Wednesday, August 18, 2010
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I was playing around with some scripts today while I was working on an upgrade. I didn’t want to individually write out the names of files in a batch file and I wanted to create a quick Powershell Script. If you are using SharePoint 2010 you can use these lines of code in the Powershell Manager to deploy only .wsp files to your SharePoint 2010 Web Applications:
$dir = [directory]
$list = Get-ChildItem $dir | where {$_.extension -eq ".wsp"}
foreach($my_file in Get-ChildItem $list){Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath $my_file.FullName}
foreach($my_file in Get-ChildItem $list){Install-SPSolution -Identity $my_file.Name -AllWebApplications -GACDeployment}
Basically, you throw in the directory into a variable, then you throw the files into a variable in Powershell filtered by .wsp. Then you loop through the files and add the solutions to the store, then loop through the files and deploy them to the web applications. You can change the scripts accordingly. I figured this would be something you all could use so enjoy!
Monday, August 09, 2010
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Why is it important you attend the Best Practices Practices Conference? I can’t vouch for everyone, but I think my sessions will be great (and all the other speaker’s sessions as well). One of them is something I’ve been working on in concept for at least 6 months. This session is called Building A Rich Media Application in Silverlight. The second I saw the tools for webcam and video integration I thought how can we incorporate this into SharePoint? How cool would it be if you could record a netcast within SharePoint? I’m actually going to talk about the best practices for building an application. Why is the client object model better getting your media from Silverlight input devices than WCF? What tools do you get out of the box that will help you integrate video with Silverlight? Why are the webcam tools practical in SharePoint application? These are just a few questions I will answer through the course of the presentation.
But wait there is more…
You get a whole other presentation for price of one on Mopping Up Bad Code: A Migration that Should Have Never Happened. This presentation is based off of a migration project I had last year. You get to see what was done initially to the environment, what problems occurred in the environment, and what I did to fix the environment.
Oh yeah and then there are 48 more sessions you may get as a bonus as well. So basically if you have the ability to clone yourself you could potentially attend 50 sessions. Unfortunately, you have to buy enough tickets for each clone, but the knowledge transfer bonus afterwards may work out to your advantage. Here is the linkage for the sessions, speakers, and ticket buying: https://www.bestpracticesconference.com/.
As a shameless plug please sign up to live blog. See my last post for the linkage. Hopefully I will see you at the conference! Thus concludes this episode of the Life of Becky. Tune in later for possible code snippets and other items in the next post.
Saturday, August 07, 2010
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I’ve been quiet lately for many reasons, such as SharePoint Saturday New York and heavy amounts of travel due to funerals and family events and life.
So I think a lot of you have been wondering what is this Women in SharePoint thing? How does it fit into the community? Well, there are five of us, Kathryn Birstein, Cathy Dew, Lori Gowin, Karuana Gitamu, and myself. A year ago from this past June I wrote a blog post how I felt being a woman in SharePoint. It feels great to live in this era, because I feel less strain than some family members and friends did back in the day. Unfortunately if you noticed in the technology arena, including SharePoint, we see less young girls going into technology related majors. We see less women going into technology related jobs. I think it’s incredibly important to have an organization to support networking among the women in our community and mentor young girls trying to get into technology related majors. We are not limited to women in the community. It is a free and open organization, so any of you guys can help us out in our endeavors. Right now one of the biggest things we are doing is organizing live blogging at Best Practices Conference. We need a few good people to go out into the sessions at Best Practices and take notes for us online. It will do us a great service and people who cannot make the conference or cannot make all the sessions. If you are interested in live blogging please go to this link and sign up: http://bpc10liveblogging.eventbrite.com/.
Also, if you are interested in Women in SharePoint our website is located at http://womeninsharepoint.org and our email address is womeninsharepoint@live.com. I think if we work together we can build a very strong healthy professional community.
If anyone wants to chat about Silverlight, Women in SharePoint, or anything else come up to me. I may not be wearing my traditional Cardinal’s hat, but I will be the one walking around with the short curly black hair.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
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I am organizing my third SharePoint Saturday event – New York City. We are going to have 9 tracks with the capacity for 300 people to show up to the event. Right now we have about 150 registered for the event. There will be a search track, Mindsharp training track, developer, architect, end user, special interest, and administration tracks. It will be a great event with such speakers as Errin O’Connor, Natalya Vokrensenskaya, Joel Oleson, Geoff Varosky, Paul Swider, and others…To see the full list of speakers and register go to http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ny.
Remember New York City in the summer is pricey, but worth it…There are a ton of free events and parks that are worth visiting, so it might be a nice mini vacation and you get some free training on the side. I hope to see you all at the event.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
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As Glados would say at the end of Portal “I’m still alive…”. I am around, but I’m just not posting as frequently as I should. I am trying to get acclimated to my new job, planning SharePoint Saturday New York City and Women in SharePoint plus trying to lead a normal life doing normal chores and hang out with my boyfriend. What does this mean? Well I’m trying to cut back to one or two events a month, which will include Heartland Developer Conference, Best Practices Conference, SPS Ozarks, SPS NYC (not speaking, running), and maybe SPS Denver and/or SPS East Bay. So with the new job acclimation the blog suffers and twitter is getting less loven. I’m only posting on twitter at night. I will try to blog when I can as I see more 2010 and 2007 things that I find interesting to share. I guess when you are a new employee you try to figure out what’s going on the first few months. It’s really hard to post on SharePoint issue while that happens. I’m really sorry guys and I will try harder to post at least a couple times a month (and maybe moderate comments slightly better). I hope that you all have a good weekend.
