Tuesday, November 17, 2009
New CTP for Microsoft Codename "Dallas", catalog for Data. Data as services. Expose data sources through the cloud.
Dallas Service Explorer used to find and configure services, preview data, see in Atom format, invoke as RESTful service, pull into Excel into new PowerPivot add-in through Atom.
Uses Astoria (OData now). Demo used NASA data service. Showed creation of a service proxy that creates the data structure for you. Quick demo took about a minute to write a WPF app that called the service, bound to a data grid. Week UI for a WPF demo, but he showed something that UI designers built that we needed 3d glasses to see.
Monday, April 27, 2009
So I've not received a response, which is about what I figured would happen. I started looking for information, and found H.R. 1200 (House) : American Health Security Act of 2009.
I'm not a politician, lawyer, or minion of Evil, so I'm not sure about some of this. I didn't yet find a Senate version of this either, but from reading this bit I have a question:
SEC. 106. RELATIONSHIP TO EXISTING FEDERAL HEALTH PROGRAMS.
(a) Medicare, Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)-
(1) IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, subject to paragraph (2)--
(A) no benefits shall be available under title XVIII of the Social Security Act for any item or service furnished after December 31, 2010;
(B) no individual is entitled to medical assistance under a State plan approved under title XIX of such Act for any item or service furnished after such date;
(C) no individual is entitled to medical assistance under an SCHIP plan under title XXI of such Act for any item or service furnished after such date; and
(D) no payment shall be made to a State under section 1903(a) or 2105(a) of such Act with respect to medical assistance or child health assistance for any item or service furnished after such date.
(2) TRANSITION- In the case of inpatient hospital services and extended care services during a continuous period of stay which began before January 1, 2011, and which had not ended as of such date, for which benefits are provided under title XVIII, under a State plan under title XIX, or a State child health plan under title XXI, of the Social Security Act, the Secretary of Health and Human Services and each State plan, respectively, shall provide for continuation of benefits under such title or plan until the end of the period of stay.
(b) Federal Employees Health Benefits Program- No benefits shall be made available under chapter 89 of title 5, United States Code, for any part of a coverage period occurring after December 31, 2010.
(c) CHAMPUS- No benefits shall be made available under sections 1079 and 1086 of title 10, United States Code, for items or services furnished after December 31, 2010.
(d) Treatment of Benefits for Veterans and Native Americans- Nothing in this Act shall affect the eligibility of veterans for the medical benefits and services provided under title 38, United States Code, or of Indians for the medical benefits and services provided by or through the Indian Health Service.
Does 2(b) above include the Senate, House, President, and other elected officials, or is just the drudge bureaucrat workers? Do the officials have yet another plan that isn't on this list? I've no idea what CHAMPUS or SCHIP are.
There's also a part in section 206 that makes me wonder:
(6) PRESCRIPTION DRUGS, BIOLOGICALS, INSULIN, MEDICAL FOODS-
(A) Outpatient prescription drugs and biologics, as specified by the Board consistent with section 615.
(B) Insulin.
(C) Medical foods (as defined in section 202(e)).
If Insulin is called out, why? There are plenty of non-insulin dependent diabetics who have expensive meds as well.
Anyway, I'll post again in a few weeks if I hear anything from my Senator.
Friday, April 17, 2009
After reading the April 13th newsletter from my state Senator, Bob Casey, I decided to send a reply. The following is the text of that message. The work week is almost over and I've yet to see a response.
Your April 13th newsletter stated that one of the issues you plan to work on is "the important work of reforming our health care system." I have some concerns about the "our" portion that might be coming.
"All Americans" is inclusive of all from the President down to those people who have made the committment to earn legal citizenship and everyone in between. My concern is that like in some socialist countries, such as the late USSR, the political elite will have a diffent set of benefits from those that are paying for it.
Right now the President, Senate, House members, et al have free and open access to places like Johns Hopkins for any health care issues. Will our government leaders do the ethically correct, and morally required thing? Will they change their elite health plan and follow the new "universal" health plan they devise for the rest of us?
I have to say right now that I won't believe it until I see it. I'm hoping that I'll be proven incorrect, and will be ecstatic to be able to say I was wrong.
What say you, Mr. Senator?
Our elected officials work for us, not the other way around. Why are they treated better than me and others that pay taxes?
Thursday, October 09, 2008
I'm fairly disappointed with the Republican party, being a somewhat moderate Republican. I'm even more dissapointed with the news media and the one-sided coverage they're providing. It seems that everything I might possibly want to know about the personal lives of McCain and Palin, and their families, has been covered in excruciating detail, but I can't find any real info about Obama.
