/bill's House O Insomnia : Books

Pro SharePoint 2007 Development Techniques

William — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 02:31:09 GMT

Earlier this week, Microsoft hosted a Sharepoint boot camp. I was scheduled to attend but ended up doing some work for Microsoft related to Mobility. It's really strange how things work in this industry. I mean, when I was getting started, I was desperate to get experience and training was a luxury that I didn't even really think of. Once you're established though, it's amazing how many opportunities present themselves.

Sharepoint is one aspect of my game that got really behind although as of late, I've been making a pretty decent comeback attempt. Attending a weekend intensive hosted by Dunn Training and Sahil Malik was priceless and got me way over most of the humps that will stunt your development early on.

I've read through just about every Apress book on Sharepoint and recently just got a copy of Pro Sharepoint 2007 Development Techniques. Sahil spoke really well of it and at the risk of sounding like a starstruck teeny bopper, Sahil's advice can pretty much be taken blindly with the knowledge it's right. The one thing he forgot to tell me about it though is that it's not something you want to read until after you've got all your work done. I was in the middle of a ton of new stuff and then this showed up on my doorstep. Flipped through Chapter 1, nothing eventful there, Chapter 2 Creating Interactive Web Parts using Ajax - and that was the last anyone heard from me. It started with a "Oh cool, so that's how you do it" followed by a "I wonder if I can..." followed by a "Oh crap, it's 3:00 am. Prior to getting this book, I had loaded up on all the latest and greatest Silverlight stuff, pulled down Expression Blend bound and determined to learn how to do something cool with it, started to make progress and figured I'd just dip my toe in the Sharepoint pool. Then I got to Chatper 2.

So I forced myself to just 'move on' and go into Chapter 3 - Reporting Services... I often have thoughts on the lines of "If you'd have told me 20 years ago that I'd be sitting in front of a computer ________________ I'd have thought you were nuts" and I can tell you for certain, if you'd have told me 3 years ago that I would spend more than 20 minutes enjoying report writing, I'd have thought you were high or nuts, perhaps both. Reporting Services has some weird effect on me though and I often find myself enjoying myself way more than I ever should writing a report. Thus it was with this. I had a long list of things I wanted to accomplish (the least of which was running to Best Buy to buy RockBand and shredding) by tonight and thanks to this book, I've done zilch. Nada. I've made it to Chapter 3 and got some cool Ajax effects to work and wrote a function to pull tiffs out of a database and render them in Reporting Services. Lame, I know. Anyway, at this rate, this book will turn into a full blown habit by Chapter 5 and I'll be selling my stereo to buy another copy of Chapter 6 before much furthter. I can say this though, even if the rest of the book totally sucks, Chatpers 2 and 3 are cool enough I would still be glad I got it. Then again, considering I have a virgin Windows Home Server sitting two feet away from me, with nothing set up on it, all because of this book, maybe I wouldn't. Not sure why it's so intriguing to me, but once again, trusting Sahil proved right...

Pimpology Law 11 - Avoid Gorillas and Godzillas

William — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:12:00 GMT

I'm somewhat hesitant to write this because I really want people to buy this book. However I figured from all the freaking emails I'm getting asking if I'm serious, I probably ought to make it clear that Yes, I am totally serious about this. One of you seems to think this is my just trying to get a rise out of people, but well, if that's what I was doing i'd choose a different venue.

So now that I've read Pimpin Ken's seminal masterpiece - aka Pimpology - The 48 Laws of the Game , I can say honestly that if you changed the title, this book would look just like any other Business Book I read in grad school although this is a lot more interesting. I was thinking about it in relation to my personal job:

Law 11 - Avoid Gorillas and Godzillas

Although I thought I was hip to most lingo, I was clueless as to what a Gorilla or Godzilla was. He uses personal anecdotes, but essentially they are both basically folks that you work with that don't play by the rules and as such, put the whole game at risk. I once worked at a company that had a really lax policy about arriving and leaving - as long as you did your work, they didn't care. Then, one guy started missing meetings. He was never there yet recorded hours all the time. He'd do all of his work in one burst, but this caused problems because we often to had to wait for his stuff. So managment cracked the whip and we all had to start being there during business hours and all this others stuff that really made it suck. All because of one person. To quote Pimpin Ken "Gorillas and Godzillas are bad for the game. They are bad business and as such, they have to go" (Gotta love his writing style). So.... "this is one instance where the real pimps may work together to take care of the situation."

Law 11 goes hand in hand with Law 23 - A Ho Joines a Stable to Ruin it.

