Steve Bargelt

The Daily WTF. Best. Site. Ever.

No doubt about it The Daily WTF is my new favorite site. I’ve been sending links out to coworkers on a reqular basis for about a week now… this site is just priceless. I laugh out loud every stinkin’ day.

Here is one of today’s entries:

Josh Breckman worked for a company that landed a contract to develop a content management system for a fairly large government website. Much of the project involved developing a content management system so that employees would be able to build and maintain the ever-changing content for their site.

Because they already had an existing website with a lot of content, the customer wanted to take the opportunity to reorganize and upload all the content into the new site before it went live. As you might imagine, this was a fairly time consuming process. But after a few months, they had finally put all the content into the system and opened it up to the Internet.

Things went pretty well for a few days after going live. But, on day six, things went not-so-well: all of the content on the website had completely vanished and all pages led to the default "please enter content" page. Whoops.

Josh was called in to investigate and noticed that one particularly troublesome external IP had gone in and deleted *all* of the content on the system. The IP didn't belong to some overseas hacker bent on destroying helpful government information. It resolved to googlebot.com, Google's very own web crawling spider. Whoops.

After quite a bit of research (and scrambling around to find a non-corrupt backup), Josh found the problem. A user copied and pasted some content from one page to another, including an "edit" hyperlink to edit the content on the page. Normally, this wouldn't be an issue, since an outside user would need to enter a name and password. But, the CMS authentication subsystem didn't take into account the sophisticated hacking techniques of Google's spider. Whoops.

As it turns out, Google's spider doesn't use cookies, which means that it can easily bypass a check for the "isLoggedOn" cookie to be "false". It also doesn't pay attention to Javascript, which would normally prompt and redirect users who are not logged on. It does, however, follow every hyperlink on every page it finds, including those with "Delete Page" in the title. Whoops.

After all was said and done, Josh was able to restore a fairly older version of the site from backups. He brought up the root cause -- that security could be beaten by disabiling cookies and javascript -- but management didn't quite see what was wrong with that. Instead, they told the client to NEVER copy paste content from other pages.

[via: The Spider of Doom - The Daily WTF.]

posted @ Wednesday, March 29, 2006 10:15 AM | Feedback (1) |

ChubClub 2006: Week 12

273.4 pounds with 23.1 body fat. As I predicted this was a tough week… no excuses but Microsoft does provide ample crap-food to conference attendees.

Training

• Weights: Thursday, Saturday, Monday – typical workout all three nights. Only bummer is that I could have made this a 4–workout week and I didn’t. I got home late from the conference on Wednesday and just slacked. Oops.
• Cardio: Yeah. STILL need to improve here.

Food

Conference food sucked. All-in-all though I didn’t do too bad. ;-) Had to hit 3 Pigs Barbecue while in Bellevue… damn they have awesome pork sammiches! 3 Pigs is possibly the ONLY think I miss about the Eastside!

Stats

Today (1/12/06) 273.4, 23.4% BF
Started (1/1/06) 271, 25.3 BF%

Here are the charts for 2006 (click for larger versions):

NEW CHARTS!!!
Lean muscle and fat charts:
 

Weight Chart:

Body Fat % Chart:

posted @ Monday, March 27, 2006 3:43 AM | Feedback (0) |

Office DevCon 2006: Day 3

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Microsoft Office (VSTO): Creating Multi-Tier Application
John Durant  — dude gets it! This guy in an awesome presenter. Probably the best session of the conference and it isn’t even about 2007 Office System! I wish I could bottle his energy – the dude is a ball of fire! Unfortunately there isn’t a lot to report here since the session was all about shipping products and technologies.

I think he had about 6 slides. The rest of the time was spent in Visual Studio and Office. We saw code. We saw lots of code.

Bottom line: if you ever get a chance to see John present – do it. Ignore the subject matter – just go see him work the room – it will be well worth your time.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Extending Web Content Management – Page Authoring and Rendering
Starting out well – only 5 minutes in and Visual Studio is up and we’re looking at code! Nice.

*Custom field controls
The example MovieSelector. Edit mode derives from BaseRichSelector. Two classes for the FieldControl – one for edit mode one for view mode. MovieField.cs and MovieSelector.cs. Nice and clean way to create the control. I like.

Note: I’ve bitched incessantly about wanting to see more code and less PowerPoint – which I still believe should be the case at a DevCon – but I also now realize that it is much harder to take notes and/or blog about code samples!  

*Smart Client Authoring
To be honest – I did other work during these demos. I might change my mind in the future but as of right now I don’t care about Smart Client Authoring. I do commend Jim Masson for his sparse use of PowerPoint and the amount of time spent in Visual Studio.

