Fear and Loathing

It's Saturday morning as I enter this but the last few days have been an incredibly exhausting time. Our schedule on the campus starts around 5:30 when you get up, usually entails a half hour bus ride from the hotels and then various sessions. Yesterday was the most exhaustive of the schedule as our brains were saturated with presentation upon presentation. Again, a lot of stuff I've seen at PDC but the experience of having the product teams here and interacting with them makes drinking the Kool-Aid much more paletable.

The day was full of cool sessions and has got a lot of us thinking about what we'll be doing for the next year as we help you guys get up to speed on the new products, ease your migrations and pain points if you going from the current version to the new one, and generally look at doing what we do with our technology areas; push the envelope of what is possible. There's been a lot of inspiration this week, a lot of in-depth conversations with people, and a lot of new horizons to discover as we continue to integrate, innovate, and communicate our experiences and yours with the SharePoint technology stack and look at ways to really drive the creation of business solutions on the platform to the n-th degree.

After what seemed like a whirlwind day of sessions yesterday, we wound down with a trip to the Experience Music Project (EMP) and the Sci-Fi Museum (SFM) at the Space Needle last night. It was a pretty packed event but lots of interesting stuff to see. If you have a chance to check it out when you're in Seattle, give it a try. So it's off to breakfast now with the final sessions wrapping up today, saying goodbye to everyone and a BBQ to end the week. Here's to hoping the weather is good for us today.

MVP Group Photo Pool (Join up today!)
My MVP Summit Flickr Set

First off, my apologies for those that were tortured in their news aggregators with yesterdays blog entry. It was a long day and I did 4 or 5 separate postings in Notepad throughout the day then a single blog post which was probably the longest one I've done so far.

Today was the first "real" day at the summit as we had some great keynotes (including one from Steve Ballmer, boy does he just have a killer stage presence) and then some general sessions (some new, some stuff I've seen at PDC). Again, a lot of networking and talking and meeting with new people. There's just so many of us here and so many Microsoft people to talk to as well.

As I mentioned, I'll keep these posts shorter as I'm sure you don't want to spend more than a few minutes reading my blabber. The fact that I can't post details about what's going on here will keep the posts short and like I said before, will be more about how many beers per MVP are being consumed and what blackmail pictures we can post on Microsoft employees.

I've created a Flickr Group Photo Pool here. If you have MVP pictures please add them to your Flickr site and join the MVP group! It's open for anyone to join so just join up and add your pics (as I'm sure everyone is getting tired of my SharePoint people pics). C'mon MVPs, let's see pics from the other groups. Also you should tag your pictures with "mvp05" which will allow anyone to find the pictures from the Summit quickly and easily. Please pass this information to other MVPs that you see taking pictures! (and yes, Channel 9 guy is back for the Summit!)

MVP Group Photo Pool
My MVP Summit Flickr Set

Speaking of Notepad, we don't have an MVP for Notepad. I think this is a serious gap in the entire MVP substructure and something needs to be done about it immediately.

I'm at the airport waiting for flight AC205 to Vancouver then another hop down to Seattle for the Summit. I have to hand it to Air Canada for the check-in process. It's a slick set of machines that you walk up to, insert a credit card and get your boarding pass and whatnot printed out for you. Took all of about 10 minutes to get through it and checked my bag in then I was off. Sometimes you can upgrade your seat or whatever, which I was hoping to do, but guess the flight is filled up. In any case, it's a great way to check in and gives me that little shot of nerdrenaline in the morning that we geeks need.

Getting through customs was easy, as usual. Hey guys, this is Calgary and while we do call it an "International" airport, expect to show up about an hour (tops) before your flight at any time during the day. I'm planning on doing a lot of traveling this year as I now have clients down in the States to nuture and pamper so the Aeroplan guy convinced me that $120 a year is a good thing to for their plan. Seems like a good deal and it was after I had my morning coffee at Timmy's so why not.

