It’s been a long time coming but I’m proud to announce Business Intelligence Studio (BIS) from Orange Peel Corporation (OPC). I’ve been developing BIS for the last 2 years with the best set of Developers. I personally want to thank my two core developers: Freddy Castro and Irvin Gomez. Thanks so much for all your hard work and believing in the product. Without your dedication to the product, it would not have been possible.
I also want to thank Ignacio, Genaro, Alma, Araceli, Marcos and Fernando, ! All Key members that helped get us to the next level.
I may poke fun at Microsoft at times and get frustrated but in the end I truly believe that when it comes to Business Intelligence and development tools, there is no better company! Our product compliments PerformancePoint Server. Based on Microsoft’s feedback last week when I was up in Redmond only confirms that!
It’s been a long and crazy two years but now the real fun begins. If you’re looking to take your budget and planning for PerformancePoint to the next level, then you owe it to yourself to check out BIS!
What I was laughing my ass off about this video is a few months back I was chatting with a Microsoft Employee who happens to be in Sales. He said the almost the exact same line as the video. He said in so many words ”Some Enterprises did not deploy Vista because they don’t want to Adopt early but that going to be over with SP1″. When he said it to me, I was thinking then, Man he is really drinking the Microsoft Kool-aid. Now after watching this video I’m convinced its now a PIC line directly to the heart. I also had to bit by tongue and not ask him about all the people who have rolled back to XP.
I used both OS X and I’m a switcher (no not to OS X, I did that already, but back to XP) but I still have one machine running Vista. What’s even more depressing is that the machine has still not done the auto update to SP1. I talked to another Microsoft employee who works there for a long time now but does not always give me the company line told me it will not update my computer until the issues for certain drivers on my machine have been resolved. If I try to update SP1 on its own it will fail! Some Service Pack! All the more reason to stay with XP and wait for XP SP3.
Am I the only one that has noticed a disturbing trend going on with the .net open source projects? Instead of them being supported by developer community, Microsoft is hiring the developers that created them like they are going out of style.
Sure, at the moment it looks like it could be a good thing, but in the end is the source code being owned by Microsoft or will they still be truly open source?
It first started out out with Jon Lam with his Ruby port to .net. Then Phil Haack with SubText and finally Rob Conery with SubSonic.
I guess I find it a bit ironic that these Open Source developers would have no problem drinking the kool-aid so easily. Don’t get me wrong I think its great that they are working at Microsoft, they need to make a living.
I put this way, its like a politician who’s a Democratic one day, is now running as a Republican because someone gave them some money. However they are still able to be continue their liberal agenda. Would this not seem a little strange to you?
As many of you may have heard, Microsoft has released Safari for Windows. You maybe asking yourself why do I care! First if your a web developer that uses Windows XP or Vista as you primary operating system, you should be excited!
Should you be excited that you’ll get to use a really good browser? Sure, but the primary reason I can think of is that you now have a browser that you can run on your machine that will allow you to test your web applications for OS X! You no longer have to ask your Apple friend or creative department to do your testing.
Personally I use OS X all the time so this is not a big deal for me. However this is a big deal for the 40+ developers that work the company I run (with my other partners) and it should be for you also!
Think about it… you now have the same browser that 90% of all Apple users have and use on their computer. The other 10% is Firefox, that you have already covered. No sane Apple user still uses IE for the Mac. Safari now hold roughly 5% of the total web browser share and this number is going to increase due to the number of people who continue to jump to OS X (I had another friend who just asked me that he is thinking of switching himself and his mother to OS X). Now that Safari is available for Windows, that number should continue to rise.
It’s a really good browser that is bound to gain acceptance because it’s backed by Apple. FireFox may have the geeks, but Apple has the branding to get people to use Safari if they have had enough of IE. You can bet the bank that Apple will distribute the browser with iTunes as they have been doing with Quicktime. They are getting millions downloading iTunes on Windows each month. If they start distributing Safari with iTunes, and market it correctly, you’re bound to see a huge percentage of users!
Either way you look at it, you’ll need to download it and test your web applications. Heck you may even begin to use it as your own primary browser!