*Create or Edit Pages Automatically
The basic premise here is to automatically create a publishing page when a document is added to a document library. So building upon the smart client authoring demo (which I did not pay attention to) you can setup an event handler on a doc lib and have it kick off your document converter. The classic example: press releases. So when marketing dude uploads a new press release to a doc lib you can create a publishing page on your intra/inter net site(s).

Publishing API =
SPWeb web etc.
Publishingweb pubWeb = PublishingWeb.GetPublishingWeb(web)

*Extending The Page Editing Bar

• XML file defines actions
• Links Code
• Context Sensitive!
• In code you can select the states that your custom action should show up under
• ConsoleAction base class – derive from this class
• In code you can security trim your custom actions!
• ShowError mesa GE – VERY COOL. This allows you to surface error messages in the Page Editing Bar in a uniform way.

*Other Authoring Extensibility Points

• HTML Editor – add new buttons and code to toolbar
• Styling and branding
• Master Pages, Layouts, CSS
• HTML editor styles using CSS
• Web part styles using XSL
• Automation
• Event handlers
• Custom workflows
• LOB Apps and/or page integrated into SharePoint (example HR app HTML page to show vacation balances etc.)

 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 : Extending Web Content Management Features — Navigation, Caching and Operations
ASP.Net 2.0 Post cache substitution – very cool to allow customization (and the like) on cached pages.

Jim mentioned that most of will only have to worry about caching on Internet sites. I had to chuckle. Our Intranet gets more use than most Internet sites!

Claims 500–800 requests per second per processor on the WFE with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 when using page caching.

This was a good session on a dry topic – performance and caching. To be honest – I’m tired of typing notes!

posted @ Thursday, March 23, 2006 9:19 AM | Feedback (4) |

Connecting your Career with your Passions

I’ve always considered myself lucky that my career is my passion. I LOVE being a geek.

via:David J. Anderson

Last night I met Curt Rosengren who calls himself a passion catalyst at a book tour party for Gus Lee author of newly published Courage, organized by Lisa Haneberg, a fellow Seattlite and author on management topics - of which much more in another post after I've read the book. Meanwhile, Curt helps clients to connect their careers with their passions to make themselves a lot happier at work and consequently at home too. Passionate, happy people are more productive and as managers we need to encourage our staff to find their passions and connect them with their career goals.

Connecting your Career with your Passions.

posted @ Thursday, March 23, 2006 5:11 AM | Feedback (0) |

Office DevCon 2006: Day 2, Part 2

Developing Workflows for the 2007 Microsoft Office System and Windows SharePoint  Service “v3”
Basic steps for workflow development

1. Model workflow in VS
2. Create and bind InfoPath forms
3. Deploy to SharePoint Server
4. Debug the running workflow

Examples use the Office “12” SharePoint Servers Beta 1 TR Starter kit – which adds a project type “SharePoint Sequential Workflow…”

Types of InfoPath forms in Workflows

1. Association form
• when user adds workflow to a list
• for setting options on WF
2. Initiation form
• for manual workflow start
• collects WF params
3. Task completion form
• a user completes a task
4. Modification form

To deploy your workflow to a SharePoint server:

• Generate metadatafiles
• Feature.xml
• Workflow.XML
• Create the CAB (WSP) – box admin installs (via spadmin, IISreset)
• Install/activate the features
• Associate WF to the list/library

Now we get to see CODE! Sweet – my fast is happy now!

Linking InfoPath forms into a workflow – in InfoPath designer you can export source files. One of which is a .xsd file. Then run xsd.exe on that .xsd from within a VS command prompt. That generates a c# file (class) based on the form. Now reference the class from within your workflow project. Very slick

Customizing and Extending Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Search
I see a pattern here. The presenter is busy clicking checkboxes and configuring web parts from within the tool parts. WTF? When did the definition of “Developer” include button clicking? This is frustrating. The description of this presentation has this phrase: “how to make use of the search engine and API from within your code” 

So the presenter just said that he was showing us the GUI crap so that we have a frame of reference. Jeezus – I can click around a freakin’ UI myself. I equate this to a college professor reading from a book. I can do that on my own. Show me something that ain’t in the book. Show me cool stuff!!! ooooooo now we’re geeting into code. NOT… we are changing the XSLTs. Cool stuff for Ux dudes… but not for me.

Cool search thing #1 – I think we (at work) will be able to define an XSL for certain content types (think News) so that they show up differently in search results. Not sure how useful it is but it seems like there might be some value here.

