Todd's Blog

OttawaSQL.net Event – Visual Studio for Database Professionals

posted on September 26, 2008

Free Evening Event @ Microsoft Ottawa

Thursday, October 2^nd 5:30 – 8:30 PM

Visual Studio for Database Professionals – Christian Coté

Visual Studio for Database Professionals, Christian Coté

Too many times, database maintenance and deployment represent a challenge during application development. This session will demonstrate how Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals (VSTS4DBP) can ease database deployment while being integrated into version control. Database unit tests and generic data generation that can be used for development will also be demonstrated and discussed.

Christian

Christian Coté is an IT consultant with more than twelve years of experience. He is Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist Business Intelligence (MCTS-BI). For the last nine years, he has mainly worked on ETL (extraction – transformation- load of data) projects with both SQL Server and Oracle.

REGISTRATION:

LOCATION:

RSVP: Event Registration

Arrival: 5:15 PM to 5:30 PM

Presentation: 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM

Refreshments: Pizza and Pop

Microsoft Ottawa, World Exchange Plaza

100 Queen Street, Suite 500, Ottawa

EVENT SPONSOR:

Our October event is sponsored by SQLTeach and DevTeach.

Use our group’s rebate code OT00SQLNET to register and save an extra $50!

Note: DevTeach is raising its price on October 1st

We would like to remind you that DevTeach is raising its price by $100 October 1st. This exceptional event will be held at the Marriott Chateau Champlain Montreal on Dec. 1-5. Check out the 8 cool tracks. Take advantage of this early bird price by registering before October 1st.

OttawaSQL.net is community group of Ottawa area developers and IT professionals. We share an interest in Microsoft’s data technologies especially: SQL Server, SharePoint, PerformancePoint, Workflow Foundations, LINQ, ADO.NET and Entity Framework.

Learning Resources for MDOP Exam

posted on September 26, 2008

Are you planning on utilizing the free exam code for the 70-656 exam that Trika posted to her blog? If you do, you'll want to book quickly as the free voucher is only available to the first 500 people.

If you are going to write the exam, check out Garth's post about free E-learning courses that Microsoft has out. The one which will help you prepare for this exam is Clinic 6335- Exploring Microsoft Application Virtualization.

Free exam voucher, free training, doesn't get much easier to get certified.

The Strength of the Blackberry

posted on September 25, 2008

Mark Evans posted a bit about what he thought was the strength of the blackberry, which is its keyboard. While I agree with Mark that the keyboard is easy and makes popping of an email quick, I have seen my friends with iPhones do it just as quick as me. I also had to buy pointing sticks for some of the staff as they just couldn’t use the keyboard on their Blackberry, it was too difficult for them. I personally feel the strength of the Blackberry is its corporate inroads and how easy it is to get up and running. Getting a Blackberry running in a corporate environment is as simple as downloading the Enterprise Server from Blackberry, installing it on a computer and then linking it to your messaging infrastructure. There is no inbound firewall ports to open which helps mitigate the risk to the environment and there was no security certificates needed to be purchased . While these things aren’t harder to do work wise, in some environments it creates more complexity as there might be different teams for the firewall versus the messaging teams.

As long as RIM has its NOC and no one else is going that route, I don’t see RIM’s dominance in the corporate environment fading. The only other company who could pull off putting up a NOC tomorrow would be Microsoft and I could see them doing it as a SaaS offering which would tie into Exchange.