David McCollough : Tulsa

Tulsa TechFest

dmccollough — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:59:17 GMT

We’re coming up on 2 weeks until Tulsa TechFest and we want to do one last big push for attendees. We’re a little bit behind right now in our registrations, so please help us spread the word by forwarding this message on to your communities:

Tulsa TechFest

Friday, Nov 6, 2009 at OSU – Tulsa

8:00 AM – 6:30 PM

Keynote by Joe Fletcher – UX lead for Microsoft Surface team

13 Tracks – 65 Sessions of top developer, architect, designer and IT pro content

FREE event – just bring 2 cans of food for the Eastern Oklahoma Food Bank or $2 for the Family and Children’s Services of Tulsa

Just visit http://tulsatechfest.com to register today!

Tulsa Developers .NET User Group Meeting featuring Chris Koenig

dmccollough — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:40:05 GMT

Date: 08/31/2009

Time: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Location: Tulsa Community College – Northeast Campus

Street: 3727 E. Apache, Tulsa Ok

Bio:

Chris Koenig is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, based in Dallas, TX. Prior to joining Microsoft, Chris worked as a Senior Architect on the Architecture Strategy Team for The Capital Group in San Antonio, and as an Architect, Developer and Development Team Lead for the global solution provider Avanade.

As a consultant, Chris worked with a variety of clients from many vertical markets, ISVs and other solution providers on enterprise-class Windows and web-based applications. Today, Chris focuses on building, growing, and enhancing the developer communities in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas.

Chris is a devoted husband and father of four awesome children who keep him very busy. In his spare time, Chris serves as Scoutmaster for his oldest son's Troop, and Committee Chair for his youngest sons' Pack. Chris also enjoys traveling, cooking, camping and playing guitar.

You can contact Chris through his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/chkoenig, via email at chris.koenig@microsoft.com, or via Windows Live Messenger at chris@koenigweb.com.

Abstract:

Microsoft Visual C# 4.0

Come hear about what’s coming in the next version of C#! Released with .NET Framework 4, the C# language has continued to evolve into one of the world’s most popular programming languages. Join Microsoft Developer Evangelist Chris Koenig for a tour of what’s in store for C# 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 including the new dynamic language features, optional and named parameters, and more!

They will be giving away one copy of the Telerik Premium Collection for .Net US $1299 value as one of the door prizes!

For more information and to RSVP for the meeting, click here.

Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group Monthly Meeting – August 10th

dmccollough — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:43:00 GMT

Date: 08/10/2009

Time: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Location: Tulsa Community College – Northeast Campus

Street: 3727 E. Apache, Tulsa Ok

Bio:

Richard Oltmann and Jim Hudson are Senior Architects at OakTree Software. They have
over 11 years of SharePoint implementation and devolopment experience.

Abstract:

Enterprise SharePoint Design and Database Provisioning

Most SharePoint implementations are adhoc. To build an infrastructure that
will support terabytes of data and thousands of users, however, requires much
planning and research. We will look at design from a user perspective, scalability and
database considerations.

Agenda:

6pm - 6:30 Pizza and Mingle - Sponsored by TekSystems

6:30 - 6:45 Announcements
6:45 - 7:45 Presentation!
7:45 - 8:00 Drawings and Door Prizes

Location:

TCC (Tulsa Community College) Northeast Campus
3727 East Apache
Tulsa, OK 74115
918-594-8000
Campus Map | Live | Yahoo | Google | MapQuest

Door Prizes:

All the normal swag and giveaways! Free Stuff! How cool is that?

Sponsors:

Thanks to our sponsors:

TekSystems - Thanks for purchasing the Pizza for our meetings.

ISOCentric - Thanks for providing us hosting for the groups web site.

INETA.org - For allowing us to be a Charter Member and providing awesome Speakers!

Microsoft - For providing us with a lot of support and product giveaways!

Orielly books - For providing us with books.

Wrox books - For providing us with books.

Have any special requests? Let us know at this link.

