Thursday, October 15, 2009
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I'm getting ready to pack my bags, 3 laptops, 2 external hard drives, etc... and head out to the SharePoint Conference. I'm looking forward to meeting up with some old friends and make some new ones.
Monday, June 09, 2008
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Today, at 6am Eastern time, Microsoft announced the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint. We're particularly excited about this, as we've spent the last few months building it!
PKS is freely available on codeplex. It allows you to use MOSS as a podcasting platform. Users can upload documents/podcasts/videocasts along with secondary files. This is great if you want to store your sample code, documentation, etc. along with your podcast. Folks can rate, comment and download the content or just watch the video directly on the details page!
I think one of the biggest wins of the kit was using as much out-of-the-box WSS/MOSS technology as we possibly could: Content Types, SPD Workflows, MasterPages, etc... Having said that, we did have to go above and beyond in a few areas. For example, the ratings & commenting component has its own database as does the download tracking. Furthermore, we're not storing the video files in a list. We're instead using an event handler to pull them out and store them on disk. We've also got a funky SIlverlight file uploader as well as a Silverlight video player that is embedded in the podcast details page.
It is definitely worth taking a look at all of the cool stuff in this kit. One note of warning - this is an early release with its fair share of bugs. The team worked very hard to get this out of the door and I promise you that we'll continue to work hard in the coming weeks to squish as many of those bugs as we can!
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
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Is anyone else having problems getting Microsoft Reader to work on 64 bit Vista? For that matter, is anyone else using MS Reader?
I started a few years ago and am addicted. I love having access to Powell's rather large ebook store from anywhere in the world that I have WiFi access. With my tablet PC, I can even get the right form factor (assuming I can get the product to load). Oh well.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
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I've been doing a lot of travelling for projects that I can't talk about. However, I can show you this cool suitcase marking I saw last week in Milwaukee!
It is close enough to the Heroes helix that it made me smile.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
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I accidentally found this cool shortcut on my tablet for changing screen orientation. Ctrl-Alt <arrow key> rotates the screen to the direction the arrow is pointing. That saves me a ton of clicks.
Unfortunately, I don't know of a pen equivalent. Too bad there is no Toshiba flashcard for rotating the screen.
Monday, July 09, 2007
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I just got a last minute invitation to speak at the Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference. I'll be talking about a cool solution we built for a very large international aid organization. It uses SharePoint workflows and content types along with the OpenXML file formats to handle what was formerly a very heavily paper-based process. What's even cooler is that a) it is hosted on the coolest hardware ever (a Z5Technologies Nomad), and b) we're working on a deal where you can license something similar and deploy it with your own custom services offerings!
I'll be speaking on Tuesday at 5:15pm in the Partner Solutions Theater which is located in booth 1037. Stop by and say “Hello!”
Friday, April 13, 2007
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MSDN just published two Visual How-Tos that I created that walk you through building the XML metadata for creating an entity and then a series of related entities. They're pretty simplistic in nature and literally start you with a blank XML file. So, if you are interested in learning some of the very basics of the Business Data Catalog, you should check them out :-)
I'd like to thank the the MSDN team for giving me a crack at creating a few Visual How-To's for their site. If you've ever seen me present, you know that I have a very off-the-cuff style of presenting. My presentations are usually demo heavy and while things usually don't go perfectly, you'll generally be able to leave the presentation knowing what happened and why. I like to think I'm good at presenting.
Having said that, I'm discovering that while I'm definitely made for the stage, film is another beast entirely. All of a sudden all of those little goofs that are perfectly acceptable in a live demo stand out like a sore thumb in a WMV file. Naturally, I'll try to fix them, so I go back and edit just that part of the video but magically my voice turns out louder or the mouse jumps or (because I forgot to hide my task bar) I magically move forward and then backward in time between my edits. It was soooo much harder to get right than presenting. I was quite suprised, so, if you see a visual How-To that you particularly like, be sure to track down the auther and send him/her some Kudo's for their hard work :)
Friday, February 16, 2007
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I bet you thought this was going to be a post about the spiffy new Content Controls and all of the spiffy new scenarios they give us when we bind them to a custom XML file in the new docx file format.
Well, nope, I'm not even going to mention that. Instead, I'm going to post about another option that can help if you need to generate a document from XML data with repeating nodes...
Thursday, February 15, 2007
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About 20 people have beaten me to this, but I can't resist talking about it. As Julie and Steve mentioned, a few of us were sitting around Redmond earlier in the week at an event where certain PMs and Dev's were kind enough to let us ask them random questions. One of the responses shocked us all. It went something like, “Well, don't forget to take into account the complexity of the Outlook controls. For example, take the outlook date control.” We all stared blankly. It seemed like a normal date control to all of us. They continued, “now type 'one week before Christmas' into it.”
We were all flabbergasted.
To respond directly to Julie's comment, “I'm quite proud that I beat out the other bloggers next to me in announcing (or, rather, publically shaming myself for not knowing) this feature.” I can personally attest to the fact that not only did she blog this while the conversation was still going on, she was certainly happy that she beat the rest of us to the punch :)