robrohr.org : TechEd

Commence the Techival

robrohr — Thu, 24 May 2007 12:48:00 GMT

My first TechEd post is about the deep technical issues, and the first party of the week where they can be discussed. Party with Palermo!

And so it begins.

I haven't been to this one, but it looks like it will be a fun time. The party is at the Glo Lounge, with it's apparently eye-searing decorative sense, but I'll have my shades so all will be well. Some of the big names in my developer world will be in attendance.

Update: I didn't end up going to this event, as my flight didn't arrive in Orlando until 10:30PM, and then I had to deal with my missing baggage, and didn't end up getting to my hotel until almost midnight. Garumph.

Integrating TechEd 2006 schedule with Outlook and OneNote

robrohr — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 16:07:00 GMT

I have been looking at the Beta 2 for Office 2007 on my tablet PC for the last 2 weeks, and as always, am using the massive TechEd session schedule RSS feed as an experimental base for looking at Office integration.

I had written an application last year to generate OneNote notebooks (PONGen) from complicated RSS feeds, and had used that to generate a nice set of notebooks for the conference. This summer, I was waiting to see if Microsoft's vaunted RSS integration in Outlook 2007, when mixed with the Simple List Extension (SLE) which was used to encode some of the event information in the 2006 TechEd schedule feed, would result in Outlook asking if you wanted to show RSS event feeds in native calendar view, or at least give an "import from RSS" option.

No such luck.

So, this year, in addition to making a project file that will allow me to convert the new feed format into a bunch of OneNote notebooks (in progress), I wrote a xslt file to convert the RSS feed into a CSV that can be (more or less) directly imported into an Outlook calendar.

Caveats: I'm still running into a pile of date inspired aggravation.

The team generating the RSS feed stored the session times as converted to GMT -7 to GMT. Understand that the events in question are occurring in Boston (EDT = GMT -5, adjusted for daylight savings).
Outlook ignores any indication of timezone when importing times, assuming that the raw time is appropriate for the local time zone of the machine doing the importing.

The net affect being: if you import the events directly into a machine set to GMT -5: Eastern Standard Time, the events will be imported 7 hours from when they actually occur. Since I didn't have time to do time conversions in xslt (substrings and conditional branching galore) I just change my timezone to Cairo, Egypt (GMT +2), import the CSV, then revert my timezone back to EST.

There are some other quirks to the transformation/import process, which are dealt with in the directions, but the results are sufficient to get my schedule into my smartphone so I don't have to boot my tablet to figure out what room my meeting is.

All in all, less work then importing breakout sessions into outlook one at a time.

Article: Instructions - Importing TechEd 2006 schedule from RSS into Outlook Calendar

The Mobilizer Madness has been podcast.

robrohr — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 01:36:00 GMT

Is podcast a verb or am I just verbing nouns again?

Those folks roaming the TechEd Convention on Segways, wearing black shirts are the TechEd 2005 Podcast Crew. They spent the better part of Monday evening filming the Mobilizer Madness scavenger hunt. The (video) podcast of our march (shuffle?) to victory on Monday is now available. If you want, you can subscribe to the TechEd 2005 Podcast feed as well. I've downloaded some of the video onto my new iRiver and it's pretty sweet. I don't know why the list price is 2.5 times that of an X-Box, but that doesn't mean I'm in any hurry to return it.

You can also see an interview with Samantha Bee, of the Daily Show fame here as well.

How can I get started with podcasting? Eat less and exercise. Sorry, but that's the only advice I know.

Monday Mobilizer Madness Winners...

robrohr — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 20:58:00 GMT

And the winners of the Monday Night Mobilizer Madness is...

The canux!

Why am I so excited about this? Because I was granted honorary canuxxedness at the last minute as the contest was about to start.

Only two of the team members were actually from Canada, but they were good-natured enough to grant us temporary asylum. Apparently it involves holding a beer while tearing about the convention center. Thankfully, no Scotsmen were injured during this event.

There was another team named the canucks, but they apparently expended all their mental effort on spelling and grammar, rather than the important things (don't spill your beer while running up the stairs.) I guess this would mean that we are the canuxx0rz!

The Spoils:

Contrary to the literature, the winning team members did not win "brand spanking new VX6600 Verizon Smartphone(s)." We did, however, each win an iriver PMC-120 portable media player.

Team members:

Jeff Gerard - Wawanesa Insurance
Terry Smith - Wawanesa Insurance
Steve Shurte - Lexis Nexis
Matt Lipinski - Lexis Nexis
Doug Lutz - Lexis Nexis
Andrew Loree - Lexis Nexis
Rob Rohr - University of Vermont

Honorary award for Best Team Name goes to: The Asshats. I wonder if my prissy blog will edit that one out?

Everybody was tremendously good sports. Good luck to the folks going on Tuesday & Wednesday evenings!

Oh, Canada! Our home and native land...

Get the TechEd session schedule in OneNote

robrohr — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 12:31:00 GMT

Of course, you already know that TechEd attendees are entitled to a free download of OneNote (login and scroll down).

You can also get the schedule of breakouts, etc., loaded into OneNote for happy searching and annotating bliss. You do not need a TabletPC in order to enjoy OneNote. Although it helps.

I hacked together an app to generate OneNote notebooks from various datafeeds. The link below gets the notebook generator with a default project file that draws the RSS of the TechEd schedule.

PONGen - Programmable OneNote Notebook Generator
v. 1.1.1979

Latest version of PONGen (build 1.0.1979.22423)
Requires OneNote SP1 and .Net framework 1.1

Or, if you just want a zip file of the generated notebooks (1.2 Meg) these were generated last Thursday.

More sample project files to come...

Enterprise Library: Patterns and Practices Hands-on Labs

robrohr — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 20:20:00 GMT

A month or two ago, I attended most of the web-casts for the Enterprise Library 1.0: Application Blocks from MSDN. Very interesting. I have a few projects that could benefit from these items. Although MS has made it excedingly easy for us to download and implement these (free) products, I wasn't able to get over the hump and do anything other than download the code for implementation later.

I found out two weeks ago that you can download the Enterprise Library 1.0 Hands on Labs, which includes 8 labs in C# and VB.Net introducing the various application blocks. (30-60 minutes per lab). Somehow, this still didn't get me off my duff and into the application blocks.

Now, at TechEd, I see that Hands on Lab DEV014 is making it even easier on me.

Discover the seven new application blocks featured in Enterprise Library with this hands-on lab in which you learn how these new application blocks will help you to build enterprise class applications more quickly than ever before. Labs are included for data access, exception handling, configuration management, security, crypto and logging.

If I don't do it now when they are practically injecting the knowledge into my brain like filling into a Twinkie(TM), I am beyond hope.

Ooh, look! A twinkie!

The best laid plans of mice and men...

robrohr — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 19:07:00 GMT

...couldn't put Humpty together again. Nope, wrong mixed metaphore.

I'm at TechEd Orlando, 2005, in CommNet, blogging and mailing. I'm checked into my hotel and the conference, and have a moment to catch my breath. This is not the first time I attended a TechEd in Orlando. TechEd 2000 was also here, and the hotel I chose that time was this little rinky dink operation that left much to be desired. So I got inspired to nail down my accomodations early and make sure I was in a good hotel, conveniently located. I looked at some maps and chose one of the two hotels that sit directly adjacent to the conference center.

Er... whoops. The convention center in 2000 consisted of one building approximately 3/4 mile long. This is now referred to as the "West Building." Since then, these eager Floridians built a new building, called the "North/South" building, in which Microsoft has chosen to hold this year's version of TechEd. My conveniently located hotel is north of the West building, and the North/South building is significantly to the east.