Last hope for the day (it has Visual Studio in the title – must be cool, right?):
SharePoint Technology Tools, Techniques, References and Resources for Visual Studio Developers
Use FrontPage 2007 SharePoint Designer to:

• Write no-code workflows
• Modify CSS files
• Edit .aspx pages
• Add script to pages
• Customize look & feel of web parts
• Write XSLT to customize data rendering

Introducing Code Name “Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint Services”

• Aims to address pain points around SP development
• Adds SP project type to VS
• Set of VS Project and Item templates
• Build. Deploy, debug support
• EWSS XSDs for XML intellisense

After installing Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint Services there will be a a “SharePoint” node in the Visual Studio new project dialog where you can create a new:

• web part
• site definition
• list definition
• feature definition
• event handler
• workflow activity 

SWEET! It gets better:
When you it F5 it creates the CAB, deploys the web part, registers in SafeControls, adds to gallery, attaches to process. Wow. How hard was this in SharePoint 2003? This is a serious PITA! I think I have 4 or 5 docs I reference to get web part debugging working with the current version! Wow… this is awesome.

The bad news… won’t be ready until RTM. So much for helping beta and TAP customers!

Cool tips. Create a batch file like:

stsadm -o deleteweb -url http://localhost/test
stsadm -o createweb -url http://localhost/test -lcid 1033 -sitetemplate HELPDESK#1 -title TestWeb
start http://localhost/test

This would be good to setup/teardown a web for UnitTests.

posted @ Wednesday, March 22, 2006 2:44 PM | Feedback (2) |

Windows Live Developer Center

Site looks very cool: http://msdn.microsoft.com/live/

posted @ Wednesday, March 22, 2006 1:48 PM | Feedback (0) |

Office 12 (207 Microsoft Office) NDA Lift

By the way – in case you were wondering of the M$FT police were going to come after me for blogging about Office 12:

As of March 21, 2006, Microsoft is officially lifting our previous request for non-disclosure of Office Server products. This change in our NDA policy is driven by the open nature of the Office Developers Conference and the information that is being covered at that event.

The following things are now public:

• Product naming and packaging
• All Client applications, including Groove 2007
• All Server applications, including both capabilities and feature-level server details
• Key investment areas (collaboration, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Project Management).

posted @ Wednesday, March 22, 2006 1:15 PM | Feedback (0) |

Visual Studio Tools for Office "v3" March CTP

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2e85132b-7370-4137-a19a-15752ea83952&displaylang=en

Overview

posted @ Wednesday, March 22, 2006 1:04 PM | Feedback (2) |

Office DevCon 2006: Day 2, Part 1

First session was useless. Damn. One hour I’ll never get back. The topic was Content Types… but the demos were all about clicking around the SP UI. I can figure that out on my own. I want code… and I want lots of it!! This conference is titled “Microsoft Office System Developers Conference 2006” Maybe a more appropriate titled would be “Microsoft Office System GUI-Clicking-Administrator Conference 2006” Jeesh. Show me the c#!

Using Workflow In Windows SharePoint Services “3” – So the speaker starts out by saying that this session will contain very little code. $#!%$. He says that they found that if they jump right into code that they lost people. That they found they needed to show the UI and the user experience first. Office Developers must be a dense crowd. SHOW ME CODE. Anyway – rant off. Obviously George really knows his stuff. I’m just a code snob… sorry.

Office Workflow Ecosystem = Source List, Task List, History List, Reporting & Administration, WF, Web Service

• Ability to sunset one workflow and start a new workflow… allows the old workflows to finish in old workflow.
• Integrated with Outlook… task notification, task completion
• Scenarios
• OOTB Solutions in Office 12. Customized by the average list administrator
• Designer Workflows (still no code). Custom Tracking Apps, Document Processes, Custom Form Actions. Can use activities, cannot create new activities. Can use custom activities created by VS Developers.
• Visual Studio and Workflow SDK: LOB Integration, Industry specific processes etc. Can create custom activities that can be used from within FrontPage 2007.
• DWPs extended to allow deployment of workflows
• Workflow integration with the Office 12 client apps is REALLY slick. Example: Create word doc, from within Word you can start the workflow… no trip to SharePoint, no trip to another App. Cool. It gets better – users who have workflow tasks get notifications inside of Word when viewing a document that is under workflow. Cool.
• Tools
• FrontPage
• Wizard based
• Re-use OOB/deployed activities
• Forms – Auto-generated forms or ASPX
• Deployment – workflow authored LIVE against server
• VS
• Visual workflow designers
• Re-use OOB activities and create new activities
• Forms – Auto generated, ASPX or Infopath
• Deployment – solution package generated / box administrator install-able
• Windows Workflow Foundation
• Workflows are a set of activities
• Activities are the building blocks
• O12 will ship with a set of activities (ex: add item to SP list)
• Office Workflow Host (WSS Host):
• Persistence
• Event Delivery
• Timer – allows delay activities
• History and Reporting – overrode the WF history mechanisms to use SP lists
• WF is hosted in WSS process on all front-end machines
• Workflow instances are aggressively dehydrated to the back-end database

posted @ Wednesday, March 22, 2006 7:57 AM | Feedback (0) |

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Building applications

One message (vibe, transmission, marketing babble?) I’m getting from all of the Microsoft guys is to really think of Office SharePoint Server 2007 (OSS 2007) as a platform for developing applications for your enterprise.

