WCF and SOA

There is a book soon to be available from Apress,
Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation
May be worth a read, its on my shopping list.

Standardizing SOA

Standards for SOA development

Those damn ports !!!!

For all those Skype users out there, be warned that Skype can use port 80/443 on your local machine, so if you are looking to also run IIS on your box, then you will need to either use a different port for IIS, or change the port being used by Skype.  I just wasted several hours on this one !!!!! ( W3SVC Event Id 115 ), EventID will be used again I am sure, as this is the site that gave me the heads up regarding Skype.

Office 7 !!!!!

I have been using Office 7 for a while now, and have to make a comment on the new UI.  I hate it, and for one very big reason, I had to re-learn how to the navigate the environment.  Why did microsoft see the need to radically change the look and feel of the application, this will, I am sure, alienate many users?  Scratch below the UI surface, and there are many new features like the Document Workflow, that are pretty interesting, tighter integration with SharePoint and the new Excel Services, also add to the upgraded product.  Even with the new feature sets, the UI has left me with a very bad taste, I am sure that I will get over this, as Microsoft will expect the masses to do as well.

Ref : Re-Aligning Projects

With the ever increasing demand for quality software, delivered quicker, long gone are the days of 6 month deliverables, the business moves too quickly for those timeframes to be acceptable.  There are still some die hard fans of the 6 month deliverable, check out the comments/views from a collegue

Presentations

I have always been nervous when it comes to presenting, so I decided some guidance was in order.  I looked around and found the following course, two days that really demonstrates what is involved putting a wining presentation together.  The biggest take away for me, is the fact that it’s not what you have to say, but how you say it that will determine if your presentation succeeds.  Several of the excercises in the course, involve being video taped as you present, the video is then yours to view in the privacy of your own home.  Very eye opening, as it shows all your warts.

I have been witness to many presentations, some have been great, and others have left me feeling what the **** where they thinking, to those I highly recommend the Presentation Advantage course

Algorithmic Trading

Can we believe all that we read from Finextra/IBM, are the traders going the same way as the dinosours. Perhaps this is inevitable, given the pervasiveness of software.

Halloween just round the corner

I am a huge horror film fan, so this is a link to watch over the next couple of weeks as a prelude to halloween I highly recommend the British gore fest The Descent, a scary and very well made movie.