I was waiting at the terminal and looking at the no smoking sign everywhere but there were a ton of places to buy tobacco at the shops. This doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to me but okay, I'll go with it (there are some places in the food area sectioned off like a glass house where you can toke up). A guy who was obviously going to head into smoke land asked me if I had a lighter. What the hell? Why do smokers never have lighters? You're a smoker, isn't that the main tool for your habit? You need two things as a smoker, a cigarette and a way to product flame. You ever see anyone with asthma borrow an inhaler? I don't think so. Some peoples kids.

I'm staying at the Crowne Plaza (Room 2055). I'm planning on hooking up with Al Dunbar at Seattle to share a ride with him and his daughter. Also picked up the required items for the flight, a tin of Tim Horton coffee for our ex-Canadian MVP Lead and a keychain Calgary for someone who's collecting them at the Summit (sorry, can't remember who so hopefully we'll hook up before the weekend). As odd as it may sound, I collect sand from various places in the world (my secret plan to build my own beach) so hopefully there are a few people at the summit that are going to be bringing me a sample. The security I hear at the Summit is pretty tight if you're not an MVP and with all the NDA stuff going on, as I said, this may just be a series of horrible blogs on Bil's Adventure in Microsoft Land with pictures of drunk MVPs and homeless Seatle people (or drunk Seattle people and homeless MVPs, whichever works for you). Feel free to change the channel to something more interesting.

The weather looks great for take-off here in Cowtown but I don't have any WiFi access at the airport so can't check to see what's going on in Seattle. I really think it would be great if they just provided free WiFi at all airports and not for certain customers (Telus Mobily customers get it free, but I'm on another plan). Really is it that hard to make us geeks happy when we're stuck sitting around for a couple of hours? It's not like we're going to be downloading the latest Brad Pitt movie on our laptops at the airport are we? Oh well. Someday. I did however buy a new Brookstone umbrella (complete with light up handle for the nerd factor) coming back from PDC just in case it's wet down there.

They just paged Mr. Douglas MacArthur to the desk. Can't wait to see old iron guts show up. I thought he was dead but guess the heroes don't die, they just wander aimlessly through the Calgary airport looking for their luggage. I'm off to find Elvis and Jim to see if they want to jam.

Takeoff was good. I missed a great photo-op with the downtown core being lit by the morning sun and the Rocky Mountains in the background while water flowed off the window. Oh well. The Rocky Mountains look awesome, as always, and even more so at 10,000 feet as the snow covers the tops now. It never ceases to amaze me how stupid people are when they get onto a plane. I mean, how freakin' hard is it to find your seat? The seats are clearly labeled (at least IMHO) with the row and what letter is the window seat. Watching everyone board no less than 3 groups were in the wrong seat with 1 not even near the right row (they were 3 rows off and on the wrong side). Is it that much to ask for people to learn their ABCs and 123s by now? The flight is pretty thin and I lucked out to have an empty seat next to me so nobody bumping my elbow as I update the blog.

I can't see anyone else on the flight I know but I'm sure there were some coming from T.O., Edmonton, and Calgary on here. Maybe I could scream "MVP Rocks!" at the top of my lungs and see if anyone looks. I could always chalk it up to Tourettes if the air people ask. Well, I have my dorky MVP badge around my neck so that's about as dorky as I can get for someone to spot me. The upside is that if I get lost (say in a bar or something) you can just drop me in a mailbox and hopefully they'll return me to the SharePoint group in Redmond (wouldn't that be a neat package to get at the office eh Fitz?).

I do find that I'm just going to have to change to business class (and why is it called business class now instead of first class? to ease the blow to those in the "hospitality class" so they don't think they're second class. That's just plain dumb). At least in first business class, my extra deep laptop won't dig into my gut as I type. It's great that they have a nice wrist area for the new laptops, but now you need an extra deep seat (which you definately do not get in second hospitality class) just to open the damn thing.

