So I'm sitting at SYD airport on my way home. It's been a pretty full on 10 days of Tech Ed madness. Here's my recap and thoughts.

1. Last Saturday (seems so long ago) we had the New Zealand Microsoft community leaders day and then the Dot Net User Group AGM. This was a great day and really good to be able to put faces to names. I stepped down as the President of the NZ Dot Net Users Group and my focus for the next 12 months is going to be around presenting on topics- probably mainly on cloud services and Oslo.
2. Sunday was Code Camp but I spent most of the time Camped in my room working on my decks and demos for the week. I knew I had a session every day of the week so was pacing myself. Hit up the speakers dinner on the Sunday night which was great. Spent the evening chatting with Dr Neil, Steve Riley, Ivan T, Angus Logan, JamesNK and Reed Shafner (wow how good am I remembering all those names!)
   I also popped into the hands on Labs on Sunday afternoon and they were cranking... more on these later.
3. Monday saw TechEd kick off in earnest. I actually quite liked the politicos presenting... but then I am a political animal. Others were not so happy with it. I had my first session before lunch focusing on Cloud Services. I could have said it was about BizTalk services but then no one would have turned up so I fibbed a little. The session went really well with good audience interaction and good evals. I decided afterwards that my demos were kinda arse. I was showing off some stuff we had built at Intergen* but because parts of the app we built have yet to be announced I couldn't show the whole thing. Based on this I resolved to re-do my demos for Sydney.
   I attended the VIP/Sponsors drinks on Monday night and passed on both the Bloggers Dinner and Architects Dinner as I was just too exhausted.
4. I ran the Web Futures panel session on Tuesday. This went really well with both the audience and the panel enjoying it I think? On the panel were Jorke from MS Aus, Nigel Parker, Scott Hanselmann, Harry Pierson, Trent Mankelow from Optimal Usability and Jonas Foles. There was a great turnout of Intergenites in the crowd and we even got to give some mad yellow props when Trent said the best colors for links were Yellow on Black!
   Tuesday night was the party night. I got a special VIP invite as I was in the top 20 on the Veek of the Week competition- this was a comp run by the MSNZ marketing guys around Virtualization. The VIP area was nice with killer cocktails, but, it needed a few more people. I did a video interview about the way we've used Virtualization in the Intergen Data Center to provide MedRecruit with high end hosting at a reasonable price point.
   I was in bed by about 9pm as I was presenting again on Wednesday.
5. Wednesday I presented my session on Microsoft Oslo. Again, this went really well given that I had so little to show off. Because Oslo is still so far off it was really a case of going through the 50k foot view. Ran into some great folks from some big NZ business^ who are keen to follow up around Oslo when I'm able to talk in more detail. i.e. Post PDC in early November. Enjoyed catching up with people at the leaving drinks and kinda gorged myself on the mini duck spring rolls....
   After the drinks I grabbed some food and hit the hay.
6. Thursday morning I was out on the 7am flight to Sydney. Got a lift to the airport with Scott Cate who I've heard does a killer Javascript demo. Spent most of the flight catching up on email but managed 1/2 an hour of FreezeTV (Skiing stuff) on the all new touch screen AirNZ entertainment system. Someone needs to boot their User eXperience people up the bum as it's still pretty below par, though much better than their older system.
   Scott and I caught a cab into the hotel and then headed over to the Darling Harbour conference center.
   I presented my Cloud Services session that afternoon and to be honest I thought I really NAILED it (i.e. best session of the week). The evals were only so so though :-( It drives me a bit insane when people comment "room too small, room too cold, good session though" and then tick 6's for everything. Or come along to a 200 level session on stuff that's barely been announced and grumble that I didn't dive deep enough.... grumble grumble....
   I spent a bunch of time patrolling the exhibition pavilion. Sharepoint is huge in Aus at the moment with and I also had a chat with some people about some RFID demos that I'm keen to do soon. This was much bigger than the last Aus TechEd I went to in Brisbane.
   The party for Aus TechEd was Thursday night but I bailed and went back to catch up on some sleep.... trying hard to stay on Kiwi time which meant up at 5am at the latest!!!
7. Friday I ran the Web Futures panel again with a slightly different bunch of people. This included Shane Morris who is a UX evangelist for MSFT and ex Optimal Experience. He made a really good point in the session about branded intranets and how they can become a real rallying point for staff. I think our own Intranet at Intergen, the Kernel, really is a great example of this. The audience was much more active in Australia and while I got through ALL my pre-canned questions in NZ I only managed a couple in Aus,
   My Oslo session was the last session of the day on Friday. Tough gig again I guess. I was up against Steve Riley and this thing called the Mobile Smackdown which seems to have some history in Aus and is reputed to 'sell out' very early. I still got a pretty full room and a lot of interest and 'probing' questions. Some of which I could answer, some of which I knew the answer but couldn't say and some of which I was just like.... where on earth did that come from.

