Darryl Burling @ Work : Microsoft

Blog moved to burling.co.nz

dburling — Thu, 15 May 2008 01:34:17 GMT

When I first started at Microsoft I had my own blog on my own site. However, after a few months I started blogging here anyway and removed the blog from my own site.

Recently I've dusted off the old site and started afresh with a nice new blogging engine that I really like and with a nice design that I also like.

If you are interested in following my adventures, please subscribe to the main feed at http://burling.co.nz. If you would just like to get the work related blog posts, subscribe to the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/darrylburling - this is my work specific blog.

If you are already subscribed to the work feed - you'll not have to do anything - nor will you be reading this through a feed reader.

Hopefully the main feed will be more interesting to you, but you have the choice.

Tech Ed and MSDN Unplugged update

dburling — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 03:12:45 GMT

Sometimes it feels like we just live from one event to the next. So while we’ve now got the launch events out of the way, there is more coming – and we need your help to make them the best events they can be

First up – we are getting underway with our Unplugged sessions again. The unplugged sessions are where we tour around various towns and cities throughout New Zealand to give presentations. Nigel and I are doing these over the next few weeks. I’m expanding on my launch topic by doing a session on mixing up the web using HTTP, REST, WCF, PHP and IIS7 and Nigel is doing a Mix08 wrap up session.

You can get full details of these sessions and register at microsoft.co.nz/unplugged. Hopefully we’ll see you there.

The other thing that I’m starting to turn my attention to at the moment is Tech Ed. Each year we try and make Tech Ed better. This year is no exception – as I have more confirmed details, I’ll put them out here and on my blog. To start with though, I want your help.

What do you want to see at Tech Ed this year?

We are just starting to lock down track topics now, and I’m keen to hear from you. What sessions do you think will make Tech Ed better? What speakers do you want to see? What sessions should we not do? What level do you want us to pitch at? Do we have enough business sessions or should we have more introductory material?

If you have ideas, please either email me through the contact form, reply or leave a comment at the end of this blog post.

This is your opportunity to let us know how we can improve Tech Ed. Please note that while we will take all your suggestions into account, we may not be able to meet every need and whim, so please allow us to take some license with regards to the final outcome :-)

Thanks for your help!

Happy Coding!

Changes in DPE (and a new blog to follow)

dburling — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 05:33:44 GMT

As you may know Sean has moved on to Redmond which means we have a new manager here in DPE New Zealand.

Scott Wylie is now the Director of the Developer and Platform Strategy team here in New Zealand. Scott has been in Microsoft New Zealand for longer than almost anyone else in Microsoft New Zealand. This is good news. He understands how Microsoft works and has a long career of great success both in management and on the ground having started in a technical role.

One of the things Scott is famous for (at least in the NZ sub) is his musical abilities. He is in a band that plays frequently - President Gas. Check out their website here. Scott is well loved at our kick off event that we have each year, where he normally picks up the guitar and belts out a few good numbers...

Anyway, Scott is pretty excited to be in DPE New Zealand, and has started blogging. So subscribe to his feed, read his first post and make him feel welcome! If you are coming to the launch events, make sure you bump into him and say Hi.

Microsoft Launch Events in March

dburling — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:15:40 GMT

I got asked yesterday when we are having our launch events for Visual Studio 2008, SQL 2008 and Windows Server 2008, so I thought I should put the current dates out so you can pencil them in.

We are going to be visiting Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch as follows:

Christchurch - March 11
Wellington - (two identical events) - March 18 & 19
Auckland - March 26

We are running two events in Wellington - both the same - to cater for smaller venues and larger audiences - so if you are in Wellington, hopefully the event will be more comfortable for you :-)

More details to come in the future.

In the meantime, watch this blog for details of the 2008 Summer Road Trip that the community is bringing to 11 centres throughout the country in February - more on this later today...

Working with Microsoft

dburling — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:14:00 GMT

I have a presentation that I've done a couple of times now about how to work with Microsoft including details of what the MVP and RD programs are and how they work.

I just read Rods' blog on ConnectioNZ from last week (I've been on leave) and can't stress how critical his points at the end of that email were.

