I won't be there, but Andrew Woodward stepped up to the plate and arranged a SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night at the San Diego Best Practices conference coming up in February. It's at the La Jolla Brew House on February 3rd at 7p until whenever.

Here's wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays... stop reading blogs and go spend time with family!

... but come back in a few days please. :)

[via Stefan Gossner & Maxime Bombardier]

The Content Editor Web Part, as many people have realized who've tried to use it in Publishing sites and then extend multiple Web apps or leverage content deployment, stores links as absolute references rather than relative ones. For instance, if you have a link to http://staging.adventureworkstravel.com/pages/contactus.aspx in a CEWP on a page and then do content deployment to http://www.adventureworkstravel.com, the link will be pointing back to the staging site (which will... or should... be inaccessible).

Sidebar: In my opinion, you shouldn't using the CEWP in Publishing sites. In fact, for most if not all my deployments, we remove that Web Part from the Web Part gallery and add a <SafeControl /> entry in the site's web.config to flag is as NOT a safe control. You should be using field controls instead (see my blog post detailing this here which is also on the ECM team blog and also discussed in my MSDN article Prescriptive Guidance for MOSS 2007 WCM Sites).

Maxime Bombardier has come up with an interesting workaround to fixing this for all WSS 3.0 based sites, including Publishing sites. This approach uses a custom ASP.NET Control Adapter to do some link fixup. In his post he references Waldek's similar process.

» Maxime Bombardier: Fixing absolute URLs for all Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) of Content Editor Web Part with a Control Adapter

Earlier this year I built a custom server with a few goals in mind:

• Very powerful & capable of running multiple machines for an extended time
• Must be quiet
• Fault tolerant
• Not requiring a hardware upgrade for a few years

The specs for this box have made it something that's turned into a great business expense as I've got so much use out of it. It's a nice strong machine that runs VERY quiet:

• Dual Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.33Ghz (8 cores total)
• 32GB RAM FBDIMM DDR2-800
• 1.5TB 7200 RPM fault tolerant storage (RAID 0+1)

I documented the build out experience in a series of three posts (part 1, part 2 & part 3) which explained how it was built and the parts used. Since then, and for some reason since posting a few pictures to Facebook of a cabinet I built over the last week to house it (along with my other computer equipment), I've received a lot of questions about not just the build out and box, but also general use and management. So instead of sending people to multiple links across my blog, I've written up a new article that supplements these other posts. In it I cover:

• Primary Virtualzation Server Goals
• First Failed Attempt
• Hardware List & Tech Specs
• Buildout & Placement
• Server Software Setup
• Virtual Machine / Client Connectivity - Working with the VMs on a Daily Basis

I hope this is helpful to some folks out there considering on doing something similar. You can read the whole article here:

» Creating a Custom and Quiet Virtualization Rig with Microsoft's Hyper-V

[via SharePoint Security]

I couldn't agree more with Adam's latest post. Too many people get hung up on "best practices" and thing they are the panacea in their SharePoint deployment when they should ALWAYS be taken at face value and used simply as a point of consideration in implementations. Great post Adam...

» When Best Practices Aren’t Best Practices

[via Wouter Van Vugt]

One of the biggest value add propositions of SharePoint's integration of Windows Workflow Foundation is the introduction of a human element. The biggest piece of this is likely the forms. Developers are given two options: ASP.NET pages (for WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007) or InfoPath forms (as long as you have a MOSS 2007 license). I usually prefer InfoPath forms because you can build and deploy a fully functioning form with zero or no code pretty quick. However, you're limited to just MOSS deployments...

When it comes to WSS 3.0 sites, your only option is ASP.NET pages. Unfortunately this means no slick designer and lots of code in just to implement the necessary plumbing.

... until now! Fellow Ted Pattison Group instructors Wouter Van Vugt (OpenXML MVP) and Chris Predeek have a project on CodePlex they posted as a final RTM stable release that helps you with this: WSS3 Workflow Tools. As Wouter says on his blog, it consists of:

• Base classes for all workflow form types
• UserControl framework, quite similar (but better …eh..) to what InfoPath is providing in MOSS
• Visual designers for InputForm, InputFormSection, InputFormControl and ButtonSection
• Visual Studio templates for VS2005 / VS2008, for all forms and controls
• Easy to use installer

Very cool stuff... it's worthy of a download and kicking of the tires!

» CodePlex: WSS3 Workflow Tools

Earlier today Microsoft released the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) toolkit on MSDN Code Gallery as a unsupported sample for SharePoint under the Ms-PL license. As defined by OASIS, WSRP:

WSRP defines a set of interfaces and related semantics which standardize interactions with components providing user-facing markup, including the processing of user interactions with that markup. This allows applications to consume such components as providing a portion of the overall user application without having to write unique code for interacting with each component.

SharePoint already included a WSRP consumer component. The toolkit includes the capability to implement the producer side. Included in the toolkit you'll find (1) a Visual Studio sample project that different approaches to create WSRP output from SharePoint, (2) a whitepaper documenting the architectural approaches and (3) screencasts.

