I have 6 invites to Pownce too. If you want one then leave your e-mail attached to a comment and I'll forward one on.

It's been a few weeks since my last post and I've been busy with customers and Outlook add-ins. Last week, however, I was at Microsoft's internal conference. It's like a TechEd proving ground where presenters get to try out their talks on an internal audience. There is some amazing stuff coming down the line in Windows Server, Visual Studio and SQL Server. I'm really pleased about the data warehousing enhancements across the SQL Server product line.

Way back in 2004 I went to TechEd and blogged a series of articles about new features that would arrive in SQL Server 2005. I plan to do a similar series for SQL Server 2008 but since a lot of stuff we saw last week is still internal I'll only blog about bits in publicly released CTP's.

Finally, the Popfly mashup site is now allowing invitations so the first five people to leave a comment telling me what you plan to do with your mashup gets an invite. You need to leave me your e-mail address as well.

The results of the previous three tests are interesting. In both IE7 and Firefox all three render correctly (although the PRE tag in the first one causes the text to spill into the right hand bar). When viewing the RSS feed it becomes a whole new story:

• IE7 doesn't honor PRE tags, single spaces or stylesheets
• Firefox doesn't honor PRE tags, single spaces or stylesheets as well but at least it cuts out the embedded stylesheet in the last post
• Google Reader also doesn't honor PRE tags, single spaces or stylesheets and to cap it all anything in a PRE tag just renders to the end of line and stops so it makes things impossible to read

I wonder, is there a standard that feed readers need to adhere to? What is the best way of embedding syntax colored code in blog posts?

Trackbacks are disabled whilst I figure out a way to stop the !***!!! spammers.

In addition to RSS, I've also added email distribution to the site. If you read via a feed reader then please carry on as normal. But...

...if you don't know what RSS is and would prefer to have these posts sent via e-mail instead then either click the orange "email readers" button on the right or go directly to the sign-up page.

This is a spam free opt-in newsletter service and you can even keep your e-mail address hidden from me. Any further questions can best be answered by FeedBlitz themselves.

Scott Adams has a blog.... It's at http://dilbertblog.typepad.com (rss).

This blog has been lacking in technical content recently because we are in the "End Game" part of our project and consequently I don't want to jump the gun and talk about something thats not released yet.

This post is a head's up notification that sometime in the next month or so we should be baked enough to start talking. Hopefully I'll then be able to tell you how we pushed Reporting Services beyond it's basic feature set and indeed include features they still haven't got right in the 2005 version.

In the meantime why not sit back, relax and listen to some funky soulful house at Full House Radio.

Now playing: Full House Radio - Live Streaming

I guess it had to happen sometime, the spammers have found the Blogger site I cross post to. Since their anti-spam guards are no where as sophisicated as dasBlog, I'm forced to remove the ability to comment. If you are reading on Blogger then why not come over to my main site where life is so much better.

Just a quick post to say I've moved the blog to a sub-folder because upgrading every virtual directory under the root every time I upgrade dasBlog is a pain.

You shouldn't notice anything different except you have now come through to /blog instead of the root. I have redirectors on the site so any old permalinks should still point to the correct place. This goes for my feeds as well but some readers don't understand redirects and you'll have to update.

Just a quick post to say Happy Birthday to my blog. My first post was a year ago yesterday and was pretty inconsequential but going to Tech-Ed shortly after brought some technical content online. My most Googled posts have to be "Uniqueidentifiers as Primary Key Columns" and "How to trash your system when writing installers". The geekiest toy was "Geekman" and the hardest post to write was "Coder Block". I used to post nearly every day but realised I couldn't keep up the pace and now it's more like once or twice a week at the weekend. Long may it continue.

Just for fun and to kill some time, here are the flags of the visitors to this website last week. They are ordered by number of hits from that country. I had no idea there was such a diverse collection.

[Apr 2008 edit: sorry, there used to be a picture here but it got to be the top hit in Google image search for a very common term and I can't support the amount of bandwith needed to service all the queries.]

These guys are driving me nuts so I'm afraid I've had to protect my site by forcing you to login before changing anything. If you feel you need access then let me know and I'll give you a password.

Since installing the blacklist I have had a noticeable drop in referral spam which is good news. The thing that does concern me is false positives. I have had to drop a number of keywords from the list because they are just too common: "hole" appears in "whole" which one search provider uses to tag the query with "wholeinternet"; "golf" was in the list but I since I am buying one there is no reason to block it.

