This is a side benefit of having blogger friends from around the world. Once in a blue moon, Malek Kemmou, writes his blog posts in his own language and I get this beautiful artwork in my feedreader:

I have no idea what it says, but that's okay. Another thing I love about his blog (besides all the usual stuff) is that he has an entire category called: "don't read if you're not Stephen Forte". If you know Stephen, you can only imagine the content of those posts!

www.acehaid.org

Jeff Schoolcraft asks some good questions about growing a User Group (he is one of the leaders of WinProTeamVienna) - how to increase awareness, why do people go, why do people NOT go?

I have heard these questions before.

Sounds like a perfect survey for INETA!

www.acehaid.org

After fiddling with Sharepoint WSS for most of this week, getting advice from some Sharepoint geeks, reading the documentation,googling a lot and hanging out in the newsgroups, I have finally worked out that what I want to do is use a combination of all of the methods of working with WSS.

My plan at this point (and don't hold me to it) is to use [...read more...]

[A DevLife post]

www.acehaid.org

Hey, cool. That was a good idea on the part of the MVP program. A perfect fit for Don Kiely, Anil John, Robert Hurlbut and as Don says "Keith Brown (of course!)".

www.acehaid.org

I just took a look at the WSE newsgroup and noticed that there are gobs of unanswered questions up there. Hey, WSE gurus, come help out!

I will go take a crack at ones I am confident on over the weekend, but many are out of my scope. There are much more knowledgeable people out there than me.

(microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.webservices.enhancements)

 

www.acehaid.org

You *know* I'm focused on something when I'm not blogging a lot. Though I'm not making any great new discoveries that would be revelations - just learning stuff that lots of people know.

I spent most of yesterday struggling with Sharepoint and getting frustrated with the limitations of the WSS U.I. even with a lot of customization.

I hit up the three sharepoint gurus that I know (Dave Burke, Eli Robillard and Amanda Murphy) who basically all encouraged me in believing that I could just write my own front end with sharepoint driving the backend.

Dave is the best for this because he hates Sharepoint but has written a lot of major stuff with it. That, to me, is an advantage, because he has found his way around it pretty darn well. He gave me lots of pointers. I have a lot to learn in a short period of time. We'll see how it goes.

There are a lot of great sharepoint resources out there, but I'm really lucky to have a few I can lean on when I have spent too much time researching or trying to figure out one little thing.

At least Dave has been blogging up a storm, so I'm happy someone's keeping the geek blog level up high in Vermont!

I definitely will have to write about the problems I have had (still unsolved, but found a workaround) with installing WSS on my webserver!

www.acehaid.org

http://www.unix-girl.com/blog/archives/2005/06/the_good_the_ba.html

She should have come to TechEd and attended the Women in I.T. luncheon. There are more and more women attending at every conference I go to. Even the ladies room isn't always empty!

www.acehaid.org

There is nothing more fun than having a new project to work on and new things to learn. Yesterday I got involved with a project for my client where I am going to get to work with Sharepoint Windows Services for the first time. I have been a ... [read more]

[A DevLife Post]

www.acehaid.org

"The Scoop on Wi-Fi" article in Fortune Small Business this month is all about how businesses are levering wi-fi and becoming REALLY mobile. Tablet PC's are a highlight of every one of the businesses that were featured in the article. The issues (July/August) isn't online yet, but last month's issue with the cover story about Microsoft's anthropoligists who learn how businesses work is. Just before I received that issue, Rich and I watched a film named Kitchen Stories, about Swedish researchers who were sent to Norway in the 50's to watch the patterns of single men in their kitchens. They had to be silent observers in the homes of their studies. Wonderful movie. Strange occupation. It seems that Microsoft's do the same: sit quietly in an office and watch someone work. Hard to pretend they aren't there.

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Since February, the blogosphere has been abuzz with AJAX, which had been used by GoogleMaps and impressed the pants off of a lot of web developers. AJAX incorporates XMLHttp but is not limited to I.E. Now it is "hold the presses" at Microsoft who is planning [read more]

[A DevLife post]

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

I do, and I was sure to look to see if he created one for WSE3.0. Yes he did. Today , in fact. My hero!

