The Utah County .NET User Group will be having thier January meeting on Wednesday, January 16. Ben Miller will be speaking about the new features of SQL Server 2008. For more information about the meeting and topic please see the UCNUG web site at www.ucnug.org.

Earlier this week I upgraded my AT&T 8525 phone from Windows Mobile 5 to Windows Mobile 6. It was a fairly painless process to do the upgrade. I was looking forward to it since I had heard lots of good things about the latest version of Windows Mobile but hadn't really had a chance to play with it.

My first impressions were good. Setting up my e-mail and the partnership with the computer was easy to do. My only complaint in this area is that the new Pocket Outlook (or something on the phone) is smart enough to realize that my HotMail account is not normally accessible through Pocket Outlook and it redirects me to Pocket IE to go to the HotMail site. This is a minor inconvenience since I was able to read HotMail in the old version of Pocket Outlook.
One thing I really like is the ability to look up e-mail addresses in the "company directory" a.k.a. Global Address List from Exchange. This is great because I don't have to add everyone I might want to send an e-mail to into my contacts list. I can just add the ones I am going to send e-mail to a lot and the others I can look up as I need to.

I really like the larger screen for typing in my PIN to unlock the device. Before I had to use the keyboard which meant either sliding out the device to get to the built in keyboard or using the stylus. The new buttons are big enough that I can use my finger. This is useful when all I want to do is make a call.

The alarms started working again. I don't know what I did before but the alarm sound only chimed when I was turning the phone on. That meant I got a lot of alarms every time I landed at a new destination and turned the phone on. It was kind of embarrassing to have the phone beeping at me in the plane. It also meant that the phone couldn't work as a backup alarm clock when I was traveling.

I haven't had a lot of time to add new applications to the phone but the ones that I have added seem to work just fine.

I got this in my e-mail today for the meeting happening tomorrow. It sounds like the lucky few first people will be able to get a copy of Visual Studio 2008 and install it on their laptop right there.

VISUAL STUDIO INSTALLFEST!

For this month’s meeting we'll all get together and install Visual Studio. We have a very limited number of copies of Visual Studio 2008 Professional. Show up and get yours, first come first serve, then sit down and install! Bring your laptop and a powerstrip.

So come out and have some fun, we hope to see you there!

Many thanks to Richard Hunhausen for pointing me to http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/default.mspx where resistration for the Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 launch event in Los Angeles on February 27 is now open. This will be the big lauch event with Steve Balmer giving the keynote. I am sure it will be a good show and there will be some really cool demos that have been held in reserve for the lauch.

If you are unable to make Los Angeles you can also check the same site for registration for your local event. I was pleased to see that Salt Lake City is on the list for May 20 but registration is not yet open.

First of all let me say Happy 2008 to everyone out there. It seems hard to believe that another year has come and gone.

I have sworn off swearing off making predictions and will attempt to come up with a list of things that I think will be important to all of us working in technology.

1. The Economy - In the past few years it seemed to me that IT budgets were increasing and companies were willing to take a chance on newer technologies or new ways of thinking. With the mixed signals on the economy and nobody really knowing if the US is headed for inflation or a recession but it seems from my informal polling that IT budgets are staying flat or increasing at a smaller rate. That could be a local phenomenon but if it is true it means that we will all be back to justifying costs and showing a shorter ROI for our projects.
2. Green - No, not the lime green color that my daughter is crazy about but the environmentally conscience type of green. Before "green" has been seen as something you do because you are an activist. After all, three years ago when I looked at purchasing a car I just couldn't justify the increased cost of a hybrid vehicle. I would have loved to own one but I just couldn't ever see saving enough in fuel costs to justify the larger up front cost let alone the expected higher maintenance costs. Most companies have looked at their "green" initiatives in the same manner. If they could save money by consolidating servers (and save the environment as a side effect) they were willing to do it but nobody in their right mind would spend extra money just to be green. I now see more companies seeing green as an investment that might cost them money in the short term but that will pay off large dividends in the long term. Besides that being green can be used as a competitive advantage if you can show how your competitors are polluting worse than you are.
   I think technology can help out a lot here. Not only are newer computers getting better about saving energy, the newer operating systems like Windows Vista are pre-configured with energy saving settings that will shut down monitors, spin down hard drives, and will eventually put the computer to sleep. There are other technologies that allow me to shut down my machine but have it wake up when it needs to be patched by the IT group so I don't have to leave my machine on all night long one or more nights in the month. There is also tremendous potential for IT applications to be used for tracking energy usage and providing plans for cutting down on the impact of our technology on the environment.
3. Open Source - I think that open source software has become such a large portion of our industry that to think that it will ever go away is just a fantasy. I also don't see it taking over the world and all "closed source" software going away. I think there is room for both models. I still don't see how you can build a long term business on creating and giving away software but if someone can figure a way to do it I am more than willing to use their software. I see a longer term where Linux and a few successful large projects will be supported and a lot of small utilities but the majority of the software industry will still be run on closed source software. I am not sure what the final percentages will be but I will expect that for the next few years at least we will see open source gaining in prominence. I also expect to continue to hear open source touted as the fix to all the software ills just like structured programming and object oriented programming and a lot of other "silver bullet" ideas before it. One thing is for sure and that is the whole collaborative model of most open source projects has proved that quality software that addresses a business need can be developed by large, geographically distributed teams.
4. Communications - A lot of major players in the industry have "unified communications" offerings. If you take a larger look at software a lot of it is about communicating ideas. I am putting software like Microsoft Office, blogging, pod casting, and web conferencing software into this larger bucket of communications software. There are countless articles and studies talking about how we are overwhelmed with data but starving for information. I think a lot of this problem lies in the way that we try to communicate facts to each other. I think that whoever is able to come up with software that will help us weed out irrelevant facts and drill down on the data that will ultimately become information that we can use will have done us all a service.
   I see a bunch of different technologies that can help with this communication issue. Some of the most obvious are the web conferencing and telecommunications type software like skype but there is a large range from the spam filters that we use to the business intellingence and data mining that drives the dashboards, KPIs, and reports that we rely on to software for creating presentations (just an aside, anyone who could figure out a way to stop boring PowerPoint presentations from being delivered would be a real hero). As we are innundated with information and expected to be constantly available this software will become more and more part of our lives. I think it might be too soon for it to appear this year but within a few years I would expect to see the resurgence of "agent" software that will go out and find information that is of interest to us and put it into neat little packages of information that we can get whenever it is convenient for us.
5. Security - I just read a report on the rise in data breaches last year. It is staggering how much data is lost because someone left a laptop in a cab or because somone sent unencrypted data through the mail and the package was lost. I see many more companies implementing a Chief Security Officer or similar position that will be responsible for making sure that data is secured. I also hear more about encrypting data whenever it is at rest so it will not be compromised. We also have to be aware of phishing attacks and other on-line scams. All of these threats will need to be addressed if we are to continue growing our digital economy.

