Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'Community'

SuperChristmas 2009

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

SuperMondays, in partnership with Thursday Fizz, Adesign Association, Refresh Teeside and VBUG are proud to announce:

SuperChristmas is the Christmas party that brings our organisations together to round off an excellent year and to set the scene for 2010. The party will start at 7:00pm on Thursday 17th December 2009 at Hoults Yard.

Tickets are on sale for £7.50. You can buy them here...

The ticket price includes a light dinner, ceilidh dancing, and as much free beer/wine/soft drinks as the budget will allow…all served in a farm house theme decked out with bales of hay!

Everybody is welcome, so please do invite your friends … there will be no presentations on the night so leave your laptops, notebooks and netbooks at home!

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Find myITforum on LinkedIn

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

myITforum.com, Inc. Company Profile | LinkedIn

Get ready for MMS by grabbing the #MMS2010 Twitter hash tag

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

http://tinyurl.com/yjube67

Grab Henry Wilson's MMS 2010 Cost Justification Document

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

http://myitforum.com/cs2/files/folders/mms/entry142218.aspx

A Tripp to Melbourne?

robfarley — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve been to Melbourne (although I did pass through the airport there on my way back from Wagga). I don’t know when I’ll be there next, but I have felt tempted to try to get there this week.

Partly it’s because my mum is about to turn sixty, but also because my friends Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal are in Australia this week, and speaking at the Melbourne SQL Server User Group tomorrow night.

I won’t be there, but if you’re going to be in Melbourne, then make sure you register and get yourself there. It’s bound to be quite packed, as these guys are the world experts in their areas – so be early and tell them hi from me!

Are you attending MMS 2010? Participate in the System Center community online poll…

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

http://www.myitforum.com/absolutepm/polls/mms2010poll.asp

System Center Operations Manager : We need your vote!

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Hello OM Community,

Most of you know we recently launched an easy to reach feedback portal for you all to file bugs and/or suggestions for the next version of Operations Manager - located here: https://connect.microsoft.com/OpsMgr/Feedback - All you need to do is be registered on Connect.
What is cool is that we are now able to utilized the "Vote" feedback mechanism to help prioritize our work based on feedback from YOU. For example, today I can see 4 items that have had at least 3 votes. The first (scheduling maintenance mode) which we plan to do for v.next; the second being adding the OE tool in the product, etc., etc.

We would love to have you all vote on the existing feedback here so we can shape the product - based on what you want rather than what we think you need :)

System Center Operations Manager : We need your vote!

A busy month – a new book, a new car, a new phone

robfarley — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

I don’t know why Septembers are always busy. This one feels like it’s been interesting, and I’m not sure life will be the same again.

But first, some of the biggest news – the book that I wrote a couple of chapters for is now available for purchase!

A challenge was put out a while back for SQL MVPs to write a book for charity. Paul Nielsen spearheaded it, and I’m pleased to say that there was a massive response. I wrote two chapters, and this week we have had the notice that the book can now be purchased from Manning Press. If you go to http://www.SQLServerMVPDeepDives.com you will be able to buy the Early Access Edition, which will get you updated electronic copies as the chapters become available (final layouts, images, etc still appearing). All the royalties for this book go to charity rather than the authors, so buy up! I promise to sign any copy put in front of me, but if you go to the PASS conference in November, you can probably get at least 40 or so of the other authors to sign it instead.

I’m planning to get a signed copy brought back from the US, and will auction it off to members of the Adelaide SQL Server User Group, giving the money to charity too.

It feels good to have the book finished!

September has also busy for a number of reasons. The company is growing nicely, celebrating a year this week, and keeping my time somewhat occupied. We achieved Gold Partner status with Microsoft at the end of August, and are ticking along well. On a more negative note, the winter has taken its toll with flu in the family, which is lousy – but we also bought a new car (finally got the people mover we’ve been promising ourselves). I replaced my old phone with an iPhone (part of me thinks that I’ll go back to Windows Mobile next time), and bought my wife one too (plus a DS for her birthday). I feel like we’re more gadgety than ever!

Not to mention TechEd Australia, which was a fun time. Grant Paisley surfing at Dreamworld was a sight to behold, and I hope there are photos somewhere! I gave a talk on SQL Azure, which gave me a number of headaches leading up to the conference, finding new things I wanted to mention on a daily basis! I also gave a talk on the danger of scalar functions in SQL Server, which I will be repeating in just over a week at Wagga, a couple of days after presenting at the Albury/Wodonga .Net User Group. An email arrived about half an hour after my scalar functions talk, saying that someone in the audience had just applied the principles I showed and made some vital queries run thirty times faster! Terrific news I think.

Bringing another laptop (an HP Mini) home from TechEd has also added to the number of gadgets in the house…

Tomorrow I hope to be able to write that I have been awarded MVP status for another year, which will be a tremendous honour. I keep wondering how much longer I’ll be able to remain in the company of such a fantastically skilled and helpful crowd. Every time I receive the award I’m both humbled and proud, and feel amazingly blessed.

myITforum.com Welcomes New Bronze Sponsor: ManageEngine

Anonymous — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Desktop Central is a web-based windows desktop management software that helps in managing 1000s of desktops from a central location. It automates the complete desktop management life cycle ranging from a simple configuration to complex software deployment. With its network-neutral architecture, the administrator can easily manage any windows networks like Active Directory, Workgroup, or other directory services.

