Attended Cloud Camp PDX today.  Great overall conversation, with a lot of familiar faces & people of the Portland brain trust participating.

The conference started off with a large group gathering in the main cafeteria room.  There was an unpanel put together with a few cloud gurus.  After a round of questions the main sessions where laid out and everyone started out to the break out session.  Open session conference topics ranges from couchdb to cloud security, to the glorious tips and tricks of Amazon.  Overall a great bunch of discussions really breaking down what a cloud is and what a cloud does.

Overall a lot of fun, great food, and good people with great minds.  One has to love to Portland tech scene.  If there was ever a reason for a company to locate in Portland, this room full of talent discussing the bleeding edge of technology is a prime reason.

After that we all broke into second set sessions.  I went to the "Is Cloud Computing a return to the time share, maintenance model, and what does that mean?".  I have to say, I don't think it will ever be an honest return to truly dumb terminals and server focus, it will continue to be mixed.

That was it for me, being the host I had cleanup and such, so hope all had fun.  I had a blast as I tend to at nerd events.  All in all, a good day.

Alright, alright, I'm learning it already?

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While working through some of the Excel scenarios lately I've come upon some more ways to test Excel.

Create an Excel Application instance with the default workbook.  Doing this will drastically speed up your tests.  Do this in the fixture setup & assign it to a property of the test class.  This way, no more startup and tear down of the Excel object for each test.

public Application ExcelApplication { get; set; }

[TestFixtureSetUp]

public void CreateExcelAppAppropriately()

{

    ExcelApplication = new Application();

    ExcelApplication.Workbooks.Add(Type.Missing);

    ExcelApplication.Visible = true;

}

That will give you a good kick start when you end up with a few dozen or more tests.  Starting up and killing the Excel Instance on each test can be brutal in overall performance.  For the shutdown of the tests, as long as you have clean code and don?t have odd Excel threads or something running off everywhere, the fixture shutdown can be as simple as below.

        [TestFixtureTearDown]

        public void QuitExcelAppAppropriately()

        {

            foreach (Workbook workbook in ExcelApplication.Workbooks)

            {

                workbook.Close(false, false, Type.Missing);

            }

            ExcelApplication.Quit();

        }

One other thing I like to do is add a boolean value that sets the Excel instance to stay visible and not close after the tests.  I create a private bool and then set it in any test I?m currently working with.  When I?m done I just remove the assignment and let it default to false.  This way the Excel instance doesn?t stay open for the build & tests on the build server.

private bool reviewExcelPostTests;

[TestFixtureTearDown]

public void QuitExcelAppAppropriately()

{

    if (reviewExcelPostTests)

        return;

    foreach (Workbook workbook in ExcelApplication.Workbooks)

    {

        workbook.Close(false, false, Type.Missing);

    }

    ExcelApplication.Quit();

}

That's it for my Excel tips today, I'll have some more coming in the near future.

Well, Oracle is officially tossed into the trash bin of providers in .NET 4.0.  That?s fine by me, I've not seen an Oracle installation in about 8 years and don?t really care to.  Between SQL Server and all the other top notch options, not really sure why anyone needs Oracle anyway.  Aside from that a lot of my work has been for highly distributed web applications that decimate RDBMSs anyway.  Alternatives where needed, and relational data just doesn?t cut it a lot of the time once scale achieves a certain level.

In other news, will VB survive?  That is a good questions?  Do I care?  No, not really.  I don't really have anything against the language, but don't have anything for it either.  With what has been wrecked and wrought over the years because of that language, I'm perfectly content to wave it farewell - BUT - alas Lisa Feigenbaum the PM in .NET Managed Languages Group assures us that it does have a life.

In other news, it is time to call it a day and head out for some brew and entertainment.

I've been working on some ActionScript code for work related projects, and was really hoping that I could get a Flex Builder 3 and Flash CS4 License purchased for ongoing use.  The Adobe tools & frameworks are really pretty sweet.  So with ongoing efforts continuing with the Adobe Tools/Codez the decision was made to purchase the tools.  I'm stoked, and looking forward to more ActionScript work and getting to figure out this framework stack.

When creating an Excel Application there are some things to keep in mind.  Recently I was creating some tests, which I'm not sure if they'd be "unit test", but they do test Excel.  I created a fixture setup and a fixture tear down that would create my Excel Application object that I?d want to test again.  The code I ended up with is shown below.

