Eli Robillard's World of Blog.

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.

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.

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!

What's Here

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?"

Bil's been posting aplenty on the SharePoint Application Templates (the SPATs?), I'll play aggregator.

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).

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.