One of the things that baffles people when they first move to our particular neck of the woods (that being North Texas and surrounding environs) is how quickly the weather can change. It’s not uncommon to see forty or fifty degree temperature changes in a single day. It can be ninety degrees on Monday, snowing […]

Mark Rackley put up a good post on the pros and cons of using SharePoint Designer. I first met Mark at Tulsa TechFest last year when he was just diving into SharePoint. He’s come a long way since then and I enjoyed talking to him at the snowed-in SharePoint Saturday event this past weekend. Keep […]

Paul Culmsee has authored a series of posts (the pertinent portions are here, here and here) on the whole Site Definition argument (see Joel’s original post here, and a deeper dive into the issue from me here and here) that I’m still shaking my head trying to follow. The gist of it seems to be […]

When people ask me where my office is, I’ve often joked that it’s my Chevy Silverado. That’s probably more true than I’d like it to be; I do spend a lot of my time driving between clients (or on airplanes, in which case my office address switches to seat 20B). Lately I’ve been filling the […]

Sooner or later, every blogger who also happens to be a consultant encounters the same scenario. You learn something during a client engagement and blog about it – being careful never to name the client or give any identifying information – in order to share valuable information with the community at large so some poor […]

Sometimes, we take all this SharePoint stuff way too seriously. Every now and then we need to lighten it up a bit and have a good chuckle (or three). Take a gander at the shenanigans when Bob Fox, Rob Foster, Spence Harbar, Ben Robb, Andrew Woodward, and myself found ourselves with a video camera and […]

This one wasted several hours of an otherwise productive day. I was working on a demo site with a bunch of DVWP’s and custom pages when I noticed that all the publishing zones in my layout pages had disappeared. I could edit the list item and see the fields from my content type but when […]

  With the publication of the SharePoint Guidance code samples and documentation from the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group, the issue of Test Driven Development in a SharePoint environment has gained new prominence. A great deal of discussion is being devoted to this topic in the blogosphere and various communities (see Andrew Woodward’s excellent posts […]

Yes, it’s that time again – time to start planning for TechEd 2009. This year marks a return to the consolidated one-week format from the much derided and generally loathed split two-week format of last year. It will also be moving from Orlando to Los Angeles – a welcome change of scenery, if nothing else. […]

Here’s a scenario that many seasoned consultants will be familiar with. A customer has a major problem – usually self-induced – that they have been trying to solve themselves for some period of time or hired some junior consultant to elevate from a minor annoyance to a complete catastrophe. So they call me in a […]