Many quick updates and first XSLT sample for SharePoint – Event Management System

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Okay. Life has been rolling so very fast lately. Here are a few quick updates to as quickly as possible keep everyone updated:

Jan 24, 2009 – Second annual - HoustonTechFest – Presented “Building Powerful WebParts with SharePoint 2007” and “WCF for the REST of us”! Awesome audience participation!

Feb 7, 2009 – Presented at the first annual SharePoint Saturday KC - “Building Powerful WebParts with SharePoint 2007”. Becky Isserman and team did an awesome job! Attended some awesome presentations. Had some great BBQ with Daniel Larson!

March 1-5, 2009 – MVP Summit 09! Totally awesome. Got to see the Gu (Scott Guthrie) and hang out with a bunch of the SharePoint MVPs!

March 28, 2009 – Second annual School of Dev / first time to join with SharePoint Saturday! – about 87 people braved the weather reports to attend. It was just rain! Then 9am to 3pm had about 6+ inches of snow drop and stop. Within 24 hours 99.9% was all melted. Presented “Building Powerful WebParts with SharePoint 2007” and “Knowledge (Social) Networking for the Enterprise”

April 16, 2009 – White paper I wrote for Quest.com was republished on to the home page as a Popular Article on SSWUG.org – SQL Server and SharePoint – The More You Know, The Better Off You Are (if you are a paid member you can read it here.)

April 18, 2009 – St Louis MOSS Camp! Had a great time presenting – “Building Powerful WebParts with SharePoint 2007“ and attending the other sessions. Becky Isserman and Scott Spradlin talked me into playing Rock band with spoons for drum sticks, didn’t do too bad. LOL

April 25, 2009 – NWACodeCamp – awesome job! Especially for their first event! “Presented Building Powerful WebParts with SharePoint 2007”.

May 28, 2009 – Baby # 5 – Kadison Zoey-Mae Walker born, thanks to my beautiful wife!

June 1, 2009 – Two year term as Vice President of the INETA NORAM Speakers Bureau ended.

June 22, 2009 – 1st day at Microsoft as a ADC (Application Developer Consultant) – in Dallas at Las Colinas office for New Employee Orientation, after hours - attended DFW SharePoint group that night and saw Ted Pattison!

June 23, 2009 – Day 2 at Microsoft, after hours – attended Dallas ASP .NET User Group where Dr. Tobias Komischke, Director of User Experience @ Infragistics presented.

June 29, 2009 – Turned over Tulsa Developers .NET user group to the very capable Vice-President Sean Whitesell and the other groups to their respective leaders as well.

July 2, 2009 – My beautiful bride and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary

July 27-31, 2009 – TechReady 9 in Seattle. I thought the MVP Summit was huge. Wow. Amazing time, learned a lot, and met a lot of new people. Plus, folks I haven’t seen in awhile – Zewei Song, Michael Wiley, Steve Walker.. and lots of new friends!

Okay.. whew. There’s a whole lot more in there as well, between the monthly TulsaDevelopers.NET, Tulsa SQL Server Group, Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group and Tulsa Java Developers Group that I was involved with every month until recently due to my commute and some new NWASQL Server User Group meetings at lunch. But, my “quick” update has turned into a lot more.

Now… finally on to the code!

For those of you that haven’t seen my “Building Powerful WebParts for SharePoint 2007” session, I totally love writing code and utilizing SharePoint as an application development platform. But, it took several years and practically hundreds of contacts to find a hosting company able and generous enough to donate/sponsor a virtual server for the TulsaTechFest.com web site and for the Tulsa User Groups I am involved with.

Due to timing, I had to build out the site last year so quickly that I took the opportunity to explore the functionality of SharePoint Designer 2007 for the first time.

I utilized it to enable friendly url’s in SharePoint (can anyone say /Pages)? yuck!

I copied the 2008 content as a Site Template to kick start the 2009 site. But that left a lot of extra data, so I just recently added an “Active” Yes/No checkbox to the Speakers List. That’s one thing I’ve learned over the last 4 years of running large events, the agenda is bound to change up to the last minute.

Starting with Visual Studio 2008, it offered the excellent ability to debug XSLT! I took advantage of that, to deliver a no-code solution for the Event Management, by parsing the SharePoint List RSS feed utilizing XSLT. The default RSS feed is kind of gnarly to work with, but I’ve managed to work around it. (See my WSS_LIST_RSS_FIELDS.xsl distributed as part of my PowerQueryWebPart CodePlex project for a great reusable parser.)

Ironically, when I first added the Active filter to the xsl:for-each statement the xsl:sort quit sorting by the SortOrder number column. Very strange. Open in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, same results. Sleep on it. Deploy today, so I could share with the world and get some others input and boom – it works!

