Ed Meets The Spoons!

Legendary Canadian 80's band The Spoons played the Boston Manor in Burlington on March 14, 2009.  What an awesome time I had at this intimate setting concert with one of my favourite bands!  Gordon Deppe and Sandy Horne were very friendly with fans, circulating around the club both before and after the concert, signing autographs - and pausing for this photo opp!  Great to see you guys still together and playing after 30 years (like Rush)!  Personal favourite song of the night was "No Electrons", followed by "Red Light" and "One in Ten Words".  All the usual hits where there too.  Check out their schedule at http://www.thespoons.ca and catch them live soon!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cool!  My Own Billboard!

I had the privilege recently to speak at the May 2008 inaugural Developer Summit in Bangalore India.

As part of the event promotion, I found myself suddently plastered on billboards throughout the city!  I guess the tag of "Harley Riding SharePoint Guru" will follow me from now on. I have to admit, it's one of the coolest things ever to have your very own billboard!

The event details can be found at http://www.developersummit.com.  The conference organizers, the attendees, the speakers, the city, the hotel and staff, and the people of the city of Bangalore were all AWESOME making this a most memorable trip in my lifetime.  It is highly recommended to put Bangalore and India on your list of must visit travel destinations.

Stages of Grief and SharePoint Development

I have been teaching SharePoint 2007 (WSS and MOSS) Development courses for over a year now!  Both the excellent Ted Pattison materials and the (getting better) Microsoft Official Cirriculum courses surrounding SharePoint.

The development model for SharePoint customizations using Visual Studio is....  How can we say?  "non optimal".  We are coding web pages inside of a class library project.  That's right.  Just sit back and think about that for a minute or two so it sinks in.  ASP.NET 2.0 development, with absolutely none of the productivity of a web project to develop it in.  "Auto event wire up"?  Ha!  We are back to a code behind model that literally has the class file sitting on its own with us to wire it up to the ASPX page manually.

While "The Feature" and WSP Solution Packages are there to save the day from a deployment perspective, it still needs us to understand deeply the "12 hive" and TEMPLATE directory to figure out exactly where all the bits and pieces need to go.  And then to get it to actually work (since WSS wants to work with a minimum of security enabled).  Debugging?  Deploy the solution and "attach to process".  And the sometimes extra fun of GAC debugging (making sure your PDB symbol files make it to the GAC MSIL directories).  The round tripping from code changes to testing can fray the edges of your sanity a bit.

So I've figured out that my role as an instructor in this course is not to teach them all about SharePoint (well, only a side objective), but rather to take them through the Kübler-Ross model better known as the "stages of grief".  My role is better described as a counsellor whose objective is to take students over the course of 5 days from Denial towards the path of Acceptance.  Refer to Wikipedia, but the stages in our case for SharePoint development are:

1. Denial:  "This can't be happening.  I simply refuse to believe that this is how we have to code an ASP.NET 2.0 application"
2. Anger:  "Why me?  Why was I assigned this? It's not fair!"; (transfer of blame) "Microsoft provided NO SUPPORT at all to the person developing in SharePoint?!?  You have go to be kidding me!"
3. Bargaining:  "I'll do anything.  This is my job.  Please just a little bit of help!  A tool!  A utility!  Something!!" (ever try to do a BDC Appliation Definition File?)
4. Depression:  "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?"; "I'm going to die . . . What's the point?"
5. Acceptance:  "It's going to be OK.  I'm not alone.  Everyone has to do customizations this way."; "I can't fight it, I may as well just figure out how to do it."

If I could attach a picture to "bargaining" it would my one of my students Jarred.  Picture him sitting in front of the computer intently staring at the screen, both hands raised with fingers crossed, thinking "Come on!  WORK!!!".

It is HOPE that keeps us going.  It is getting better.  Lots of great SharePoint MVPs and CodePlex community efforts have provided lots of excellent utilities and tools (THANKS, Ted Pattison for STSDEV on CodePlex).  The SDKs are getting revved with better tools and templates.  The big hope will be the next version of Visual Studio, where hopefully the underlying development model for a SharePoint web application will be directly supported with ASP.NET 2.0 like productivity!

Provide some comments!  Am I alone in this analogy?!?

California Dreamin' on a Harley!

Than-Q to Q107 Radio and Jacox Harley Davidson in Toronto for sending us all expenses paid to California to tour the Pacific Coast Highway - a dream trip of a lifetime!

We started in Los Angeles and did basically a figure 8.  From LA through mountains/desert of Highway 33 to Pismo Beach (the centre point of the 8) up 101 to Greenfield, over on the G16 to Carmel-by-the-sea.  Then it was back south on the Pacific Coast Hwy 1 (gorgeous!) back to Pismo Beach.  From there took the 101 south back to Los Angeles, following the coast again.  Actually the start and end point was the highly recommended Route 66 Riders http://www.Route66Riders.com that took excellent care of us and the rental arrangement.

For all the pictures, please see http://www.flickr.com/photos/29780639@N07/sets/

The Open Highway

Ed Musters is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Consultant, and owner of the Open Highway Consulting Inc. in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  I am president of the Toronto .NET User Group, one of the largest in North American with over 4000 members and running for over 5 years now.

I am a passionate evangelist of the Microsoft .NET development platform and looking forward to what the future will bring with the release of Visual Studio 2008.  I also specialize in SharePoint 2007 development and training.  I am one of few worldwide certified in the Microsoft Solutions Framework and truly believe the process and team building is the path to successful software delivery (team = software!!).

With this blog, I hope to share with you my presentations, tips and tricks learned, and specialized knowledge areas such as COM+.  I will share with you experiences along the open information highway - and even perhaps experiences on the real highways touring with my motorcycle "Iron Horse 2003".