I thought I’d summarize a few recent developer tool announcements from Microsoft. Taken individually each of these announcements is certainly positive but may appear somewhat inconsequential.  Taken together I think they constitute a very important trend.  First, let’s enumerate them:

• Visual Studio Team System Database Edition, known informally as “Data Dude,” will be merged into Visual Studio Team System Development Edition.  Current software assurance licensees of either product are being immediately granted a license to the other.  The same is true of subscribers to MSDN editions that include either Team System product (subscribers will be able to download the other product from the MSDN Subscriptions site). This goes into effect October 1, i.e. just a few hours after I will be posting this.  The announcement itself appears in a post on Brian Harry’s blog.
• Microsoft is shipping the Open Source jQuery JavaScript Library and providing Visual Studio integration for it as a free stand-alone Web download, and as part of the forthcoming ASP.NET MVC release.  Microsoft will also integrate jQuery in future versions of Visual Studio.
• Microsoft joined the Object Management Group (OMG) earlier this month.

Each of these announcements is a win for the developer.  Many influencers in the .NET community have been saying for a long time that Microsoft should ship a single version of the Visual Studio Team System client and dispense with most of the separate product SKUs.  While the current Team Suite SKU is that unified edition, it’s viewed by many organizations as cost prohibitive and so Development Edition has seen the strongest uptake.  For Microsoft shops to  have to choose between the Development and Database Editions was really awkward.  Most developers need both feature sets, but were forced to pick the Developer Edition.  That caused them to miss out on the Database Edition features that they needed.  Now that will no longer be the case.

The jQuery library, beyond its feature set (allowing developers to determine and modify HTML content programmatically), is an Open Source tool enjoying great popularity.  Microsoft is working with the jQuery team in their efforts to integrate it into Visual Studio and has pledged not to fork the code (build their own custom version).  In other words, Microsoft is embracing an Open Source technology, without reservation, and decided to do so in spite of an initial intent to build such functionality on their own.  From Scott Guthrie’s blog post on the subject: “Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it?  We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too.”

Remember that initial ad campaign for Vista?  “The Wow Starts Now.”  Well, maybe it hadn’t then, but it definitely has now.  Scott’s quote demonstrates an uncanny display of common sense, that is not necessarily, ummm…, Microsoft’s hallmark.  I believe strongly that this pragmatist, a-political approach to making .NET better and working with the broad developer community to serve their interests has a strong believer and advocate in Scott Guthrie and that his rising influence in the developer division means we’ll continue to see such announcements made and measures taken.  This is Microsoft at its best.  Bravo.

Continuing in this extra-Redmond peacemaking (“extra” as in “outside of”, not as in “more”), or at the very least, extra-Redmond détente, Microsoft has re-joined the Object Management Group and has, in effect, staged a reconciliation with UML (Unified Modeling Language).  This means that the forthcoming Oslo modeling technologies are likely to “play well with others.”  That is to say, other companies, other products, and other (skeptical) developers.  That’s good citizenship and it’s good business.  Again, the display of pragmatism is noteworthy.

An effective price drop on Team System, and an embrace of Open Source, UML and an open standards body.  Is this the new, more open Microsoft that some predicted would take root post-Gates?  Perhaps.  Is it a merely a marketing ploy?  Elements of it may be, though I think the earnest component of the announcements is the dominant one.  But even, if in self-defense, developers wish to take a skeptical outlook on these moves, there’s tangible benefits for them to enjoy, and more for them at least to look forward to.

Recent articles like this one have been speculating on the possibility that a potential flaw in IIS might be responsible for a rash of malicious iFrame attacks that have plagued the Web recently.

It would appear that IIS, ASP[.NET, and SQL Server are not the culprits.  A response to me and others, direct from Microsoft follows.

***

We have been investigating these reports today and just posted two blog posts about them:

http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2008/04/25/questions-about-web-server-attacks.aspx

http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2008/04/25/sql-injection-attacks-on-iis-web-servers.aspx

The high-level summary is:

These *are not* a result of any known security issue with IIS, SQL, ASP or ASP.NET (or any other Microsoft product)

These are instead the result of SQL injection issues within the web pages/applications hosted on these sites

 The above blog posts provide more details on the attacks and have pointers on how to make sure your site doesn’t have SQL injection issues.