I guess Microsoft has or will be canceling PDC 2007 this year due to the fact there is really nothing to talk about. (Windows Server 2008 will be announced at Dev Connections, SQL Server 2008 “Katmai” was introduced at BI Conference in Seattle, Silverlight was announced at Mix07 and Visual Studio “Orcas” has already been announced and given out as a CTP2 to MSDN subscribers.)
This is a bit disappointing because this is my favorite Microsoft Conference and its been almost 2 years since I went to one. If I had known this earlier I would have signed up for Mix 07 or Tech*Ed 07.
I never thought the day would come when I find out people like Mike Gunderloy have had it with Microsoft! I don’t know Mike personally but I know several people (including my old boss) that were really tight with him. His name would come up all the time as “The Microsoft Expert”. Back when I was getting started in the consulting business, Mike G and Ken Getz where the Access 2.0 Gods!
The last couple of months I’ve been extremely busy and had zero time to go and read all my RSS Feeds or even add entries to my blog. (My five fans are now probably gone too!) Today reading through my other feeds I found that Mike G had a new site called “A fresh Cup”. I started going through Mike’s site and came across an entry that he’s had enough with Microsoft. Hell, he even bought himself a Macbook Pro! If it was still April I would have thought that this was an extended April fools joke! I don’t know all the details but something must have been pulling him away for a while. I don’t think it’s just the one thing that made him decide to really try to no use anything created from Microsoft.
I really hope that Mike G can work it out because his expertise is something the community can not afford to lose!
Wow! I never thought I would admit it but I really do like, no love, Windows Vista. I’ve installed it on my desktop computer and it’s been for the most part a very good experience. However, I don’t recommend it for notebooks at the moment. The two notebooks I have tried it on, runs a bit sluggish. As long as you have a new machine, with at least 2 gigs of RAM and a decent graphics card, Vista is beautiful. The last couple of weeks I’ve been working on my desktop and when I go to use my Macbook pro notebook, it feels a bit dated. Maybe it’s the Aero theme that has me hooked or the new sleek UI but whatever it is I’m hooked.
I did have some problems with the sound card drivers at first but I was able to get this resolved after digging through the forums. The other real problem I had was with Visual Studio 2005 not running as smooth as it should. This was resolved when I updated Visual Studio 2005 to Service Pack 1 and found a Vista update for Visual Studio 2005 sp1. After updating VS2005, it’s been working pretty well!
I did have to turn off the infamous “Cancel or Allow” dialogs! (If you’ve seen the new Apple commercial and have been using Vista, you know how true it is with dealing with that annoying dialog box.) This “interruption” was driving me bonkers. So much so I hated the whole Vista experience at first. I was about 10 minutes into reinstalling Windows XP, when I found out I could turn this off (The Apple commercial stated this could be done! Thanks Apple!!) and things got a lot better from there.The Speech recognition in Vista is AMAZING! I tried it out the other day and I’m truly impressed on how good it was. I won’t go into it here but it has come a long way!
The other thing that may have had a positive influence is the new Office 2007. At first I was extremly worried about what Microsoft did to Office with the new Ribbon feature, but after using it to write some documents at work, I could not believe that this was not thought of sooner!
Well there you have it. A switcher that is not afraid to admit he likes something else beside OS X. The good news is I’ll have a new version of OS X in the next month or so. Hopefully I can fall back in love with my Apple again. I’m sure I will!
Oh! I almost forgot! My Seven year old son was asking to use the computer and he noticed it was no longer running Windows XP. He said to me “Is this a new Mac dad?” HAHA…That’s it! I like Windows Vista because it looks so much like OS X!!
Replace “ServerName” with the name of your server. A list of users associated with the site is now available for you to edit or remove.
Now you can change the site collection owner, the descriptive name and add comments. I love this feature because when I was first setting up groups and users on our Sharepoint server a few years back, I included the domain name as part of the name (which was the default). This looked ugly and for the life of me I could not figure out how to change it. This page allows you to just that!
The page also works on sites. For Example our SPS server has several sites and each one has different security settings. We don’t want our consultants reviewing our sales site and stealing potential clients now do we?
On Friday I had created a presentation for my kids school. I’ve done the 8th grade graduation presentation for the last couple of years. I get all the images and video from each student and use Keynote and iLife create it on my Mac. I can create a very professional presentation that can be watched from a DVD very quickly.