Visual example:
[] ( ) . , , , :"; O o o o . """"" x

Legend:
[] - Convention Center, N/S building
( ) - Sun
. - Mercury
, , , - Venus, Earth and Mars
:"; - asteroid belt
O - Jupiter
o o o - Saturn, Uranus, Neptune
. - Pluto
"""" - Oort cloud (theoretical)
x - Rosen Plaza hotel

Why blog if you can't engage in a little hyperbole? If I choose to walk through the West building, my walk to and from the convention center is ~1.7 miles each way. If I cut through the lot behind the Peabody hotel, and make a beeline for the north end of the North/South Building (it looks doable from the overhead satellite pictures on NASA World Wind,) I can cut my commute to a mile each way. Of course I risk donating a limb to the local alligators, or running afoul (this is a joke who's effect is only clear in retrospect) of the caretakers of the ducks over at the Peabody.

Oh well. At least I'm not stuck in some low rent equivalent like my colleague, Tom, who's hotel doesn't even have high speed internet access. Wait. What's this? I have to drop $10/day if I want to get on the net from my hotel room? Gosh, this place is practically neolithic.

My other colleague, John, is in the other Rosen hotel, directly across the street from the North/South building, the lucky bustard (got to be careful, Community Server edits out fowl language. But not bad puns.). He decided that the best way to experience TechEd this year would be to run a half marathon this morning, then cram himself onto an airplane, and fly to Florida. On the latenight flight. Ouch. I wouldn't trade hotels with him for the lactic acid that's building up in his legs right now.

Enjoy the conference, folks! I know I will.

What if I just want the darn TechEd Schedule?

robrohr — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 12:24:00 GMT

Sure, you can download and install the PONGen (Programmable OneNote Notebook Generator) app with the specially tailored TechEd Orlando 2005 project file to build the current schedule from the RSS feeds.

But some people ask me, "Hey, Rob, I want the schedule automatically generated for me, but I don't want to load your slow, craptacular, probably bloated and buggy code on my pristine system. I've spent months carefully scrubbing every bit on my hard drive to make sure it is gleaming and eager to load. Can I get the schedule without introducing my system to your {shiver}... ehem... "application?"

The answer is, "Sure!" - (TechEd2005.zip - 1.2Meg)

If you have OneNote (SP1) already installed, go to your {shudder} My Documents\My Notebook folder. This was created by the OneNote install to house all your funky chunky notebooks. Create a folder there, then dump all the contents of the Zip file above into that folder.

Share and enjoy!

In time for TechEd (barely)

robrohr — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 02:40:00 GMT

PONGen - Programmable OneNote Notebook Generator
v. 1.1.1979.22423 - Download

Many changes:

Fully templated: Feeds and parsing are now independent (~97%) of the app itself. Look in the (default) project file, TechEdScheduler.xml for a look at how the TechEd notebooks were created. First section points to and names each data feed. Right now, only RSS style XML feeds are supported, though that will be easy to change to any quasi-tabular XML stream. Notice the four Teched RSS feeds are mashed together into one big bloated feed called "main" (The Breakout feed alone clocks in at a half meg.) The second section defines a table into which feed data and/or substrings will be mashed, one line of data per posting. The third section lists parse commands that define how data items in the source feed are to be processed and dumped into the table defined in the section above. The final section lists a pile of static HTML pages to be downloaded and pumped into various notebooks, as well as templates for how each row of data is to be represented in the notebooks. If you don't want to see descriptions or prefer different font sizes, whatever, muck about with the formattedOutput strings (see String.Format help info for, well, help).
Most importantly, in an effort to maintain good relationships with Microsoft, I have decided to change my first attempt at an icon for this application for a second, less infringing icon. I no longer baldly "pay homage to" the Microsoft OneNote application icon. Now I "pay homage to" the great game of Pong.

Version 1.0 icon:

Version 1.1 icon:

I'm sure you all will heave a sigh of relief. Actual user interface will be forthcoming.