I constantly see a link with McCain and Bush, regardless of how real that is, yet the Obama team yells foul whenever an association with criminals, radicals, extremists, and terrorists is brought up. I mean, he really hasn't done much in his half-term of Senator, so what else do we have to look at?
He's a helluva speaker, although shows a real anger when questioned about things he doesn't want to talk about. He doesn't seem to have any solid details about how he'll actually change anything, just that he'll change things. I don't even see any evidence that he understands basic macroeconomics. This whole Fanny/Freddie mess is being blamed on the Bush administration, which hurts McCain by party allegience, yet Bush was working with a solid Democratic House and Senate. Heck, I heard someone on a talk show say that Obama not only got a mortgage through Freddie, he got some kind of sweetened deal. Yah, we'll see change all right.
I can't actually see where he's got ANY qualifications for assuming the Presidency. Except for one year in the Senate, the mayor of my small town is just as qualified. :)
I liked Hilary a lot more. While she's still more of a socialist than I like (hey, I earn my money, I want to keep it and spend it myself!), she didn't scare me like Obama. I'm actually frightened about what will happen if he wins this election. Frightened for myself, my family, and my country.
Understand that if there was a more capable Democrat running, I think McCain would be in a lot more trouble. I'm finding that a lot more people are worried than I expected, and a lot more are wondering what Obama is really all about.
I'm not posting any more about this, but I had to vent a little about the crappy media coverage.
In case anyone doesn't understand, this is my personal opinion and doesn't reflect anything at all from my employer or this blog site.
Been a bit busy, including a job change that's had a lot of effect on me. I now work for SunGard Higher Education as a Lead Systems Architect, working on a new project using Microsoft tools and platforms. This has so far been all positive for me, and includes some really interesting work.
Also signed up for the PDC, so now I've got to see what (private) events I can get into ;).
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The Philadelphia chapter of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) is pleased to announce the IT Architect Regional Conference, the largest event in the Philadelphia area to address the pressing needs of IT architects today. There are over 15 seminars and two tracks separated by specialty: Enterprise and Software Architecture. Architects of all levels can take their skills to the next level.
Enterprise Architecture Track:
Learn efficient strategies for linking your enterprise strategy to implementation, create and articulate sound ROI, prioritize your objectives, inspire employees to share your vision, dive in to governance concepts, and enhance your agile strategies.
Software Architecture Track:
Increase alignment between architecture, business and development, troubleshoot your software architecture, assess architecture and software maturity, drive architecture evolution by effectively selecting next generation technology through a rigorous evaluation process, integrate with dynamic management processes, governance for the successful software architect, and enhance design with realistic software architecture toolsets.
Call for Presentations
If you are in or near the Philadelphia area and would like to speak at our upcoming conference, please download the Presenter Form.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
The primary hard drive in my Vista media center (Dell XPS 410) died a hard death, so I got a new drive and started rebuilding. Well, it turns out that my Vista DVD is pre-sp1, which means the SATA driver I needed wasn't there. I tried getting one from Dell downloads, but it didn't work. I got to the point in setup where it SAID it was copying files, but nothing happened - overnight.
Since I have only a small amount of time late at night for personal projects, after the second day my wife was ready to cut off body parts. Twin 2 year old boys, no TV... not a pretty picture.
So I decided that the TV/DVR wasn't going to be a hobby any more, and bought a TiVo HD unit from Best Buy. I called Verizon to see if I could replace my two STB's with cablecards, which would also give me the high def capability the Dell box lacked (you can do the cablecard/HD configuration with the XPS 420, not 410). I have to say, the Verizon rep (working in Pittsburgh), was GREAT. I don't remember every having a better customer experience. While we were talking, he was reviewing my account - I have phone, internet, and TV service. After reviewing options, he was able to give me the same service - except for swapping the two STB's with two cablecards (they didn't have multi-cards, so I needed two to record two channels at once) - for $178 instead of the $252 I've been paying. Then the bad news - it would be about 2.5 weeks before a technician would be able to come with the cards and install them. Great, those body parts were history.
So the next day just before noon, the rep calls me on my cell phone. He made some calls that morning and a technician was scheduled to come the next day. Sure enough, around 2pm the tech came and an hour or so later got the cablecards installed and TiVo was all set.
The only real issue with the TiVo is that it's only got a 250Gb drive, whereas I had 1.2Tb in my Vista box. The only "approved" way to expand it is to get a 500Gb external drive from WD, called the My DVR something-or-other, and plug it into the eSATA port. It's about $199, so is an option when I need the space.
All is not lost on the XPS 410 box. Once I have the time to get it up and running, I'm going to add a few Gb of RAM and turn it into a video editing machine. I have an HD, 60Gb video recorder and my little laptop doesn't do well editing the movies from it.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Mitch Ruebush, Don Urbanic, Brian Mitchell and I met a few months ago to initiate a local chapter of the IASA. and the time has now come to have our first meeting. Our chapter president, Mitch Ruebush, will be moderating the first meeting. Here are the particulars from his invitation e-mail:
You are invited to IASA - Philadelphia's first meeting on February 6th, 2008 at the Microsoft Malvern office. We have set up an official IASA Web site at http://www.iasahome.org/web/Philadelphia/home to provide more information on IASA and the Philly chapter. Please use this site to keep up with the Philadelphia IASA community.
Agenda:
Refreshments & Network
Introductions
What do you want from an architecture professional group?
How do you want to help?
Topic:
What is Architecture?
Join us for a moderated discussion on the practicality of what IT architecture is. We will discuss what is the meaning of IT architecture, roles and responsibilities, approaches to IT architecture, common architecture processes and artifacts and what should be in the architecture toolkit.
Moderator:
Mitch Ruebush is the Architecture Team Leader at ING DIRECT, fsb. He is responsible for defining and coordinating the architecture for the applications and infrastructure at ING DIRECT. He has written a number of books and articles on .NET and enjoys spending his time as a father of two great kids, a hobbyist film maker, playing piano and saxophone and trying to write a video game.
Date: Feb. 6th, 2008
Time: 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Location:
Microsoft Corporation
Great Valley Corporate Center
45 Liberty Blvd., Suite 210
Malvern, PA 19355
IASA (International Association of Software Architects) is the premier association focused on the IT architecture profession through education, advocacy, events, and the development of best practices.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
The TDD webinar this morning had about 210 connections, so I'd say it went well. There were some people who didn't catch my e-mail address, so if you're one of them just post a reply here and I'll get back to you.
I believe that at some point the recording and the PowerPoint deck will be made available through the ITMPI web site.
Monday, June 04, 2007
ARC201 – Ron Jacobs on the Architectural Landscape
Good to see Ron again, he's having a ball in his current role at Microsoft. After obligatory plugs for his ArcCast series, we got into three topics.
TDD concepts.
http://extremeprogramming.org was mentioned as a reference.
TDD Primer from Peter Provost was shown…. I like his statement that TDD is about creating a class that does what you want it to do and nothing more. Also made it clear that architectural design is still necessary. Most people I talk to about TDD start out thinking it's chaotic, which is far from the truth.
If you're not into TDD…
- Add a test.
- Run all tests and see them fail.
- Write just enough code to make the test pass
- Run all tests and see them pass
- Refactor code
I got a kick out of this since I'm presenting a TDD webcast for ITMPI in October.
UI Patterns MVC (Model/View/Controller) and MVP (Model/View/Presenter)
NMock tool (www.nmock.org) shown to show implementing mocks, nice it was plugged. I like this tool a lot.
Spike results for TDD/MVP project.
Ron did a project over a couple of days to prove out MVP and TDD, and results looked positive. Some questions came up at the end about usefulness of TDD for front ends, and during the responses I mentioned that unit testing a complete UI is a bit out of context when you're talking TDD. That gets more into functional testing.
Old Home Week: Dwayne Robinson, Paul Bethany, Dave Armstrong, all ex-Microsoft from Malvern. It was wild seeing them in their different roles at Mondosoft, BinaryTree, and neudesic, respectively.
DAT201 – The next release of SQL Server: Overview
Started with a brief overview of the history of data processing. Pre-monolithic data processing (batch, computational), OLTP, into Connected Systems. Sort of fluffy filler since I got to live through all of, but decent setup to why "Katmai" (SQL Server 2008) is evolving into what it's looking to be.
Katmai has a lot of cool new features. Too many to review, but some things I wish we had now for sure – Performance data collection, System analysis, declarative management (policies). There was a demo by Dan Jones (MSFT Program Manager) on declarative management that showed a policy where a table could not be created under the dbo schema. Dan has a session on Wednesday where he goes into details, so I may check that out.
Support for non-relational data is really going to make for some interesting apps. Spatial/mapping information, binary data including video, sound, etc., is going to be huge.
