Notes From The Road: 2014 in review

So many things happen in 2014, for me, it was a year of radical changes in my life, most of them extremely good others less so but in the end, it was once again a professional and personal remarkable year for me.

Released my first book…

In partnership with BizTalk360 (the publisher) and my company DevScope, I was able to produce and publish my first book completely free for the community. A book that was announced in Oslo, Norway during the last BizTalk Innovation day of 2014.

“BizTalk Mapping Patterns and Best Practices” book is a 400-page recipe that offers insights on how maps work, the most common patterns in real-time scenarios, and best practices for BizTalk Developers to develop effective, robust, and organized maps. The book has as technical reviewers Steef-Jan Wiggers, Nino Crudele, Michael Stephenson and José António Silva and is available for you to download at BizTalk360 website here.

Multiple speaking engagements…

I had the opportunity to be present, has a speaker, in multiple events across Europe (UK, Norway, and Portugal). But the most relevant, due to its main objective, was in April of 2014, where DevScope and I participated in the second Global Windows Azure Bootcamp, an event held in 138 locations around the globe. This allowed all participants to have a one-day deep dive class and get up to speed on developing Cloud Computing Applications for Windows Azure. In addition to this great learning opportunity, the hands-on labs featured launching a huge global compute farm to perform diabetes research using the contributions (processing time) from all participants all over the globe.

During the event, our team (DevScope Team) dedicated a total of 159 of our virtual machines, spread over 5 Azure Datacenters worldwide. The final statistics were recently published and, although not all processing was leveraged, our overall effort is still 38% of all Portuguese contribution.

Overall Statistics for DevScope, Portugal

• Total worker role instances: 140
• Total targets processed: 1441
• Total processing time: 5 days 14 hours 8 minutes.

Here is the complete list of speaking engagements that I had in 2014:

• BizTalk Summit 2014 London (March 3rd & 4th)

• Global Windows Azure Bootcamp – Lisboa (March 29)

• XLIX Encontro da Comunidade SQLPort – Porto (April 23)

• BizTalk Innovation Day Oslo (September 25)

• LIX Encontro da Comunidade SQLPort (October 15)

• SQLSaturday #341 – Porto (October 18)

For me is always a great honor and joy to be participating in events, either as speaker or attendee, be with old friends, meet new people and share the knowledge!

And yet had the opportunity to attend some events like:

• MVP Global Summit 2014

• XLVII Encontro da Comunidade SQLPort Porto
• And an incalculable number of internal training events in DevScope were we address all kind of topics like VisualStudio Data Tools, Upgrade to SharePoint 2013, Azure ML (Machine Learning), SharePoint Apps, Tools for x-platform development, Twitter Bootstrap, SQL 2014 Power Tools, productivity tips and so on.

• And more

My Blog is still growing…

Very special thanks to all my reader I really appreciate the 310,000 visits to my blog, from 183 countries in the past year. That’s 110,000 more visits than last year!

• 2013: 200,000 visits, 176 countries, 79 new posts
• 2012: 170,000 visits, 171 countries, 102 new posts
• 2011: 91,000 visits, 61 new posts

And this last year was the weakest year in terms of post-publication with only 52, less 27 than the last year.

The posts that got the most views in 2014 were:

1. “Cannot open database ‘…’ requested by the login. The login failed” or “The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘…’, database ‘…’, schema ‘dbo’” posted on February 2012 (for the third year on the top
2.  BizTalk 2013 Installation and Configuration – Important considerations before set up the server (Part 1) posted in May 2013
3. The source was not found, but some or all event logs could not be searched. Inaccessible logs: Security. posted on February 2012
4. BizTalk 2013 Installation and Configuration – Install and Configure BizTalk Server 2013 (Part 9) posted in May 2013
5. How To import Add Reference from WSDL file posted in June 2009

However, my favorite’s posts that I enjoyed writing last year was:

• BizTalk Server: Demystifying the Test Map operation in Visual Studio because I spent almost all the year finishing the Mapper book trying to find new techniques e explaining others.
• New release: Managing and cleaning BizTalk Server MarkLog database tables: sp_DeleteBackupHistoryAndMarkLogsHistory because it was a community effort
• BizTalk Mapper: Best Practices when using Custom XSLT files because whenever I speak about this topic I always think that is a controversial topic and generate an intense discussion.

TechNet Wiki, BizTalk Open Source Contributions

And as has been the case in recent years, I’m BizTalk Technet Contributor where I write articles in Microsoft TechNet Wiki and BizTalk TechNet moderator. I’m also a member of the TechNet Wiki Community Council and TechNet Wiki Ninja Blogger.

• BizTalk Open Source Contributions in Microsoft TechNet Gallery and in GitHub;
• You can see all of my articles here.

And many other contributions….

Besides community work…

Friendship, family, traveling and running were also important things besides community work hehe…

• 2014 was the year I start to run (who knows maybe one day I will join Steef-Jan and Kent Weare to a half marathon)

• Besides traveling for speaking events I was able to visit London (UK), Piacenza (Italy) Saint-Nazaire (France) and Salvador (Brazil) for pleasure

• Portuguese MVP Meetings

• Family and friends!

Thanks for following me, for reading my blog and I promise that I will continue to share my knowledge during 2015.