50 Before 50 – The best way to celebrate a big birthday is with friends

“How will you celebrate your 50th” Throw a big party and invite all your friends? Take a trip with a few good friends? Neither was right for me. Whenever we have a lot of people over for a party I feel like I just don’t have enough time to catch up with all the guests. When you take a cool trip with friends, it’s a wonderful opportunity to connect, but everyone has different travel routines and standards, and the financial and time constraints limit who can join.

I’ve been joking that my mid-life crisis is becoming a metalhead, but joking aside, turning 50 is a good opportunity to take a minute and pause.

So, when I turned 49, I decided I would celebrate my 50th by trying to catch up with 50 friends before I hit 5-0. All too often the day to day business of life stops us from finding time to spend with people we love. How often have you said to someone “We should get together sometime” only to have a year, or two, or five go by.

Setting this goal would force me to jam all those “sometimes” into 365 days.

For those who don’t like reading, I have added a then & now photo collage at the bottom of the post to give you an idea of the wide array of friendships I had a chance to re-energize over the year!Thank you to each and every friend who made time to catch up, and to all of you I did not get to catch up with… I still want to see you!

I won’t go into detail on every single lunch, supper, run, coffee, but I do want to share what I learned from the experience.

Lesson #1 Friends are for life

Just because you haven’t seen someone in a year, 5 years, 20 years, doesn’t mean you can’t reach out and have a great time catching up! My record reunion was with a high school friend Nanette. We had not seen each other or really stayed in touch for the last 27 years or so, not so much as a Christmas card/email. But when we met this summer, we stayed at the restaurant long after we had paid the bill talking about friends, family, and life. Try not to take offense if a friend is in town and does not make time to see you. I travel a lot, for work and for pleasure. Sometimes my schedule is taken up visiting family, or entertaining others. Sometimes I just want to spend a night flopped in my hotel room with a can of pringles and whatever Will Smith movie is playing on AMC. Even extroverts like me need a little down time. I don’t always have the energy to go across town and meet someone for supper. It doesn’t change the fact that when it does work out, I always enjoy catching up with you! So please reach out and I promise to do the same.

#2 – Friends come from all walks of your life

50 friends in one year? Do I even have 50 friends? I have been working at home for the past 8+ years, and at times that leaves me feeling isolated and lonely. This exercise has been a reminder, that when I do feel alone, all I have to do is reach out. My friends are there, they just don’t know when I need them. Yes, they are busy, just like me, so it may take a couple a while to catch up in person, but wow I do have a lot of wonderful people in my life!

For my 50 Before 50 challenge, my definition was simple: A friend is someone I look forward to seeing and spending time with. My list included sisters, in-laws, my godmother, nieces and nephews, childhood friends, high school friends, university friends, interns, co-workers, conference buddies, ultimate players, soccer players, running buddies, kickboxing partners, parents I met at hockey practices or kids birthday parties, and more! Some are deep friendships, some are acquaintances who have only recently become friends. I am fortunate because not only did I find 50 people I wanted to spend time with who were willing to reciprocate, but also because there are friends I wanted to catch up with and didn’t and I met new people who I hope become friends.

#3 Catching up takes effort

There are friends you see regularly. I run Sunday mornings with a wonderful group of friends. I look forward to it, and it’s easy, it’s part of my routine. Catching up with Janice & Cheryl in Dallas, required detouring my Austin trip through Dallas and renting a car to drive from Dallas to Austin and back. But Cheryl and Janice immediately re-arranged their own plans to meet for dinner on the one and only night that I was available. Roxanne & Tony met me in a town halfway between Pembroke and Ottawa on a Tuesday night for dinner because that was the only way to fit it in. Sometimes, okay, many times, I had to take advantage of business trips, or make special trips to make it all happen. I met friends in Fredericton, Burlington, Boston, Toronto, Seattle, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Las Vegas, Dallas, San Francisco, Montreal, Calgary, and even on a cruise ship! My friends were great about making an effort to meet me in whatever window was available to help me hit my 50 before 50 goal. Letting me crash at their place, picking me up from my hotel to grab breakfast before work, inviting me to crash their girls night out at the theatre, trekking into the city from the burbs, driving across town to join me for a run, taking the train to Ottawa. I would never have hit the goal without their efforts! I should also mention how lucky I am to have a husband who supported me in pursuing my goal!

