So here I was working on a project that required me to look at existing .DLLs and figure out what objects, constructors, methods and properties there were.  I’m also required to return some friendly data, like the stuff you get from intellisense in Visual Studio.  I thought this was all done via System.Reflection and you can get some of it, but the friendly content just isn’t there.

After spending a ton of time looking through the System.Reflection members and looking again and looking through google and even bing I couldn’t figure out how to to get the summary and other information from the .dll using reflection.  It’s because it’s not in there.  Talk about trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip!  Where it is is in an XML document that is shipped with the DLL.  It has the same name as the .DLL just with an .XML extension instead ...

So I just downloaded Visual Studio 2010 and in the time that it took to doanload and install I went and did some research on F#.  I’ve been feeling a little behind lately so when I saw F# I thought, “Great! What happened to D# and E#?  I’m still back over here on C#!”

Turns out that F# is for functional programming - in short passing functions  and results around through pipes.  It’ll remind some of PowerShell.  A lot of the examples out there now are very mathematical based. Not sure if this is marketing to the financial and engineering problems or if the language is solely suited for that kind of problem.  There is also built in parallelism which made me start paying attention again.  The other thing that I like about it a lot is that it’s a script and about as fast as C# and C++.

let’s ...

I just migrated from CMS 2002 to sitefinity.  I looked at a lot of different options and decided that sitefinity was best for me.  The migration was fairly strait forward with a few minor hiccups here and there.  All in all I’m pretty happy with sitefinity.

How I decided which WCM tool to use.

First of all free was a qualifier.  If I couldn’t get it for free then it didn’t get looked at.  A logo at the bottom of the page is a small price to pay for me, which is the requirement of sitefinity and others.

I looked at community server which I ended up using for the South Florida SharePoint User Group SFSPUG.  Community Server was really more geared to a community site, as you would expect by the name.  Telligent also makes a product called Graffiti and I looked at that as well.

I almost ...

Clients love me so much they want to see me in their building everyday.  I wouldn't say that my clients have crappy equipment they just don't buy the same stuff I would.  So I go to work.  Terminal services into my network from the clients office.  So I used to use mstsc /v:myServer /f /console  v is for serVer f is for full screen and console . . . well that puts me on the console session.  It's nice this way because when I get local I can just log in and everything is the way I left it.  well as of recent mstc 6.1 I believe console has been replaced with admin.  so instead of /console its now /admin.  /console doesn't give you an error, it just doesn't do any thing.  I wonder why they couldn't have just reused the console switch to maKe ADMIN DO WHAT IT DOES ...

It's a well known fact that versioning webparts is a real pain in the butt. Big Jim in DC and I have been pondering, searching the Internet and discussing what are some good ways to version web parts and features.  Today we decided to do something about it and came up with a simple strategy.  Use pre-build events to call a script that writes a value to the AssemblyFileVersion attribute of  the assebmlyInfo.cs (sorry vb'ers your just going to have to modify the scripts on your own ).  Then with another script read that value from the assemblyInfo.cs and write it to the feature.xml.  The description attribute to be specific.  That way from the user interface you can see the version and time built.

Jim wrote the script to update the Assembly and it can be found here.

This is what my pre-build events look like:

CD "$(ProjectDir)UTILS"
cscript /nologo ...

My pal Pirooz just showed me http://www.justsharepointjobs.com/

This is a pretty interesting site not only does it have jobs but it seems to have some pretty good references.  They list some blogs and sites, but they also listed conferences.  I thought that was cool.  You can't even get a list of all up coming conferences from the Microsoft site.

They have a great start I hope they keep up the good work.

Patrick Tisseghem has just written a couple of articles for MSDN on building Windows SharePoint Services solution with Visual Studio 2005 Extensions.  Well a couple of articles is putting it lightly it's 58 pages of printed material that is more than a starting point it's everything you need to know to build solutions on WSS.

Part 1: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530302.aspx
Part 2: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530301.aspx

On the surface this seems like it's only for WSS but it also applies to MOSS as well.

I just got back from devConnections.  It's actually still going on, but I had to come home and forage.  I'm not going to make the mistake of writing a blog post like I did for the MVP summit again, but suffice it to say I met a lot of people and cemented more relationships.

Lawrence Liu was to do the key note presentation and he was stuck in Chicago, on his birthday no less, so I ended up having 2 hour to prepare for it.  I literally had 15 minutes of fame, it was a lot of fun and the best part was when attendees told me how much they appreciated it.

It was a great event and I'm glad I went.

I just got back from the MVP summit 2007 and as with all conferences I tried to meet as many folks as I could. I met Sean O’Driscoll who, as it turns out, is the person ultimately responsible for the MVP award program. I must say Sean has a great sense of humor. Met Jason Medero for the first time, we are working on the same Wrox book. We discussed everything from balance of life issues to crazy clients. Because of our conversation I’m getting a kayak, canoe or something and paddle up and down the intracoastal in the morning and making some time for me.

When it comes to balance of life we all decided to take Monday off and shoot each other with paintballs. Besides doing the Macarena, I think paintball is the most fun I’ve ever had. Dan Larson has some video of paintball, ...

So the European SharePoint conference was outstanding.  The beer was especially good and the people were great.  I had opportunity to meet a lot of people who work with and around SharePoint.  A lot of folks that I already knew of but hadn't had opportunity to meet yet.

I stayed at the Estrel Berlin hotel, where the conference was held.  I bought a wireless lan internet access coupon for 8 hours.   The username is EST0085587 and the password is 38127656.  I didn't use much of it so there should be close to 8 hours left.

The was the largest SharePoint focused conference to date.  There was quite an exhibit hall, many sessions and just an all around great experience.  I think  the most surprising thing was that everyone spoke great English.  It was freezing cold so I decided to see Germany from the inside out only going out 3 nights ...