RSVP for this month's meeting by responding to this thread.
(Must be logged in to the site)

Be SURE to RSVP no later than Noon on August 10th and you will get an extra entry for the prize drawings! So, do it now, before you forget and miss out!

Show up for the first time or bring a new buddy and you both get TWO extra entries!

Multilingual SharePoint Publishing Sites

dmccollough — Wed, 13 May 2009 03:05:28 GMT

I work for SpringPoint Technologies, they are a Microsoft Managed Gold Partner based in Tulsa Oklahoma.

Recently I have been presenting the lessons we learned while working on a SharePoint Publishing portal that needed to have Multilingual support.

I thought I would also present the material here as well and upload my slides.

Introduction

Enabling SharePoint variations on a Publishing Portal allows you to (somewhat) easily create a web application where you can have content pages translated into other languages.

Variations can also be used to provide alternate pages for mobile devices.

Planning

Supporting multiple languages should be considered very early in your design process.

Variations effects all aspects of a publishing portal including site structure, lists, master pages, page layouts, document libraries and basically everything.

Implementation

A key factor in successfully implementing variations is the patch level of the SharePoint Farm.

The Minimum level that should be used is 12.0.0.6318. This is MOSS 2007 SP1 plus the infrastructure updates for both WSS 3.0 (KB 951695) and MOSS 2007 (KB 951297).

MOSS 2007 SP2 is supposed to improve performance and reliability but I have not yet had a chance to download and test.

If you have Home as your root site, when you turn variations on it will become /EN/Home

Any code that you might be using to create lists, page instances, site structure will need to be variation aware.

Page content is NOT translated.

Variations labels MUST match the culture codes in order for page propagation to work.

Once variations are turned on, you can’t turn them off.

Performance

Creating the site hierarchies for the target sites is VERY resource intensive and time consuming. It is recommended that you create only one target site at a time and verify that all of it’s content has propagated prior to creating any additional sites.

You will experience performance problems using variations in a virtual environment, unless that virtual environment very closely mimics physical hardware.

Depending on site size, page propagation times will vary.

Lessons Learned

Hidden pages in a pages gallery will be propagated to the target web sites, but they will not be hidden in the target web sites.

Document libraries are not propagated to the target web sites.

If you have a page hidden in the current navigation it will not be hidden in the target web sites.

Changing the default welcome page requires you to reset it on the target web sites.

Source variation lists are not propagated to the target web sites. If the content in the lists needs to be translated for each of the target web sites, you will have to create the lists manually or with code on each of the target web sites.

Only page galleries will be propagated to the target web sites and the pages will be in draft mode.

Using a custom master page on the source site requires you to reset the master page on the target web sites.

Images in the source variation are not propagated to the target sites.

Content types MUST match between page gallery’s in both the source and target web sites.

Changing the default welcome page requires you to reset it on the target web sites.

Sample Code

Retrieve all variation labels and iterate over

// Grab all of the variations.
ReadOnlyCollection<VariationLabel> variationLabels = Variations.Current.UserAccessibleLabels;

foreach (VariationLabel vl in variationLabels)
{
   using (SPWeb webSite = siteCollection.OpenWeb("/" + vl.Title + "/AboutUs"))
   {
	// List Creation code omitted …
   }
}

Retrieve all variation labels and iterate over

ReadOnlyCollection<VariationLabel> variationLabels = Variations.Current.UserAccessibleLabels;

foreach (VariationLabel vl in variationLabels)
{
   if (vl.IsSource)
   {
      return vl;
   }
}

Retrieve relative URL for current variation

string currentUrl = SPContext.Current.Web.Url;

ReadOnlyCollection<VariationLabel> variationLabels = Variations.Current.UserAccessibleLabels;

foreach (VariationLabel vl in variationLabels)
{
   if (currentUrl.StartsWith(vl.TopWebUrl, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase))
   {
      variationUrl = "/" + vl.Title;

      break;
   }
}

Utilities

It’s possible that the variation relationships can become corrupt. Tim Dobrinski has created a variations editor utility to help fix the relationships list. You can download it from this url.

Download the slide deck from here.

Hope this helps anybody that is working with variations.

David M. McCollough