Are you new to SharePoint, and want to find out more? Is your company already using the technology, but you’d like to expand your knowledge with best practices? Do you have specific business or technical questions, and want to take advantage of this opportunity to speak with the experts?

SharePoint Saturday East Bay is an educational, informative and always FREE day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals and MVPs, covering a wide variety of topics focused on Microsoft SharePoint technologies. SharePoint Saturday is open to the public, and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint! Food and beverages will be provided throughout the day, wrapping up with a raffle and many prizes.

Features

· 40 sessions across 7 different tracks, including Business Intelligence, Search, Social Media, Metadata and Taxonomy, Migration and Upgrade, SharePoint Designer, Branding, and more…

· 30+ speakers, 20 sponsors, product demonstrations, best practices

· Fabulous raffle items, including SharePoint tools and a new iPad!

· Food and beverages throughout the day

Invite your friends, your colleagues, and your entire team!  Register online today at http://spsbay.eventbrite.com

SharePoint Saturday East Bay

When:                   September 11, 2010

                              Doors open at 7:30am, Keynote at 8:30am

Where:                  San Ramon Marriott

My session:          SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight a Bigger Picture

2600 Bishop Drive

San Ramon, CA 94583 

Phone:  925-867-9200

A crucial part of driving and sustaining a change towards better adoption of Agile is the opportunity to celebrate success – small wins, frequently. Winning teams have clear expectations, understandable context and the commitment to get the work done-done. Driving point in declaring small wins after each iteration is setting the scope of the iteration close to the actual capacity of the team. If you consistently get burn up charts where the scope undergoes big adjustments downward (red scope line), this is a clear sign that the team committed to more that can be done. Reasons for that can be lack of experience in estimating points, external pressures etc.  A good way to control the scope is to experiment each iteration to committing to a lower/higher number estimated points, so that the scope is with in the 5% margin from the average for the team (green scope line). This can be achieved by controlling external pressures, estimating points as a team rather than individually and actively negotiating with product owner and other stakeholders about what goes in the iteration and what not. 

 

While dry charts and numbers don’t create great software, they help teams adjust and build up the culture of the motivated successful team.  Step 1 - pick the right size for each bite.

We've all seen sessions where the power of SIlverlight is demonstrated with "Hello World!" apps and smily faces. We've also seen sessions on SharePoint 2010 that outline how to use the Client OM, but stop short when it comes to putting the complete solution into perspective.

Is this enough to build well researched and designed, innovative solutions?

I am really thrilled to join as a speaker and attendee with many other SharePoint enthusiasts at the two upcoming SharePoint Saturday events on the West Coast. I'll talk about how our team at Global 360 approaches business solutions. Starting with an outline of the use of Sketchflow as a design, communication and prototyping tool and then taking a deeper dive into how to use SharePoint 2010, Silverlight and specifically the SharePoint 2010 Client Object Model to transform the prototype into a small scale case management application.

If you are interested, join the SharePoint crowds at:

SharePoint Saturday - East Bay

SharePoint Saturday - Los Angeles

So you have a layouts page you used in your SharePoint 2007 product and you want to use it in SharePoint 2010. The functionality did not change much, however when you open the page it looks ugly and it uses an older SharePoint 2007 master page. What can I do to fix this, so that I have one code base that covers both platforms?

One option is to dynamically change the master page on the PreInit event. Keep the aspx page as it is and do not change the master page entry. In the page class add the snippet below. In this particular example I use reflection to find out the version of SharePoint, but you can use any other method.

protected override void OnPreInit(EventArgs e)
{
    bool isSP2010 = false;
    try
    {
        Assembly assembly = Assembly.LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.Sharepoint");
        var assemblyName = assembly.GetName();
        isSP2010 = assemblyName.Version.Major > 13;
    }
    catch (Exception)
    {
        isSP2010 = false;
    }
    if (isSP2010)
    {
        this.Page.MasterPageFile = "/_layouts/applicationv4.master";
    }          
}

Layouts work on both SharePoint 2007 and 2010!

Dovizhdane!

Credit goes also to Dan D. and Ivan P., thanks!

In order to install a web application running only in 32-bit mode, I had to change the default IIS application pool settings to allow 32-bit applications. This worked fine for my application, however later I installed SharePoint 2010 on the same machine and when I opened the Central Administration I got the wonderful:

HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.

No IIS logs, no ULS logs, not much clues… The SharePoint Central Administration application pool was always shutting down for some reason.

It turns out that if Enable for 32-bit Applications is enabled SharePoint will not load and turn down the application pool. I changed this setting back to false and I was able to get to the Central Admin.

When you create a new external content type for security purposes SharePoint 2010 will not assign any permissions. The first thing people try to do is to create an external list using the external data source and try to open it. The following error occurs:

Access denied by Business Data Connectivity.

The first thing I tried to do is check permissions for the current user to the database and check other permissions. Save yourselves some time and jump directly to Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications > Business Data Connectivity Services. From the drop down context menu on your external data source select Set Permissions. Add users or groups, set actual permissions for each group, keep the propagate option selected.

I am not sure how the permissions are propagated, but I guess there is job that gets executed, so some delay may be expected.

The external list works!

Living in some of the most culturally diverse and tolerant places in the US and in the world has thought me a lot about cultural tolerance, however I realize that this was a long learning process and as a kid growing in the capital of Bulgaria I simply was not exposed to the issue of cultural or ethnical diversity in the same way an open modern society does. I recall how only couple of years after the infamous words of President Reagan that ended with “Tear down this wall!” resulted in a cultural vacuum that quickly caught the attention of a number of NGOs. As a result I was fortunate to visit West Berlin several days after the wall fell and mingle with peers from distant, until then, West Germany. Every summer for the next 4-5 years thank to organizations sponsored by governments, private businesses and giving individuals as a college student I met with hundreds of peers from neighboring Turkey, Macedonia, Rumania and many other European countries. Prejudice and stereotypes about our Balkan and European neighbors fell down faster than the Berlin wall.

Now almost 20 years later I decided to support a similar project trying to help kids from a small and diverse (about 30, 000) town in Bulgaria with a large Roma population. Roma have been living on the Balkans for hundreds of years. They have darker skin and they rarely had equal opportunities anywhere they live in eastern Europe. Bulgarians and Roma in this town live separated in their own neighborhoods, schools and rituals effectively establishing a cultural wall that inhibits the growth of this town. The Roma school is underfunded and the graduation rates and the employment rates are much lower. The little common both groups have is related to crime and trouble. Most of the efforts of the authorities are directed in monetary assistance, but that does not address the underlying issue of lack of tolerance on both sides of town.

Katie a US Peace Corp volunteer with a strong faith embarked on a mission to educate kids from both sides of town about cultural and ethnical tolerance and help them establish rituals and cultural ties that will remain self sustained after her departure in two years. She works with a local NGO based in the Roma school and she already had some success with several small projects including a culturally neutral Halloween party with kids of both ethnic groups.

Her next project is Summer of Dreams where Katie and other volunteers will help 20 kids from both groups learn about tolerance and diversity on a neutral grounds in a summer camp in another part of the country. Currently the Peace Corp is collecting donations for her project on this page http://sn.im/SummerOfDreams. I find that this is a great way to spread the real values of the American culture based on tolerance, giving, diversity and equal opportunity. If you do too, please consider supporting Katie and her volunteer peers in this effort. You can also follow Katie on her blog http://handofhope.blogspot.com, where she shares the hardships and successes of her mission.

Another way to support the project is to twitter:

Tolerance and equal opportunities need work. Support #SummerOfDreams #Bulgaria here http://sn.im/SummerOfDreams or retweet