Kirk Haselden

What's happened to this blog...

Well, it's been a while since I've blogged. And for good reason. The last six months, and in particular, the last three have been extremely busy and difficult. For the most part, if I was doing any writing, it was on my forthcoming book. Yes, it's done. Now it's simply a matter of letting the publisher machinery churn. I suppose, like anyone who has ever written a book, especially a technical reference, I've had some real disappointments, some trying times and some highs. I won't bore you with them all, but just to say that writing a technical reference is extremely difficult. The writing isn't so hard, in fact, it was pretty easy. I just had to poor out my brain into the chapters. The difficult part is the time and the things you have to give up to make it happen. In the time I took to write the book I missed essentially 2.5 child years out of my children's lives. That's the tough part.

On the bright side, I truly believe that I've been able to provide some real value to readers. Time and time again I've seen questions about the product that are answered by the book. There are roughly 40 sample packages, 7 custom tasks in various degrees of completeness including the expression task that let's you modify the value of a variable with an expression and an encryption task with a stock task UI that let's you encrypt/decrypt text files, 4 custom components including a JPEG metadata extractor source adapter, data profile transform and two ADO.NET destination adapters. There are two configuration utilities. One for editing configurations in a package directly and one for bulk editing a configuration in multiple packages simultaneously. All have the source code available. There are some especially helpful chapters on configurations, tuning the dataflow task, SSIS security and writing custom components. Although the original concept and table of contents for the book was much more expansive, I believe that the final results address the lionshare of topics that people really want to know. I hope you enjoy the book and that it helps you get the most out of Integration Services. You can pre-order the book here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0672327813/ref=sr_11_1/002-5741340-2320813?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Another factor in my recent recording reticence is a role change. I've taken a position in the Office Business Applications group. This is a great opportunity to help continue the emphasis on Business Intelligence at Microsoft. While my primary focus has been Integration Services for the last 5 years, this new role will allow me to spread my wings a bit and impact a wider range of products. My current project is not announced and probably won't be for some time, however I will be focusing more broadly on the full Microsoft BI Suite of tools and future entries you find here will likely reflect that. I still have a number of SSIS blogs that I want to get around to, but I'll also be tackling other subjects such as BSM, BPM, UDM, AS, MDM, EIM and other such TLAs.

Well, that's enough blathering from me for one night.

Thanks,

Universe.Earth.Software.Microsoft.Office.OBA.KirkHaselden