TechEd Schedule imported into OneNote

robrohr — Tue, 31 May 2005 19:07:00 GMT

PONGen - Programmable OneNote Notebook Generator
v. 1.0.1977.24802

A new version of PONGen available (build 1.0.1977.24802)

This one comes with a project file that consumes all TechEd 2005 (Orlando) Schedule feeds, and generates a series of notebooks in OneNote listing all sessions that are available each day.

In addition, generic information from static web pages is added to the notebooks, (Keynotes are not included in the feeds, map of the area, daily agendas, etc.)

Interface: Crusty
Choices: Binary (Build? Yes/No)
Hackable: Look in the TechEdScheduler.xml for opportunities to customize. Sections currently wired to the code are <PROJECTSETTINGS />, <DATAFEEDS />, <DATASCHEMAS> and <STATICPAGES />. Right now, the stuff listed in <PARSETEMPLATE /> and <OUTPUTTEMPLATE /> is hard-coded for the TechEd feed, and will most likely cause errors on other feeds.

Have Fun!

TechEd Scheduler, updated...

robrohr — Wed, 25 May 2005 12:39:00 GMT

PONGen - Programmable OneNote Notebook Generator
v. 1.0.1970.32712

The fairly decent, if you don't poke it too much version - Download Installer - 387K (build 1970)
The Really Rough first public version: Download Installer - 384K (build 1969)
Requires .Net Framework v1.1 - Download

If you have an older version installed, you will need to uninstall (Control Panel | Add/Remove Programs) it before installing the latest build.

What does it do?

See original PONGen post for details...

Issues addressed in this build:

Performance: I was logging the parsing of each record as well as the population of that record into a Log tab in OneNote. Slow. Now logging a bare minimum of events, and run time is cut in half.
Customization: I've done a little work in the adding of static web content to pages in the heirarchy. Root around in the outputTemplates.xml file, section, for ideas on how to add your own pages to the notebook heirarchy. Other customization options are available in PONGen.config. Note: the schema of these files will definitely change in future versions, though the techniques will remain the same. Side benefit: adding this functionality helps, but doesn't guarantee that tabs will be created in the appropriate order.
Error handling: File not found errors are treated a little more gracefully when searching for outputTemplate.xml.

What is still left to be done?

Provide increased customisation options: integrate the provider model, so other RSS feeds and datasets can be similarly consumed and rendered.
Allow for a partial run: populate today's events, for example, or tomorrow, or tomorrow+ (all future events). Limit update to show only certain tracks, for example.
More rigorous exception handling: Still work to be done when network connection is broken, or web sites don't respond in a timely fashion.
Serialize subset of XML feeds to be able to generate "updates only" view of schedule.
Anything else I haven't currently considered: This falls under the "whatever" clause.

First (Exceedingly Rough) Release of PONGen.

robrohr — Tue, 24 May 2005 16:59:00 GMT

PONGen - Programmable OneNote Notebook Generator
v. 1.0.1969.18962

The Really Rough first public version: Download Installer - 384K
Requires .Net Framework v1.1 - Download

What does it do?

PONGen grabs the current TechEd 2005 Orlando Breakout schedule from an RSS feed, and generates multiple OneNote notebooks containing the latest Breakout Session schedule.

Got OneNote?

Want to see a sample notebook? - Download 266K

You Don't Have OneNote? Are you enrolled in TechEd Orlando 2005?

All registered attendees to TechEd Orlando 2005 (not sure about other locations) are entitled to download a free, full version ($99 value) of OneNote after logging in at http://msteched.com. Download that puppy, check it out. I assure you it's worth it even without my klunky app.

What happens when you run PONGen?

PONGen is a console application. You are not asked for any input in this version. PONGen opens the OneNote Importer object, creates a tab called General Info, and adds a page containing the full TechEd Orlando agenda for the week as published at the TechEd Conference Agenda page. A tab for each day of the conference (Sunday 5th - Friday 10th) is then created, and a daily Agenda page is added to each tab.