Materials for the workshop Lenni Lobel and I presented on April 3rd are available here.

Since Wednesday's announcement by Microsoft that it will publish the source code for major parts of the .NET Framework, there has been a lot of press and commentary.  Much of the press was positive and much of the commentary negative.

My own quotes were part of the positive press.  Specifically, I corresponded at length with Darryl Taft of eWeek, resulting in quotes in the article “Microsoft Reveals .Net Source Code” and with Mary Jo Foley, which resulted in a quote in her blog post on the subject.

Much of the negative commentary focused on how by publishing of the Framework source under their Reference License, Microsoft has prevented the Framework code from being truly Open Source.  Other commentators went further, and surmised that Microsoft has published the source for reasons of entrapment: essentially, by allowing people to see the source, Microsoft could then pursue developers involved in Open Source projects, including Novell’s Mono, who might be “influenced” into writing similar code and introducing it into these Open Source products.

With my own opinion and bias well-known and documented, I still feel compelled to respond. I do this because I fear that while some of these criticisms may be, technically, true, they are quite beside the point.  So here goes…

First, to the point that Microsoft is not releasing .NET Framework source code into a true Open Source vehicle: you are 100% correct.  There is nothing new here.  Except for the relatively small set of code that Microsoft releases under its “permissive” license, it is not an Open Source company, does not especially believe in the Open Source model, and does not view non-adherence to Open Source conventions as a failing, a compromise, or a cop-out.  Rather, it views what we might call “exposed source” as a learning tool, and a development aid.  Specifically, in the case of the .NET Framework source and Visual Studio 2008, the main scenario for using the source will be to aid and ease debugging of .NET applications.  Think Microsoft is being a tease?  Nope.  You’re just just mis-reading her signals.  Go proposition another girl.

Second, to the point that Microsoft may be luring Open Source developers into copyright infringement: (a) you’re ignoring history, and (b) you’re confusing Microsoft with a monolithic organization.  Allow me to elaborate on both points.  (A) Microsoft has been releasing source code since the early 90s, including that for its C/C++ compiler and its MFC and ATL frameworks for Win32 (Joel Spolsky speaks to this quite authoritatively in another Mary Jo quote here).  (B) There really are people at Microsoft who are hostile to Open Source and even somewhat vindictive toward its proponents.  Thing is, Scott Guthrie, the person who pushed for and announced the release of the .NET Framework source code, isn’t one of them.  Scott is a no-nonsense guy whose main concerns are developer satisfaction and technical excellence.  It was also Scott who worked with Novell and Miguel de Icaza, to make “Moonlight” (a Linux/Mono version of Silverlight) a reality, and to endorse it rather than relegate it to renegade status.  Scott was also a driving force behind ASP.NET which of course requires Windows on the server, but works with most any browser and OS on the client.

Let’s be real clear: worst case, things became no worse after Wednesday’s announcement than they were before it.  Best case, they became a lot better.  And I would encourage even the most ardent Microsoft critic to consider the latter opinion.  It’s a fairly safe bet that Scott Guthrie overcame internal resistance at Microsoft in order to release the Framework source.  He likely needed to convince people who felt strongly that exposing the source would be putting intellectual property at undue risk.  Scott probably needed to present a business case that showed how the developer gains and their positive impact on Microsoft's business far outweighed the risks of IP theft.  So if you want Microsoft to be more Open and less “evil,” you’ll want people with Scott Guthrie’s mind set to be successful, and you’ll want to support his initiatives.  If you want Microsoft to stumble, that’s fine too.  But if so, it becomes difficult to argue issues like this on the merits, since that viewpoint can lead to predetermined conclusions.

Microsoft has already sent out a save the date for next year’s MIX conference.  This comes just days after they announced an indefinite postponement of PDC ‘07.