So I rolled into Vancouver airport without incident and met up with Eric from Winnipeg and Al Dunbar from Edmonton (whom I setup a ride to the hotel with). The flight was short from Vancouver to Seattle on board a tiny prop plane which isn't much bigger than a SUV (but probably uses up a little more fuel). Didn't we invent some technology called the jet engine back in the 50s or something? We hit Seattle and checked into the hotel. The hotel I'm staying at (The Crowne Plaza) is quite nice (trust me, anything where the shower head is at eye level is bonus in my books) with the room being nice and roomy. You can reach me in room 2055 if you're looking for me. Feel free to drop by sometime. It was interesting to find a package with ear plugs, a face mask, and a hypno-CD that I can play on my Sony "Dream Machine". Guess they figure we're going to be so burnt out from the day we need it to relax (either that or the CD is actually subliminal messages telling us to buy more Microsoft product). It was also interesting to find movies that are still in the theatre (like War of the Worlds) available for $13 on my TV set. In any case, check out the pics in my Flickr site for more goodness. 

The summit, well, is fantastic. It's going to be bloody exhaustive the next few days so expect more long dribbly blogs from me at the end of the night. I grabbed a short bus ride (30 minutes) from the hotel to the Microsoft Campus. Oh boy is the campus impressive. It's a proverbial city unto itself, with buildings all over each unique in architectureal design. Very, very slick. After registration I had planned to hit the Employee store and stock up on my Linux posters, but networking took it's toll and I hooked up with some great people that I've been reading their blogs for months now. It's truely awesome to put words to faces and great to meet people like Michael Greth from Germany in person (watch for a MVP Summit podcast from him soon). Like PDC, this event is huge with over 1500 MVPs in attendance and 1200 Microsquishy employees catering to our every need. Pure magic.

So it's off to a dinner and drinking and whatever gutter I end up in tonight. At least this trip I still have the same camera I started with. Catch you guys tommorow.

Flickr MVP Photos

It's here! It's here! Just wanted to let you know that WSS SP 2 is now available on the Microsoft Download Center. You can find the direct download link here.

The WSS SP 2 release has substantial supportability improvements including:

• Support for running on 64-bit machines in 32-bit emulation mode 
• Support for Reverse Proxy and Alternate URL support
• Support for IP Bound virtual servers
• Support for off-box SSL termination
• Support for SQL Server 2005
• Support for ASP.NET 2.0

Everyong running WSS and SPS are encouraged to update to WSS SP 2.  However, although SPS SP1/RTM will be able to run on top of WSS SP2, Microsoft is restricting support for the "shared" functionality that is added in SP2 for SPS and WSS until SPS SP2 ships. The shared functionality is the support improvements above.

In other words, even though you'll be able to install WSS SP2 on SPS SP1/RTM installs, you still need to wait for SPS SP2 before utilizing any of the newly-supported functionality above.

Some useful KB articles related to this release:

• Issues that are fixed in SP2
• Description of WSS SP2
• Guidance for deploying WSS SP 2 including the new SP 2 version number
• This KB article has been updated to reflect that SP 2 now enables Kerberos out of box. The one main addition in the article is how to switch back to to NTLM if you accidentally chose Kerberos and it was not what you wanted.  If you chose Kerberos and did not configure the SPN then your users will not be able to autheticate to the SharePoint site.
• When switching a WSS virtual server from ASP.NET 1.0 to ASP.NET 2.0 you need to run an stsadm operation to update web.config for new ASP.NET 2.0 security settings

The Windows SharePoint Services Administration Guide will be updated later in the day today. Make sure to download the latest copy so that you have instructions for using the new WSS SP 2 feature functionality.

• Compiled Help File Build
• Live version on Technet

Windows SharePoint Services SP 2 will also ship in Windows Server R2.  Additional documentation about the new SP 2 features is included in this walkthrough document.

Thanks to Gabe Bratton for this information and Microsoft for this very cool release. Get yours today before they're all gone. Operators are standing by!

Update (14:26 MST): Added links to the KB articles with a description of the Service Pack and what issues it fixes. These are now online for your consumption. Enjoy!