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
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I saw an MSDN Forum post today, so I looked for a ListInstance Hidden property in SharePoint 2007 features. There is none, but interestingly enough there is one in 2010. I wondered what would happen if you did this:
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<ListInstance
FeatureId="00bfea71-de22-43b2-a848-c05709900100"
Title="Hidden List Test"
Description="Testing a hidden list."
TemplateType="100"
Hidden="TRUE"
OnQuickLaunch="FALSE"
Url="Lists/TestHidden" />
</Elements>
It hides the entire list from SharePoint Designer and the browser, however you can hit the list by typing in the url in internet explorer. Pretty cool stuff. Enjoy guys.
Friday, April 23, 2010
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Stuff has changed drastically for me in the past two to three years. I moved over 1000 miles from Saint Louis. I go outside and I get up in front of crowds with less issues. Now I'm changing jobs again. I'm not really sure what to say here. I was obviously unhappy and I needed to do something different. So quit two days ago and I guess it worked out that I end with B&R this Friday, then head to TEC and SPS Huntsville and a week from this Monday I start my new job at Gig Werks. I'm not sure what to expect or where I'm heading, but I think it's a step in the right direction. I won't really know what kind of impact this will have on my life for at least another 6 months to a year.
For some reason I can't sleep tonight and I think it's really a reflection of my last day. Tomorrow is an ending and a beginning at the same time. So it's both kind of sad and exciting. I don't know why I'm really excited to go to Disney Land for the second time ever in my life time. I get to ride the Teacups. For the longest time when I was a kid I wanted to go to Disney Land. I wanted to ride the teacups. In 2007, at the age of 25, I rode the teacups for my first ever visit to LA. That was the start of finally syncing up with my childhood goals. I wanted to live near a major city. I wanted to visit all the major cities in the world. I wanted to see everything and meet everyone. This job change will probably turn into something great I just don't know it yet. I'm walking again outside my comfort zone and stepping into uncharted territory. In 2-3 years I'll probably write another blog post how this week lead to something great. It just stinks when you have to leave behind something you know and love. I will miss all my current colleagues, but I'm sure I'll gain some new ones and keep in touch with the old. To 2010 being a great year for change and hopefully by the end of the year I can say I went to Europe. To reaching my goals and my dreams. Don't let anyone stop you from getting what you want in life (unless you are axe murderer please don't kill anyone that's just wrong). Have a good weekend everyone!
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
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There are weeks we go about our life thinking nothing is going to change nothing will happen. Then there are other weeks a billion things happen at once. Friday started off very weird for me. I flew into Atlanta and I met some cool people for another SharePoint event. I had some good conversations. Saturday then hit me and my virtual machine bombed in my presentation after the auto updater ran. I was writing code on the board and describing everything in notepad. I would say as presentations go it was the best and the worst presentation all wrapped into one. The next day I was in Baltimore and I hung out with my aunt which was relatively uneventful and great. Then Monday hit and half my presentations failed or succeeded and my screen freezes so I start describing the code. I was on top of my game until Monday night. On top of the world. I'm exhausted I get into Raleigh and one of the craziest stories of my life happens. So my boss has been renting cars through Priceline this week I got a different company than the other weeks. The company gives me a Ford Focus and I plug in the coordinates on my IPhone where I want go. I head out and then I get to the destination hotel (or I thought I did). I go inside it's the wrong hotel the other one is a few miles away. I walk outside hop into the car and it sounds like a gunshot. Nothing is starting...Am I doing something wrong? No I'm not the car is completely dead in the water. I call the rental car facility and they tell me to call roadside they are closing for the night. Roadside says they can't give me a new car but they can get me a jump then I have to take it up with the facility. They send me a tow truck to give me a jump the guy can't jump the car. He tells me this vehicle was towed about an hour ago. He shows me a copy of a slip from when he towed it. We also notice the rental car company left one of there price scanning guns in the vehicle. I call up roadside and now they are interested in getting me a car because I need to be onsite tomorrow. They get the manager of the facility on the phone he apologizes profusely and he says he'll be there in 10 minutes. About 30 minutes pass and him plus another dude show up with a Ford Escape leather interior. At this point I hand him the gun tell him someone left it in the vehicle and that I'm not so happy with them. I ask them to comp my rental they can't due to Priceline, however if I call him again this week he can get me a voucher. It's about 2 am and I'm ready to get to the hotel I don't make it in the next morning until 10 am. I would say this was a crazy week all forms of technology are trying to tell me something. What I have no idea, but we'll see the outcome soon. I feel so weird tons of change is about to happen. I don't know if it's good or bad. I think this week is some form of omen.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
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Here is a list of the events I will be speaking at in the next few months (Yes I am a sado-masochist):
- SharePoint Saturday Atlanta, Saturday, April 17th
- SharePoint .org Conference, April 18th-20th
- TEC, April 25th-28th
- SharePoint Saturday Huntsville, Saturday, May 1st
- SharePoint Saturday Philadelphia, Saturday, May 8th
- SharePoint Saturday DC, Saturday, May 15th
- SharePoint Saturday Ozarks, Saturday, June 13th
I am trying to organize a SharePint at TEC after the LA SPUG meeting with Joel on Tuesday, April 27th. Does anyone know if there is a good spot around the JW Marriott in downtown LA? Maybe we can get a bunch of local SharePointers to attend.
For those interested here is a link to my sky drive with my demos and slides: http://cid-8e2654c5f01e6069.skydrive.live.com/summary.aspx?sa=685834311. Thanks again for letting me attend the event.