This really has my few remaining brain cells spinning. See with SharePoint Products and Technologies 2003 (okay wait. I’m sorry Fitz I’m going to call all of this “stuff” SharePoint. I’m tired of trying to say WSS/SP or SPPT or OSS or Office SharePoint Server 2007. This is just ridiculous – I’m saying SharePoint or SP from now on… with a version [year] designator – if you are lucky — screw it!) we really treat SharePoint almost strictly as a portal – a place to surface content.

With SP 2003 whenever we are tasked with building a new application we build stand-alone applications outside of SharePoint with ASP.Net and/or other relevant technologies. It is hosted on separate servers from SharePoint and has no ties to SharePoint whatsoever. If the project requires that we surface data on our Intranet we will add tasks (or stories if you prefer) to create web parts to surface the data.

Microsoft seems to want us to change our thinking. They want us to build applications on/in SharePoint 2007. Seems that we can now create and easily maintain custom administration pages – something that was not possible (well, not easy and probably not supported) in SharePoint 2003. At first glance the benefits seem great – you can create packages (features, templates, content types, etc.) that solve problems and make them available throughout your enterprise. One other hurdle in the current versions of SP is that lists perform so poorly that you cannot use them for any type of data (I stress ANY) for applications. I am told that lists are much more performant in SP07 – but I’m still not convinced that lists and documents are the proper storage mechanism for all data for all custom applications. I think we will continue to write applications against SQL Server databases. just makes sense, right.

As I alluded to earlier… I need to think about this Microsoft meme a bit more – more investigation will assuredly help.

EDIT 3/22:3:54PM - I meant to add this: I think I will challenge my team to re-write one of our custom apps in pure OSS. Should be a good (maybe frustrating) exercise.

posted @ Wednesday, March 22, 2006 6:23 AM | Feedback (1) |

Office DevCon 2006: Day 1, Part 2

I spent the second half of the day in .Net Development on Microsoft SharePoint Technologies . * tracks. Not a lot of in-depth code but Mike Ammerlaan supplied a great overview of WSS development in the Office 2007 world. Here are my notes – not a lot of detail here hopefully that will come in future posts (oh – and I’m sure mistakes are mine not Mike’s):

• Cross-site groups seem very useful
• You can finally make required properties (meta data) required. It seems that they have closed all of the loopholes – like posting via web folder, etc. This is great news in that we can now be sure that a document has the proper meta data attached.
• Versioning is vastly improved. There is now major/minor versioning control. You can set a list up so that only authors (users with write access) can see minor versions. This allows you to keep a major version published to the public while iterating on a new version.
• Version trimming is available – as in “only keep 10 versions f these docs” – nice way to save space.
• Column templates – best described with an example: at Microsoft they have standardized the options for Priority. So in WSS they create a column template that only has the options 0,1,2,3. Now the column “Priority” means the same thing on every object that uses it. Very cool.
• Content types – very big – too much to cover in this overview. The coolest thing from this overview is that content types are hierarchical. Another quick example is in order:  You can have a “base document” for your company that all documents derive from. “Base Document” —> “Customer Research Doc” —> “Office Customer Research Doc” etc. Very cool for keeping all docs in-line with company standards.
• Auditing – too complicated to take notes (that was what my note said – way to go Steve). I remember thinking that auditing was very cool and that I need to investigate more… I think we can use it at work.
• Server-side object model:
• Most objects (list items, documents etc) have property bags
• Impersonation & elevation —> an example of how this might be used is a workflow where the system need to so something as a user but that user’s token is long gone.
• SPContext —> reminds me of CmsHttpContext —> gives you the context of the SP site (or web?) that you are on
• SPUtility – wraps things like URL encoding etc. Use SPUtility in SharePoint apps – that way you are guaranteed that you are using the same methods that OOTB SP apps are using.
• Extensible admin object(s).
• Events
• There are now async events (Pre and Post). YES! Finally.
• You can register multiple event listeners. YES!
• You can bind at web level or item level.
• there is a “web deleting” event – possibility to write a “web” recycle bin
• Derives from SPItemEventReceiver
• Note that events are not guaranteed (DB crashes after you delete a file – no guarantee that msg will be delivered)
• Pre-events do not contain binary stream (so when saving a doc you do not have access to the doc)
• Changelogs – seems simple but allows you to write a service (web service?) that queries a list’s changelog – if nothing has happened – do nothing. If the changelog has entries “do something.” So provides a way to “lightly” check a list or library for changes… as opposed to interrogating each list item (or document) for changes. Very cool.
• SPSiteQuery object – can search an entire site… much improved over SPQuery!!
• Alerts – now you can create custom templates for the alert email. You can now target alerts – for instance if you want all help desk employees to be alerted of a new list item – like “The mainframe is down!”
• Timer Jobs and Work Items (need to investigate more.

