Countdown to the Conference–Team Foundation Server

Many moons ago I did a webinar about application lifecycle management using Team Foundation Server.  Since that time, TFS has been upgraded to version 2010, and with it comes some exciting new enhancements.  This is also good news for SharePoint developers, as the 2010 suite of Microsoft products helps push SharePoint development into 1st-class citizenship.  In fact, it’s even easier now to use TFS as part of your tool set thanks to your MSDN subscription.
I’ll be talking about this topic a little more during my presentation at the Heartland Conference next week.  I think it’ll be somewhere around slide #15.  :)  See you there!

Countdown to the Conference – Sneak Peek: Sandboxed Solutions

Next week, I’ll be speaking at the Microsoft Heartland SharePoint Conference 2011 in Lewis Center, Ohio. My topic will be:

Make Your Developers Love You! (aka SharePoint ALM for Dev Managers)

As we countdown to conference day, I thought I’d give you a sneak peek at some of the subjects I’ll be covering during my talk.  One point of interest in SharePoint 2010 that I’ll be speaking on is the concept of sandboxed solutions – custom code solutions that operate within a subset of the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace, and that can be easily deployed and monitored with minimal impact to the stability of your farm.

Register today to check out my presentation and see why sandboxed solutions are one of the enhancements in SharePoint 2010 that will help make SharePoint Devs and Admins a happy family once again. :)

The Age of the Devs approaches… thanks to Office 365!

Well, if you’ve been keeping up with the latest Microsoft news, you might have heard that MS has been pretty excited about their upcoming release of Office in the Cloud – Office 365. In a nutshell:

• we’re talking Microsoft Office suite, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync (instant messaging and presence) being offered ‘online’ with pay-as-you-go pricing
• we’re talking no more server patching, updating, or upgrading
• we’re talking a subscription-based option for businesses that want to purchase Office
• we’re talking about cloud services being offered to public schools as a no-cost or low-cost hosted service
• we’re talking access to all your productivity tools and enterprise data wherever you go, across PC, phone, and browser

Putting a Cool Glow on your XML code

Lately I’ve been looking over the XML code contained in the Application Definition File for some SharePoint Business Data Catalog work I’ve been doing. As I normally do, I used Visual Studio as my XML viewer of choice. But I had to pause for a second to sit back and appreciate how Visual Studio 2010 makes looking at all that XML code a lot nicer. : )

Document Management Using SharePoint – SharePoint Saturday slides posted

Saturday’s SharePoint event here in Columbus, Ohio was great.  I give kudos to the folks that worked hard to put it together, and who pulled off bringing together such a great lineup of speakers.  If you’re a SharePoint junkie in Central Ohio and you missed the event, I now shed a tear for you. (wiping away fake tear) 

The only consolation I can give you is that you can scroll down a little to see the slides from my presentation.  Although it doesn’t include the live demos I ran during my talk, it at least gives you a peek at what I think are some of the main points of interest as it relates to document management in SharePoint 2007 and 2010.
There – don’t you feel better now? :)

Video Post: 10-minute Lightning Talk–The Challenges of Real-World SharePoint

Since it’s only 10-minutes, I thought I’d go ahead and post my slides with live narration, in case you weren’t able to attend last night’s COSPUG meeting (that means you, Brian!)    I’m also interested to hear any feedback or comments on the topic – what has your own experience been trying to use SharePoint outside the office environment?  Post a comment below.  Thanx.

Real-world Challenges of SharePoint

Today I’ll be presenting a Lightning Talk on SharePoint at the Central Ohio SharePoint User Group meeting.  That means I’ve got no more than 10-minutes to dazzle the crowd with my thoughts about the challenges of using SharePoint outside of a controlled office environment, specifically as it relates to:

• Access
• Installation
• Device integration
• Learning Curve
• Choice of tools

This is a free event, but if you show up please don’t heckle me. :)
UPDATE: I posted a video of this presentation with live narration.