By way of Euan Garden:

• Ashvini Sharma (rss)
• Donald Farmer (rss)
• Kamal Hathi (rss)
• Kirk Haselden (rss)

Hey guys, how about a nice article on automated SSIS deployment for us ISVs that need to write installers for our products?

Also, don't forget to check out Darren and Allan's SQLDTS.com site reincarnated as SQLIS.com - SQL Server Integration Services on the Web.

Now playing: - Ryan's Radio

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.

Christmas is only four weeks away so as usual I've been asked what I want. I hate this question. Mainly because I never have an answer. I'm very lucky in that I don't usually want for anything as I'm able to just go and buy it. I realise that not everyone is fortunate enough to be in this position. Also if I want a Ferrari I can't afford one but you get the idea.

The best kind of gifts are those that you wouldn't think of buying yourself. By that I mean the kind of gift that never occurred to you. For example, my father is as much a Manchester United supporter as I am and a couple of years ago he was given an old (circa 1930's) replica United football. Genius.

Unfortunately, the reverse is not quite the same. I nearly always ask my family what they want. Is this because I don't want to disappoint? Or maybe I don't know them well enough to come up with something as I've described above. I guess I have a bit of a reputation within my family for buying strange gifts when left to my own devices. The meditation kit I bought my mother a few years back was probably the pinnacle of weird presents but I like to give people the opportunity to try something new.

I guess there is always the usual options that are a good bet for me - DVD's, CD's and books. You can never buy "all you want" with those. For some reason I never receive books though. It's strange as my house if full of them so it's pretty obvious I like to read.

Help me out here, leave a comment with suggestions on how to answer the question above.

I see Hotmail has upgraded my account to 250MB… Gee-thanks… But I’m afraid it’s too late, I already use G-mail as my main internet account. Hotmail is now a just a passport sign-in and junk mail repository. For me to switch back, Hotmail will have to become a lot better than G-mail. Here’s some hints:

• Hotmail is too slow
• It’s got too many graphics
• The search sucks
• No POP support
• No permanent tray notification for e-mails (you have to click on the Messenger guy)
• G-mail has auto-complete in the to: cc: lists
• It’s file attachment is faster
• The spell checking is easier to use (although no custom dictionary yet)
• Labels are a more natural and powerful mechanism than Hotmail folders
• G-mail filters are excellent
• I can drive G-mail from the keyboard

Let me know when it’s fixed and I’ll have a look.

Well I've just completed the campaign and I agree with Eric Gunnerson - it's a bit of an anti-climax at the end. You just finish a level (with obligatory level boss) and you get a quick cut scene and the credits. Do let the credits run as there is a bit more video at the end though.

The game is excellent but I'm left wondering if wasn't easier than the previous version. It only took a week this time instead of two or three. Hopefully the live games can prolong the interest.

I took the next step last night - to try and connect to Xbox Live™... Not an easy problem because the router is upstairs (Xbox is downstairs), so I've bought a Wireless-G adapter. The adapter was easy to setup but connecting wasn't - reboot the router, modify the firewall, install a firmware upgrade (and panic when I then lost the internet completely).

I did manage to get connected but I think the delay on my broadband (it's via satellite) is going to cause issues. Whenever I play I get massive lag so as I move along I'll find myself back where I was a couple of seconds previously. I'm at a distinct disadvantage when going one-on-one with another player as I'll be shooting at their position 2 seconds prior.

I get two months of free trial so I'll see how things go. Hopefully everything will work OK because I guess I'll have completed the game in a few days and will need something to continue the interest. Check back in a month or so for progress.

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]