So there you go. Not earth-shattering… but as you can see there are a number of improvements over WSS/SPPS v2 that will make professional developer’s lives easier.

More information to come from day two…

posted @ Wednesday, March 22, 2006 5:57 AM | Feedback (0) |

My fast is not happy

posted @ Wednesday, March 22, 2006 4:11 AM | Feedback (0) |

Riya: I'm in the beta! YES!

Just installed the Riya uploader. The JRE 1.5 is required. Damnit. I guess it is no big deal. I’m over it.

I’m so excited… the sign up pages encourage you to upload 1000+ photos! How cool is that?

So far I’ve uploaded a little over 300 photos… and at this point I will have to reserve judgment. So much potential… I need to give it more photos and a bit more time. I’m still learning and so is Riya! :-)

posted @ Tuesday, March 21, 2006 6:48 PM | Feedback (0) |

Office DevCon: Day 1, Part 1

Keynote: Pretty typical keynote session – BillG and Steven Sinofsky talked at a pretty high level – explaining some of the business reasons that we should adopt Office 2007. Yeah – yawn. The most notable announcements were that we will be getting Visual Studio Tools for Office v3 CTP – very cool. I’ve been bitching for months about the apparent lack of Visual Studio support in Office 12 (and vise-versa). Looks like I was bitching for nothing (what is new?). 

Keynote part deux: Kurt DelBene – another lame marketing-speak keynote. Okay that was a bit harsh… probably not seserved. One thing that stuck with me here was at the end Kurt demonstrated an application that was built without code! Hey WAIT a minute – you are speaking at a DEVELOPER conference. I thought that was a stupid move. Forget India – Microsoft might be putting us out of work! Anyway – Kurt also talked about a SharePoint VSIP that will allow you to work with the OSS object model in Visual Studio… wow my day is only getting better! Okay – one more – us Professional Developers (MSFT’s term for dudes who use Visual Studio) will also be getting an Infopath designer plug-in (add-in? VSIP?) for Visual Studio. This is awesome.

In another demo Kurt showed some features of Live Communications Server – one in which you can group individuals into a group IM account – think “help desk.” His example has a web part on a site (a wiki – a new SP template out of the box) that showed the status of the “help desk” IM account. If any one of the help desk individuals was available the presence icon showed available – if they are all busy the icon showed busy. This allowed the end user to IM the help desk to ask a question about the site he was on and the question was answered by a Help Desk account. Very cool.

posted @ Tuesday, March 21, 2006 11:06 AM | Feedback (0) |

ChubClub: My Workout

I thought I’d publish my workout – mostly for my own record – and probably partially to compensate for the fact that I know this week is going to suck. I’m going to be at a Microsoft conference at their Redmond campus and one thing they do really well is feed their guests. They love to push the sugar to keep you awake! ;-)

Anyway – back on topic. The following list is what I did on the evening of 3/20/2006 – it is a pretty typical workout – I do vary the order and resistance from time to time to keep the muscles guessing. Also the last three were done in a circuit fashion after my workout partner had gone home.

Dips (weight-assisted):
Set 1: -38 pounds, 10 reps
Set 2: -66 pounds, 10 reps
Set 3: -66 pounds, 10 reps

Pull-ups (weight-assisted):
Set 1: -95 pounds, 10 reps
Set 2: -95 pounds, 10 reps
Set 3: -95 pounds, 10 reps

Supinated standing curls (dumbbell):
Set 1: 35 pounds, 10 reps
Set 2: 35 pounds, 10 reps
Set 3: 35 pounds, 10 reps

Tricep pull-downs:
Set 1: 98 pounds, 10 reps
Set 2: 98 pounds, 10 reps
Set 3: 98 pounds, 10 reps

Bench press:
Set 1: 206 pounds, 10 reps
Set 2: 227 pounds, 10 reps
Set 3: 227 pounds, 10 reps

Seated concentration curls (dumbbell):
Set 1: 35 pounds, 10 reps (each arm, duh)
Set 2: 35 pounds, 8 reps
Set 3: 35 pounds, 10 reps

