Mar meeting of St. Louis .NET User Group

I saw Randy Walker (blog | twitter | company) give a good talk on soft skills for developers. He stressed humility, confidence, setting level of expectations, performance, gaining respect; all of which lead to leadership.

It was good.

At the end of the night, they raffled off some prizes. My number was called about 4th. I could have chosen a month worth of free Pluralsight online training videos [which Kevin Grossnicklaus spoke very highly of] or the Microsoft Press 70-515 book. I chose the former, but was very tempted by the latter.

February meeting of St. Louis .NET User Group

I attended the February 2011 meeting of the St. Louis .NET User Group (website|twitter).
Brian Blanchard (website|twitter) gave a good presentation on Microsoft Azure. He shared a lot of information he gained while at Microsoft PDC 2010.

Among the other things he presented, I liked the SQLAzure Connect -- allowing cloud-hosted apps to reach back into on-site systems (SQLServer). And the integration of BIDS and SQL Azure Reporting was good.

As it relates to SharePoint 2010:
Steve Fox (blog) gave this good presentation at PDC 2010:
Integrating #SharePoint w Windows Azure'

I won a Microsoft LifeCam Cinema webcam as door prize.

Dec mtng of St Louis MS BI Group

Erika Bakse (twitter | blog) gave a good presentation. I took some random notes:

Tuples: Location, Location, Location

e.g., Four dimensions Workbook, sheet, column, row
'[Bikes.xlsx]'Sales 2008'!$B$2

two dimensional grid
Mountain-200 Black, 1/1/2008 bucket has a value of $66,xxx

adding dimensions to your tuple makes your buckets smaller
removing dimensions has the opposite effect

Basic Set Theory
Union, Intersect, Difference, Transform, Project

domain and range of a function

Identities ... cf. DeMorgan's laws

Advanced Set Functions in MDX: Generate
acts like mathematical function f:A->B
transforms elements of A into elements of B
takes each product member from the first set, finds its parent member, then unions all the parents together


Advanced Set Functions in MDX: Extract
removes dimensions, which makes buckets bigger
acts like mathematical projection
f:(X x Y) -> X

first set take sthe cross join of Bikes & Countries and returns those tuples that have a nonempty sales amount
extract function returns just the country members - eliminates the [Product].[Category].[Bikes] member from all the tuples

MDX Essentials by William Pearson

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Clayton Groom (twitter | skydrive) gave a great presentation and demo as well.

Did a lot of demos with Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (with Adventure Works cube).

Showed Visual Studio 2008 for building SSRS report that utilizes MDX

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cool twitter 'places' feature

click image for larger view



I like how you can see in twitter who's tweeting near you:


It'd be cooler if it were powered by Bing Maps rather than G maps.

stldodn - Intro to Microsoft Business Intelligence

Dean Furness gave an excellent presentation on Microsoft Business Intelligence.

Excel Services allows dashboarding even without PerformancePoint

Excel Services allows multiple people to simultaneously edit Excel spreadsheet, without having Excel client installed on individual desktop

SQLServer
mdf primary data file Program Files ... MSSQL ... DATA
accompanying ldf file
load data, it allocates space, ...

Use SQL Server Management Studio to access data, don't access data files directly

cube is installed in (view it in Windows Explorer) Microsoft SQL Server ... / OLAP / Data
cube data has "*.dim" files ...
cube - different architecture for same data
when denormalize data for performance, changing structure ... similar for cubes ...

with SQL Server Management Studio pivot tables, drag and drop quickly to create slices of data
cube data architected for high speed performance reporting
use Excel (not MDX, no TRANSACT-SQL) ...
cube, structured differently, gives opportunity for drag-n-drop ...
trusted data built for high performance and reporting ...

Excel "Data" tab ...
ODC office data connection file ... stored in SharePoint ...
From Other Sources
from Analysis Services cube ...
instead of "From Other Sources" use "Existing Connections" to get from SharePoint site
bring into pivot table env in Excel ...

Excel as a report authoring tool ...

cube set of information that connects to data that's already out there

create a view on cube ... with Visual Studio and BIDS

save Excel to SharePoint ... saving can kick off a workflow to get ppl to approve it before it gets published ..
get ppl to stop attaching docs to emails

Excel Services - example
1) creates Excel with Excel 2010 on his desktop (thick client)
then thin client:
2) I go to SharePoint to open it ... I don't have Excel installed ... opens directly in my browser within SharePoint
view only mode ... office web applicaton, so "Edit in Browser" ... basic ribbon ...

status bar "1 person editing" ... last one to make a change wins

cube is data platform .... security ... multiple apps can access it

slicers ...Excel dashboard ... remove pivot table floating window... built on multiple pivot tables ...

every time click, running a query against cube ...

one axis months; categories;

Options ... Slicer

instead of 'IT, build me a report, show me where the data connection (and cube) is, and I'm empowered to do it..."

mixed mode SharePoint ... 5000 users use free SharePoint, buy 250 for ppl who need dashboards

office web apps, edit in browser is new in SharePoint 2010


PerformancePoint Services
healthcare demo

Balanced Scorecard

Financial Dashboard -- drill down, click and run another query ...


cube is development effort

first:
business and use case identification and translation
interface and navigation design when click, what shows up ... what shows up next ...
second:
technology
MDX (akin to Transact-SQL), t-sql, .NET


Book "Informaton Dashboard Design" The Effective Visual Communication of Data Stephen Few @OReillymedia
logo does not go in top left corner
top left corner is most important

lines, bars, grids ... try to get users to not scroll ...


SQL SERver 2008 Analysis Services Step by Step Scott Cameron

SQL Server 2008 MDX Step by Step ... Bryan C Smith

microsoft.com/bi -- tons of videos ...

get IT folks to add value to business community ... bus comm to be self-serving ...

StL Microsoft BI users Group ... Wed Aug 25 12:30 - 4PM ...

St. Louis Atlassian User Group - First Meeting

At St. Louis Atlassian User Group mtng, Contegix is showing X DocBot and Atlassian's JIRA Studio.

Used for project & security management.

Showed Atlassian Crowd product.

Powerful JIRA workflows.

OData

Christopher DeWeese gave an excellent presentation on OData tonight at St. Louis .NET Users Group.

He mentioned SharePoint 2010 supports OData. So I found a couple of links:

Every SharePoint 2010 server is a Data Services server (blogs.msdn.com/b/pablo)

REST and SharePoint 2010 Quick Start Guide: The Open Data Protocol

Add Spark to Your OData: Consuming Data Services in Excel 2010 Part 2 (blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi)