A number of SharePoint MVP’s – Andrew Connell, Rob Bogue, Todd Bleeker, Matt McDermott, Todd Baginski, Maurice Prather, Scot Hillier and myself – got together at TechEd North America 2009 to talk about SharePoint Development for TechEd Online. See what happens when we all get in a room together and talk SharePoint for an hour […]

I thought I was doing something simple – I created a site collection on a development server, built out everything the way I wanted it, then tried to export and import it into my production environment. The export went smooth with no errors but when I tried the import I got the following: "FatalError: The […]

The guys over at the SharePoint Podshow have posted the discussion I had with Andrew Woodward regarding SharePoint and TDD during the European Best Practices conference. I assure you that no MVP’s were hurt during the taping of this show. Honest. I didn’t even smack Woody with my hat. Go check it out!

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 […]

Recently there has been a great deal of attention devoted to SharePoint Site Definitions in the blogosphere. A month ago I posted an article to the ISPA web site regarding the pros and cons of SharePoint Designer versus Custom Site Definitions. Just a few days ago, Joel Oleson wrote a blog entry lamenting the use […]

I often get asked about the pros and cons of using SharePoint Designer versus custom site definitions for branding purposes. There seems to be a great deal of confusion surrounding this topic so I’ll offer my two cent’s worth in hopes that it clears the air and helps you, the SharePoint developer or administrator, make […]

At the DFW SharePoint Community meeting this week we had a lively discussion about SharePoint web services and how difficult they are to debug. This actually has nothing to do with SharePoint per se – all methods that return nothing but strings are hard to debug – but it is a common pain point so […]

I author all of my blog posts in Word 2007. Why? Well, first, I’m in Word all the time anyway and it’s a familiar environment; second, the blog template allows me to work offline and compose my posts for uploading later; and finally, because the formatting (especially of code blocks) is much closer to what […]

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 […]