Bringing Business Intelligence knowledge to the .Net developer crowd has been something that I’ve been trying to do over the last year. So, when Andrew Brust offered me an opportunity to work with him on a PDC pre-conference workshop with intent of bringing some BI goodness to the PDC crowd, I couldn’t turn it down. The workshop is called “Developing Microsoft BI Applications - The How and The Why”, and if you have seen my BI For the .Net Guy talk, you’ll have a good idea as to what attendees will be in for, only a lot more stuff covered, and even better (thanks to the help of Andrew). We start you off assuming you haven’t done BI before (and let’s face it, .Net BI applications are not, yet, common), and bring up to speed with some of the terms and concepts of BI and OLAP, how to migrate from transactional data stores to BI data stores, and then shoe how to access them using .Net. We then shift gears and show how to use the various BI Presentation Technologies (Reporting Service, Report Builder, Sharepoint, Performance Point, Gemini and some 3rd party tools). The last 1/3 of the workshop is all about how to strategically integrate BI into your line of business applications (and engage your business owners/clients and show what can and can’t be done with BI).
If you want to find out some more, Peter Laudati interviewed Andrew and myself about the workshop. Actually, Peter jumped in and helped us (Thanks Peter!), when we couldn’t travel out to Redmond to be interviewed by Robert Hess on “The Knowledge Chamber” (that wouldn’t have been so cool, but it wasn’t meant to be :( ).
So, if you headed out to the PDC, signup for the workshops and register for Developing Microsoft BI Applications - The How and The Why. Yes, I know we are in tough economic times, but the PDC is always my favorite Microsoft conference. You get to find out about the future of the Microsoft development stack, and hangout with the uber-geeks. I’m staying at the Westin (seems as though the bar in the lobby is always filled with great late night conversations).