If you are consultant like me, then it is very important to understand “magic” of communication. I found one nice place to read about interpersonal skills: http://sourcesofinsight.com/2009/05/25/top-10-lessons-learned-in-interpersonal-skills/ What I would like to stress is one topic: LISTEN For myself I noted that often I think that I understood the problem and start talking (yeap, the next day I understand how I …) about my understanding, which is sometimes absolutely wrong.

Ok, I’ve decided to start new category: Living in HD. This is because I’ve recently bought a Canon HF100 camera as a replacement for my old Sony DV camcorder. I did it mainly because those “low” quality movies I’ve done with Sony look quite ugly on LCD TV capable showing 720p. And the tapes, those tapes. I hated copying them to computer at the filming speed. So, here I am, a person that owns pretty decent consumer camcorder and doesn’t know almost anything about making the HD movies.

Lets presume that you have a 3rd party application that just runs a query against the SQL Server. You see in the profiler that the query does not performs well and can see the way to optimize the query, however it is the 3rd party application. Is it a dead-end or still there are chances to do something about it? Very nice article here (in Russian language) P.S. It is also quite funny to read as long as you know Russian language well :)

Today I did received an e-mail from MSDN and found a real nice thing there. If you attend the intructor-led course about SQL Server, you’ll get SQL Server 2008 with single CAL for free. More details here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/sql/2008/offer/default.mspx Nice

Security is always A topic, because you have to maintain multiple gates. IIS and WCF is a good example of that. When you want to configure security settings for WCF - you’ll have to change the web.config file appropriately and … most probably the IIS configuration as well. This post will serve me as a reminder as well on what I have to do in order to achieve the necessary results.

For those who are interested in SkyDrive - it is available in Lithuania as well (you should check though). So, if you’re interested in storing and sharing files on the internet - skydrive is an option. Please, visit the http://skydrive.live.com to sign-up.

BizTalk best practices analyzer 1.1 was released with couple updates. The link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDA047E3-408E-48BA-83F9-F397226CD6D4&displaylang=en Keep up to date with BizTalk operations guide: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5251f103-329d-4f8d-95b5-64f99f2f6dfc&DisplayLang=en And finally, I found this one today and I am quite happy with the finding: http://www.codeplex.com/bud. It is a BizUnit designer or in other words GUI for setting up BizUnit test scenarios.

This week we had a local user group meeting, where I was giving a presentation about BizTalk development and deployment automation. The main idea for the presentation was that there are a lot of options to do the automation. As a sample cases I took these two scenarios: Automating BizTalk solution build using MSBuild Automating BizTalk deployment using PowerShell I have uploaded my presentation and sample scripts to SkyDrive. In the zip file you will find presentation and sample scripts:

If you’ll notice, BizTalk Operations Guide was released to public. Check these links: http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/a/d/aad035e6-e03b-4bea-ad9a-fa1ff8d10ca0/BTS06R2_OpReadiness.docx http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/a/d/aad035e6-e03b-4bea-ad9a-fa1ff8d10ca0/BTS06R2_OpReadiness.exe http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/a/d/aad035e6-e03b-4bea-ad9a-fa1ff8d10ca0/BTS06R2_OpReadiness.pdf The .exe file contains compressed HTM help file (.chm), which is quite useful for TOC and search features.

Yes, I have bought WHS and installed it myself on a PC I have used during the beta testing period. And finally, WHS did what is supposed to do. Helped me to recover the broken computer. The story short: One day WHS icon popped up with yellow message like “your wife’s computer wasn’t backed up for couple of days”. Single click deeper revealed message like “unable to read disk C”. chkdsk /r /f (check disk command line option, by the way, suggested by the WHS) reveals quite a bunch of bad blocks Tried to backup once more, no luck … some more bad blocks come in :( Next day I bought in the local shop new disk for her laptop (a bit bigger of course), replaced and booted from WHS computer recovery CD Few answers to questions: the language settings, WHS password, the computer to restore Selected last successful backup to restore Waited for ~40minutes (could be a bit faster, but the another computer started backup in the evening or … night … well, you know) Restart and … Like it hasn’t been broken Hopefully, I will not need to repeat the procedure with any of the home computers soon, but … IT WORKED, when the things went wrong :D