Seems like the teams at Microsoft with the momentum are on the ASP.NET/Silverlight side of the shop.  And the show with the mojo is the one that builds bridges…to designers and thus to customers of other companies’ products.  It would be a bit glib to say “there’s a lesson in that,” so I’ll pretend not to say it.

Microsoft has just announced that it will be rescheduling this year’s PDC to an as yet undetermined date.  Microsoft’s reasoning for this, essentially, is that between MIX, Tech*Ed Orlando and Barcelona, and (I suspect) its Business Intelligence Conference held two weeks ago, and a slew of recent and soon-to-come alpha and beta releases, developers have enough to chew on for a while.  The folks in Redmond prefer to wait until we’re well into the next wave of technologies before launching a new PDC.  If my memory serves me correctly, Microsoft made the same decision two PDCs back and, with hindsight, people appreciated the decision and judged it wise.

Interestingly, Microsoft lists four events at which it will be presenting future technology content, and the first one on the list is VSLive! New York, to be held Sept 16^th – 19^th in Brooklyn, USA.  As the Conference Chair of that event, I’m gratified by this nice little promo.  We will in fact have content on “Katmai” (the next release of SQL Server) and very likely a keynote on Silverlight, all of which will be presented by product team members from Redmond.  Meanwhile, the vast majority of our content will be focused on technology that’s shipping today.  We think this strikes the right balance of “futures” and practical present-tense-relevant material.

On April 24th, I will be presenting a session called "Real Time BI with SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services" at the sold-out Microsoft Financial Services Developers Conference, at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in New York City.  My firm, newly branded as twentysix New York, is a Platinum sponsor, and my twentysix colleague Kent Brown, will be presenting as well.

In my session, I will cover a number of methods for implementing real-time Business Intelligence, including use of the new proactive caching features of Analysis Services 2005 and the SQL Service Broker, as well as some approaches that work well in SQL Server 2000.

While I was in San Francisco for VSLive, I took half an hour to talk about BI with Ron Jacobs, host of ARCast, Microsoft's Internet audio podcast for software architects.  The show went up online yesterday.

You can read a blurb about it, and click a link to play it here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/ARCast_with_Ron_Jacobs

Direct links to wma- and mp3-formatted copies of the show are:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Podcasts/164350_ARCast020106-BIWithSQLServer.wma
http://channel9.msdn.com/Podcasts/164350_ARCast020106-BIWithSQLServer.mp3

The podcast is timely, given that I just returned from the Microsoft BI PAC (Partner Advisory Council) meeting.  While most of what was discussed there is under non-disclosure, what I can tell you is that Microsoft is serious about BI on the server, on the client, and from line of business applications.  Watch out Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion!

Better late than never.  Click here for--->materials from my Jan. 31 ADO MD.NET talk and click here for--->materials from my Feb. 1 ASP.NET data binding talk.

Registration for Code Camp NYC, which we officially announced only last week, is already full!  Either the Microsoft registration site is buggy (doubtful), or there is incredible pent-up demand for this kind of event in New York City, given that the Code Camp NYC’s Web site was up for only two days before the event filled up.  Granted, we are limited to 150 attendees, but this is still an impressively strong response.  It’s pretty clear that .NET has garnered quite a standing in New York.

Wait list registrations are still being taken.  I encourage all interested in attending to sign up for the waitlist; a certain percentage of registrants for free events never show up, so your chances of getting in are decent.

I guess we’ll have to do another Code Camp in New York City again soon.  It’s been so long since I’ve posted here, that a request for comments may reach very few of you. Be that as it may, I would appreciate hearing your preference for the frequency with which we hold these events. 

And if you’re interested in being part of a perpetual team of Code Camp NYC organizers, please email volunteersnyc@codecamp.us.

Kent Brown, our firm's new Enterprise Integration Practice Manager, is hard at work establishing a new user group in New York City.  The group will focus on business process integration, Microsoft style, involving products and technologies like BizTalk Server, Windows Communication Foundation (f.k.a. Indigo), Windows Workflow Foundation, SQL Server 2005 Integration Services and more.  Kent's working with Microsoft NYNJ and Redmond, and has been consulting with the leaders of the recently established Northwest Connected Systems user group.  More details, including meeting dates and Web URL, as they become available.

