SADev

I have been very focused during the day on a project and my evenings have been taken up a lot with VSTS Rangers work so the blog has lagged a bit so here are some things you should be aware of (if you follow me on Twitter, then you probably have heard these in 140 characters or less):

I was awarded the title of VSTS Rangers Champion - this is a great honour since it is a peer vote from VSTS External Rangers (no Microsoft Staff) and MVP’s for involvement in the VSTS Rangers projects.

The VSTS Rangers shipped the alpha of the integration platform for TFS 2010 - this is important for me because it means some of the bits I have worked on are now public and I am expecting some feedback to get them better for beta and release next year. It is also important since my big contribution to the integration platform, which is an adapter I will cover in future blog posts, has a fairly stable base.

Dev4Dev’s in coming up in just over a week. This is one of my favourite events because it really is event for passionate developers since they have to give up a Saturday morning for it (no using an event to sneak off work). I will be presenting on Visual Studio 2010! Which should be great, based on my first dry run to an internal audience at BB&D last week. Two more of my BB&D team mates will be presenting Zayd Kara on TFS Basic and (if memory serves me) Rudi Grobler on Sketchflow!

The Information Worker user group is really blowing my mind with it’s growth, on Tuesday we had 74 people attend our meeting. For a community that only had a 100 or so people signed up on the website at the beginning of the year that is brilliant. Thanks must go to my fellow leads: Veronique, Michael, Marc, Zlatan, Hilton and Daniel. We will be having a final Jo’burg event for the year on the 2nd and it will be a fun ask the experts session.

I created this poster (A3 in size) which covers the 8 key areas of Outlook

One of the things that I do at BB&D, is produce guidance posters. So far I have produced two of them and both are publically available on the BB&D developer guidance site DRP. The first is “Outlook + Exchange = Better Together” and the second is “ADO.NET Data Services Cheat Sheet”, not two things you think about together often.

On May the 23rd InformationWorker and Inobits are getting together and offering FREE SharePoint developer training. It is a full day event where Inobits will be providing a number of lab based training sessions focused on developing with SharePoint. Also being a full day event there will be some lunch provided for everyone (special thanks to 3Fifteen for sponsoring it). It should be a really great event for everyone, because you pick the lab/s you want to do which means if you are a beginner or expert you do the ones that will benefit you.

This week was a special week for the InformationWorker user group, because BB&D (the great company I work for) provided a huge box of t-shirts for the group. In the box were two types of shirts, the Wanna Collaborate? and the MOSS-A-SAURUS.

Yip, MOSS the acronym for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is no more, because it is now officially announced that the next version is Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

Mark Stacey sent me a tweet the other day about Google searches of SharePoint. I changed it slightly since the MOSS parameter was bringing back a lot of non-SharePoint content.

What could look better than a great poster on SharePoint development up on your wall? How about if it was free? Well the S.A. Architect community has a number of posters in crazy high resolutions (they all seem to  be around 33mega pixels or 6872 x 4916 for the more technical ones out there). So what posters are available and where do you get them?

Well you can get them and hundreds more from: S.A. Architect Posters, and the posters are: