Certified!

Though I've long been certifiable, I'm finally certified! Took, and passed on the first try, Microsoft's 70-513 today, making me an MCTS in WCF/service applications in .NET 4.0.

My feelings on certs have varied over the years, but I've come to the conclusions that 1) it probably doesn't hurt to have them, and 2) if nothing else, they serve as motivation to polish certain areas of my skillset.

Though I've presented on WCF three times, I haven't used WCF anywhere near as heavily as I've wanted to the past 4-5 years; of course, the new opportunity with Redbox should change that for me :) Buried myself in studying, and a relevant project (queue-based, discoverable PubSub) that also has benefits for work (Apprenda) the past ~4 weeks or so, with a very happy outcome.

Windows 2008R2: Windows Update stuck at 0%

Windows 2008R2 has finally let me down. For some time now it has been my most-favorite Microsoft OS since MS-DOS 3.0. Administrator- and developer-friendly, stable, performant, reliable. Until now.

For a week or so now, since the off-schedule high-priority Microsoft updates 2-3 weeks ago perhaps, I have had a six-month young Windows 2008R2 Standard (x64) machine (Hyper-V image) that refused to download updates. Despite doing some minor cleanup, service tweaking, rebooting a few times, it was just plain stuck.



I didn't see any apparent system errors or Windows Update specific entries in the Event Viewer - Windows Logs, System or Application. There were, however, a number of TrustedInstaller errors:



Though I had not had the "opportunity" to experience an issue with Role Management, I was simply concerned with getting Windows Updates back to up-to-date, after days of frustration I came across this MSDN forum post that led me to a working solution.

I worked through all steps of the post marked as answer, finding that an in-place "upgrade" was apparently the only solution that worked in my scenario. This is rather disappointing -- up until now, Windows 2008R2 had never failed me.

Microsoft Roadshow Returns to Tech Valley

The Microsoft Northeast Roadshow is back in town, this time Friday, March 12th at the Troy Hilton Garden inn. Developer Evangelist Jim O'Neil has a blog post with further details.

Win 7 Carries MSFT EPS above estimates

Next Leg of the MSDN NE Roadshow is on!

THE MSDN Northeast Roadshow team of Jim O’Neil and Chris Bowen will be making another stop in Albany, NY:

MSDN Events Presents >
The MSDN Northeast Roadshow - "Don't Fear the Coder" Tour

Thursday, November 12, 2009
9:30 AM - 3:30 PM Eastern Time
Welcome Time: 9:00 AM

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
1623 15th St
Biotech Building
Albany, New York 12180

Lunch Included

The Agenda: Clever Hacking, Slashed Efforts, and Killer Applications
Topics Include:
• Something WCF This Way Comes
• RIA Window – Expression, Silverlight, and MVVM
• "Help!" – Grasping at Lifelines
• LINQ De-crypted
• Tales from the Webside - ASP.NET WebForms, AJAX, and More

Register today for the Roadshow (seating is limited), and we’ll see you soon! http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9693448

/MSFT announcement

A quick .02: seating's really not that limited at this event. Not once, not ever. But that's mostly thanks to the use of RPI's biotech auditorium, which can seat a good number of people.

Busy fall in Tech Valley!

Great slate of upcoming events before the snow falls (hopefully!)

This week we had Steve Andrews' MVC presentation at TVUG. Next month, October 6th I believe, I'll be presenting the basics of OAuth and Linq2Twitter, in the context of using the Twitter API. That will be followed up at our November 7th Tech Valley Code Camp (I need to update the site, sorry!) with a more in-depth look at DotNetOpenAuth and Linq2Twitter.

Also coming up THIS MONTH: The Microsoft Northeast Roadshow returns to Albany on September 22nd at RPI! Jim O'Neil has full details.

Northeast Roadshow: Food for Thoughts Tour

After a long summer, you’re probably hungry for more tools and techniques to feed your development efforts. Touring the northeast this fall for the tenth Roadshow, road and code warriors Jim O’Neil and Chris Bowen have cooked up a select menu of sessions that are sure to please the heartiest of appetites. From current tools and technologies to practical insights, there is plenty to digest!

Reservations are required, so register today for a seating at these free and relaxed technology events.

You’ll see how Chris and Jim handle the heat of the demo kitchen, dish out knowledge, and pepper guests with half-baked humor, all the while being grilled by audience questions.

The Agenda – A Four Course Meal for the Mind

(Rochester attendees, note that program starts at 10 a.m.)

1:00 PM – Essential Patterns, Practically Served

Design patterns, they’re important but often presented with unappetizing formality, like getting only the oat bits from a box of marshmallow cereal. We’ll sample a small set of key patterns, but also show you how free frameworks and tools (such as Enterprise Library, Prism, Unity, Velocity, and others) put each of those patterns directly into practice – so you can too. You’ll leave with a mind full of practical technology and a healthy understanding of how to turn underlying patterns into recipes for success.

2:15 PM – 7-Up(grade) Your Applications

Refresh your existing applications by pouring in some the new features of Windows 7 via the managed-code Windows API Code Pack. We’ll quench your thirst for how to incorporate the Taskbar, jumplists, and Libraries by taking the cap off an existing Windows Forms application and adding new capabilities, all the while retaining compatibility for your XP and Vista users. We’ll have you bubbling with excitement, able to give your applications that extra pop.

3:30 PM – Silverlight Snacks that Satisfy

There’s a generous amount of delicious ingredients in Silverlight 3 and we’re going to focus deeply on some of the most enriching. We’re going beyond the standard fare in this code-heavy session to create an application that leverages the new out-of-browser and offline execution features, local and remote connections, local data storage, and more. You’ll see that Silverlight 3 applications can be fortified with features so they can go well beyond being eye candy.

