jb's Blog

Community Leader of the Year

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:33:00

Darryl just announced this years "Community Leader of the Year" awards, which recognizes some of the stars within the Microsoft community here in NZ who really go above and beyond to make the user groups and other community events happen nationwide.

Check out Darryls post for all the detail..

In particular I would like to give a special mention to Kirk Jackson who has been organizing the Wellington .NET User Groups and Adrian Engelbrecht who runs the Wellington SQL Server User Group.

Kirk has been running the original .NET user group here in Wellington for many years now, and does so without any fuss or complaints. Not just that but he is one of the most likable guys you will meet :) Next time you pop along to one of the Wellington .NET User Groups, make sure you say hello to Kirk and give him some love for all the hard work he puts in :)

Adrian has been running the SQL Server User Group since it started up last year, and quickly established it as a regular user group serving the local SQL Server community. Adrian saw the success we were having with the standard .NET User Groups, but being a DBA he wanted to see more SQL Server (and who wouldnt?) so he took it upon himself to establish a group and put in the hard yards getting it up and running. Again, please thank Adrian when you are next at the SQL Server User Group, its largely been down to his effort and determination that we have it at all :)

So thanks guys and keep up the awesome work! :)

New build of SQL Server 2008 available

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:27:00

Word just in - if you have an MSDN or TechNet subscription, there is now a new release of SQL Server 2008 available for you to work with - Release Candidate 0 (RC0).

As expected, this is likely to be the last public build put out prior to final release, and has been put out to co-incide with TechEd over in the US. Its pretty much a feature complete build, although there is some minor functionality being committed prior to release.

Download it now and get it fired up in your testing environments today :)

Incremental Improvements..

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:08:00

I like software updates that improve performance, lower memory usage and generally get rid of garbage.

If you are running Vista, you may have found some issues with the integrated Windows Search, particularly if also running Outlook with very large PST files *grumble*

If you are also in this boat, I can happily recommend installing the new Windows Search 4.0 - its a good incremental improvement! :)

LightSpeed 2.0 - now targetting Visual Studio 2008 and LINQ!

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:45:00

Earlier in the week we pushed out the final release of LightSpeed 2.0 , our domain modeling and OR/M framework.

The big changes in 2.0 are our support for .NET 3.5 and LINQ and an integrated design surface for Visual Studio 2008 which allows you to model your entities through Visual Studio.

LINQ is certainly the most exciting piece in .NET 3.5 for most developers, and many of you are already looking at using it on future projects. Based on your feedback, the first main feature we put in to 2.0 was to take extend our existing query framework to allow you to access it through native LINQ queries.

Secondly, Visual Studio 2008 is being adopted very quickly by the community. One of the things I noticed on the RoadTrip earlier in the year and again during our user groups here in Wellington was how vocal everyone is about either having switched to 2008 or looking to make the switch soon. Not just for 3.5 but because of the multi-targetting support allowing you to continue developing your .NET 2.0 projects while taking advantage of all the new features.

One of the great things about Visual Studio has been the visual design surfaces, particularly since 2005 when we got the new modeling capabilities introduce with Team System. The second main feature we introduced with LightSpeed 2.0 was a modeling surface for LightSpeed including schema round-tripping to allow you to design model first (as you are looking to) or to import your schema quickly from an existing database.

An example of the Design Surface in action

Andrew put up a nice detailed post of all the new features on the Mindscape Blog, and the best way to get started with LightSpeed is to download the trial version, bust open one of the samples and start coding :)

We look forward to hearing your feedback!

What is a Share Price?

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:59:00

Great question.. Glad you asked! When it was asked of me a while back I gave a fairly mundane answer: "Whatever someone is prepared to pay for it" .. little did I know there was so much more involved! :)

Turns out when it comes to valuing companies, its a rather scientific exercise and one that often leads to quite a lot of effort put in to understanding a companies background, revenues, potential for growth and profitability.

Recently, we were involved with launching the new Valuecruncher site. Valuecruncher is a local company who is well regarded for their work in working out accurate company valuations. The site itself provides an online tool which produces the same type of valuations for publicly traded companies by using a discounted cashflow model.

If you are into stocks in any way or simply looking to answer my original question then give it a look and tell your friends.. the best way to get started is to dive in to changing an existing valuation, maybe start with Microsoft, Apple and Google :)

Now thats useful..

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:55:00

Its not often that features get included late in a product release, however looks like we get a great freebie for working with SPATIAL data in SQL 2008.

Isaac from the SQL Server team posted this morning about the new map control which has been included it into SSMS (as above) which gives you a quick visualization about a shape when returning in a record set. Useful!

Wonder if its re-hostable? :)

Slides from April/May Architect Forum Talks

Fri, 09 May 2008 11:59:00

Over the past few weeks I presented at the recent round of Architect Forums hosted by Mark Carroll talking about ORM's, LINQ and changes in the way we are working with data when building software solutions.

From the feedback the talk was well recieved, and I appreciated the good amount of discussion that has come out of it (both during the sessions themselves and the ensuing emails I have recieved) - thanks for all your thoughts :)

I have uploaded the slides from the session, so you can download them and use them as you wish. A number of you asked if you could re-present some of the material internally, and as usual there is definitely no problem with that! :)

Download Slides

If you are keen in finding out more about LightSpeed and some of the things I showed, we have more information on the product page and you can sign up for the beta of LightSpeed 2 if that interests you also.

I like it..

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:15:00

Fresh from the build box..

Just a little something that Ivan has been cooking up over the last week or so :)

Announcing WPF Elements

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:49:00

Hot on the heels of our very popular WPF Property Grid, we have followed up with a line of business focused control suite for WPF which we feel provides the "essential" controls for anyone developing line of business applications.

We have called this new offering WPF Elements and it includes the following controls:

If you are doing any WPF development, download the trial and give the controls a spin - if you like them, then you can pick a copy from our online store. Also if you are interested in the Property Grid then you might like to take advantage of our "Controls Combo" special which will let you buy the Enterprise Edition of both the Property Grid and Elements for only $50 more than one of the single packages - nice! :)

If you have any feedback or queries, drop us a line in the online forums - we look forward to getting your thoughts! :)