And that's it. Another solid year of Tech Ed.

The highlights for me this year was the kick ass Intergen Hands on Labs setup in Auckland (If I do say so myself!). I think we really nailed it this year. It looked great, we had the infrastructure and labs down pretty well and didn't have too many labs we had to pull. Well done to the team- I got a lot of positive commentary from both within MSFT NZ and other attendees.
Other highlights were getting over to Aus again. It's always interesting to see what's going on over here.

Well.... a surprise this morning in the keynote... and I don't just mean Oliver Driver's glasses. Microsoft extended an invitation to National (John Key) and Labour (David Cunliffe) to present their IT/Broadband strategies.

I genuinely enjoyed both these presentations, but then I am a bit of a political animal. A few of the thoughts that struck me:

1. Both these two gentlemen are smart, well spoken and have actually had a real job outside parliament.
2. They agree on more than they disagree on
3. Cunliffe was a bit disingenuous when he said National will be dicking around for 18 months. Key is on record saying they'll have diggers laying conduit by Christmas
4. Cunliffe didn't wow me as much as a spekaer this time as he did at the CIO conference last year-  that said I could still see myself voting for a Cunliffe lead Labour party
5. Key had the call of the day about people needing to use broadband for more than porn and online poker.
6. I'm not sure if Key is going to 'own' the digital strategy himself when they win the election. Not sure I'm much into Maurice to be honest.
7. Not sure how much depth National have. Key is brilliant, my observation of the rest is they are pretty mediocre.
8. Despite being a pretty hardcore Libertarian, I think the most efficient and effective approach will be for Chorus to own and managed a regulated return infrastructure network and make this available under open access. The irony is this is the National policy.

I didn't hang around for the last half of the keynote as I was presenting in the session afterwards. Photos below.

So we (the MSDN Regional Directors around the world) are doing something a bit different in the lead up to Microsoft PDC in LAX. We've got the PDC 'Brain in a Jar' and we're taking it on a world tour. Here it is on the New Zealand leg with Dr Neil, Adam Cogan, JB, myself and Jonas Folles at Sky City in Auckland.

So I'm a real fan of Xero now having been using it for several months across a number of my businesses. I am, however, a Westpac customer so until now have not been able to automate my statement data feeds.

This has now changed. Well done to the Xero team for finally getting Westpac sorted.

The sting in the tail though is that Westpac want to charge me $25 for setting this feature up.

This was noted by both Rowan and Ben commenting that Westpac just don't 'get it'.

I have already sent a *wild* please explain email to my bank manager and await a reply. To be honest Westpac have never really *got* small business. I remember the first time I applied for a mortgage was when I was running Kognition. They declined my application even though I had solid cashflow forecasts. The irony was that when I finally came to settle on the house I had the full purchase price actually sitting in the business account (it was a small house in Dunedin... don't go getting any ideas of vast wealth...).

So Westpac. Sort your shit out!

I'll post any updates here... But have every intention to throw my toys over this one...

Sometimes you just want to do this

update foo set bar=123 order by foo.lastmodifiedtimestamp

Why.... well you may rely on the order of the timestamp.

