A KB article came out March 8th 2007 indicating that the /3gb switch is no longer available.  This is because on x32 we only have 4GB to work with, now on an x64 we have much more addressable memory.  The /3gb switch actually choked the kernel by moving a gig to the user mode from the kernel.  This actually caused more problems than it solved so the switch was removed in SP2.  This is a classic example of software desperately trying to make up for hardware shortcomings.  The solution - buy 64 bit hardware with the appropriate amount of ram.

Yesterday I completed SharePoint 123 course and then went to a bar-b-que.

In case you hadn't heard of it you can find it at http://www.sharepoint.com. The Atlanta Microsoft Professionals (http://www.atlantamspros.com/) who are Brendon Schwartz, Keith Rome, Matt Ranlett, and Dan Attis built course ware for SharePoint.  It can be done in 6 different sessions, there are 3 hours of lecture and 3 hours of Lab.  I say lecture but it's really demo.  The 300 course had only 15 slides in it for a 3 hour talk and I think half of those were slides that said DEMO.

Being an MCT in the past I know that it takes about three hours for every hour of presentation to prepare.  I went through everything and felt pretty confident about it.  Everything worked for me.  That's when I should have realized there was a problem.  Nothing worked in my presentation.  The demo gods were angry that day.  Luckily Brandon Schwartz popped in after watching me struggle a few minutes he realized I was drowning and jumped in to help fill the voids as I was feverishly trying to get my demos to work.

I learned a lot from the 300 presentation in particular.  I really liked the VBA to SharePoint techniques. It didn't work in my demo, but I was really impressed when I saw it working while I was preparing for the presentation.

This course ware was really well thought out.  I never knew how much so until Brandon told me that it took 4 guys took 3 months to put it together.  That's 1 year in people years!

If you don't get opportunity to watch or give the presentation I strongly suggest reading the slides and doing the labs.  Just going through and preparing for it was either a great refresher or something completely new.

I'm using InfoPath a little more for this one particular project.  It's very interesting because the project is disconnected for the most part.  We are using InfoPath and satellite phones to communicate a ship's status back to the corporate offices.  I ran into a problem that caused me quite a bit of trouble and I wrote about it here http://www.wildwires.com/Tutorial/Office/InfoPath/ImageSwap.htm

Essentially I just wanted to swap out images and I was trying to use the picture control.  That was a very bad idea, because it sends the image information in the document.  I'm working with satellite phones and they charge by the bit.  I finally  realized that what I needed to do was mark up the stylesheet (view.xsl).  Once I got that figured out everything else pretty much fell into place.  InfoPath is a very nice tool, but it only gets us so far.  I wonder what version Next has in store for us.