 stars

Second Session

For the second session it was a tossup between "Entity Framewoork 101" or "Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data". Again I chose the one that would benefit my current employer, "Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data". Man I wish I knew abou this a month ago. I had this project which basically was a GridView with CRUD operation so users change change their information on the web. Well with a Dynamic Data Web application project. You can create a page with a GridView with CRUD operations in 10 minutes max! It took me a week to get to the point that the speaker got to in 10 minutes! It was crazy! Check it out because my simple GridView project is a very common IT project in companies.

The speaker gave the impression that this might have been his first conference presentation. But he did alright and actually had someone from the audience do the demo.

Rating: 5 stars because of usefulness.

Lunch

Lunch was interesting. They had people sit together according to a topic they were interested in. It was called the Birds of a Feather Lunch. I sat at the SharePoint table and had an interesting conversation with a SharePoint consultant and one of the SharePoint speakers, David Walker whose session I went to after lunch. My discussion with the consultant was how to solve content editing and publishing issues in WSS. WSS does not have a decent content editor that is hosted in the browser.

After Lunch Session

After lunch I went to a session I thought would help me advance technically. "Practical Use of Model View Presenter and .NET". I'm very weak when it comes to design patterns so I thought I would try to learn something. I did learned about the Model View Presenter passive view pattern. It's a good pattern but to sum it up, if you take the traditional three tier architecture model and add an additional layer between the UI and business layer and name it the View, then you have the MVP pattern.

Rating: 3 stars for knowledge gained. Other than that. It was boring.

Next Session

This is the timeslot with the session of the speaker I spoke with at lunch, the first SharePoint session. I think David Walker did not do a good job of presenting what the title of the session inferred you were going to learn "Best and Worst Practices - SharePoint as an Application Development Architecture". He mention maybe 3 best practices in his whole session and 2 of them were SharePoint 101 practices. A waste of time.

Rating: 1 star

Last Session

A bad mix of sessions for this timeslot but because I wanted to tell my company I went to everything then I chose a session to attend, "Using Windows Workflow Foundation to Build an Order Processing System". Robert Green, the speaker, did a good job I thought. It got me very interested in doing Workflows with WWF (the old WWE, bad humor). The only thing is that he assume to much previous WWF knowledge for me.

Rating: 4 stars

VSLive After Dark - The furure of .NET

I was hungary by now so I went and got something to eat and miss the beginning of this but caught most of it. It was a panel of independent consultants that answered questions from the moderator. One question was worthy of noting "What are the Pros and Cons of .NET". One speaker hit the nail on the head. It keeps changing every 6 months! Once you get familiar with one thing, something new comes one and they tell you to forget everything you just learned like with conventional ADO.NET. Now LINQ is out and that is the new sliced bread so learn and use it.

That was it.

What I learned:

LINQ to SQL - Ultimately gets converted to conventional ADO.NET, Produces dynamic SQL and only benefit is to decrease lines of code.

Web Services - Only use web services externally - Internet
WCF - Only use internally - Intranet

Refresher of MVP pattern

Get the book - Domain Driven Design by Eric Allen

Tomorrow should be better

Until next time...

Day 1 at VSLive Dallas

Finally in Dallas! I just enjoyed the beautiful hotel, Adolphus Hotel. I did not pay to participate in the all day workshops in the first day. I did not want to try to justify that to my company. Just getting them to pay for this was challenging enough.

I will give an update after each day of what I learned and what I found to be interesting. Check back each day.


Talk to you soon.

Until Next time...

VSLive 2008 in Dallas Bound on Monday!

VSLive 2008 in Dallas Bound on Monday! I will be there the whole week and hope to gain alot of knowledge and have a good time!!!

I could blog from my cell phone. Hmmm...

I'm going to take alot of pictures. So keep checking back!

Until next time...

IBM's XML Challenge - Are You an XML Superstar?‏

Contest Time!

What is this contest?

The XML Challenge is designed to recognize developers who will shape the XML landscape of the future.

Why Enter?

Glory. If you're a student, then you can leverage your entry in your job hunt. If you're already in the professional ranks, you can gain some well-deserved recognition for your XML skills. Oh yeah, and there's thousands of dollars in prizes, ranging from Wiis to complimentary technical conferences.

http://xmlchallenge.com/

Until next time...