While I can't do it justice, the basic point here is that you need to throughly screen those that come to work for you. I've heard every excuse in the book for poor screening - "Reference checks don't matter, they just use their friends or people that will lie for them", "You can't get people to be honest about them or they risk getting sued", "What they did in the past doesn't mean anything about what they'll do in the future" blah blah blah. And while all that is true to some extent, the price of being wrong when employing someone is typically huge. How many times have you been stuck somewhere where some manipulative ahole causes all sorts of problems? He gets everyone all riled up about everything. He convinces people mgt is screwing them. He fosters this "us against them " attitude. He trashed people who dare disagree with him. Or he doesn't do any work or does crappy work. And you have to deal with this crap for months because "they need a paper trail" and the only way to get that is usually to let him screw up bad and have you clean it up? There's no excuse for not screening. We all have made a poor hiring decision, but you shouldn't have many of these in your career and if you ask enough questions, take some time and watch how they respond, look for consistency and the like.

However, you can tell people this over and over and folks never seem to realize beforehand that they are hiring a problem. I bet if every hiring manager read Pimpin Ken's book - such issues would be a thing of the past. I need to get off my butt and work on another book - "Everything you needed to know about consulting in the words of a Pimp".

Pimpology vs Harry Potter

William — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 03:44:00 GMT

On Fridays, Kim and I typically go to P.F. Changs for dinner and then go to Barnes and Noble to and go book shopping. Tonight everything was going well, and after dinner we walked across the street to B & N. At some point, I started having flashbacks to the Elian Gonzalez drama that gripped Miami for so long and made many facets of life difficult.

By the time we walked to the parking lot, we saw news truck after news truck. Every major media network was represented. The whole complex was just packed and all the parking spaces by B & N were taken. At that point it dawned on me that this was Harry Potter release night. Actually, that last part isn't exactly true, that's how I wished it went down.

Right before we were finishing dinner, Kim mentioned that it was Harry Potter release night and that it might be crowded. I opened my big trap and said "Jeezzusss, how crowded to you think it can be?" After all, this is still Greenville. It's not uncommon for people to send letters to the editor talking about how Harry Potter == speed train to h*ll. I frequently overhear people in stores and restaurants talking about how awful Harry Potter is or how terrible so and so is b/c they let their kids watch/read Harry Potter stuff. So I couldn't possibly imagine that many people would be out waiting to pick up the book. Not surprisingly, I was wrong.

The store was packed. I mean Jammed packed. There were people walking around with "The end is near signs" everywhere. Everyone under 20 it seemed was dressed up in Harry Potter garb ranging from just wearing the glasses to going all the way. Few things irritate me more than crowds and to be honest, the last time I was in a book store that was this crowded, I was a Senior in high school in B Dalton trying to get a copy of the Satanic Verses before they pulled it from the shelf. Heck, they were pulling it from the shelf so it had to be cool. If I remember, it was really expensive (this was 1988 or 89), something like $50.00 - which back then, was pretty pricey for a book of that nature. Anyway,, I couldn't get into the computer books isle so I took a detour to try to go down the aisle from another direction. I walked back the Self Help aisle and was kind of chuckling at some of the folks there and the titles of books. I was almost expecting to see some unemployable dork reading Drive Yourself Sane or some equally lame garbage when, low and behold I saw this:

Pimpology - The 48 Laws of the Game

Never forget yo, the Hype is real.

Mind you, this was in Self Help/Self Improvement section. At first I figured it was humor just b/c of the title. Then I picked it up though and realized it was actually serious. It should have been in the Business Books section although I guess I can't argue that it's a self improvement book too.

It's a classic case of don't judge a book by the cover I guess, b/c it's apparently a very serious book,extremely serious from the parts I've skimmed, but well, as Pimpin' Ken says "Remember that if ifs and ands were pots and pans, the whole world would be a kitchen" So it caught my eye and I just had to flip through it. I said "Look honey, this is just what I need" and Kim just rolled her eyes at me and gave me that "there he goes again" look. Some guy next to me was reading something by some dude named James Bradshaw about healing your inner child or something. He glanced at the cover of my book and looked at my like I was buying a Harry Potter book for my kid or something. So I flip through the Table Of Contents:

Law 4 - Keep a Ho in Arrears

Law 8 - Pimp like you Ho-Less

Law 19 - Turn Ho ends into dividends

These were just a few of the valuable lessons contained in Pimpology - The 48 Laws of the Game. Kim disappeared at that point, I suspect b/c she realized how stupid I was going to look when I walked up the counter to buy this book. The lines were insane and as I tried to cut through the crowds to get over to the checkout line, all I could think was "It's hard out here for a Pimp". As I was in line, Kim found her way over to me. I started reading excerpts of the book and with each passing phrase from Pimpin' Ken, she seemed more and more convinced I'm a complete idiot. So I get to the counter and proceeded to check out. The girl behind the counter was a school teacher and stared at the cover , looked at me, looked really confused and then told me "Well, people buy all kinds of stuff. People come in and buy High Times magazine and books on how to grow pot. They always say it's for a class project and I know it's not b/c i'm a teacher." I assured her that my interest in the Pimp Game was purely academic, but I figured there was no way she was going to believe it was for a term paper. The fact that this book is actually serious, still kind of amazes me. Although it's sort of silly sounding, Pimpin' Ken is totally serious. Virtually every facet of pimpin is covered in depth and he brings a lot of real world experience to the table. If you'd have told me 20 years ago that 20 years from now, I'd be in a bookstore late on a Friday night, buying a self-improvement book on Pimpin, by a Pimp, well, I probably would have fallen over laughing.

But there I was. It seemed surreal b/c well, I just tried to imagine my picture on the cover instead of Pimpin' Ken and thought, "Nope, it would never work for me". I remember back when Self-Improvement was the same in most every store - Psycho-Cybernetics, Dianetics, all the Napoleon Hill series, Tony Robbins' stuff, M Scott Peck's books. On the less serious side there was also a whole bunch of stuff on inner children, families of choice and other silliness and "Recovery". Over the years, Self-Improvement has developed a whole lot of niche areas, but never did I think I'd see a book on the Rules of Pimping. There was all sorts of books there on how to get over crappy relationships, healing anger, assertiveness and the like - so I'm not sure how that crew would deal with Pimpin' Ken. As surreal as all this was, I guess it was the Harry Potter insanity was the perfect backdrop for it. Hey, if all these people can sit around dressed up like Wizards and whatever, carrying around "The end is near signs", some reclusive computer nerd like me has every right to try to keep it real with Pimpin' Ken (although something about that name isn't sitting well with me. I mean, the Pimpin' part is ok, but Ken just isn't working. I think a single consonant would at least sound a lot more real.

So at this point, I need to quit writing and get back to reading Ken Blanchard , Agatha Christie and Dale Cargnegie quotes framed in the context of a modern day Pimp. By tomorrow morning, I'll hopefully be able to Turn Ho Ends into Dividends or more practical stuff like "Be a leader". Once I get that down, I'm going to get busy reading "Law 36 - Be Internationally Known, Nationally Recognized and Locally Accepted". This is critical of course, because the streets are watching and I'm not sure I've done enough prepartion building my street cred. We'll see. All in all though, I'll take Pimpin' Ken over Harry Potter any day of the week.

I'm hoping by the way, to finally get my career as a gangsta rapper started. As i have mentioned before, I was thinking of starting a rap crew called "B Nice and tha Hoe Killaz". I of course would be B-Nice (B as in Bill for those of you that dont' keep it real). Finding the Hoe Killaz however, has proven to be illusive although I've found some possible leads during the two times I've ridden on the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority aka MARTA

Accordingly, following Pimpin' Ken's 33rd Law "Bring Your People with You to the Top", I'd like to offer any of my regular readers an opportunity to join the Hoe Killaz. I'd prefer people with some fresh Grillz , but in the spirit of keepin it real, lack of a fly Grill and bling, will not bar you from consideration to take it to the next level as a Hoe Killa. Use the contact me link for more information.

UPDATE: Since I first posted this on Friday, it's gotten the crap indexed out of it. If you Search Google for the phrase Pimpin Ken this post is # 11 . Since then, I started doing a little research and I found Pimpin Ken and got an Add from him. Also hooked up with Big Paper Chase aka Oil Can Harry and Hoetester. If you haven't figured it out - IMHO, Hoetester has to be one of the flyest rappers I've heard in years but for some reason, I never came across his work. As far as Paper Chase goes, he's already come up and proven his game is tops. I'm not a big MySpace fan and in general, am not a big social networking guys. But with Adds like this, Barbie Cummings and some of the other folks I've come across, I'm starting to see the light.

Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation

William — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 23:41:00 GMT

I went on a book binge this week and have had my nose buried in WCF all week. There's a lot of really good stuff out there, but without a doubt, Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation by Chris Peiris is probably my favorite.

Overall, the book is just over 400 pages but the author says quite a bit in those 400 pages. The coolest part is that they go over just about every topic that the MSDN Documentation is short on. I found that a lot of things that I stumbled my way through were covered there as well.