The one keyword I am undecided about is "virgin". There are a high number of spammers still using the keyword but it means that every referral from virgin.net (there is a search engine there too) will get a 404. Koan too has changed her URL; can you guess why yakushitsu.blogspot.com gets blocked?

So, next time you get a 404 response back from a web site then check who referred you in the first place. They maybe stopping you from seeing the page so try pasting the URL into a new browser window. To the users of the virgin.net search engine - I am sorry but you will never see this post.

I’ve finally got around to upgrading to the next version and I can’t say it’s been a pleasure. Not due to the software itself but because, when I set the site up, I made the mistake of installing the blog in the site root folder. This means the web.config settings automatically flow to all virtual directories below. Any <httpModules> and <httpHandlers> sections need to be carefully undone in web.config files lower in the tree. The problem is that to remove an entry from these sections the web application needs to load any referenced assemblies. Simple – just copy them into the bin directory. Unfortunately not if, like nGallery, the application is actually using a previous version of that assembly. I’ve had to do a special build of nGallery referencing an updated FreeTextBox control.

I did try setting a new blog up in a sub-folder and redirecting any relevant requests but testing with RssBandit showed that news aggregators would have a problem. Everyone would just assume the feed had died unless they actually pointed a browser at the URL. Also, I wonder what Google does with permanent redirects? Does it update it’s copy or just index the new page losing the original Page Rank?

There are a number of new features in this upgrade; most of them behind the scenes. But one you can play with is the new Month View. I’ve also upgraded the wiki. If anything is broken then let me know.

My feed list is starting to get out of hand. It's so large that I've started adding feeds already subscribed to because I can't remember if they are new or not. Robert, I don't know how you keep up with all your feeds.

To help, I've knocked together a little tool to clean duplicates out of my OPML file. It's a .NET console application so just supply the relevant filename on the command line. It will backup the file before processing. Source is included but it's nothing special. Enjoy.

Now playing: - Ryan's Radio

In a previous post I talked about how difficult it is to blog in a small company and promised a follow up on the kind of things you could blog about. Well I think corporate blogging has to be about customers. If a blog doesn't have any customer focused content then it's a personal site; possibly very interesting, but not corporate. Microsoft bloggers are fortunate because, for most of them, they are doing the same job as their customers i.e. software development. This means they get to talk about their daily activities. For those of us whose customers are in a different field, we have to look for content that may not be immediately available.

It's time for some examples. I work for a company whose main business is selling software to help customers optimise their contact centres. What do our customers want to hear about? They probably want to know about how they can save money, keep their customers happy, integrate new systems and new developments in the field. To get specific, most of Exony's customers use Cisco ICM so they are probably interested in how to do great things with it. As I haven't found any Cisco bloggers (let me know if there are any) then we could fill that gap along with how to get the best out of the marriage between ICM and Exony.

To end, I tend to get more motivated by promising a post on a subject so look out for more on Exony Reporting and Cisco ICM here in the near future.

There seems to be a lot of blog chatter about corporate blogging at the moment; specifically how beneficial it can be. Well Microsoft has managed to make it work but I think they are in a rather unique position. Of the hundreds of Microsoft bloggers, most are blogging about new products and features. This allows them to generate interest and effectively market the new software. Their blogs are very popular and a request for feedback usually gets a number of useful suggestions.

All very good for the customer but blogs are open to the public. Anyone can read them and make use of their content. The use to customers is enormous but competitors can also read and utilise the information. Somasegar is making noises about exposing more Microsoft internals from specifications to daily builds. This must be good news for the competition or is it?

How come Microsoft can do this without giving away all their corporate secrets? I guess the answer is scale. How many developers/tester/program managers are working on a typical product - thousands by all account. Most companies can't muster a fraction of that resource so, even if they did have all the specifications of up and coming products, there is no way they could develop a better product in the same amount of time.

Think about the flip side of this discussion. My company is tiny - I can count the developers on one hand yet we produce enterprise scale applications. What if I were to blog about new features I was working on? How quickly could a larger competitor steal my ideas?

I never understood how bundling a browser with the operating system could be considered anti-competitive because as a customer I like that Windows has lots of additional features bundled and as a developer I can rely on it's presence for my own work. For the first time though I can see how a large company can on one hand be helping its customers and at the same time using that strategy to gain an advantage over it's competitors.

