Model Oriented Architecture E-Summit

I'm listening now to Model Oriented Architecture E-Summit provided by International Association of Software Architects.
There are several companies, who present on the idea of automatic code generation. The concept is intriguing - draw proper model in a tool and it will generate application code. My architecture hat is excited, but my realistic coding hat is skeptical.
I will look on more demos at http://bluage.com/index.php?cID=online_demos and metacase.com to see more. It's interesting to see whole vendor space in this area, as VS2010 also offer modeling tool.

On the market

That happens once a decade, but it did happen yesterday. I'm on the market now, searching for a great employer.
It still once month more for me working for Spencer Stuart and I have a lot of work to wrap up, so my posts will be both about current work and job search.

24 hours of PASS

I was listening through 8 live sessions of 24 hours of PASS and now listening through one more recorded session 24 Hours of PASS: Session 23 (DBA) - Analyzing File and Wait Statistics by Andrew Kelly.

Most of sessions are very useful. Seems like the conference activity slowly shifts close and close to online only mode.

MSDN Virtual Lab: Application Development for Microsoft SQL Server 2008

I've run through MSDN Virtual Lab: Application Development for Microsoft SQL Server 2008: Let's Write Some Code!
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032420592&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US
Pretty interesting format to integrate database and data access code training on many new SQL2008 features: table-valued parameters, FileStream columns, Sparse columns, spatial columns and date/time columns, write ADO.NET code which uses table-valued parameters, FileStream, sparse columns, spatial types, and date and time columns.

Advanced troubleshooting

Was troubleshooting third-party application integration.

The agent installed on our server, configured, started
Firewall ports opened both on boundary and IPSEC firewalls.
Remote host can not establish connection with agent.

1. Checked network monitor - shows SYN sent to agent, no return ACK
2. Checked firewall logs, no blocking.
3. Checked netstat -n -a - agent not listening on the port, where remote suppose to connect.
4. Checked netstat -n -o - agent not listening on any port.
5. Checked Application Event log - agent service reported error on startup, with call stack containing functions OnLoad and CreateIPPerformanceCoutners.
Reason - not enough security to access performance counter related registry keys under agent account NETWORK_SERVICE.
6. Changed service account for the agent to LocalSystem - connection established, network traffic flows.

Solution - recommended vendor to have proper error handling for non critical services such as performance counter reporting - basically wrap CreateIPPerformanceCoutners
into try/catch.


On this troubleshooting - where is the boundary between software engineer and network engineer?

Submitted to MSFT Connect

I'm designing SSRS based solution for information worker pipeline. The report should become an application with following functionality
1. present information row by row,
2. fire URL based actions on each row
3. Sort and page
4. Mark row as procesed when row is processed (in this session only)

While 1-3 are simple and possible, I don't see solution for (4).
User should be able to click somewhere on the row and change visible attribute of the row (color, checkbox,etc). The workaround "toggle visibility" doesn't work, because it's lost on sorting (while it seems like to be preserved on paging).
Only known workaround (mark row as completed by writing something to DB and rerun report) have too big performance impact to be considered.

http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=427692

XamlFest-Chicago

WPF, Silverlight, Expression Blend. Happen to be one of the best training sessions I ever attended. Two days of coding together with John Pelak.

My visited countries - it's so much left...

Data Mining - dissecting business process

Picked up new project, figured out the way to segment business process and measure really interesting business process performance counters. Implemented as SSAS cube and now runing data mining model on this cube to detect and predict dependencies.

Visual Studio - problem opening web application with mixed authentication on subfolders

Submitted IIS7/Visual Studio bug to Microsoft Connect:

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=377142

0. Create 2 level folder structure on disk with html file in subfolder.
1. Created web application on Vista localhost
2. Set application authentication to windows only
3. Set authentication to subfolder to anonymous only.
4. Open web application in visual studio (running as local administrator)
5. The subfolder shows up in solution explorer with green dot, but it pointed to root of web application, not to subfolder as it should.
6. However if subfolder was converted to virtual directory - everything works as expected.

Some development Technologies I've used over last 6 month

Roundup not in any particular order (seems like it's good to do this pretty regularly)

• TSQL
  
• Blackberry Visual Studio (C#) app 
  
• Blackberry Java app 
  
• Silverlight 2 
  
• C# Winforms
  
• Outlook addin
  
• Clickonce deployment
  
• Delphi 6
  
• SQL Analysis services
  
• Javascript
  
• SQL XQuery
  
• ASP.NET C#
  
• Java application reverse engineering
  
• Coveo enterprise search
  
• Linguistic Entity Extraction (separate post)
  
• Netinsight enterprise logging
  
• Google Map API
  
• Windows 2008 Server configuration and security
  
• SQL 2000, 2005,2008 Servers administration
  
• Web applications performance optimizations (compression, consolidation, sprites etc)
  
• Vista application security issues, process isolation, ActiveX replacements,etc
  
• Vista sidebars
  
• Google toolbar buttons
  
• SQUID web proxy configuration
• Windows Mobile C# development
• Windows Services .NET development

Probably something is missed.

SQL 2008 Exams

Just got a response from Microsoft that two SQL 2008 beta exams I had 2 month ago are passed successfully.
25th and 26th passed Microsoft exam respectively are:
71-451 PRO: Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Designing and Optimizing Database Solutions
71-433 TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Database Development

Mobility

Seems like February is month of good project starts. I've mentioned already about starting Office Business application project and now Mobility project which has even longer history was pushed through.
The first prototype is designed and already running on Blackberry and it's impressive.
It's web based, but I hope for Google Gears or similar to provide offline functionality in a future.

Microsoft Office Developer Conference

For last 4-5 years I've attempted to evangelize OBA - office business applications. Those are extensions to Microsoft Office - Outlook, Word, etc which extend them to match business processes.
The idea finally got traction and right in this time Microsoft happened to host Microsoft Office Developer Conference in San Jose.
The conference was good, but short - 2 days of compressed information with 3-4 "need to be there" parallel sessions.
I've concentrated on architecture sessions and by the end of conference had pretty solid architecture design.

Microsoft Certified Architect - Sorry

I was not able to obtain financing. The Microsoft Certified Architect certification is postponed either until my employers will get order of magnitude more training budget or price will drop order of magnitude.

MCA Database

After completing MCITP certifications I've got interviewed and invited to Microsoft Certified Architect MCA Database (SQL Ranger) program by Microsoft. Now is difficult part - to get financing for this....

Spain Vacation

It's not an easy task to fit together huge plans, reality and school vacation time frame, but we did it pretty well. My family - four of us - got a great vacation, traveling around Spain in 18 days. 10 cities in order of visit - Barcelona, Sevilla, Libreja, Jerez, Cadiz, Arcos, Ronda, Granada, Cordoba, Toledo.

MCITP: Database Developer

It took another 6 weeks to prepare and pass two exams for MCITP: Database Developer Certification. First was PRO: Designing and Optimizing Data Access by Using Microsoft®
SQL Server™ 2005 and than PRO: Designing Database Solutions by Using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005.
The learning process brought a lot of new. Exams and learning are a great compensator for the narrow view we have, limited by corporate environments, where 80% of product features are unused.
As said before exams now much better determine concentrations. The development exams were much easier for me than DBA exams. And yes, I know that I can have multiple attempts, but it just my personal preference to pass exams from first attempt.
So now I have 2 current MCITP certifications - SQL developer and SQL DBA.

Coding project

Coding project is underway. The idea is to create automatic taxonomy generator which reproduce brain logic of human taxonomy editor and automatically generate entity taxonomy.
I've wrote initial algorithm and users like it. On current stage it's only suggest to user the most probable taxonomy, but the goal is to make it work better than average user and offload this task from over burned users.
Now it's matter of iterative improvement.
The whole implementation is done on SQL 2005.

October - exam season

I'm deep in training. Over the last two weeks I've passed two Microsoft exams Exam 70-447: UPGRADE: MCDBA Skills to MCITP Database Administrator by Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Exam 70-431: TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - Implementation and Maintenance
and earned two certifications MCTS SQL 2005 and MCITP SQL 2005 DBA.
It's interesting that exams became much better now and clearly reflect my knowledge and skills level. I've got lower score on lower level MCTS exam (around 800) which clearly reflect that I'm not working much under field DBA hat (insert tape, etc) and very high (920) score on architect level MCITP exam.