Ben Walters InfoPath MVP

Well it’s been a while since I posted on this blog and for good reason. In December I began a new role with Microsoft Australia. One of the side effects of taking up this role was that I resign my MVP status.

So this will be my final post to my MSMVPS blog, it was great to be a part of the MVP Program the years that I was and I was proud to call myself and MVP. I hope that I will still have the  pleasure of working with the MVP community moving forward.

Now for the good news I have a new blog, if you click here you will find my new Microsoft hosted blog. If you wish to contact me please do so via this new blog as I will not be monitoring the traffic from my old blog from now on.

Well this has taken a lot longer than I would have liked to get this recording up on the web.

Here it is, my session that I presented at the MOSSIG September meeting enjoy. Unfortunately the original recording I made on the night didn’t come out as well I would have liked so I had to re-record the session. I’ve done my best to address any questions that were asked on the night however if I’ve missed some please feel free to shoot them through on the comments and I’ll respond asap.

It’s now officially official, SharePoint Saturday Melbourne is locked in and scheduled for November 14th the site is now live and we are accepting Speaker Submissions so head on over to http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/melbourne and start getting those presentation idea’s down, we will stop accepting session submissions on Oct 21st so make sure you get your ideas in, don’t forget to when making submissions this will be occurring after the SharePoint Conference in Vegas so we should have a lot more freedom to talk about some of the new features of 2010. We’ll also have event registration open in the coming days so watch this space.

“Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event.  SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.  SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!”

Also be sure to follow http://www.twitter.com/spsmelbourne for all the latest info around the event. We are hoping we can top Sydney's attendance this time around and make this the biggest SPS event in Australia to date.

Wow I can’t believe its been nearly a month since my last InfoPath 2010 video, it’s amazing how time sneaks past you when your not looking. In this video I take a look at one of the new controls in InfoPath 2010 the Picture button control. This new control adds a whole heap of new opportunities when designing forms that you want to be more engaging for your form user.

Also I had a couple of comments on my last video that it was too small, I should mention that all videos on my blog are Silverlight so if you double click the video it’ll maximise to full screen.

The very first international SharePoint Saturday is now complete and so far all feedback has been very positive. First I’d like to say a big thankyou to all the speakers that made the effort to put their sessions together, and an even bigger thankyou to those speakers who trekked both from interstate and also internationally. All sessions were very well received as is evident by the feedback we heard at the pub afterwards;

“I was expecting user-group level presentations, but these were as good as anything I’d see at Tech Ed.”

–SharePoint Saturday Sydney Attendee

Secondly I’d like to shout out big props to Brian Farnhill who was instrumental in making the day as successful as it was.

While I have a couple of days off now with the family to rest and relax, I have taken some time to have a think about lessons learned and things to change for the next SharePoint Saturday which both Brian and I are hoping will be as big if not better than our first endeavour, the top 2 that spring to mind  are 1. Make sure we have coffee for attendees, decaffeinated IT people can be a very agitated bunch 2. Don’t be afraid to think bigger, while we were organising this event I found myself thinking we would have trouble to get sponsorship, or attendees or speakers but it turns out if the event is there the support will follow close behind.

Now if you happen to be in Adelaide this coming weekend 15th August then be sure to check out www.sharepointsaturday.org for details on the SPS event happening over there and if not then check out some of these pics from SharePoint Saturday Sydney

With the release of the Office 2010 Client Applications earlier this week I thought it would be good to put together a couple of videos highlighting some of the new features of InfoPath 2010 Client interface, the following video takes you through some of the Interface changes in InfoPath 2010 

Registrations for SharePoint Saturday Sydney are now open, so if you are planning to attend I recommend you head over now and follow the “Click to Attend” link

Also don’t forget if you have any session ideas you can also forward them through using the form on the site.

It’s official SharePoint Saturday will be happening on the 8th of August at the Microsoft office in North Ryde.

For those of you who don’t know SharePoint Saturday is the tech community craze that’s been sweeping the U.S. (and more recently the world) Originally stared by Michael Lotter the SharePoint Saturday event is based around having a single day of sessions all about SharePoint that is totally free.

“Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event.  SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.  SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint! “ –SharePoint Saturday.org

So what do we need from you? at present Brian Farnhill and I are putting out the call for content, if your interested in presenting head on over to the SharePoint Saturday Sydney web site and fill out the speaker submission form then simply email it back to us. The call for content closes on the 10th of July so if you’re planning to be in Sydney at this time and have an awesome presentation it would be great to hear from you.

Also make sure you’re following SharePoint Saturday on twitter for all the up to date information on the event.

So as we all know by now I recently rebuilt my machine with Windows 2008 R2. My main reason for doing this is so I could have a fully functional SharePoint development environment that runs locally without the need for virtual machines. Plus I now have the option of using Hyper-V when I do have the need for a virtual environment.

I did however run into an issue when I attempted to setup my local development SharePoint site. Personally I prefer to have my local dev site under a host header, this time I decided to use spdev.local as my site host header. As per usual I also updated my hosts file under c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc to point to the local IP (127.0.0.1) for that host header.

However when I attempted to access my shiny new dev environment IE would prompt me for my credentials a number of times then simply display a blank page.

After doing some  “Binging” I tracked down the following TechNet article that informed me of a security feature related all the way back to IE 5.1. The long and short of it is that the security update in question prevents IE from navigating to a host header site on a loopback adapter.

This setting is configured in the registry on windows, and there are actually 2 registry settings that can be used to resolve this issue.

The first disables windows making the loopback check all together, the second allows you create a list of “trusted” host headers

Now while I could duplicate the instructions to this workaround best to checkout the TechNet article directly

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

This evening I began rebuilding my laptop with Windows 2008 R2, while the install went swimmingly I did run into an issue once my machine was up and running, I couldn’t connect to my wireless network. The now the obvious issue would be that the drivers for my wireless adapter were missing but further investigation cleared that up. My adapter was there but no wireless networks were detected.

So off to the fabled internet I went in search of answers. Turns out the Wireless Auto Configuration service is not installed on the server products by default. Open up the server feature manager and low and behold all the way at the bottom is the option to install the Wireless Auto Configuration Manager. Five minutes  later I was connected again.

Now to finish my rebuild before tomorrow morning :os

I’ve been running windows 7 for a while now on both my home and work PC’s and all in all I’ve been pretty impressed. However, today I found one feature/bug that I can see will cause no end of pain.

Today I decided to download the R2 of Windows 2008, so after firing up the Microsoft Transfer Manager selecting the C drive as my download location and then waiting for the next couple of hours my transfer was complete.

The problem, the file I had supposedly stored on my C Drive was no where to be seen. I did some checking in the FTM to be sure the transfer hadn’t failed, but still no file to be found.

So after some much heated clicking around I noticed the following button

Turns out that the file I told FTM to stored in c:\ was placed in “c:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore”

Not very intuitive place to put things Microsoft

Tonight a friend and I headed out to see the new Star Trek film at Hoyts in Melbourne. While we waited for the film to start we got to talking/reminiscing about some of the games we spent our youth playing. Some where between our recount of Grim Fandango and X-Wing Alliance we came to the conclusion that there is a lot of IP out there in the games industry that is ripe to be ported to Xbox Live Arcade.

For example Lucas Arts has around 7 titles that I can think of off the top of my head that were great hits back in the 90’s that would be accepted with wide open loving arms if released to XBLA. As mentioned above Grim Fandango and X-Wing Alliance are a great start. But why stop there when Lucas Arts has some great content in games like Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Rebel Assault and of course the original space flight sim that I’m sure we all sunk more than a few hours into X-Wing vs Tie Fighter 

Of course Lucas Arts isn’t the only studio out there that I can see is resting on it’s laurels when it comes to classy game IP from yester year. Take Activision or as they were known in the day Sierra, they had a great series of games in the Space Quest, Kings Quest and Gabriel Knight franchises, while these were probably not amazing graphically they had great storylines and humour that gave them a special charm,

Now I can understand people like Activision and Lucas Arts are probably more focused on your big budget games, but it surprises me that Microsoft hasn’t made an attempt to re-release some of it’s older titles and breath some new life into them. Two I can think of that got a lot of my attention gaming wise was Starlancer and Freelancer both games that have some great co-op and multiplayer prospects, and in theory would not be difficult to move across to the Xbox Architecture.