These are a few (fairly obvious) trends that I think will be important in 2008. Who knows, if I am right I may do something crazy in 2009 like predict when the next version of Visual Studio will be released.

Today I tried to download a training kit for Visual Studio 2008 as it promised all sorts of things like labs, demos, and PowerPoint presentations that might come in handy for user group meetings later on. I was prompted to view the beta page for the new download center that uses Microsoft Silverlight.

I clicked around a little bit and I do have to say that I like the new interface. The download center provided a good search mechanism to find the download I wanted. I was thinking to myself that the least Microsoft could have done would have been to take me to the download I requested instead of the home page when I realized that my download had opened in the original page and that the beta was in a pop-up window. That resolved the one concern that I had while trying to find the training kit. I am sure if I spent more time on the site I could come up with a list of things I like and those that I don't like but for now I am pleased.

My favorite feature was the alphabetical list of downloads. One of my biggest complaints about the MSDN Subscriber download page is that you have to find products by their product family in the tree view. Some products (like SharePoint) have Office in the name but are in the servers branch of the tree. It isn't a big deal to look in a couple of places and I can search by name on that site as well but I really like being able to hover over a letter and see all the downloads that are available.

I hope you all enjoyed Christmas and at least got to spend the day away from work. I came back in and was catching up on my e-mail this morning when I found 2 different messages with much the same theme. It is an important topic so I thought I would share with the rest of the world (or at least that small part of the world that reads my blog).

The first e-mail was on Pex. Pex stands for Program EXploration and is a research project at Microsoft. According to the web page explaining the project it is designed to look at code, automatically generate unit tests, and in some cases it will even suggest bug fixes. Now I know that a lot of the research projects never make it out of the lab and into our hands but if this were to become available in the next version of Visual Studio it would really raise the bar for productivity. It would also mean that a lot of menial tasks (writing simple unit test cases) could be automated and would free up the humans to do what they do best, figuring out new ways to solve business problems.

The second e-mail was from a web site. Burried in the details was an offer for a free paperback book on peer code reviews. I had to read that twice, it seems there are lots of free e-books to be had but a real live dead trees book shipped to me, well I had to click on the link. I got taken to this page where there are lots of nice things written about the book. It looks like you can trade some of your personal information for a copy of the book. I have to admit that the nice statements about the book make me think that it is a very long list of reasons why I should buy some software so I decided not to order the book. It isn't that I don't think peer reviews are a good idea but that I really don't want to buy software. When we were doing peer reviews I don't know that we found a lot of bugs but just knowing that you were going to have to give the code to someone else and then defend why you did things a certain way made you think a lot harder about commenting your code, making sure it was designed well, and that you weren't doing any "hacks" just because you could.

Last night while watching the news I saw a report of an earthquake in New Zealand. I immediately thought of all of the people that I have shared e-mails with and the few that I have met from New Zealand. It got me to thinking about how much smaller the world has become, or how much larger my view of it has become over the last few years. This year alone I have been to Canada, Malaysia, the Czech Republic, and Italy. I have also traveled around the United States and met many people from different countries. I am constantly amazed at how well we can get along when we are talking technology, cars, or other shared interests and how that doesn't seem to scale as well when "governments" and "countries" get involved.

I am sure that most people just want to get along with their neighbors, no matter how far away those neighbors might live. The Regional Director program has helped me to meet people from many different countries. We don't always agree on every topic and the sometimes lively debate is one of the real benefits of the program. One thing we all seem to do is care about how technology will affect us and our parents, grandparents, and children.

If I can come up with some good predictions of where technology will take us in 2008 I will put them down in another post. Until then I hope that technology is making your life easier, your world smaller, and helping you to keep in touch with your friends and neighbors.