Call it lucky or unlucky but I will be in Orlando for two weeks in June for both sessions of TechEd 2008 – and I’m not even speaking! Here’s a rundown of the planned activities (this post subject to frequent updates as the event approaches): Developer Week (June 3rd – 6th, 2008) Monday, June 2nd […]

To all the developer types who attend the D/FW SharePoint Community meetings, the schedule is pretty full for the May 20th meeting and we might not be able to squeeze in the break-out sessions as part of the regular agenda.  Fear not – we can still crunch some code after everyone else has left, even if we […]

Whenever a new platform, technology, or computing paradigm comes along there is the inevitable rush to proclaim it the greatest thing since sliced bread, the cure to all of mankind’s ills, the savior of civilization. What usually starts out as a worthwhile experiment in solving a particular problem with some out-of-the-box thinking quickly mushrooms into […]

As a consequence of having a fairly high profile in the SharePoint Development community, I get a lot of inquiries from .NET developers, Java programmers, and even some legacy non-OO types, requesting guidance on how to get started in SharePoint development. I wish the answer was as easy as "Go buy this book and you’ll […]

One of the challenges that consulting organizations (like ourselves) deal with on a daily basis is insuring that effective mechanisms exists to communicate with clients throughout the lifecycle of a project. In the old days (like, say, eons ago in the mid-nineties) weekly status meetings and conference calls would suffice but in today’s environment of […]

I’ve been in Seattle all week at the 2008 MVP Summit.  If you’ve ever wondered what goes on at these events, check out Lawrence Liu’s post (I’m in the pictures but naturally, being one of the tallest, I’m always in the back somewhere – and I forgot to bring my hat so I was mostly incognito).    […]

Andrew Connell, MOSS MVP and SharePoint WCM Expert Extraordinaire, has released a useful new utility for all you designers and developers who create SharePoint solution packages on a regular basis. This tool is an add-in to Visual Studio (both 2005 and 2008) that allows you to create a complete 12 hive replica, manifest, and DDF […]

I have often had the need to add a sequential counter to a list in lieu of the built-in list ID field. Why? Well, to begin with, the ID field isn’t very user friendly. Let’s say you have a list with 1000 items in it, and your view breaks those items down into chunks of […]

TechEd 2008 in Orlando will be split into two weeks this year – the first week for developers and the second for IT professionals. I will actually be at both events (do I really need two full weeks in Orlando?), working the Microsoft kiosks during the Dev week and manning our own booth during the […]

Building on the earlier work done by Steve Peschka, Waldek Mastykarz has written a post regarding the use of the Content by Query Web Part versus custom data aggregation methods.  His results show completely different metrics for the PortalSiteMaprovider than Steve’s, which is a bit surprising (and contrary to some of our own, less empirical, […]