3Sharp - Projects

2009 SharePoint Conference

John Peltonen — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:14:18 GMT

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.

Podcasting Kit for SharePoint

John Peltonen — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:53:07 GMT

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!

Speaking at the Worldwide Partner Conference

John Peltonen — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 17:55:00 GMT

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!”

On recording a Visual How-To for the MSDN folks.

John Peltonen — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 22:47:00 GMT

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 :)

Where has all the time gone?

John Peltonen — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 23:32:00 GMT

Wow, I can't believe how long it has been since I last bloged. Since September, I've been very heads down in the land of Office 12. Sadly, this means that there hasn't been a lot to blog about! However, 3Sharp is working on a rather large O11 development project that really deserves some blogging attention - Lots of SharePoint automation, InfoPath, Outlook AddIns and all sorts of other fun stuff.

However, that post will have to wait for another day. Currently, I'm just popping online to take a breather from the latest O12 demo we're working on. This current demo is meant to show off what you can do without code (a real change for us)! All I can say is that Office has come a long way from the FabriKam days! Just in terms of workflow alone, what took as many lines of code we now get for free!

Office 12 Developer Labs at PDC

John Peltonen — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 00:45:00 GMT

If you're at the PDC, be sure to check out the developer labs for Office 12. A few of us at 3Sharp along with Charles Maxson of Office Zealot fame and Scott Jamison put together a bunch of quick (20-30min) introductions to various new features of the Office apps (Word, Excel, Ppt, InfoPath, etc) from a dev perspective. The beauty is that they won't take a whole lot of time, so you could conceivably cram a bunch of them in between sessions. (If you've been expecting to hear from me and haven't, it's because we were neck deep trying to ship these in time!)

Be sure to let David Gerhardt know if you like them as he ran the project :)

As always, if you are at the conference, it would be a sin not to stop by the cabanas (assuming it is set up anything like TechEd) to talk with the various PMs. This is your best chance to a) figure out where they are driving Office and b) influence the direction. You are literally talking to the spec writers!

Office Zealot Podcast #6 is Live

John Peltonen — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 16:17:00 GMT

I just thought that Charles and Chris were calling to say “Hi.” Little did I know they were secretly recording the call!

In the latest OZ Podcast, Podcast #6, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by these two Office masters. They let me ramble on about my theories of Office development and some of the large publicly available Office 11 solutions that 3Sharp has done - FabriKam and GeneriCo: what they are, how to use them what was hard and what is cool :^)

At they end of the interview they asked me where people should go for more info. I, showing my inability to think on my feet, couldn't come up with much. So here's a new list:

a) The Office Zealot blog feed (duh). This feed is the best single source of information out there for up to the minute development information about the entire Office suite! The only catch is that it can be a bit overwhelming. I subscribe to the main feed with Newsgator so that all the posts end up in Outlook. Additionally, I use Lookout to index all of the feed so that I can do targeted searches across months of valuable posts all within Outlook!

b) Understanding XML is key to Office development nowadays. Aaron Skonnard and Martin Gudgin have a good reference book called Essential XML Quick Reference that covers many of the XML specifications and can be downloaded for free! Priscilla Walmsley's book, Definitive XML Schema is also superb. Finally, the W3C also has a great XML schema primer.

TechEd Presentation: CLI319 (complex LOB solutions with Office)

John Peltonen — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 16:14:00 GMT

I'm about an hour away from delivering session number two down in HOT & HUMID Orlando. Here is the rather long list of links that I am going to make reference to!

FabriKam SharePoint Workflow documentation
SharePoint GotDotNet Workflow Connector
K2.Net (you can also go visit them at their booth down here)
MSDN: Customizing the Shortcut Menu for [SharePoint] List Items
MSDN: Custom CAML Views in SharePoint Team Services
Programmatically import form library files into Excel
Online SharePoint Portal Server labs
FabriKam SQLXML Adapter documentation
XML Support in SQL Server 2005
XML Options in SQL Server 2005
MSDN: VSTO Technical Articles
VSTO Team Blogs: 2005 2003
GeneriCo
Smart Client Offline Application Block

FabriKam Tip

John Peltonen — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 12:24:00 GMT

Since I'm on a FabriKam kick here at TechEd, I figured I'd post tips as they came up. Tip number one is - Don't log in as administrator!

Instead, login as BrianC. We use the Active Directory to store the org chart info for FabriKam as well as some custom stuff such as signing authority for budgets and expense reports. Naturally, the admin account doesn't have any of these settings configured. However, BrianC is both a full-fledged employee and an administrator.

Tip number one point five: Everyone's password in FabriKam is P@ssw0rd.

FabriKam is shipping!

John Peltonen — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 17:37:00 GMT

Well, we finally got FabriKam out of the door! I used to know the numbers (almost all of our development was finished last year around this time) but I can tell you that it represents:

Over 3 years of developer time (assuming 40 hour work weeks)
20,000+ lines of managed code
600 pages of documentation
Obviously a strong use of Office System (lots of emphasis on InfoPath and SharePoint)
Strong use of Back Office (BTS 04, SQL2K w/SQL XML)

It's not perfect, but we're definitely proud of it. Now it is yours to enjoy and learn from!