Archives
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Article: Essential Software for Windows Mobile 5
My WM5 device is an iMate JASJAR (aka the HTC Universal). This article describes applications and practices to make this device as handy as a laptop.
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Essential Software for Windows Mobile 5
My old WM5 device was the iMate JASJAR (aka the HTC Universal), now I have an HTC P4350 (aka the HTC Herald). This article describes applications and practices to make this device as handy as a laptop.
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Free CorasWorks Training Thursday!
This is late warning, but tomorrow there is a free CorasWorks workshop at CTC from 8:30am to 5:00pm. If you would like to sit in, please e-mail jprets@corasworks.net!
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The TSPUG Mission (Note: meeting Wednesday evening)
Despite my objections to mission statements (which all inevitably reduce to "all babies must eat"), I've written one for the Toronto SharePoint User Group to eliminate confusion and placed it on our website. After some rumination I removed the opening line which read "TSPUG is a place where SharePoint geeks learn from each other," to leave what you find below (mainly because I couldn't distill "learn together" to "all babies must eat," but also because a group of geeks is correctly a "gaggle" and it's too late to change the logo). But if the members demand it, I'll put it right back in.
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Social Network and Relationship Finder (SNARF)
I've been following MS sociologist Marc Smith's work for a few years now. In a nutshell, Marc's task is to mine data for socially-relevant information, and he's written some interesting papers on virtual communities.
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Excel Server and SharePoint
On Wednesday in the MSDN Excel blog there was a nice piece on the integration of the new Excel Server and SharePoint. This was actually part 11 (of x) in a lengthy series on the Excel Server being released with Office 12.
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Announcing the Toronto User Group Community Blog
You can now stay up-to-date on the various User Group meetings around town by surfing to: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/torontoug/
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Toronto Code Camp - Saturday 2006-01-14
The Toronto Code Camp is a great event for developers to learn new tricks for .NET. I'm delivering a session (January 14, 1:00 to 2:15) on one of my favourite new features -- MSBuild and Web Deployment Projects for Visual Studio.
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Son of SmartPart released!
First Jan Tielens created SmartPart as a way of quickly deploying any ASP.NET control as a Web Part. Then WSS SP2 made it possible to upgrade your WSS boxes to run on ASP.NET v2, though without being able to take advantage of v2 features.
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Need to migrate C++ apps in the GTA?
East of Toronto .NET User Group Flash
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Multilingual SharePoint
In Canada, extranet sites are often provided in both of our distinct national languages -- en-ca (English-Canadian) and en-nf (English-Newfoundland). Occasionally, government sites are also presented in the less entertaining fr-ca (Québécois).
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Red Green, Whidbey Launch, and the SharePoint Users Group
It's another jam-packed week, if you're at any of these upcoming events, be sure to say hi.
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Speculation on SPS vNext
I'm trying to shake a cold, so what follows may be entirely the result of too much cough medicine. Someone asked what to expect from SPS in the Office 12 timeframe, and the fact is that not much was announced at PDC. There was OFF313: Web Content Management Application Development and Engine Extensibility, and. . . that was about it. I wasn't in on the TAP and I'm not under any NDAs with the SharePoint team, so there's no time like now to walk the plank and speculate.
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Launch Cassini in any folder
Wouldn't it be great if you could launch a web server on any folder just by right-clicking? Robert McLaws built a utility that does just that. This will be one of those "how'd I live without it" tools for ASP.NET v2 (Whidbey) development and testing. Thanks Robert!
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PDC 2005 Slide Decks
All sessions presented at PDC 2005:
http://commnet.microsoftpdc.com/content/downloads.aspx -
Slide deck: Web Parts in WSS v2, ASP.NET v2, and WSS v3.
Thanks again to Graham for asking us to present, the audience for showing up, and to Ali for co-presenting with me at the Metro Toronto .Net User Group last night.
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Metro Toronto .NET User Group: Web Part Wednesday
I'm back at the Metro Toronto .NET User Group tomorrow night where I'll be co-presenting with Ali Kheradvar.
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Clippy, Interactivity, and Product Success
The other day I read this: "Now, they make a big deal out of the "interactive menus," but I was working under the impression that all menus were interactive, like when you go into a restaurant and point to where it says "steak," it shows up a little later and then you eat it. Now that's interactive." [Red Green, Ardmoreite.com article, may require free registration]
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Straw Poll: Speech Recognition
If saying "F*** off Clippy" actually closed Clippy, would you have kept Clippy enabled?
