Phil Argy on the Australian Computer Society and the ICT industry.

One of the non-technical sessions that we had at Code Camp Oz this year was a session by Phil Argy who is the current president of the Australian Computer Society. I found that there was a lot to disagree with Phil about what he said (or atleast that was my gut reaction) and there was also a lot to agree with, it seemed to me that while I feel the goals of the ACS are generally admirable (especially about building ICT awareness among policy makers), the implementation needs a lot of work.

I make the following observations:

• You cannot engage and mobilise the ICT community by having committee meetings.
• You cannot grow your membership without an inclusive membership that welcomes all.
• You cannot encourage broad participation through an expensive fee structure.
• When you have a chicken and egg problem – buy a goat.

Thanks for the time Phil, I think you have inspired me to take action!

Bill Chesnut on BizTalk 2006 Improvements

After Dan’s session I sat in on some of Bill Chesnut’s session on the improvements in BizTalk 2006. I’ve already worked with BizTalk 2006 and the HL7 Accelerator and I really like the new adminsitration features in the product (about 1000% better than BizTalk 2004) – but one of the things that is really going to save coding time is the new error handling orchestrations.

I think that a lot of companies that didn’t adopt BizTalk 2004 previously for a number of reasons should really look at what this new version offers.

Dan Green’s session in Windows Worflow Foundation (WF, not WWF)

I’m sitting here listening to the first session at Code Camp Oz 2006. Dan is talking on Windows Workflow Foundation which is a new workflow technology which targets the .NET platform and which has some snazzy designer capabilities in Visual Studio 2005.

Eventually WF will replace the orchestration technology used in future versions of BizTalk and it will be embedded into SharePoint v3 to support the workflow functions in that product.

What I love about it is that its a workflow engine that doesn’t really pretend to be more important than the program. What I mean by that is that unlike BizTalk you can slap everything you need for the workflow into an application assembly and ship. This means is that it has awesome scalability from a design point of view because you can use it as the backbone for a WPF Navigation Application, or you could use it in an enterprise scale order processing system.

I was very pleased that Dan touched on some of the pain points with the product at the moment where the abstraction seens to break down, including the extra work you need to do to maintain state across transactional workflows.

Thanks Dan – an awesome first session to Code Camp!

Code Camp Oz 2006: Day 1

Well – the first day of Code Camp Oz 2006 is done and dusted and I think that most folks had a good day, and hopefully learnt heaps. I managed to attend quite a few sessions today in amongst helping folks with various enquiries and catching up with various people that I don’t get to see that often.

We started and finished pretty much on time and most people indulged in the wine tasting put on by CSU and a great number made tracks to the Golden Seasons restaurant. It was great to socialise over a meal and get to know people a little better.

There was a facinating discussion where I learnt lots of new things about sorting algorithms, I’d repeat it here but I don’t think I could do the material justice . . .

Darren Neimke on Windows Vista!

Darren’s session was up before mine and he was presenting on some of the UX and security enhancements (among other things) to be found in Windows Vista. By the far the most contentious issue for the audience was UAP/UAC (User Access Protection/User Access Control – depending on who you ask).

Because developers tend to run as administrators on their machine it was interesting to see the rooms reaction when they discovered that Vista would actually fight against their elevated privilege adiction. Indeed – with the current build of Visual Studio 2005, its hard to see how you can survive without administrative rights – particularly when dealing with ASP.NET development and SQL Express (if thats part or your solution).