It's weird it's 2009...If I look back to when I was 10 all I wanted to do was get to 18, so I could leave my parents house. On December 31st, 2000 things were so very different. I was 17 years old about to turn 18 a couple months later. I went to my grandmother's apartment at the assisted living facility a week before and she was complaining of a cold or the flu. This day was the day that she would end up in the hospital. I had this gut feeling that we wouldn't see her again outside of the hospital. I went to the hospital every day until January 30th. I was crying in my bedroom. I guess my parents couldn't hear me. They were debating on whether they should wake me up, because my grandmother had passed away. Every year during New Years I remember what happened to lead up to that day. Ever year I put on my Jewish Star to remind me who she was and what she wanted for me. She told me I could do whatever I wanted. She was one of the few positive influences in my life that made me feel like I could succeed. She is the reason why I am here writing this blog. She taught me how to type on a keyboard using an old Smith Corona Typewriter when I was 10. She helped me buy my first computer when I was 15. When we went to private school and my mom would not wake up due to crippling depression she took me and my brother to school. She gave me her 1985 Chrysler Lebaron when she could no longer drive, so I could bring myself to Lacrosse practice. Despite all her crazy flaws she was my beacon of hope for the future of what I could accomplish. I will never forget where I came from and who helped me get there. This year I need to remember that my family and friends are very important. They hold the glue together in your life and they help you out when you fall. Happy New Year Everyone in the SharePoint Nation!
First off I have the best volunteers in the whole wide world. The delegation process was not too bad. I don't have as much on my plate as I did before.
Second I managed to convince some of my really awesome St. Louis pals to sign up. It looks like we have these guys speaking with the INETA help (tentatively):
Daniel Larson
Corey Van Dyke
Michael Lotter
Becky Bertram
Corey Roth
Todd Kitta
Matt Bremer
Erin O'Conner
Tony Lanni
We decided to do two lab sessions back to back that were End User and kind of a what is SharePoint type training. We are going to try and get some hard drives loaded with VPC's or use the Microsoft VPC and have people follow along if they bring laptops. Tentatively we will have three sessions back to back with the same trainer, then repeat them again. We might run two tracks parallel to each other with the lab sessions. We are only allowing 20 people to sign up for these sessions at a time. We're not sure how we will be handling this, so everyone should sign up on the regular click to attend.
While the End User/What is SharePoint training is going on we will have three other tracks: Development, Admin/Arch/Infrastructure, and Special Interest with mixed topics from all th other speakers. We are hoping to get a total of 15-17 speakers overall. Right now I am limiting abstracts to two, but may end up only allowing one session per person with the exception of the training.
If anyone is interested in helping out with the training portion you can e-mail sharepointsaturdaykc@gmail.com. If you would like to register for the event the link is located at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/kc.
I may not have all the information updated yet, because I work a full time job and will try to get the extra stuff posted. I may not be blogging much about anything other than the event. I will try really hard to throw up some posts, but it's not always easy. I realize now why some of you guys out there stop for a while running things. It's incredibly hard and it takes an army of people to run, but I think it's worth it for Kansas City. It should help strengthen our SharePoint Nation! presence in Kansas City.
So some of you have no idea who I am. I don't even know who I am sometimes. What self respecting 26 year old knows who they are. Anyway, I moved to Kansas City about a year and a half ago and I was depressed when I moved. I had just started to get involved with the St. Louis Jewish Community. I was going to go to start school again, but my job basically was we want to move you to Kansas City and we don't really have other options. I knew how it went. I was 24 years old. I had to move. My boyfriend lived in Kansas City, but I was a St. Louis girl. I would roller-blade in Stacey Park. Every so often I would go and get a free meal from my parents. I could see my friends Leah, Jason, and Jaimie all the time. I knew things were about to change I just didn't know how or why. I ended up moving in June 07. Around April of 07 I started to play World of Warcraft again. I was really depressed, so I pushed myself into an introverted online coma. The happiest times were when I visited St. Louis every weekend up until June. I kept trying to visit St. Louis as much as possible on the weekends. I had some really good times with my boyfriend, but he had to work and go to school. I was really getting into MOSS at my new job at Terracon, but the job can only carry you so far without a social life you are nothing. I didn't like who I was becoming and what I was doing. My mom is Bipolar. I had some rough times growing up. I have more depression checks and balances than some people. If I'm depressed I need to find some way to get out of it.
