I attended my second meeting on 03/12/08.  The guest speaker for this meeting was Miguel Castro and the topic was extensibility designs and patterns.  This was over my head in ways but I was able to grasp the overall concept and can see the benefit of creating your own providers, modules, plug-ins, etc. (time well spent).

Instead of connecting to a specific text file to get data you connect to the source that contains the file to retrieve the data.  This gives you the ability to easily point you module to different data sources when changes are needed instead of modifying the application.  Efficient!

The initial setup may be time consuming but sounds like it's well work it. For more information on this topic please visit Miguel's site.  For those in the Cincinnati area interested in .NET programming can visit CINNUG for meeting dates and times.

I attended a special interest group on 03/11/08 (first timer) on Business Intelligence.  Really interested stuff.  Performance Point Server 2007 was the topic and the guest speaker was Craig Utley.  Now this is the way to create reports!

PPS2007 allows businesses to monitor their performance through easy-to-use Scorecards and Dashboards. The most common data source for the monitoring service is cubes.  Users can view data across multiple dimensions. They can drill down or across dimensions with just a click.

The actual setup is time consuming and involves the business decision makers of the company and those with the financial background to analyze and create the plan.  Your job as the programmer is to create the application and once set up the plan can easily be modified if/when necessary.

The application can handle just about any size business but is pricey, $20,000 and $195/user.  This price includes 2 servers, PPS2007 and ProClarity.  You publish your applications with Sharepoint.  However, it was brought to our attention the next release of Performance Point Server may no longer work with the free version of Sharepoint.

My company could use some sharp looking reports and graphs to identify sales, trends, forecasting, etc.  However, I don't see us purchasing PPS2007 any time in the near future.  I've recently been appointed to incorporate BI into the company and I'm looking forward to the opportunity.

I've finally moved into the 21st century of programming. Yes, it's taking me quite a while but I've arrived. I created, with tons of help, my first ASP.NET application using C# AND I mostly understand how it works. :-)

This application selects a list of items from our web database, reads a few different directories on one of the network drives to check for a matching image, and generates several reports based on the results.

Even though I did need a lot of help to create this application I was still very exciting to be in the drivers seat with the Programmer's Ed instructor by my side. I'm really looking forward to more projects in .NET.