It's not really huge amounts of fame, but I will be speaking at SUGDC Summer Regional SharePoint Conference. I saw a post yesterday on a blog about this event, so I thought hey why not throw out an abstract and bio see if they want me to come out. At this point I had not thought out exactly how I would get there and where I would stay. They responding today telling me that they would give me 15 minutes to speak about SharePoint and AJAX at a roundtable. I was like that is so cool, but how am I going to get here and where am I going to stay (in my head more so than to the conference owners). Somehow after speaking with the SUGDC people in charge and my company I managed to secure hotel and flight, so that I can actually attend. At the end of the day I was kind of floating on a cloud, because this kind of event is huge. I have been speaking to about 9-15 people in various Midwest User Groups or Code Camps. This event in D.C. is going to be pretty big, but it will at least give me a chance to practice for Tulsa Techfest in October. Plus I am speaking about AJAX and SharePoint, which are two of my very favorite topics these days. Every time I go to an event I am nervous at first but when I get up there it is starting to feel like I belong in front of people. It is so much fun to meet new SharePoint Devs too. I am not so sure how often I will get out to the east coast, so this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see people like Paul Galvin or Sahil Malik. Plus I get a double bonus of seeing my aunt who lives in Columbia, MD. I also may get to see my friend Navid, who moved from St. Louis to Baltimore a few months after I moved to Kansas City. It is also kind of nice to expose myself to a new area of the U.S. that I only see about once or twice a year. I have been living in the Midwest for 26 years and I feel like I am sheltered. At any rate this is going to be a lot of fun. If anyone wants to meet up let me know. I am going to try and arrive that Thursday night and will stay until the end of the event on Saturday.
I had an incredible time in Tulsa. Things were a bit rocky at first, because Google gave me some bad directions for Friday night, so I turned around about 4 times just to get the 11th street exist from highway 64. I was a little disappointed with the Doubletree Inn, so I'm sticking with Hampton Inn from now on. $20 for a burger and Ore Ida fries that I could make on my grill at home is insane. Some of the people were really nice at the hotel, but some were just flat out rude. When it was time to go to sleep I could barely get there, because someone decided to run around and make a lot of noise. Everything else went pretty well, except for some camera issues (don't even get me started about Best Buy)...
The next day the alarm went off about 7 am, so I woke up showered and was really glad to leave. I got some directions from some of the nicer hotel staff the night before, so getting to Tulsa Community College was incredibly easy. I felt a little nervous at first, because no one was there so I sat around playing with my electronics a bit until registration opened. Eventually I met up with Scott Spradlin, one of the coolest SharePoint Devs from MOSS Camp. I also ended up meeting the coordinator, David Walker, who has the most energy I have ever seen in a dev. I think he could do 50 tasks at once and get them done in an hour. He said he had 4 kids, so maybe they keep him on his toes:)
I presented in the same room right after Scott, which was great because he talked about building web parts in SharePoint. His whole talk sort of led into my talk about building AJAX Solutions in SharePoint using the SmartPart. When I finally came up to speak I felt a lot more confident than I was with my MOSS Camp Presentation. I believe that I messed up much less in this presentation than I did at MOSS Camp. I got a lot of great questions and a couple people handed me there business cards for friends who are good at drawing. Hopefully, I can get some people to help me out with the MOSS Comic I want to create. After my speech I felt really energized like I could play 10 tracks in a row on the drums in Rock Band. Unfortunately due to camera issues I only was able to see Scott's Presentation, but I did meet Corey Roth who seems like a really neat guy. I think he's the first person who aggregates to http://www.sharepointfeeds.com that I have actually met in real life. It is kind of cool to put a face to a name.
At the end of the day I was really happy to meet all the awesome people and take home a couple prizes. I took home with me a third VS 2008 T-Shirt and a Silverlight 1.0. David Wise invited me to Tulsa Techfest in October and pending any issues I will definitely come back to Tulsa. The Devs are friendly and despite many citizens trying to maul me down on the highway I ended up surviving unscathed. If anyone else has the opportunity to go to Tulsa for a Dev event I would recommend you get out there ASAP so you can benefit from the awesomeness. I hope that everyone had a good Mother's Day and a good weekend.
Also, if anyone missed my CodePlex Project link for the slides and code at School of Dev it is: http://www.codeplex.com/MOSSLoverAJAXControl.
There will be a Kansas City Office Geeks meeting on Thursday, June 5th at 6 pm at Centriq FOSS probably a SharePoint Overview with Office Tools or a re-doing of my presentation at the Tulsa School of Dev on SharePoint Development in AJAX. If anyone is interested please e-mail me at rebecca.isserman@gmail.com or go to http://www.officegeeks.org/kcog. I understand that this is the week fo TechEd for Developers, so some people may not be inclined to come. For those of you not going it will be a great presentation no matter what. I am going to post more information as the date gets near.
