Can’t believe it has been 6 months since I posted anything.  No, I haven’t been dead; No, it isn’t that I haven’t been doing anything worthwhile to blog about.  Once again tyranny of the urgent has robbed from the important.  I really feel that blogging is important, but just like exercise and other positive habits, it takes discipline and persistence to maintain it. 

So, I’m adding to my New Years Resolution to blog daily, along with resuming working out daily (maybe I can figure out a way to do them both at the same time :-).  Anyway, as far as writing, I have always been a perfectionist, not wanting to post anything until all of the bugs are out and I’ve proof-read several times.  But, that becomes paralyzing to maintaining a blog and doesn’t provide value to the community.  I’m going to change over to just do short posts and talk about what I do and not worry about not having all the related code cleaned up and working.

So, what have I been up to in the past 6 months.  Here’s a list of what I’ll try to catch up on:

1) Web parts – We did a Collaboration/SOA proof-of-concept project using SharePoint Portal and I got to do a few web parts, a couple of interesting aspects from those that I’ll share.

2) BizTalk/SharePoint integration – This was also a byproduct of the SharePoint Portal project as we included some BizTalk integration including a custom pipeline.

3) Updates to the Generator for Data and Business Objects.  This was a tool that I developed over a year ago that was recently updated to improve the UI.  Although some of what the tool does is addressed by Linq.  There are some components of this that have relevance even in a LInq environment and the principles/approach involved in automating application development are relevant.

4) SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager) Tools: Have developed some custom interfaces to assist with rollout and provide better efficiency to help desk personnel in order to perform specific tasks tied to large-scale operations using SCCM.

5) Radius: Write (actually re-wrote) a Custom Win32 DLL as an extension to Internet Authentication Services (IAS).   This was written in C++.  I’d like to share my experience with this in that I tried to do some of this in managed code using Interop and ran into some insurmountable challenges calling from the unmanaged code.

6) TFS: Workshops around best practices for SSIS and using Team Build with SSIS.  This is still in process.

7) PhD Work: Almost done with my Preliminary proposal and would like to share my approach.  The emphasis is on the value of automated software development and techniques based on relational metadata.

So, stay tuned, little by little I hopefully can start sharing the things that I’ve learned that hopefully have some value for the community.