Yesterday Dan posted on his experiences getting a grid running behind SharePoint with Excel 2007.
It turns out that it is remarkable easy if you use the Digipede Network.
Check it out: West Coast Grid: Putting a grid behind Excel 2007.
Good job, Dan.
Tags: .NET, CCS, Digipede, Office2007, SharePoint
I was at the Users in Charge session of BloggerCon IV the other day led by Chris Pirillo (Dan Farber has a good write up here). Good topic, though I had hoped it was going to be more about how users can insert themselves into product development versus how it turned out: (mostly) complaining about specific applications / hardware. As a developer I was supposed to sit quietly and listen . . .
Anyway, in the spirit of that session, here is something that really drives me crazy: I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The company that sells this is Nuance. They sell some other products. I don’t want them. I don’t want emails from them about these other products, but I do want upgrade information for Dragon. It appears that I have to get emails about all of their products to learn about upgrades. Not so uncommon, but annoying.
I have easily seen 100 of these emails over the years. Certainly irritating, but not that big a deal. I don’t bridle at this like some do. Apparently this isn’t enough though, they have integrated these offers into the Dragon self-update feature. So every once in a while I get a dialog box that pops up. Presumably, it is checking for updates (i.e., bug fixes) for NaturallySpeaking. Even when it doesn’t find any, it tries to sell me other products.
Can I update without self-update? No, that isn’t actually possible. Can I turn off the promotions in self-update? I can’t figure it out.
What does the user-in-charge do? Complain, certainly. Stop using the product? Not upgrade next time? Maybe.
Dan, Director of Products at Digipede, was interviewed on .NET Rocks a couple weeks ago. It looks like it went live yesterday. Check it out here: Dan Ciruli on Grid Computing.
I haven’t heard it yet . . . I wonder if he explains his push-up challenge.
Previously, I asked Vista Beta 2 — Install it?
I just came from the Microsoft ISV CTO Summit (and before that a Vista Partner Opportunity day). They were throwing Vistas at me.
I couldn’t resist, so I installed Vista Beta 2 on Sunday morning. Ran into this:
It is the last one that stopped me. I can fix the problem (and will have to eventually), but I just don’t have the bandwidth to work through this and the next 20 issues that come up. This morning, I restored XP SP2. Ghost rocks and I’m back to work.
I’m kind of down about it because I would like to support the Vista beta to help make it better. Well, I can’t do it this time.
The good news is that this was just a big background task and didn’t impact anything I needed to do.
Read J. LeRoy’s great post on IM, titled Infuriating Messenger 2.0 — he has some great rules about IM. We (mostly) all ascribe to reasonable telephone and email etiquette, but for IM? It is all over the map. This makes me think about a couple of things about these 3 mediums:
What I like about email? One thing I like about IM is that it speeds up the asynchronous
And Jim admits that we are first cousins. That’s his story . . . 😉
A busy week, but I made it.
The first session (that I saw) this morning was led by Phil Torrone. People giving / talking about tools. Many questions about how to do specific things and what tricks people have to get it done (regarding blogging and podcasting). Clearly this stuff is still too hard.
Now (OK — two hours ago), Jay Rosen on Citizen Journalism. Very good topic / question: how do we do “users know more” journalism?
This is often mapped into “open source” journalism. One person suggests it needs a new name to help with the constant argument of “what is journalism?” Not a bad idea. I don’t like the term “open source journalism” because of the double meaning of the word “source”. “Users know more” doesn’t mean that the source of a story (e.g., an involved party) is “open”.
People are struggling (and Jay Rosen) has to keep bringing people back to the topic: how to do “users know more” journalism. I understand that after the talk he said that none of his questions were answered.
An interesting discussion just the same.
Tags: BloggerCon, BloggerConIV
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Microsoft ISV CTO Summit. While little of the content is new to me, the opportunity to meet with Microsoft product folk as well as network with other CTOs has been well worth the trip. Every CTO I have talked to at this event is very qualified, though some are more deeply knowledgeable about the newest Microsoft technologies. As a result, it is a challenge for Microsoft at these kinds of events to provide the right level of information for everyone.
Considering this, they have done a very good job.
Anyway, aside from the content, I planned to make the most out of trip to Seattle by connecting with some people outside of the Summit. And aside from a false start — a missing mystery guest — have a good trip so far. Among other people I’ve met with, I:
So far, so good.
This afternoon I will fly up to Seattle for the Microsoft ISV CTO Summit. I hope that this is more than just an opportunity for Microsoft to market to CTOs. I am hopeful that it will be more since (I believe) that most of the content at this event is under NDA.
Tonight I will be having dinner with J. LeRoy and, I think, one guest to be named later.
The Concurrency and Coordination Runtime have been released. You can find it here, as a part of the new Microsoft Robotics Studio.
I gave my take on the significance of the CCR when the Channel 9 video was posted (see
CCR SDK and more benefits to .NET with links to the Microsoft content).
I keep a list of topics into which I plan to do a “deep dive”. The CCR just got bumped to the top of my list.
I attended the Windows Vista Partner Marketing Day yesterday. This is the formal kickoff coordinating worldwide launch events with partners. This is another way that Microsoft is doing a good job engaging its partners — and an indication that this will be a very big launch. Yesterday they demonstrated many features of Vista — I have seen a lot of this before, but I have to say: It all looks really cool.
I left there with a copy of beta 2 on DVD. I have avoided downloading it as I don’t have the time to install it and really use it. From my perspective, there is no real value in my just installing it somewhere — I need to install it on my main laptop. Of course this isn’t recommended.
But now that I have the beta, it is just begging me to install it . . .
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