You can’t always see people in person, so remember all the ways you can connect without being there in person. Mail a physical Christmas card, make a phone call, send an email, mail a postcard! Share a photo or add a personal note when you write on their birthday wall in Facebook. It will be appreciated!

#3 The grass is NEVER greener

If all you see from your friends is their social media feeds or Christmas newsletters, you get a very skewed view of their lives. I struggle with FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). When I see my friends hosting a dinner, running a race, gathering at a conference, travelling, receiving awards, being successful I have to admit, all too often my first reaction is jealousy and even a bit of sadness. Am I missing out? Am I less successful? Let’s be 100% clear! I am not fishing for sympathy or comfort! My life is good with it’s own ups and downs (left my job to join a start up, that didn’t work out, applied for a job tailor made for me, didn’t get the job, Connor is having fun taking Geo Engineering at Queens, Carter is about to star in another school play, I set personal bests running this year, Trevor and I did not freeze at the Grey Cup!)  But the human brain does like to mess with us and it is so easy to focus on what we don’t have or what we are missing instead of appreciating what we have (cue up suitable song here – Rolling Stones – Can’t Always Get What You Want, or Cheryl Crow Soak up the Sun). Well next time you have that moment, I’m here to tell you when sit down and get past the ‘how about this weather’ conversation and really connect you are reminded everyone’s life is full of ups and downs. Work may be going great, but mum or dad is getting older and needs more care. One kid is doing great, but the other is struggling. Had an amazing vacation, but lost a much loved dog or cat. Cancer sucks.

Maybe we all need to print and hang up a few more photos from the good moments instead of just posting them on Facebook so when things are rough we have a physical reminder that we were happy before, and yes we can be happy again. Hmmm, do you suppose that’s why I have a hidden passion for scrapbooking? (“Look at this Photograph – every time I do it makes me laugh”)

#4 – Take a moment to be thankful for each day that you wake up healthy.

There’s a great scene in The Princess Bride. Tyrone, the six fingered man, invites Prince Humperdink to come help torture Wesley. Prince Humperdink says “Tyrone, you know much I love watching you work. But I’ve got my country’s 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped!” Tyrone replies “Get some rest, if you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything”. So true! Many of the friends I caught up with, battled or are still battling: fractures, concussions, hip, knee, back, foot issues, cancer, heart problems, depression. Many of them attended a funeral this year for a co-worker, friend, or relative who was taken away. Sometimes those funerals came at the end of a long life well lived. Some came far too soon caused by a tragic accident or illness. So within the scope of what you can control, take care of yourself! For all of you still grieving, or coping with illness (your own or someone else’s) hug! Please don’t hesitate to reach out for help when you need it.

#5 – What makes you awesome isn’t your job/house/car/running pace

What makes you awesome is the fact that when we sit down together you will listen patiently as I talk about my last marathon and show you pictures from my heavy metal cruise. In return I promise to listen as you share stories of <insert whatever is going on in your life here>. You are awesome because when we get together we can share a laugh or a cry. You are awesome because you took time out of your busy life to hang out with me. Thank you!

#6 It never ends…

For all of you who are recent friends, or who I did not manage to catch up with this year… I’m thikning 60 before 60! Though to make it a little easier, I’m giving myself a decade to get this one done!  So shall we set a date? I can’t wait to see you! Meanwhile here is a selection of photos past and present from those who helped me reach 50 before 50!

Want to learn more about Visual Studio 11 and .NET 4.5 Beta?

I know I’m not the only one curious about the contents of Visual Studio 11 and .NET 4.5 so here are some resources to help you see what’s coming!

Get the beta February 29th!

The Visual Studio team has gone hog wild the past few days releasing lots of great information about Visual Studio 11 and the .NET 4.5 Beta that will be available February 29th. I just wanted to share with you some of the great articles they have posted so you can start geeking out!

