David L. Walker - .NET Solution Provider

Yesterday I had the great privilege of presenting to the Oklahoma Chapter of the IAMCP (International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners). This was the first time in a few years that I presented to a mostly non-developer audience. I really enjoyed the challenge and hope to have the opportunity to do that more frequently. It is much more challenging, since you have to actually explain something without really being able to dive into code and show exactly what your talking about.

Since SQL Data Services along with the rest of the Windows Azure framework is still in beta, I tried to make the session as interactive as possible with Q & A, Open Discussion, etc.

Here are the slides that I used: zip (2.4 mb – Office 2007/pptx).

I grabbed them from our awesome Microsoft Developer Evangelist Zain Naboulsi, who presented VS2008 Debugging, Mobile and Azure back on Jan 30th.

Since he was covering so much and pressed for time, he didn’t get to cover SQL Data Services much. On top of that, it was just two days earlier on Jan 28th that Microsoft actually released the beta for SQL Data Services SDK.

Of course, as I left the meeting, I received the announcement in my mailbox that Microsoft just pushed a new version of Azure SDK:

• Install both the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio and SDK: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=128752
• Install the Windows Azure SDK alone: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=130232

I’ll be delivering the same slides, but with a LOT more code demonstrations on March 28th, 2009 at the second annual School of Dev event! This year for the first time it is joining forces with the first annual SharePoint Saturday Tulsa event, where I’ll be giving the presentation that I have been more frequently doing for awhile now: Building Powerful WebParts for SharePoint 2007. With all the speakers and topics, you wont want to miss this event! See you there!

Happy New Year! At the pace that 2009 has started off at it is very obvious it will be a very successful year. Bad Economy? Ha!

Please help me congratulate the 16 new speakers welcomed into the INETA NORAM Speakers Bureau (in no particular order):

1. Chris Williams
2. Keith Elder
3. Jason Bock
4. Claudio Lassala
5. Rachel Appel
6. Andrew Dunn
7. Chris Love
8. Cory Smith
9. Tim Rayburn
10. Jim Wooley
11. Rob Windsor
12. Amanda Laucher
13. Adam Machanic
14. Stuart Celarier
15. Pete Brown
16. Steve Andrews

Thank you to all who submitted applications. The selection process was very difficult and the number of applicants overwhelming, because of this we will be having a second round in the first quarter of 2009.

Have your local INETA User Group request them to come and deliver a presentation. If you are not a member of one, join one, if there is not one near you, start one - http://www.ineta.org.

“You can learn more together than you ever could alone.”

We appreciate everyone's past and future community contributions.

It is a very exciting time! We are also launching the new INETA NORAM Regional Speakers Bureau more details will be announced shortly. We are still accepting applications for this new speaker bureau.

We just had an ultrasound done and now know that baby # 5 is a Geekette and will be here May/June!

Happy New Year!

I just wrapped up my first opportunity as a webcast presenter. Thanks to the terrific folks at Quest Software. They produce a bi-weekly webcast appropriately titled "Pain-of-the-Week". "These 45-minute online presentations will explore many of those challenges, present real-world use cases and offer solutions and best practices that you can use in your own environment."

The Converging Paths of SQL Server and SharePoint – Don't Wait Until It's Too Late!

SharePoint and SQL Server architecture and maintenance requirements have a lot in common. Both platforms share identical features for configuration, security and management.

Join our experts in this webcast to examine the similarities in SharePoint and SQL Server administration. Learn why it’s important for you to get familiar with both platforms to streamline your day-to-day tasks.

Presenters: David Walker, Doug Davis, David Gugick

The little that I was able to watch the attendee numbers, showed at one time over 515+ attendees. We had great Q&A session as well.

Be sure to watch the site for other upcoming webcasts that can hopefully help you alleviate your Pain-of-the-Week.

Our presentation will be available shortly under the "Past Webcasts" if you were unable to attend.

Thank you Quest for the opportunity. Everyone at Quest did a great job and they work very hard to make these webcasts useful.

