Ben Walters InfoPath MVP

Using InfoPath 2010 Today

2009-10-14T05:44:59Z

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....(read more)

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne! 14th November

2009-09-22T11:45:38Z

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...(read more)

InfoPath 2010 Picture Button Control

2009-08-13T21:55:55Z

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...(read more)

As the dust settles from SharePoint Saturday Sydney

2009-08-09T10:29:53Z

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...(read more)

A lap around InfoPath 2010 Part 1

2009-07-17T00:03:05Z

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 ...(read more)

SharePoint Saturday Sydney Registrations now open

2009-06-18T01:11:16Z

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....(read more)

ANNOUNCING SharePoint Saturday Sydney!

2009-06-08T02:01:00Z

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...(read more)

Get SharePoint host headers working locally in Windows 2008 R2

2009-06-04T06:09:52Z

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...(read more)

Get your wireless working in Win 2008 R2

2009-05-28T11:13:19Z

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...(read more)

Where did my files go?

2009-05-28T09:32:38Z

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...(read more)

Games missing from XBLA that I wish were there

2009-05-19T15:03:31Z

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...(read more)

SharePoint Timer Service issues when upgrading to SP2

2009-05-19T01:35:22Z

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...(read more)

Create Form based on an existing Schema

2009-04-21T12:39:31Z

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....(read more)

Accessing Active Directory from an InfoPath Form

2009-04-21T06:44:43Z

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...(read more)

How to calculate the number of days between 2 dates in InfoPath

2009-04-21T05:13:27Z

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...(read more)

Office SP2 to release next week

2009-04-15T06:11:01Z

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...(read more)

SharePoint 503 Service Unavailable Error

2009-03-24T01:31:11Z

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...(read more)

SharePoint Designer at no extra cost

2009-03-18T21:14:02Z

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...(read more)

IE8 Gets Release Candidate

2009-01-27T00:10:22Z

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....(read more)

New PerformancePoint user group on the horizon

2009-01-22T21:30:20Z

Yesterday I received an email from an old colleague of mine Adrian Downes, letting me know that there is a new User group starting up in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide dedicated to all things PerformancePoint, while a launch date for the Australian PerformancePoint Special Interest Group (APSIG) is still on the way you can check out more details on the group and who’s involved here...(read more)