However, I don’t have a portable Mac so each year I’ve played the DVD on my Dell notebook. I’ve been running Windows XP and it’s been pretty reliable. However a couple of weeks ago, I installed Windows Vista Beta 2 on my notebook.
Today I went down to the school, did test run and it played great in Windows Media Center. When it came time to showing the presentation (about 1.5 hours after the test run), Windows Media center decides to die. I kid you not! The exact moment when I have over 300 people waiting to watch the presentation, Media center crashes. Then a few minutes later Windows Vista Crashes! I had to reboot the computer while the principal and my wife are worried that we may not be able to play the presentation.
After the presentation my wife starts laughing and says that does not say much for Microsoft’s new operating system! I know, it’s a Beta, but by the time you’re in Beta 2, the core OS should be stable enough that something this trivial should not happen.
I can guarantee you next year, I’ll be doing everything on that new Mac book pro I’ve been waiting to get!
After using it for the last couple of days I am pretty impressed by the rendering engine, but there is a couple of obvious things that should NOT be hapenning for a product at Version 7. FTP does not work at all!!
The other issue which is very strange is the back button. The history get’s screwed up and and this causes the back button to become completely useless!
For Example:
I type in http://www.nhl.com and check out the hockey scores.
then I type http://www.digg.com and start checking out what’s hot for the day. I click a story that takes me to that site. After I read it, I want to go back to digg, so I click the back button. Guess where it takes me? To Digg.com? Nope! It takes me back to nhl.com! And the history (little down arrow for the back button) for back is not available to select from.
The last thing I absolutlely hate is the interface! It’s terrible. However, knowing Microsoft they are not done with the look at feel (that is how it was for IE 3 and 4’s beta) and will not give us the final look until they release it.
So for now I think its not that useable for every day browsing but as a good tool to test things out.
Today I took the Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) test for Designing a Portal Solution with Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies and passed it! I was a bit worried because I only studied a couple of hours this morning before heading over to the local college to take it.
I actually did quiet well! I passed with a score of 900 out of 1000! The funny thing is I knew the 5 questions that I got wrong were. When I was answering the question I kepting asking myself if this was the answer that Microsoft wanted to hear or was it the answer that felt was right based on deploying a couple Sharepoint sites over the years. As you guess, I made the wrong choice. Next time I need to remember to give the Microsoft answer, even if I feel its wrong!
When you only miss five or six questions you really want to take the test over again and get them all right!! Oh well! At least this is off my plate as one of my goals to complete this spring!
Steve Ballmer: “No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children–in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.”
Now that is sad. Reminds me of the crazy christians (just the crazy ones) where they would not let their kids read Harry Potter because it could lead to witchcraft!
I found this great website that has over 100 stories of the early development days of the Apple Macintosh computer. The site contains the personal stories from the people who actually put their blood, sweat and tears into creating one of the first personal GUI Operating Systems.
I was 10 years old when all this was going down and I was really into computers, but not Apple computers. In fact, the first Mac that I bought was when I was 30! I actually hated the Mac when I was growing up. Not because I was a PC/Microsoft fanboy, but because I was a big Commodore 64/128/Amiga lover. Now that I have a new respect for using the Mac, it great to read how things really began!
It’s really quiet an interesting read on how different the computer industry was and yet how it’s still the same.
I love the stories about how Steve Jobs was so fanatical and how he was perceived with the people that worked for him. The reference’s to Steve Job’s Reality Distortion was funny as hell and I can see this persona in Steve Jobs even today. It’s probably not has bad, but heck, that’s what make Steve jobs, well Steve Jobs!
The site is called Folklore. Even if your not a Apple/Steve Jobs/Mac fan, there are still several things that happenned that changed the way we use computers today. Did you know that the OK button that we use everyday was first called the DO IT Button? Check it out!
There are times when you need to select text in column mode instead of the tradtional row selection. Think of it like selecting a range of columns and rows in Excel.
For example, lets say I want to highlight all the strings from this section of constants because you want to put into a store procedure as input parameters.
Move the cursor to the beginning column you want to start highlighting from. Hold down the ALT key and then press and hold down the left mouse button. Then Highlight the code you want with the mouse or arrow keys. Once you have the code you need, simply copy ( + C), cut ( + X), paste ( + V) or delete.