At that point in time I tried to get back into the LGBT Community at UMKC without success. I realized I was a little too old for the college crowd. I tried to hang out with old friends from UMKC, but some of them had moved on. At that point I thought let's try a user group. I thought that I would be overwhelmed by some guys talking about algorithms and procedures that were way over my head. I tried to talk myself out of going. It was new and weird. I was introverted (I still am). So I went to the Kansas City .Net User Group. Jeff Julian, John Alexander, Doug Butscher, and a few other guys were sitting on a panel talking about who knows what for who knows how long. I enjoyed it. They mentioned that they had written a SharePoint Development Book with a bunch of people during the meeting. I thought ok these guys have got to be good people I need to seriously do something I would never do. I need to walk up and talk to one of these guys and open a dialog. That way I might end up meeting someone at the least I can hang out with in the future and watch dvds or play video games. I know it's weird, but I had no friends in Kansas City and I thought maybe this was a way to make some. I spent a decent amount of time talking to Jeff Julian about something SharePoint. I really don't remember. From that point on the best days of my month were spent waiting for the .Net User Group Meetings. It was my only social time away from WoW.
Around the late summer months of 07 early fall months Jeff had started a user group called the Kansas City Office Geeks. I wanted to attend, but I was in a Dale Carnegie Trainer Program. Somehow after a few months I quit the program and started attending Office Geeks. I believe it was in October or November of last year that I spoke in front of an audience for the first time (it was around 5 or 6 people). I presented on SharePoint Disaster Recovery. Somehow after that meeting I decided to attend every single Office Geeks meeting. Jeff asked for some recruiting advice and somehow I was a co-leader at some point, then I was running the meetings and the group. At the same point in time, October, I quit World of Warcraft, because I wanted to get out of this depression pool. That's when things started to take off. I planned all the meetings for most of the year, speakers, sponsors, and what not. We were getting on average 13 people. We had a great year in 2008 for the most part we had decent attendance for a special interest group in Kansas City. I really loved working with Office Geeks and with the community in Kansas City.
This past year I also took part in the Coders 4 Charity event. We took home the prize and I met some great people. Lee Brandt, Joe Loux, Blake Thiess, and Tim Wright all good people. Lee is I would like to say is a friend. Lee's big thing is getting events started in Kansas City. He wants us to have something for our own, because we don't all have $1,000 to go to Kansas City. His passion kind of fuels my own passion. Early on this year I went to MOSS Camp in St. Louis and I thought wouldn't this be great in Kansas City. I let it stew, because I wasn't sure with so much work needing to be done for Office Geeks how could we hold such an event? Anyway, Lee's baby was the Kansas City Day of Dot Net. He wanted to hold a code camp here. He held it a week ago in Kansas City. I helped out by getting the SharePoint speakers. I secretly was testing his event to see if I could actually hold my event. With his event succeeding I realized that we could hold a SharePoint event after all. We had enough people. It would probably only be about three tracks, but we can do it. After his event I started sending out information and putting things into place for SharePoint Saturday. I get really excited when I am passionate about something. For some reason helping out the community by planning a free SharePoint event got me excited. I built the website, e-mailed a few sponsors (mostly without luck I don't like asking for things from people), got a ton of volunteer support, got a few speakers. The event still could use work, but I am finally coming full circle. I am happy with what I am doing for the community and happy with my life. I am no longer depressed. You guys have to realize yeah I am doing this for selfish reasons, but not the reasons you think I am doing it. If you think otherwise you don't know me. Most of you who read my blog things you know me. I am the product of my environment. I was taught that if you work hard for what you want you will get it. I worked very hard to get to where I am. I am going to continue to work hard. Yes, I am scared most of the time that I will fall like the rest of you so I put out 110% most of the time. I am scared that this event will fail big time, but I am not willing to give up. I will not stop working with the community in Kansas City. I will not stop blogging. I will not stop being me. If you want to get to know me come up and say "Hi" sometime on facebook, im, twitter, whatever you feel like I'm here. I know I'm flawed. I fail at getting back to people sometimes and I am sorry. I will catch you guys later. I hope that you all have a good holidays.
