So — how's that for a Microsoft-ism? — a friend forwarded me a link to Project Rosetta, and — not knowing a thing about design — I found it to be an interesting resource. Not just an interesting resource, but potentially an interesting _training_ resource.

What Is It?
Project Rosetta, to my untrained eye (trust me on that, I really know nothing about design; I mean, you have *seen* my blog's design, haven't you?), looks to be a series of articles on how to accomplish a variety of design and development tasks in Microsoft's Silverlight. If you are interested in learning about how to mark up XAML, as well as program a variety of activities using your favorite .NET development language, these articles could prove to be extremely helpful in learning more about Silverlight. Moreover, these articles show you how to use Expression and Visual Studio to accomplish the tasks. Most articles include easy-to-understand screen shots, downloadable source code, and live, running applications to illustrate the runtime behavior.

I've read a couple of the article, and skimmed several more. According to my way of thinking, they an "atomic" example, basically building block pieces (like make a dot appear with a mouse click or have some swank animation follow the mouse pointer), that illustrate a single, specific core technique or a small group of related techniques. With a little bit of study, you could combine those techniques into more robust applications. From there you can begin to experiment upon the solid foundation and start creating real applications that do even swankier stuff.

But Wait! There's More!
Not only is Project Rosetta a potentially valuable training resource for nascent Silverlight developers, the authors go one step further by essentially offering side-by-side examples in Flash to help Flash-savvy designers and developers see the parallels in technique using Silverlight. It's a great approach to help experienced and new designers alike learn more about another potential tool they can stash in their technology bag of tricks.

And all indications are Project Rosetta is just at the beginning of a continued series of how to articles on using Silverlight, with parallel examples in Flash. So go check it out.

50 New Sessions Announced
The PDC Planning Team just announced they've published over 50 new sessions to the PDC 2008 site. From the looks of it (based on my cursory skim of the session list), PDC 2008 may be well on its way to 200+ total sessions. Here's what they have to share with us...

Well, it happened again. I meant to post more in August — I even mentioned this last month. And what happened? The month got away from me and a "forcing factor" has me posting again.

Forcing Factor
The forcing factor is simple: I need to let all nine of you know about new events we have coming up in the next couple of weeks. You see, Microsoft started our new fiscal year (FY09, for those of you in the know) on July 1, 2008 (I know, FY09 in 2008 — took me a while to get used to it, too). My team and I have been spending a lot time the past couple of months planning for this new fiscal year (one could argue almost to the point of too much planning). We spent the last couple of weeks shifting gears from planning mode to executing mode.

Now I must admit there are still some planning efforts underway, namely budgets, year-end reviews, new FY commitments, and so forth. But the team is ready to unleash their efforts on for our technical audiences and communities in the Central Region. And by unleash, I mean MSDN Unleashed, our effort to expand the reach of the well known, highly respected MSDN Events format to more cities more consistently.

But that's not all! (Sound's like a knife commercial, doesn't it?) In addition to delivering MSDN Unleashed events for developers, we are also running ArcReady events. What's our calendar-of-events? Head on over to Elysium Systems to find out. To learn more — read on...

MSDN Unleashed
The MSDN Unleashed events will follow a similar, albeit smaller, format to what you will find in their larger MSDN Events cousins. In this quarter, we will deliver two topics, Demystifying WPF and Developing Applications with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. Both will also be featured in formal MSDN Events, and the larger event format will also highlight the Ten Reasons your Applications will be More Secure when Deployed on Vista.

Demystifying WPF
Today's applications need to do more than simply work. They need to draw in the user, and provide a differentiated experience. This means moving beyond battleship gray forms, boxy UIs, and providing a positive user experience. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides powerful capabilities to develop a compelling user interface, the kind that makes an application stand out. In this session, we'll examine the core concepts of WPF such as layout panels, data binding, styles and control templates, and we'll use them to develop an application UI from the ground up.