What I’ve listed above is by no means an exhaustive, and I’m sure there are more you could probably think of but the above are a few that I enjoyed completing more than once.

So this is my official call out to each of these developers/publishers time to look at some of those games that made you great and see if you can’t help us gamers in our mid-20’s relive our youth :o)

Last week I had my first official deployment of SharePoint SP2 in the field. While most of the install succeeded with out any issues I did run into a problem while I was attempting to run the configuration wizard. The error I received indicated that the Timer service failed to start. My first idea was to start the Timer service manually and then re run the configuration wizard.

This approach soon came to a halt, when I started the timer service the service began attempting to run the scheduled update jobs in the background. This caused issues as the configuration wizard would not start as it believed there was an update already in progress.

So now I was stuck with a server that was apparently updating but I had no idea if this was actually happening or not. So after doing some hunting I found I could force the upgrade using STSADM. However I still had the issue that SharePoint thought an upgrade was already in progress.

After a little more hunting I found the following command to reset the Upgrade running status;

STSADM –o setproperty –pn command-line-upgrade-running –pv no

then I ran this command to execute the upgrade using the command line

PSCONFIG –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b –wait –force

10-15 minutes later I was up and running.

Ok so this is the last of my video posts for today. This video shows how you can design a new InfoPath form based of an existing schema file.

The embedded video below highlights how to load user details from Active Directory into your InfoPath form.

The solution highlighted uses the LDAP Webservice found on codeplex to make the LDAP connection. The best thing about this approach is that the search method included in the service pretty much takes care of returning around 90% of the data you might need to get back from your AD.

Once again big shout out to the guys at Camtasia for making this so easy to record

Recently while helping some people via the Newsgroups I’ve found it easier to build a video of how to solve a problem rather than type pages and pages of instructions.

In addition to giving a big call out to Camtasia studio as an editing platform and the Silverlight Hosting from live I thought it would be useful to also post my videos here.

This solution specifically deals with how to calculate the number of days between 2 selected dates.

How to Calculate the Number of Days between to dates in InfoPath

Officially the second service pack for the Office suite will release next week, and while I’m sure there are a whole swag of features, additions and security improvements that will not be immediately visible to the naked eye. There are a couple of things that peaked my interest when reading through the summary of updates on the “Microsoft Update Product Team Blog”

The first piece of information that caught my eye was the addition of a new STSADM command for assessing how ready your SharePoint server is for upgrade to O14, and also provides best practice feedback for your current environment.

The second little nugget that I noticed is the mention of “Substantial improvements to Forms-based authentication.” while no more detail is provided for this I can only hope that this means the setup and configuration of FBA has been improved and that its now more compatible with web based InfoPath forms.

The third point that interests me is the Form Server improvement around reducing the load times around large web based forms, I’m not sure on the exact improvements that have been made here but I'll be very interested in to try this out.

The final improvement that I made note has been a personal bug bear for a while and has finally been addressed. That being when a web based form is rendered that contains a required field the “Cannot be blank” message would render above the field, preventing the user from clicking on the field in question. With this Form Server issue addressed I can start using the “Cannot be blank” option in my InfoPath forms again WooT!

For full details on the other updates included be sure to check the link above.

For the last couple of days I’ve been doing some work on a SharePoint event handler which was progressing at a good rate until I started getting a “503 Service unavailable” error after deploying an update.

After some searching it turned out that when WSP builder deployed the update for my Event Handler the App Pools for the SharePoint site failed to start. After restarting these from IIS manager all was good. Not sure exactly why the App Pools decided they didn’t want to come back up as I couldn’t spot any issues in the event logs on the server, but all is well now.

Wow where does the time go I just had a look and my last post was on the 27 of Jan lot has happened since then and lots to tell but this is a quick post before I head back out in to the fray.

I got news the other day that SharePoint Designer that Application we all know and love (and hate at times) will officially be a free download from 1-Apr-2009.

Also any existing licensed SPD users will be upgraded to expression web.

Ok that’s it for now time to get going

Got the notification this morning that IE8 has officially gone RC1, if you’re running the Partner preview this will not automatically update so you’ll need to head on over to the Internet Explorer Beta Website to download the latest copy.