• Visual Studio 11 Beta home page
• What’s new in Visual Studio 11 Beta – Visual Studio product page
• The Road to Visual Studio 11 BETA AND .net 4.5 Beta – blog post by S.Somasegar
• Sneak Preview of Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5 Beta – blog post by Jason Zander
• Coming Soon: TFS Express – blog post by Brian Harry
• Introducing the New Developer Experience – blog post from Visual Studio Blog
• Visual Studio 11 Beta Go Live – Information on how to go live with the Visual Studio 11 Beta and .NET Framework 4.5 Beta

And one last link, because betas are great to download and explore but if you haven’t bought or renewed your existing Visual Studio license Get ready with MSDN: Save up to 35% on Visual Studio with MSDN

How do I use HTML5 in Visual Studio 2010?

In this post, I’ll share what I learned about how to get started writing HTML5 code in Visual Studio 2010.

HTML5 seems to be everywhere these days! I started trying it myself a few months back and I quickly decided that if possible, I wanted to play with it in Visual Studio. I’ve been working with Visual Studio for years, it’s got to be simpler to keep working with the developer tool I already know and love rather than moving to a new tool. Besides I want to be able to incorporate HTML5 into ASP.NET applications!  It took me a bit of messing about to get up and running with HTML5 the way I know there will be greater support for HTML5 in Visual Studio 11. But for now I am working with Visual Studio 2010.  I thought I would share what I learned so hopefully it will be easier for you.

Here’s what you want to do:

• Add HTML5 validation and intellisense
• Create an HTML5 project
• Set up for <video> and <audio>
• Play!

Add HTML5 Validation and Intellisense

You will definitely want to make sure you have Service Pack 1 installed! By installing Service Pack 1 you get both intellisense (can’t live without that anymore) and validation for HTML5. Don’t forget after you install Service pack 1 to go to Tools | Options | Text Editor | HTML | Validation and set the validation to HTML5 or XHTML5 or the HTML5 validation won’t work.

First of all there is a really great blog by Burke Holland on how to use the MVC HTML5 template for Visual Studio 2010 here.

Create an HTML5 project in Visual Studio

You have a couple of choices here.

• Modify an existing template to be HTML5 or create your own template. There is a great blog describing how to do that here.
• Download the MotherEffin ASP.NET MVC HTML5 template that Jacob Gable was kind enough to post on the VisualStudio Gallery.
• Download the mobile ready ASP.NET MVC HTML5 template that Sammy Ageil was kind enough to post on the Visual Studio Gallery

Set up for <video> and <audio>

The first tags I started playing with in Visual Studio were the video and audio tags. I immediately had problems getting an actual video to display on my web page it was really frustrating. Here is what I had to do to get everything working. The basic problem was with the MIME types. When a .avi, or .MP3 file was used on my website, the web server didn’t recognize that those were video and audio files. To get it working I had to edit my web.config file and make sure I had IIS express running in the development environment instead of the development server built into Visual Studio to ensure that my web.config file was being used to figure out the MIME types. You need to do this for the WOFF fonts as well.

• Install IIS Express
• Specify the mime types you will be using in your web.config file. Here’s an example:

      <system.webServer>
        <staticContent>
          <mimeMap fileExtension=".mp4" mimeType="video/mp4" />
          <mimeMap fileExtension=".m4v" mimeType="video/mp4" />
          <mimeMap fileExtension=".woff" mimeType="application/x-woff" />
          <mimeMap fileExtension=".webm" mimeType="video/webm" />
          <mimeMap fileExtension=".ogg" mimeType="video/ogg" />
          <mimeMap fileExtension=".ogv" mimeType="video/ogg" />
        </staticContent>
      </system.webServer>

  .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
  {
  font-size: small;
  color: black;
  font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
  background-color: #ffffff;
  /*white-space: pre;*/
  }
  .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
  .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
  .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
  .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
  .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
  .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
  .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
  .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
  .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
  .csharpcode .alt
  {
  background-color: #f4f4f4;
  width: 100%;
  margin: 0em;
  }
  .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

Change the project settings, by right clicking on the project and changing the settings to Use IIS Express when debugging in Visual Studio.

