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, […]

With the release of Sonar, developers now have the ability to analyze the performance characteristics of custom-built web parts. The next obvious step is to optimize that web part code to make it as efficient and performant as possible. Here are my top five tips for improving web part performance (feel free to add your […]

Over the last few months I’ve received a great deal of feedback from developers who have attended the DFW SharePoint Community meetings.  They’ve mostly expressed frustration with the lack of development topics and technical deep-dives, which is understandable considering that groups of this size tend to be comprised mostly of IT professionals and end users.  To address […]

With all the press that SharePoint performance and capacity planning has been getting lately, Lawrence Liu asked me to do a write-up on some of the background and architecture of Sonar.  If you’re at all interested in SharePoint performance (and if you’re reading this that’s probably a safe bet), go check it out then download […]

Sometimes, you just get so annoyed you have to rant or you’ll explode.  The object of my ire this day is all the notebook vendors who claim to support "4GB of RAM" and Vista.  Bulls**t!!!  Buy one, try to install Vista x64 so you can use that $500 worth of 4 gig goodness and see what happens.  No drivers.  […]

AC told me last week that he was going to be in the Big Apple soon but with one thing and another going on I forgot (thanks for the reminder Bob).  If you live in or around the New York area and are at all interested in content management, publishing, site customization, site definitions, etc. then you […]