Brian H. Prince

This event will feature the top 5 industry standard practices for creating and managing quality controlled custom solutions built on SharePoint.  If your organization has struggled with how to best implement a custom line of business applications in a predictable and structured process, this event is for you.  During this session you’ll learn how Application Lifecycle Management tools and techniques can be applied to the process of creating custom web parts and other SharePoint additions.  These techniques will vastly improve the quality and predictability of all your custom line of business applications being delivered through SharePoint.   Date Location Register Southfield, MI Tuesday, September 29, 2009 Microsoft Office 1000 Town Center Suite 1930 So...

SharePoint has become a huge product. Almost everywhere I go, someone is asking me about SharePoint. They either want to know how to develop on it or how to deploy it, or they want to find someone who knows how. If you are looking for resources to learn more about SharePoint, I recommend a podcast by Rob, Nick and Brett. Their podcast is called “SharePoint Pod Show”. There are some good books out there, but hearing experience MOSS developers talk about it on a regular pod show really immerses you into the technology. Their current show is about SharePoint skills, and how they fit into your career and the current ‘economy’. Their show is based on a recent poll. It’s very interesting. If you are into SharePoint, or have to work with it, I suggest you give them a spin.

A few months ago I sat down with Jim Holmes and Philip Jordan at Quick Solutions to talk about an elegant way to handle a difficult scenario. ARCast.TV - Jim Holmes and Philip Jordan on Excel Services http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/ARCast.TV/ARCastTV-Jim-Homes-and-Philip-Jordan-on-Business-Models-that-leverage-Excel-Services/ They often have customers with complex business logic in Excel, and the customer often thinks they want a new application to replace this. But the users also want to be able to update not only the business data, but the business MODELS. Trying to do this can be difficult, so Jim and Philip turned to MOSS, and Excel Services. Excel Services allows the user to publish their spreadsheets to their consumers. The consumers use the sheet in the browser. They don’t need Excel on the desktop. The great thing is the Intellectual Property of the business model is safe, because the end consumer only ever gets to see the output of the models, not the math behind th...

As many of you know I am on the board of CodeMash . We are now working on updating the site for this year's conference.  We just pushed v1 live, and are now working on the attendee registration features. Last year we had a great site. It was ASP.NET, web services built with the service software factory, and SQL Server 2005. It worked great. One of the features for the site was a news channel that was on the homepage, a news page, and an rss feed. In order to manage the news content we also had an admin tool, and some supporting tables and so on. This worked fine. But this year, as I was refactoring, I just didn't want to deal with remote DBs, and upgrading the admin interface. So, one day while I was talking to local WSS bad boy (amongst other things), I came up with the idea of having the news content come from a WSS list that was on our planning portal. Sounded easy to me; wire the news business object to the web services for WSS instead of some EntLib code that I had i...

We have leased our own dedicated server as part of working on getting the back end tech setup for CodeMash 2008. Last year we used Sharepoint 2003 for the planning portal. This year we will be using WSS v3. There are a lot of great enhancements that will help us a lot. I installed WSS on our server, and then deployed an asp.net application that we are going to use to collect speaker submissions. This app is a simple form, with some validation, that then submits the topic to a list in WSS via the WSS web services. The app worked great on my laptop connecting to our WSS site on our dedicated server. When I deployed the app however, it was failing the authentication into the WSS web services. The first step to troubleshoot this was to log into the portal from my machine. That worked. Then, try to login from the server itself (since that is where the web service is being called from.). That didn't work. The portal was working fine, but wouldn't let you login from the local machi...