A couple of months ago an opportunity unexpectedly made its way into my life that would offer something different for my career. At first I ignored it, but after a while I started thinking about the possibilities before me. There were a couple of job openings at this “little” company, which you may have heard of before, Microsoft, that intrigued me. ......

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Do you know what happens when you create a new instance of a class? Why do we need a value type and a reference type? Do you know what is meant when the .NET framework is referred to as a “managed” platform? What is managed versus unmanaged code? Why do we need a .NET runtime? What is a memory leak; is that like an oil leak? All of these are questions ......

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In the world of custom web application development a critical component of our success is the hosting environment and services. We can choose to deploy our web applications using 3rd party hosting providers such as GoDaddy.com, Rackspace, DiscountASP.NET, or another provider, or we can choose to deploy to on premise servers either virtual or physical. ......

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I have stepped it up a notch and am speaking at numerous user groups and technical conferences in the South East in the coming months. These include .NET & SharePoint user groups as well as SQL Saturday and SharePoint Saturday all day conferences. I will also be submitting to a couple of more regional events that I’m considering including Houston ......

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I encountered the error “Failed to create a system.double from text ‘50’” when trying to develop a SketchFlow project. After doing some digging I found that it was just that I had a space after my number “50.” After removing the space, SketchFlow was able to load the page. Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Blend,Expression ......

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This is my first real go round with Expression Blend and SketchFlow and it is taking quite a while to get used to it. After several iterations of names and screen dragging, dropping in the SketchFlow Map, and adding a few elements to some screens, I decided to try and run my recently created Silverlight SketchFlow project. To my surprise I received ......

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It pains me to write this post as I feel like an idiot for having wasted my time on this “problem.” Hopefully in posting this, I can keep some other poor lost soul working at 4 AM in the morning from spending wasteful minutes scratching his head and getting frustrated. The Visual Studio designer will work fine in resolving namespaces, but when you build ......

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For my first “real” attempt at creating a business application using Silverlight I decided to use WCF RIA Services, Silverlight 4.0, and Visual Studio.NET 2010. What easier way to get started than through a template provided by VS.NET 2010, right? Well, in its effort to make it easier it also create some headaches. Sometimes abstraction can add a learning ......

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During the deployment testing of an integration component with Commerce Server 2009’s Order Service I encountered the following error at a client site "Column requires a valid DataType." It was occuring right at the point when deserializing the dataset from the GetPurchaseOrderAsDataSet() call. We did not encounter this problem at all on any of the ......

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I found it very odd that this was not available when doing some search engine queries. My requirement was to take in an AD user name and query SharePoint 2010 to determine the SharePoint groups in which the account belongs. The code was to run from within a RIA Authentication Service, which is code run on a server and is not likely on the SharePoint ......

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I ran across a blog entry with a consolidated list of links to the SharePoint 2007 planning worksheets. These are good starting points for your discovery, analysis, and design and are provided by Microsoft. I would suggest tweaking them to meet your organizational needs. http://itfootprint.wordpres... ......

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Over the past three plus years that I have been working with SharePoint, I have never had the pleasure of giving an Excel Services presentation to a client. Well, thanks to our awesome sales team this past week I was able to do that very thing. I have been a part of some Excel Services implementations, but they were really focused on trying to create ......

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After the second installment of our Speaker Idol format, I was asked by INETA to write an article for the January newsletter targeting other user group leaders. It came out great. The article describes the event format and some of our lessons learned. You can view the article at http://ineta.org/newsletter... There is ......

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On Monday the PnP team released the 2nd drop of the SharePoint 2010 Guidance. Included is an example of a sandboxed solution, which is a good list aggregation scenario related to SOW’s (statements of work) and estimates across a number of sub-sites. I am VERY excited about the work that is being done and guidance documentation and code that will be ......

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On Friday the Patterns and Practices team released the first drop of the SharePoint 2010 Guidance, http://spg.codeplex.com/Rel... It includes the upgrades for service locator, config manager, and logger. There is some great guidance for the new Sandbox feature of 2010 in the upcoming release. Stay tuned ......

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