Fear and Loathing

Hope everyone is geared up for the VS2005 launch! Steve B is about to go onstage in San Francisco in a minute or two with the keynote speech (Developers, Developers, Developers, anyone?). It's going to be blast!

The Canadian Launch starts tommorow with my good friend John Bristowe doing the honors of presenting all kinds of crazy stuff on centre stage. The launch starts in Toronto tommorow (November 8th) with it continuing throughout most of the month (John's in for a lot of airtime).

If you had the opportunity to check out TechEd the concept of Cabana's was flying about like a wild ride. You stop in, talk to some softies, MVPs, and otherwise knowledgable gentlemen about anything you want. Something you saw at the main presentation. Something you want to do with Visual Studio but can't. Something that bugs you about SQL Server 2005. Whatever. Anyways, it's a more relaxed atmosphere and we have some whiteboards and whatnot for you to sit back, relax, and have some fun. So drop by the Cabana's for some cool fun or just to talk. The Calgary launch is November 24th so hopefully you're hooked up already. I'm also at the Edmonton Launch on the 15th and there are some VIP dinners the night before each launch so if you're going to be at those, keep a clear line between me and the cheesecake if you want to make it to your next birthday.

BTW, if you're registered for the event you're going home with a special copy of VS2005. Yup. Free. This is not the current free Express edition, but a real, full blown (non-expiring) edition of the IDE. So after you get home from the event you'll be able to start building 2.0 apps immediately. How cool is that?

Well actually, for you it's start up your favorite MP3 player. Yes, I've dived into the deep, dark quagmire called podcasting. Together with Dan Sellers, John Bristowe, and James Kovacs we've launched a new podcast on .NET (like the world needs another podcast). John pitched the idea to us about doing a podcast (similar to .NET Rocks! but more techy and laid back) a couple of months ago. A few weeks ago we gathered in John's abode to commit our voices to the airwaves and a legend was born. Uhh, yeah.

It was a fun time and I'm hoping the podcast will be entertaining or informative to some. Be kind as it's our first foray into podcasting so other than the various technical glitches in the podcast I think it came out okay (as okay as one can sound without being completely boring). There was some discussion on SharePoint (briefly) but most of the podcast was focused on the VS2005 launch and the .NET 2.0 framework (with some bad Xbox 360 and Microsoft Bob jokes thrown in for good measure). If there's interest (and we hope there is) we'll continue this on a somewhat regular basis so feel free to leave your feedback in the forums and subscribe to the feeds to stay updated (yes, yet another userid/password you'll have to remember).

You can check out our Plumbers @ Work site here and try to live through the first episode here. This should be available on the MSDN audio site shortly as well.

This came up in the newsgroups and is a common thing that people want so I thought I would share it here (as the newsgroupie was happy with my solution).

Since the dawn of the SharePoint 2003 man, views have been ways to filter information. Of course they're public views for everyone to see. But what if you want to have views just to show data filtered by a user (for security reasons). The first answer would be "Well Bil" (as I often refer to myself in the third person) "you could just have everyone in the company create personal views and they would be, well, personal". Uh yeah. Okay, two problems with this. First, while they are "personal" they're also "public" if you know the URL to get to them. There's no security on them whatsoever and security through obscurity just doesn't cut it. Second, having everyone in a company (unless you're a company of 10) isn't really feasible. We need a better way.

Enter the [Me] filter. Yup, plain old silly little [Me] that we see in the help files for creating views. Lets say you have a list of Sales results and for whatever reason (yes, I've seen this in organizations before) the powers that be don't want Sales Guy #1 (Joe) to see Sales Guy #327 (Ricardo) information. We have a list with various Sales figures but we have a cool thing called "Created By". This is the built in field that tags the item in the list with the name of the person who created it (makes sense doesn't it?). So now we can go into the default view and add a filter. Select the "Created By" field as the filter and enter [Me] as the value it has to equal. Voila, Abbacadabra, and Presto Chango. The view now only shows Joes sales figures to Joe and Ricardo's to Ricardo. Magic huh?

If you need an "admin" view then you can just create a personal view that doesn't have the filter and do something like group by the "Created By" field. Okay, so you're looking at your browser and saying "But Bil, you just told me that the personal view isn't personal and anyone can see it". Yes, well this is SharePoint and doesn't always provide the best solutions for everyone.

An alternative that you can do though to really hide this info is possible (hide as in your security guys won't be beating you upside the head if you create a personal view). Create a new document library and give whomever access you want to it. These would be the important people with Armani suits that want to see all of the sales figures just because it's part of their performance expectations for the year. Now create a new Web Part Page and put it in this library. On this Web Part Page drag the Sales list onto it. Crack the page open in FP2003 and convert the list to a DataView Web Part (oh yeah, you're getting it now right?). Now apply whatever filters you want to the list and save it. Since the Web Part page is in a Document Library, the security is applied to the library so Ricardo and Joe won't be able to see it but the big, powerful execs will. Problem solved (I hope).

