SQL

Community Night: BE THERE

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Mon, 04/11/2011 - 08:54

Clipboard01Tomorrow is another community night, and I realised that there is MANY people who do not know about this fun event. This is a gathering of communities (or user groups or interest groups if you prefer) who meet on a regular basis. This is a totally free event which takes place the 2nd Tuesday of every month at Microsoft’s offices in Bryanston.

*Yawn* another Microsoft marketing session? WRONG! This is run by communities and Microsoft has NO say in the content or agenda, unless a community allows them Smile with tongue out Microsoft is really trying to help all communities by providing the facilities – not the content!

MobiZATo give a concrete example MobiZA, a user group focused on mobile development is doing a session on Android! talk about not Microsoft marketing there!

There is also a variety of communities in a attendance so you can also see things you would not have seen before, for example the business user group or the game developer group! And of course there is plenty of corridors for interesting discussions and some even contain food & drinks!

Hopefully I have given you a taste of what is in store and why you should attend and you can find more details on the DPE team blog.

mapFinally, if you have a user group maybe you should think of joining us at community night? Free venue, projectors, seating, food & drink. Plus plenty of people attend, could be a great way to grow your group. I would personally love to see some Linux & PHP groups there because it would allow those who have not had a chance to see the non-Microsoft world an opportunity and hopefully learn that it isn’t so cut & dry out there.

Remember, tomorrow 12th April 2011 @ Microsoft (map to the left) from first sessions kick off at 16:30 and second sessions get started between 17:30 & 18:00!

DevDays - The event for Microsoft Developers

imageIt’s that time of year again, it is DevDays time again which is the premier conference from Microsoft for developers! This year it is a very different beast from previous years:

  • Cost: For the second year, you’ll need to pay. This year it is R350 and that is excellent value for the event.
  • Cape Town first: It kicks off in Cape Town this year on May 24th and then moves to Johannesburg after that on may 26th!
  • Johannesburg new venue: We are at Gallagher Estate this year! Very excited about the venue!
  • No Durban Sad smile 
  • Hash tag from day one! See complaining to Cliff on Twitter does work so now we can all hash with #DevDaysSA!
  • No SharePoint – I can’t remember a DevDays without SharePoint, but we have so many other awesome SharePoint options now (Information Worker, SharePoint Saturdays etc…) it is good to have some balance.

There is three tracks so you may want to brush up on how to pick good sessions (short answer, mine Winking smile) plus their is special slots for student & community sessions which really excites me to see new presenters getting big stage time!

I am also very glad that BBD Software (previously known as BB&D) is a major sponsor this year!

You can signup, get more details and engage on the official site at: http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/devdays/

Agenda:

  • End-to-end software testing with Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio
    • Level: 200
      Speakers: Ahmed Salijee & Colin Dembovsky
      Visual Studio 2010 offers a wide range of software testing capabilities: manual testing, automated UI testing, database testing, low-level unit testing and even performance testing tools capable of simulating thousands of active users. It also provides support for test case management, defect tracking as well as configuring and running your tests in virtual and physical environments. But how do you know which tools to choose for your project? This session will, via a demo scenario, walk you through the various testing capabilities to assist you with the most effective use of Visual Studio 2010's testing capabilities. This session will be useful to developers as well as various tester roles including functional, performance and automation.
  • An end-to-end experience of Windows Phone 7 development
    • Level: 200
      Speaker: Rudi Grobler
      An end-to-end walk through for developing Windows Phone 7 applications using Silverlight
  • Blend: Wiring it all together
    • Level: 400
      Speaker: Shane Morris
  • A lap around Internet Explorer 9 for web developers
    • Level: 200
      Speaker: Simon Wilkinson
      Internet Explorer 9 adds new support for HTML5, CSS3 and many other new web standards, and this is the place to find out all about them. Not only will we learn about those, but we'll take a dive into the work the engineering team has done to make the browser faster through it's new JavaScript engine, the work they've done to ensure that the same mark-up works across all browsers and how hardware acceleration will make your site run faster, without any changes to your code!
  • Azure: Development from scratch
    • Level: 200
      Speaker: Gareth Jane
      The Windows Azure platform is a flexible cloud-computing platform which allows developers to rapidly create highly scalable software applications. This session will introduce developers to the various services and components of the Windows Azure Platform. We will create a very simple application on this platform, especially focusing on the areas which distinguish development on Azure from traditional application development
  • ASP.NET web development with MVC
    • Level: 400
      Speaker: Brent Samodien
      Join us in this session and discover the new features in ASP.NET MVC3 and what scenarios you can target with it. Learn more about the improved HTML Helpers and the new updates to Controller/Action/Method that make your code cleaner. Also, explore the richer URL routing and URL route mapping. We will also show how you can use alternative View Engines, including Razor.
  • A website's life: From sketch to publishing
    • Level: 200
      Speaker: Simon Wilkinson
      WebMatrix is a new, free, fully featured, easy to install web development tool that helps you build ASP.NET and PHP websites and perform validation, SEO optimization and one-click publishing. My favourite feature however is a new script syntax for ASP.NET called Razor, which will help you create dynamic websites incredibly easily. We will spend some time sketching/wireframing our website, doing visual design work in Expression Design and then experiencing the rich development toolset in WebMatrix.
  • Let's get ready for the cloud: Building your applications so they
    are cloud ready
    • Level: 400
      Speaker: Robert MacLean
      In a world where you hear people talking about the cloud, here are some guidelines on how to start building and structuring applications that will be easy to migrate to the Azure platform.
  • Code First in entity framework
    • Level: 200
      Speaker: Brent Samodien
      Code First has been a great success with customers, and in this talk, we'll take a deep dive into how it works and talk about its upcoming RTM (Q1 2011). You'll see how Code First uses convention over configuration to improve developer productivity. Its flexibility allows for either automatic database provisioning or the ability to work with an existing database. We'll be demoing features beyond the initial RTM, such as Migrations support, and we'll also talk about the roadmap for Code First going forward
  • Silverlight 5: The Future
    • Level: 200
      Speaker: Shane Morris
  • Exploring Windows Azure storage
    • Level: 400
      Speaker: Gary Hope
      Examine each of the foundation storage capabilities of Windows Azure, Blobs, Tables and Queues. Discover how to create storage accounts; upload and retrieve blobs and blob metadata; create, update and query tables; and create a simple service that uses a message queue for communication
  • LightSwitch basics: Building your first LightSwitch application
    • Level: 200
      Speaker: Robert MacLean
      Visual Studio LightSwitch is the simplest way to build business applications for the desktop and cloud. LightSwitch simplifies the development process by letting you concentrate on the business logic, while LightSwitch handles the common tasks for you. In this demo-heavy session, you will see, end to end, how to build and deploy a data-centric business application using LightSwitch. After that you will discover what is under the hood to better understand the architecture of a LightSwitch application. Finally you will learn how you can use Visual Studio 2010 Professional and Expression Blend 4 to customize and extend its UI and Data layers for when the application's requirements grow beyond what is supported by default
  • Kung Fu Silverlight: Tips and architectural patterns and practices
    • Level: 400
      Speaker: Dave Russell
      Learn about the rewards of using RIA Services together with development patterns, such as the Service Providers, Single Responsibility pattern, Commanding, user Interactions, Messaging, ChildWindows, Design Time Data, Testing, and developing using Model-View/View- Model (MVVM) pattern, to build Silverlight and Windows Phone apps. Hear the top tips you need to know for building data driven Silverlight apps that solve real world problems.
Robert MacLean Thu, 04/07/2011 - 17:13

Reporting Services - Missing features in SRS 2008

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Mon, 12/20/2010 - 12:40

clip_image002I recently helped on an interesting problem with SQL Reporting Services, where features of SRS 2008 were just gone!

History

The team had created a number of reports in SQL Server 2005 and used them successfully for a number of years. During their upgrade to SQL Server 2008 they needed to upgrade the reports to SRS 2008 format.

To be clear here, SRS doesn’t support backwards compatibility so if you want to run a report built in 2005 on a 2008 server, it must be upgraded. Thankfully this is a simple process, just open the report solution in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) 2008 and it will upgrade it.

The Problem

The team knew this process and opened the 2005 reports in BIDS 2008, no errors were reported, all reports saved correctly and were published to the SRS server. The server then rendered them, which to everyone meant that the reports had upgraded successfully.

However there was some changes to how the reports were rendered and the team needed to change the ConsumeContainerWhitespace property on the report to true to fix that rendering issue.

This is a new property in 2008, and the problem the team had is that when the report was opened in BIDS 2008 the property just wasn’t there! They could create new reports and see it, but their existing reports did not contain it.

Diagnosis

My first thing to check was that they were opening the right version of BIDS – this is the SRS persons way of saying “Have you tried turning it off and on?”.

They verified that quickly, so my next step was to check if BIDS was actually doing the upgrade. A report is just an XML file so you can open it up in notepad and check the schema to verify what version of the report it is. If it is http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2008/01/reportdefinition it is a 2008 report and if it is http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2005/01/reportdefinition it is a 2005 report.

You know what, after the upgrade it was STILL showing as a 2005 report! This confused me to no end – how could SRS 2008 render a 2005 report and why was BIDS not upgrading it?

Solution

I was close to getting the team to call Microsoft, or an exorcist, for assistance – but re-reading the email conversation between the team and me a number of times I stumbled across the piece of missing information which explained the cause. The team was using .rdlc files – these are SRS files designed for client side rendering. SRS supports these and the “normal” .rdl files.

The interesting thing about .rdlc files is that they are frozen on 2005:

  • So they do not get new features of 2008 or 2008 R2, which is why the new properties (like the one the team wanted) does not appear.
  • The schema remains on 2005 (no upgrade in BIDS)
  • and to confuse everyone, they still render on 2008 and 2008 R2!

Thankfully you can convert from .rdlc to .rdl, which means then the reports get upgraded to the 2008 or 2008 R2 formats and get all the features. The team did this and have been smiling ever since!

Bring your hard drive to Community Night

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Mon, 12/13/2010 - 12:48

Blue Male Student in a Graduation Cap, Reading a Book and Leaning Against a Stack of Books Clipart IllustrationIf you are coming to tomorrow’s community night, you want to bring your hard drive along because I will have some stuff to fill it up with:

Plus I hear that some prizes may be given away at the events too Winking smile

Visual Studio Service Pack 1 - Beta: Field Guide

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Fri, 12/10/2010 - 09:24

Brian Harry announced the availability of the service pack 1 beta which is fantastic news for all developers. This post is a field guide of me doing the installs.

Before that I wanted to point out a few key things included in this SP:

  • This can installed in production – this beta includes a “go live” license so it is supported and upgrades to the RTM of the SP will be supported.
  • This includes over 80 hotfixes for between 800 and 1000 bugs and many new features. For a full list see the link above, but here is a brief list:
    • Silverlight 4 tool support!
    • Unit testing can target the 3.5 framework now.
    • IntelliTrace support for 64bit and SharePoint!
    • Performance Wizard for Silverlight!
    • HTML 5 support
    • IIS Express support
    • SQL Compact Edition 4 Tooling

Details on the last three can be found on Hanselman’s blog.

  • Some third party systems may break with this, at this time known ones are:
    • ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 1 – this will be fixed in the next update.
    • Visual Studio Async CTP – this will break completely! No news, yet, on when it will be fixed.

The Process

For me there are three files you need to get:

  • Update for .NET 4
  • Update for Visual Studio
  • Update for Team Foundation Server (not covered in this post)

Step 1

.NET 4 installInstall the .NET 4 update first – this took on my machine 24 minutes to do. It is important to note that I did shutdown Visual Studio first but I had some other applications open, including Pull which is .NET 4.

At the end of the process I needed to restart!

image

This step is no specifically needed as the VS SP will include this automatically, however I personally like the idea of doing it manually and making sure .NET 4 apps continue to work before I continue to the VS install.

Step 2

imageOn to the Visual Studio install which after a few minutes tells you what will be updated and then, tells you that it wants to download 490Mb!

image

What I had done was to download the smaller installer version (less than 1Mb) which means it first figures out what is needed and then downloads the rest. This is great for some people as the download size is less, however since I live in South Africa (read: bandwidth is a luxury) and I work with 300+ other developers it is better for me to get the “DVD” labelled one which is bigger (in my case 103Mb bigger) but contains everything in one go so it can be shared easily and the bandwidth hit just once!

image

Step 3

We re-join the action a while later (when the “DVD” edition downloaded, approx. 1 hour 21 min later) we start process again and this time the download size is 0Mb Open-mouthed smile 

image

This took 29 min to process (remember this is without the download) this install and success!

image

Notes

I haven’t found anything in the many extensions I use daily that has broken! In particular my favourites all work

Tech·Ed Africa 2010: Want to go for free?

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Tue, 08/24/2010 - 09:53

Win 1 of 4 Tickets to Microsoft Tech·Ed Africa 2010 worth R6 150 each!!!

Venue:    ICC Durban

Date:       17th - 20th October 2010

All you need to do is take a photo of a Microsoft Tag in a really cool/funny/practical place and upload the picture to the Facebook competition page.