Many people see the benefit of using Microsoft for their own marketing, etc, but few understand how do to it. Rod has a great history of doing this, and summarizes exactly some of the points from my presentation (not that he got them there).

Love or hate Microsoft you have to acknowledge how good they are at partnering.
Hopefully something useful from my discussion was how to partner effectively with Microsoft. Here are some tips.

Understand what the Microsoft individuals you are working with are goaled on. If you’re synced up with that your in good shape.
Normally the individuals goals are in sync with the MS corporate goals. Ask what they are. Then you can line up your messaging and themes and the magic starts to happen.
You need to build a relationship. Get to know the people you are working with.
Look for ways that you can add value

Simple stuff I know but someone at MS today pointed out that many of the relationships they have feel more like the traditional vendor/customer relationship than a partnership.

Read the rest in Rods post: Connectionz

Off to Seattle, then traveling and then Tech Ed.

dburling — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:53:41 GMT

Many of us at Microsoft are traveling at this time of the year. There are a number of conferences on that attract Microsoft employees from all over the world - there is the Microsoft Partner conference, which a number of kiwis from partner companies were at (I believe Gen-i, Provoke and Fujitsu were represented - Intergen was actually presenting there), then there is MGX which is an internal Microsoft Management and sales conference and then Tech Ready, one of two major training conferences.

These are all big events - Tech Ready is at least two times bigger than our Tech Ed event in terms of attendees and has over 1000 sessions to choose from over five days. Then there are all the ancillary events - I've got three days of training and meetings before the actual event, not to mention the "odd get together" at the end of various days training.

Once I'm back from there I'm out of the office for the following week at offsite meetings. Then I'm back for the week before Tech Ed and then I'll be at Tech Ed and Student day.

I'll try and post the occasional photo from Tech Ready, but mostly I'll be quiet for a few weeks.

If you are a Tech Ed ANZ speaker...

If you are a Tech Ed speaker make sure you have registered in the Speaker Portal and have all your flights sorted out - this will save me hunting you down while I'm in Seattle :-)

The sound of inevitability - help us help you

dburling — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 22:17:00 GMT

It happens every year... Tech Ed sells out and we have lots of people who miss out on getting tickets.

How can this happen?

When tickets go on sale we blog about it, we note it in MSDN and Technet Flash Newsletters, and we advertise in mainstream media (ComputerWorld, etc), not to mention that we are all talking to our customers about it when we talk to them.

But somehow we always have a reasonable number of people who miss out on tickets.

How can you make sure you don't miss out next year? Here are the key ways of helping us to help you.

Firstly we send out MSDN Flash and TechNet Flash once every two weeks, and we've talked about Tech Ed in almost every one of them.

So, here is my quick informal poll - please reply in the comments.

My question to you

1) Do you know about MSDN Flash (sign up here - note LiveID (aka passport) required)?

2) If you receive MSDN Flash - do you read it? If so, what parts?

3) What is your ideal newsletter format?

Please give us some feedback to help reach out more effectively with these mechanisms :-)

Working at Microsoft and meetings

dburling — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 20:26:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I came to the realization that at Microsoft we have relatively few meetings. I know - it is probably something I should have picked up ages ago, but its not until you are insanely busy that you notice it - or maybe I've just got a grip...

Anywho, this one thing stands out as a huge differentiator about working at Microsoft compared to pretty much any organization I've worked at in the past. I've worked for big multi national companies before as well as small start up companies and can say that Microsoft seems to have as few as start ups.

That's not to say we don't have meetings - we have performance review meetings (normally 1:1's) and a variety of other meetings related to customers or whatever, but there are none of the long drawn out project meetings that other companies seem to have

Why is this? I've been thinking about this, and I think part of the reason for it is that Microsoft has an internal culture of trust. Each of us have very specific outcomes that we need to drive and we are held responsible for those outcomes. Failing to achieve those outcomes means you have broken trust and this obviously affects relationships in the team. As a result the general culture at Microsoft is to deliver on what you promised and a high level of accountability based on integrity. This one underlying cultural component allows us to do away with many of the project based meetings that you'd typically have.

To bring this home, as we are running Tech Ed we are working across geographical boundaries (Australia, New Zealand, USA, UK) to put together the event, and this means the occasional phone call, and once a week conference calls, but those calls are short (normally less than 30 minutes) and agendas are normally to the point. To a large extent everyone knows exactly what they need to do and have clear deadlines and simply deliver to the deadline. Any questions are handled with a quick and simple phone call and a quick decision.

For example on Wednesday we had our first Tech Ed NZ stakeholder meeting. It was 45 minutes long had around 13 people in attendance and really served more as a status report than anything else.

That's not to say that we haven't started Tech Ed planning. At the meeting we were told that we have only 150 tickets left (buy one today if you want to go at all), and the speakers and tracks are around 99% locked down (more on this later).

Its great to work at an organization where everyone knows what they need to do and just go and do it. It saves loads of time and things get done efficiently.

Technical Briefings - over and out!

dburling — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:59:56 GMT

I've just finished the keynote presentation for the Christchurch Technical briefings. Phew! Great to have that out of the way. I can now go back to normality ;-)

The last few weeks have been great in many ways. I've now done my first ever keynote series, which itself has been a great experience.

We've also spoken to over 2000 technical people (maybe including you!) about the value that Windows Vista and .Net 3.0 are delivering to customers today.

For many people is was the first time they've ever been introduced to SoftGrid too - which is a fantastic product and its great to see the excitement this product is generating amonst IT administrators in New Zealand.

We've also shown you some of the future technologies that are coming up - just like this time last year, we have a huge pipeline of products. Hopefully you all got to see Nigel using Expression Web and Expression Blend to create interactive web sites, and maybe even got to see his session on building applications users love (he assures me he'll be posting a video of his session soon).

Lots of people have been interested in Windows Home Server too. If you want more information on this, check out the links in my previous blog post.

We are also going to be making videos of Jeremy and JD's talks, so keep your eye out for those too. Oh - and if you are interested in seeing the BackgroundMotion project, hang fire - its not live yet - the guys have got a little bit of polish to put on it before it is launched - not to mention that we want to document it so you can understand how it works...

Thanks to everyone who came along and for all the feedback. Its been great to be able to present to you all, and I look forward to seeing you at TechEd 2007 (by the way, registration is now open)!

Technorati tags: Event, Developer, IT, Administrator, .Net, Vista, Windows, Microsoft, Softgrid, Expression, Designer, TechEd

Windows Home Server

dburling — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 05:39:53 GMT

One of the cool things that you'll see in the Microsot Technical Briefings over the last couple of weeks is Windows Home Server.

I sometimes get asked where to go to get more information on Windows Home Server. The places you should head to are:

Microsoft @ CES.

This is where it all began - the first time the world got to see and hear about Windows Home Server at CES in Las Vagas in January 2007. Video located here.

Product Overview

There is a kind of viral overview page that gives you a bit of the basic information available at http://stopdigitalamnesia.com.

Chalie Kindels Blog.

Charlie is the guy who is heading up the Windows Home Server effort. He often has information on his blog about WHS, so you should check it out and bookmark it. His blog is found here (note it currently seems to be down).

Windows Home Server team blog.

The Windows Home Server team have started a TechNet blog. It also has lots of really good information both on the product and how it fits in the market and in Microsoft. Check out the WHS Team blog.

There are also some community sites springing up around home server, check out mshomeserver.org for a cool start.

Cool stuff. Check it out.

Technorati tags: Windows, Home Server, WHS, Microsoft, HomeServer

SQL Server 2005 Service pack 2 released - Vista devs rejoice!

dburling — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 03:12:56 GMT

If you've been waiting for SQL Server 2005 to be released, well it is out now :-)

When you install SQL Server 2005 on Vista, you'll be prompted to install Service pack 2 - only problem is that it hasn't been available - until today.

You can download it here.

I've taken to developing on Windows Server 2003 (via RDP) at home, but I'm using Vista at work, so I'll be putting this on pretty soon.

Technorati tags: Vista, SQL Server, SQL, Service Pack, Microsoft, Windows, SQL Server 2005, Developers