Archive for the ‘Announcement’ Category

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Meeting the SQL Azure Development Team

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Last week I was at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, WA, USA. I was invited by the SQL Azure Development Team to look at some of the new unreleased features and comment on features in their roadmap.

Unfortunately most of the content was confidential, meaning that I was under NDA, so I may not disclose any details. Sorry :-/

During the week with the SQL Azure Development Team I was fortunate to be engaged in technical detailed discussion about some of the upcoming feature releases – mainly discussing the SQL Server features not currently available in SQL Azure. It was interesting and enlightening at the same time to discuss their technical challenges and why they have build SQL Azure the way they have.

All in all, my conclusion after this event is that Microsoft takes SQL Azure seriously and it will become a major player in the RDBMS world. It will not just be a SQL Server in the cloud, but a separate product with different market segments and different features. I am looking forward to a bright future with SQL Azure :-)

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Posted in Announcement, SQL Azure, SQL Server | No Comments »

Ageing pictogram

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

I’m in Prague, Czech for the Apache Lucene EuroCon 2010; wandered around, where I saw this drawing on a house wall.

I find it hilarious – especially the natural shadow over the coffins. It’s just by pure coincidence that I was there, at the time of day where the doorway cast its shadow over the coffins :-)

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Posted in Conference, Full Text Search, Lucene, Stuff | No Comments »

Miracle Open World 2010 Lucene Presentation

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

The conference is over and it was a great success. I meet a lot of new people and had lots of technical discussions about .Net, graph databases, freetext search, SQL Server, Oracle Service Bus, debugging with WinDbg and extensions.

The slides and demo code for my Lucene session is available here:

My session “Making freetext search with Lucene.Net work for you” abstract:

Lucene is an open source full-featured text search engine library, making searching in large amounts of text lightning fast. Lucene are in use by many large sites like Wikipedia, LinkedIn, MySpace etc.

It is easy to get started with Lucene, but there are many pitfalls… In this session you will learn about the do’s and don’t’s for indexing and searching, tools, scaling, new features in version 2.9 and some of the more advanced features.

This presentation will use the Microsoft .Net implementation of Lucene named Lucene.Net, but the content of this presentation applies for ported versions of Lucene.

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Posted in .Net, Announcement, Full Text Search, Lucene, SQL Server | 2 Comments »

Speaking about Lucene at Miracle Open World 2010

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

The conference Miracle Open World 2010 is soon upon us at Legoland (April 14.-16.) :-)

There will be four tracks this year: Oracle track, SQL Server track, .Net track and a workshop track.

The conference is legendary because time spend at the conference is divided between 80% technical stuff and 80% social networking. No kidding’ socializing is a big part of this conference with gala-dinner and the not-to-miss beach party at Lalandia Aquadome (including drinks).

This year I only have one session where I’ll be presenting Lucene.Net.

Session abstract:

Lucene is an open source full-featured text search engine library, making searching in large amounts of text lightning fast. Lucene are in use by many large sites like Wikipedia, LinkedIn, MySpace etc.

It is easy to get started with Lucene, but there are many pitfalls… In this session you will learn about the do’s and don’t’s for indexing and searching, tools, scaling, new features in version 2.9 and some of the more advanced features.

This presentation will use the Microsoft .Net implementation of Lucene named Lucene.Net, but the content of this presentation applies for ported versions of Lucene.

At the time of writing, 207 participants have registered for the conference. You can still register – it’s not too late.

See more at the Miracle Open World 2010 site.

Posted in .Net, Announcement, Conference, Lucene, SQL Server | No Comments »

It’s my birthday today

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Yep – It’s true, I’m one year older today.

The American singer and songwriter Marvin Gaye and Hans Christian Andersen – the world famous Danish author and poet noted for his children’s fairy tale stories like “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Little Mermaid” – both where born April 2nd.

This is also the day, The Falklands War started where Argentina invades the British Falkland Islands in 1982.

You can read more about April 2nd on Wikipedia.

Now I’m already 33 years old :-S

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TechEd Berlin 2009

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

TechEd Berlin 2009I’m going to TechEd conference in Berlin next week. Are you going?

I haven’t taken the time to browse through the session catalogs yet, but I will be seeking information about:

  • Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST Search and how Microsoft incorporates into their products
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and especially the spatial support for Reporting Services
  • The new features of Windows Communication Foundation 4.0, the redesigned Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 and .Net 4.0 in general.
  • The Windows Azure Platform
  • ASP.Net MVC 2

If you are going, drop me a mail and I’ll buy you a beer. That’s the least I can do for my readers :-)

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Posted in Announcement, Conference | 2 Comments »

New blog – NoTech

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

A talented colleague of mine Thomas Schou-Moldt has started blogging about software development processes and methods. He is passionate about the subject and writes well.

The blog is in Danish and called NoTech.

Blog description:

Here I’ll share my opinions, joys and frustrations about software development and IT projects – both the good stories and horrendous experiences.

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Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 available

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 screenshots

I can’t wait to see what Microsoft can get out of WPF with the new WPF-based IDE.

The Microsoft developer and platform evangelist Dan Fernandez has written an installation cheat sheet guide.

Update 13th July 2009: On the BCL Team Blog Justin Van Patten has written the blog post What’s New in the BCL in .NET 4 Beta 1.

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World’s first electronic annual general meeting

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Today I just witness the electronic annual general meeting for the investment company SparIndex. This is the first 100% electronic annual general meeting ever.

The stakes was high, especially for the system owner VP Securities as journalists and photographs wandered around the offices ready to report success or failure in the media.

My job as a technical consultant, together with a handful of other techies, was to monitor the solution during the live annual general meeting. Our job was to prevent any technical glitches or in the event of a crash recover as fast as possible.

The tension was high right up to the last minute before the premiere, but everything went smooth. :-)

Screenshot of the World’s first electronic annual general meeting

Screenshot of the World’s first electronic annual general meeting

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In-flight entertainment running on Windows

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

In-flight entertainment reboot

Recently when I was flying back to Europe from South Africa with Lufthansa on Airbus A340-600 the In-flight entertainment crashed just before takeoff. They had to restart the entire system. I could see the entire reload of the system including the initial download with 115K baud XModem protocol download.

Yikes! I hope that only non-vital systems are running Windows for an airliner. :-)

Posted in Announcement | 2 Comments »

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