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TSPUG tonight, and downloads galore
Tonight's TSPUG meeting brings us the long-awaited SharePoint Backup, Restore, and Disaster Recovery presentation by Radu Vaduva. As usual we'll spend some time before the presentation talking about what's new and answering questions.
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Build Project add-in planned for release with VS2005
If you've knocked your head against the wall to come up with ways to deploy multiple web.config files for Dev, Testing, Staging, and Production servers, the answer is on the way. It takes the the form of an add-in for Visual Studio 2005 -- a Build Project Manager.
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I'm in Redmond!
No, not that Redmond. I'm in beautiful Redmond, Oregon with the scent of pine in the air, mountains on the horizon, and some great fishing just a short ride away. But yeah, I was planning to be in Redmond, WA. I suppose this is divine justice for making my latest catch-phrase, "unless something goes horribly wrong."
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Toronto SharePoint User Group: Meeting Tonight!
I'm posting at 4:47 and the TSPUG meeting start at 6:00, but registration is at capacity so hey, c'est la vie. The complete agenda for tonight is posted on the TSPUG site.
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Collected Best Practices for Taxonomy Design
Portal Architecture
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The Business Data Catalog
PDC 2005 Session OFF321
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InfoPath for Smart Clients, Browsers, and WinForms
I'm posting this as we go through the Q&A portion of this presentation, which covered both InfoPath development, and InfoPath's capabilities in publishing and interacting with different environs. InfoPath forms can now be used both inside MS Infopath ("smart client"), over a browser, or embedded in other apps. Here come the notes...
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SharePoint v3 Collaboration and Tracking Features
Notes from a terrifc session today at PDC. I expect to post notes from other sessions, the main delay will be converting from ink to text and doing a bit of proof-reading. All in all, it's beena grat day for SharePoint, and I hope this gives you a good taste of what's to come.
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PDC - Atlas is Alive
Atlas.asp.net went live at 8:00am PDT today to coincide with the keynote.
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SharePoint Tips
SPS / WSS Password Management.
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SharePoint Best Practices
Deployment
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Displaying a document library on another WSS site
A nifty way to use the Page Viewer and a Dialog View to display a document library on another site from Chandima Kulathilake.
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PDC 2005 - I'll be there
PDC is coming next week, and it promises to be a great week of insight into what's coming in the months and years ahead for SharePoint, ASP.NET, and the Windows platform. I'll be posting on the PDC Bloggers feed, and plan to do a presentation on what's coming for SharePoint later this year for the Toronto SharePoint Users Group.
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Scott Guthrie Posting Frenzy
Scott Guthrie oversees the ASP.NET and IIS development teams. Lately, he's been posting some great (and I mean "great" in the Alexandrian sense of "impressive" and "enlightening") stuff on leveraging IIS from Visual Studio, and the new Web Project model (also in abridged form). He's posted 8 times so far in August, which is a great indication that internal efforts are on-track as Whidbey glides in, and the team is now turning its attention to supporting the developer community in anticipation of the RTM.
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Eli's SharePoint Resources: New and improved!
After a year and 32065 web views, I've reorganized and moved the SharePoint resource page into an article. In addition to giving it a more sensible URL, the switch reflects the fact that this is a continuously updated resource and not a one-time posting. I've also added hand-tuned searches, making it easy to locate the most current information for each topic. Don't forget to update your bookmarks and links, and as always, enjoy!
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Eli's SharePoint Resources
What's Here
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Answering the timeless question: Is the Xbox 360 backwards compatible?
It's surprising. When it happens that someone hears you work with people from Microsoft on a nearly daily basis, after the obligatory next sentence which includes some reference to this "Bill" guy, the first real question they ask is... "so will I be able to play my old games on the new Xbox?"
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SP Application Templates, Fixes, and the SP Template Project
Bil's been posting aplenty on the SharePoint Application Templates (the SPATs?), I'll play aggregator.