I can't find the link, but a while ago, KC had a post where his server program uploaded itself his web server and ran itself. His comment was something to the effect about "What did the first Blacksmith use". I was always really impressed with that program. And not just b/c of the lower cased one's coding skill. The idea itself was really cool. So when WSE 3.0 came out and MTOM was implemented, I tried to bite his style and accomplish the same thing with MTOM. It's an easy port so it didn't take much skill on my part.

Anyway, I've been trying to figure out how to port most of the WSE 3.0 code from my 70-529 book over to WCF. I've been able to do most of it, however it's been frustrating at times. I'm make a lot of typos and copy/paste errors and neither play well with .config files. After wasting about 3 hours trying to get the MTOM port to work, I read through this book and Viola'. I was kinda mad at myself for overcomplicating things that much. So I guess I really like the book in large part b/c I've had quite a few similar experiences with it.

My favorite chapters are discussed below:

Chapter 4 - It discusses installation and configuration. This is the single most frustrating area when learning WCF. Writing code instead of using .config files is lame so I try to avoid it. But getting some help in avoiding common mistakes is priceless..

Chatper 6 discusses managing WCF Services. Not a glamorous subject but being able to monitor and troubleshoot your programs is critical. Moreover, when you're first learning how to do things, it's easy to ignore performance. It's easy to overlook things that can kill performance. After reading this chapter, I am in a lot better shape to find problems

Chaper 7 discusses security. Obviously a pretty big issue when you're building services. Just for good measure there's some CardSpace stuff at the end which was a nice touch.

Chapter 9 discusses transactions. For obvious reasons, this is a subject you need to learn well and although I thought I was pretty familiar with them, I learned more than a few things from this chapter.

-------------------

All in all, this book was pretty impressive. They do mostly real world stuff and while they certainly talk theory, they stick to stuff that you'll encounter in your day to day development. You can only take so much theory and I've found that the documentation on MSDN is really heavy on theory and not enough implementation. This book will bridge that gap. Scott Klein's WCF book will help quite a bit too but won't be out for another month or two.

I also picked up John Sharp's Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation Step by Step. So far, my impressions are quite favorable although I haven't went through it in quite the detail I did with this one. I worked through each of the examples and found them pretty cool. Should have a review of it up shortly.

Professional Microsoft SmartPhone Programming

William — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 00:59:00 GMT

I just got a copy of Professional Microsoft SmartPhone Programming and all I can say is NICE! I always worried that the first real SmartPhone book would not go into enough depth to be useful. Not an issue here. Basically, the book is a list of "What would you like to do with Smartphone" and shows you how to do it.

I need to finish reading the last two chapters before I can fully review it but having read most of it already, this book is just plain good and if you have any interest in Smartphone Programming, it's worth its weight in gold.

Errata for 70-536

William — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 00:42:00 GMT

I just wanted to open up a discussion on it so here it is . I'll be posting updates/corrections/everything else there and if anyone is interested in posting, the floor is open. Please use the link above (here it is) to post. For some reason there...(read more)

Do you have any ideas about preparation for 70-529?

William — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 02:30:00 GMT

As you may know, I'm coauthoring http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/70-529.asp . In particular, I'm covering the following objectives: Create and configure an XML Web service method. Create a public method. Attach the WebMethodAttribute attribute...(read more)

The momentum just keeps coming

William — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 18:31:00 GMT

Today, we've hit 246 overall and #2 in Computers and Internet at Amazon. We made #1 yesterday and are at #2 in Computers at Barnes and Noble. I'd like to thank Herb Sewell and Walter Bellhaven for their assistance in this matter....(read more)

70-536 Moving Quickly

William — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 02:44:00 GMT

Well, we've got some pretty stiff stiff competition -- Ann's book is getting all the glory but our 70-536 MCTS Guide is already kicking some butt. We moved up 1,000 points since yesterday overall on Amazon's rankings and have just broken #60 in Computers...(read more)

Biztalk Server 2004 Unleashed

William — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 01:47:00 GMT

...(read more)

Foundations of Atlas - Rapid Ajax Development with ASP.NET 2.0

William — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:47:00 GMT

I just got a copy of Foundations of Atlas - Rapid Ajax Development with ASP.NET 2.0 by Laurence Moroney. All I can say is, It's just plain good. Actually, it's great. So far, it's the best Ajax book I've read ( Wally still hasnt' mailed me a copy of his...(read more)

My book hits Amazon top 100 in Technology

William — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 14:07:00 GMT

The rankings change frequently, but yesterday, the day before My First MS Press Book was officially released, it broke the Top 100 on Amazon's rankings for Computer and Internet . It's sitting at 2,537 overall which is very cool but we have a long way...(read more)

Text To Speech Ideas?

William — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 04:01:00 GMT

I've been getting back into my Speech Server book and well, there's a lot to it. My 4th chapter covers Grammars in depth and is a lot longer than I anticpated. If you do much speech work, they you know that Grammars are everything and ostensibly the most important chunk of development. Anyway, i was proofing my Text To Speech chapter and one of the examples I came up with was well, fairly cool. To use the TTS engine, it's pretty straightforward, you really just need to call the Speak method of the SpVoice object passing in a String and some flags. Anyway, there's not really much to it so I was looking to come up with a cool angle. There are many applications that will allow you to read the text on a page, but I just created an implementation that allows you to specify a URL and it will retrieve the text and read it back to you. As I was writing it, I started to use my new found Regex expertise to strip out the HTML , and then I realized that wasn't a good idea. Why? Because if you don't have the markup, then it's hard to differentiate between values on a blog or a web page. So what I need to do now is check for blog entries and instead of stripping out the tags, just replace them with recognizable text. That way, they will be read (probably don't need to closing tags) and I can tell the difference between blog titles, entries and the like. In its simplest form (without stripping out markup), here's what the code looks like. I'll be posting the stripped out version later - so you can have a simple blog reader than can read to you as you multi-task something else:

private void btnSpeak_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
     SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags SpFlags = SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFlagsAsync;
     SpVoice VoiceDemo = new SpVoice(); 
     WebRequest DemoWebRequest = WebRequest.Create("http://msmvps.com/WilliamRyan"); 
     WebResponse DemoWebResponse = DemoWebRequest.GetResponse();
     Stream ReceiveStream = DemoWebResponse.GetResponseStream();
     Encoding encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8");
     StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader(ReceiveStream, encoding);
     String Response = readStream.ReadToEnd(); 
     VoiceDemo.Speak(Response, SpFlags);
     readStream.Close(); 
     DemoWebResponse.Close();
}

This application also allows you to point to a blog, and have it read the entries, and save them to a voice file. I tried it with a few of my favorite blogs and it's pretty decent. Having a little trouble recognizing "Pr4n" and "a55" but that can be handled with Regular Expressions (hell, or even simple String.Replace methods). The only problem is that it doesn't lend itself well to material you want to publish.

In case your interested, the next part of this application that I go through in Chapter 4 is using voice input to recognize what you ask it, and retrieve just what you ask for. So you can ask it to read a specific blog , skip entries, repeat items it's just read and well, anything else I can think of. Each of the latter demonstrate implementations of Grammar utilization and well, are amazingly powerful. I started working on a Dual Tone Multi Frequency application which allows you to read stuff from the phone - so you can use Touch Tones to read blogs, select new ones, repeat what it read and the like. This is giving me a little more trouble than I was expecting but I'm getting close.

So what do you think? Am I on the right track with the idea of replacing markup tags with clearly recognizable ones, just so that it makes a better 'being read to' experience?

Regular Expression Recipes for Windows Developers: A Problem-Solution Approach (A Problem-Solution Approach)

William — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 18:52:00 GMT

My buddy Brian Davis is probably one of the most kick a55 regex gurus I've ever come across. That's created a little bit of a problem b/c whenever I need a regex, even a really complex one, he can usually whip it up in his head faster than I can describe it to him. At work, we do a tremendous amount of document processing and manipulation and Regex's have made all the difference there. Before my old boss, got there, we had about 15k lines of VBA Word Macro code to handle all of our processing. It was icky, error prone and a nightmare to maintain (any time anyone wants to reminisce about the good old days, whip out the Visual Basic Editor in Word and have them create a simple class library that does anything useful. That should shut them up pretty quickly) and since we were invoking it through .NET, it was comparatively slow. I started playing with Regex's but I was still learning them and there was just too much code to replace (not to mention that if you screw anything up, it causes big problems immediately). Then Brian started and fixed everything. Code is so much easier to deal with and maintain now and accuracy and speed have increased so much it's hard to even believe we used to do anything else. But that also means that we have some pretty sophisticated Regex's. Being the only person there that is any good at Regex's is a little dangerous b/c Brian's the only one that can work with many of the more complex ones.

