Events

BoSS and Beyond: Upcoming Boston-Area Tech Events

In case you missed my or Geoff’s or Sadie’s or Jason’s tweets, know this: the members of the Boston SharePoint Salon, or BoSS, will convene this Thursday, 10/27, at Eastern Standard in Kenmore, between the hours of 7-9pm. We’ll be talking about Power View and self-service BI, among other things. All are welcome, and you can RSVP here and get more info , here or here.

Can’t make it? Hate SharePoint? Don’t even know what Power View is? No worries—there are plenty of other upcoming events on the Boston tech horizon. Below, a subjective listing of the best, in chronological order.

1.       Boston Code Camp 16

a.       What:  A veritable multi-platform, polylingual workshop bonanza. If you have interest in HTML5, cloud architecture, ASP.NET MVC3, jQuery, LINQ, Netduino, Metro Style Apps, SharePoint, iOS5, XNA 4.0… you should go.

b.      Who: Patrick Hynds, Bob Goodearl, Chris Bowen and Chris Pels

c.       When: 10/29, 8:30am-6:40pm

d.      Where: Microsoft, 201 Jones Road, Waltham

e.      How: by registering on eventbrite

f.        Cost: Free

2.       WhereCamp Boston

a.       What: A two-day conference devoted to the intersection of technology and geography, with sessions on GIS, web mapping, start-ups, mobile computing, social software and more. Cartosoft’s Andres Ferrate, Development Seed’s Tom MacWright and Unterbahn’s Jeff Warren are keynoting.

b.      Who: Ignite Spatial Boston

c.       When: 10/29-10/30

d.      Where: Microsoft NERD Center, One Memorial Drive, Cambridge

e.      How: by registering on eventbrite

f.        Cost: 10$/day

3.       Network Visualization: Everything You Wanted to Know (But Were Afraid to Ask)

a.       What: IBM’s Frank van Ham will give a practical overview of the common algorithms used in drawing network visualizations, and the common pitfalls associated with implementing these algorithms.

b.      Who: Boston Data Visualization

c.       When: 11/1, 7pm

d.      Where: Bocoup Loft, 355 Congress Street, Boston

e.      How: by registering on BDV’s meetup page

f.        Cost: Free

4.       Nicholas Zakas on High Performance JavaScript

a.       What: Ex-Yahoo! front-end engineer and  High Performance Javascript author Nicholas Zakas will take you through some of Javascript’s speedblocks, and how to dismantle them.

b.      Who: Web Performance Boston

c.       When: 11/3, 6:30pm

d.      Where: Wayfair Offices, 177 Huntington Ave, 24th Floor, Boston

e.      How: By registering on WPB’s meetup page

5.       Google Analytics for Developers

a.       What: An evening spent investigating what lies under Google Analytics’ hood, and which parts contain information that the business users on your team will want to know.

b.      Who: Google Analytics author Justin Cutroni and Boston PHP

c.       When: 11/9, 6pm

d.      Where: Microsoft NERD Center, One Memorial Drive, Cambridge

e.      How: by registering on Boston PHP’s meetup page

f.        Cost: Free

6.       MIT Enterprise Forum: Changing the World: How  Innovators Are Using the Web for Social Action

a.       What: An roundtable on how innovative web strategies are being implemented in the non-profit sphere, moderated by Covestor’s Asheesh Advani. Water.org’s Mike McCamon, Boston Rising’s Tiziana Dearing, SoChange’s Mike Norman and Charity Partner’s David Wagner are speaking.

b.      Who: Doug Banks and the MIT Enterprise Forum

c.       When: 11/9, 5:30pm-9pm

d.      Where: MIT Stata Center, Kirsch Auditorium, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

e.      How: by registering at mitforumcambridge.org

f.        Cost: Students and members, free, non-members, $25

7.       Babson Entrepreneurship Forum

a.       What: Three days of panels, lectures and networking events aimed at entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. Among the keynotes are HBS’ Michael Porter, General Catalyst Partner’s Charlie Baker, Kairos Society’s Ankur Jain and CNN Analyst David Gergen; speakers include Hubspot’s Andrew Quinn,  Flagship Venture’s Noubar Afeyan, Idea Paint’s John Goscha and 410Lab’s David Troy.

b.      Who: Babson College Graduate Student Association

c.       When: 11/11-11/13

d.      Where: Babson College Main Campus, 231 Forest Street, Wellesley MA

e.      How: by registering at babsonforum.com

f.        Cost: Students, $60-140; Professionals, $125-205

8.       HTML5 Game Camp

a.       What: A day devoted to HTML5 games and the tools, skills and standards you need to know to make them. The camp ends with a judging showcase, so come with a laptop and your listening cap.

