My latest article for ASPAlliance.com has been posted today.  You can read it by clicking here. The article is titled Azure Basics: Say 'Hello' to the Cloud.  This article goes through the basics of using Azure.  I don't think it's my best work, but it does get to the point.  Let me know what you think.  Here's a list of all of my articles.

• CodeSnip: Taming the Page Flash Beast in ASP.NET 2.0
• CodeSnip: Changing the Color of a List Item's Text at Run-Time with Visual Basic 2005
• Using Local Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services in ASP.NET
• Handling Events within a Repeater Control Using ASP.NET 2.0
• Cross-Page Postbacks Made Easy with .NET 2.0
• Book Review: DotNetNuke Skinning Tutorial
• Azure Basics - Say 'Hello' to the Cloud

Take a look at all of them, check them out.  Personally, I think my best one is Handling Events within a Repeater Control using ASP.Net 2.0.  Mostly because it was the most complicated thing I've ever done in programming.

As many people know.  I am not just the Microsoft Practice Director at ConsultUSA, but I am an Associate Pastor at Family Fellowship Christian Center.  I've been serving in this position for about 8 years now.  I've been sitting under Pastor Rick Pulido for around 11 years. 

Well, things they are a changin', as they must from time to time.  Family Fellowship was not set up to be a singular entity from the start.  It was intended to be a training ground out of which many congregations would flow.  Well, the first of these church plants is scheduled to take place in 14 months in Miami, FL, with the second scheduled about 1-4 years after that point.  That second one, will be in Sarasot, FL and it will be pastored by none other than... me.

I'm not sure how this is going to effect my remaining time in Pittsburgh, but I know that I'm going to start dedicating myself to preperation for this next step in my life.  

I'm actually kind of torn in this.  I've been prepared for this step for years.  However, I've never wanted to be the senior pastor anywhere.  I've always been comfortable with my position as a #2.  I actually kind of relish that spot.

For those of you who think that being a pastor would be easy, let me inform you, it's not.  Your life becomes a fishbowl and you're not the only fish in the bowl, every member of your family is there with you.  Can you imagine being an 8 year old boy with the whole world watching your every move?  I can tell you, it's hard.  I will say this, if anyone who ever attends one of the churches that I Pastor and they ever say to one of my kids, "...but you're the Pastor's son..." followed by anything, I will read them the riot act and probably show them the door.  My first job is still to protect my family, and I will do it with prejudice.

Other than that, I am in the process of making plans on what type of church I'm looking to create.  What do I want the environment to be like?  What type of music do we want to bring to the people?  What will be the major message to people? At this point, everything is vague, but I have some ideas.  I guess that is what I have to determine in the next few years.

Well, until that time.  I'll see you soon enough Sarasota.

The Family Fellowship Christian Center of Pennsylvania worship team is preparing to record our demo this weekend.  We have been given the opportunity to present our music to a producer in Hollywood that may want to use our music in some movies. 

We've been working on some recordings for a couple of years now, but we never really went all out.  Now we have motivation to get as much stuff into someones hands as we can push out.  This weekend we'll record, next week we'll mix and master and the week after we'll send out the recordings to the producer.  We're just excited to have an opportunity to finally do something with the music that we've written in house.  I think we'll actually be doing one of the songs that I wrote as well.  That is if we can pull together an arrangement other than me on the accoustic guitar, which is the way it was written and has always been performed.

The other exciting this is, I get to pull my bass guitar out of the mothballs and lay down some of the bass tracks.  Since Chuck Behune took over playing bass on the team, I've gotten a little out of practice, but there are a lot of the songs that I wrote the bass lines for and the pastor would like me to reprise them.  Which is cool.  Even if he uses all of Chuck's tracks instead of mine, it's no big deal, my voice will still be the only male voice on the recording, with the exception of one or two songs.  Either way, if our stuff gets used, my voice will be heard by a lot of people.  If it's not used, it'll just be heard by a couple of very influential people in the music industry.  Either way... very cool.

Well, I snagged a couple of pictures that were snapped by Rich Dudley at the code camp on Saturday.  It shows some of our preperation and the presentation. 

Matt, Nate and I preparing in the Speakers Lounge

Nate, making last minute changes... As I start the presentation.

I'm presenting and Matt is looking on.  This is happening at the same time as the last picture.

This one is Nate presenting while Matt and I are looking on.  No picture of Rich, he had the camera.

I'll put up another post up tonight or tomorrow with a link to the presentation.  This won't have any of the code, but it will be my slides.  We want to make the code pristine before we post that.

Well, Rich, Matt, Nate and I just got done with our presentation at the Pittsburgh .Net Code Camp at the University of Pittsburgh.  This was the culmination of a week of Chaos.  Topped with last minute heroics and nervous expectations, we really pulled of a decent talk.

It started with an idea, write an application that would be hosted in Windows Azure using Silverlight 2 and WCF Web Services.  This seemed simple enough to do.  Create the Azure Development Fabric, write some code and deploy to the cloud.  Well, perhaps it would have been that simple if we weren't dealing with CTP (Community Technology Preview) technologies.

The pain started with Azure Table Storage, WCF integration and finally connecting everything to Silverlight.  We spent 20+ extra hours this week in preparation for the talk, including Friday night until 2 AM (I guess that would be Saturday morning.), and getting up and getting to Pitt early to work on it again.

There will be a couple of posts coming outlining the specific difficulties that we encountered and how and if we were able to overcome them.

