By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 20 December 2010
 The great feedback i received at EvangelOz last week really struck a chord with me. As a speaker at conferences one of the things that I hate is the feedback forms. Not because I don’t welcome feedback, because I can’t remember EVER getting feedback that was actually useful. Giving me feedback like “Giving out prize [insert prize here] was really lame.” doesn’t help me to give a better presentation next time, it just makes me feel bad that I have a little company that can’t afford to give out $1000 phones every time I do a presentation.
I hear many people whinge and complain about conferences, the speakers and the content so I say to all of you: if you want your experience to be better, give constructive feedback and take control of the experience you want to have. If you’re only at a $2,500 conference in the hope of winning a $1000 phone, then maybe you should rethink why you’re actually there.
Giving great feedback is really an art, and an art I don’t claim to be expert in. When I was in school I had a great teacher who helped us all be better at making constructive criticism. He would read someone’s homework or assignment or test submission to the class and everyone’s task was to write down 3 things they liked, and 3 things they think the person could have done better. At first this sounds really easy but if you’re given something really awesome to listen to it’s hard to find something to pick on and if you’re given something really bad, often it’s hard to find something you like. His idea was that we can always improve but not to overwhelm people in the number of ways they can do that. If you just concentrate on the negatives, the person is likely to feel disillusioned and eventually give up and if you only say the positives they will never improve or may feel your feedback is not genuine.
The idea of good and too improve was re-enforced this year when I attended the Imagine Cup finals....
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By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 20 December 2010
For the final of our three amazing, yet long and intense days at EvangelOz we each gave a 10 minute presentation showing off what we’d learned. There was so much to think about – just look at what we did on Day 1. For something a bit different, and because my new laptop doesn’t have any of my old presentations on it, I decided I’d do a non technical talk. Coming up with an idea and content from scratch with very little preparation time proved to be difficult. In the end I think it worked out ok. I tried a lot of new things, lots of gestures, lots of movement and some story telling that at the time felt very over the top. Even looking at the video now, it feels like too much.
I’d love to hear your feedback so have uploaded the video to YouTube here or you can watch below.
We finished off the day with a mystery activity. We all had a few guesses at what terrible task had been lined up for us. In the end it turned out to be getting on our soapbox in public for 3 minutes. Turns out you have to get permission from building management first, or maybe the security guards were a little bored and just wanted to pick a fight. It was great to see everyone get up and give it a go. It’s quite surprising how scary it isn’t when you’re surrounded by people to support you and the fact strangers will go to great length to avoid the crazy person bellowing across the square. Many thanks to Mark and Chris for being my participants/volunteers in my crazy tirade against smoking in public places.
One of the best things about the 3 days was the wonderful, constructive feedback I received and I think that’s worth a whole blog post on its own. Big thanks to Andrew and Sarah for allowing us to be part of what I think is going to be an awesome year! So John and I need to practise what we’ve been learning so here’s our...
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By Soul Solutions on
Thursday, 16 December 2010
 As many of you probably know the open source, super smooth, DeepEarth Map control supports the very cool NearMap imagery content for Australia. You know, the first imagery provider in the world to fly every capital city in Australia every month and publish that data live on the web within about 2 weeks in full resolution! (tiny exception is we’ve had so much rain that taking photos recently has been pretty hard for the NearMap team). You can create your own Silverlight powered map control for your application using the DeepEarth control and your favourite Silverlight (.Net) developer. Just point them to http://deepearth.codeplex.com or we’d be more then happy to help.
We have a demo site for you to check it out at http://deepearth.soulsolutions.com.au/nearmapdemo/ but this site is only a demo, go checkout the washing you had on the line two weeks ago. Who is that parked in your driveway last month? Wow that tree has grown over the last 6 months, and look they built a Bridge…
We have to move the demo site from time to time as we’re getting way too many hits. If you like the control why not grab a copy and put it in your application. Government and commercial users can contact NearMap for great value-for-money licensing, personal users and many businesses can use it...
