Brian H. Madsen

At the beginning of each year i sit down and try to knot out what i feel worth spending time on for the coming year. 2011 being a new year got that same treatment.

I’ve found that this leaves less time wasted and categorise my efforst into three main groups.

Major, Minor and AdHoc..

What i do is i take large (Major) targets, such as learning a new framework, achieving something (like a promotion, getting certified in X, not shooting the dog) and allocate a timeframe to it.

Say for instance MVC 3.

ok, i’m fairly up to speed with MVC 2, but it’s a new version so i try to give it a Major ranking.
Since the year has 12 months the more “Major” targets i add, the less time i have for it. But the year is divided equally (basic math here, 4 “Major” targets == 3 months to learn each..12 “Major” targets…well…get back to me on that one). So since MVC 3 is one of my “Major” targets for this year we start out with 12 months for it (it’s the first and highest priority at the moment).

“Minor” targets are in weekly increments but cannot exceed more than what 1 single “Major” target has allocated (otherwise i’d be a “Major” right).

“AdHoc” targets are daily summaries – such as blogging, tweeting, attending an event – they’re small 1 day targets only and cannot exceed more than a “Minor” target (makes sense?).

So, question now is, what’s your “Major” and “Minor” targets for this year? or haven’t you thought about this yet (tick tock tick tock…that’s the sound of your time running out)?

LIDNUG is now an open group – What does this mean? well, for all sense and purposes LIDNUG will continue to be the #1 spot for .Net.

This was a feature that was introduced a little while back by LinkedIn – It used to be so that all group discussions were closed and only accessible by members. This meant that if you had a great discussion going, or saw somebody else who had a good one going, that you really couldn’t link to it via twitter and/or blogs/forums etc. The problem always was that LI would annoyingly ask you to log in first – and then once you’d logged in you didn’t get redirected on to the discussion you wanted to read in the first place. That’s all been fixed now tho – can link directly to discussions in the group and people will be able to access them.

The differences are:

a) old discussions are now archived and only available to previous members. (this was done so that privacy policies were still kept a priority)Â
b) new discussions can be read and linked to by the general public – even non-LinkedIn members.
c) in order to post a discussion or comment you still have to be a group member.

So as you can see, nothing major has changed – we thought that with the absolutely fantastic discussions we have from you, the members, it’d be a shame to withhold this from other people.

So, welcome to a new chapter of LIDNUG – this is 2011!

LIDNUG: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=43315

How extremely convenient – Scott Guthrie (i’m sure his new nickname should be Megamind) has just put up links to his “Best of 2010″. All neatly categorised for us!

Been through most of the links so far and i have to admit i agree with him. One comment on his entry states “Scott, you are a mini-MSDN to us”. Well, that is almost as accurate a description as is possible.

Definitely worth a re-read of some of the older posts – also noticed that there’s a few I hadn’t read yet (????).

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/12/31/links-to-my-best-of-2010-posts.aspx

Since i left the army back in the 90′s and taken on a full-time desk job (IT Consultant) I must admit that i’ve gotten a little soft around the edges.

In my defense i’m a lazy shit – yes, that’s a defense because it’s obviously the truth. That is however changing and one of the things i’m doing these days is to take my young Rottweiler puppy with me on a nightly walk.

And, to say that the lazyness is being shelved, i’ve kept the walks up over the christmas period where i had 3 weeks off to enjoy the festive season.

In those three week i doubt i missed more than 3 walks – hell i even walked the dog on New Years Eve as we got home from the party – that was around 1:30am.

So i’m quite serious about actually shedding some of this “softness” and i’m sure it’ll help.

I want to do more – but i do have to be a bit careful as i have a dodgy knee (had a knee reconstruction done when i was younger) and the extra weight isn’t helping things. So, as soon as i’ve gotten rid of a bit of the excess then i’ll be taking on more active..errr..activities.

Not quite sure yet – i’m not a “sporty” person by aussie standards – that’s to say i don’t enjoy the typical aussie sports (Footy or Cricket) but i’m sure i’ll find something else.

Always wanted to take up some sort of martial arts – but am unsure as to what i’ll be picking – i know i don’t want an “aggressive” art..i’m plenty aggressive as it is and i don’t think it’d be a good idea to pick something that would errr…enhance that. We’ll see.

So, the nightly walk is approx. 4.71km long and i must admit, i’m probably enjoying it as much as the dog is now as well.This is the route I drag Rosie around on.

So far there’s 15 confirmed fatal casualties, with 61 people still unaccounted for, from the Queensland floods this week and 75% of Queensland has been declared a natural disaster area.

We already have federal and corporate support and thousands of private residents has either generously donated their time or their financial support.

Financial support for the flood victims has raised $54,636,576 as of the 14th of January 10am.

Microsoft put the call out for businesses in need of disaster storage for their data earlier this week.

Catherine Eibner announced on her blog the initiative to provide Azure storage for those in and around Brisbane

Parts of the Australian MVP community has also come together to offer their services to businesses affected by the floods – Queensland IT Flood Relief Program.

The Queensland Flood IT relief team is a group of volunteers who are collecting spare PC’s, printers, servers, from companies all across Australia. We will then service, and rebuild them with an aim to send them to people in Queensland who need the support to get started.

So what can you do to help?

Contact the QLD IT Flood Relief via email or phone (02 8003 7213) if you can either:

• Provide transport for equipment from NSW to QLD

Donate some of the following:

• Computers – PC, Macs, Laptops etc
• Servers or networking equipment
• Spare parts – cases, hard drives, memory, cables etc
• Printers
• Phones/PBX systems
• Tools (screwdrivers etc)
• Software
• or anything else IT related that you can come up with – all help is gratefully apprecitated.