I don't necessarily agree that big company blogging is anti-competitive and I don't agree that small companies can't blog so in a future post I'll talk about finding the right things to blog about.

At the beginning of October I was starting to get referral spam so I implemented a blacklist to help remove anything that wasn't a true referrer. Well over a month on and I now have 10 times the amount of referral spam. It's not just the same stuff either - they are really clever with their domain names containing none of the keywords I'd previously picked. This means I have to login each day, checks the logs and add a new set of keywords to the list.

So I've coded up yet another change. This time I've inverted the functionality to only show referrers that I have configured. The code turns out to be cleaner and the site is far less maintenance for me so hopefully this should solve my problems for a while.

[Edit: I've sent the code to Omar so this should make it into the 1.7 release]

There are quite a number of Exony bloggers and on average a new one starts each week. This is great for the bloggers and great for the company but I've noticed that the first couple of articles usually contain content thats a little too "open". As we don't yet have a corporate blogging policy I would suggest that new bloggers bear the following points in mind:

• Anything that's on the internet is public and the correct Google search can find what you've written in a second.
• Don't talk about new features until they are announced publicly. Even Microsoft bloggers are completely silent until a formal announcement has been made - we didn't hear about Visual Studio Team System until the Tech-Ed announcement, nor did we hear about the Express Editions until Tech-Ed Europe.
• Strategy and road-maps are best left to the marketing team.
• Once a feature is out in the open (e.g. press release) blogging about it is probably good publicity but be aware that your words can be twisted by unscrupulous people. Write carefully.
• Prospective customers might use your blog to decide on a purchase. If you write badly with spelling mistakes and poor content then they are likely to assume the whole company is run the same way.
• Exony is valued on it's IPR. Don't give it away.
• You are running a community - your readers. Treat them with respect.
• Full text feeds please. I don't generally read anything that can't be downloaded to my aggregator and read off-line.
• Linking is good. What better way to show us what you're reading? It brings relevant content together and provides a better picture.
• If in doubt, I'll be happy to take a look at your draft before you post it.

For additional guidelines, I recommend the Sun Policy on Public Discourse.

A quick shot with my new camera of where I spend a lot of time. Somewhere I can go and geek out in peace and as you might expect it's full of things I've collected over the years. In fact, I never take anything off the pin-board, just put new stuff over the top. The most used item is well within reach - my MSDN discs (top shelf, blue case). I'm a big fan of O'Reilly books (third shelf) and the Addison Wesley "Object Technology Series" (second shelf). There are loads more - I have piles of books all over the house as you can see to the left of the laptop. There are also thousands of records (bottom shelf) mainly from the 90s when I was into mixing. On the wall to the left (out of shot) there is a huge map of the world which is great for getting some perspective and yes, that is a giant poster of Sarah Michelle Gellar - it was a leaving gift from Sony. The FHM calendar is replaced with whatever I get given each year. There is more to the right which you can see in the panorama.

Maybe this could start a new meme (assuming someone like Robert Scoble is kind enough to pass on the thought) - where do you blog from? (Send me a trackback so I can find you).

[Edit: I was about to post and remembered that there are two passwords and a couple of addresses on the pin-board so I've edited them from the picture here and in the gallery. Thats what the smudges are.]

Ryan Stevens (aka Solidstore) has started blogging. He is a developer right to the core and has a particular talent with networking and security (and FarCry). He even runs a hosting service from his house!

With Ryan that makes four Exony bloggers including our CEO and as we only have 30 or so employees, I make that a better ratio than Microsoft...

I was on the verge of posting something last night that I'm glad I didn't. I was angry and had a lot to say. As it turns out, I feel differently today. I think there is a lesson here - posting to your weblog is much like writing an e-mail. The same golden rules apply; primarily - don't hit the send button when emotional. You might say that it's easy to change an article later but people will have seen the original and as Scoble points out: your original words will live forever in the various search engine caches.

Bradley Greathead, a fellow Exony employee has started blogging. He is responsible for our application server and, in particular, the middle tier development. I foresee lots of useful posts - subscribed!

I wasn't very happy with the clunkyness of blogger, so I've moved over to dasBlog. But due to some constraints from hosting service, I have to move to the root of the site: http://www.jamessnape.me.uk/default.aspx. Hopefully this is the last switch.

I've decided to host the blog in my own domain www.jamessnape.me.uk so I can include pictures more readily. You can find it at http://www.jamessnape.me.uk.