Developing Applications with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1
Service Pack 1 and Visual Studio 2008 introduce a wide variety of new features for targeting Windows, Office and the Web. This includes more controls, a streamlined setup, improved startup performance, fresh graphics features, improved AJAX support, and much more. We're also introducing the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services, which are designed to simplify application data access by providing an extensible, conceptual model for data from any source, while enabling this model to closely reflect business requirements. Don't miss this lively session and learn how to use these powerful new features in your applications.

ArcReady
These events are for established solution architects, aspiring architects, and senior developers. They focus on practical application architecture to meet real-world business and technical needs. This quarter's focuses on Architecting Modern Distributed Applications, and features two sessions, Blueprints for Success and Making It Real.

Blueprints for Success
In this session, we will survey the modern architecture landscape from the ground up, including infrastructure, application, and client solution choices. We’ll discuss how current industry trends are shaping our architectures and present an innovative architecture mapping technique for analyzing our customer’s needs and aligning them to today’s technologies and solution patterns.

Making It Real
In this session, we’ll take a look at several case studies to learn how to apply the mapping technique from Session 1 to architect real world solutions that add true business value. We’ll examine applications we use every day and take a walk through a Microsoft reference architecture that explores many of the decisions we face when building modern distributed applications.

In Closing, I Would Like to Thank the Academy...
We have a couple dozen great events on deck for you to attend, and we have plans to deliver more in the next quarter. Starting in the first of the new year, we hope to expand our informal event efforts to more cities in more venues, and we may just change things up a bit so the events themselves offer something new and unique.

So, visit the events page on Elysium Systems and register to attend the events.

I've noticed a bad habit creeping up in my posts. Namely the use of internal Microsoft terminology when I type. Wow, a new bad habit to break. Like drinking caffeine (which, I am proud to say, I've largely quit drinking).

When Speaking Publicly, Are you this Annoying?
Oddly, not so much. At least, I don't use Micro-speak (yup, it's even referenced on the intarwebs) to a great degree when delivering presentations or speaking publicly. I am often mindful of my audience when delivering a presentation. I often — although not always — manage to explain acronyms. I rarely use a technology term without explaining it. And, most importantly, I really try to only use Micro-speak with audiences "in the know", such as our valued partners, MVPs or RDs.

So... Why in Written Form?
Honestly, it's probably laziness on my part. So I will try to do my level-best to clean up my Micro-speak. And to provide you with a handy translation guide, I just created a glossary of terms I find too hard not to reference in posts. I'll work on keeping that up-to-date.

Thank you for your patience.

Common terms that I occasionally (and inadvertently) use in blog posts. One could call them "Micro-speak".

I will try to keep this article up-to-date with terms that I use (and shouldn't). Consider it something of a map to help you translate my lazy posts.

Yes, I realize I am averaging one post a month. Which is a shame, as I actually do have a couple of topics on my backlog (playing with Visual Studio Tools for Office and consuming my blog from another site) that I think might be of interest. Perhaps I will have more time in August. Or perhaps I won't get a post out until September.

Thanks for keeping me honest!

Some days it is just so hard to find the time to get important things done, like this blog post. Perhaps in the coming weeks I will recap how seriously my team (the Technical Audience Evangelism Team in the Central US) takes planning at Microsoft. We really put a lot of thought and effort into crafting great programs and plans for our technical audience: architects and developers. Yet the intensity of our planning efforts and the focus and discipline we have put into crafting our plans has put a serious pinch on my time. It has kept me from getting things done, like this blog post. I was supposed to finish it up two weeks ago.

My friend and colleague, Denny Boynton, has been involved in a little something called ARCast.tv v2.0, the evolution of Ron Jacobs' excellent ARCast program on Channel 9. Denny and his peers are picking up the baton from Ron and running the evolution of the program, and the evolution is well underway.

What Happened to Ron?
For those of you who don't know, Ron has moved into a new role here at Microsoft. He announced his new job on his blog back in February. He has relinquished the reins on ARCast and is now a Technical Evangelist in our corporate-based Developer & Platform Evangelism team as a Technical Evangelist.