It's suprprisingly hard to do but is possible using CTEs.

WITH InvoicesNumbered AS

SELECT *, ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY LastModifiedTimestamp desc) AS RowNum

FROM Invoice

UPDATE InvoicesNumbered

set createdby =

(select top 1 userID from [user] where clientid = InvoicesNumbered .invoiceclientid)

WHERE RowNum < 20000; --Use a number larger than the row count of the table.

Idea pinched from here. Reposted in search of better Live Search ranking for the obvious search query 'controlling update order in SQL Server'

Watching tonight it seems that only poor, illiterate, ugly fatties are interested in buying iPhones.

I'm sorry but harden the ^%%*& up. 

Pony up the cash or stop bleating.

Still... good fun watching Mark Rushworth from Vodafone try to put his media training through its paces.

[Update] Video is here

See

http://www.changingthewayyoufly.co.nz

AirNZ have announced a bunch of new things.

Highlights from where I sit.

1. All domestic flights including smartsavers now acrue status credits. THis is something I have advocated for sometime. I've never been super fussed on whether I get points for smartsaver fares but missing 0out on status credits really isn't great for encouraging brand loyalty. Very pleased to see this.

2. New Space+ seating on domestic flights. Forward rows on the NZ733, NZ766 and NZ320 aircraft will have new seating and more room. Againa bit bonus for those of us who *need* to spend timwe on the laptop doing emails on the plane. This was always a sore point for me becuase QF has heaps of room in those seats. A +ve change.

All in all very +ve.

So got an email from Brett Roberts @ Microsoft this evening saying he wanted to stick an op-ed piece he did for Computerworld up on the web but he didn't have anywhere to put it. Now usuall I'd be a snarky little bastard and remind Brett that his company has a blogging platform (Live Spaces) which they must have invested oodles into and maybe he should start blogging..... but instead I volunteered to post his piece up here. So herewith the piece that Brett did for Computerworld alongside Don Christie from the NZOSS. The opinions below are not mine (except where I am quoted) but I do share some similar sentiments and I was on the 'Yes please' side of the ledger in the whole OOXML process.

Computerworld Q&A

1.       Why should we care about global standards, or in this case the debate around Open XML?

The Office Open XML format is gaining momentum. There are literally thousands of developers already building applications which utilise or interoperate with the current Ecma 376 standard across a variety of platforms including Linux, Windows, Mac OS and Palm OS. These span the industry from big players like Apple, IBM and Novell to innovative companies in New Zealand like Intergen.

In the past, document formats have been closed and this has caused problems for developers but it’s also been an issue for companies and government organisations who need to retain long-term access to information stored in those documents. Opening up the document formats via a published and freely-available specification is a great step forward. Placing that specification under the stewardship of the International Organisation for Standardization - ISO – is even more significant for the broad IT community because it means the standard is permanently in the public domain and subject to the strict controls and processes of the independent International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

2.       What are the benefits or otherwise of Open XML to New Zealand businesses and the New Zealand public?

The Open XML specification empowers developers to create a host of new innovations for customers.  Chris Auld, Intergen’s Director of Strategy and Innovation says, “having an internationally documented standard such as Office Open XML allows innovative New Zealand companies such as Intergen to reach a global audience.

Demonstrating this, Intergen has announced it groundbreaking new software product TextGlow. A world-first, TextGlow allows users to view Office Open XML Word documents without having to download them, irrespective of whether or not they have Microsoft Word or any other Microsoft Office application installed.

“TextGlow is a unique product combining Office Open XML and Silverlight for the first time,” says Auld. “Microsoft Office documents have traditionally required software to be installed on the local machine. The new XML- based file format, coupled with Silverlight, has allowed us to make documents viewable directly through users’ web browsers. We are already cross platform on Windows and Macintosh and hope to be supporting Linux in the next couple of months.” 

With many organisations storing documents in web based document management systems such as SharePoint products and technologies, a quick preview of documents within the browser will boost productivity significantly.