Leg Press:
Set 1: 455 pounds, 20 reps
Set 2: 455 pounds, 20 reps
Set 3: 455 pounds, 20 reps

Abs:
40 raised leg crunches
30 twisting crunches
40 swiss ball crunches

posted @ Tuesday, March 21, 2006 3:29 AM | Feedback (1) |

CE Pro : Vista May Not Support HD DVD at Launch

[from this post: CE Pro : Vista May Not Support HD DVD at Launch]

Even though Microsoft officially supports HD DVD (see related blog, the company isn't sure that Vista will include native support for the next-gen DVD format.

posted @ Monday, March 20, 2006 12:04 AM | Feedback (0) |

GoF Patterns for Team System 2005

Gang of four domain specific language from Clipcode via Darrell Norton’s blog…

[from this post: Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP] : GoF Patterns DSL for Team System 2005]

Clipcode has released a GoF Domain Specific Language built using Microsoft's DSL tools for Visual Studio 2005. The currently available snapshot build of Clipcode-GoF-DSL supports the GoF creational patterns (prototype, singleton, builder, abstract factory and factory method). Future builds will support the other GoF patterns.

posted @ Friday, March 17, 2006 3:37 PM | Feedback (0) |

Post on AVICap and .Net 2.0

Always looking for cool programming projects!!

[from this post: Teach Your Old Web Cam New Tricks: Use Video Captures in Your .NET Applications]

Using the AVICap window class available in the Windows operating system, you can easily incorporate video capture capabilities into your Windows application. The uses of this functionality are endless but in particular you can easily populate employee and other person databases with mug shots taken directly from the users' terminal.

posted @ Friday, March 17, 2006 3:31 PM | Feedback (0) |

Lean Software Development: Implementation Guide

Looks like a follow-up to the book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers is in the works:

Lean Software Development: An Implementation Guide

posted @ Friday, March 17, 2006 3:29 PM | Feedback (0) |

Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites (O12 / Office 2007)

The SharePoint team is posting some great information (even if they can’t spell proliferation). I hope they keep it up.

[from this post: SharePoint Team Blog : Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites]

As the usage of SharePoint increases, there is a profileration of SharePoint sites. This makes it harder and harder to keep track of where your documents are located and also to see a unified view of your "stuff".
In Office SharePoint Server 2007, we are introducing a couple of new web parts that address this problem.

 

 

posted @ Friday, March 17, 2006 11:08 AM | Feedback (0) |

An educational crisis (Education Blog On 10)

This is an awesome post on the state of CS and IT education in our great nation. As some of you may remember I am trying to start up a programming class at my son’s elementary school. I stopped pushing the idea when I realized the district did not want to install Squeak on the machines at my son’s school (it is only an ActiveX control and yes – it is free). This article has inspired me to try again and push the subject!

[from this post: An educational crisis (Education Blog On 10)]

-Parents. A lot of parents are scared off by the news reports that all the IT jobs are being offshored to India and China. It's not true, and we need to get them better information.
-Guidance counselors. I try very hard not to simply blast guidance counselors, because despite being the butt of many jokes over the years many guidance counselors are very well-intentioned and trying to be helpful. But the reality is that when it comes to the IT industry, they are giving out bad information. Part of the blame is ours, because we haven't ensured that they have the good information to give out.

posted @ Friday, March 17, 2006 6:49 AM | Feedback (0) |

ServiceOrientation.org

Thomas Erl, the author of Service-Oriented Architecture : Concepts, Technology, and Design and Service-Oriented Architecture : A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services (hands-down the two best SOA books on the market) runs this site:

[from this post: ServiceOrientation.org]

I spent a good amount of time researching service-orientation in preparation for solution designs and while writing my second book about SOA. I found it interesting how the IT industry, as a whole, is moving toward a service-oriented architectural model without a clear, universal definition of what service-orientation actually is.

posted @ Friday, March 17, 2006 6:41 AM | Feedback (0) |

The importance of System.Environment.NewLine

Great post regarding System.Environment.NewLine and System.Environment.PathSeparator:

[Cory Foy: The importance of System.Environment.NewLine]

posted @ Friday, March 17, 2006 6:36 AM | Feedback (0) |

ChubClub 2006: Week 11

271 pounds with 23.1% body fat. Recently it really hit me that no matter what I say about not caring about my weight and only caring about my body fat percentage – in the end when I see my weight on the scale and it is higher than my goal I get bummed - even if my BF% is dropping. Over the last few weeks I’ve gained all the weight that I had lost in the previous 8 weeks back. I have been pretty bummed about it despite the fact that I’ve seen my body fat percentage continue to decline (even though it is not declining as fast as I’d like). I need to get over it!

