Jim Lavin

I just got back from attending my first Dallas VSTS User Group Meeting. Vince Blasberg gave a presentation titled "Reporting in Visual Studio Team System." He gave a great deep dive into the database architecture around TFS, the Data Warehouse and the OLAP Services. Vince also had some great tips on how custom work item field attributes can affect reporting as well as learning resources around building TFS Reports. I'm hoping we do a deep dive around mining the Data Warehouse for dashboard data reporting. It was great first experience with the group.

Turns out that Vince and I worked together at CLR/FAST-TAX back in the mid 90s. We spent some time after the meeting chatting about old friends and the old days of working 18 hours days getting ready for tax season.

You can learn more about the Dallas VSTS User Group at http://www.dallasvsts.com

So this weekend I was catching up on some web casts and caught Mark Pesce's Keynote from ReMix08 Australia. It was basically about how the current Internet culture is hyper-connected because of social networking sites like Twitter. So, I decided to check it out and joined up. It's pretty simple, just send random posts through out the day to indicate what you are doing or what is on your mind. Besides posting your thoughts and what you are doing, you can follow others and monitor what they are posting. There are even some innovative sights that are monitoring the thousands of posts and using them to come up with some really unique presentations of what the Twitter society is currently thinking.

You can find me at http://www.twitter.com/jimlavin,  maybe we'll bump into each other, who knows.