I know I am updating almost every day about the event. I have no idea why, but I am really excited. I've never planned anything. I helped out a little with KC Day of Dot Net, but it's definitely not the same. I feel sympathetic for Lee Brandt.
So we have a registration page and a word document that people can fill out to submit speaker abstracts. I am going to start working within the next few days to get more sponsors and setup the sponsor page. If you want to register for the event or download the speaker abstract go to the main site: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/kc/.
I know I have two months, but I am worried that we won't have a lot of attendees or speakers. I think we'll do just fine, but you never really know how anything will go until after the day that it happened.
Michael Lotter is trying to get these events to spread all over the U.S. and such. If anyone is interested in setting up an event in there city I can put you in touch with him. Anyway, I'll catch you guys later. I have a ton of work to do and such.
For those of you out there who can't pay a ton of money to attend one of the conferences there will be three SharePoint Saturday events and probably a MOSS Camp going on in the first quarter of the year. Here is the information that I have on these events:
| Event Name | Date | Venue | Website | Comments |
| SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach | Saturday, January 10th, 2009 | ATC | http://www.sharepointsaturday.org | Joel Oleson, Michael Lotter, Paul Galvin, Mark Miller, and more will be at this event...You get to see these guys for free and hit up a pretty beach need I say more? |
| Toronto SharePoint Camp | Saturday, January 24th, 2009 | TBD | http://www.torontosharepointcamp.com/ | Information will be posted on the website soon. |
| SharePoint Saturday Kansas City | Saturday, February 7th, 2009 | Centriq | http://www.sharepointsaturday.org
/kc | For all your middle U.S. peoples we are doing a free event for SharePoint in Kansas City.We are in the planning stages, so check back in a few weeks and we'll have more information. |
| SharePoint Saturday NYC | Saturday, February 21st, 2009 | TBD | TBD | Still in the planning stages, but will be headed up by Michael Lotter. It's really hard to find something free in the city for free. |
| MOSS Camp St. Louis | End of Q1 2009 | TBD | http://www.stlsug.org/
MOSSCamp/default.aspx | I went to this last year starting my whole year of speaking. Kurt Rolland and Covenant Technology Partners are heading up this event in St. Louis. Last year they had a total of 75 people. I bet this year it will be bigger and better. Some names they had were Todd Kitta, Corey Vandjk, Jeff Julian, and Paul Schaeflin. |
I am hoping that I can maintain a list of free SharePoint events as the year passes. I like traveling and attending events. I have found a lot of people asking about events happening throughout the year. If you know of any free events going on related to SharePoint (maybe even just a code camp track) let me know and I will post on this page. I am going to throw up a link on my blog to this post. If anyone is interested in volunteering, speaking, or attending these events and you have any questions I can direct you towards the person in charge. I hope this blog post is helpful.