My First Creatine Experience
The long story is that I decided to try a cycle of creatine monohydrate loading starting during week 8 of this year (my week ending 2/23/06). I’ve been debating trying creatine for a good six or eight months now and back in mid February I was in a nutrition store when I saw a large tub of creatine on sale — I just could not resist.

The results were insane… I went from 263 to 269 in one week and my body fat dropped from 24.3 to 22%. The problem was that I still did not like seeing 269 on the scale where the 263 used to be! I was actually pretty bummed. This is why getting in shape is so damned hard. I was consuming 20g of creatine per day, I was lifting like a mad-man I was feeling great. My body fat % dropped and I was still upset to see a weight gain! What?

When I weighed in second week I was up to 274 at 24.1% body fat (I’m not sure if this was a fluke or if the 22% from the previous week was a fluke or if the numbers were just spot-on?). I was pissed. I was actually up 3 pounds higher that I was at the beginning of the year. Ouch. I quit creatine right then and there.

This week I started looking back at the numbers. I guess deep-down I knew that something didn’t jive between how I felt and what had actually transpired during that first week – so I decided to do some math (math usually makes me feel better). 263*24.3% = 63.91 pounds of fat which leaves 199.09 pounds of lean muscle. 269*22% = 29.18 pounds of fat which leaves 209.82 pounds of lean muscle! Yes I had gained 10 pounds of lean muscle the first creatine week! Yet I was still not happy. I think the fact that I was not happy led to a completely and utterly disastrous second week… I didn’t eat very well, I didn’t do much aerobic exercise. The horrid second week was completely my fault and not the creatine.

In order to combat this in the future I’ve modified my excel spreadsheet to do fat & lean mass calculations for me. Seems so simple yet it freakin’ rocks! For instance I can see that this week I weigh the exact same as I did at the start of the year… yet I’ve lost almost 9 pounds of fat! That is killer. Totally killer. It does match up to how I’m feeling as well… my pants are getting loose, my shirts are getting tighter around the upper-arms! I hope (the human brain is a weird thing so no guarantees!) that I’m over the “weight is all that matters” mind set – I hope the math will keep me on the right track! In line with this I will be adding another chart (or two) to my weekly blog posts to track my fat vs. lean mass numbers. I’m having a slight Excel problem or I would post them this week (it really shouldn’t be this hard to not chart zeros!)

One other note on creatine: I must admit that I also felt much better during my workouts – I hurt less, I could lift more and I could could do more reps. Don’t get me wrong – lifting weights is still hard. Very hard. The funny thing is that while I was on the creatine I didn’t really notice that it hurt less… only after stopping did I realize (ouch!) that it hurt a lot more and that I wasn’t recovering as fast.

So I guess in conclusion I’ll be trying creatine again in the not so distant future. I’ll probably start loading during week 14 and this time I’ll try to ignore the weight-gain if there is one!

 Training

• Weights: Friday, Monday  – great workouts both nights. My knee is bothering me a bit from a workout a few weeks ago where I did a “bad squat” – so I didn’t do squats – also refrained from leg presses on Friday night for the same reason. I’ll probably lay off squats for another week. Hit the abs hard on Monday.
• Cardio: Yeah. I still need to improve here. I need to hit the treadmill on a more regular basis. The first hike of the year was a resounding success though!

Food

Did okay here this week. I’ve been going out to lunch a bit too often. I need to get back on the wagon here! I mean I’m not going crazy – I’m just not being “perfect.”

Stats

Today (3/16/06) 271, 23.1% BF (
Started (1/1/06) 271, 25.3% BF

Here are the charts for 2006 (click for larger versions):

posted @ Friday, March 17, 2006 6:31 AM | Feedback (1) |

TechEd 2006 - here we come

Well I’m all set and ready for TechEd 2006 in Boston. There are approximately 12 of us going from the team I work on. Should be a blast.

One disappointment so far is that both Red Sox games on the weekend before TechEd are sold out! Damn! We really wanted to hit the Sunday (6/11) 2:05 game versus Texas. If anyone out there in the metaverse has extra tix for that game – let me know!

Related topic http://techedbloggers.net is up and running – very cool!

posted @ Thursday, March 16, 2006 2:19 PM | Feedback (2) |

Rattlesnake Ledge Hike 3/12/2006

Johnboy does a much better job than I will describing our hike on Sunday. I must say that I am damned proud of John. He showed up, he gave it his all and damn it – he made it to the top! John – keep up that attitude and you are going to hit all of your goals for the year!

 
Johnboy @ the top!!!

