I am about to leave on a trip and suddenly felt the need to get a USB adapter to allow me to partner a phone and computer via Bluetooth. I found several options online and at reasonable prices but with my short timeframe I couldn’t get it shipped to me so I started looking for a bricks and mortar solution. I pulled up a search engine that touts itself as having more information about local businesses than others and searched for computer. I was mainly looking for phone numbers since I thought I knew the computer stores in the area. I found a couple of new entries and decided to look them up. One of them had the following page provided by the search engine.

Despite having an address the default map seems to show me a 500 mile radius. It wasn't at all useful. I thought it might be due to the address having a street name where most addresses in this area are based on a grid system with numeric values for north/south and east/west. After clicking on the zoom in button 10 times and sliding the map around because it didn't zoom in on the pushpin I was able to get to this map image

Obviously the map knows where the street is and could have mapped it. In the end I ended up not calling the business because they didn't appear to offer what I wanted but if I hadn't been so pressed for time I wouldn't have even messed with clicking the zoom in button 10 times. If I were the advertiser I would be asking the web site to update the map to help drive more business. As it stands I suspect that a lot of people would pass up this business if they couldn't figure out where it is located.

I read an article on ars technicha that said I could get a free copy of Office 2010 if I agreed to test it extensively. I went to the Microsoft Connect site and it looks like they are trying to get home users, students, and small businesses to agree to use Office 2010 on a “loaner” laptop for 6 months and then be willing to “share your story” through public relations and marketing. I don’t really fall into any of those categories but I would like to start using Office 2010 since most of my day is spent in Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and InfoPath with some Visual Studio and other applications thrown in.

I filled out the survey and I will see if I am selected. If you are interested too then you need to live in the US and fill out the survey before June 30.

I just saw an e-mail that says Microsoft is having a “fan drive” to get fans of the Microsoft Patterns & Practices summit on their Facebook group. You can go to the P&P Summit Page on Facebook and become a fan. On the page there is this description of the summit.

If you're a software architect or developer who is passionate about mastering your craft, you should register now to attend the next patterns & practices Summit, October 12-16th on Microsoft's main corporate campus in Redmond, Washington, USA.

According to the e-mail if the group reaches 250 fans by the end of the month a random (non-Microsoft) person will get a free pass to the summit. I just became a fan and there are 67 fans now.

I got the following announcement via e-mail. The SSWUG virtual conferences are a good way to get training at your desk. Each presentation is given several times throughout the day so you can listen at your convenience. Also with the online chat you can ask the presenter and other attendees questions as you need.

  http://www.sswug.org  
Your Database/BI/IT Tech News  
   Wednesday, July 22 - Friday, July 24

SSWUG's Summer '09 Refresher vConference

Business Intelligence, SQL Server, .NET Development and Sharepoint. Top content, top industry speakers and top accessibility...all online. 

Hi Everyone,

The first round of Early Bird discounts for the 

SSWUG.ORG Summer Refresher vConference

end Monday, June 22 so register now to get the best rates!

Tune-up your job skills over three days in:

SQL Server 

.NET Development

Business Intelligence

Sharepoint
 
Early Bird registration is $60/discipline. You can also get the Summer vConference and the Fall vConference (with all new content) for only $145/discipline.  

These Early Bird rates go up on June 22 so don't hesitate!

See you online!

Stephen Wynkoop, Founder
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
swynk@sswug.org
 

Speakers: 

Ted Malone

Brian Knight

Chris Randall

Craig Utley

Donald Farmer

Erik Veerman

John Welch

Matt Masson

Matthew Roche

Scot Reagin

Ben Hoelting

Rachel Appel

Donald Belcham

and many more...  


© 2009 Bits on the Wire, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Bits on the Wire, Inc.
6420 E. Broadway Blvd, Suite A300
Tucson, AZ 85710

I just saw that the call for speakers is open for the fall Utah Code Camp. The code camp will be on September 19. The website lists a bunch of speakers (I think they are the speakers from last year) and gives you an idea of the kind of speakers and topics that can be covered. I know that Pat is always looking for new speakers and new ideas. If you have experience in anything from a basic presentation up through the latest and greatest features of some product I am sure we would all love to hear about it.

Today there were many pieces of good news for the Apache Stonehenge project. I have been working on the project for the last few months. There has been a lot of work (mostly by others) to make sure that we have a good quality release. The first is that we have released the M1 milestone that shows interoperability between PHP, Java, and .NET implementations of the application. You can mix and match the different front ends, business processing services, and order processing services as you want. I will paste the announcement below for those who are interested.

The second piece of good news was that the Stonehenge project was a large part of the demo given during the keynote at the Java One conference today. Greg Leake from Microsoft and Harold Carr from Sun demonstrated Stonehenge working with a Java implementation created by Sun.

The third piece of good news was that Sun donated their implementation of the Stocktrader application to the Apache Stonehenge project. Now there are multiple Java implementations.

Since the whole purpose of the Stonehenge project is to show interoperability between different web service stacks I would love to see other vendors such as BEA (Oracle) and IBM also contribute solutions. For many years we have been talking about how standards will help the industry with interoperability. The Apache Stonehenge project is showing concrete proof of how that works and better yet with the code and configuration files available anyone can examine how it was done and duplicate it in their mixed environment.

As promised earlier here is the text from the announcement of the Stonehenge M1 milestone.

