BTW, speaking of TechEd 2005, we’re currently inviting potential presenters to submit proposals to speak. Norman is taking over ownership of the Architecture track, but I’m still responsible for technical content and community for the track. If you’re interested in presenting at TechEd on any topic, head over to the TechEd 2005 Call For Papers website. Proposals are due by the end of December.

Since Norman joined the team a few months ago, I’m no longer in firefighter mode. For about six months my team was short a marketing manager and I ended up picking up a bunch of extra duties. For example, I took over as TechEd architect track owner when out previous marketing manager left. I don’t know much about marketing, but I guess I did OK – I received a Marketing Impact Award for my work on TechEd. However, I’m very happy to have handed those marketing responsibilities back to their rightful owner. Even still, Norman is trying to educate me about marketing. He made me read the first two chapters of Building Strong Brands by David Aaker. I actually got thru the first three chapters before borrowing Birth of the Chaordic Age by Dee Hock from my father at Thanksgiving.

You would think that I would now have more time for blogging, but alas that has not been the case. When I was firefighting, I had no time for planning. Now, of course, I do. So between planning and thanksgiving vacation I’ve just been too busy to blog much.

One thing I’m getting into recently is SQL Service Broker. I’m working on an interesting community project that is building on top of SSB. Luckily, one of the primary architects of SSB sits down the hall from me. Of course, not everyone is so lucky, so watch this space as I dig deeper on SSB. A good place to start is the SSB First Look article. In order to start getting a handle on SSB, I ported the Hello World example from that article from T-SQL to C#. It’s a bit tricky, as there is no SSB-specific framework – you just use SqlCommand to execute SSB commands like BEGIN DIALOG and RECEIVE – but otherwise it’s pretty straightforward. My sample also demonstrates using the new SQL Management Objects to create databases and SSB related objects (message types, contracts, queues and services). Here’s the code – enjoy.

My pal Chris started a blog over the weekend - I’ve been bugging him to do so for quite a while. I’ve know Chris for several years – he used to be an officer in a company that I helped migrate over to .NET. The company got sold, but Chris hasn’t blogged what he does now so I’m not going to spoil the surprise (hint – he did blog about automatic external defibrillators).

So far, Chris is doing a lot of ranting – his favorite pub in Edmonton (which I’ve been to), Amazon Theater, and reselling livestrong bracelets. Personally, I think it’s funny that Chris can build a wearyellow livestrong flair for his blog template, but he hasn’t built an XML flair that points to his syndication feed.

Chop busting aside, I’m glad to see Chris posting. When I first met Chris, I was transitioning from consultant to technical sales, and I’ve learned a bunch from Chris about how business works that has come in very handy now that I work with architects. Chris, can’t wait to see more from you. But when are you coming to Seattle for a visit?