4:45 PM – Chips off the .NET Block

As seasoned developers, we know there’s a mix of options on the trail to implementing requirements. From staples like value types vs. reference types, interfaces vs. classes, Strings vs. StringBuilder, to other more exotic ingredients you may have yet tried, this session will dip into ways to leverage .NET, offering a taste of the impact they have on code execution, performance, and extensibility.

5:50 PM – “Check Please!” – We’ll box any leftovers, collect your comment cards, and distribute an array of giveaways.

I've become a believer

In LINQ. Well, at least in LINQ to SQL, and some of the neat LINQ-to projects like LINQ to flickr and those sorts.

I'm not quite so sure about LINQ to XML -- I still find myself using a lot of XPath, which I thought LINQ would let me get away from. Sure, LINQ to XML is nice for WRITING XML, but reading? I'm not sure it's a big win.

But let's get back to the subject at hand: LINQ to SQL. For quite some time, I felt that LINQ to SQL reduced developer knowledge of the data model below acceptable levels, provided a nearly unnecessary level of abstraction, and coddled the drag-and-drop Mort crowd.

Some of that may still be true, but when building a quick system like one project I've been working on the past three or four weeks and another the past five days, LINQ to SQL, in my mind, gives .NET the feel of something more dynamic like PHP or Ruby. This reduces development pain on short projects, mockups/prototypes or architectural spikes IMMENSELY. You can be much more agile in evolving your data model and business logic without paying the price of a brittle, static data tier. Yes, I found myself dragging-and-dropping tables, over and over again -- and I felt almost no shame in doing so.

According to Microsoft, LINQ takes measures against SQL injection -- one of the topmost reasons for using stored procedures. One of the other big reasons for SQL Server stored procs is performance of course. On small datasets, performance is adequate. I haven't had a chance to test on large datasets yet, or under scale conditions. There are steps you can take to improve performance I plan on exploring.

But of course you can still use stored procedures with LINQ, dragging-and-dropping again, and calling them like a standard .NET method via the wrapper LINQ and the Entity Framework create.

I'm not sure you lose anything with LINQ, and you certainly gain quite a bit in a number of scenarios. I suspect I will be using it quite frequently in the future.

UPDATE: CANCELLED :( March 11th, 2009: Microsoft Roadshow in town

Update: unfortunately Microsoft has had to cut the Albany stop on the Roadshow, probably for the remainder of 2009.

Per Chris Bowen's blog, the MS Roadshow is back in Tech Valley! Once again hosted by Autotask, the event is next Wednesday, March 11th, 8:30am-4:00pm.

Register online.

I got to play with a Surface yesterday

I should have taken pics, these just don't do it justice:




One thing that seemed odd was that the fit/finish of the Surface to the surrounding poly seemed a bit rough, as seen through the poly housing. Maybe it was just this particular unit, which was being set up for demo purposes, but it seems like the standard housing, as exampled above.

Microsoft Northeast Roadshow Coming to Albany!

Chris Bowen, Microsoft Developer Evangelist out of Boston, managed to get Albany on the itinerary for the Fall 2008 Northeast Roadshow. Thanks, Chris & Jim!

This event has bypassed us in the past. What is a Northeast tech roadshow without a stop in the heart of Tech Valley?

Quick Agenda:

8:30 – Registration

9:00 – Understanding the ADO.NET Entity Framework

10:30 – Discovering Dynamic Data

11:15 - Exploring Internet Explorer 8

12:00 – RoboLunch

1:00 - UI, UX, U Confused?

1:45 - A RESTed Development

3:15 - Befriending Unit Testing

4:00 – Wrapup, Giveways, and Bon Voyage!

Looking forward to the Robotics Studio, IE8 and especially the REST stuff myself!

Big happenings this week?

Rumors are running rampant about renewed Microhoo talks. Scoble is also proclaiming Microsoft's intent, per John Furrier, to buy Facebook outright, and close it up, turning this from "Facebook vs. Google" to "Microsoft vs. the Web".

What will this mean? To most of us, not much. Digital natives, however, I'm sure wait with bated breath. If Microsoft consolidated a position in search, and landed a major (the premier?) social networking asset, will it open a cloud computing platform a la Google App Engine to fill that gap in its offerings? As an integrated whole, and speaking as a .NET-head, that would be one SWEET setup. Speaking as an advocate for openness, transparency, portability and competition, however, I'd have to note some concerns.

Now if only Windows Mobile could be made a true competitor, outside the enterprise sector.

Meanwhile, Twitter continues to pique interest, peak traffic, and make news.

Windows 2008 due to launch today

Windows 2008 - a look at Server Core

I've played with the 2008 betas -- pretty sweet -- but I hadn't bothered to play with Server Core specifically.

Until I can run ASP.NET on Server Core, I probably won't bother. And even then, I suspect it will never be much more than a VM on my fullblown 2008 machine.

Now if only I could get a copy of SP1 for my Vista machines that is guaranteed to NOT brick my notebooks.

Microsoft To Give Students Dev Software For Free

Microsoft To Give Students Dev Software For Free

Why weren't they doing this when I was a poor 18YO freshman?

Sure, they had "academic" rates -- but $40 or $60, even for a piece of $300+ software, is still a big chunk of change for someone unemployed, or underemployed.

As a primarily Microsoft developer, I think this is great for students.

Is it Microsoft making further efforts at marketing to students? No doubt about it. I still think it's a good thing for students -- run Linux, run Windows, get to know Eclipse, get to know Visual Studio, get to know MySQL, get to know Oracle, get to know SQL Server, get to know whatever you get your hands on, because in software engineering, experience is your true education.