I am this week’s guest on “.NET Rocks,” the popular Internet audio talk show covering .NET development.  This week’s show features me chatting about Microsoft BI technologies, with specific attention paid to Analysis Services in SQL Server 2005, including its OLAP and Data Mining feature sets.  I mention Business Scorecard Manager as well, and talk about Microsoft’s (increasingly well played) position in the BI market.

For those who don’t know, the main Web URL for the show is:
http://www.dotnetrocks.com

And Microsoft runs a mirror site here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/dotnetrocks
(although my show’s not up on the mirror site yet)

It’s only a matter of time before I actually start blogging regularly again.  No, really.  The problem is that I’ve been working on a book, albeit with two co-authors, and we’ve been in crunch mode for a while.  It’ll be over soon.  And the book will kick ass…if we ever finish it.

Between the book, a new job (now almost 15 months old) and a new son (now almost 14 months old), being overwhelmed has been a theme in my life for a while now.

The Internet overwhelms me too, and it annoys me.  There’s too much content, and too little editing (and I realize that this blog is complicit in that phenomenon).  One day people are going to remember why the hell they used to read trade and technical magazines.  They’ll remember that editors culled through stuff for them, and packaged it up in relatively small publications, that came out at a reasonable frequency.  You could read them from cover to cover and even wait in anticipation for the next issue.

Call me a Luddite, but that was a useful format.  It was respectful of my time.  And it was respectful of the authors’ work too.  Blogs and RSS aggregators and all the articles posted daily to the Web by the major trade pubs don’t offer that respect.  And that is a drag on productivity in the industry which impacts negatively on the economy.

So my quest has been to find outlets in the new medium that help me approximate the discriminating taste and editorial efficiency of the old magazine format.

I’ve only just begun, but I have found one very useful resource: Slashdot Review.  It’s a ten minute daily evening audio podcast (it comes out once each weekday evening as well as most Sundays) that summarizes the day’s most interesting posts on Slashdot.  It’s an extremely time-efficient way to keep abreast of tech industry current events, and the audio format will give your monitor-sore eyes a rest.

Slashdot Review’s host, Andrew McCaskey, is unaffiliated with Slashdot, though he’s an avid reader.  He adds his own articulate opinions at times, and educates his listeners in podcasting trends and technologies.  He also puts out a show with high production value, and that makes it fun to listen to.  I listen on my PC, my Creative Zen Micro audio player, and in my living room on my Media Center PC.  By the way, the show’s content does exist in blog form, and the podcast RSS feed I supplied in the last paragraph contains text that accompanies each mp3 "enclosure."

I’m going to keep looking for resources like this.  I’m now more hopeful that the Internet’s content pollution can be tamed.

Short of spell-checking and proofreading, work on the "Advanced OLAP" chapter for my upcoming book on SQL Server 2005 (with co-authors Stephen Forte and Bill Zack) is done.  This one chapter (which we may end splitting into two) covers an array of new features in Analysis Services 2005. 

I believe very strongly that with this release of SQL Server, all Microsoft-centric developers should learn at least a little about OLAP.  The biggest reason for this is that building cubes, building application functionality around them and keeping them up-to-date is now something that any good database administrator and/or developer can do.

It's time to step up.  To explain why, let me just outline some common-sense principles that this release is based upon.  They make the technology more accessible to you, and to the BI market in general:

• Keeping your cubes up-to-date shouldn't involve a lot of work.  Proactive Caching, which in its basic form can be configured with a Wizard, can be used to maximize availability of your cube and currency of its data.
• You shouldn't need to be an OLAP expert to build simple cubes. It's not just that the tools used to build cubes are eaiser to use and more sophisticated, it's that the principles themselves are easier.  Simple things are simple to do.  Parent-child dimensions are easier, ordering of members in a dimension is easier, supporting multiple hierarchies is much more straightforward, etc.
• You shouldn't need to be an analyst or statician to use the cubes that get built.  Built in visualization tools (KPIs) make cube data much easier to comprehend.  Display folders allow for an immediate taxonomy of what can be an otherwise overwhelming list of dimensions and measures.  And new perspectives make it simple to publish a subset of a cube and make it look like a separate cube to client applications.
• You shouldn't need high-level permissions on your database to build a cube on it.  Analysis Services 2005 just needs your untransformed tables, views or stored procedures.  Special queries stored in the AS database's Data Source View can help you transform the data if need be, and single tables can be used for multiple dimensions, so you don't need to create multiple views on the same table.  You can even use your fact table as a dimension table.
• OLAP development should be more like other development.  When you do go beyond simple cubes, and you need to write some server-side MDX code to make things work the way you want, you should have development and debugging support akin to what most developers are used to.  Designing cubes inside Visual Studio makes this possible, and it's really cool!
• Learning MDX should be less necessary and less difficult.  OLAP/MDX developers now have the same kind of drag and drop code generation and Intellisense support (albeit limited) that other devs do.  They also have access to a huge library of templates for both server-side MDX expressions and client-side MDX queries.  I'm all for coding into a blank page, but if used properly, tools and templates help you learn.  MDX is a bear; that shouldn't be compounded with a velvet rope and a bunch of bouncers denying you entrance to the learning club and, thankfully, it no longer is.
• OLAP reporting should be easy.  Check!  Reporting Services' support for OLAP (and data mining) is strong, with an MDX query designer built right into the product.  That same designer is now built into SQL Server Management Studio too, making Analysis Services a first class client inside SSMS, right alongside SQL's relational engine.
• There should still be cool stuff for the experts.  Don't worry OLAP experts, your franchise has not been eradicated.  There's a slew of features that you, and only you, can help customers realize the full value of.  What this release does is lower barriers to entry, and most likely increase the market and demand for your expertise.

'Nuff said.  If you want to learn more, you gotta wait for the book.

Code and slides for my ASP.NET 2.0 Data Binding session can be found here.

Code and slides for my ADO MD.NET session can be found here.

Code zips from both of my Tech Ed talks are now posted.  Code from my "Windows Forms: Making the Most of WinForms 2.0 Data Binding" session (CLI322) with Steve Lasker (including Steve's code) can be found here.  Code from my "Developing SQL Server 2005 OLAP Applications with ADO MD.NET" session (BIN326) can be found here.

I enjoyed giving both talks.  They took a ton of work and the positive responses to both were a great reward.

(Free copy of Office 2003 Pro for the first person who posts a comment correctly explaining that reference.)

More details to come (including code), but here's a first glimpse of what worked and what didn't when I combined Whidbey with Oracle:

        ·         Even though ODP.NET was installed on the same machine as VS 2005, none of the VS dialogs or wizards recognized it.

·         Using Microsoft’s Oracle provider in the Server Explorer window, I could enumerate, but not view the PL/SQL code for, stored procedures within Oracle packages.

·         Using Microsoft’s Oracle provider in the TableAdapter Configuration Wizard, stored procedures in packages were not enumerated and could not be selected.  Therefore, typed DataSets against Oracle package-based stored procs were no go.

·         I couldn’t use the ASP.NET SqlDataSource control with ODP.NET.  The latter isn’t available from any drop-downs, and manually typing “Oracle.DataAccess.Client” into the Provider property created errors when I tried to run the page.

·         The winning combination was the ObjectDataSource control combined with “hand-written” classes that use ODP.NET to implement CRUD operations on package-based stored procedures.

·         Most of my research was in ASP.NET 2.0, and not Windows Forms.  But similar results came up there as well.

Code and slides from my Thursday 3/17/05 Lunch and Learn session can be found here.  The Projects and WebSites folders within the zip contain sub folders which should be copied into the My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects and My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\WebSites folders respectively.  The SSProjTestScripts folder should be copied into the My Documents\SQL Server Management Studio\Projects folder. Throw the PPT wherever you please.