I am going to speak about some of the AJAX Page Loading User Controls that I have created. I am going to talk about how a developer would go about converting the SharePoint Application to work with AJAX. Here is my bio and Abstract:
Abstract:
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) allows developers to create loading screens easily without a great deal of development in SharePoint 2007. In this session we will walk through how to create various page load events using the AJAX toolkit, Web User Controls, the SmartPart, and SharePoint. We will also convert the web .config, master pages, and server, so that the Site Collection is AJAX ready.
Bio:
Becky Isserman has been a SharePoint Developer, since 2005 when she went through the Portal University with Levi, Ray, and Shoup in Springfield, IL. She is an Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) and a Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD). She has been a web designer/developer since she was fifteen hand coding HTML 3.0 websites in NotePad. She enjoys working with SharePoint 2007, because she can perform the roles of administrator, developer, designer, and architect. She currently lives in Olathe, Kansas, where she works at Terracon Consultants, Inc. and lives with her two cats, Gambit and Rogue, plus her boyfriend, Johnny. If you would like to contact her you can e-mail her at rebecca.isserman@gmail.com or fill out the contact form at her blog http://www.mosslover.com.
Here is a link to the School of Dev if you are interested in attending: www.Schoolofdev.com. Thanks to Scott Spradlin for telling me about this event and coercing me to come out. I would say he's one of my favorite St. Louis Devs. I hope to meet some nice Oklahomans next week, especially David Walker who is one of my Twitter Followers. If anyone knows of any other code camps coming up that need presenters in the 500 mile radius I would be willing to come out just let me know in advance the information.
I bought the domain www.mosscomic.com, because I had an insane idea to start a web comic related to SharePoint. I have always wanted to start a web comic, but never really had the artistic skills. I was wondering if anyone would like to help me out with my crazy endeavor. Let me know through the contact form and maybe I can organize a messaging brain storm session in the next month or so. So far I have one other person interested who is also artistically challenged like myself.
If you want to show the progress bar please refer back to this post on how to get an AJAX Progress Bar to work with SharePoint: http://www.mosslover.com/archive/2008/04/17/how-i-got-an-ajax-progress-bar-to-work-in.aspx.
For the next step you want to create a Javascript Function in your user control or web part that looks a little bit like this:
<script type="javascript/text" >
HideButtons()
{
var Button1 = <%= Button1.ClientID %>';
document.getElementbyId(Button1).style.display="none";
}
</script>
If you wanted to do the same thing in a Web Part, then it would look more like this:
string functionHideButtons = "<script type=\"javascript/text\" >\n";
functionHideButtons += "HideButtons()\n";
functionHideButtons += "{\n";
functionHideButtons += "var Button1 = <%= Button1.ClientID %>';\n";
functionHideButtons +=
"document.getElementbyId(Button1).style.display=\"none\";\n";
functionHideButtons += "}\n";
functionHideButtons += "</script>\n";
writer.Write(functionHideButtons);
If you have a Cancel Button too, then you may want to add two different functions. So maybe a CancelHide and a EventHide or something relational to whatever event your button click will do. If you have followed my instructions on how to insert the proper UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress Controls, then all you need to do is add the part to link the Javascript Function to the button click event.
In a Web User Control your code you would add this code just before the /> in your button markup:
ClientOnClickScript="javascript:HideButtons();"
If you are working with a Web Part, instead of adding the above code you would put this piece of code in your Render Method:
Button1.ClientOnClickScript = "HideButtons()";
If anyone has any questions or comments please feel free to ask them. If you would like another post on AJAX Controls as related to Web Parts, then I would be more than willing to add another post if someone asks for it. I am hoping to post within the next week on how to load a page by using a hidden button click and not forgoing any use of threading.
I am attempting to do something nutty that I will explain in a second...
We need all the links from a link list appended to the bottom of the quick launch and a bunch of global links appended to the top of the quick launch. The global links are universal to a bunch of sites, however the bottom links are not. So we decided to add the global links to the top master page and the site specific links from the link list to a nested child master page. The global links can change if the applications are changed, so we wanted a central place that is easy to change in one fell swoop. That is why they site in a global parent page, because it makes everything so much easier.
The second master page, the child master page, is local to each site (our office sites--we have 95), so the users of that office can add or remove links from that list really easily. I figured out that we could drop an XSLT dataview in SharePoint Designer that will automatically add all the links and open them in a new window. All you need to do is go to SharePoint Designer and go into the datasource view and drop that list item underneath the quick launch bar. If you right click on this dataview and select Layout, then you should be able to play around with the different types of layouts. If you want a drop down you can manipulate that version or you can use the single property display and it will show just a link. If you want to make it look like the quick launch, then you need to play with the styles. Right now I am at this part. If anyone knows an easy way to add the styles to these links I am all ears. I was amazed at the relative ease when I was creating this solution. We really have no set deadline, so I am way ahead of schedule:) That is good since I hear we have about 28 SharePoint Projects and only two SharePoint Devs here.