I had a blast! It was so awesome to hike again… in 2004 I hiked like a fool then nothing – seriously nothing in 2005. I’m glad to be back at it.

Derek – ooo look at the snow, Da boyz (John, Erick, Derek) enjoying the view.

The gang (Erick, John, Melinda, Briana, Derek) hangin’ out at the top!

View the whole photo gallery here.

posted @ Thursday, March 16, 2006 3:29 AM | Feedback (0) |

junxion box

The junxion box seems like a nice idea – although it seems a bit expensive at $699. You could always just make your own StompBox for about $400.

[from this site: junxion box.]

1. Insert a cellular PC Card modem into your Junxion Box™
2. Connect to the Junxion Box using Ethernet or Wi-Fi
3. Use the wireless Internet or share a local area network

The Junxion Box enables any device with Ethernet or Wi-Fi to more easily and cost-effectively connect with the latest data services from leading U.S. wireless carriers.

As the early market leader in transportable wireless WAN routers, Junxion supports a wide range of enterprise and government customer applications.

posted @ Monday, March 13, 2006 1:06 AM | Feedback (0) |

SharePoint Team Blog : Page Anatomy

Awesome post about OSS page anatomy!

[from this post: SharePoint Team Blog : Page Anatomy]

No this post is not about a popular TV show! We'll cover the integrated framework we are using in the next release of SPS + CMS (breaking news - now officially Office SharePoint Server 2007 - I will cover that in a second post later today) to enable people to create, manage and publish the spectrum of very simple to very sophisticated internet sites. We've learned a lot from a variety of customer feedback on ASP.NET, WSS, SPS, CMS, FrontPage and more and hopefully brought this all together in a powerful way. Let's go through them piece by piece.

posted @ Wednesday, March 08, 2006 7:39 PM | Feedback (0) |

Catching Up...

With a new baby in the house I’ve seriously neglected reading my feeds and my blog posting. I don’t want to let any of these posts slip through the cracks – so I’m capturing them here for future reference.

 dmitryr's blog : ASP.NET RSS Toolkit
SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Godzilla PVR
VSTS Widgets — Accentient, Inc.
ASP.Net 2.0 Health Monitoring — J.net : ASP.NET 2.0's Best Kept Secret?
Virtual PC Guy's WebLog : Configuring Heartbeat parameters under Virtual Server
Code Review Ideas from Chris Sells — Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet
Never struggle with writing that PInvoke signature from scratch again — pinvoke.net: the interop wiki!
Zero configuration VPN — Hamachi : Stay Connected
Wild computer desk — http://lian-li.com/Product/OA/OA_F1.htm

posted @ Wednesday, March 08, 2006 7:33 PM | Feedback (0) |

Microsoft RAW Image thumbnail viewer

[from this post: Microsoft RAW Image thumbnail viewer]

If you need to ask then you probably wouldnt understand ;)
For those of you who do ;) ;)
Microsoft RAW Image thumbnail viewer– get it here, and Happy shooting.

posted @ Wednesday, March 08, 2006 6:58 PM | Feedback (0) |

Modifying the VS 2005 file templates

…and another one from AC a complete HowTo for editing the VS2005 template files complete with down-loadable templates:

[from this post: Modifying the VS 2005 file templates]

It was a royal PITA when you wanted to move your code templates and settings from one machine to another in Visual Studio 2003. There were registry entries, files embedded within your profile, and files embedded within the VS program directory.

Visual Studio 2005 addressed this problem and made it a lot easier to move your settings around with the import/export wizard. Now all your settings are persisted in a single file you can move around. All the file templates are also in one place (except for your personal additions). One of the first things I did was update my settings in the IDE and update all the file templates to reflect my preferences. It’s pretty self explanatory and well documented how to move your settings around so I won’t cover that.

posted @ Wednesday, March 08, 2006 3:47 PM | Feedback (0) |

HOWTO: Squeeze Every Last Drop of Performance Out of Your Virtual PCs

Andrew Connell has some of the most useful posts and HowTo articles out in the metaverse. This one is no exception.

[from this post: HOWTO: Squeeze Every Last Drop of Performance Out of Your Virtual PCs]

In this article, I'll outline some of the things I do with all my VPCs in order to keep them up to speed. Some of these things I've picked up along the way from my own experience, from the Virtual PC newsgroup, virtualization blogs, webcasts, and other sources. One disclaimer: I did receive a list of some performance things from someone who I wanted to give credit to, but he claimed he got the list from someone else and he wasn't sure who that was so he didn't want to claim credit for something that was someone else's work. Thus, some of the techniques listed here may not be original, so please don't take it that I'm trying to play them off as such.

posted @ Wednesday, March 08, 2006 3:44 PM | Feedback (0) |