I just received the email below from Sitecore regarding stability issues that .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (Service Pack 1) is causing with all Sitecore products. I am glad they sent this out. Hopefully the companies using Sitecore products will see it before they install the Service Pack and lose a lot of time with the issues it is causing.

There are a couple questions that come to mind, but the first one is this the only product that will have problems?

If you are using a product that is built on top of ASP.NET you may need to be very careful. The bug described and the issues with it have not been reported specifically yet. It has simply been described as a "bug in the LosFormatter class (System.Web.UI.LosFormatter in System.Web.dll, used to serialize and deserialize an ASP.NET ViewState)."

It would be interesting to know if any other products have problems, if you know of any others let us know, via comments.

My most important question though is, could this have been caught in the Beta cycle? Or is this a bug/change put in place since the last Beta release?

Why change how ViewState is serialized and deserialized anyway? :)

ASP.NET MVC is looking more interesting all the time. Just have to wait for the rest of the marketplace to get it integrated into their products. :)

Here's the email:

Dear Sitecore Enthusiast,

You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the Sitecore Product Issues and Patches mailing list.
On Monday, August 4th, Microsoft released the following service packs: Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1.
Sitecore has discovered that these service packs introduce a bug in the LosFormatter class (System.Web.UI.LosFormatter in System.Web.dll, used to serialize and deserialize an ASP.NET ViewState). This bug causes stability issues in Sitecore products. Sitecore has raised this as an urgent priority issue with Microsoft (case number : SRQ080813600454) and is working to help resolve this issue.
In the meantime, PLEASE DO NOT INSTALL .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 on any server running a Sitecore product (including Sitecore WCMS, Intranet Portal, and Foundry) until further notice!
Symptoms associated with installing either of these service packs:

• Memory consumption increases dramatically and single core CPU usage goes up to 100% when opening the Access Viewer or Media Library applications.
• OutOfMemoryExceptions thrown in the Desktop and Content Editor.
• The browser becomes unresponsive when accessing Sitecore.

Just 2 days ago now the SharePoint Pod Show pushed their very first podcast. It was definitely great to listen to it and am very excited about the upcoming shows! They've created a SharePoint Pod Show FaceBook group so you can let them know what you want to hear as well!

A few weeks ago one of the hosts, Rob Foster instant messaged me that he was starting up a SHAREPOINT NATION! FaceBook group and wanted me to start up a SHAREPOINT NATION! LinkedIn group, so I did. It's a term, a chant, a life style, that Rob coined around the time frame of the MVP Summit. You can find some of the history about it on his blog, We are SharePoint Nation!!! In my opinion it is the difference between a "social networking" thing and a real life group of motivated and enthusiastic individuals working together as a community, a REAL community, a NATION.

Since then, SharePoint MVP, Amanda Murphy found the time to create the awesome logo that's now on all the groups and sites and simply says it all: Virtually Everything you need for SharePoint.

On July 16th, 2008, just a few short weeks ago, Bob Fox and crew launched the International SharePoint Professionals Association (ISPA). You can find out the details and plans on his blog post Announcing it.

SharePoint Magazine launched it's first "issue" within the last couple weeks as well. Although, if you follow me on Twitter @DavidWalker you already heard me razz them for running it using WordPress. That is definitely no reason to not read it! They already have some great information. There's many sites that fall victim to this type of technical treachery - SharePointBestPractices.com is built with PHP.

Finally, the open source project that SharePoint MVP - Stacy Draper and I have been hard at work on became publicly available around July 14th, 2008. We still have just a little more work to wrap it up for Release 1.0, typical scope creep issues with guys who are very excited about the project and the functionality that it can provide. The day before we had to make it public, CodePlex forces projects to be public within 30 days after creation or they will be deleted, we added a bunch of stuff that broke the deployment script at the moment. I hope to get his resolved as quickly as possible, so we can release version 1.0. In the mean time, check out the project and what it can do at CodePlex.com/PowerQueryWebPart. Once, Release 1.0 goes live I'll post more details about the making of the project and how this swiss army knife can be a must have in your WebPart Gallery in any SharePoint site.