When my last cellphone died I bought a new smartphone from AT&T Wireless. I paid quite a bit for this phone, and it has worked well enough (awful reception at my home, but reasonable elsewhere). Even since Cingular acquired ATTW, I have never had any billing problems with them before... it is usually roughly $54 a month.

This week I recieved my bill for last month. It was for $257!! It seems that because the Microsoft recruiter was calling me from a land line (as opposed to a mobile line), Cingular counted every minute of those calls last month (over 400 minutes of it) as "overage", and billed me for it at $0.45 a minute.

First of all, I am almost certain that I would never have agreed to $0.45 per minute unless the carrier's policy was to allow a plan with higher limits to be applied retroactively (which is something Cingular will not do). I also do not recall signing a 3 year contract - only a 1 year contract, however I do not have paperwork to back this up so I am now at the mercy of their contract termination fee ($175 by itself). I feel like I am being robbed in broad daylight.

I am also pretty miffed that being recruited by Microsoft ended up costing me a few hundred dollars out of my own pocket.

As you can tell from my last post, I have been on the recieving end of quite a few interviews lately. But on the flip side, I have also been performing just as many interviews myself on behalf of AfterHours.

So when did I miss the big shallowing of the talent pool?

The last time I helped an employer with interviewing, there was a certain quality bar that everyone recognized. People with skills below that bar were not submitted. People above the bar were submitted for consideration - and almost always at an hourly rate that was in line with their experience level (we are talking contractors here).

This time however, I continue to be surprised - nay, astounded - at the audacity of recruiters that have been submitting resumes to us for consideration. Easily four out five have been so incredibly overinflated that once it gets to a real interview, the candidate cannot support their own resume claims. For example, I interviewed a person only a few days ago that claimed to be a "senior .NET developer" and "proficient with SQL Server". Yet this person was unable to answer correctly a single basic technical question in either subject area. I wish this were the exception, but it is seemingly the norm. I am sorry, but when a contractor is presented as "senior" with a billing rate approaching $100/hour, they had damn well be able to stand up to a basic technical interview.

I won't even talk about the cases (yes, plural) where the person being interviewed was obviously not even the same person described on the resume itself...

Now granted not all submissions have been so bad. Most from Circle Consulting and Project Solutions have been relatively solid (or at least acceptable).

Recruiters: you need to get your act together. I think you need to pass the same certifications that we (developers, architects, etc) need to pass. You need to understand the technologies so that you can adequately screen these people out before their resumes make it to us (and piss us off enough to never call on you again). I mean, isn't that YOUR JOB??

Job Seekers: Stop lying on your resumes. Dishonesty on a resume is the BEST way to ensure that you will be passed up by an employer. You might be able to bullshit your way past the recruiter's screening process, but you aren't going to make it any further than that, and you definately will not survive long once your new employer discovers that you really don't posess the skills they asked for.

OK, I have blown off enough steam for now. I know it won't make one iota of a difference, but it at least makes me feel better to shout into the \dev\null abyss...

You may have noticed that I have not posted anything new in approximately 3 or 4 weeks (and somewhat sparse in the couple of weeks prior to that). No, I have not grown tired of blogging (not by a long shot) - I have simply been exceptionally busy lately.

Busy with what you may ask?

Well, over the last few months I have endured what can best be described as a barrage of technical and personal interviews with various consulting firms. Most notably, about twelve interviews from Microsoft groups (MCS), most of which I suspect were designed to "break my spirit". I even flew out to Phoenix and Seattle at one point. I will give this one bit of advice to anyone currently in the MCS interview process (or considering it): Do your homework. They will expect you to know their vocabulary for project roles and stages... especially the MSF Team Model. It would be very beneficial to know beforehand the differences between Program, Project, and Product managers. And also - many interviewers will purposely drill as deeply into a subject as necessary to find your limits. This means that you will not get every question right... just be honest about what you do and do not know (self-assessment is very important, and they compare this to their own assessment).

In the end, I decided that at least for now Microsoft is not the best place for me to continue building my consulting career. I chose instead to accept an offer from Intellinet, a consulting firm based here in Atlanta. This allows me to remain in the Atlanta area, where I can continue to be very active in the user community (which I enjoy greatly). The people I have met at Intellinet seem to be very honest, personable, and technically skilled. I have no doubt that I will enjoy working with them in this next stage of my career.

Lastly, if anyone is interested in joining (as either an FTE or contract senior developer, working with .NET 2.0 and possibly SQL 2005) a great group of developers, DBA's, and analysts I would definately recommend my former employer. They were a very enjoyable group to work with.

Over two weeks ago I bought a new HP Z552 media center system and a Linksys WMCE54AG Media Center Extender. I had such high hopes. I was going to be able to record my favorite shows for playback on my own schedule. I was going to centralize my digital photos and videos. I was looking forward to being able to play back any of this either on my main TV (rear-projection unit), or on my bedroom TV. I figured that by paying a premium price for the OEM'd system (over $1800 for both MCE and the extender), I would ensure a positive and hassle-free experience with MCE.

Today I am dismantling the whole thing and taking it back.