Play!

Once you have it up and running you can start exploring the world of HTML5. There are some great resources on learning HTML5 here. Make sure you read up on feature detection since different browsers will support different HTML5 features and because you will need this for backwards compatibility as well!

If you want to experiment with <video>, I found it handy to just download Big Buck Bunny since you can get it in multiple formats so it’s great for experimenting with the fallback features of HTML5 <video> for different browsers.

Since a big part of HTML5 is the cross browser support, make sure you try it out in different browsers, or use the F12 developer tools in Internet Explorer to test how your code will work in different browsers or older browsers.

Most of all have fun!

Do you hate SharePoint? Part 4 of 4

If the answer is yes, could your hatred be caused by your local implementation? In this final post of our blog series we look at the last of four common problems with SharePoint implementations and how you can address them.

Once again, a huge thank you to Neil MacIsaac, SharePoint MCT, for putting this entire series together. Happy reading!

If you missed the earlier posts you can find them here

1. Information Management
2. Project Management
3. Information Security
4. Business Intelligence

This week we look at Business Intelligence.

4. Business Intelligence

Are there organizations out there that are really striving for Business Unintelligence? Wouldn’t everything that an organization does be in an effort to do something better? I love the term Business Intelligence (BI) mainly because of its massive overuse and its wide misunderstanding as ‘reporting’. So the question really becomes "How do we maximize our BI?" First, it is important to understand what BI really is. It is about making better decisions. If we have better data, and a better understanding of our data, it would be logical to conclude we would make better decisions right? Not necessarily. The theory is correct, but in practice most organizations fail to implement this properly by not focusing on the decision that they are trying to improve and instead only achieve in bombarding their key decision makers with an avalanche of reports. What is also surprising is that most of the decision makers in an organization are probably the ones asking for the reports in the first place. Let me give you an example. In a sales based business, you might see some monthly sales figures like this (overly simplified for the sake of discussion)

Sales Member	Monthly Sales (Units)
John	5,437
Mary	8,350
Bob	3,043
Jim	7,410

Why do we need to see these sales figures? The typical answer you will get will be "Because I need to know if there are any problems and to see if we are doing better or worse than last month or last year." So, with the above numbers, where is the problem? Most people would focus on Bob because his numbers are lower than the others. What isn’t shown with these numbers is that Bob is the newest of team and manages the smallest sales area. Can you still spot where the problem is in the above sales numbers? The typical failure in implementing a BI solution within SharePoint is usually in the disregard for a proper BI solution that focuses on those key decisions which strives to achieve a better decision by supplying as much data around the factors and drivers of the data as the data itself. Instead we see fancier reports of the above sales table and hope that our decision makers will ‘figure it out’. Another interesting point concerning SharePoint and BI integration is the potential for SharePoint to implement the decision. If our BI solution is focused on key decisions, a good solution should allow the user to implement the decision as quickly and easily as possible.

Conclusion

As you can see, SharePoint offers many challenges when deployed into an organization and requires due diligence to maximize your return. I hope that some of my tips may make their way into your organization and perhaps save you from some of the common pitfalls that have trapped others. There is good reason why SharePoint has become as popular as it has and hopefully you will be better able to get the most out of your implementation.

Do you hate SharePoint? Part 3 of 4

If the answer is yes, could your hatred be caused by your local implementation? In this blog series we look at four common problems with SharePoint implementations and how you can address them.

We continue our series by Neil McIsaac, SharePoint MCT, for putting this together. Happy reading! If you missed it you can still read Part 1 and Part 2 of the series

SharePoint is an interesting platform and as it grows as a product and with its already incredible adoption, it is an important cornerstone for many organizations. But ask the people that work with it, and you will find a divided love it or hate it passion for the product.

Why hate it?

It’s my experience (which dates back to the site server/dashboard days), that many customers have difficulty handling the product and I mean this a number of ways. Here’s the issue:

SharePoint will amplify your problems.

