Blog ala Vidar

This has been a VERY busy week. Started with publishing a new build of R3. I wish I had more time to test before it was published, but now everything should be fixed at least! Next time we’re planning a freeze two weeks before the build where we’re only going to test and fix bugs. Monday – Wednesday I was at work for a total of 40 hours, to make sure everything should go as planned on TechNet, NNUG, AppEd and with the upgrade of SQL3.

On Thursday we went to Stavanger. We were 12 people, some went to MSDN and some to TechNet. I went to TechNet, where the red thread was Microsoft Virtualization with mainly Hyper-V but also a bit about Virtual PC and Virtual Server. Virtualization is something we’ve already started using in Omega and we’re expanding weekly! Less physical servers means less hardware-failures, easier maintenance and of course reduced cost! We learned some tricks and tips about virtualization. We also met one of my heroes, Jon Jahren. We showed him our plan about hardware setup for the new SQL3, and got some tips about how to improve it. For example, we had planned to split up the MDF to several RAID-arrays. According to him, there were no point in this. He recommended putting the MDF on ONE RAID-array, using RAID 10. He also mentioned that tempdb should have it’s own array (as we already planned), and of course the LDF-file should have one. Making several MDF-files on the same RAID-array was good though. One pr CPU! Jon also had a “competition”. The person who asked him a question he couldn’t answer, got a SQL Server 2008 jacket. I asked him a question which he actually didn’t answer, but he apparently forgot about it or something, so he made a new competition. “Hvor mange indianere får en plass til i et hult tre?” ….. En stamme. “How many Indians can you fit into a hollow tree?” … “One tribe”.. Tribe in Norwegian (“stamme”) is the same word as for a tree-trunk. Leif was the first to answer correctly, so he got the jacket. And, yes. I’m REALLY jealous! I’m going to send Jon a mail about it!

After MSDN/TechNet we went to Ølensvåg to have a NNUG meeting. The topic was “C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5, news and best practices” with Jan Ove Halvorsen. It was a great session! We will upload his powerpoint to NNUG’s website. After that, Johnny had a zip-talk about CR3, and everyone seemed to be very impressed. There were people from Hatteland, Ecciti, Ølen Betong and Bouvet (and Omega of course) there.

On Thursday evening we went to “Løo”. This is a nice place to get to know people. We sat up till 2am, chatting!

AppEd started on Friday morning, with a keynote from Johnny and some guidelines. After that we had a “Tell us where it hurts” session, where we got some input about what, and how, we could do things better. We discussed documentation, builds, reporting issues and a couple of other things. I think it’s great to have sessions like this, where we can discuss and get to know problems that we might not be aware of. Torgeir continued with ReportingDX where I learned a couple of new things 🙂 Johnny had a little session about what we’ve made in PIMS R3.

After lunch, we split up in two where Arild had a (very interesting) session about SSIS and Johnny had one about AppFrame Security Model. After that there were two sessions going at the same time: CR3 Development and CR3 Hardcore. I participated at hardcore. I’m amazed by how much cool words Jan Leon, Peter and Torgeir knows. Serialization, delegates, proxy object, surrogate etc. I know some cool words in SQL Server, but not that many! In these sessions I started feeling sick. Not of the session, but there’s been some problems with the water in Ølen, and some has been sick (vomiting etc). I had to get home, so I couldn’t participate at “Løo” where they had dinner etc. We planned a quiz, where we were going to elect “Norgesmester i AppFrame”. Norwegian Champion in AppFrame. Of topic: You may have noticed I’m writing AppFrame, and not Appframe. This is the new way to write AppFrame.
ANYHOW! Arild Røksund won and got a T-shirt saying “AppFrame Developer Hero”, a mouse he can connect to a USB-port that cycles on a bicycle. The faster you type on your keyboard, the faster the mouse cycles. In addition he got the title “Norgesmester i AppFrame” and 50.000 advantage points. Semion Larin and Aleksander Birkeland got second and third place. They also got the t-shirt and cycling mouse.

I didn’t feel too good when I woke up, so I waited till after lunch to get to Ølen. Before that, they had hands on labs (to play with CR3), setting up R3 and R3 web. When I got to Ølen, me and Arild had a three hour session about Database Development. We went through new features in 2005 and 2008, Service Broker, Indexing and Statistics and Query Tuning. Håvard Ravatn showed me a thing I didn’t know about CROSS APPLY. I thought you could only use it for UDF’s, but no… You can also use it for queries 🙂

Because I was sick, and JanCB also was sick, we did not upgrade SQL3 this weekend. I’m still looking forward to get it up on SQL Server 2008. The plan now is after the salary payment is done.

I’ve already started planning AppEd 2009 😀 I hope you think the same as me, that it was a big success! I also hope we can expand it, so more people can attend!