August 2007 - Posts
After a long break, I've finally finished the gallery for
Week 23 of my six month trip around Australia in 2005. As expected, the Tassie portion of the trip produced a lot of shots, and it took a long time to go through them. 15 shots in this gallery, which is the most since
Week 8, which covered the Mt Isa rodeo and Ayers Rocks.
Last year I used 13 of the photos I took from my 6 month trip around Australia in 2005 to make a calendar for a Christmas present for family and friend. The print company I used was
Kainos Print from the ACT, and the actual order form for the calendar is
here - they make the process quite simple. The final proof for this years calanar (4+MB PDF) is
up on my site if you're interested in seeing how it turned out. Generally I was very happy with the result, and plan on using Kainos again this year.
The main change I need to make for the years images is to lighten the dark images significantly (March and May look very dark when not in direct light). Other than that, the 2007 calandar looks great.
The 2008 images will come from my trip to Arizona, Utah and Nevada before the MVP summit.
Wupatki Pueblo is pencilled in for Jan, and
Antelope Canyon will be in there too.
If you're interested in purchasing a copy, please drop me an email. Cost will be around AU30 including postage in Australia. Happy to send OS for a bit extra postage, but be warned that the public holidays and school holidays in the calandar are mostly Australia-specific.
Its hard to believe that its been over three years since I started doing the C++ column at CodeGuru (and still no missed columns). I plan to keep going to beat
Kate Gregory's record of 42 articles, at which point in time I'll demand to get the URL for the column changed (
http://www.codeguru.com/columns/Kate/). I know Kate is fairly vindictive, and believe this is one possible response from Kate's fans:
(I've got into trouble before for not making it absolutely clear when I'm making stuff up, so for the record, I actually don't know Kate, and I'm sure she is not vindictive or has any knowledge of our relative article count).
The last two articles I've done have been on VC++ 2008, which has some pretty nice new features, particularly around Interop. The
August article shows how easy it is to extend the marshaling library, and this is likely to be one of the most used new features of Orcas for C++ developers. Next months article will look at upgrading the version of Scribble that ships with the Visual C++ 6 sample to use the Vista common controls. If there is anything you'd like to see covered in upcoming articles, please leave a comment and I'll happily suggest it to my editor.
The
site's not updated yet, but I'm happy to confirm that I'll be in Perth on 6 Sep to present my Code Generation in the Real World talk. The blurb for the talk is:
Real-world Code Generationby Nick Wienholt
There is a lot more to real-world code generation than simple spitting out a bunch of objects based on a database schema.What is the re-generation story?How are the generated objects extensible?How do I integrate custom stored procs?How do I return a collection with only a sub-set of fields populated?What is the performance like?How do I maintain source control on the database, the generated objects and the settings used for the generation?
This presentation will cover a code generation process using CodeSmith, .net Tiers and VSTS Database Professional that addresses all these points and more.The end result is a development process that can go from schema modification to full back-end regeneration in under 10 minutes.
The talk was well received when I did it at
SDNUG, and the great
Adam Cogan told me after the session it was his favorite session he seen so-far in 07.
I haven't been to the Perth User Group since Dec 04, and I'm looking forward to catching up with Mitch W and Nick R when I'm over there.
I'm flying out of Sydney on the day before APAC and coming back on the red-eye on the day of the start of the summit. Should be interesting.
Thanks to Sanjay and Sin from INETA APAC for making the trip possible by funding the flight.
Released a couple of weeks ago,
SOA in the Real World is a good summary of the guidance that Microsoft has been putting out for the last 5 years. As my main task in the current gig is the writing a document of integration stategy and then working with the development team implementating web services for the first time, the e-book is a timely helper with this task. I'm still working through the first few chapters, but it looks promising.