Countdown to the Conference: The Show Must Go On

Although the dreaded snow storm is approaching, I’m told the Microsoft Heartland Conference here in Columbus, Ohio is still scheduled to continue tomorrow.  So, you still have a chance to hear from the likes of SharePoint Evangelist Joel Oleson, SharePoint Master-Certified Mario Fulan… and even me! :)  It’ll take more than a few snowflakes and some ominous-looking clouds to keep us from geeking out on SharePoint.

Speaking of clouds, I wrote in a previous post about the impact that I think Microsoft’s cloud-based offering, Office365, will have on SharePoint developers.  I’ll be talking more about this topic during my presentation, and mentioning how certain aspects of developing for SharePoint Online present both advantages as well as challenges.

Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow – be sure to tell ‘em that Rix Bits the SharePoint Cowbell sent ya! :)

Countdown to the Conference: Buy vs Build in SharePoint

In my talk next week, one of my topics will be related to the question:

…do I build my solution from scratch, or do I buy something off-the-shelf?

Hopefully I will help people to see that one of the main reasons why we invested in SharePoint to begin with is because of its “out-of-the-box” value.  There are so many solutions that can be created using features already included with SharePoint, that many times we can avoid custom development altogether. (which sometimes makes poor Visual Studio 2010 feel very lonely and neglected) 

Also, even if out-of-the-box features don’t quite cut the mustard, we must also remember that there are some great 3rd party tools out there as well, especially for things like workflow and web part development.

There will be several well-known vendors at next week’s Microsoft Heartland SharePoint conference, including Nintex (workflow) and Quest (web parts).  Don’t miss it – register today!

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? :)