So why do we hate it? I would hate anything that made my problems larger. But did SharePoint create the problem? That would be like blaming the carpenters hammer for building a crooked house. The problems are our own doing in the majority of cases. In my experience, the most common problem SharePoint seems to amplify are the following;

1. Information Management
2. Project Management
3. Information Security
4. Business Intelligence

This week we look at Information Security.

3. Information Security

SharePoint has a confusing security architecture. A friend of mine continually jokes that you can do anything in SharePoint, as long as you know the 6 strategically placed security settings you need to set to allow users to interact with your content. I like to keep things simple. I always start addressing security by asking these 3 basic questions;

What are the requirements?

This question is pretty straight forward and we do it relatively well. Who gets access, and who doesn’t.

How do we know we meet the security requirements?

This is one area where SharePoint poses some difficulty, since it lacks any worthwhile reporting tools and has enough security layers that are hidden in the UI that it feels like finding an answer to this question is akin to finding the meaning of life itself. Paired with the products inability to properly handle security inheritance and the lack of a proper method to deny permissions and you are on a never ending hunt for individualized permissions. Yuck. Unfortunately the best security reporting tools are third party. Your team needs to sit down and address how your organization will address security reporting and auditing.

When is the last time we checked?

Security audits are often checked at implementation, but rarely checked afterwards. Permission elevation happens for various reasons such as troubleshooting, making it necessary to schedule our audits. If running an audit is painful because we haven’t properly addressed the above question, then scheduling it will hurt that much more. Again, get a good security tool.

Information Security Tips

Here are a few tips on implementing security in SharePoint to help make things a little more manageable.

Libraries/Lists are for security

I am not a fan of the Shared Documents Library which comes as a default. If you have ever heard me talk on the subject, you know I get a bit worked up about it. I am a fan of lists/libraries in SharePoint and I completely understand Microsoft’s position in adding it. It was a necessary evil. The problem that I have with it is what most people put in it. It goes against pretty much every information management principal that we have. Many organizations use this library and why not? It says "Shared" and I want to share my stuff, so why not? The reasons are many, but at a simple level, you will end up with a folder structure that mimics your old file shares, and make it work by placing individual permissions on folders and files to compensate for your lack of proper architecture. If you think of lists and libraries as containers, which if you were paying attention in the previous blog post when I ranted about the importance of structure, you can shape these containers to better store its information. You can change the shape (think ‘content types’), and you can change the behaviour (think ‘workflows’ and ‘views’) to better aid the end user in the task they have at hand (think ‘Use Cases’). Coming back to permissions, if we have a container with similar information in it, we can control permissions to all of its content by controlling permissions to the container. In other words, permissions in SharePoint are best handled at the list and library level and not at the folder or file/item level. Which brings me to a solid point: If you are not sure how many libraries you should have, look at the common permissions to your content. If a group of people need read access to one type of content but not to another type of content, then the content should be in the same list/library and we can control permissions to the content by setting the permissions once on the list or library. So how many lists or libraries should you have? The answer is in how many groups of content with the same permissions you have. This is not always the answer, but it is a good starting point.

Use SharePoint groups as functional roles

SharePoint groups are best used to reflect functionality rather than entity. Since we typically use Active Directory groups, adding the AD groups to our SharePoint groups to reflect the same group would be redundant. For example, having a Sales group in AD, which we mimic and create a Sales group in SharePoint usually offers little benefit. Having a group in SharePoint that reflects their ability is preferred. For example, I can create a group in SharePoint called Sales Lead Generators that can better reflect what anyone in that group can ‘do’ rather than who they are. Not only does it simplify security administration, it makes audit reporting a lot easier to read and verify.

Use Information Rights Management

Information Rights Management has been around for some time now. Surprisingly, most organizations that want to secure documents rely on securing the folder or physical media where the file is stored. The problem is that this security simply doesn’t follow the document where ever it goes. IRM on the other hand, does! You just have to ask someone if their documents are just as secure after an employee that has proper permissions to the file copies it to a thumb drive, or inadvertently emails it to the wrong person. SharePoint and IRM integrate very well. You can check out more about IRM here.