The RSS feed of the schedule of Breakout Sessions is then downloaded from http://www.msteched.com/content/BreakoutRSS.aspx, and loaded into an in-memory dataset. The description field of each session is parsed using regular expressions to extract the date, time slot and location, which are also added to the dataset. This dataset is then used to generate a page for each time slot, which contains all the Breakout Sessions that are available during that time slot.

What is still left to be done?

Performance: current run times are ~30 seconds on my machine (very high speed network.) The RSS feed for the breakout sessions alone runs about half a meg, so downloading and parsing that data is taking a bit of time.
Provide increased customisation options: integrate the provider model, so other RSS feeds and datasets can be similarly consumed and rendered.
Allow for a partial run: populate today's events, for example, or tomorrow, or tomorrow+ (all future events). Limit update to show only certain tracks, for example.
More rigorous exception handling: or, to be truthful, any exception handling at all. This puppy doesn't fail gracefully.
Anything else I haven't currently considered: This falls under the "whatever" clause.

Odd behaviors

The tab generation appears to occur "in random order." I am aware of this and am researching options to address this, but the OneNote Importer Managed interface doesn't allow you to directly interact with the Notebook (Top of page Tab) objects, but rather the Page (side of page Tab) objects. If you create a Page in a nonexistent Notebook, a new Notebook of that name is created for you. Page commits/writes appear to be somewhat asynchronous. I'll address this if I can.

Every time PONGen is run, a new set of pages is generated. Updates to existing pages don't occur. I am also well aware of this. In the OneNote Importer Managed interface, page objects are assigned a GUID, which is private within the interface. I cannot (yet) retrieve this GUID to make sure that a subsequent run outputs to existing pages rather than adds a new page. I'd love to solve this as well, but am not sure that I'll be able to address this before TechEd.

The TechEd RSS feeds are live.

robrohr — Fri, 20 May 2005 19:47:00 GMT

I can now continue development on the TechEd scheduler for OneNote that I had been working on before my vacation/battle with bronchial phlegm.

I hectored the kind folks at EventPoint (who is doing the msteched.com site) again yesterday to see if they had any new info about the RSS feed containing the updated TechEd schedule. Yesterday evening, I got a response from the same fellow, saying, keep looking, it will be up real soon now.

I looked again today at the Sessions & Lab Catalog page, and all of the sudden, I was basking in the orange glow of the RSS buttons below.

There are four feeds, Breakouts, Birds of a Feather, Labs, and Lunchtime sessions.

The big kahuna, the Breakouts feed clocks in at a solid 450K. They might want to reconsider the amount of data in that one if it's going to be hit hourly by even a fraction of the 10,000 attendees.

Once I get a barely useful, functional version up, I'll post an .msi.

Ask and ye shall receive...

admin — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 13:26:00 GMT

Last year at TechEd, I had the sweetest setup. My (at the time) new Gateway M275 TabletPC stuffed with every beta available (XP SP2 beta, Office 2003 beta, OneNote SP1 beta, InfoPath beta, etc.) was begging to be the envy of all conference attendees. I spent hours setting up OneNote, so I had a tab for every day, and a page for every time slot, listing all the sessions I would like to attend at that time (location, link to slide deck if available).

This all worked out wonderfully once the conference network recovered from the hack attacks, and I was able to get a hotel room in the same time zone as the San Diego Conference Center.

Each day had an associated tab across the top of the notebook. Flight and hotel information were located on pages in the General Info tab. Things I had to remember for registration were stored on a page under the Sunday tab. Along one side were the individual pages pertaining to the particular time slots, listing those sessions in which I had interest. Session cancelled? Here, at hand, were a list of other possibilities.

The page named Friday Options would have the schedule for all of Friday, whereas the timeslot pages would list in more detail, the sessions available for that time. I would also link to local copies of the powerpoints, where available, so I could take notes directly on the slides. I know, ink on slides is not searchable, whereas ink in OneNote is searchable. Maybe I should have inserted the slides as images.