Enterprise data warehouse updates for portioning, data compression, query optimizations, persistent lookups, change data capture, a new MERGE t-sql statement…
Reporting and BI improvements includes UI, since MS purchased technology from Dundas (some of the best charting/graphics tools for MS development), new cube design tools, ability to host SQL RS w/out IIS…
This is going to rock!
After the wonderful scrambled egg breakfast, we walked down the hall to the keynote. Bob Muglia will be presenting, so it should be interesting as Bob does a nice job. Wireless access is weak in Hall D, where the keynote is.
We survived the party with Polermo last night, which was a blast. Met up with Miguel Castro, Don Demsak, Joe Healy, Russ Faustino, and a slew of other notables. A few dozen of us wandered down to Hooters afterwards and eventually more wandered in, 'til we had the place completely geeked out. Naked 911 wings and a pitcher, what a way to end the day.
The "Back to the Future" parody was pretty funny, showing Microsoft picking on itself for all the "visions" throughout the years… Hailstorm, integrated storage, Microsoft Bob, Clippy, finally deciding that the keynote should be about real-world stuff. Complete with Delorean and Doc…
Dynamic IT for the People-Ready Business is Bob's presentation title. Much about DSI, with a fair overview of what makes up business agility by Gartner.
Some demos of System Center, teasers with SQL Server 2008 and IIS 7.0, Silverlight,
Not one of the best Tech-Ed keynotes, but some of the virtualization demos were eye-opening.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
My company, Computer Aid, Inc., is the sponsor for The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI), and the ITMPI is hosting some interesting webinars during the course of the year. I'm going to be presenting in October on Test Driven Design, using VSTS and other tools to show examples of TDD cycles. This is going to be fun for me since I used to do many presentations and just started getting into webinars before leaving Microsoft at the end of 2005.
From the webinar info web site: The Software Best Practices Webinars Series is a not-for-profit educational program aimed at improving the practice and management of software development and maintenance worldwide.
Topics covered in 2007 will include:
- Software Measurement
- Software Project Estimation
- Software Testing
- Software Project Management
- Software Benchmarking
- Rapid Application Development
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- Legacy Systems Support
- Agile Development
- Software Six Sigma
- IT Project Governance
- IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
- Outsourcing Best Practices
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Each webinar will feature an expert speaker who has extensively researched and successfully applied best practice principles to the development and maintenance of software.
These webinars are free, as is the newsletter that you can sign up for at the ITMPI web site.
Friday, April 27, 2007
I wish I knew about this the last time I bought a box from Dell. This has got to be nominated for product of the decade.
http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/
From their site:
So, you're the proud owner of a new PC. You anxiously open the box, dumping out the contents, casting the instructions aside. You feverishly push your old PC off the desk and get the new one set up. On the floor lies a pile of plastic wrap and twist ties. Your brand spanking new PC boots up only to greet you with a plethora of pop up advertisements pestering you to pay for anti-virus software or sign up for a music service. Your desktop is littered with website links for 'special offers.' The system tray is already full of programs that continuously use your internet connection to make sure that you're 'up to date.'
"When did I ask for this?" you ask. Well, you didn't and that's where the PC Decrapifier comes in. The PC Decrapifier attempts to remove all of the crap on your PC that you never asked for or wanted. To manually remove all of this stuff by hand can take at least an hour (depending on the severity of the infestation.) The PC Decrapifier will detect the 'crap' on your system, you choose what to uninstall, then sit back and let the PC Decrapifier work its magic.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Since my twins were born in 2005, I haven't done even one overnight trip. Tech Ed 2007 better be worth it :).
Monday, February 12, 2007
The first time my XBox 360 died, it was the Red Ring of Death. That happened in July 2006, 10 months after the Mfr. Date on my console. So I had to send the box back and pay the $140 repair fee, and got my XBox back in August 2006. But then a check appeared in the mail a few months ago, refunding the $140 because Microsoft decided to do the right thing and make the warrenty for a year. Nice!
Now, about 6 months later, the DVD drive is dying. When I insert a game disc, I get a message in several languages telling me to insert the disc into an XBox 360. I have to admit that I usually yell at the console, in one language - but a very colorful one - that I am sticking the bloody disc into an XBox 360. That never works, but does offer some relief.
I should have enjoyed that modicum of relief, because relief is not what I got when I called XBox repairs. It turns out that when I had it repaired the first time I should have been offered an option to purchase a 1 or 3 year extended warrany, which I would have given the quality control issues on this beast. It also turned out that repaired XBoxes have only a 90 day warranty. So, XBox Repair gets my $140 back to fix this box again. They'd damned well better send me the warranty paperwork this time.