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By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 22 November 2010
Who is invited? If you are a geek and a girl or know of one who is willing to escort you then you are welcome and encouraged to come along. There is a technical focus with the intention of having fun and connecting with other women in IT. It’s the last dinner of 2010 so we thought we’d have something a little more casual and have a informal networking night with drinks kindly sponsored by Microsoft. Jade Buddah have a happy hour on Friday afternoons if you wish to arrive earlier. Happy Hour is from 4-6pm downstairs and 5-7pm upstairs. For those interested in purchasing food the menu selection can be found here: http://jadebuddha.com.au/?section=menu Who pays for event Microsoft have kindly sponsored this event’s drinks Where + When Date: Friday 26 November, 2010 Time: from 5pm Where: Jade Buddha : 1 Eagle Street, Brisbane 4001
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By Soul Solutions on
Friday, 24 September 2010
 I was trying to add some validation logic into one of my forms. I added a function to my domain data service that I wanted to call from my Silverlight application using an [Invoke] attribute.
It all looked good but every time I tried to call it I kept getting an an error: Invoice operation [functionname] failed validation. Please inspect ValidationErrors on the operation for details After pulling my hair out for a bit I realised the entity I was passing into the function was getting validated and ValidationErrors were getting set. This is somewhat annoying. To get around this for now, what I’ve done is change my function from: [Invoke]
public bool IsLayerNameUnique(Entity myEntity)
to pass the fields that i need instead e.g. [Invoke]
public bool IsLayerNameUnique(string name, Guid id) This now means I can run the function but is somewhat annoying. If I needed to validate a bunch of fields it would mean I’d have to pass them all in. Anyone got a better way to do this?
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By Soul Solutions on
Thursday, 23 September 2010
 While doing some development using RIA services, Silverlight 4 and SQL I started to get this error after modifying one of my pages:
A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (provider: Shared Memory Provider, error: 0 - The handle is invalid.) My application had shut down correctly and I then discovered it had also broke all my current forms so figuring whatever I’d just changed must have caused it, I reverted my change to continue with this error. I stopped and started SQL Server..still no luck. I commented out a bunch of code till it was bare minimum and still no luck. Still don’t know what caused it but after an hour of trying things I did the reboot your computer trick and tada it all worked again. So if anyone knows how to fix this other than rebooting your computer, please let me know.
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By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 13 September 2010
 I was trying to create a RIA Services Class Library in VS2010 today and it kept failing to create both of the required projects with “A project with that name is already opened in the solution” as the error.
After searching around I’d found other projects that had a similar issue and the common thing was they were using AnkhSVN. There are 2 workarounds that also worked for me: 1. Disable AnkhSVN create the project, and re-enable it. 2. When you create the project make sure the casing exactly matches the actual directory e.g. use C:\Users\BronwenZ\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects and not the default of c:\users\bronwenz\documents\visual studio 2010\projects
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By Soul Solutions on
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
 Currently priced at only $2,500 per organisation MapData Sciences has just released the most current online road data map for Australia and New Zealand ready for you to use. Supplied as a hosted tile set the product is amazing value, you can simply plug this into your current generation GIS software or web application with ease, get 4 updates per year and a SLA to top it off. Find all the details here on MDS’ website.
The tile set is supplied in the now de facto web standard EPSG:3857, 256px square “Quad Tree” tiles. This format is used by Bing, Google, Yahoo, OSM and ESRI meaning that the most recent version of most GIS software will allow you to add this as a layer. MDS provides instructions on how to integrate with ESRI’s products as part of your welcome email.
Apart from the good value the impressive news is around Australia and New Zealand getting a first class current road map with an actual schedule of updates:
MapData Science shows the new tunnel...
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By Soul Solutions on
Wednesday, 18 August 2010
Last year over 80 attendees rolled up their sleeves at Tech Ed and got hard to work playing with Lego at the Lego Serious Play Women Build Event. We challenged each attendee to suggest ideas on ways to contribute to their local community to help encourage and support women working in IT.
Catherine has been hard at work organising this year’s event and since then has heard many a great story of the contributions both male and female attendees have made back in their local communities as a result of last year’s event. Microsoft want to recognise the people who have achieved great things in their local community in the last year and thank each of them for their efforts!
So, how did you do?
Tell us your story or the story of someone you know. Share the challenges and successes experienced. Go in the running to receive recognition from peers, win some cool prizes from our sponsors and possibly be awarded the inaugural 2010 Women in IT Community Contributor of the Year Award!
Nominate yourself or someone you know here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WIT2010
Tech Ed Australia 2010 WIT event
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