Here's why:

• The "IR Blaster" sucks with changing channels on my cable set-top box. Half the time it does not work at all, and often attempting to change the channel will trigger the set-top box to enter "program guide" mode, where it is impossible to change channels (without pressing the "exit" button on the original cable remote). This is certainly a nuisance when watching TV in the main room, but it is downright unacceptable when it happens while using the Extender (I have to walk down to my TV room in the basement to press that "exit" button before regaining control).
• Wireless is Useless. The Extender unit has integrated wireless, as does the MCE system itself. Installation manual recommends against connecting both to a WiFi access point (due to double hops). However, the Extender simply would not associate with the MCE if I attach the Extender to my access point while the MCE is directly attached via wired Ethernet. The only way to get the Extender functioning is to enable "access point mode" on the MCE system itself, so that Over-The-Air traffic goes directly from MCE to Extender. The catch here is that while the wireless connection is in Access Point Mode, the wired ethernet connection fails to operate, preventing access to/from any other networked computers including the internet (so the program schedule etc will not download).
• The tuner configuration is a nightmare. I have Comcast cable with a Motorola set-top box that is used rather widespread among their customers. Yet the MCE tuner configuration could not recognize it. My only two options were to guess the model number (it's not printed anywheres on the set-top box) from a list of about 20 Motorola devices, or to "train" the MCE to understand the IR codes used by that remote. It takes forever to get this configured correctly, and setting up more than one tuner is incrementally more difficult.
• The MCE system is nowhere near silent. HP chose to not use silent fans in the housing, and they also chose to not provide sufficient dampening on the hard drive.
• The MCE system is rather slow. I expected more performance out of a machine with these specs. It's really not much faster than my 3 year old laptop. I suspect the hard drive is a very cheap unit, and this impacts performance the most.
• The Extender is not very stable. While the video quality is good most of the time, it encounters "network congestion" often enough to be annoying (once an hour or so). There is nothing else attached to the network that connects the MCE to the Extender, so this must be related to some other issue. The Extender also has a habit of freezing up for as long as a minute at a time for no apparent reason... which is especially annoying if you are attempting to channel surf.
• Which brings up another problem - channel surfing is nearly impossible with the instability of the IR Blaster link. Changing channels quickly (quicker than once every 15 seconds) is a sure way to get the cable box to go into that dreaded guide mode.

Basically, the MCE platform has a lot of promise, that's for sure. I will almost definately try to return to it once these issues are addressed in future versions, but for now I just do not have the patience for these kinds of problems. Perhaps if the hardware did not cost me nearly $2000 I would be a little more forgiving - but for now I am going back to a primitive non-digital entertainment architecture.

And to be fair, my experience is due moreso to the abysmally poor products from Linksys and HP than to the core MCE operating system. But in order to achieve an adequate "wife acceptance factor" in my home, the MCE unit MUST look like it belongs next to a television... and very few vendors offer a system in that form factor (as opposed to the standard tower/desktop PC form factor). So for now, as far as I am concerned, this hardware is fairly representative of all MCE systems, since it's the only one I would accept in my living room.

Summary:

BizTalk Server 2004 Unleashed is a deep exploration into Microsoft's flagship orchestration and integration product.

This book covers a lot of ground. In 680 pages it covers everything from the basics of building schemas and maps all the way up to Business Activity Services and Human Workflow Services. In between, it spends time on Pipelines, Orchestrations, Adapters, the Business Rule Engine, and even Single Sign-On. For the developer, it goes into detail on debugging as well as the creation of all BizTalk elements. For the Architect, it outlines the various messaging and orchestration patterns, and how they are normally handled in a BizTalk implementation. For the Administrator, it explains deployment as well as ongoing monitoring, instrumentation and management. It takes an especially deep look at scaling up/out of BizTalk deployments at all four tiers of the product's architecture.

In all, this book does a good job of dealing with the details of BizTalk development and administration. It caters to those who already have a grasp of the product, definately not a beginner's book. In fact, even for those familiar with BizTalk, the chapters on HWS, BAS, and BAM might be a little too difficult. One thing the book does an outstanding job of is describing the scale-out strategies available in large deployment situations.

This book is most useful to:

• Messaging Architects
• Messaging Developers
• Messaging Administrators

Recommendation:

4 out of 5 stars

I am holding back on a 5-star rating on this one. While it does a great job at handling the details, and leaves no stone unturned in many areas, the treatment of the advanced services such as BAS, BAM, HWS, and HAT is a bit too dry - even for a reader like myself who normally can make it through such material. Unless you are actually using these features in your day-to-day work, these chapters will likely not make much sense. They come off more as a "user manual" than as a reference-class book. In other words, lots of "how" and "when", but rarely does it answer the more important question of "why".

The remainder (and bulk) of the book however is top-notch. And since it is effectively the only book available today for BizTalk 2004, it would not be right to give this one any less than a 4 out of 5.

Fantastic!

Microsoft finally remembered that the majority of their MSDN subscribers are not huge enterprise customers, but rather the smaller one to five developer teams that permeate the industry.

In response to heavy feedback, they are introducing a five-seat version of Team Foundation Server with the version of MSDN that replaces Universal.

In less than 24 hours the festivities will begin.

Towards the end of the day, my presentation will be a deep look into asynchronous programming, with particular emphasis on multithreading. This is more or less the same presentation I gave a few months ago to the C# User Group, but with information about the new Semaphore support in 2.0 (with a corresponding example project).

The other major difference is that with the C# UG version of this presentation, it took me an hour and 20 minutes to cover it... moving through it all very quickly. However at Code Camp, we are limited to under an hour! More slides, more demos, and less time to do it!

I am also posting the Slide Deck and Sample Code here, for anyone who misses the presentation or that just wants to see what the session is covering before deciding which one they want to attend.