Now the clipboard has stored only the text that is highlighted above. The only thing now is remove the quotes and the semi-colons in when posting it in your stored procedure!
ALT + Left Mouse button = Column Text Selection
This feature also works in Visual Studio 2003. (It may work in 2001 but I have not used it in several years to remember)
Another nice feature that will save on time and re-indenting your code is the Surrounds with snippets. It works the same way as Code Snippets but the difference is that you highlight a section of code that you want to surround your code with.
This example I am going to surround a section of my code with a try catch. The keyboard short cut is Ctrl + K and the S.
A popup combo box will appear asking you what type. You can selec the you want to surround with. Since I am going to use a try catch, I can hit the “T” key and then hit enter.
My code is now surrounded by a try/catch with the Exception object available for me to assign a variable to.
Now that you’ve seen the power of using Code Snippets, the only thing cooler is creating your very own code snippets!
The best tool that I’ve seen to help you create your own is one from Microsoft. It’s actually an open source project that if want to contribute to, you can.
One of the new features of Visual Studio 2005 is the ability to use Code Snippets.
At times coding can be very repeative and the 9 out of 10 times its the same thing that I am typing. By using the snippets feature I can reduce this.
So How do you insert a Code Snippet? The fastest way is from the keyboard Press the Ctrl key + K and then X.
A popup window will appear for you do select the available snippets. There are several to choose from and you can even create your own! For this tip I am going to do a Property snippet. Press ‘P’ on your keyboard or scroll through the list and select it.
Your code will now have the snippet template of the property item in place. Very cool! However the best is yet to come! Notice that the private data member type is highlighted.
Go ahead and change it to the type you need. I am going to change mine to a string.
To change the name of the private data member simply hit the tab key. Now the highlighted box is around the private data member name. Type in the name you would normally give your private data members.
One really nice feature is the set and get values have been modified automatically to the same name as the private data member.
Finally tab one more time and enter your property Name.
Once you like what you see hit the enter key. However if you want to change any of the values you made you can simply hit the tab key again and it cycle through them all. (You can’t do this after hit the enter key though)
To me this is one of my favorite features and I find myself constantly doing these key strokes when I am in Visual Studio 2003. One more reason to port everything over to .net 2.0!
For the last couple of weeks I have been deep in development on a new project using Visual Studio 2005. All I can say is “Thank you Microsoft!” The debugging tools alone are worth the upgrade. I can’t tell you how much more productive I have been using the new Visual Studio. Microsoft, I take back everything I have said bad about you (for aleast a couple of days, or until something drives me nuts about Windows XP). This is one awesome IDE.
There is a great site I found by a developer at Microsoft. He is presenting his top debugging tips. I greatly suggest if you are using Visual Studio 2005 that you read his tips. They have been extemely useful and I want to pass this on to all (3) of my readers!
Well today my brother Adam called me about getting new drivers for his new ATI card. I went to the ATI web site today and I noticed that they have released Drivers for Windows Vista! Damn! I just unistalled Vista because of the lack of driver support. Oh well. I guess when the next major build of Vista is released on MSDN, I will reinstall it knowing that I can get drivers for it!
After using Vista for about 3 weeks I came to the conclusion that I could not continue to have it as my primary Windows computer. It’s far too buggy for day to day usage. Sure it’s in beta but I don’t recall XP beta being this bad.
The biggest problem is that anything that uses Direct X was giving me headaches. The lack of proper drivers for my graphics card played a huge factor.
There were several other bugs that were also annoying. The one cool feature of rendering the application window as a thumbnail as you hovered over the taskbar would quickly get confused on what window it owned and should render. Yes that’s a small thing but it bugged the hell out of me!
IE 7 kept crashing on me. It still has a long way to go when it comes to properly handling sites designed using the latest CSS 2.0 standards.
The fact that I could not get my RAID controller to work should have stopped me right there from installing it.
When the next beta comes out, I will probably try it again. Until then, it’s XP for now.
As many of you may have heard, Microsoft has released 
Wow! I never thought I would admit it but I really do like, no love, Windows Vista. I’ve installed it on my desktop computer and it’s been for the most part a very good experience. However, I don’t recommend it for notebooks at the moment. The two notebooks I have tried it on, runs a bit sluggish. 
Oh well! At least this is off my plate as one of my goals to complete this spring!
I found this great 
