Venture-Capitals and Innovation....

While taking a look to the new proposals from Tech-Cruch 2008 (http://www.techcrunch50.com/), I've found these as been of great interests.

http://www.yammer.com/ (it's twitter for professional use! that's great to keep track of projects effort!)

http://www.connectivelogic.co.uk/

Ok TechCrunch has been dominated by appliance for MS Table and I give my attention to different kind of stuffes that doesn't means they are better!

It's also interesting that there is so much "gazoline" to find new ideas and that there is a structured approach in looking for that by these conferences organized by VCs and a Major company like MS and Google to leverage the growing of an echosystem around their technologies.

It's different from the technological park that we've in Europe. Great approach. In we've to learn a lot from that!

A funny work environment

I began my professional life quite early when I was 20 years old (...and now I'm 36 sigh) working in C and C++ and getting happy discovering memory leaks and managing pointers... but that's another story!

For the first years very often I was the youngest in the companies I joined and sometimes they seems to be fool giving some small managing duties or customers visits. That was very stressful to me because of my lack of experience and this was considered by me a huge problem. Also I thought that because I was one of youngest I had to compensate appearing as the most serious and concrete guy in the world...

Big mistake! (Or maybe not, I don't know because I cannot change that times..who knows!).

What I learnt during time is that serious and coercive management doesn't pay and create unnecessary stress...

My approach (that I've to say is spontaneous) is leading by example, working with my team and giving also to myself technical assignment (or accepting assignment suggested by colleagues), in this way there isn't predefined hierarchy but just a single and whole team!

In this way you can joke and kid freely (for example when a small error is done by someone) and keep in mind that teaching by kidding of errors is the best approach (people remember things during an emotion and lightly kid with someone provide a positive emotion)...

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about all of this because I'm not sure  if this is a good approach.

Very often we have teams kidding and laughing and, I've to say, we achieve very good results but...it could also be a little bit disorienting (in Italy it's not so common having a funny work environment)

Well, maybe I've found the answer by myself reading some books regarding who the brain working and cognitive engineering (Brain Rules from John Medina and Body Language from Allan and Barbara Pease)

It’s very easy:

• When you truly laugh a lot of endorphin is released in your body...
• Endorphin is very similar to morphine, it increases the heart rate but doesn't stimulate the cortisol generation (which usually is generated with morphine to slow down its effects over brain but having a lot of collateral effects…)
• Increasing the heart rate also the breath rate increase and in this way more oxygen is delivered by blood
• More oxygen in the blood also means more oxygen for the brain and with oxygen the brain works better!

So having a lot of laughs on work environment it's good and it should be a must! ...it's chemically demonstrated!

AIM (Italian Metallurgy Conference) Ferrara 24th-26th September

Just for the italian readers, on friday 26th of the next I'll speak @AIM of Ferrara (http://www.metallurgia-italiana.net/index.php?action=dettaglio_evento&id=18&evid=149).

I'll be engaged in 2 different speeches:

Sunsetting: l’approccio metodologico di TiQ per il revamping dei sistemi di controllo processo di Livello2

Sunsetting is our methodology framework for the migration of legacy process control application to Microsoft .Net leveraging our platform TiQ Steel Platform.

Tracking: localizzazione satellitare veicoli, gestione della logistica di stabilimento

In this session I'll explain a Success Story with Microsoft Italy (http://www.microsoft.com/italy/casi/caso.aspx?uid=586366c2-fdd5-4e2f-900e-7e65cfc757c9) about an integrated system for railways tracking leveraging standard tecnology (GPS, GPRS, DGPS, BizTalk, Flash, ....).

Not the most difficult project in which I was involved but the one with most widely range of technology adopted.

And in the final speech (I think I should jump between the rooms like in Robin Williams dinner in Mrs Doubtfire) with my colleague Luca Erba:

Data-WareHouse: la gestione dei dati di produzione per analizzare la qualità dei prodotti

Here we'll explain how to leverage SQL Server Analysis Service and Sharepoint to define prediction model for quality analysis of steel coils

If anyone will be closer to Ferrara on thursday evening I'll be happy having a dinner together.

Windows Complete Backup over Network

I'm already around Europe with my laptop and my concern are the backup is my laptop was lost or steal.

Each time I'm back at home in Luton, I perform a complete backup of my pc on the server using my wifi network.

The standard Vista user interface doesn't allow you to perform backup to a shared network drive, instead you need to use the wbadmin.exe (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc742083.aspx) command line application.