First off it rocked...Special thanks to Lee Brandt, Blake Thiess, Joe Loux, Timothy Wright, and John Alexander. These guys were my teammates and what I would consider some of my new friends. They are some of the best band-mates a girl could ask for in Rockband also. So here is a little bit of my experience in general:
I was looking forward to this event for a month. I was incredibly excited, because I love helping a good cause and felt like I had not done enough to give back to the community. I love hanging out with developers. I feel like I sit in a cubicle coding by myself a lot and the only person I see is my project lead on a daily basis. It was nice to mix it up and see people. So socially this was a geek's paradise. All the people were enthusiastic and loved code like I do. We sort of played shuffle with our charity at the beginning, because the first charity wanted to sell our source code. In the end we were paired with Boyscout Troop 813 of Blue Springs, Missouri. The guy in charge was very knowledgeable with infrastructure and networking, so he was a geek like us. You could see his face light up when he talked about his job. When Doug sent me the e-mail about the solution I'm thinking this would be great in SharePoint. There was a bit of a debate at the beginning about SharePoint vs. DotNetNuke. SharePoint's free version inevitably won out and what we ended up with was the product (I will post a link when John gets the site public facing). It was fun teaching people about SharePoint and I learned a new trick. I also realize that I hate Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint web parts. I spent half of Saturday trying to get the media viewer web part to work and wanting to destroy the code by the end of the day. John Alexander spent about the other half of the day trying to recompile the source and search around the net for a solution on how to fix the web part. At the end of the weekend we created a content editor web part using Javascript and XAML that pointed to an ASPX Page pulling the pictures from the SharePoint Object Model.
The setup was great, because each project had a room. You had the charity coordinators show up on the first day, so you could gather requirements. The rest of the time you sat in your room and worked within your teams. There were books and software trials that we could use for development. Food was provided at the proper intervals, so we were well nourished. There was a fridge stocked full of caffeine, water, and other liquids. There were two rooms with Rockband, so that we could take breaks when we were frustrated (this helped so much after that ordeal with the Silverlight Blueprint web part failed). Overall this event made me come out with a ton of self esteem points and a lot of developer/geeky happiness. John Alexander, Jeff Julian, and Doug Butscher should get a big gold star for planning such an awesome event. If St. Louis ends up owning up to the challenge and putting together an event I would definitely attend.
In the end my team took home the prize (Guitar Hero Portable and VS 2008) with the most applause and loudest cheers. I would say that I just gained about 500 self esteem points this weekend a ton of self confidence. I hope that everyone else had as great a time as I did this weekend. Now time to watch BSG...
I am working with a form in InfoPath 2003 using a bunch of filters and the current() row tag in a repeating table. The problem is when I use Rich Text Fields it does not render the HTML correctly. I am seeing tags for divs and breaks. When I try to do a string.replace and pass in the C# break equivalent of \n it removes the tags and adds no breaks in the Rich Text field. I am not sure if many people are using InfoPath 2003 still for development or if anyone is using it in MOSS. If you are you know of a workaround or solution it would be greatly appreciated. If not I'm going to google around and see if I can find something to fix this issue. I will post a solution if I find one by google or on my own.
As you may have read FrontPage Extensions were uninstalled after I pushed some hotfixes to our production box (http://mosslover.com/archive/2008/04/21/hotfix-946517-and-941422-where-did-my-frontpage-extensions-go.aspx). The day before I noticed that search was not working, but I re-indexed everything and it seemed fine. The next day not so much. The Shared Service Provider(SSP) decided it no longer wanted to recognize production as an indexing server. Right now we are running on a two box farm with a SQL Box and Application/Index/Query Box. I tried to flush the search service by stopping and starting it a couple of times before creating a new SSP. Once I created the new SSP and re-indexed everything I had a problem with usage data. Apparently, you need to go to Shared Services Administration and click on Usage Reporting under Office SharePoint Usage Reporting. If you want to track search queries, then check Search Query Logging. For regular usage data reports of user site data check the box next to Processing Settings. Click on OK. After waiting a day usage data returned to my SharePoint Sites. Since these hotfixes are not tested this could happen to your server or not. It could have something to do with Query and Indexing residing on the same server as the application server. I really have no idea. Our test server is one server with a series of virtual servers. There is a query, index, and application server plus a SQL Server. What may help is taking a backup of your SSP prior to running the hotfix through stsadm. Especially, if you want your usage data or you have BDC Data that is imperitive for SharePoint to run properly. If anyone has any questions let me know.