Willy-Peter Schaub's Cave of Chamomile Simplicity

Honorary List ... it is time to thank a lot of people for their efforts in the SA Community for 2008!

It is unfortunate that most heroes are never mentioned or known to the world, with them operating under cover, deep behind enemy lines and often unselfishly fighting for everyone but themselves. I am, however, not nostalgic and talking about the war heroes of the many wars that have raged on planet Terra, instead I am referring to the heroes in the information technology world, making a huge difference to the South-African IT communities.

My definition for a hero is a person who goes beyond the expectations, shows relentless passion and energy and are willing to push the boundaries, for the good of the community.

... often the Heroes are the last left, when the going gets tough!

The list is long and I am likely to omit someone ... but as it is more important to start the list and add names until the list is complete, I herewith present my list of heroes in the "South-African" IT communities I am exposed to, listed in no specific order:

People to watch ... will likely join the heroes list soon:

"Heroes", thank you for all your efforts, for unselfishly sharing information, for investing an incredible amount of personal time, for caring about the communities and for making South-Africa a better and stronger "IT place".

We bow in front of you! 

If we went beyond the South-African borders we would need to list all of the TFS/VSTS MVPs and the VSTS Product Group members, both of which "rock!",  but for the time being, I will constrain the list to South-Africa.

Have you also forgotten the SUBST command by any chance?

I have been busy debugging and implementing workarounds for a toothache I experienced with Visual Studio and had to create a few directories on the D drive ... which I do not have on my laptop. Being pragmatic, I attached my external drive and created the directories ... fortunately Philip Kelley dusted off a few of my spider webs by saying "It’s easier to use the subst command".

In case you have also forgotten this useful command, let me demonstrate its use:

1. Assume you need a path d:\silly\cool\command ... Note to Herman, this is an arbitrary, non-meaningful path, used for demo purposes only.
2. Problem is that you only have a c: drive.
3. Fire up the command line, Start -> Run -> Cmd -> Enter
4. Type in the following command: Mkdir c:\demo\silly\cool\command
   
5. Type in the following command: Subst d: c:\demo
   
6. Now for the acid test, run the command dir d: /s /ad, which would have failed before step 5.
   

To summarise:

Thanks for pointing out this great DOS command Philip! We should spend far more time on the command line ... there is so much power we take for granted these days and a lot of power we have unfortunately forgotten.

SAArchitect - News and request for member registration!

If you have been, are or would like to become a member of the SA Architect community, then please register yourself on our new community site (see point 3 above).

We are displaying the SA Architect hosted events or events that SA Architect members have access to on the home page of the new site (see point 2 above). Please keep an eye on the events and advise as to what is good, bag or ugly ... q;-)

Lastly if you are in the academic world, please have a look at our latest academia initiative (see point 1 above) and download the academia program flyer for more information.

Back in the trenches ...

After 4 days of holiday at the coast at Sodwana Bay, I am trying to reboot my humanoid central processor and replace the vacation processes with business processes ... if ever you need a break and you enjoy Scuba Diving, go to the Sodwana Bay Lodge and enjoy a few dives on 5 mile reef. On our last dive, my son and I recorded Humpback whales, Whale sharks, Potato Bass, Firefish, Scorpion, Turtle,Octopus and many, many, more.

We saw so much on our last dive that we literally stopped diving for the rest of the holiday, vegetating and relaxing at the beach, tumbling in the waves and enjoying the bits-and-bytes-less beach life.

  ... we were "moeg" at the end of the day q;-)

The best part ... I left my laptop and mobile phone at home and was therefore not tempted by the Centrino Duo devils to "quickly" fire up the laptop.

MVP ... breaking news q;-)

I have just been notified that I will be part of the MVP community for a while longer, remaining a proud member of the greatest community, made up of  the VSTS product group, the VSTS MVPs and the South-African MVP communities q;-)

Thanks to the VSTS Product group for such a great product, the VSTS MVPs for being such awesome professionals and evangelists, my South-African community colleagues and our MVP "Boss", meneer Ruari Plint, who is juggling the whole of MEA. You are the very best and it is a great honour to work with you all!

A special thanks to Henk and Zayd, who have worked with me on the numerous academic and interoperability initiatives in South-Africa. This award is also for you, because your commitment, passion and support was a huge part of my renewal. You two are very special!

I am now off to the coast, to take my oldest son to the Indian Ocean for some relaxing Scuba diving. See you all next week.

Community Academic Program

October 2008 we are visiting Rhodes university (www.rhodes.ac.za) for another technology awareness program, as shown on the following flyer:

For this battling with the image and information hidden within the flyer, here are a few extracts:

ACADEMIC TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM SERVICES

• Planning and Proposals for IT Environments
• Hardware Sponsorship
• Hardware installation
• Software installation.
• Evangelism and Mentorship for
• Software development concepts
• Software development technologies
• Application Life Cycle (ALM) Management
• Technology Readiness Training (“Boot Camps”)
• Programming Tools, i.e. Visual Studio, Teamprise, …
• Programming Languages, i.e. C#, …
• ALM Solutions, i.e. TFS, …
• Frameworks, i.e. Silverlight, Moonlight, Mono,

Interoperability – a difficult word to say, an easy concept to understand

Interoperability is a property referring to the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together (inter-operate), taking into account social, political, and organizational factors. (Wikipedia).

We strongly believe that interoperability has and will play a strategic role in real-world solutions and we advocate the right technology for the job. Stop the vendor wars, start collaborating, integrating and make interoperability an ally, not a difficult technology term.

South-African MVP’s & Community Leads take the lead …

Microsoft Most valued Professionals (MVPs) and Community Leads are vendor agnostic evangelists, with the following

characteristics:

• A technology specialist
• An influencer
• A community participant
• An independent expert
• A super passionate person
• A Technology Leader

The MVPs and Community Leads, in collaboration with proud sponsors are engaging with technical communities and academic institutions nationally and internationally to share their knowledge, their experience and their passion for technology and solutions.

The academic technology program is an opportunity for these passionate evangelists to ensure that the next generation of students will become the evangelists and leaders of tomorrow.

What is Teamprise?

Teamprise is a suite of client applications for accessing Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server from outside of the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Teamprise enables software development teams to use the source control, work item tracking, build, and reporting features of Team Foundation Server from within the Eclipse IDE, and from other operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS X.

Program Phases

We typically approach the academic program with three major phases and an optional fourth, which includes support. The other three phases typically entail:

Phase #1 - Evangelism

The core objectives of the initial phase are to introduce the evangelists and the academic program to the academic institutions. Typically a 1-2 hour workshop demonstrates interoperability options. The core deliverable of this phase is a proposal to the academic institution on the way and options going forward.

Phase #2 - Deploy

The “deploy” phase is about installing and configuring an application lifecycle management solution at the academic institution, which delivers a value add to Microsoft and Java focused development environments, introducing typical development environments and more importantly the seamless integration and interoperability between different development environments.

Phase #3 - Embrace

During the “Embrace” phase focused technology workshops and boot camps introduce state of the art and strategic software solutions and development environments to students and lectures alike. The workshops and boot camps are tailored to the academic institution.

Interested?

If you are interested in us extending the program to your academic environment, please contact one of the SA Architect leads. Refer to www.saarchitect.net for contact details.

Watch this blog for a report of the event next month ... we will report on the good, the bad and the ugly! We will also enjoy and report on the infamous Klipies Coffee in Grahamstown q;-)

Event is proudly sponsored by:

In addition, we have received amazing support from Ruari at Microsoft South-Africa, as well as Jeff and Charles (Chuck) from the VSTS product group. You guys "rock"!

.NET Enterprise Books for the Connoisseur ... all available in PDF!