More details in the competition animated video here.

Full Competition Rules on our Facebook page.

Dates for Submissions & Announcements of Winners:

  • 25 Aug 2010    -    Last Date For Submissions (week 1) (5pm)
  • 27 Aug 2010    -    Week 1 Winner Announced
  • 01 Sep 2010    -    Last Date For Submissions (week 2) (5pm)
  • 03 Sep 2010    -    Week 2 Winner Announced
  • 08 Sep 2010    -    Last Date For Submissions (week 3) (5pm)
  • 10 Sep 2010    -    Week 3 Winner Announced
  • 15 Sep 2010    -    Last Date For Submissions (week 4) (5pm)
  • 17 Sep 2010    -    Week 4 Winner Announced

Submissions & Announcements of Winners:

  • A new winner will be selected weekly.
  • Last date for submissions for a particular week is 5pm Wednesday of that week.
  • Winner for that week will be announced on the Friday.
  • Submissions after 5pm will count towards the following week.
  • Submissions which did not win in a previous week will still be considered in following weeks and need not be re-submitted.
  • A person can only win once, thereafter all his other submissions will be ignored.
  • You cannot submit on behalf of another person.
  • Submissions are done by posting a photo to the Facebook page wall.

Terms and Conditions apply:

This competition is limited to Tech·Ed Africa 2010 entrance and does not include Travel, hotel or any other expenses. You will be required to help out at the Developers Community Lounge at Tech·Ed Africa 2010 for 3 hours a day if you do win. For Full list of rules please consult the Facebook page.

It's Dev4Dev's time again!

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Fri, 08/20/2010 - 09:30

My favourite gathering of developers happens 2 or 3 times a year, it’s called Dev4Devs. This is a free event which Microsoft runs, where ANYONE can present a topic but they only have 20min! This means that in a morning you see 7 topics and rather than getting swamped in all the details you dive directly to the really important parts.

The topic list is below, and there is some exciting topics there and even some non-MS technology is covered too!

I am also really glad that the entire ATC team at BB&D, which is the team I work in, is presenting – they are highlighted in the list below!

The next one comes on the 4th September 2010 and it occurs at Microsoft’s offices in Johannesburg and you can register at https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032456806&Culture=en-ZA

Session List for Dev4Devs

Windows Phone 7 - Getting Started

A high level introduction to getting started with Windows Phone 7 development including: where to begin, options for developers, thinking about design and a demonstration application.

Presenter: Johannes van Schalkwyk

Making MVVM easy

Starting with WPF, Silverlight or WP7? Heard of MVVM but think it’s WAY too complex for your simple application? Join me for a crash course using the easiest MVVM framework available… Caliburn.Micro!
Presenter: Rudi Grobler (ATC Team Member)

Why you should care about Google Closure

Closure is a modularised set of JavaScript libraries that can assist you in building rich internet applications.

It's been battle-tested by Google on sites like: Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps.

Attend this short intro to get an understanding of how important these libraries are and why you should consider using them in your next big internet app.

Presenter: Simon Stewart

Introducing NHibernate 3

The daddy of .NET ORM is back with a new release, in this session you'll see a few of the newest features - such as a full IQueryable LINQ provider - that makes NHibernate 3 the best release yet!
Presenter: Kevin McKelvin

Branding SharePoint 2010 with MasterPages, Layouts and CSS

One of the largest limitations of WSS3.0 and MOSS2007 is the ability to brand SharePoint without intricate knowledge of the platform and in some cases breaking a few rules and modifying out of the box system files to get the desired look and feel. Come and see how the theming engine in SharePoint 2010 together with CSS, Master Pages and Layouts can be used to brand your SharePoint site using the amazing new SharePoint Designer 2010.
Presenter: Brent Samodien

Unit Testing - Code Coverage & Mocking

In this presentation William will demonstrate how code coverage tools help measure the effectiveness of your unit tests.  He will also show how Mocking tools can help to add value to your unit tests and ensure that all edge-case logic is properly checked.
Presenter: William Brander (ATC Team Member)

Getting ready for Windows Azure development

Heard about the cloud? Excited about the possibilities? In this session we have a 1000-mile introduction to Microsoft’s operating system for the cloud, Windows Azure, how it compares to the other cloud offerings that are out there and how to get your hands dirty with the skill-up process. Endless possibilities + new tech = fun stuff.
Presenter: Ryno Rijnsburger