Next week, part 4 business intelligence…

If I can build a phone app anyone can: Changing the keyboard and IsNumeric

In todays blog I start coding my app, the first task is having users enter a time for my timer and making sure they enter a number. So I explore adding code to make sure they enter a number, and changing the on screen keyboard to show just numbers.

Wow I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about the projects, tools, and controls, it’s great that I am finally starting to code! If you missed any earlier posts you can find them here. My application will be a presentation timer that I can use to make sure I don’t talk too long.

I’ve created a New project of type Windows Phone Application in Visual C# (by the way as I start to code if you can make any of my code more elegant, feel free to leave comments, I am open to suggestions and improvements).

When I created my project I chose target Windows Phone OS 7.1 (which is the same as 7.5 which is the same as Mango) because at this point most Windows Phone users have Mango and I want to be able to use the latest features.

Adding validation code

I need a text box where a user can enter the number of hours, minutes, or seconds for the timer. So I’ll just drag a TextBox control to my page. I change the name of the TextBox to txtHours and set the Text to a value of 1, this will be the default value. When I run the app and click in the TextBox it looks like this.

I don’t want users entering letters, so I had better add some validation to make sure the users enters numbers in the TextBox and i will add a TextBlock for displaying an error message to the user.

I create a TextBlock control and name it blkMessage and set the Foreground property to Red and the Text property to an empty string.

Now I double click on the my TextBox control which takes me to the code page and creates a TextChanged event handler for me. The TextChanged event handler fires whenever a user changes the content of my TextBox, so it literally fires every time you type in a letter or number (that means I don’t want too much code in there because it wouldn’t be great for performance). In my event handler I test to see if the value in the text box is numeric, if it isn’t, I display an error message. If it is a valid value, I clear out the error message. My code looks like this. BUT IsNumeric is a function I had to add myself it is not built in! I got the code for the IsNumeric function from this blog post (thank you Keith Murray)

        private void txtHours_TextChanged(object sender, TextChangedEventArgs e)
        {
            if (!IsNumeric(txtHours.Text))
            {
                blkMessage.Text = "You must enter numbers only";
            }
            else
            {
                blkMessage.Text = "";
            }
        }

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

Now if a user enters letters or other non numeric values in the field they see an error message like this:

Changing the on screen keyboard

That works, but I don’t like the way the keypad comes us as letters as default which could be a bit annoying. With mobile apps you really want the user to have to use the keyboard as little as possible, so every keyboard tap I can save the user is a good thing. In addition, it’s good design to stop someone from entering an invalid value in the first place wherever possible, if I display a numeric keypad I don’t need to worry about someone entering letters and symbols! A quick bing search turns up a blog post that talks about setting the InputScope to get the numeric keyboard. Sounds worth a try. Unfortunately I can’t find a way to set that value in the property page so I am going to have to edit the XAML, and of course the XAML example in the blog post doesn’t work, but a quick search on MSDN for InputScope gives me the correct syntax.

So I have to open up the XAML pane by clicking on the little arrow button in the corner

Then find the <TextBox …/> called txtHours and add the InputScope attribute and set it to Number (wow I didn’t think I’d be messing in the XAML code this soon! but this really wasn’t that scary)

        <Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0">
            <TextBox InputScope="Number" 
                     Height="69" 
                     HorizontalAlignment="Left" 
                     Margin="76,106,0,0" 
                     Name="txtHours" 
                     Text="1" 
                     VerticalAlignment="Top" 
                     Width="77" 
                     IsEnabled="True"/>
        </Grid>

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

And now when I run the application in the emulator, check it out: just numbers! Much better for my user!

So now I just need to replicate that logic for my hours, minutes and seconds textboxes. It’s fun to be starting my application. We’ll see what I learn next. Hope you are making progress with your apps as well. Remember if you publish an application by May 20th, 2012 you can get cool stuff thanks to the developer movement so get coding!

Hang out with others who geek out on technology, find your local user group!

There are user groups all over the country where fellow geeks meet, share knowledge, network, and talk technology. Find your nearest user group and check it out!

