Tim Leung's Blog

Last week, we were very lucky to have Sebastien Lambla do a session at our Bracknell user group. The topic of the talk was 'When Agile development goes wrong'.

Since the group was quite small, we did away with the PowerPoints after the break and ended up chatting late into the evening about all things Agile.

For anyone interested, the slides can be downloaded from Seb's blog here:
http://serialseb.blogspot.com/2009/06/when-agile-goes-bad-slides-and-pointers.html

If anyone wants to see his session, Seb will be repeating it on the 14 July 2009 in Nuneaton.

Yesterday evening, I organised a LiveMeeting with Laurent Bugnion - the first online meeting that we've had for several months.

The title of Laurent's meeting was the .Net continuum and the topics covered included ASP.NET, AJAX, Silverlight and WPF.

Many thanks to Laurent for giving up his time to be involved and if any one is interested, here is a recording of a similar session that he gave at Mix.

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T13F

Earlier on this week, Johannes Kebeck gave a presentation at my VBUG Bracknell group on Virtual Earth and Windows Live Maps. The venue for the event was the Bracknell Council Chambers, a plush location in the centre of town. 

The content throughout the evening was excellent. Johannes began by talking about the MapPoint background of Live Maps and key acquisitions throughout the years which makes Virtual Earth what it is today. These include partnerships with TerraServer, GeoTango, and Multimap.

Unlike Google Street View, the 3D imagery in Live Maps is extrapolated using the images taken from the sky. To capture these images, 5 cameras onboard an airplane are used and the the amount of storage required to hold a typical city is around 100TB. These images are processed using Windows HPC Server (High Performance Computing).

During the demonstration, Johannes demonstrated how maps can include time and weather information. During an overcast evening, a map will display a cloudy dark image.

Examples of commercial applications included the Harley Davidson website. Using the site, riders can upload their favourite motorcycle routes which are then displayed and shared with others on a map. Superimposed upon the maps are the locations of Shell petrol stations and Great Western hotels. Using sponsorship from these companies, Harley Davidson can profit from the site.

Johannes next described the 5 different APIs that are available. If using the JavaScript API, there is a project on CodePlex that adds intellisense to Visual Studio which can be found here.

One of the more fascinating parts of the talk was a demonstration on GeoCoding. Using the GeoNames 'RSS to GeoRSS Converter' web service found here, an input RSS feed is accepted. The output provided by this service adds longitude and latitude data.

During his demonstration, Johannes created a Popfly mashup in under 2 minutes. The BBC news RSS feed was used as the input. The impressive thing about the demo is that given a piece of text such as "The US president approves measures that will allow Cuban-Americans to travel more freely to Cuba", the service uses natural language processing to determine that the text relates to Cuba despite references to the US in the sentence.

Another interesting sites mentioned during the evening included a preview of upcoming technology which currently shows a race car demonstration.
http://preview.local.live.com

Johannes also spoke about how maps are rendered using a pattern of squares that you can smoothly zoom into. This technology is closely related to DeepZoom and HD View. If you wish to create your own panoramic images that you can view using HD View, ICE (Image Composite Editor) can be used to do this.

More details about these applications can be found on the Microsoft Research site here:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/HDView/
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/

During another demo, an existing PDF map was superimposed on top of a LiveMap. To do this, the MapCruncher application was used.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/mapcruncher/Gallery/

At the end of the evening, Alan Le Marquand from Microsoft kindly donated a TechNet subscription as a prize.  The evening was certainly interesting so many thanks to to Johannes and Alan for making the event a success.

Earlier on this week, Santosh Benjamin and David Parker gave presentations on Biztalk and Visio at my VBUG meeting in Bracknell.

Santosh began with an introduction to Biztallk. This was an excellent overview that included details on Biztalk usage scenarios, topologies, adapters and state persistence. More details can be found on his blog here:

http://santoshbenjamin.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/speaking-at-vbug-bracknell

Santosh also mentioned Windows Server 'Dublin' (http://www.microsoft.com/NET/Dublin.aspx) and has kindly offered to speak further on this subject later on in the year.

Next, David Parker gave an introduction to Visio. This included a demonstration of the Org Chart wizard and sample code showing these charts can be created in VBA code. The key highlight for me was learning how to bind data to diagrams. David also demonstrated visViewer, a free utility which he has developed enabling Visio files to be viewed without Visio. A summary of what was covered can be found on David's blog here:

http://bvisual.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3350D61BC93733A9!1311.entry  

Radio Bracknell (http://www.radiobracknell.com/) are now helping to promote our activities in Bracknell and our next meeting will take place on the 7th April where Johannes Kebeck will be doing a talk on Microsoft Virtual Earth.

During yesterday evening, we held our first meeting at our new venue in Bracknell. There was much interest in this event and places filled up very quick. It was also good to see many new faces at this event.

Our guest speaker Colin Leversuch-Roberts gave an excellent talk on SQL Server Indexes and performance. There was much more that he could have covered and it's a shame that we didn't have more time. Afterwards, I gave a brief session on a few random SQL Server tips which some people found useful.

For more details on SQL Server Indexes and performance, you can visit Colin's blog here.
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/grumpyolddba/

Colin has expressed an interest to speak in Bracknell again and I look forward to taking him up on his offer!