After doing ARCast.TV for the last couple of years I have decided to hang it up and do something new. Work is underway on the next version of .NET including 2 technologies that I find very interesting. They are Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). My new thing will be to explain these technologies to the world as they appear in .NET v.Next. We won't have much to say about these for the next few months but they will have a coming out party at PDC '08 so I'll see you there.

So, What is ARCast v2.0?
Denny can explain it far better than me, but ARCast v2.0 is an evolution of the program Ron created and ran. As opposed to one core person creating the videos, several evangelists across Microsoft are contributing. They record interviews and discussions with Microsoft guests, industry luminaries, technical experts, and various other "big name guests". They host an interview-style format discussion where the guests share their thoughts, ruminations, and hot sports opinions on all things architecture.

Software architect, to be exact. They have covered a host of interesting topics, from what architecture means at Microsoft to architecting solutions based on specific technologies or products. What topics, you ask? Ah, read on! There's not much more, I promise.

ARCast v2.0 Episode Guide
Here is a short list of their initial episodes:

• ARCast.TV — Simon Guest on Architecture at Microsoft
• ARCast.TV — Juval Lowy on Interface Based Design
• ARCast.TV — Biff Gaut discusses the Microsoft Certified Architect Program
• ARCast.TV — Sundar Swaminathan on MOSS for Public Facing Web Sites
• ARCast.TV — Essential WCF

And they have produced a couple of episodes in addition to these. So head on over to ARCast.tv and check out the fine work of Denny and his peers.

Oh, and Denny, in case you are reading this... I apologize for getting this out two weeks later than I promised. Hopefully you are just impressed enough with a manager who figured out how to use Live Writer and edit his dasBlog templates. (With Larry Clarkin's help, of course.)

It is July 1 and I haven't posted in nearly a month (June 10 being the last blog post). Perhaps a little transparency is in order. For those in the know, it is the start of Microsoft's Fiscal Year 2009, FY09. The last several weeks — the final few weeks of our last fiscal year (FY08) — have involved multiple efforts, from recapping last year's business results to business planning for the new fiscal year.

My excuse for not posting is simple: I have been involved in several year-end and planning efforts. Preparing for reviews, for example, have included FY08 year-end business review, preparing people reviews, and finding the time to tackle my own self assessment review. Writing one's year-end self assessment, even after nearly 20 years in the industry, is still hard. How does one strike that delicate balance between "not enough" and "self aggrandizing"? It isn't easy, is it?

I have also been working on FY09 planning efforts for our local geography (the center of the USA — you know, those 18 states from Michigan and Ohio in the east to Kansas and Nebraska in the west; from Minnesota in the north to Texas in the south). Working with my peers, our local plans have begun to take shape. Our ideas encompass Microsoft-led public events, such as ArcReady and MSDN Events; supporting great community efforts like devLink in Nashville, IndyTechFest (Indianapolis, of course), and HDC in both Minneapolis and Omaha, among many, many other fine events; and continued support and evolution of our online such as the great MSDN Webcasts and stellar podcasts like The Thirsty Developer and Spaghetti Code.

Beyond collaborating with my peers on programs, events, and activities we want to run locally, I have been working on some US-wide planning efforts as well. Oh, and lots and lots of conference calls.

And all that speaks to a need to prioritize on the critical tasks at hand. Obviously the blog has suffered from a lack of love in the process. Well, at least for today, the ol' blog is getting some love. And I blame Jeff Blankenburg for it with his recent post titled Celebrate Contribupendence Day! July 3, 2008. That wacky word caught my eye and made me take a break and give my blog some much needed attention.

So What Is Contribupendence Day?
As I said, I saw Jeff's post fly across my inbox (thank you, Outlook) and found the word "Contribupendence" so intriguing that I stopped down to give the post a read. Jeff is basically proposing a new type of meme, somewhat like the previous one I responded to, but with a really nice twist. See, Jeff is going to leave some nice comments, recommendations, and friendly notes on his colleagues' social networking engine of choice. Whether a nice comment on a blog, via Plaxo or on Twitter; or a recommendation on LinkedIn; Jeff is going to take the time to recognize his peers and the great work they do.