We are pleased to announce the release of Apache Stonehenge
(incubator) version M1.
You can download this release from
http://incubator.apache.org/stonehenge/download.html
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/incubator/stonehenge
 
Apache Stonehenge is a set of example applications for Service
Oriented Architecture
that spans languages and platforms and demonstrates best practise and
interoperability.
The aim of the Stonehenge project is to develop a set of sample applications to
demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying
platform technologies
by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols. By having
a set of sample
applications, with multiple language and framework implementations
will become a useful
and important part of the SOA landscape. It will:
 
* illustrate and develop best practice for interoperable
applications that communicate
via distributed protocols,
* demonstrate interoperability between platforms,
* provide sample code upon which SOA developers can build,
* help identify interoperability issues and their solutions, and
* build confidence in cross-platform deployment of SOA technologies.
 
Disclaimer: Apache Stonehenge is an effort undergoing incubation at
the Apache Software
Foundation (ASF), sponsored by the Apache Incubator PMC. Incubation is
required of all newly accepted projects until a further review
indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making
process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful
ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection
of the completeness
or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to
be fully endorsed by the ASF.
 
Apache Stonehenge web site is at
http://incubator.apache.org/stonehenge/
 
Issues can be reported here.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/STONEHENGE
 
We welcome your early feedback.
Thank you for your interest in Apache Stonehenge
 
--Apache Stonehenge Team--
http://incubator.apache.org/stonehenge/

By now you have probably heard of bing. It is the next incarnation of Microsoft’s search engine. It is still in preview mode but www.live.com redirects to it so if you are using Microsoft as your search provider you will use it.

I want to start by commenting on the name. I have heard a lot of comments about how good or bad the name is. One of the first comments was along the lines of “it will be easier to say bing for it than live search for it”. For me the first thing I thought of was the sound that you hear in a game show when someone gets the correct answer. There is probably a formal name for the sound but to me it sounds like “bing” so every time I see the name in the search engine I associate it with the correct answer.

The other big question is if the search engine is better than live search and if it is good enough to use instead of Google. I have been using live search for a few years and have only had to go to Google a few times to get answers that I couldn’t find with live search. Granted on some occasions when I did compare results I would find that for some terms live search ranked the result I wanted higher, sometimes Google did. I didn’t keep a complete list and haven’t done any impartial comparisons but I didn’t see a discernable pattern in the results. In the last few days while I have been using bing I have felt that the results were better and there are some really cool features like how bing pulls out information you might need. If you search on “Radio Stations in NYC” you see a map and links to web pages for the different radio stations. Below that are the “normal” search results. Unfortunately searching for “Radio Stations in SLC” doesn’t give you the map and links to the stations. I am not sure why the abbreviation doesn’t work but spelling out Salt Lake City gives results formatted similar to NYC.

I was pointed to the site www.mysearchoff.com today. That web site brings up results from bing, Google, and Yahoo. I tried some phrases there and some that are usually tricky for search engines like “rulers lying in state” where there are many words that have multiple meanings and could confuse the search engine. Bing appeared to return very similar results as the other two search engines. I then searched on the name of someone in my junk e-mail folder. The name is Camara. As I expected all 3 search engines suggested that perhaps I meant to search for camera. Bing and Google had the same first page linking to information about the scam. Yahoo had the same page lower down in the rankings. Of course other search terms will have different rankings so declaring a search engine a winner after just a few searches is silly. My completely unscientific view is that bing is better than live and will help me find information better. I look forward to using some of its other features previewed at www.decisionengine.com like finding the lowest airfare and getting answers to health questions.

The title of my blog post is the same as a article from Darryl Taft at eweek. In the article (in the form of a slideshow) we see a list of people, products, and technologies that make Microsoft important to the developer. I agree with all of them. Things like having Bill Gates and Steve Balmer support developers, tools like Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server, and technologies like web services and AJAX really do provide a lot of compelling reasons to want to develop on the Microsoft platform.

I also feel from a historical sense that the reason not to develop on the Microsoft platform has some merit. In the past Microsoft has not shown a great commitment to supporting many different platforms. Some of the reason is competitive and others are economical. To be certain, Microsoft is not unique in this as other companies have removed support for an OS or CPU architecture and not been branded as being untrustworthy, but for some reason if Microsoft stops supporting RISC chips it is to help Intel and not because there are fewer and fewer RISC machines being sold. I see that attitude changing now. The change is slow in some areas (I don’t expect to see Windows open sourced any time soon) but in others like the web where you can get the source code for some of the offerings there is a strong commitment to allow customers to use the products regardless of the support provided by Microsoft.

Another area is in interoperability. As part of the work I am doing now I have been asked by Microsoft to go back and update a slide deck to point out the different places where Microsoft is able to interoperate with other platforms. I also am volunteering time with the Apache Stonehenge project. The goal of the project is to show WS-* interoperability between different web service stacks. We have just completed voting on the M1 release and are discussing M2. There is a lot of excitement and energy on making sure that there is interoperability and that anyone can download the code and see the interoperability happening. There are other areas like information cards and the work being done around identity where making sure that interoperability happens because without interoperability it doesn’t do any good for anyone.

Microsoft has done a lot better at working with standards bodies and making sure that they are implementing standards as they are developed without proprietary extensions to the standards. Microsoft has a touch position in that they want to innovate and be able to compete in the marketplace but at the same time they need to support standards and be the same as everyone else so their products can be used. I think in the end having all products be open source is not the ultimate answer but having some examples of how to interoperate will go a long way to making sure that everything works well together.