An introduction to Mercurial Source Control

Want a quick introduction into a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS)? Meet Mercurial it is a cross-platform, fast, lightweight source control management system designed for easy and efficient handling of distributed projects.
Presenter: Zayd Kara (ATC Team Member)

Making money with Coded UI

Coded UI is a brand new feature of Visual Studio 2010 which enables you to quickly build automated user interface tests for your application and run them as if they were unit tests. In the talk we will look at how Coded UI can change your life, one UI at a time!
Presenter: ME! (ATC Team Member)

Hack .Net in 10 Seconds - Why obfuscation is critical

Hacking 101 – I demonstrate how to bypass basic copy protection in an unobfusctaed .Net application through reverse engineering and show how obfuscation adds a layer of protection. I also demonstrate additional techniques for protecting your applications from hacking once they are released in the wild.
Presenter: Mark Pearl

Composite Applications with PRISM

In this session Stephan will demonstrate how to leverage the Composite Application Libraries to create modularized applications for WPF and Silverlight. He will also show you how to do multi-targeted development by sharing lots of code between the web and desktop applications.
Presenter: Stephan Johnson

An Introduction to Pex and Moles

An introduction into Pex and Moles, covering the basics of Mole Types and Mole Stubs and Parameterised Testing.
Presenter: Dave Russell

ASP.NET Dynamic Data

I will briefly introduce ASP.NET Dynamic Data by showing how to build a complete data maintenance web application with almost zero code.

Moving on, I will demonstrate some standard ways of customising a Dynamic Data application, and some more advanced non-standard customisation techniques. I will finish off by illustrating how Dynamic Data libraries and controls can be leveraged in other applications that don't normally use dynamic data.

Presenter: Brady Kelly

ASP.NET MVC 3

As you probably already surmised, ASP.NET MVC 3 is the next major release of ASP.NET MVC. Join us as we highlight the upcoming features and modifications to this popular framework.
Presenters: Jaco Pretorius and Kobus Brummer

Pulled Apart - Part V: You are a DB server with SQLite

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 10:09

onebit_26Note: This is part of a series, you can find the rest of the parts in the series index.

One of the design decisions for Pull, is that it should just run without the need for an install. This requirement means that everything it needs to run should be available all the time and this brought an interesting problem to my design. The issue was that I needed a database to store all the info Pull uses (podcasts, episodes etc…) but I couldn’t require people to install SQL Server Express or PostgreSQL.

The solution was to use a file based database called SQLite, which requires just a few dll files to provide all the database functionality I would expect to my application to use but without the need for a database server. As this is a .NET application I used one of the wrappers for .NET called System.Data.SQLite. Usage with System.Data.SQLite can be via ADO.NET like code or via the Entity Framework.

I initially used EF for my development, but I found a mass of issues due to the assumptions that EF makes about when to open/close connections. These assumptions make sense when I have a DB server, but when I have a file which will be called from multiple threads those assumptions come back to bite and caused me no end of pain.

What I ended up doing to solve it was to build my own ORM which made use of reflection to handle mapping to classes, ala EF, but used a static instance and was very eager to close the connection to the file. These changes solved major issues with stability caused by EF while still providing a decent developer experience.

Mapping

Mapping of my classes to the database is done using a simple attribute which has a name and primary key indicator. For example the log class looks like the following. Note that I use the same attribute for columns and tables as I assume Class=Table and Property=Column. In the following all the properties names match the DB column names, but this is not a requirement.

[DataStore(Name = "Log")]
internal class Log
{
    [DataStore(Name = "PK", PrimaryKey = true)]
    public Guid PK { get; set; }
    
    [DataStore(Name = "Source")]
    public string Source { get; set; }
    
    [DataStore(Name = "Occured")]
    public DateTime Occured { get; set; }
    
    [DataStore(Name = "StackTrace")]
    public string StackTrace { get; set; }

    [DataStore(Name = "Message")]
    public string Message { get; set; }
}

Using that information, I can take a object and using reflection build up the SQL needed. An example of this is how I create the update command:

private static SQLiteCommand ConvertToUpdateCommand<T>(T item)
{
    SQLiteCommand command = new SQLiteCommand();
    string insertCommandText = string.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, "UPDATE [{0}] SET ", ((DataStoreAttribute)typeof(T).GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DataStoreAttribute), false)[0]).Name);
    int parameterCounter = 0;

    object PKValue = null;
    string PKColumn = string.Empty;