I think it's a really nice idea. And I even hope to be able to participate. Assuming my current workload doesn't get in the way.

Larry Clarkin just tagged me, and, as he says (and I'm paraphrasing here) in his meme post, "Tag, Brian, your it." As I'm a relative neophyte at active blogging — you can see this blog has only really been active since April 2008 — I will cop to the fact that I needed a explanation, which Larry provided. I completely dig this idea. This meme is particularly interesting as it builds on my first "real" post, What Language Are You?

Stack Trace
Plagiarizing directly from Larry, because it's in theme with the meme and kind of cool, here is the current stack trace:

Michael Eaton (post) —> Sarah Dutkiewicz (post) —> Jeff Blankenburg (post) —> Josh Holmes (post) —> Larry Clarkin (post) —> me

How old were you when you started programming?
I was a sophomore in high school, probably spring of 1985 or so (my memory of the distance past isn't that great). I do recall it was in a class called Computer Math. I wrote a text-base Space Invaders-like game using a boatload of ASCII, print commands (the good old ?), and what was probably an infinite loop construct to stream the ship from the top to the bottom of the screen. It was a couple thousand lines of code and didn't all that well, but I got an A and had a blast with that project. So I was probably 16 years old and finally knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.

The next two year, in both my junior and senior years of high school, I took classes at the votech school as part of my curriculum, learning to program RPG and FORTRAN. I enrolled at Truman State University (then called Northeast Missouri State University) as a Computer Science major and ended up being one of the rare 25% that never changed their major.

What was your first language?
BASIC

What was the first real program you wrote?
This is a tricky one. What does "real" mean?

One could argue that the Space Invaders-like hack was a "real" program, though it was childish, immature, involved lots of poorly defined loops, and ended up not really working like the coin-op I was aiming for. So perhaps that shouldn't count.

I could say my first real program was COBOL85, DB2, and CICS for my first "real" post-graduate job. But I wrote fully-functioning programs before that "real" job. One in particular comes to mind, from my internship at Truman. I helped write the student credit transfer application for our Student Information System. I also got a job my senior year in college working for the same department writing other applications for SIS.

But, really, the first program I wrote that truly felt like a real program was in my sophomore year in college, as part of a Data Structures class. The program in question was a doubly-linked queue data structure, designed as a base class construct with bi-directional pointer structures to allow for FIFO queue behavior as well as bi-directional traversal of the data in the queue. I ended up doing very poorly in the class, barely squeaking out a D, and I eventually retook the class in my junior year to improve my grade, eventually earning an A. But this was the first time I really, truly understood how computers functioned.

I also sat next to someone who would become a good friend and we reminisced about Buckaroo Banzai. Which could explain the poor performance in the class. Either that or sophomores shouldn't take senior-level classes while also taking Calculus II and Chemistry II. But I digress...

What languages have you used since you started programming?
This is a great question, and I loved seeing Larry's list. I had previously published an exhaustive list in my What Language Are You post. So I will only give you a quick recap.

I've programmed in a wide range of languages, most of them from school (Prolog, Modula-2, and others). I've also programmed in a half dozen languages for work, though if I consider the bulk of my work there are three core languages 85% or more of my applications were written in: COBOL85, Visual Basic (multiple versions from v4 through v2008), and C#.

What was your first professional programming gig?
The Principal Financial Group in Des Moines, IA hired me fresh out of college. I was assigned to Corporate Services, a team focused on internal business processes, and I wrote applications in COBOL85, DB2, and CICS. The very first thing they did with me is retrain me to do programming the Principal way. I took classed for four weeks, learning how PFG structured applications, used copybooks, crafted JCL, and how to properly lay out a CICS screen.

I went from that working on a team building mainframe applications using Micro Focus COBOL. We experimented with host offloading, so we built, tested, and debugged our applications using the Micro Focus IDE on OS/2, replacing JCL with REXX scripts, and using IBM's DB2/2 to simulate our production databases.