As most of you know my blog posts are a little random and more towards free writing. I just think and write. So today the Kansas City Day of Dot Net took place at Centriq. I was freaking out a little bit, because I wanted it to succeed so bad. I was afraid that being our first event here in the past ten year that no one would show up. From what I understand Lee Brandt was thinking the same thing. This event was solely born from his idea that we needed to plan more events in Kansas City. He did a great job. Of the three of us, Myself, Doug Butscher, and Lee Brandt, this event was Lee's baby. Doug and I were there to make sure that things went off without a hitch. (I was sort of there to test the SharePoint waters in Kansas City too, which turned out to be pretty hot.) A month ago I was freaking out, because I told Lee I would get the SharePoint speakers. I was using Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, im, and whatever else I had available. Somehow I managed to get some great speakers, Michael Lotter, Todd Bleeker, and Steve Walker to come out to Kansas City from all over the place. We had an overwhelming number of people show up interested in SharePoint. I came home with a list of about 21-22 people. In about a week I'm going to start planning a SharePoint event for February. We gave out some surveys that I will go over later this week. I think we have a good base of people in Kansas City to host a whole slew of events. Honestly, I don't think I would even be at this point without Lee or Doug. I have to thank myself for walking up to Jeff Julian and John Alexander in May or June of 07 at the Kansas City .Net User Group. So I guess I have to thank Jeff, John, Doug, and Lee for helping me get to this point. Thanks guys. Thanks for making me realize Kansas City might not be as bad as I once thought it was. No you still cannot beat St. Louis by a long-shot, but hey it definitely beats some of the other places out there that could be far worse. It's really all about the community and the awesome people. This is kind of ridiculous, but any of you guys out there in the SharePoint Community or Geeks with Blogs Community...Don't hesitate to say hi to someone you don't know it may lead to something insane that you never expected. I am pretty beat from the event, so I will catch you guys later. No SharePoint insight for this week. It's more of a general cry out to get involved with your community, because it's probably made of awesomeness that you would never expect.
So I decided it was time to take a few minutes this week and discuss what I learned this week. This moral is not really something new it's more a reiteration. I hate third party features with little to no documentation. I like developing my own products and knowing what I am doing. I was working with some big name third party feature and I felt like an idiot. First off I had to contact them to get an older version of the product. Some guy with a name like Frankenstein's henchman contacted me. If that wasn't enough it took until the beginning of this week to receive any type of response. It was creepy. Just when I was about to write Mr. Henchmen, I receive and e-mail with the link to the proper trial version of the product. At that point I opened up my VPC and installed the product. I noticed that there was no developer documentation or SDK for the product. I read all 40 pages of the user guide and it was all tailored towards the end user. I am thinking I need to create a Site Column, so how do I even fathom doing such a thing? I sat for about two to three hours and studied the site columns, content types, and list fields. I realized it was a special field type. So I slapped that into my site columns feature and added a reference in my content type feature.
Now I was at the most painful part of my day, trying to figure out what control they were using to pull the information from this feature into an Edit Form. That's when I realized there were exactly four assemblies installed in the folder I needed. I had no idea which assembly held the right information. So I'm thinking it's about time to download Reflector or gain a sixth sense of telepathy like Jean Grey or Charles Xavier. I started opening up assemblies like there was no other and couldn't find a single control that dealt with the feature. I imed this dude from work and he pulls open the 12 hive and looks into the field types. He finds the control and assembly in about thirty minutes. I look in my folder and that assembly is not sitting inside the folder. I open up the GAC and it looks like the installer shoved it into right place. At that point I realize let's crack open the CAB file...(Seriously guys who uses a CAB file anymore? Aren't the cool kids using WSP files nowadays?) So guess what I find inside is the exact assembly I want to reference, so I extract it and in VS 2008 look around for the field type. A bit later I end up finding the exact field type I want to reference. Tomorrow I will be adding this field type to my edit form web part.
So the moral of this story guys...I hate third party tools that do not contain any documentation. So I'm going to ask you guys to do me a favor. Please if you are going to sell a product write at least some form of developer documentation or at least make your stuff obvious. If you are installing a bunch of items with the assembly, then you may want to consider installing all the dll files in a common folder so developers can find them and reference them. As I said before, I am not nor do I wish to be Jean Grey or Charles Xavier (maybe Gambit, Rogue, or Spiderman). I know it's hard to document items, but if you're going to sell something it looks really bad on your company without any type of documentation. Anyway that is my rant and I am sure someone is laughing at me and my blog post. I hope that you all have a Happy Thanksgiving! I am signing out for the week. Going home to the rents back in St. Louis and then coming back on Friday so I can go shopping and see Twilight yet again. I am not taking a computer with me, but you all know I am an IPhone/Internet Junkie who will crack and touch a computer or use her IPhone on Twitter way too much. Anyway catch you all later:)
There will be an all day SharePoint Event called SharePoint Saturday on Saturday, January 10th from 8 am to 6:30 pm at the ATC in Virginia Beach. If you wish to volunteer as a speaker or just want to sign up to attend the event go to http://www.sharepointsaturday.org. I'm already signed up to present on Cheap and Easy Wildcard Search. As most SharePoint Nation! Events it should be awesome. According to the site if you attend you have the chance to win a Zune or a Mindsharp Training Course. So as my usual shpeal goes...SIGN UP...DO EET...You know you want to...
I know a few people were looking for a SharePoint Development 101 Presentation, so I am changing from my Cheap and Easy Wildcard Search Presentation. I am going to start with a user control and then head towards feature and webpart development. I will also talk about some tools and how to get started with SharePoint Development. That way the people in Kansas City interested in getting started with SharePoint get a little bit of an idea where to start. If you guys are interested in my Wildcard Search Presentation I might do it at Office Geeks later on this year.
So people are always asking me how do I get Silverlight to work in SharePoint? Then Paul Galvin and some other people told me why not post the steps. So here is what you want to do:
- Get Visual Studio 2008 and download SP1 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=FBEE1648-7106-44A7-9649-6D9F6D58056E&displaylang=en. The installer may stick at one part and may take an hour or two, so make sure you leave tons of time to spare.
- Get the Microsoft Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 with SP1 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=c22d6a7b-546f-4407-8ef6-d60c8ee221ed&displaylang=en.
- Get Expression Blend 2.0 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5FF08106-B9F4-43CD-ABAD-4CC9D9C208D7&displaylang=en.
- Download Expression Blend SP1 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=EB9B5C48-BA2B-4C39-A1C3-135C60BBBE66&displaylang=en.
- Create a new Silverlight Application using the Silverlight Application Template in Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2.0
SharePoint specific instructions:
- Create a new Virtual Directory on your SharePoint Application in IIS (c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\webappfolder\) called ClientBin. Make sure the directory has Read and Run Permissions. This directory is where you will put all your compiled Silverlight files (XAP files).
- Check the MIME Types in IIS to see if .XAP and .XAML are included (this is added in Server 2008 automagically, but not necessarily in Server 2003). If these entries are not included add them by using the new button and type in Extension: XAML MIME Type:application/xaml+xml and for the second entry Extension: XAP MIME Type:application/x-silverlight-app. Adding these extensions as MIME Types makes them trusted extensions.
- Add the System.Web.Silverlight.dll to the Global Assembly Cache (click on Start and then Run and type in Assembly and hit Enter, you can drag the assembly into this window).
Note: Once you install the Silverlight Extensions for Visutal Studio this should be in the c:\program files directory under the SDK. - Add a Safe Control to your Web .Config File by navigating to the IIS folder for your SharePoint Application (c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\webappfolder\). Open the file in NotePad or another editing program and look for the <SafeControls> Tag. Add this tag at the end of the entries:
<SafeControl Assembly="System.Web.Silverlight, Version=2.0.5.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Namespace="System.Web.UI.SilverlightControls" TypeName="*" Safe="True" /> - Copy your XAP File into the ClientBin Directory you created above.
- Create a SharePoint Webpart and add a reference to System.Web.UI.SilverlightControls and add a using statement. You should be able to create a new control and reference it in the CreateChildControls like such:
public Silverlight MySilverlightControl;
protected override void CreateChildControls()
{
MySilverlightControl = new Silverlight();
MySilverlightControl.ID = "slControl";
MySilverlightControl.Source = "/ClientBin/MyXAPFile.xap";
this.Controls.add(MySilverlightControl);
}
These are pretty much all the steps you need to follow to use a Silverlight Control in a webpart. You need to also remember that you cannot directly reference the SharePoint Object Model in a Silverlight Control. You can use the SharePoint Webservices or create your own webservice. Silverlight renders like a client side javascript application and does not work like an ASP .Net Application. It is more of a presentation layer than a data layer. If anyone has any comments, questions, or concerns let me know.