Update (23:18 MST): Microsoft is also (officially) supporting FireFox 1.0.4 (and later) with this SP2 for WSS. Sweet!

A couple of quickies tonight.

In preparation for the upcoming Service Pack 2 for WSS (which provides ASP.NET 2.0 support to enable WSS to run on ASP.NET 2.0. but we do
not get to use native ASP.NET 2.0 web parts until WSS v3), the online SharePoint Products and Technologies SDK documentation has been updated already to include information about reverse proxy support and the WSS object model. You can check out the updated documentation here (Note that the Service Pack hasn't been released yet but stay tuned for that).

Just a note with the next few days I'm away at the MVP Summit, I'm delaying my WSS V3 Deep Dive series to start next Monday, October 3 when I get back (also gives me more time to prep and get as much in as I can).

I've finally got caught up on everything that happened at PDC (as well getting my system back online at home). I'm starting a series of SharePoint V3 Deep Dives next week focusing on various new features so stay tuned for that. The week will be cut short as I'm off to Redmond on Wednesday for the MVP Summit and I think all of it will be NDA so no blogging (but I'll post pics on my Flickr site of other MVPs getting drunk which should be good for blackmail sometime in the future).

Stramit (among others) has a great blog posting with links to all the non-NDA PowerPoint presentations on Office 12 and SharePoint V3. Check it out. There's also a whack of other slide decks here as well for the rest of the conference covering Vista, Windows Workflow, and other next year goodness.

Finally I just got an email today about Amazon and Microsoft hosting a Developer Challenge. It's dated September 12 and was supposed to be done at the launch of PDC but for whatever reason it dropped in my inbox this morning (you probably already know about so ignore this passage if that's the case). First place is $5,000 of Amazon bucks and there are some pretty good runner up prizes (like an X-Box 360 which is always good). Basically build an interesting application using the Amazon Web Services. The contest runs through until December 31 so there's plenty of time to check out the details here and get building!

Back in Calgary after a week in sunny L.A. It's good to be home but took me awhile to get going. When I returned one of my development PCs had decided to do some Windows updating while I was gone (how nice of it) and ended up getting screwed up on reboot as it looked for hal.dll (I'm sure some of you have seen that before). Had to fiddle with some drives but got it back now.

Kit Kai, a fellow MVP, has posted a series of great articles on allowing a team to edit a document together. It's broken down into 4 articles and you can check out the series here:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

Finally there's a global MVP summit coming up at the end of the month. A week from now I'll be down in Redmond hanging with the SharePoint dudes and having a grand time with other MVPs. It's quite an event as MVPs from all around the world get together and have a good time. Unfortunately for some, their governments (for whatever reasons) have denied issuing visas to them. The MVPs from Sri Lanka won't be attending the summit which is too bad as global should mean global and not "everyone except these countries..." So Jinath, Manzi, and Prasanna won't be joining us in Washington next week. We'll remember to raise a glass to you and get you some cool schwag.

That's it for this years Professional Developers Conference. It's done like dinner. As I'm writing they just announced that there was a single winning ticket for the L.A. lottery here, which was at $250 million. Yup, that's a quarter billion dollars which is about what it probably cost for this years PDC. A slow day for walking (9,030 steps, 6.84 miles) and pretty quiet as things wound down. The Channel 9 guys were giving away the bean bag chairs so a few people were on the bus with their own Channel 9 guy they can use in their cubicle (can you imagine explaining that to airline security or even buying an extra ticket for your chair?). 

No SharePoint sessions today. Sad huh? I finally managed to hook up with Kate Gregory this morning during breakfast. When you come to these things there's sessions you want to attend (or have to give), booths to see, etc. but you end up always hooking up with people and getting distracted (the butterfly effect). This is what's been happening all week with me and others mention it as well. It's good that I met a few people (even stumbling across Medhat, a MCS guy from Calgary that I've known for years) on the last day as it might be awhile before I see them again, even though we're always travelling around and such. Kate of course was heading off to the C++ talks which I heard was pretty interesting.