We have just released the PDF, soft copy, eBook style books for the following three books on www.drp.co.za and www.saarchitect.net. On the later server find the books here and remember that www.drp.co.za is geared at American region and www.saarchitect.net for the MEA region.

If you are like me and appreciate the printed copy, refer to http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2007/08/21/bb-amp-d-drp-books-what-are-they-availability-cost-and-ordering.aspxfor details.

Sponsor for this eBook (PDF) initiative is Barone, Budge & Dominick, supporting the local and international IT communities!

Goodbye SAArchitect, welcome SAArchitect!

Thanks to some amazing work from two our our SAArchitect leads, Robert MacLean (who still has not uploaded his own profile and mugshot) and Zayd Kara, we are finally able to say goodbye to the old SA Architect site:

... and welcome to the new community site: 
 

The new site allows registrations, contains the same value-add content and much, much more in the future and boasts the infamous "Bulldog" aggregator control to aggregate a number of community lead RSS feeds, applicable to SA Architect. Give us your views on the new site and please register as soon as possible, so that we can give the SA Architect community a quantified face again in the future.

Thanks leads, the site is looking great!

Visual Studio 2010! Yes, yes, yes...

The news is out ... the next version of Visual Studio, code named Rosario, will officially be known as "Visual Studio 2010". This kind of give a hint to the release period, I think, and you can get more detailed information at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc948977.aspx.

The best news, however, is the merger of  the Visual Studio Database Professional Edition and the Developer Edition. THANK YOU Microsoft, for listening to us and making it happen! I have oicked up the following sentence and I quite, which brings even more good news and I quote: "In recognition of the increased need to integrate more of the lifecycle members together, we will provide a unified Development and Database product in Visual Studio Team System 2010. Beginning October 1, 2008 Development Edition and Database Edition MSDN subscribers will have access to both products."

Note the text in bold ... Yes, yes, yes ... we are on a winning path here q;-)

South-African IT Community servers ... stats to be proud of!

A colleague asked me today for some stats on quick reference poster hits and downloads. Well after looking at the two community servers we are responsible for, namely www.saarchitect.net and www.drp.co.za, I found that the statistics are actually very promising. So much so, that I am posting some of the stats in this post, so that everyone can see the "value-add" the two environments are bringing to the local and international community.

To all the Community leads and MVPs feeding these servers, THANK YOU very much for your efforts and keep it up!

SA Architect Statistics

www.saarchitect.net

• The top ten favourites in terms of downloads from this site are:
  

  1	3006 light weight scrum process template	poster	878
  2	rosario_ctp12_evaluation	whitepaper	540
  3	0013 csharp formatting poster	poster	267
  4	0202 microsoft team system teamreview	poster	188
  5	tfs guidance whitepaper	whitepaper	136

• We have a total of 9368 downloads of value-add artifacts to-date.
• We currently have an average of 419 poster downloads per month on the SA Architect website.

Developer Readiness Program Statistics

www.drp.co.za

• The top ten favourites in terms of downloads from this site are:
  

  1	Team Foundation Server (TFS) Guidance Whitepaper Technology	whitepaper	1297
  2	0202 Microsoft Team System Project Planning	poster	1192
  3	0004 Best Practices Poster	poster	1136
  4	0006 CSharp Poster	poster	1116
  5	0000 System_NameSpace	poster	1070

• We have a total of 74566 downloads of value-add artifacts to-date.
• We currently have an average of 2787 poster downloads per month on the DRP website
• In terms of demographics the picture for the past three (3) months looks like:
  
  With the details as follows:
  

  Rank	Country	Page Views	Visits	Hits	Bandwidth (KB)
  1	United States	40448	12435	88683	5153835
  2	N/A	34146	9358	80924	3639200
  3	Germany	8028	483	12174	559238
  4	Russian Federation	7116	301	14909	551838
  5	United Kingdom	5465	341	14452	648777
  6	South Africa	4547	657