Okay, the posts are probably going to be fast and furious (sans Vin Diesel) for the next month or so as we kick off the Visual Studio 2005 launch (and throw in the appropriate SharePoint info here and there). If you're still waiting for your MSDN download to complete (like I am) then you can check out the 2.0 Framework download here or the SDK download here. This is the final version stuff so get developing! No more betas, no more release candidates, no more what flavour of product x should I use with framework y?

Also if you haven't already signed up for the 2005 Visual Studio Launch Event I urge you to do so now. Seats are filling up across the country so some places are in waiting mode now. This is the biggest launch event in Microsoft's history and frankly, the products just kick ass (go ahead Eclipse and Java guys, slam me all you want). The main launch event page can be found here. Sweaty Steve Ballmer is going to be kicking it off in San Francisco on November 7th. I saw him at the MVP Summit as he gave the keynote there. Steve is an excellent presenter and really gets the crowd going.

As for the Canada launch, it kicks off November 8th in Toronto with lots of great stuff. I'll be working at the Calgary event at the Stampede on November 24th (and maybe head up to Edmonton for the launch there on the 15th) so come by and have some fun. We're going to be doing some cool stuff at the launch with the Cabana idea that started at TechEd. Basically an informal area where you can sit down, talk about VS2005, SQL Server 2005 or whatever (yes, SharePoint) and relax with some MVPs and Microsquishies. We'll have some whiteboards setup and be there to answer questions, talk about the new products, and whatever else strikes your fancy. It's going to be a blast.

Like I said, lots to post on the new products, on what's going on in SharePointLand (especially with 2.0 support now [well, except for SPS]) and other goodies going on. So stay tuned for some cool stuff.

Just found out that the release version of Visual Studio 2005 and various goodies are now available on MSDN Downloads. This includes Visual Studio 2005, Visio for Enterprise Architects (2005), and SQL 2005. These are the standard and professional editions of VS2005 but not the Visual Studio Team System line.

Gentlemen, start your engines!

Thanks for the IM AC!

EDIT: I managed to download SQL Server 2005 and Visio but couldn't get the IDE before both MSDN and the downloads turfed. According to Microsoft they are working on it but expect to get your download later with the other products coming online within a few days as well.

EDIT 2: DVD images are now online and the download site seems to be functioning again. Hope there's nobody on dial-up that's trying to get this stuff. Also watch for some cool announcements next week about VS2005 and what's going on in my corner of the world.

How much is a SharePoint blog worth to you? Based on some research by Tristan Louis on how much a blog is worth (based on linking, popularity, phases of the moon, whatever) Dane Carlson wrote a small applet that will calculate the value of your blog. Just input your blog's URL and it comes back with a value and a small snippet of HTML you can put on your site. Here's mine:

While it's completely silly and who knows what the calculation is based on, my blog showed up to be worth about $45k. Fitz came in at $44k so not sure if that's good or bad. Anyways just for kicks, I wasted 15 minutes of my life and here's the rundown on how much most of the SharePointHeads blogs are worth (in descending order of value, just so we can show up each other in our little circle of freakness).

So next time one of us spouts off perls of wisdom just remember that you're getting high priced information for free (based on this incredibly scientific system, can you feel the sarcasm dripping from your browser yet?). BTW, Scoble's blog (which some say is the mother of all blogs) comes in around $2.2 million for comparison.

My blog was getting lonely so I thought I would post a quick tip for people.

By default, when you create a new sub-area in SharePoint Portal Server (off the Home page) it will be a content area. From there you can create sub-areas and whatnot but what if you want the new area to use the News template? Or one of your own custom ones?

1. Navigate to your Portals home page
2. Click on Change Settings
3. Click on the Page tab
4. Change the Subarea Templates option to be able to use any template

Voila. Done. Now when you create a new subarea off the home page, it'll ask you what template you want to use for it. I don't know how many times I keep having to do this when I setup a new dev portal and how much frustration it brings me that I have to blow away my area, change the setting, then recreated it.

This Official SharePoint Portal Server Tip brought to you by the letter "P" and the number "42".

I don't often point my blog to other peoples but I thought this was relevant (and way overdue) and it was a Sunday afternoon and I'm not wearing any pants. Susan Bradley, our SBS Diva, has posted an excellent comparison of plain-jane WSS against Small Business Server (SBS) and it's use of WSS here. As with most Microsoft products coming out these days (VSTS, Navision, CRM, Project Server, etc.) they all use WSS for their document sharing and collaboration junk. SBS is no exception and Susan nails the differences between the two in a nice entry. This question comes up a lot and there seems to be a lot of bickering about WSS vs. WSS on SBS so hopefully this clears things up as they are really the same thing, just configured differently. No magic. No mirrors. Just options. Go read. Now.