The guys also need hands on deck to help assemble the computers et al.

Please link to this blog post, the QLD IT Flood Relief Program (http://www.qlditrelief.org/)  and help spread the word (twitter is a good start – nudge nudge wink wink).

Please note that the QLD IT Flood Relief cannot accept financial donations – please donate directly to the QLD Flood Relief Fund instead.

Update: The community is already getting behind this initiative – a very good friend of mine, Mike Hopgood, is already helping organise things from Brisbane (He’s a local IT Pro guy). Thanks Mike! Appreciate your support!

This is exciting times indeed – first we had theannouncement that NuGet, WebMatrix and ASP.Net MVC 3 was being released this week – but now we also had the news come out that Project Orchard hit version 1.

Orchard is community driven project, aimed at creating reusable components for the ASP.Net platform and there’s some stars involved with this project for sure so here’s a shout-out to all of those who’s put their backs into this project:

• Michael Bach- Program Manager
• Bertrand Le Roy – Program Manager
• Bradley Millington – Engineering Lead
• Renaud Paquay – Development Lead
• Erik Porter – Developer
• Dave Reed - Developer
• Sebastian Ros – Developer
• Jonathan Wall - UX Designer
• Suha Can – Developer
• Louis DeJardin – Developer
• Nathan Heskew - Developer

(if i missed any, then i apologise profusely in advance – feel free to ping me name, role and URL to anybody left out and I’ll update the list).

There’s a ton of modules already written for Orchard as well as some themes.

Orchard is also appearing in the Microsoft Web Application Gallery (http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery) and can be installed via the Web Platform Installer (http://www.microsoft.com/web/platform/default.aspx).

Get yourself a free 30-day pass to Windows Azure and SQL Azure:

Site: http://www.windowsazurepass.com/
Promo code: MPR001

Over the recent week, business and residents in the Brisbane area has been hit by a massive flood – this has seen 10 people lose their lives already (of those 10, 5 were children) – and everybody are putting in their bit to help where they can.

It’s times like these where we really see what community is all about…

Catherine Eibner came up with an idea to help out the businesses in Brisbane which were not only being hit hard now, but are likely to be hit even harder once business starts up again. One of the things that is of the upmost importance to their business is data..pure and simple..and not every business out there are capable of having a fully redundant enterprise storage solution available to them. Maybe they’re not even hosting their own data, but are relying on service providers in Brisbane to store their data. Since it’s highly likely that data centres will be hit just as massively (100,000 homes were scheduled to loose power, for how long nobody knows) when the power outages are coming, chances are (however slim, do you really want to risk it?) that they may also be affected.

So, the solution Catherine came up with was to provide Brisbane businesses temporary storage on the Windows Azure platform – for free!!!

You’re no doubt aware of the extreme flooding that has been occurring throughout Queensland and now encroaching upon Brisbane CBD.

Our own car park in downtown Brisbane is under water…

Microsoft is helping through government infrastructure support, temporary software licenses/online services access, and facilitating donations & volunteering.

One effort where we’re hoping to enlist your support is in helping small/medium businesses back up their data (server loss could be catastrophic for a small business).  I know when I had my business, I didn’t have the data redundancies in place to cope with something of this magnitude. Hopefully – in using the infrastructure that Microsoft has available, we can help prevent this for some of the businesses effected by the floods.

We’re proposing a very simple approach: backing up files to a local virtual hard disk and uploading those files into Windows Azure storage.  This is not designed to provide application-level services and is only meant to be short term storage (accounts expire in 30 days).  However, it could provide the data backup solution your customers need in this time of crisis.  Note: the Azure accounts we’ve secured carry no guaranteed SLA or data liability (and you’re not permitted to charge for these Azure account resources).

For more information about this offering, please read through Catherine’s blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ceibner/archive/2011/01/13/azure-disaster-recovery-storage-offered-for-brisbane-businesses.aspx.

So if you or your clients are in need of some disaster storage assistance, read through that post on how to quickly get up and running…

You know those famous last words?

It’ll never happen to me

Well, are you or your clients prepared to risk it?

Big thanks to Catherine Eibner, Microsoft and those involved with making this offer available..

In all honesty, LINQ is a brilliant addition to the .Net framework – and it’s a breeze to work with…well..sometimes.

it’s those times you think “Man, it would be really nice if we had a great tool to help me out here”…

Enter Stage Left – LINQPad – i cannot praise this application enough and i’m sure many of my friends are tired of hearing me throw a “you should see what i did in LINQPad today” over a beer (ok, i’m admittedly a geek…).

You may also think that you only use LINQ a little bit…well that’s because you’re not using LINQPad folks!

The author of LINQPad is Joe Albahari, C# MVP Extraordinaire!

Wow – i knew 2011 was going to be a cool year and already in January we’ll be seeing a few cool things released by the ASP.Net team!

Both WebMatrix, ASP.Net MVC 3 and NuGet are being launched on the 13th of January, 2011 – all will be revealed in full at CodeMash and you can see the live stream (probably using that awesome Silverlight stuff again eh!).

And of course, this is good news because CodeMash sold out back in October already!

The stream starts at 12:30pm EST….now, i wont say i’m jealous…ok, i am..more than 100 sessions of pure geeky developer goodness! what would it take to get something like that running in Australia i wonder? Needless to say, the guys behind CodeMash has done a phenomenal job at getting this organised! Hats off for you fellas!