I first saw Seattle-based Tableau Software a few years back at a conference expo, and ended up spending about an hour at their booth. Then I dragged friends over to their booth. Being a big fan of Edward Tufte and his beautiful work on data visualization, I was instantly impressed with what Tableau is doing. If your job includes analysis of data, or creating visual representations of data for others to analyze and draw their own conclusions, then you need to look at this company's award-winning software.

They now have a page of interesting examples of data visualization created using Tableau. It is well worth exploring even if you aren't interested in their product. You can drill into the details of each example, including downloading the data behind each visualization. What better way to convince someone of your analysis than to show them the data?

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I had a bit of trouble with the dynamic popups on the examples page. When you hover the mouse over an example, a detail window is popped up. If the popup window is displayed so that the mouse is in the window, it immediately closes the popup window. The net effect is an annoying flash — now you see it, now you don't. No, you can't move the mouse fast enough to get it out of the way, and I couldn't see any rhyme or reason to where the page decides to pop up each window.

That's a real UX bummer, Tableau. Can you get that fixed, please?

For now, you can just click directly on the example for a detail page.

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From what I've seen, Tableau has been hard at work evolving their capabilities and offerings, including a free Tableau Reader. Nice.

Want more? Take a product tour, download a free trial, watch on-demand web seminars, or make plans to attend their first customer conference 20–22 July 2008 in Seattle, Washington.

Time sure has a way of creeping up on you when you're not looking. This Friday, 2 May 2008, is the last change to save $200 on TechEd 2008 conference registration.

If you're just waking up and smelling the coffee, due to the popularity of this conference in recent years, this year TechEd is two separate conferences on two subsequent weeks. TechEd Developers 2008 is 3–6 June 2008, and TechEd IT Professionals 2008 is 10–13 June 2008, both in Orlando, Florida, USA.

I am looking forward to the new split-week format. The last few TechEds have so large it's been easy to feel lost in the vast sea of attendees. While I am certain that this year won't exactly be intimate, it will be more approachable and on the whole a better experience for all concerned.

Join in the fun at BarCamp Portland 2008 this weekend. It is a free developer event for people to share and learn from each other. The content is determined by the attendees at the event. Friday evening is a kickoff reception, session planning and networking. Saturday and Sunday are the real-deal BarCamp sessions.

All activities are at CubeSpace, 622 SE Grand, Portland, OR, 97214. Be sure to register at Upcoming.

Here's a handy trick for whipping C# using declarations into shape. Visual Studio 2008 will remove unused using declarations, or sort them, or both in one shot. Here's how.

In Visual Studio 2008, open a .cs file. Right-click anywhere in the block of using declarations at the top of the file and select Organize Usings. Now you can select Remove Unused Usings, Sort Usings, or Remove and Sort which does both.

The new, redesigned INETA website launched and it is well worth checking out. INETA is the world-wide association of .NET user groups, and the new website makes it even easier to find local user groups, locate speakers in the Speakers Bureau, watch INETA Live videos, and much more.

I have been involved in a number of ways with INETA since 2002. In fact, Bob Goodearl and I co-chair the Birds-of-a-Feather track at TechEd Developers 2008 on behalf of the .NET community under the auspices of INETA. They are good folks.

Kudos to everyone who's devoted time and effort to the site redesign — ineta.org is looking good!

I attended the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2008 in Seattle and Redmond, Washington last week. Great technology and it is always nice to mingle with 1,700 of my closest übernerd friends. Monday and Thursday we were all together in Seattle's WSCTC for keynotes, general meetings, and Open Spaces sessions. That formed the crunchy outer shell around the dense chewy inner nougat of breakout sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday held at various locations on the Redmond campus.

I attended the Connected Systems Division (CSD) track, where the first session answered one question on everyone's mind, "can we blog/twitter/podcast/text/talk about the track sessions?" There were several answers: no, no, no, no, and no. Okay, we are allowed to say that we were at the MVP Summit in the CSD track, and that we talked about Oslo. And that's it. Here goes:

I went to the MVP Summit and attended the CSD track. We talked about Oslo. It was cool.

Now what else can I talk about? Great Party with Palermo on Sunday evening. On Monday, Sean O'Driscoll, who will be leaving Microsoft shortly, gave a great speech about community. I liked the Open Spaces sessions on Monday afternoon, they were fairly similar in nature to Birds-of-a-Feather sessions that I help run at TechEd and PDC, so I was right at home. Michelle Laroux Bustamante led a WCF discussion, and Roman Kiss talked about his WCF null channel on Code Project. It was great to catch up with Roman on several issues during the Summit. Monday evening I I geeked it up with Sam Gentile and other folks from Neudesic, and then I ducked out of the reception to work on the TechEd BOF sessions.

At Tuesday night's CSD dinner I had the pleasure of dining with Don Box, and then discussing deployment woes and aspirations with Sasha. I was so engrossed in the conversation I didn't realized everyone else had left the restaurant, and sprinted back to the shuttle bus just in time. Wednesday night was the attendee party at the EMP, where I had some fun sharing around my new light-up juggling balls. Lots of geeks juggle.

Thursday we heard keynote sessions and Q&A with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzy and Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer. Ozzy's keynote was interesting, but I personally felt it missed the mark on being inspiring. In fairness, MVPs are a tough crowd.  Ballmer, by contrast, is a dynamic character on and off the stage, and had some good answers to tough questions. Thursday afternoon I was back on campus for some follow-up CSD sessions about some very exciting technology.

Thursday evening I met up with Australian Regional Director Adam Cogan and we had dinner and discussed versioning for services. Adam was asking all the right questions. How come we don't have any of the right answers? And why aren't they baked into the platform?

Friday the Summit was over, but I had some meetings on campus. While waiting for a public transit bus from Seattle to Redmond, I got an added bonus to my trip: Pat Helland walked up an introduced himself. As luck would have it, that's his daily commute bus. We had a great conversation on the ride in.

All in all, it was a great geek week.

I grabbed a taxi in Seattle the other day, and asked my driver my customary question, "Where are you from?"

"Ah," he said, "now that is a very interesting question. Maybe you mean, 'where do I come from first?' is that it?" Well, sure, that's a good place to start. "Very well, how about if I answer your question with a question?" I didn't know there was going to be a test on this ride or I might have studied up. "What was the first country to recognize the sovereignty of the United States?" OMG, today's quiz subject is US history.

Thinking, thinking. I remembered that Benjamin Franklin was off in France somewhere around that time. Maybe he secured French recognition of the newly minted United States. "France," I confidently declared.

"Nope. I'll give you a hint. Do you want a hint from classical music or classic rock?"

Let's go for classic rock.

"Crosby, Stills and Nash sang a song called Marrakesh Express, so what country is Marrakech in?"

"Morocco." Whew! I know that by luck: there's a Moroccan restaurant in Portland named Marrakesh. "Really, Morocco?"

"Yes, in 1777!" Cool, I did not know that. I don't think that I even knew that once and then forgot it. But Morocco? Really?

Yes, Morocco really was the first country to recognize the independence of the United States of America, with references cited.

We arrived at my destination and I paid my driver and thanked him for the history lesson. And we didn't get to where else he was from.

Now I've got some reading to do.

Compensable, adjective: that which can be compensated. Yes, it really is a word. I was under the mistaken impression that I had to say compensatable, but that's not even a word. So WS-BusinessActivity describes compensable activities.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer, used his April 8 keynote address at RSA Conference 2008 to introduce End to End Trust, a Microsoft initiative built on authenticating identities and securing Web-based transactions and communications.

"We don't want this to be interpreted as a Microsoft play. We're saying that these are the concepts that we generally support and we've put them together in this white paper and we're asking the industry to talk about it...”

— George Stathakopoulos, general manager of security response, Microsoft, quoted in eWeek article

Craig Mundie's End to End Trust keynote address from the conference is available as webcast or transcript. Microsoft's press release provides an overview, and a related eWeek article frames the issue for a broader audience. The real goods, including the cornerstone whitepaper, are at www.microsoft.com/endtoendtrust.

For those attending the Microsoft MVP Summit, here's some late breaking news. Patrick Smacchia (C# MVP) has a talk on NDepend that's a new addition to the schedule. It will be 5PM, Wednesday, 16 April 2008 in the MSCC. The session highlights new features of NDepend, including integration with code coverage metrics from NCover or VSTS.

If you aren't aware of NDepend, it a freaking amazing code analysis tool. It generates seriously deep code metrics, and provides tools for analyzing and visualizing the results. In the Documentation section of the website you can find a pdf "placemat" for understanding the code metrics which I created with help from Scott Hanselman and Patrick Cauldwell.