Greg Robinson's Blog

So it is time for the web (as we know it) to die.

gregarobinson — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:42:00 GMT

We all read articles and blogs on this subject, some good, some bad, some crazy, some not. Rocky wrote an excellent post on this subject recently, one worth reading.

Agile: Well said

gregarobinson — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:37:00 GMT

I am a huge fan of Agile Software Development. One day I do plan to write a blog post of my own on this...until then Jared did a great job voicing pretty much everything I believe in Agile.

Application Architecture Guide - 2nd Edition

gregarobinson — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:34:00 GMT

FYI

http://blogs.msdn.com/dphill/archive/2009/01/15/application-architecture-guide-2nd-edition.aspx | Comments

The long awaited 2nd edition of the patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide has just reached content complete status. Congratulations to J.D. and the whole Application Architecture Guide team on a superb job! You can download the content complete version of the guide from the CodePlex site here.

The Application Architecture Guide is one of our most important releases this year. Painting a coherent picture for an area as deep and wide as application architecture is very difficult, but judging by the download numbers (nearly 37000 in less than a day!) the community is clearly looking for this kind of guidance.

The guide itself is really the tip of the ice berg. J.D. and team have made much more content, including how-to's and videos, available at the Application Architecture Guide's Knowledge Base site here. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Next step for the guide is final editing, getting it published to MSDN and printing it in book form, so be sure to look for it in a book store near you soon!

.NET Software Developer needed

gregarobinson — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 18:58:00 GMT

I know there are a lot of folks looking for work so I plan to post what I know:

Charlottesville, VA

Permanent Hire

Not remote/offsite

".NET Software Developer

We're looking to add a web developer to our software development group. You'll work in a development team where flexibility, creativity, and continuous learning form the modus operandi. Successful Web Developer Candidates have:

4+ years experience with Microsoft web technologies, including ASP.NET, VB.NET, and MS SQL Server

Understanding of the full software development lifecycle

Proficiency in Object Oriented and N-tier architecture design principles

Interface implementation (HTML/DHTML/CSS/AJAX)

Deep knowledge of XML (a must)

Knowledge of XSL/XSLT (a plus)

Desire to thrive in a creative team environment

The ability to quickly learn and effectively apply new technologies and concepts"

SharePoint Saturday

gregarobinson — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:45:00 GMT

I will be heading down to Virginia Beach this Saturday to attend SharePoint Saturday. Give me a ping if you will be there too.

How to add a Users Desktop shortcut to a Setup project ins VS 2008

gregarobinson — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:02:00 GMT

I wasted far to much time trying to figure this out on my own. I finally came across this link, which made it all real easy.

Web development in the .NET world has gotten a lot more interesting in the last couple of years

gregarobinson — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:13:00 GMT

A good and quick read on the 3 options by Davy Brion

What is Cloud computing?

gregarobinson — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:51:00 GMT

I have been trying to get my hands on this term "cloud computing". It's very confusing. I do not feel bad now as even the experts cannot agree on what it is.

Creating a windows service in .Net

gregarobinson — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:27:00 GMT

I was going to get around to blogging about this, eventually. I came across this read this morning which does a nice job, so I am now spared!

OSLO = 42

gregarobinson — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:57:00 GMT

A good post from Head in the Cloud.

How Microsoft tests software

gregarobinson — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 14:40:00 GMT

Good post from I.M. Testy

Developing Visual Studio in the snow

gregarobinson — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:20:00 GMT

I thought this was a cool pic

Good news, XP will be around a little longer

gregarobinson — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:10:00 GMT

Microsoft Extends Windows XP Cutoff Date

Migrate sites, lists and libraries between SharePoint servers with views, versions, user-info, web parts, permissions and metadata.

gregarobinson — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 12:35:00 GMT

My client asked me to figure out how to copy a SharePoint site from one server to another server. In my clients case they have an internal SharePoint site that they would like to copy to one of their clients/customers servers.

Metalogix offers content migration and archiving solutions. Thanks for sharing this with me Mark. I took a look at their solutions and they look good, and will certainly do the job.

I am a figure it out for yourself kind of person so I dug into the SharePoint documentation.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes the Stsadm tool for command-line administration of Office SharePoint Server 2007 servers and sites. Stsadm is located at the following path on the drive where SharePoint Products and Technologies is installed: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN. You must be an administrator on the local computer to use Stsadm.

Stsadm provides a method for performing the Office SharePoint Server 2007 administration tasks at the command line or by using batch files or scripts. For more on the Stsadm tool see this site.

Two of the operations, Export and Import, can be used to move a Sharepoint site and its contents from one server to another. The Export operation exports site and subsite data from a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 installation and the Import operation imports site and subsite data from a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 installation. Using the combination of two one can package up a Sharepoint site, with its contents, and move it to another server.

The stsadm tool is located here: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN. Open cmd.exe to use this tool. First, start with the export using the stsadmn tool with the following parameters:

stsadm -o export -url http://therurl/theexistingsite -includeusersecurity -nofilecompression -filename test

Executing this will create a folder under the BIN folder named “test”. The test folder will contain .dat, .log and .xml files. I cannot state this for sure, as I have not been able to document it, but it appears each .dat files represents a document (a PDF in my clients case).

I used the nofilecompression parameter as I was seeing low disk space errors while testing this on a development server. This will enable file compression in the import package. The import package is stored in the folder specified by the -filename parameter. It is recommended to use this parameter for performance reasons. If compression is enabled, it can increase the import process by approximately 30%.

The includeusersecurity parameter preserves the user security settings. I am not sure at this point if this is needed when creating an import package that will be executed outside of a client's network as the user settings on a clients server will most likley differ from the internal settings.

Now, to import simply replace the Export operation above with the Import operation. You also need to replace "url http://therurl/theexistingsite with" url http://therurl/thenewsite, pointing to the url for the site you are importing to.

So far so good, this process seems to work.

MGrammer

gregarobinson — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:05:00 GMT

Man, where have I been. I was catching up on my RSS feeds this morning and tripped on this.