All of this sure looks nice, but it was a pain to create, and, you guessed it, the schedule continued to change throughout the week. The general structure of the day remained the same, but the session details weren't fixed in stone. Some aspects of the schedule weren't known until after arriving at the conference (Birds of a Feather,) while other sessions were changed to meet demand.

This year, a significant portion of the schedule in the second half of the week is dedicated to providing the most popular sessions again, so others can attend who had conflicts earlier.

For somebody who sets up the schedule ahead of time, and paints a nice pretty schedule is doomed to the worst of all techie fates. A data set that is out of synch, and skewing fast.

My goal this year: Get a majority of this thing set up automatically, and provide for synchronization.

How do I go about this? The OneNote Managed API makes it a bit easier for me to autogenerate OneNote notebooks. The Provider Model Design Pattern and Specification makes it easier for me to customize this code and use it for other tasty projects I have in mind for the Business School (autogenerate notebooks for classes based upon assignment items from the online syllabus.) Using the Custom Calendar Providers for Outlook 2003 (make any datasource look like a Sharepoint events list, so Outlook will suck it up natively) to stuff otherwise recalcitrant blobs of data into a sweet and cuddly Outlook Calendar view.

“Think it will work? It'll take a miracle.” - Valerie, Miracle Max (the Princess Bride)

All I would need in order for this to be possible would be an RSS feed of the TechEd 2005 schedule.

So naturally, I clicked the Contact Us link at the bottom of the attendee scheduler, and asked:

At some point, will an RSS feed (or any other parseable data stream) of the scheduled sessions at TechEd in Orlando be available, so we can be appraised of the changes to the schedule? I would like to write a tool that dumps the session schedule to OneNote, and an RSS feed of the schedule would be most helpful.

The next day, they responded:

Hello Rob,

Thank you for contacting Support.

We are planning just such a feed, and anticipate it will be live by mid-May.

Super! Even if none of my nefarious automation plans get off the ground, I'll still be able to use Newsgator to organize my sessions, see updates in comparative real time. Wowsers, Cheif. I'm willing to dive in and start coding now. We'll see if I'm successful. BTW: I also suggested they include slide decks as hyperlinks or enclosures into the feed. It will be nice to preload the tablet with slide decks of likely sessions in a less haphazard fashion.

I'm going to Orlando.

robrohr — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 23:42:00 GMT

TechEd is in Orlando again this year. I love TechEd, but I hate Disney. Luckily, I think I can avoid Walt's fiendish demesne.

I took a look at the initial session list and I only found one CMS specific listing. I can't say that I'm pleased/surprised. Perhaps the rumors (I guess they're not really circumspect about this, are they?) about CMS getting rolled up into the Sharepoint team will result in CMS sessions appearing as Sharepoint sessions.

It looks like the CMS sessions are going to appear under the Portals track.

Portals
Discover how to leverage Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server to interact effectively with your line-of-business applications like SAP; learn best practices for deploying, managing, aggregating, and searching Windows SharePoint Services sites; find out how Microsoft Content Management Server can fulfill your web content management needs – and how these products, along with other Microsoft Office System products and technologies like Microsoft Office Live Communications Server and Microsoft Office Project Server help you create highly scalable portal and collaboration solutions to meet your business and technical needs. Discover how these technologies integrate with other Microsoft Windows Server System technologies for easy deployment and management. Learn best practices from experts in architecting, deploying, and managing portal and collaboration solutions on the intranet, extranet, and Internet and hear about partner solutions that can further enhance your environment. Developers and IT professionals alike will see how to build custom, robust collaboration solutions and easily manage them.

Luckily, I have tons to learn about VS 2005, Yukon, and Portal technologies to keep me from wasting time in the gaming pit. Whatever happens, I ought to be able to buttonhole the CMS folks in the Cabana.