Use the following script:

wbadmin start backup -backupTarget:\\MyServer\MyShare -allCritical -user:MyDomain\MyNetworkUser -password:MyPersonalPassword
pause

If you have the UAC on, on you must execute the script as Administrator.

For more information take a look to: http://www.techinvasion.net/2007/11/12/vista-complete-pc-backup-to-network-share/

UML Tools

I need to "fetch" my UML skills and I'm looking to some good tools.

I thank Francesco for the following links:

http://www.magicdraw.com/

http://staruml.sourceforge.net/en/

http://argouml.tigris.org/

MagicDraw seems to be better than Rational Rose.

The community edition hasn't reverse engineering or code generation support and it's limited to 20 shapes for diagrams (...but It's good for me, I've just to draw some architectures and explain them).

StarUml is veeeery young but it's growing I'l take a look on it.

ArgoUML I worked and love it and in the past but now it's no more updated. I think that Poseidon is the commercial version of ArgoUML.

Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit v2.0 x86

Just as a personal remark. I haven't yet time to evaluate it...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=263cd480-f6eb-4fa3-9f2e-2d47618505f2&displaylang=en

It's a candidate for the Must Have Tools for any Sharepoint administrator.

The Developers Group London - 08.09.2008

Yesterday, as usually by some times, I went @ The Developers Group to the Reading Microsoft Campus Place (closer to London UK).

It's a very nice place (also if the weather is cloudly) and seems to be in Seattle with different buildings commited to different things (maybe seems to be in Seattle also because the weather conditions more or less are the same...)

  

In yesterday meeting the sessions were:

Overview of Silverlight 2 - Mike Ormond (Microsoft)
In this session we take a look at the sorts of web experiences that can be built with Silverlight 2.
We look at the different scenarios that Silverlight 2 enables and the core capabilities of the platform
for rich web experiences built on .NET. We also take an introductory look at the tooling and frameworks
that developers and designers have available to them for building Silverlight 2 applications.

Remarks by Corrado - Nothing to say. During the session some Silverlight demo have been presented and also some technical integration explanation about VS 2008 was been showed. My personal feeling is that all the effort on Silverlight development isn't on VS2008, XAML etc. but on Blend... You cannot create a "real world" application without Expression Blend and it's not an easy to learn tool... Well you must know the .Net Silverlight fundamental but the effort is on Expression!

 

Delphi 2009, What’s New? - Jon Harrison (Embarcadero)
Jon gives us an overview of the new features in Delphi 2009, including:
- new IDE features
- new and enhanced VCL components
- new DataSnap architecture
- new Unicode support

Remarks by Corrado - Nice platform. Seems to be in VS 2005 (not yet 2008). I've got 2 questions:

• If I was starting from scratch, without any Delphi skill, why should I choose Delphi against VS 2008? What's the added value??
• Is this platform tailored to migration projects? How it could enlarge Embarcadero market? Just with the integration with the DB tools?? 

Navigational Data Access in .NET - Joachim Duerr (Sybase)
Moving from ADO to ADO.NET means changing the view on how to access databases. The ADO.NET
data access model is disconnected and set based, which has advantages, but also disadvantages; all
records of the result set have to be transferred to the client in order to work with the data and
concurrency conflicts can happen when writing changes back to the database. This session shows
how you can develop in .NET but with connected record sets, with actual live data on the workstations
and the ability to lock records in the database to avoid concurrency conflicts.

Remarks by Corrado - The session showed how to create ISAM application leveraging "Advantage Database Server .Net Provider" that is built on ADO.Net extending the features to integrate with Sybase Advantage Server that basically is an ISAM-oriented (!) DBMS.

I agree with the limits of ADO.Net for ISAM oriented application but the limits arise because ADO.NET wasn't create for making ISAM applications...

I'd like to have some more architectural scenario where Sybase Advantage Server could be affordable. I can just think to small booking or crm applications where locking is very important.

 

For the upcoming sessions take a look at http://www.richplum.co.uk/

The next month (on the 15th october in Microsoft Cardinal Place closer to Victoria Station) I'll speak again aboutSharepoint:

Workflow Management
In this session we take a look at the off-the-shelf workflow features of Sharepoint, creating a quick and
easy “no-code” application with Sharepoint Designer and exploring the pros and cons of this approach.
Then we develop another sample application with Visual Studio 2008 and Windows Workflow
Foundation and bind it to a Sharepoint document list, exploring the potential of fine customization.
Windows Workflows Foundation is totally integrated with Sharepoint platform and very complex
application could be created leveraging the Sharepoint object model.