The funniest part was, I opened the talk with the slide show and going over some of our findings.  In the meantime Nate and Rich were out in the hallway trying to get some last second changes in.  Was it the prettiest presentation ever?  Not by a long shot.  However, it served it's purpose and we got through the whole thing.

Now, we received an invitation to submit an abstract for VS Connections in November, so we'll repackage this presentation and submit it for VS Connections.  It would be cool to be able to do this presentation for a much larger audience.

Now, I'm tired, with 15 minutes until the next presentation.  Then home to my boys.  I haven't seen them in two days, so I miss them tremendously.

With the release of ASP.Net MVC 1.0 we now have a stable, production ready alternative to Web Form development in ASP.Net!  The files needed to implement MVC into Visual Studio are available here.  Thanks to Maarten Balliauw for being on the forefront of letting everyone know that the release is official.

For the uninitiated.  ASP.Net MVC (Model View Controller) is a way of developing that trully seperates the concerns of a project.  In General terms, and greatly simplified, the Model is the data layer, the View is the user display and the controller is the glue that brings everthing together.

MVC will not kill Webforms, but it does offer an alternative. 

As I become more familiar with this framework, I'll put more posts out with information on what I'm doing.  I may also write some articles for some other websites on the framework as well.

Good Day!

One of the last things I want to be confronted with in a project is using fuzzy logic in stored procedures to check if something already exists in a database.  Let's face it, it's never easy and always an inexact science, at least for me. 

However, there is a silver lining to the dark cloud that is fuzzy logic, SimMetrics.

I'm a big fan of using othe peoples genius to make myself look good.  After all, why reinvent the wheel, when someone smarter has created a better wheel than you ever could.   I'm not diminishing myself, but I know where my strengths reside.

Anyhow, there is a great article written by Tasos Yalanopoulos has a great post that he wrote on setting up SimMetrics on a SQL Server database.  If you follow his instructions, he'll get you to the promised land. Tasos' post is called Beyond SoundEx - Functions for Fuzzy Searching in MS SQL Server and is a great read.

I want to give a shout out to my friend Rich Dudley for pointing me, through his blog, to this post.

Here are the photos of our little muchkin and the rest of the clan.

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Today, Saturday, February 21, 2009 at 5:30AM, the Eutsey household added a new member, a new 8lb, 10oz, 22in. baby boy named Rilian Thane.  

This little man has been a tough cookie.  We thought originally that he was going to come on Feb. 12.  Jen was having some pretty consistent contractions in the morning, but by mid afternoon they had all but died away.  That made for a nervous work week for me coming up, knowing that it could literally be any minute that I could get the call. 

I didn’t get any more warning until Thursday.  Once again, I stayed home from work thinking that the baby was on it’s way.  Once again everything fizzled for that day.  However, Jen was convinced that Friday was the day and insisted I stay home again, which, considering the circumstances, I was all gung-ho to do.

Jen and I took advantage of the two days that I had off of work.  My mom had come over Thursday morning to look after the other three kids while we were at the hospital.  Since we were waiting for the baby to make his move we decided to go out to lunch and walk the Monroeville Mall, which was immortalized in the original George Romero classic Dawn of the Dead.  However, for Thursday, the mall walk didn’t do the trick, but our lunch at Corino’s was rather nice.

Friday was more of the same, eating lunch at Primanti Brothers in Monroeville and going to Target, Marshalls and Circuit City (it’s a shame that they are going out of business, but considering that I can still get a Panisonic 42” plasma cheaper on NewEgg,com goes to show you why that happened) to do our walking.

When we got home we had a nice dinner with the family, I don’t recall the meal, but it wasn’t some high falutin’ thing, just something simple, but nice.  We settled down for the evening waiting for our shows to come on, Dollhouse at 9 and Battlestar Galactica at 10.  We then settled in for sleep, knowing that it wasn’t going to last the night.

Jen woke me up at 2am to get prepared to take her to the hospital.  She had been in the shower since Midnight and was starting to have contractions closer and closer together.  So we packed up, let my mom know we were going and took off for the hospital.

A couple of hours and some details that are best left out later, we have Rilian!

Later that morning I go home and pick up the kids and take them to meet their brother.  For the time being I only have a couple pictures of Thorin which are very entertaining, well, because that is what he is.  Entertaining or distracting. 

My next post is going to be a photo gallery of sorts, so look forward to that…

Well, the Dollhouse premier has come and gone and I am torn.

I'm torn between impressed and confussed.  

Let me explain.  If I knew nothing of the premise of this series, I would be a little dismayed.  Eliza Dusku, no matter how cute she is, is not a great actress, and if she was going to continue to only be the maliable subject of manipulation that she was in episode 1, then this series will be short lived.  Short lived because the average viewer won't understand that this is not the status quo.

I'm impressed because I do know the premise of the show, which is that after every "treatment" to wipe out Echo's memory that she will start to have some self realization of who she really is.  This is when the good stuff will start to happen.  I hope that Fox allows the series to get to that point.  We all know Fox's history with Joss Wedon Sci-Fi (see Firefly - The Complete Series.)  I mean, how many shows that were cut short before the fist season was even over cause such an uproar that they eventually make a movie (Serenity (Collector's Edition)) based on the series, just to add closure.

Knowing the brilliance of Wedon and the basic premise of the show, I was impressed that Joss resisted the temptation to reveal too much in this episode.  However, for the sake of keeping the series moving forward without the potential ban hammer of Fox hitting, I hope that Echo's memories start coming back before too long, give the casual viewer hope that something is going to be different in the long run.

Overall, I will give the premier 3.5 out of 5 stars.  The potential for greatness is there, now lets see it come to fruition.