What is Techdays?
The Canadian IT Pro Team would love to call it a Tech-Ed of the north, except on tour.
Check out the site:
www.techdays.ca to get the
info, but the dates are:
|
Date |
City |
Venue |
|
October 29/30 |
Toronto |
Toronto Congress Centre |
|
November 6/7 |
Montreal |
The Palais des Congrès |
|
November 27 |
Ottawa |
Mariott Hotel |
|
December 4 |
Winnipeg |
Delta Hotel |
|
December 10/11 |
Calgary |
Calgary Stampede Roundup Centre |
|
December 17 |
Halifax |
Halifax World Trade Centre |
|
January 21/22 |
Vancouver |
Vancouver Convention Centre |
I will be doing a presentation in Montreal and Ottawa entitled
Microsoft SQL Server:
Essential Database Maintenance for New and Seasoned DBAs. The synopsis is:
Every DBA knows that managing a database using SQL Server
requires dealing with a key set of components of SQL Server in an optimal in order
to make their lives easier. But what are the elements of SQL Server that you need
to really focus on to get the best bang for the DBA buck, and what best practices
should be followed to ensure an optimally-running an instance in SQL Server? In this
session we will walk through the Top 10 List of DBA techniques and best practices
to ensure a smooth running database and instance. You’ll learn: how to optimize data
files and transaction logs; why TempDB is special and how to treat it properly; indexing
strategies dealing with corruption; and much, much more.
I'm also doing a session entitled
Beyond Relational SQL Server 2008: Managing Unstructured
and Semi-Structured Data:
The amount of data that does not fit into the tabular format
of relational tables is increasing tremendously, be it images, sounds, text documents,
XML documents, or semi-structured data. Integrating this data with the robust, efficient
processing capabilities of SQL Server and providing integrated querying and management
of that data together with the standard relational data becomes increasingly more
important. This presentation will present new and existing functionality on how SQL
Server 2008 supports these non-relational kinds of data. The presentation will provide
insights into FILESTREAM, Remote Blob storage, new XML functionality, integrated Full-Text
Search, sparse columns, filtered indexes and the new hierarchyID type.
Should be fun. See you there!
… and then I Silverlit it!
Is alternately a LOLQuilt, a ROFLMosaic, or a Deep LOL!
Here is the full screen version.
You can click ur mouse to zoom in, shift-click to zoom out, or just use the mouse wheel to see that the image is made of thousands of LOLCats.
How this came to be?
The kittehs [...]
Roger from SilverlightAddict.com asked me for more information about how I manage the sound effects in the Silverlight version of Legend of the Greasepole.
I have a Canvas element in my scene called MusicCanvasRoot. It contains a number of MediaElement children equal to the maximum number of simultaneous sounds that the game will play. This helper [...]
I’m back in Toronto after a much appreciated break in Italy and Greece.
Before I left, I had the chance to work on a very interesting Silverlight and Windows Live project, and this week I am planning for the rest of the calendar year and eagerly anticipating the release of .NET 3.5 SP1!
Silverlight Streaming was updated [...]
I normally don’t cross-link WPF articles unless sooper-excited because I figure all of us in the WPF-o-sphere are reading each other’s blogs. But I was particularly interested on Rudi Grobler’s recent look into XAML obfuscation because I’ve encountered obfuscation issues from a couple of sides in a recent project.
To sum up, XAML obfuscation is a [...]
I’m excited to be launching a WPF training course through Toronto-based consultancy ObjectSharp. The course is called “Windows Presentation Foundation for Developers and Lead Designers,” and, as the title suggests, it offers a hands-on experience designed to give developers and lead designers the knowledge, background, tips and references they’ll need to build smart client [...]
Some WPF Line-of-Business App follow-up after my presentation at DevTeach today:
Great Snippets: Great code snippets I have installed into my Visual Studio for WPF development are the Dr Wpf and Nerd+Art snippet packs.
WPF Coding Conventions: The coding guidelines I use for WPF are a riff on Paul Stovell’s XAML and WPF Coding Guidelines.
Application Quality Guide: [...]
This Channel 9 Video is so impressive, I couldn’t help but think that this is the closest we’ve come to allowing any creative team to invent and then build an interface like the futuristic ones imagined for movies like Minority Report or Iron Man.*
* minus the holography bits. although maybe some awesome researcher could come [...]
Greg is in the middle of writing a great explanation of how to build custom WPF 3.5 SP1 pixel shader effects on his blog. He helped me re-create his sample ColorComplementEffect, so I thought I’d offer a sample solution containing an end-to-end custom WPF Pixel Shader Effect using the .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta bits.
Download [...]
A “Week of WPF” begins on Channel 9 with the announcement that the third major release of WPF (3.5 SP1) has gone beta!
Tim Sneath’s blog entry has fantastic detail about what’s coming in this release and all the download/update details (Silverlighters: see caveat below).
Folks attending my “WPF for Line Of Business apps” presentation on Thursday [...]