All code has been tested under the February CTP releases of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005.  The three Visual Studio projects demonstrate SQL Server CLR techniques, ASP.NET data binding, and numerous ADO.NET 2.0 and Windows Forms data binding tricks (including binding to objects).  The SQL Server Management Studio project contains numerous scripts that manipulate and use the CLR stored procedure and User Defined Type implemented in the SQL CLR Visual Studio project.

I am enjoying immensely the reruns of "Welcome Back, Kotter", running in syndication and on an odd, seemingly religious/family values channel, called the Good Life Network.  My Windows Media Center PC is recording these reruns in the wee hours for me.

On a recent episode, in a scene in the schoolyard, I noticed that even though the 1970s set was wildly fake-looking, one of its attempts at NYC public schoolyard graffiti was rather realistic: "B.M.T. Sheiks."  For those who don't know, BMT is one of three disused names for divisions of the NYC Subway system.  The BMT lines were once run by the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation, a private concern whose holdings were eventually taken over by the agency that is now the NY State government authority called the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.  I don't know if the Sheiks actually existed, but the BMT Lines did (and do) serve the neighborhood where the show's Buchanan High School is seemingly located.

The B.M.T. Sheiks "tag" reminds me of a strange Manhattan public access cable show in the 80s called the "Crank Call Show."  The show basically consisted of private school teenagers calling in, saying something stupid, giggling, and then hanging up.  There was one guy who kept calling in saying his name was Muhammad, and that he sold incense on the D Train and the (Times Square - Grand Central) Shuttle.  That was funny, because there really was such a person who really did that.

Why did I put this posting into the Tech Industry category?  Because it turns out that Steve Lasker, a member of the VB Team and a former RD, grew up here in NYC and worked on the crew of the Crank Call Show.  I was in stitches when he told me this a few weeks ago, and he was impressed that I even knew what the Crank Call Show was.

I never in a million years would imagine that my VB world would collide with my NYC 80s public access TV show/subway riding world.  I guess Times Square really is the crossroads of the world.

(Yes, the word "its" has no apostrophe when used in the possessive form, even though most people use one.)

Did you know that Oracle is working on a VS .NET add-in (now in Beta 2) for creating Oracle databases, tables, stored procedures, and ADO.NET objects?  Did you know they claim they will support CLR stored procedures in the database?  Did you know they have a .NET developer mail distribution list?  Did you know they keynoted at VSLive?  Did you know they they have an online Developer Center for .NET devs?

Don't you love it when software companies have to acknowledge the fact that competitors' products are out there, and the need for interoperability is a fact, not an issue?  Doesn't happen enough (and all major software companies are guilty).  Seeing this stuff from Oracle is really encouraging.  Wonder what others of you think...

I spent all day today at the New York Microsoft office at a regional gathering of Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals).  I have been a Visual Basic MVP for about a year now, in addition to being an RD (Regional Director) for about 3 years.  RDs were invited as well, though I was the only one in attendance.

This was a great opportunity to meet other MVPs from the New York/New Jersey region as well as to meet MVP program execs from Redmond, TechNet event staff, and Bob Suess (pronounced "cease" and not like the guy who wrote "Cat in the Hat") who is the new Regional DPE Director for the entire East region.  DPE stands for Developer Platform Evangelism, and despite the similarity in title, the Regional DPE Director is not an RD.

All Microsoft people present, both Redmond-based and NY/NJ-based, told us what they did, what their goals were and then very patiently listened to our feedback and ideas.  Let me just say that it was refreshing to have Redmond people come out to "the field" and also very encouraging to see that someone in the field like Bob Suess was clearly excited about working with developer influencers and building community.  Those of us who have been working for years to build successful user groups appreciate the local support and the opportunity to meet people from headquarters without having to get on a plane and go straight across the country and three timezones to do so.

I really know of no other software company that works so closely with 3rd party experts and enthusiasts.  I'd like to hear from anybody who knows otherwise, because I have to assume that IBM, Oracle, Sun, and other firms must at least have some initiatives in this area, even if they're smaller and less organized.