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

As many people know I have had 2 1/2 years of HELL with trying to update applications from the web server. Maybe if I just went back to my clients and told them I will only write HelloWorld applications from now on, I could get it to work.

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

gotta love it!!

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Mark follows up his TechEd talk with an article on the Web Services Developer Center on MSDN. What's New in WSE 3.0. I'll be reading this one this weekend!

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Okay - My name is Julie and I use FrontPage. I use FrontPage for the family websites: my parent's dog kennel, my sister's business and a few others. You know these sites, they are 95% static html and you are doing it for love (not money). Why not? My sister's business does use a little asp and we even use an asp.net site for her to maintain store lists which are served back to the FrontPage site via web services.

So don't be shy. I can admit it. And now the reason I brought this up was to preface the fact that Lisa Wollin, who is the content manager for the FrontPage Developer center is blogging some good FrontPage tips.

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

I have been playing with WSE3.0 this week and when stuffing some credentials into my web service proxy the other night, I discovered that the new wse3 namespace method for doing that makes use of generics. This *is* designed to integrate specifically with ...[more]... [A DevLife post]

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

At the INETA NORAM User Group Leader Summit on June 5, a new board was announced. I am no longer on the INETA NORAM board. The original board members and founders of INETA (Bill Evjen, Brian Loesgen, Keith Franklin, Keith Pleas) as well as myself (I was not a founding board member) are now on the Advisory Board for INETA NORAM. It was actually the old board that voted in the new board.

I am also [finally] passing on the production of the monthly INETA Newsletter that I have been doing for the past three years. The first two years, I did this on my own and then I finally I had Sheri Nawrocki's phenomenal help (she did the design, artwork and physical production, which is why it has been looking so beautiful) as well as some great editing assistance from Scott Swigart 

If I had kids, I might liken this to watching your kids go off to college. 

INETA has come a long (enormously long) way and accomplished incredible things in the past 3 years. It has gotten to a point where it has outgrown its grassroots roots (sic) and needs to be run like a professional organization. That's just not somewhere that I shine (reports? concalls? plans? agendas? minutes? phew!), but it is a perfect role for the new President, Chris Pels (who is one of the most organized people I know) and the rest of the nine member board.

Watch the INETA website for further information about the changes to INETA. I am not leaving INETA (it would take a total blood transfusion as well as a heart replacement to do that!). I am still a liaison and my role on the Advisory board will keep me involved with what is going on.

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

One of the great difficulties of programming is having to accept the fact that we can't know every little function and feature that exist in our development tools. In the old days it was easy to write an application from end to end, understand all that was available to you in your IDE and database and even fix your ...[more]... [A DevLife post]

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

I did one of my favorite sessions yesterday, the one with the evolving name. Yesterday I thought maybe it's best called "Security Basics for WSE, Indigo and Beyond". I love this talk and have done it a number of times and feel it is my calling. There is NO code in the talk at all. I explain with my own words and from my own (hard earned) understanding, security tools and methods such as credentials, keys, digital certificates, hashing, encryption and digital signing. The purpose of doing this talk is to explain this stuff to people like me because it is an important foundation for working with security but is generally glazed over with the assumption that everyone already understands it. The payload on this talk is when attendees then go to other sessions, such as Christoph Schittko's WSE3 talk this morning, Ted Neward's [rockin' - and I will write about this later] keynote on Indigo last night and further sessions on Indigo today by Ted and Steve Swartz (Indigo Architect at Microsoft). I got to gloat for a moment this morning while my average scores are still 10 (only three people did evals so far and they happened to be ones that loved the session - as more people do evals, of course, this can't possibly stick). Today I am doing a brand new talk and though it's a topic I have been very keen on for a while, Visual Debugger and other customized debugging features in VS2005, I can't expect to hit it with all 10's the first time out the gate.

Frank Arrigo noticed that fellow ASPInsider, Paul Glavich, has joined the very impressive collection of developer/consultants in the Australian Readify. I went over to check out their page and thanks to the MSDN Online feed, my Doodling on the Web article is featured on the top of their homepage. Hey, does that win me a free trip to Australia? Charles???

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881