[OT]The VSTS italian team

…just to share my praise to the italian VSTS team (…ok I’m not sure about the group definition). I mean:

• Francesca Longoni
• Lorenzo Barbieri
• Paola Rossetto
• Pasquale Della Torca

(…alphabetically sorted by first name). They’ve closed the year with an excellent and astonishing result!

Their commitment is  great but more important the professionalism and organization is simply perfect. When I worked with them for the italian ALM Day, everything was… like a swiss clock!

I hope to have the opportunity to work again with them!

SQL-Server 2005 BI Studio – Class not registered

If you get this error:

Try to install Office Web Components from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=7287252c-402e-4f72-97a5-e0fd290d4b76&displayLang=en

On my development VM I’ve installed only O2007 getting this error.

Windows 7 – Upgrading from BETA to RC, it worked!

It’s a couple of weeks that I’m receiving a notification ad every boot of my Windows 7 RC Laptop reminding me to backup data because it will expires in july without providing me the opportunity to recover data and application.

I’ve just planned 2 day to reinstall everything but thanks to my friend AndreaR (the cyborg) I used this article to upgrade.

Recap:

• Get a Win 7 RC copy from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx
• Unzip it to an external disk (a USB key is fine)
• Open the file .\sources\cversion
• Change from MinClient=7x00.0 to MinClient=7000.0
• Launch .\setup.exe and the upgrade

I know, it’s the “italian way” very pragmatic. I guess that upgraded process hasn’t been fully tested so that it has blocked by MS.

In my case it worked great (it took a couple of hours to be completed)

ANIPLA 2009 – Naples

On 19th June I had the opportunity to speak at Federico II University of Naples (Italy) to the italian national conference on Intelligent Manufacturing.

My speech was again about BAM (Business Activity Monitor) on industrial plant and it has been co-authored with Enzo Maria Tieghi from ServiTecno our partner providing us with GE Fanuc SCADA solutions.

The presentation is available here:

• PowerPoint Old Format Slide-Show
• Open Office

PS: …I was forgetting to suggest  to avoid “Oste Pazzo” restaurant at Borgo Marinari in Naples. Expect from them a huge bill depending from your home town and a meal quality that is the same of a low level restaurant in Milan. Do you know the worst things about touristic restaurant? Well, you can find them there.

IBA-Day 2009 & DDG May Meeting Follow-Up

My company has been invited to present a project developed for an Hot-Rolling-Table for a new furnace at IBA Day 2009.

I was the speaker but I’ve just presented the great job of my colleagues Eros Valzasina and Chiara Susca.

The challenges of the project were:

• How to integrate the Hot-Rolling-Table logic implemented on Siemens MMC with the new S7 PLC?
• How the system can be tested running it in parallel with the previous one (we know very well this topic for level 2 application, but this was the first time we applied our “Sunsetting” to Level 1;
• Is it possible to deliver a Level 1 PCS with a low-cost Wintel hardware using IBA technologies?

Obviously if we were invited to IBA Day, the answer is yes to all of the question…

To know how, the presentation is here:

• PowerPoint Old Format Slide-Show
• Open Office

Yesterday I also attended to may meeting of London .Net User Group

There has been a great Battle of the WEB contest (great idea from Jason Chapman) where in a 35 mins for each speaker, different Content Managed platform and approach have been presented.

Obviously I’ve talked about Sharepoint but my battle has been a Waterloo…

My demo server with MOSS and WSS runs out of ADSL so that I talked about Content Management using the italian intranet running on WSS…

I’ve to be grateful to BT for this…

Anyway presentation is here:

• PowerPoint Old Format Slide-Show
• Open Office

AISTech 2009

For my company AISTech (America Iron and Steel Technology institute) is “the event” and until now we’ve 7 papers (and 7 sessions) about projects we’ve delivered on metal market.

This year we’re also exhibitor and you can find our stand on the aisle 2900.

In the past days I’ve took some sessions:

• “Computer Applications - Level 1 & 2 Control Systems and Migration” was driven by Andy Szabo from ArcelorMittal and from my friend Wlodzimierz Filipczyk (the most skilled person about level 1 and level 2 systems on steel market I’ve ever meet).
  My session was about our methodological approach and the framework in leveraging data and information available from basic automation and PCS to provide high-level business information and also how to downsize unflexible level 3 functions to level 2 systems. Presentation is here.
  About the technical stuff the involved platform are Sharepoint, Reporting Services, .Net and Analysis Services.
• “Cranes - Crane Technology I” track where I’ve spoken about a project that we’re delivering to mananage an automatic slab yard. Our system leverage an optimizer platform providing simulation, trend analysis and hot-roll mill scheduling accordingly to different policy. Presentation is here.
  We’re developing this project leveraging IBM ILog platform, using .Net for integration and WPF for the Front-End. We’ve also to deal with TMEIC-GE software to manage overhead cranes mission control.
• “Electrical Applications - Updating Electrical Applications for Continuous Improvements” track where we explained how we’re using our “Sunsetting” approach in rewriting a Level 2 PCS to manage the power distribution of an 11 milion tons steel maker plant.
  The news in this project is that we’re using Microsoft OSLO (a Domain Specific Language) to express the relationship between the component of power switches network. Presentation is here.

Reporting Services 2005, 2008 and more…

I was getting mad in configuring our internal report servers exposing them to internet on https using our CA.

Everything was ok using the reporting services web-server (I was able to navigate and invoke all the reports) but it was impossible having the report manager application working.

The problem was that the DNS names (obviously) were different from netbios name and I’ve found this article that solved my problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

This is gold!

What is surprising is that in any real world scenario you will find a DNS name different from the internal, why I need to hack the registry to deploy my configuration?!

PS: Remember to restart IISAdminService, an iisreset isn’t enough!