Sorry for the ridiculously late notice, but I'll be speaking on Monday, February 14th (uh...today) at Microsoft's ISV Community Days event on Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005.  I'll be presenting a "Lunch and Learn" session on ADO.NET 2.0, covering SQL Server 2005 CLR features, async and MARS (multiple active result set) querying, enhancements to typed DataSets, and the new data binding models in Windows Forms 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0. The event will be held at the offices of ThinkPath at 195 Broadway, near Fulton (and the World Trade Center site -- I hate calling it "Ground Zero").  It's a $99 event and seems well worth it.  I'm told most of the content is coming from Redmond.

Again, sorry for the late notice but, have no fear, Microsoft will be repeating the event on March 17th.  Pretty cool that I will be speaking on both Saint Valentine's Day and Saint Patrick's Day.  Not bad for a Nice Jewish Boy, eh?.  Thanks to MS NY/NJ ISV DE (is that enough acronyms?) Sajee Mathew for inviting me to take part in the event.

Oh, I also just found out I'll be speaking at Tech Ed 2005, in lovely Orlando, in June.  At that talk I'll be covering Windows Forms 2.0 data binding exclusively.  Can you tell I like that topic?

I've told literally no one that I have started a blog, so if you're reading this anywhere close to the day it was posted, you have my admiration.

I have long resisted the blog trend, but have recently come to the conclusion that such resistance is futile.  Within the world of tech writers and speakers, it has become the case that not having a blog is somewhat akin to not having a cell phone or an email address in the mainstream world: there are a few left who cling to such principles, but they seem to annoy or inconvenience everyone else.  So although I find this whole process a bit self-indulgent, I am now a blogger, and will do my best not to whine about something I've decided to partake in.

I have just returned from VSLive! San Francisco where I carried out my duties as a conference chair and speaker.  The show was unfortunately smaller than last year's, but still an excellent event, featuring separate sub-conferences on VB .NET, C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Windows Mobile/Tablet development and software architecture.  I do wish more people would attend third-party (i.e. non-Microsoft) shows like VSLive! than seem to.  On the other hand, there is something nice about the intimacy of a smaller show...I was able to socialize with a number of the speakers, touch base with friends at Kinitos and Business Objects, and at least say hi to old friends from Fawcette Technical Publications (who produce VSLive! and have done so --previously under the name VBITS -- since 1993).

I had a bona fide international happy hour on Thursday night with friend and customer Yukiko Ito of Zest in Tokyo, fellow RDs Malek Kemmou from Morocco and Goksin Bakir from Turkey, and a very nice fellow from Microsoft Finland named Juhani Vuorio.  It was fascinating for me to watch three of my friends and a new acquaintance interact so passionately in a common second language.  Also funny was how geekdom transcends cultural differences...we all debated the efficacy of SOAP even while extolling the virtues of Services Oriented Architecture.  We also had a good chat about the upcoming Visual Studio Team System, a product of which I am still quite ignorant.  I clearly have some homework to do.

We also found out from Juhani, who is an ISV Developer Evangelist, that about half the developers at his country's high tech breadwinner, Nokia, develop with Visual Studio, despite that company's anti-Microsoft bent.  Quite the factoid, that.

Today was a serious back in New York day...Lauren, Miles (wife, son) and I went up to Central Park to witness "The Gates."  For those who don't know, The Gates is a mega installation by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude of orange quasi curtains/banners throughout the entirety of Central Park.  It just opened today and will be around for only two weeks, despite the fact that the project apparently began back in 1979! 

One more geeky thing before I close...I had a brief moment to sit with former RD and current Microsoft Visual Studio data tools mucky-muck Steve Lasker.  He showed me how Windows Forms Data Binding in Whidbey (.NET 2.0) can work harmoniously with objects, properties and generics.  Cool stuff!  And best of all, I was able to reproduce his demos from scratch on my laptop on the flight home.  What I will tell you now is that the BindingSource, BindingNavigator, and bound controls, including the new DataGridView, integrate incredibly tightly with .NET classes, allowing complete "CRUD" style operations over objects, lists of objects, and hierarchical relationships in your object model.  Imagine being able to add a new element to an object's child collection simply by typing a new row of data into a grid.  The stuff works so well its mechanics almost seem obvious.  I'll give more detail in a future post.