b.      Who:  Microsoft

c.       When: 11/17, 8:30am-5:00pm

d.      Where: Microsoft NERD Center, One Memorial Drive, Cambridge

e.      How: by registering on eventbrite

f.        Cost: free

Email, RSS Follow
Email

SharePoint

Boston SharePoint Salon: Power View and Visualization

PowerPivot, Windows 8 Metro tiles, Office 365, Power View… if there’s one category of user Microsoft seems to building its future upon, it’s the business user. And by business user, I mean a given employee who needs to analyze and interpret data without writing a single query. Without even needing to know that “query” has a technical definition. For years, Excel was the only answer MSFT provided, but many of today’s business users want to be able to not only analyze but interact with data; and the data needs to be dynamic, and thus is optimally accessed from the browser. Enter: visualization, which is an interactive, abstracted visual representation of a given data set.Power View, née Project Cresent, is Microsoft’s new visualization application, and it sits inside SharePoint Server 2010. With Crescent, users can turn tables of data from PowerPivot workbooks or SQL Server 2012 instances into interactive charts, tiles and other vizualizations.
At the October Boston SharePoint Salon (BoSS), we’ll be talking Power View and the dataviz trend in general, its impact on database devs and admins, how it may play out in Office 15 and the next version of SharePoint and how many Euros, approximately, it takes to smuggle 20 kilos of guanciale past customs. Cool? Cool.
BoSS is happening at Eastern Standard, home of the Frobisher. If you want in, invite yourself on Facebook or @ me on Twitter.  See you there!

Email, RSS Follow
Email

OfficeWriter

Creating and Hooking Up a Custom Action in WiX

As mentioned previously, we started using WiX for our own installers. Out of the box, WiX can do pretty much anything you’d like, but sometimes you need to do a little something extra. One avenue we can use is a Custom Action (CA). There are quite a few types, but among the most useful is the Type 1 Custom Action. This style of action is a function call to an external Custom Action Dynamic Link Library.

These types of custom actions can call code from basically anywhere, so they can utilize existing code for things like validating a license key, or determining other requirements. In this tutorial I’ll show you everything you need to create a Type 1 Immediate Custom Action and link it into the installer.

Part 1: Creating and Hooking Up a Custom Action DLL

With Votive, setting up a DLL to be a Custom Action DLL is as easy as setting up a new project. Continue reading Creating and Hooking Up a Custom Action in WiX →

Email, RSS Follow
Email

Business Intelligence, SharePoint

Masterpiece Theatre SharePoint: Power View and Hadoop

In this episode of Masterpiece Theatre: SharePoint, we’re talking Cresent erPower View. Press play to learn why Power View is good for PowerPivot and bad for Tableau, how it transforms big Hadoop data into technophobe-friendly animated reports and what your edition of SharePoint needs to get it up and running.

Related Posts

Email, RSS Follow
Email

Events, SharePoint

SPC11: Porchetta, Pirouettes and a Whole Lot of Demos

[Jumpshot via the lovely and talented Marcy Kellar]

Unless you’re a vegetarian, teetotaler or Luddite, you’ll find nothing (too)incendiary here, folks! If I had to encapsulate our team’s SPC11experience in three words, they’d be: demos, sessions and networking. Since that is boring and vague, I’m going to break it down by numbers, instead.

24: Terabytes in Yahoo’s cube (from Kamal Hathi’s session “Vision and Strategy of BI”)

50,000: Organizations that signed up for Office365 within two weeks of its launch. So, 2.5% of what Call of Duty Elite got.

324: OfficeWriter Export to Word and Export to Excel demos shown. We were surprised to see that the demand for Word template generation was much higher than that for Excel, as outside the SharePoint world, that proportion is inversed.

Continue reading SPC11: Porchetta, Pirouettes and a Whole Lot of Demos →

Email, RSS Follow
Email

SharePoint, Women In Tech

Angels at the Gate: Tech Conferences and the Booth Babe Strategy

[Disclaimer: This is not my SPC11 recap. That is forthcoming, but in the meantime, please check out our video recaps]

There are three types of people you’ll meet at a software conference: attendees, vendors and booth babes.  The attendees are there to pick up new skills, network and score swag. The vendors are there to convince decision-makers to make the right decision. The booth babes are there to reel in the decision makers. You could make the argument that the booth babes are also vendors, but as temporary hires with little-to-no knowledge of the product, the only things they are vending are themselves.

I have two main cases against the booth babe strategy. The first, understandably, is from a feminist standpoint. The use of women as bait is objectifying and creates, to many attendees, a gender-based binary: you are a man or you are a booth babe. (It also, by the way, paints the attendees as slobbering cretins who can be manipulated through their basest instincts.) However, the feminist case against booth babes is, unfortunately, too general to be compelling. Sorry lady, you say, sex sells. Which brings me to my second, fiduciary case:  does it? And, more to the point: does it sell software? Continue reading Angels at the Gate: Tech Conferences and the Booth Babe Strategy →

Email, RSS Follow
Email

Blogged