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Be someone. Be a Senior Dev in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
A great company is hiring, is Saskatoon right for you? Features include: a mighty river, affordable real estate, the best jazz festival outside Montreal's, a beautiful university campus (featuring gothic architecture, a kick-ass synchotron, a dead Prime Minister, vampire hunters, and the airplane room, a massive mural [description] by the guy who did the picture that was excerpted for Van Halen's Fair Warning album cover [description]), outdoor Shakespeare, one of the best coffee roasteries in the country, terrain including sand dunes, prairie, two types of forest, and canadian shield within a 3 hour drive, the Rockies in like 6 hours by backroad, a lake of 20" rainbow trout an hour away, the 2nd fastest growing economy in Canada, a pretty solid local music scene (Amigo's, Bud's, Louis', the Wash 'n' Slosh for starters), an all-in-one nirvana where you can do your laundry, see a metal band, play on a z-shaped pool table, and get sloshed (again, the Wash 'n' Slosh [update: damn, it's now the Roxy and they replaced the laundry with a restaurant, oh well]), northern lights visible from inside the city, fantastic berries named after the city, and the heaviest radio show the world has ever known (Metalurgy).
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New SharePoint Applications and End-User Resources
A while back I griped about the lack of team sites that meet actual scenarios; today I'm pleased to report that Microsoft just released a pile of great sites that fit the bill nicely. It sets a great precedent and demonstrates what's possible, and I hope to see more collections like it sprout online.
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Consuming Web Services from Excel 2003
It's possible to consume web services from Excel 2003, but few of the sources seem to cover the topic from end-to-end. This post is intended as a companion to an O'Reilly article on the topic and includes a few elements I found necessary to get it all working.
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Project Management and Task Switching
At Eidenai we're working in the third milestone (M3) of a portal project for a major manufacturer. My methodology is to scope the milestone by reviewing both the planned features for M3 and the features we agreed to drop from earlier releases, identify priorities, identify available resources, break the work down into tasks, and the order the tasks according to priorities and dependencies.
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Guidelines to Drive User Adoption of SharePoint
SharePoint Advisor magazine has an excellent article by Garry Smith that covers the most important aspect of a SharePoint deployment: getting people to use it.
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Weaknesses of SharePoint
After dismissing a weak collection of complaints about SharePoint in a previous post, let's take the other side and identify some real issues (Bil has the positive). I won't rip into specific features, that would be too easy and made irrelevant with links to the third-party solutions. Instead, let's focus on the solvable, foreseeable problems that hampered the WSS 2.0 product cycle.
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Two Microsoft Canada SharePoint Job Opportunities
If I didn't already have the ideal job, I would want this first one. And if you're thinking of applying for this, let me know for two reasons: a) Eidenai is also keeping an eye out for someone to be my counterpart on the consulting (delivery) side of the business, and b) if you land it, we'll be working together.
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Thread de la semaine
A Top Five list of SharePoint gripes set off a chain of blogs. Paul Shaeflein wrote a good rebuttal, but the fact is that these are as much recycled, outdated gripes about MSFT as they are about SharePoint. The author blissfully ignores obvious facts or answers, which sort of undermines the whole exercise. Bil wrote the best post in the series simply by bringing the focus back to what SharePoint is.
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Analysing SharePoint Logs
Today's question:
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Toronto SharePoint User Group Meets Tonight. Topic: Workflow.
After three and a half days fishing the Catskills I'm back, relaxed, and slowly shifting back up through the gears. Sometimes I forget the vacation days too fast, but I have a great bit of sunburn to remind me of the weekend for a while longer.
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CodeSmith 3.0
ASPInsider Eric J. Smith has kept busy over the past several months working on a major upgrade to his CodeSmith toolset and released version 3.0 on May 16. While you'll be happy to learn that version 2.6 will continue to be available for free, both versions of 3.0 (Standard and Professional) are now paid products. I think this is a great move for both Eric and developers by helping ensure continued development of the tools, and the prices remain a bargain. I've been on two projects now where we saved literally weeks of development time by customizing CodeSmith's out-of-box scripts to generate our Data Access Layer's stored procedures and C# object code.
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Toronto BizTalk User Group Launches Tuesday!
Rod Da Silva is launching a BizTalk User Group in Toronto on Tuesday night. Rod is the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) Practice Lead here at Eidenai Innovations, and his skill and experience are part of the reason I decided to come work at Eidenai. This should be a great group, come check it out.
