Presenting @ TechDays 2009 - Enhancing the SharePoint Developer Experience

It's kind of becoming a tradition - I'm presenting a session about SharePoint at this year's TechDays on th 11th of march at 14:30 PM.

The session will focus on best practices for SharePoint development based on lessons learnt. You will learn how to approach SharePoint development to build solutions in an effective way. This is not only about knowing the right tools and techniques to speed up the SharePoint development process but also about how to avoid mistakes and making the correct design decisions.

I'm still tweaking my presentation so if you think there is some wicked tool or technique out which should not be missing in the SharePoint developer toolset - leave a comment.

Hope to see you at TechDays 2009...

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,development,microsoft,sharepoint+2007,techdays+2009,techdays,moss,wss

Congrats to winner of the free TechDays 2009 ticket

As you might have read - BIWUG - thanks to Microsoft has given away a free ticket for TechDays 2009. Congrats to Miro for guessing the correct number of replies ...

Hope to see you guys at the BIWUG booth at TechDays 2009.

Tags van Technorati: techdays+2009,microsoft,biwug

SharePoint logs - Tracing Service lost trace events

When troubleshooting problems with SharePoint one of the first places to look is the SharePoint ULS logs (also see Troubleshooting errors for InfoPath forms deployed on SharePoint). Last week I noticed something weird in the ULS logs - the only thing which seemed to be logged was "Tracing service lost trace events" log entries. The first thing to try to solve this is restarting the Windows SharePoint Service Tracing service. It definitely did the trick for me ....

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,development,troubleshooting,microsoft,sharepoint+2007

Free TechDays 2009 ticket

BIWUG is giving away a free ticket for the TechDays 2009. This year it is organized on march 11th and 12th in Metropolis Antwerp. For more details check out biwug.be .

Technorati Tags: biwug,community,techdays,microsoft,sharepoint

Maturity of the IT industry

A fellow SharePoint geek pointed me to this transcript of the Inquiry into Identity Cards - the next part is sadly enough quite recognizable...

Q373 Mr Cameron:

The question I would like to ask all of you, to which a yes or no answer is sufficient, is: do you see the public procurement difficulties as insuperable?

Professor Thomas:

Yes, I do. I would like to tell you something that you will not believe but which I think it is important that you hear, and that is that almost every IT supplier in the world today is incompetent. I have worked in the IT industry almost all my working life for large and small organisations, and I know what I speak. For example, the typical rate of delivered faults after full user acceptance testing from the maker suppliers in the industry over many years has been steady at around 20 faults per thousand lines of code. We know how to deliver software with a fault rate that is down around 0.1 faults per thousand lines of code and the industry does not adopt these techniques. We are as an industry very much in the early stages. The industry is only 50 years old. If you compare that with civil engineering, which is several thousand years old, we are tackling some of the most complex engineering designs and building some of the most complex engineering systems that the world has ever seen, essentially using craft technology. If you looked at the methods that are employed in most companies you would come to the conclusion that actually IT system development is a fashion business, not an engineering business, because they jump from one methodology to another year after year so long as it has a whizzy name, "Agile this" or "Intensive that". The underlying engineering disciplines that every mature engineering discipline has learnt it needs to use in order to be able to show that the system it is building has the required properties have not yet been employed in software and systems engineering, and that is at the heart of why these things do not work.

What's your opinion? Leave a comment...

Tags van Technorati: IT+industry,transcript

Top SharePoint Blogs - Joel's list

Check it out  -  Back by popular demand ... the top SharePoint blogs

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,microsoft,blogs,sharepoint+2007

Creating custom SharePoint alert handlers

If you need to create your own custom alert e-mails in SharePoint - definitely take a look at this one - Custom Alert Handlers: part 1 of 2 (Unfortunately part 2 was never written but part 1 will get you started just fine)

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,sharepoint+2007,microsoft,alerts,development

Reminder - Pet project idea

This has been on my radar for quite a while - Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Sample : Using Excel 2003 to Manage Project Sites with Windows SharePoint Services 2003 . If I find the time I would like to upgrade this concept to Excel 2007 and WSS 3.0 ... or maybe some of you have already tried this? Leave a comment if you did...

Update : Here's the MSDN article which accompanies the source code.

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,excel,pet+project,microsoft,vsto,visual+studio,wssv3,wss,sharepoint+2007