It’s been a long time coming but I’m proud to announce Business Intelligence Studio (BIS) from Orange Peel Corporation (OPC).  We’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!

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?

These are definitely strange times we live in.

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!!