[TestFixture]

public class ConnectionManagement

{

    public Application ExcelApplication { get; set; } 

    [TestFixtureSetUp]

    public void CreateExcelAppAppropriately()

    {

        ExcelApplication = new Application();

        ExcelApplication.Workbooks.Add(Type.Missing);

    }

    [TestFixtureTearDown]

    public void QuitExcelAppAppropriately()

    {

        foreach(Workbook workbook in ExcelApplication.Workbooks)

        {

            workbook.Close(false, false, Type.Missing);

        }

        ExcelApplication.Quit();

    }   

}

Now if anyone has a better idea on how to test Excel and knowing the code will work against the actual Excel Application, PLEASE, let me know as this doesn't feel like the best way to do this.  I keep getting the sinking suspicion that there should be a better way to test Excel Application Addins, Spreadsheet code and such.

Customer:  If we could understand the difference between these numbers, the gulf so to speak, we'd be able to make choise based on them.

Dilberty:  The difference is 3%.

Customer:  Yeah, but if we could really understand the difference, the decision making enablement would greatly empower our business.

Dilberty:  Wait, the difference is 3%, it is accurate, you can make a decision based on a 3% difference.

Customer:  We really need to understand these numbers though.

Dilberty:  ?!?!!?@?@#$!%(!$&%^(!#$@!?$!??!?!  What?

I've started ramping hard core of Adobe's suite of products.  There are numerous reasons why, but I won't bore anyone or myself.  The cool thing is the technologies that Adobe has created.  I started to write up a description but I found this video which describes the differences between Flash & Flex Development Environments, and the difference between Flash and AIR.

This player, unto itself is rather awesome, I really dig it.

The second thing I?ve started reading through is the Inside RIA Entries.  This is a valuable knowledge base from actual bloggers and users of these Adobe toolsets.

As I'm going through all of this material I'll post more of the information I'm accumulating.

On a side note from the market perspective, Microsoft really needs to bulk up against the competition, Adobe has some amazing products that really are years ahead of the competition for developing well thought out and usable user interfaces and designs in general.

[Rant On]

I went to re-download a video I had purchased, Casino Royal, and realized after some searching that I couldn't.  I have purchased music, video, and other content on the Internet before and this is the FIRST time ever that a recoverable solution wasn't provided.  Not only does Apple not provide movie downloads for the same content you?ve bought, they offer some second downloads on other things, let you download apps multiple times, and in certain circumstances might let you do this or that.  Needless to say, for a company that is supposed to keep it simple, that is the WORSE UX (user experience) and mismanaged business logic that simply, I wouldn't have expected from Apple.

I've been contemplating getting an Apple PC for a while now.  With this policy, I'm not sure I want to.  What other ways does Apple jack somebody for hard earned cash?  I also started contemplating getting an IPhone for personal use, but just realized that IPhones operate like Windows 3.11, they pretend to be multi-tasking but they aren't.  Every time I'm trying to listen to music I get interrupted by text messaging or something.  VERY annoying.

In addition to these two silly little things, the new Windows Mobile doesn't look or perform too bad.  Guess what else, I can have two apps running at one time!  OMG are u serious!  Yes, hell, I can even run 3 or 10 apps.  I guess MS developed the OS for real business use, and that usually requires the ability to do multiple things.  Sure, Windows Mobile is still rough around the edges, but it in my opinion is gaining pretty fast and already has some unique advantages.

Don't even get me started on the Blackberry Business Leader.  The functionality on it along with the fun of apps like Pandora really don't leave anyone reasons to switch from Blackberry over to IPhone.

Between bad purchase policies, betting you'll just leave whopping backups of your crap everywhere on all those extra drives and tapes people always buy (NOT) Apple is making some rather huge mistakes.

But this is why, Apple has been a 2-bit player in the competition between Apple & Microsoft for a LONG time.  Apple is by far more monopolistic, with bad business practice, and other concerns all because they expect their users to ?not think about using the computer? mess.  Bad idea.

I'll be sticking to Vista reluctantly after these two divisive observations and getting screwed out of my $15 bucks for Casino Royal.  BTW Apple, no, I'm not reading your stupid 8 gazillion page EULA about movie purchases, if I can't download what I've bought before ? and I'm buying a single time download ? it really should be a little more obvious.

Then of course, I guess I'm used to the Internet that has choices, with my options being my choice versus handed to me.

Thanks Apple, I'll keep my choices with more computing power and more options, more applications, more games, and *gasp* more hardware.

[Rant Off]

Fini.