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Wanted: InfoPath / SharePoint Developers in Toronto
If you're in the GTA and have hands-on with either (InfoPath && ASP.NET && Web Services) || ((SharePoint && ASP.NET && (Webparts && SharePoint API || Customization)), contact me.
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Publish an InfoPath Form to a Website
A piece of a current project is to build an InfoPath form that will be published to a website rather than a SharePoint library. The developer on the project configured NTFS and the Web Application to post to the folder, and made sure Front Page Server Extensions (FPSE) were enabled. But, he still couldn't publish. I figured it was a WebDAV thing since this is now the "preferred" way to publish over HTTP and sure enough, this led to the solution. I found a great article on enabling WebDAV for IIS, now we're off.
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SharePoint Applications
Today while building out some demo sites for Eidenai I went hunting for SharePoint Site Definitions and found that in the real world people happily still think in terms of scenarios rather than execution.
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Eli Robillard: SharePoint Practice Lead, Eidenai Innovations
I'm pleased to announce that I've started into a new role as SharePoint Practice Lead with a company called Eidenai Innovations. Eidenai is a Microsoft Certified Gold, Managed, and Integration Partner and in 2003 became Microsoft Canada's #2 subcontracted development partner. The team here is absolutely first class. Right back to our initial meetings it was clear that this is a company with strong vision and unmatched skills, and it's an honour to be in their ranks.
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Toronto SharePoint User Group Meeting: Wednesday Night
The next TSPUG meeting is tomorrow at 6:00pm, and I'm really looking forward to this one. Michael Herman of Parallelspace will be presenting the most common pain points and solutions for SharePoint. Michael is one of the few people -- not just in Canada but anywhere -- with knowledge this deep and I'm sure it will be a great experience.
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Resources for coding against SharePoint's Search API
It's a common scenario to want to use the great Search and Index engines from SharePoint Portal server in other .NET applications, or to customise results for a particular purpose. Some of these are pretty hard to find, so I thought I'd organize them in one place.Microsoft® SharePoint™ Portal Server: Advanced Technologies for Information Search and RetrievalSharePoint 2003 Object Models and SearchUsing SharePoint search in an ASP.NET application with noise filteringUsing SharePoint Portal Server to Index Your Custom ApplicationIntegrating Microsoft SharePoint Portal Search into Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 -
CDI Education's Technology Briefing Tour: May 3 to 13
Next Tuesday I'm off on a two week, nine city tour of Canada. CDI Education is hosting these technology briefings, and the platforms we'll cover are ASP.NET, SharePoint, and SQL Server. I will be presenting the first two and Bruce Davidson will be presenting SQL Server in the Western provinces.
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Toronto SharePoint User Group: Meeting One
I just returned from the first TSPUG meeting and it was a blast! Thanks to Heather, Kaylie, Martin and everyone else at CDI Education who put in extra-long days to coordinate registration, arrange the fine catered food, and generally help it to all run smooth beyond expectations.
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Google Maps, now with Satellite
Google Maps just keep getting better. First the best map UI around, and now the most amazing satellite maps around. Go get directions to somewhere, click the numbers representing the turns on the right side, and fall in love.
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Optimal CDEx Settings
I couldn't find a review, comparison or guide for CDEx settings when using the Lame encoder so I did some playing around today. Before today I just set CDEx to a bitrate of 192 and forgot about it. Now I'll be going back and re-ripping a bunch of disks that I actually like to hear, because I expect my MP3s will be around longer than a bunch of my CDs and they're a whole lot handier.
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ASP.NET Page Lifecycle
The page execution cycle can be a difficult thing to master. Most issues with an event not firing or form data being lost during postback can usually be solved by better understanding the lifecycle. I've constructed a few targeted searches to help out.
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FeedMap
Feedmap shows where you're blogging from, and who else is blogging nearby. Nifty. Too bad .Text blocks the script block required for the inline map, I'll paste in a copy when the inclination strikes.
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Laws of the Lazy Programmer
To recap, lazy programming is not necessarily the easiest path in the short-term. The lazy path is the most efficient in the long-term to understand, reuse, maintain, and extend. Over time, the lazy paths waste the least time, money and energy. Being perfectly lazy often requires some hard work up front to ensure these long-term goals are met.