    GetAttributedProperties(typeof(T), (property, attribute) =>
    {
        if (!attribute.PrimaryKey)
        {
            insertCommandText += string.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, "[{0}]=@A{1}, ", attribute.Name, parameterCounter);
            command.Parameters.AddWithValue(string.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, "A{0}", parameterCounter), property.GetValue(item, null));
            parameterCounter++;
        }
        else
        {
            PKValue = property.GetValue(item, null);
            PKColumn = attribute.Name;
        }
    });

    insertCommandText = insertCommandText.Remove(insertCommandText.Length - 2);
    insertCommandText += string.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, " WHERE [{0}]=@PK", PKColumn);
    command.Parameters.AddWithValue("PK", PKValue);
    command.CommandText = insertCommandText;

    return command;
}

Final Thoughts

I have been very happy with SQLite as a database, but the learning curve has been tough for someone coming from a database server history. Once I understood the limitations and differences to DB servers it has been a great experience with SQLite.

I’ve been very happy with my ORM as it has made the development very easy working with proper objects and really hiding all the DB functionality away. There are some performance issues in the ORM which I have not solved and I am not feeling a major rush to solve either because the sizes of data in Pull are fairly light to start with. Examples of those performance issues is

  • I have no way to batch commands in one transaction. So for inserting podcast episodes, for each episode I create a new command, a new transaction, open the DB, run command, close DB and transaction. What I should have is a way to create a bunch of commands and then run them all using one transaction and one open/close of the DB.
  • Updating updates every field in the object, regardless if it has changed. This is because I have no object tracking implemented to figure this out.

Despite these the system still runs really well and overall I am happy with the choice of DB.

Presentation Dump - Mid 2010: VS2010, NDepend, RESTful Design, SSIS, EntLib 5, .NET Reflection, AppFabric, BDD, Sikuli & Redmine

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Thu, 07/08/2010 - 12:12

The past 6 months have been hectic from a presentation perspective for me, with 20 presentations and classes given this year so far. So instead of a single dump of presentations at the end of the year, as I did last year, I am doing a mid-year dump.

What is new in Visual Studio 2010

This presentation is the one I have given many times this year. It originally started as 10 on 10, which looked at 10 features in 20min for Dev4Dev’s last year. It then evolved into 12 on 10, which added two more features, still in 20min. It then evolved into ?? on 10 for 6 degrees of code where it became an hour and half presentation. It is demo heavy and really the slides are the very basics – the important is hidden slides and notes for the demos.

NDepend

The tool that keeps on giving! For people working with taking over customer sites, reviewing code or anything else where you need to deal with other peoples code this tool is a must. This presentation was given to the architecture team at BB&D.

RESTful Design

RESTful design is an evolution of an earlier presentation I did, REST & JSON, which drops the JSON stuff completely and also drops the heavy compare with SOAP/WS* parts which seemed to cause confusion. This revised presentation covers just REST and looks at it much more practically by covering the required HTTP knowledge and patterns for designing RESTful services.

SQL Server Integration Services

Another upgrade in 2010 of an earlier presentation which not only cleans up some aspects but also goes into a lot more detail.

Enterprise Library

“The presentation that never was”, often I will spend time researching a technology or trend and preparing the presentation to come to the conclusion that it is just not worth the time of the attendee’s. Enterprise Library 5 is one of those, as the presentation covered what is new in it, and that is not very much.

.NET Reflection

This one is actually one from last year, but I had problems getting it onto SlideShare so it is only showing up now.

Windows Server AppFabric

AppFabric, the local one – not the Azure one, was a great presentation I did for the BB&D architecture team. This is not the original presentation – it has been edited to remove customer info as a lot of analogies between a project BB&D did and AppFabric was in it (cause who hasn’t built a system similar to AppFabric).

BDD

One of the presentations I spent the most time on this year, and one of the most exciting presentations. It really is a great methodology and I would love to see it used more.

Sikuli

Another presentation which did not make the cut to actually be presented. It is an interesting project, but of limited scope and when compared to the Coded UI from Visual Studio 2010 it is really far behind.

Redmine

Redmine is a bug tracking system, and being it’s not TFS may surprise you that an ALM MVP would do training on it. However for me to do training meant I head to learn it, which means I know the ALM landscape better and can point out which is better or not without uneducated bias (btw it still is TFS :)). This training was aimed not at developers but at call centre/power user people who would log initial bugs to then be managed in the system – so it was more of a ticketing system than a bug system in the end.