So for a while, I've decided to learn Regex's well once and for all. I get all gung ho for a few days and then get caught up in other things. Anyway, I'm back in one of the "I really need to learn this stuff once and for all" phases. So I just picked up Regular Expression Recipes for Windows Developers: A Problem-Solution Approach (A Problem-Solution Approach)
and man, it's awesome. I bought Dan Appleman's Regular Expressions with .NET a while ago and it was a great reference book. And while I can't speak well enough of Dan's book, this one is basically just example after example with in depth explanations about what's being done and why. So it's not really a reference book but it's so heavy with examples (damned good ones for that matter) and explanations that you can pretty much figure out just about anything after using it. I've spent about 6 hours with it and am already a lot more confident in working with Regex's. I think it's going to be a work in progress with this, just keep working through them and see what happens and why - but this may be one of the best investments I've made in a long time.

It's true that in many places knowing Regex's may be little more than a luxury, but in my case, Text Parsing is everything b/c it's at the core of everything important we do at my company. I've come across quite a few great books lately and this ranks up there with the best of the. If you need to get up to speed with Regular Expressions in .NET, a copy of Dan's book and this one will almost certainly get you anywhere you need to go.

Book Update

William — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 18:41:00 GMT

A few of you have asked so I figured I'd mention a general update on my Speech Server book. Chapter 1-3 are in the bag and I'm just about done with Chapter 4.

Chapter 1 covers your standard technology introduction a brief description of the tools you work with when building Speech Server applications.
Chapter 2 is a background and description of SALT and now it fits into the current paradigm of speech server development (going forward SALT is on the way out but that's another story)
Chapter 3 covers TTS. This was pretty cool to write b/c building code samples with TTS is pretty neat. Just to amuse myself, I've put the lyrics of a few of my favorite gangsta rap songs in the TTS engine. Without a doubt, a big part of having a successful rap career is your 'style' and delivery. Back in the day when TRON first came out, it proved that you may not need a human to have a successful movie actor. That's been proven over and over again with many virtual girls and the like. Well, the same may be true in the future with rappers, but you're going to need some pretty sophisticated TTS Voices before it even approaches anything that's not completely hysterical. What I wouldn't do to get a TTS person that talks like William Hung.
Chapter 4 is Grammars, ostensibly the most important and involved part of building speech enabled apps. I have a little more to work on with Grammars b/c every time I think I've covered everything, I realize that there's a lot more I need to cover.

All in all things are running about three weeks behind the original deadline since I'm flying solo on this one but they're coming along well.

I spoke with my partners at KJM Solutions Hosting and the good news is that, not only do we have Sql Server 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 hosting, but we're going to host Speech Server as well. So I'm going to have a few web services and other apps that will be publicly available. If you buy the book, I'm going to have the code provided and you'll be able to hit some of this stuff 'live' which is pretty helpful. It's helpful b/c it's very easy to get web services and other applications working locally but a lot of time the deployment can be a little more involved. Nonetheless, I'll have everything you need to work through the samples provided locally and also have some stuff publicly exposed so you can do it 'for real'.

Seasons Changing

William — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 15:43:00 GMT

Today one of my Tobin Titus is packing up for his move to Microsoft. At the same time, another good buddy, Chris Williams is moving to Greenville. Although I live in Augusta, I spend most of my time here in Greenville. Chump Change , since I know you're reading this, please make good on some of your threats - I'm up here enough that you can't plausibly claim I'm hard to find. Anyway, Chris is going to work at Tiba Solutions and he'll be a great asset there. Hopefully we'll be getting together later today to chat. However I'm in both Greenville and Redmond so often, i'll be seeing a lot of both of them.

I realized I've neglected my blog for a while. Well, it's because I've been working on a few top secret projects with Microsoft that are keeping me busy, coupled with some contract work with Mark Dunn and Eric Marvets, coupled with my day job, coupled with my Speech Server book, exacerbated by the fact I have been utterly unable to get broadband access at my crib which is about 40 minutes away from where I work. When I get home I'm on dial-up and while it works in an emergency, it's about as fast as my GRPS connection running on my KJam.

Let me digress into writing since I've gotten some experience in it. What do you think the hardest part of writing is? Content? Relevant examples? Cool code ideas? Well they all take some work to do correctly, but I'd have to say the most difficult/frustrating part is dealing with Formatting and Screen Caps in particular. One one project, I had 20 some Screen caps. I had to redo all of them. Each publisher has different formats and I'm not enough of a graphics guy to really understand the nuances. But I sh1t you not, getting screen caps and formatting correct can be about the hardest part of writing. (Well, depending on who the publisher is, getting paid and reimbursed may be the hardest part, but that's not the case with anyone I'm working with NOW. Besides, not getting paid for money owed over 6 months late really isn't that big of a deal is it?)

Everything I'm working with now is like a dream come true. Apress is a dream to work with, I couldn't speak better of them without having Jenna Jameson as my product manager. Eric Marvets has been my point of contact through Dunn Training and has been amazing. We even have group meetings with Microsoft Live Meeting, which totally rocks. We're also using Source Offsite for this and although my inital experience with it was horrific, things seem a lot better here.

I've been doing a lot with Microsoft as well but really shouldn't be saying too much about it. Suffice to say if you ever have an opportunity to work with Microsoft Learning or Grandmasters , hop all over it. Yes, I'm biting off a lot, but at least I'll probably be able to buy that Porsche Boxster I've wanted by the end of the year. Fortunately I'm too damn busy to spend anything so things should be good when it's all over. If you're interested in getting involved with Microsoft Learning or MS Press, let me know privately and I'll put you in contact with some people. Same goes for writing a book. Just remember the golden rule, it's all about the screen cap.

So I have been going to work, going home, writing, going to bed, waking up, going to work, going home, writing, loop. The upside is that currently I may be the most informed developer on the System.Configuration namespace in the country, maybe universe. And at this pace, I'm going to be the next John Robbins when it comes to System.Diagnostics. Hell, just hanging around Jeffrey and watching his technique gave me more than a few new ideas. No, I'll never has his game at debugging, but I may be able to come close at least with respect to Debugging .NET Framework 2.0 apps. And I'm quickly earning guru status on Globalization.

With respect to System.Configuration, there's a lot there and a lot to blog about. I have to change the examples I've used so not to violate anything, but I promise a few articles on the pretty kick a33 new features associated with handling Connection Strings available with the 2.0 Framework.

If I have some time today, I'll post some of the Configuration stuff. Many find it a lame subject, I don't, particularly if you're using Remoting. But even if you're not, the enhancements in 2.0 are so many that it's honestly something you really should take a look at.

Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze some time in this week to blog some more, I've got a ton to write about.

Ideas Wanted

William — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 01:25:00 GMT

Well, as I sit here swamped in more work than I ever imagined that I'd be lucky enough to have, I need to be proactive... As I've mentioned a few times, I think Sahil currently holds the high water mark for kick a55. Ok, if I racked my little brain I'm sure Charles Petzold or Jeffrey Richter probably wrote something better but until I meed Charles or until Jeffrey teaches me a magic trick (or better yet, takes me for a ride in his helicopter), I'm standing by my assertion. Well, I really want to join that club. Which brings me to my current conundrum and I have a few questions that i would ask for your feedback on:

1- I've seen a lot of discussion about 'tone'. I actually remember some dipsh1t lecturing Sahil about the tone and style of his writing. And to be honest, there's a lot of disagrement on it. I've heard a lot both ways, about too much conversational style being a distraction, too much straightforwardness being boring. If I had my way I'd lean a lot toward the humorous conversational way of writing but, I don't have that little voice in my head that tells me when I'm going to far. With respect to tone, Sahil does a great job, as does John Robbins. I absolutely love the way they interject real world stuff they've been through with technical content. Johns story about Debug Assertions still makes me laugh. But I've also heard a lot of people say John went too far and it's _______ (fill in critical word here). Well, whaddyathink here?

2- Without divulging trade secrets, a big part of the book is going to be the walkthroughs at the end that wrap up the material and explain things in depth. My ideas so far go something like:

Dial Tone Confession - "Hello, you've reached Father WindowsBox. Using the keypad, enter the time (in months) since you're last confession... If you've taken the name of the lord in vein, press 9, fornicated, press 8, etc etc"
Digital Girlfriend - (I'm going to have some trouble here though b/c Sara's a smart a33 too and the digital boyfriend she'll come up with will probably be more brutal). "What do you want to do tonight honey?" "Shop" "Cool, IRiver has new portable media centers out and i've been dying for one" "NO BILL, I meant shop for me, how does White House Black Market Sound" "Boring, how about Circuit City" "Where's my rolling pin" You get the idea
Recruiter - "Hi Bill, I have an exciting opportunity I'd like to tell you about" "Are you a recruiter" "Yes" "Go to h3ll and die" "Well I see here you have .NET Experience" "I lied, I don't even know what .NET is" "Ok, don't say that in the interview, when can you do a face to face"
Interview the Prophet (Never mind, i don't want killed)
McDonalds Drive through - I'd take the menu and prices from a local McDonalds and let you put in an order, cancel things, change them, give you your total and tell you to drive ahead
Conversation with Linux or Firefox zealot - Admittedly, I'd have to work here not to go over the edge but I still think this could be funny. Actually, the only grammar you'd need for the firefox guys would be "Well IE isn't standards compliant, Security, Haliburton" (for you Team America fans)
Dial A Liberal /Dial a Conservative - Now way to be policitally correct and be funny but could probably squeak this one through.
Gangsta Rappa - Ok this is probably my favorite one but in order to do it, I'd need explitives. Maybe I can get it through and do it as a separate download
Computer Science Professor - I'll model it after my beloved Dr. Jarman but I without a visual I can't make it roll it's eyes in disgust every time I ask it something. Nonetheless, since most of my readers will probably have had at least a CS class, this could be fun.

All of these would show you how to create the scenario using Speech Server. Yes, it's going to be a *** writing it all. Each one that I've toyed with outside of the straight telephony one is going to be rough. However it's a great way to teach how to really use one. +, Sara is pretty kick a55 with Artificial Intelligence so we could do a lot.

So here's your chance to be heard. Got an idea? Let me know b/c I'll seriously consider just about anything. My Gangsta Rappa Persona is probably going to die an early death as are most of these (I have two that are totally serious already that will definitely make it through) but that's b/c I tend toward the offensive. I honestly do welcome your ideas and will credit you fully for them.

Sahil goes big time.

William — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 23:57:00 GMT

Well I knew it was coming for a while, but all I can say is it couldn't happen to a more deserving guy . Congrats Sahil. If they're half as good as good as his book that's resplendent in every way, they'll be a must have for any serious ADO.NET developer. Nicely done El Maliko!

Building Intelligent .NET Applications

William — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 20:30:00 GMT

Well, my review of Sara's book go Slashdotted . If you haven't picked up her Building Intelligent .NET Applications , well, let me shamelessly try to encourage your to pick it up . Sara is currently working on some pretty slick robotics stuff and hopefully I'll be learning a thing or two from her. Currently, we're still trying to figure out how to get the framework on a PIC or embedded so we can make battlebots and run them around in C# but that's not going so hot. DotNetCPU is apparently unavailable which sucks, I really should have picked it up while it was.

Our new ADO.NET book is out...

William — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 18:01:00 GMT

Well, our new book Professional ADO.NET 2: Programming with SQL Server 2005, Oracle, and MySQL was finally released. I'll be mailing out a few copies to my homies so if you're interested in one, please let me know. This was my second book and since it was on ADO.NET, it was a subject near and dear to my heart. I only wrote two of the chapters but it was a real honor getting to write on ADO.NET and it was an even bigger honor to work with the people I did (like most things involving the MVP Program, I was the dumb one out of the group but I really learned a lot working with people a lot brighter than me ;-) ). Working with multiple people is always a challenge because of all of the coordination that has to go on, but my friend and our lead author Wally McClure did a really great job making it all work. One of the side benefits of working on a project like this is getting to work with so many great folks and getting to know Wally a lot better. If you're interested in learning ADO.NET 2.0, I objectively think this book is an excellent vehicle to get you there.

Which brings me to another point. It seems like just yesterday that some guy named Sahil Malik started posting in the ADO.NET newsgroup. I remember thinking to myself, 'Wow, this guy is really impressive'. I started reading his blog and we eventually became friends. I had the pleasure of nominating him to the MVP program and a lot of other people shared my feelings about him - in the period of just a few months Sahil was a MVP as well. When i first heard Sahil was writing a book on ADO.NET 2.0, I was really excited b/c I knew it would be great. He probably has the best command of the subject matter of anyone I know, or at least as good as anyone out there (Frans Bouma and Shawn Wildermuth are about as brilliant and well versed as they come too). I got to work with Sahil a little while he was writing the book and when it was finally released, it exceeded my already high expectations. Just looking at the Amazon rankings, which stay under 2,000 most of the time, you can tell that everyone agrees. Anwyay, I mention this because Sahil taught me quite a bit and encouraged me to get into writing. When i was working on my chapters, I ran a lot of stuff by him and he helped me out quite a bit. If you're going to buy an ADO.NET 2.0 book, obviously I encourage you to pick up a copy of our book, but no library could be complete without having a copy of Sahil's book in it. (I've referred it to a good many friends and co-workers and everyone has had strong praise for it).

So I just wanted to thank all of my co-authors for including me on the project and being so great to work with, and wanted to thanks Sahil and Frans, not to mention Angel , Sushil , David Sceppa and the rest of the ADO.NET team, Shawn Wildermuth, Miha , Bill Vaughn and everyone else that's helped me learn ADO.NET