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TechEd 2004 – Day 3

Day 3 (Friday) – the final day. I had trouble getting up this morning. Its been a whole week without exercise, and hardly any fruit. My body starts breaking down pretty quickly. Also I’m missing my wife big time. Anything over a night away from her and I start feeling down. But I’ll be seeing her tonight so I’ve just got to hold on. Missed the first session cause I was running late...

TechEd 2004 – Day 2

BizTalk 2004 We’ve used BizTalk a lot at work, but only BTS2002. This new version is incredible. As Scott Woodbridge said, this is a revolutionary jump, not just evolutionary. Everything is done from in VS2003 and the output/deployment is via assemblies. I don’t really know where to start, there is so much to say about this product. See Scott’s blog for more details: User group/MSDN...

TechEd 2004 – Day 1

Some of my thoughts on TechEd 2004 held in Canberra, Australia from August 3-6. Whilst today (Wednesday) is officially day 2 (it started on Tuesday with registration and a welcome reception) I have labelled my posts based on the 3 days of sessions. Keynote The conference was opened by Dr Joe MacInnis, a marine scientist who has done heaps of impressive stuff. But I won’t note that here, see for...

The Rule of Four

Just borrowed The Rule of Four from the library. I’m hooked.
I’m told it is similar, but better, to The Da Vinci code which I loved.
Michele started reading it aswell, and because we are both hooked we had to go and buy a copy. We spent the afternoon together reading it in a cafe.

STREXTRACT()

I’m almost too embarassed to mention this… I found a VFP function STREXTRACT() for extracting text from a string. Yep, I have the following code all over the place: nStart = AT(‘Starting text’, cString) nEnd = AT(‘End text’, cString) cSubString = SUBSTR(cString, nStart, nEnd – nStart) which can now be replaced with: cSubString = STREXTRACT(cString...

Moving back end rules to the middle tier

Traditionally I have been putting a lot of the admin business logic (eg auditing, recent changes logs) in the back end, but I’m wondering if I should be moving it to the middle tier.   Let me give you a simple example. In SQL I log the last change to a record in a field using an update trigger that checks SUSER_SNAME(). Previously (read client-server projects) this was fine. But...

Too much doing not enough finishing

The usual problem – why can’t people finish projects?   At work we do so much great stuff: clever design, efficient development, reasonable testing, but then we drop the ball when it comes to managing the client. A client rang me to say they were disappointed with one of the projects we did recently – it was all going fantastically until the final release. It wasn’t...

Steve Vai concert

Steve Vai played Sydney last night. Awesome show. This is the third time I’ve seen him in Sydney. Billy was on bass, Tony MacAlpine on guitars/keyboards, Dave on guitars and Jeremy on drums. Tight band. Nice show. Come back anytime Steve.

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