I was speaking recently about HTML5 and pinned sites in Internet Explorer 9 to 58 developers in Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was a meeting of the Fredericton Developer  User Group. They meet once a month. A typical evening involves pizza and pop, time to network with the others at the meeting and then a presentation on a topic of interest by either a group member or a guest speaker.

Sometimes we get so caught up in our own department or our own projects that we forget to take time to learn, grow and just have a little fun from time to time with other people who will get our jokes about constructors and garbage collectors. If you are fortunate, you may get to attend conferences like TechDays, DevTeach, or Prairie DevCon but not all of us can get away for a conference and even if you do those are usually just once a year.

Joining a user group gives you a chance to be part of a like minded community who deal with the same sorts of challenges you do, day in and day out. It can keep you motivated, interested, and can help you stay on top of technology. We often co-ordinate with user groups when we have new content we want to share across the country. We’ve organized a Windows Phone Mango Tour, Cloud camps, and an ITpro tour tour through local user groups, so you can trust them to know about any significant events and promotions going on in Canada that could help you.

There are two places you can look up your local user group: MSDN Canadian Community and TechNet Canada User Groups. Check both lists because some user groups are listed on one and not the other. There are even a few virtual user groups if you don’t find one physically located near you.

Find your nearest user group and go geek out!

My love affair with Visual Studio: Error Correction

I have been working with Visual Studio for years, and I’ve found a few tricks along the way that make my coding easier. In this blog post I’ll show one of my favourite time savers the Error Correction feature.

When you are writing code for a form or a class as part of a team, or even if you are just starting work on a project which will be made up of multiple classes, you always end up having to reference classes, properties, or methods in your code that haven’t been written yet. So you either have to comment out those calls, add them later, or add stubs so your code will compile. In Visual Studio 2010 they added a neat little feature that will add the stubs for you!

Say I am writing code for a click event handler that will create and populate an instance of a Student object who will be registering for a course. I haven’t created the Student class yet so I see a squiggly under the word student and this little rectangle at the end of the squiggly.

Now comes the cool part, I can carefully hover the mouse over the tiny rectangle and a little warning symbol will appear, if I hover just right it will appear with an arrow beside it that I can click on.

Clicking on that little arrow will bring up a menu of options that will fix the error for me! By the way, if like me, you find using the mouse to bring up the list fiddly, you can use the keyboard to bring up the correction menu by putting the cursor on the word student and hitting CTRL + . that’s CONTROL KEY and a PERIOD.

Visual Studio is offering to create a Student class for me, or to define a new type (variable essentially). If I click on Generate ‘Class Student’ I can see a new class appear in Solution Explorer called Student.vb

If I open up the Student class I see it has not only created a class, but because my code called a constructor and passed in two variables, it created a constructor method in the class as well that accepts two variables!

The code isn’t complete by any means, but it’s enough to get rid of the squiggly on Student in my event handler!

Of course now I have squiggly lines under vFirstName and vLastName because I haven’t declared those yet, but if I bring up the Error Correction list for those variables I select Generate field for vFirstName and then Generate field for vLastName and it adds the declarations for me!

Sure, it didn’t’ know what data type to make the variables, it’s not perfect, but when I am trying to test something quickly these little Error Correction tools that will generate code stubs for me can be a real time-saver.

This blog also appears on the Canadian Solution Developer Blog

Do you hate SharePoint? Part 2 of 4

If the answer is yes, could your hatred be caused by your local implementation? In this second part of our blog series we continue to explore four common problems with SharePoint implementations and how you can address them.

Once again, a huge thank you to Neil McIsaac, SharePoint MCT, for putting this together. Happy reading! If you missed Part 1 – Information Management, you can read it here

SharePoint is an interesting platform and as it grows as a product and with its already incredible adoption, it is an important cornerstone for many organizations. But ask the people that work with it, and you will find a divided love it or hate it passion for the product.

Why hate it?

It’s my experience (which dates back to the site server/dashboard days), that many customers have difficulty handling the product and I mean this a number of ways. Here’s the issue:

SharePoint will amplify your problems.