In addition, a recent blog by Jan van den Beld, former Secretary General of Ecma International in Geneva, http://janvandenbeld.blogspot.com/2008/02/six-benefits-you-can-get-from-isoiec.html  highlights six  key benefits to Open XML. In brief:

1. Transfer of control

2. Transfer stewardship

3. Chance for industry and implementers:

4. Evolution of the standard

5. Interoperability

6. Conformance and interoperability testing

3.       Why is a standard for legacy documents required in light of the fact that Microsoft has just published the specs for those documents?

The rigorous technical review associated with the standards process is making it possible for Open XML to support an ever broadening set of requirements.

OpenXML is built around a small number of really important design goals. Top of the list is the goal of being able to represent existing binary documents in an XML based mark-up. To achieve this you have to have a document standard that fully represents all of the elements that are in those existing binary documents. OpenXML is the only document standard capable of doing this. Other document standards would have to be extended beyond their design goals to provide this capability.

The publishing of the binary file formats is an additional piece of the jigsaw puzzle that ensures the availability of all Microsoft Office documents for generations to come. Providing the capability for developers today to fully understand the Microsoft Office binary files will encourage both a rich array of tools to convert files to the new OpenXML format, and create additional opportunities for a limited subset of customers to just archive existing documents in their current format. This is especially  important to some customer groups, the legal community for example.

To ensure that documents are protected for generations to come organisations like the British Library and the US National Library of Congress have stepped up to act as digital archivists of the binary file format specifications. Sitting side by side with OpenXML as an ISO standard we now have an environment where documents are truly open and access to them can be guaranteed in perpetuity.

4.       If Open XML is rejected as a global standard, what will it mean for businesses and the public?

I don’t think we’ll know initially but over time strong opponents of Office Open XML will lobby governments in particular, to adopt technology procurement preferences which favour ODF-based solutions.

As a taxpayer, I’m not convinced that removing choice will increase innovation, increase competition and therefore lower costs. I suspect the opposite will happen. More concerning is the fact that there are tens of thousands of highly-skilled programmers in New Zealand who build innovative technology solutions and are quickly becoming known in the global marketplace. We should be offering them more opportunities to win export dollars– not less.

5.       Why not just one standard for all?

There are many reasons. Firstly, Office Open XML and ODF were built with very different design goals in mind. The argument that we only need one ISO standard document format makes as much sense as saying we only need one ISO standard programming language.

The “one standard for all” concept makes the assumption that the first standard “out of the starting blocks” will encompass current and future needs. It’s a tenuous argument.

And a report published by the Burton Group in January of this year agrees, stating that ODF is insufficient for complex real-world enterprise requirements...and...libraries and large businesses, faced with storing and using years of Microsoft Office legacy documents, will prefer OOXML, as OOXML can more faithfully recreate the look and metadata (such as spreadsheet formulas) stored in Microsoft’s binary file formats.

6.       Why does open XML not include macros, scripting, OLE serialisation, and leave so much to be "application-defined"?

Competition between Office Automation suites has always been an important factor in driving much of the innovation that we enjoy in the industry and as users today. The process to standardise OpenXML is a process to standardise the data format, not an application. Standardising the full application would remove the ability for different office applications to compete with each other and slow that pace of innovation.

Macros are a great example of this point. They’re an application behaviour that is unique to Microsoft Office. Macros provide the user with a way of telling the Office Suite what to do with information once it is loaded into memory. Standardising the macro language from Microsoft Office as part of the OpenXML process would force any future applications that implemented the data format to also implement the same macro language. In reality other applications may choose to implement a wide array of other macro or development languages that are more relevant to their own target users. 

7.       Should governments adopt OOXML as a document standard?

 Absolutely. Government use the older binary formats today along with Office Open XML, PDF, HTML, RTF and TXT files. Government, like all customers, choose the best tool for the job and Office Open XML offers them another option. Government is also dealing on a daily basis with Office Open XML documents being sent to them by individuals and businesses and it seems to me that adopting it as a standard makes sense from a purely pragmatic perspective.