Good to see this effort as there are those customers who have asked for this. However I'm happy to see Microsoft have more focus on technologies that do a better job in delivering on portal interop such as XML, RSS, REST and CMIS.

» SharePoint Team Blog: Announcing the WSRP Toolkit for SharePoint
» MSDN Code Gallery: WSRP Toolkit for SharePoint 2007

An article I worked on has recently been published on MSDN. The article, Finding Developer Help for SharePoint Products and Technologies, assists people in finding help and different resources when embarking on SharePoint projects. The trick is to know where to look to get good help: .NET SDK, WSS SDK or MOSS SDK. What about peer-to-peer help? Hopefully this article will attempt to nail these things down and point you in the right direction.

Here's a summary on what the article is all about:

Discover where to find the SDKs, peer-to-peer forums, MSDN developer centers, and Microsoft TechNet resources you need as you develop with Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies.

» MSDN: Finding Developer Help for SharePoint Products and Technologies

[via DevExpress]

Check out DevExpress' SharePoint ASP.NET demo control site: http://sharepoint.devexpress.com/default.aspx

This slick new SharePoint site is being used to host a few of their ASP.NET controls within SharePoint. The demo for their grid control (below) is very slick... you get the full featured capability to drag columns around and to put them in the gutter at the top for grouping:

» DevExpress ASP.NET Controls for SharePoint (announcement)

So I see I've been tagged by both pals Nick Swan and Spencer Harbar for geek Christmas recommendations. So, these are the geek things I have that I absolutely love. All are for the road warrior, like me, except one that I've extracted the most value out of.

APC Universal Battery Pack
I love this thing... we've all got devices that are powered via USB from phones to games to bluetooth headsets to MP3 players. This little guy (and I mean little) charges super fast and can then be used as a power source for any USB powered device. It works great for my Jawbone bluetooth headset, my iPod Touch & iPhone 3G and other devices. For those with 3G phones (not just the iPhone, but any battery sucking device), I love being able to jump on a plane, put my phone in airplane mode, plugging in the charge cable that came with my phone into this battery pack and dropping it in my bag. When you land, you've got a fully charged phone. I've never drained the battery on this thing... seems to charge forever!

Belkin Mini Surge Protector/Dual USB Charger
I picked this guy up just recently and it rocks. We've all been slim on power outlets in hotel rooms. This guy serves as a little spike bar, but also doubles as a USB device charger! For my last two trips, I was able to charge everything using this guy guy overnight on one single plug. What's cool is I don't have to lug around the AC adapter to my APC battery pack (above) or the plug for my iPhone anymore as they can plug right into the USB ports. Oh... and the Belkin guys were thinking: the plug can rotate 360 degrees for any situation.

Apple iPhone 3G
You know you love a device when after having it for a few months, you don't look at the newer devices, in this case phones, and get device envy. Not going to rant and rave over this one... I just love my phone. The phone experience is awesome, Exchange ActiveSync rocks, MP3 player, games, data... I love it. My only complaints: email folders are all locked in expand all mode, the speaker phone isn't loud and the vibrate is too subtle.

Sony PlayStation Portable
My wife got this for me two Christmas' ago and while I only seem to play it when I'm on the road, I love this guy. Killer little game system. Love Madden 2009 on it. I've also got some casino and racing games... would really like to get a good adventure / action / first person shooter though. Recommendations?

Bose QC3 Noise Canceling Headphones
An absolute must. Operation is easy: board plane, get these out and on your head ASAP so the joker next to you don't start talking to you. Everyone knows how well these cancel noise so when the guy looks irritated at you for ignoring him, you just point to the headphones and say "sorry, these block everything... even airplane jokers like you."

Wired Subscription
I wasn't going to mention this, but Spence nails it. Best geek magazine on the planet. I look forward to this every month. I do miss Business 2.0.

HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server
Last Christmas I finally got sick of my backup/restore strategy at home and decided to just bite the bullet and buy peace-of-mind. This guy ROCKS. I feel safe with it holding all my data... music, vidoes, photos, work stuff and now DVDs (my Vista Media Centers use a little gallery trick to show the DVD library I've ripped to my home server). I love how this guy backs up all my machines every night without me even having to think about it. Had a few machines blow up... within 2hrs I had the machine reimaged across my network from the WHS. Just to be safe I bought a 1TB WD MyBook with an eSATA port to backup the WHS.

Custom Virtualization Rig
Man, I can't tell you how much value I get out of this box I build mid-summer. Love it so much, I just ordered another 8GB of memory to boost it up to 32GB. Fantastic resource for the home office person who needs lots of machines: virtualize them! I documented the process in 3 blog posts: part 1, part 2 & part 3.

So... what do I want? I want to get one of those eReaders... but I'm not sold on the Kindle vs. Sony. There are aspects of both that I like (actually the new Kindle that will come out in the coming months.