Notes From The Road: 2014 in review

So many things happened 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.

The 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 the BizTalk360 website here.

Multiple speaking engagements…

I had the opportunity to be present, as a speaker, in multiple events across Europe (the 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 contributions.

Overall Statistics for DevScope, Portugal

• Total worker role instances: 140.
• Total targets processed: 1441.
• Total processing time: 5 days, 14 hours, and 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, it is always a great honor and joy to participate in events, either as a speaker or an 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.
• An incalculable number of internal training events in DevScope were where we addressed all kinds 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, 27 less 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 in February 2012 (for the third year on 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 in 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 posts that I enjoyed writing last year were:

• 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 it is a controversial topic and generates an intense discussion.

TechNet Wiki, BizTalk Open Source Contributions

And as has been the case in recent years, I’m a BizTalk Technet Contributor, where I write articles in Microsoft TechNet Wiki, and a 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;

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 started 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 in 2015.