For some reason Visual Studio 2008 isn’t showing the Debug XSLT option every so often. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is showing it with no issues. Reopened it and reran the Debug XSLT option and boom – working every time now. Very strange. I’ll chalk both issues up to Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 testing. All working great now.

So, simply create a Speakers list with the following columns: Title (FirstName LastName), Bio, Link, Company, Tagline, SortOrder (Number), Active (Yes/No) and you’re ready to role!

I have a SiteImages Picture Library with a sub folder called Speakers where the images are stored: Title(spaces replaced with __).jpg.

The following XSLT shows a 3 column right rail for speakers filtered by Active flag, sorted by SortOrder, Title

<xsl:transform version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
exclude-result-prefixes="xsl xs" xmlns:ddwrt2="urn:frontpage:internal">
<xsl:output method="html"/>

    <xsl:template match="rss/channel" xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime">
        <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
            <tr>
                <td>
                    <xsl:for-each select="item[substring-before(substring-after(description, 'Active:</b>'), '</div>')=' Yes']">
                        <xsl:sort select="substring-before(substring-after(description, 'SortOrder:</b>'), '</div>')" data-type="number" order="ascending"/>
                        <xsl:sort select="title" />

<a>
                                <xsl:attribute name="href">
                                    
                                    <xsl:value-of select="concat(concat('/Tulsa/2009/Speakers/', translate(title, ' ,.','')), '/')"/>
                                </xsl:attribute>
                                <img border="1" style="border-color: black;" hspace="3" vspace="3" width="46" height="60">
                                    <xsl:attribute name="src">
                                        <xsl:text>/Tulsa/2009/SiteImages/Speakers/</xsl:text>
                                        <xsl:value-of select ="translate(title,' ,.','_')"/>
                                        <xsl:text>.jpg</xsl:text>
                                    </xsl:attribute >
                                    <xsl:attribute name="alt">
                                        <xsl:value-of select="title"/>
                                        <xsl:variable name="tagline">
                                            <xsl:call-template name="getWSSDescriptionField">
                                                <xsl:with-param name="description" select="description"/>
                                                <xsl:with-param name="fieldName" select="'Tagline'"/>
                                            </xsl:call-template>
                                        </xsl:variable>
                                        <xsl:if test="$tagline!=''">
                                            <xsl:text>, </xsl:text>
                                            <xsl:value-of select="$tagline"/>
                                        </xsl:if>
                                        <xsl:variable name="company">
                                            <xsl:call-template name="getWSSDescriptionField">
                                                <xsl:with-param name="description" select="description"/>
                                                <xsl:with-param name="fieldName" select="'Company'"/>
                                            </xsl:call-template>
                                        </xsl:variable>
                                        <xsl:if test="$company!=''">
                                            <xsl:text>, </xsl:text>
                                            <xsl:value-of select="$company"/>
                                        </xsl:if>
                                    </xsl:attribute>
                                </img>
                            </a>
                            <xsl:if test="position() mod 3 = 0">
                                <br/>
                            </xsl:if>

                    </xsl:for-each>
                </td>
            </tr>
        </table>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template name="string-replace-all">
        <xsl:param name="text"/>
        <xsl:param name="replace"/>
        <xsl:param name="with"/>
        <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="contains($text, $replace)">
                <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($text, $replace)"/>
                <xsl:value-of select="$with"/>
                <xsl:call-template name="string-replace-all">
                    <xsl:with-param name="text" select="substring-after($text, $replace)"/>
                    <xsl:with-param name="replace" select="$replace"/>
                    <xsl:with-param name="with" select="$with"/>
                </xsl:call-template>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:otherwise>
                <xsl:value-of select="$text"/>
            </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template name="getWSSDescriptionField">
        <xsl:param name="description"/>
        <xsl:param name="fieldName"/>

        <xsl:variable name="before" select="concat($fieldName,':</b> ')" />
        <xsl:variable name="after" select ="'</div>'" />
        <xsl:variable name="htmlFieldStart" select="'<div class=ExternalClass'" />

        <xsl:variable name = "leftRemoved" >
            <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="substring-after($description,$before)"/>
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:variable name = "results">
            <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="substring-before($leftRemoved,$after)" />
        </xsl:variable>

<xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="starts-with($results, $htmlFieldStart)">
                <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="substring-after($results,'>')" />
            </xsl:when >
            <xsl:otherwise>
                <xsl:choose>
                    <xsl:when test="contains($results, '&amp')">
                        <xsl:call-template name="string-replace-all">
                            <xsl:with-param name="text" select="$results"/>
                            <xsl:with-param name="replace" select="'&amp;'"/>
                            <xsl:with-param name="with" select="'&'"/>
                        </xsl:call-template>
                    </xsl:when>
                    <xsl:otherwise>
                        <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="$results"/>
                    </xsl:otherwise>
                </xsl:choose>
            </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:transform>

I’ll continue explaining more of the other sections of the site, plans for the future and more in upcoming posts!

I definitely don’t claim to be an XSLT expert. I’ve just managed to keep making it do what I need as I need to over the years. It is an excellent way to build functionality into SharePoint with no-code out of the box web parts.

Let me know if you have any questions and/or suggestions for improvements!

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