I sat in on the future of Agile panel discussion. It was a good talk but didn't seem to talk much about the "future" of Agile but rather the current state of Agile and what Agile meant to everyone. On the panel were (pictured below, left to right) Don Reinertsen, Peter Provost, Jim Newkirk (father of NUnit), Don Reifer, and Clemens Szyperski, with Randy Miller moderating the fishbowl session.

What is Agile? The panel generally agreed that was "emphasis on feedforward rather than feedback" with emphasis on keeping the feedback loop short and most stated it as a "series of practices to add value to clients" which sums it up nicely. Jim Newkirk had a biased towards "the smallest amount of process needed to get the job done" with a high bandwidth within the team (which is key to any Agile practice). Peter Provost was happy to say that Agile was about the "right thing at the right time for his customers" and to do the right thing at the last "responsible" moment.

Don Reinertsen had a great analogy for Agile. He said it was like standing in the fog on a road. Waterfall is where you put a plan together to get to the end of the fog (where that is) whereas Agile tends to have you walk 50 yards, make adjustments, continue, etc. until you complete the journey. This "plan as I walk" approach is great and will give you that immediate feedback that you're on the right track (or allow you to correct it if you're heading down the wrong way).

Randy stepped up during a question and talked about the "total team" where everyone is communicating and collaborating, not just the devs. Get your testers, analysts, and architects all involved as it's important how they interact. The concept of "exploratory testing" came up (which is a term I hadn't heard of before, but then contrary to popular belief I don't know everything [except when it comes to SharePoint]) but the whole panel was quite happy about seeing this emerging and suggested taking a look at it to involve everyone.

All in all a good session (but I did have to duck out early) but check out the blogs linked above for more information. There are also a great set of links all over the place for Agile but you can start here (which is one of the many jumping points to other places).

So I'm here in L.A. for another day taking in the tourist stuff tommorow and snapping pics of the Los Angeles wildlife. A few things that I've learned from this trip:

• Take the business class flight if it's over a couple of hours, your butt will appreciate the extra space
• Don't check into a hotel with a shower designed for munchins.
• Don't answer your cell at 11pm at night from a complete stranger who only knows you through your blog. More importantly, don't say "Yes" to going out on the town with them
• The only quake I experienced in L.A. was in my head the morning after said phone call.
• Don't take the Universal Studio tour at night. While the lines were short and beer was free, the only thing we got to see were chipmunks and it wasn't even Alvin and Theordore (and I think I just lost about half the readers of this blog with that comment, so that cuts down my audience to 4 instead of 8)
• I genuinely feel that I have Electro's super powers as I was responsible for restoring power in our hotel after the blackout (well, at least it looks that way to me so just go with me on it)
• Taking notes on my PDA sucks as it note only screws up when you switch away, but it's just a bloody mess trying to make heads or tails out of it hours later. Next time is a Tablet PC and OneNote.
• Wireless was hit and miss. After the first day I couldn't get my laptop reconnected to wireless except back in Munchkin land so it was wired hookups. It's odd because I could almost always get WiFi'd with my PDA. Go figure.
• Oh yeah, SharePoint v3 ROCKS!

Again I want to say hi to everyone that I came across (it was cool seeing a few dozen people reading my blog while I was wandering through the computer areas). Also shouts out to those that I came across at the last minute like Julie Lerman, Kate Gregory, Todd Bleeker (wish we had more time to talk), Ted Pattison, Eli Robillard, Patrick, Jan, of course Fitz and the Professor and Mary Anne (and everyone else I missed).

Next week I'm starting a series of V3 posts with focus on individual features so a bit of a more deeper dive into what's to come. Talking to Fitz before I left he'll be posting almost daily for the next few weeks with all the stuff that he can now say so keep an eye out there as well on other blogs in the SharePointSphere so you can see all the cool stuff coming to a virtual machine near you.

Tags and Links
PDC05
Flickr
Moblog
Google Maps where I'm staying (Miyako)