The most significant lesson I learned at PFG what to get your database indexes and your WHERE clauses in alignment. I single-handedly — and completely inadvertently, I might add — consumed nearly 80% of one full CICS region on our ES7000, nearly crashing the LPAR. Indexes are important. Very, very important.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Yes, without a doubt. Either that or I would want to be self-sufficient millionaire. Guess which would be more likely to pan out?

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Understand the importance of "soft skills", like writing, communication, and public speaking. It turns out you have to do a lot of it in the business world: writing requirements, capturing business imperatives, and presenting project plans. Regardless of your level of seniority, everyone eventually gets involved in these tasks, and those who are particularly good at these so-called "soft skills" usually find more opportunities presented their way. A solid business acumen helps as well. Good IT departments scrutinize things and make sound decisions, and having some solid business and "soft" skills will go a long way to sound decisions are made.

What's the most fun you've ever had ... programming?
This is a great question! There are so many potential answers. In my senior year of college I had three projects that really challenged me (create a floating-point calculator with addition, subtraction, and multiplication — division must have been too hard, or we didn't have enough time; create a micro-kernel processor model; and build an algorithm to process 3x3 and 4x4 matrix algebra equations). Those were fun, hard, and exhausting... but probably not the *most* fun I've had.

There were two consulting projects during my early years of Perot Systems that I really, truly had fun working on. The first was my very first PVT (Performance Volume Test, something people did routinely in the good old days and people usually shrug off nowadays; who needs to test for performance, right?). Our application processed a billion+ CDRs (Call Detail Records; some sort of sadistic thing the telecommunications industry created to make trouble for developers), and it had to process it all over a roughly 48 hour window each month. Hence, PVT was a critical, show-stopping checkbox on the project plan. And my first PVT was third-shift baby sitting at its best. We watched jobs process, compared processing times, and noted any anomalies. (We were well past bugs at this point, so stuff _rarely_ broke.) I had a great PVT team, and had a blast for the nearly two weeks we ran multiple cycles from 10m to 8am.

The second was an assignment a good friend of mine from college and I were tasked with: replicate all test LPARs (TD, T1, T2, and T3) on our OS/2 LAN to offload host cycles for compiling and testing. We used V/REXX, Micro Focus COBOL, and VB3-based application, plus some infrastructure, to pull down an entire test LPAR with a simple command prompt command. The script ran for a couple of hours. It scrubbed all data, downloaded and converted all test data files from EBCDIC to ASCII, creating ISAM, VSAM, IMS, and DB2 data structures on the OS/2 LAN, and set up database entries in Stingray IMS and DB2/2. Then it downloaded and converted *all* source code for our application (a few thousand JCL scripts, programs and copybooks), and finally stashed everything into PVCS. It took weeks to get everything in place, but once it was done we saved the development teams a good two days worth of time with a single automated command.

Who am I calling out?
This is the tricky part, mainly due to the fact the meme has circulated for a few days now and most of my blogging friends and colleagues have already been called out.

• Brian Gorbett
• Denny Boynton (post)
• Jeff Brand (post)
• Mike Benkovich

This is a quick post letting folks know that I've updated my web site with two new Webcast series.

The first is the new Aspiring Architect Webcast Series some of my colleagues are running. These Webcasts will discuss a variety of topics relevant to people new to architecture or interested in moving from development to architecture. They will cover things like Service Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Service Bus, Web 2.0 for the Architect, among other topics of interest and relevance to new architects.

The second is a really a micro-series of MSDN Webcasts focused on Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation. Most are 300 and 400 level talks. They feature presentations by some well known MVPs.

There are still a few upcoming Team System Webcasts listed, being delivered by colleagues, so check it out. And while you are on my site, if you notice a lack of live events listed, that's because Microsoft will soon be moving into our new fiscal year and we're deep in planning events for Q1. I'll get the site updated as plans and events firm up, and I will include several community events in the database as well.