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The Future of Maps
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The Lazy Programmer: Construct Searches, Not Links
The problem with portals is that they require tending. Whether you're building a developer hub for .Net or a launchpad to find recipes, it takes a human to moderate, tend and prune. What if a hub contained well-designed searches instead? When the design goal is to return a set of possible solutions, why not create a self-maintaining solution?
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East of Toronto User Group, Generics, and ROTOR
I made the sojourn to Kate's EoT.NetUG (you can tell by the sheer length of the acronym she's a C++ guru), and had a blast. Not only did she bring in the deep expertise of Sam Gentile for tonight's meet, but had the foresight to book an LCBO-sanctioned hall, so once the main seriousness was complete it became an instant social occasion. Kudos.
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Toronto SharePoint User Group Launches April 13
I'm happy to announce that the Toronto SharePoint User Group will have its first meeting on April 13.
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RSS Feeds and Aggregators
It's amazing that the popularity of RSS is still mostly restricted to techies and high school bloggers. Don't believe me? Ask your mom. What this probably means is that there is a large surge yet to come as aggregators are built into apps that people use on a daily basis like Outlook, or a dedicated feature of MSIE). Or maybe the status quo folks are happiest reading from pre-formatted websites. When a friend asked about RSS, I put together a quick list of sites to get started.
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MSF 4 Beta
Yay, I've been waiting for this one...
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SHA-1 Broken
Whew, first MD-4, then MD-5 along with a few others, and now this. Both SSL and PGP make use of use SHA-1, and something you may be familiar with known as the .NET signed assembly.
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Great set of SharePoint Web Parts
UGS contains one of the nicest web part collections I've seen:
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Great Tablet Tools and the Toshiba M205-S810
Scott Hanselman has a nice list of essential tools for the Tablet, and ditto on the love for the M205-S810:
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Event Log Creation Utility
Goal: Create (or delete) a windows event log.
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ASP.NET Security Overview
KBAlertz just sent out notification about a great new article on the MS Support site -- it's a detailed ASP.NET security overview chock full o' links to more detailed articles, how-to's, and more. The table of contents is pasted below.
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Upcoming SharePoint Webcasts
Just in from Scott Howlett of iMason are two terrific WebCasts, one tomorrow (Tuesday, January 25) and one in February. Tomorrow's topic appears to cover accessing SharePoint as a service, and promises a healthy bit of usable code to download. February's session covers search and indexing, an important but oft-overlooking topic. In fact in any SharePoint deployment, planning the index should come soon after step one: cataloguing an organization's existing knowledge. And if you glossed over both of those, you should really pick up the Resource Kit between now and Scott's February WebCast.
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Migrating to SharePoint
Today I'm figuring out how to migrate information from Exchange Public folders into SharePoint. I found a good WebCast but the tools referenced weren't obvious to find, so here are both links in one place.
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MSDN Magazine: SharePoint Recycle Bin
The Windows Recycle Bin is a popular feature and saves the average help desk a lot of repetitive work. Unfortunately, SharePoint 2003 lacks the feature and SharePoint admins either need to turn to third-party tools or develop convoluted database recovery routines "just in case." Heck, even SharePoint 2001 has a downloadable undelete web part), why not us?
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Measuring SharePoint Traffic
Stumbled upon a post I wrote on the newsgroups that others might find helpful. The question was roughly:
I'm using FP 2003 to generate the usage statistics every month, but I doubt the accuracy. Files in the same doc lib all receive nearly the same counts, and all have 145 hits every day even during holidays when no one is in the office.
The answer:
I'll prefix this by saying that I haven't used FPs stats features, this is more of a "what I did to measure traffic."
For one, I wrote custom routines to generate statistics against the IIS logs with filters on the column which contains the username to only include live users, not the service accounts. An added advantage was being able to relate this to a user roles table (which, at that org, were kept in a table used to track accounts, configurations, physical assets, etc.), and that let me see which managers, champions and end-users were making use of what resources.
I found that links were being generated in different ways depending on context. Sometimes a path to an .aspx is referenced, sometimes the target will be a .dll with parameters. This prevents many logging apps from recording accurate stats.
There are great lessons to be learned when you understand how people use your site, so start by setting a few goals (how many users read the "Message from the President" each week?), import your IIS logs into a database - MS Access will do - read through to see how it all works and start writing simple queries to get at what you want.
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Favourite IM exchange of the day
Yeah, "you know you're a geek when," but it cracked me up.
