Random writings, thoughts, tools, and ideas....

As I sit on the couch of the place I have called home for the last 5 or so days with my bags packed, Rudi trying to cheat at chess and the children of the house going to bed, it is insane to think that it was almost 2 weeks ago I was in South Africa trying to find enough clothes to bring and now it is over

The first rule of being a MVP is don’t talk about fight club NDA material and unfortunately a lot of amazing (and even some boring) news we learnt this week was NDA.

So what can I share with you?

• Microsoft is listening – I have mentioned this before but the sheer volume of input sources to Microsoft is staggering. Some of those sources don’t always have good things to say, but Microsoft does factor that in and it is important. If you want Microsoft to change, tell them – just don’t insult them when you do.
  
• Microsoft is a business – It is there to make a profit. So when it pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into research, you can expect it wants a ROI. Being this is a technology blog, what does that mean? WATCH MICROSOFT RESEARCH.
• MVP’s are smart – I have said before that being a MVP is an award for community work but it is not until you sit in a room with some of them you realise how smart they are, and how well they can shoot:

To everyone from Microsoft who made this week special and for trusting us with information on project double rainbow unicorn*, thank you for all of it – it has been AMAZING! 

* If you have no sense of humour, project double rainbow unicorn is a joke – no such project exists or at least none I know of.

What I learnt at MVP Summit today?

It’s COLD, really, really cold. It’s raining and windy, which makes it colder.

This explains a lot about Microsoft & Seattle:

• Lot’s of micro breweries – cause beer helps with the cold
• Lot’s of coding – cause it’s too cold to go outside
• Lot’s of awesome friends – cause nothing rocks like chatting to a friend at a fire in Starbucks
  

Day 2 of Summit has been a blast as Rudi Grobler (friend of The show) and I, spent the day seeing a different side of Seattle and surrounding as we were shepherded about by Rein Hillman, a local to these parts. Having a local with a car makes a huge difference – you eat and see things that no tour guide will ever tell you. Like:

• The best Tereyaki: Yummy Tereyaki
• The biggest geek shop: Fry’s
  
• Some awesome board game shop
  
• A few of the local bars – most were closed though, so no planning on our side.

All in all, a lot of fun and food  

In the evening we headed down to Kent and the ShoWare Center to watch ICE HOCKEY! Which is an insane sport where I do not understand a thing that happened except goals – rest was just too fast and complex for my brain. I wish I had half the skills and reflexes those guys have.

Time to hit the pillow, tomorrow is all starts and I need my energy!

It is amazing how much can change in 3 minutes, this was the learning from the 1st day of MVP Summit 2011. I arrived in Seattle with Rudi Grobler for MVP summit after 23 hours of travelling which is frankly just ridiculous.

During that time I did a lot of thinking and reading (thank god for my Kindle) but shortly after arriving in a VERY cold Seattle I had my first 3 minute mind change. I walked out the lovely SEATAC airport and saw SNOW! I get like a kid with snow, but within 3 minutes the cold was just too much and the appeal of the snow wore off

One of things we did was head to the awesome Microsoft Store – this place is just fantastic. They have so much in there but so little feels like a store. It really feels like a place to go an experiment and play with Microsoft tech: There is Kinect stations, Microsoft Surfaces, tablets & laptops running Windows 7 and a variety of Windows Phone 7 devices.

The 3 minute lesson here if from the store people – having super friendly and knowledgeable really means that it is so much better and easier to buy there. I hope that this fantastic learning in the consumer space is the start of something more at Microsoft.

Finally we hit a place called The Parlor for some beer & pool and run into a Microsoft Team (WinSE – suspect is second edition, since they had a service pack 1 disk "SE" = Sustained Engineering), just guessing but I think it was their ship party.

After some pool, where Rudi kicked my ass until another friend Rein Hillman arrived (which is when I fought back fantastically) we left and I had my final 3 minute lesson: Walking with your hands in your pockets, cause it is cold, means you need to using something else to stop your fall and your face doesn’t work well.

Update: Thanks to Chris Johnson to tell me what SE meant.

March 19, 2012: This tool has had a major make over since the original release!

I’m sure, as a SharePoint power user, you’ve had the fun of your boss walking up to you and asking why the public holidays aren’t in your SharePoint calendar? (guess what happened to me last week)

You would think this would be easy, in fact Outlook supports adding holidays to calendars easily. So why isn’t SharePoint easy like that too?

I’ve had this asked a few times and never had a good answer to do it, so I decided that a simple tool needed to be built to solve this once and for all – Let me introduce SharePoint Holiday Loader (SHL).

SHL takes a standard holiday file (.hol) and allows you to publish that to a SharePoint list!

This tool is very easy to use (just need the file, the server and the calendar name) and it is free and open source. You can get the download the tool, source code, leave comments (or complaints) at: https://bitbucket.org/rmaclean/sharepoint-holiday-loader/

My old Logitech V450 mouse had an odd issue, if Windows was put to sleep and pulled the dongle out, Windows woke up. This never bothered me much since I got into a habit of doing that before I put Windows to bed.

However with my new Performance MX Mouse (aka the mouse Batman would use) it does something similar which a change of habit just can’t fix.

The new mouse has a TINY dongle which is designed to be left in all the time and I do that, however any mouse movement or button pressing will turn a sleeping Windows on. So if when I forget to turn the mouse off and toss it in my laptop bag, it will turn the laptop on and the start the process of converting my laptop bag into an oven.

The solution to both these issues is to disable this wake up feature.

Step 1) Right click on the Computer start menu item (or My Computer icon on your desktop) and select Manage

Step 2) Click on the Device Manager node (under System Tools).

Step 3) Expand Mice and other point devices, right click on the mice and click Properties

Step 4) Head to the Power Management tab, and untick Allow this device to wake the computer and finally click OK

This will prevent both the issue of dongle changes or mouse action from waking up your computer.

Foot note: how porn does that last line sound…

With SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 the ability to be a productive developer was key and there is tight out-of-the-box integration and this means that it is easy for SharePoint developers to put code into source control easily. Hilton Giesnow covers this brilliantly in a video he has: http://bit.ly/g71Gnb

Imagine a number of dedicated SharePoint developers, they may have an enterprise ALM solution like TFS and on their own machines have SharePoint 2010 Developer and VS2010 installed and life is good – but what about the individual, or ad-hoc, developer?

The problem for him is that installing SharePoint 2010 is a resource hog and you may not want it running all the time (what Hilton nicely calls the 9 to 12 development) and what about if you switching between projects, how do you switch SharePoint? The solution I found, is to have a virtual machine (VM) for SharePoint with the dev tools installed and do all work on the VM. This is great because the overhead is only there when you need it and you can easily switch between different virtual environments. The downside: source code management.

Sure you can hook up the VM to the network and manage code using the source control as you are used too, but this isn’t always easy or possible, so what else you can do? I had this problem recently where the source control is on one domain and my development was another domain. I choose to use the Mercurial Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) and I thought I would share this experience with you.

DVCS differs from “traditional” source control like TFS or SubVersion which has a client/server model where each developer is a client talking to a central server, however in DVCS every developer is their own server and does pushes/pulls (think like a sync) between other developers.

What this enables is a very lightweight set of tools installed along side SharePoint and the developer tools on the VM. At the end of each day I could run Mercurial on my machine and pull the source control down to my own machine. This meant the VM had the code and my “real” machine had the code. Then this code could easily be checked into the corporate source control system creating another backup and ensuring compliance with source management policies!

This has been a very exciting project and this configuration really made the management of the source code very smooth.

I purchased a Logitech Performance MX Mouse (to replace my other Logitech V450 mouse) which has a number of fantastic features:

• Darkfield optical sensor which works on everything, including glass
• The awesome and tiny wireless pickup that can remain plugged in all the time.
• Ability to charge off of USB and still work! 
• 7 Buttons

One of those 7 buttons defaults to a feature called Application Switcher. For Mac users this is exactly like Expose and for Windows users it is like a full screen task switcher. 

In fact on Mac runs Expose but on Windows this is a custom application and really doesn’t have the feel or the polish that the Flip 3d (the Windows+Tab thing) which ships with Windows Vista and Windows 7.

So how do you change this? There is many posts about using macro’s, assigning specific applications or even hacked drivers but from my own experience this is no longer needed and it appears most people do not know about it because it is so well hidden.

The first step is to download the latest version of SetPoint, the mouse software, from Logitech which at time of writing is 6.2. However the mouse actually ships with 4.7, a version over 3 years old! This is really odd since the mouse was only launched less than 1 year ago!

Once upgrade go to the Button Settings section, select the button and set the task to Other this will bring up a dialog with a massive drop down full of options. If you look in here for Flip 3d or maybe some alternative on application switcher you will not find it. However there is an option called Document Flip, which you guessed correctly is Flip 3d.

Set your mouse to this and viola!

2011 has started off well with the new release of Pull! This release is a major update release where the focus was on improving the experience on the front end.

Ribbon

You either love it or you hate the ribbon, but there is no doubt that using it makes you more productive and we have moved to that with this release.

There has been discussion moving the Episodes ribbon around, so this may change. Please join that or post issues if you have any other items you want to change please see the Issue Tracker.

Cover Flow

We now show podcasts using cover flow, which also means we now try to pull down the podcast art! This makes it much nicer to expose and move around podcasts!

However maybe you do not like this, check out the toolbar options:

1. Show one podcast as a time
2. Rather than the cool carousal flow, stack the podcasts next to each other.
3. Same as 2, but vertical stacking.
4. Stack across first and then stack vertically.
5. Stack vertically and then stack horizontally.
6. Carousal mode (default)

And you can use the wrench to customize the cards and change what is shown. Doing that I removed the image and status icon and shrunk the size:

And when you want to go back – you can use the reset views button in the settings.

Powerful Grids

Both the episode and download queue grid are greatly enhanced.

1. Changes made now persist!
2. You can re-order and resize columns.
3. There is full filtering support on them!
4. At the bottom is a total bar which you can turn on/off or change what is shown (try right click!).

Twitter

Twitter support got a major overhaul so the issues discussed previously are gone! Something you may want to check out though is the little arrow below the button which lets you specify your http://bit.ly username and password!

Export

You can now export to .xlsx (Excel 2007/2010) and .html in addition to .csv!

Coming up next?

Being a fairly major release there is some spit and polish we want to focus on for the next release and adding some smaller features!

Update: Event moved to the 5th March 2011 - details: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/southafrica/archive/2011/01/18/devs4devs-returns.aspx

Dev4Dev’s, my favourite event, is coming up soon! It is a free event which happens at Microsoft offices on a Saturday morning where you get to see a variety of topics! The key points that make this awesome:

• Each presentation is 20min long – so all meat in the topics with no fluff!
• Even though it is as Microsoft, it is not Microsoft – some fantastic non-Microsoft technologies has been shown before.
• It’s developers presenting to developers – so no marketing nonsense.
• You can apply to present in one of the slots – so if you want to present at bigger events (TechEd, DevDays etc…) this is a great way to get on the radar of those who make those decisions!

All the details at: Devs4Devs Returns

For me this is the first one I will miss as I will be in Seattle for MVP Summit