So why do we hate it? I would hate anything that made my problems larger. But did SharePoint create the problem? That would be like blaming the carpenters hammer for building a crooked house. The problems are our own doing in the majority of cases. In my experience, the most common problem SharePoint seems to amplify are the following;

1. Information Management
2. Project Management
3. Information Security
4. Business Intelligence

Last week we looked at Information Management, this week let’s look at Project Management.

2. Project Management

There are some interesting numbers on the frequency in which SharePoint projects fail. I won’t bore you with numbers mainly because individually they succumb to a lot of subjectivity, but ask anyone that’s been around the block a few times and they will tell you that the majority of SharePoint projects fail. Why? Blaming SharePoint for a bad project is kind of like blaming a poor house design on the hammer in the carpenter’s hand. SharePoint is a tool, albeit a very complex one, but the result is always the result of its usage and rarely the tool itself. SharePoint has its quirks, the vast majority of products do, and part of a proper SharePoint implementation is to address those quirks as best we can. But that’s not where projects tend to fail. The common culprits are the following;

Scope management

This is a really tough one to control in a SharePoint project. When the decision has been made to use SharePoint and people soon realize that it has the potential to solve the majority of your organizations problems, many organizations attempt to solve everything at once or completely the opposite, choose to only solve a single problem with SharePoint.

SharePoint projects are commonly either scoped too large, or too small. Too large a scope, and you are overwhelmed trying to coordinate a very complex solution. You get bogged down with the intricate under wirings of your organization to the point that your project will be stuck in the requirement gathering stages for years. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen organizations that have planned for a year and not really yielded any results. On the other hand, organizations that start too small usually create an inadequate solution for growth. So where is the happy medium?

To properly manage scope within a SharePoint project you need to understand a bit of the big picture of your environment and then focus on one problem at a time. The best place I have found to start is by establishing proper Use Cases for your organization, and not just the ones you think should go into SharePoint. Properly created Use Cases are one of the most powerful architecture tools that we have in IT and is something that every IT department should have on hand already. They truly help focus our solutions to be task oriented and not data oriented. By understanding what our people do or need to be able to do, we can create a better solution for them. After collecting Use Cases, we need to establish an overall vision for the SharePoint solution. This can be a little bit daunting to staff that are new to SharePoint structures. If we look to our Use Cases, we can group the cases that are shared by common roles with the idea being that those roles should be able to complete those tasks as easily as possible. By grouping them, we can establish areas in SharePoint where an employee in that role can go to and complete those tasks. We now have an idea as to the scope of our project – make an area in SharePoint do cases x, y and z. Many areas can be identified with their Use Cases bound to them, and realistic timelines could be better established for each area.

Requirements Gathering

Most organizations feel they are pretty good at requirements gathering because they’ve been doing it for so long. In my experience, they’ve just established that they don’t understand process improvement. It is the question "How can we do this better?" where we establish our daily pursuit of perfection and question our assumed excellence. There is a lot of information elsewhere on different approaches, so I will cut this down as simply as I can. If you are not using an iterative process in your IT projects, you are doing it wrong, plain and simple.

Have an Architect

I should expand on this a bit. You should have a qualified SharePoint architect or architecture committee. "We don’t have one, so where can we find one?" Good luck. There are a lot of lousy consultants out there for various reasons, but you really need to have a good architect in an IT project who understands the impact of various choices they make. When it comes to SharePoint, I offer this advice. Give your solution architect a business problem you wish them to solve in SharePoint, and ask for 3 different solutions and the pros and cons of each. If they can’t do it, RUN! They are obviously under-qualified to be supporting you. A really good architect should be able to rough out more than 3 different solutions.

Testing

Wow. This is one of my absolute worst pet peeves of the IT industry. If the only testing you are doing is User Acceptance Testing (UAT), and maybe some regression testing, you have really missed the boat. I have a whole spiel on this topic which I will save for another blog someday. When it comes to SharePoint, test your solutions including your code and go beyond the question of "Does it work", and ask "Does it work well?"

Use SharePoint to run SharePoint

This is one of my favourites mainly because it is one of the most overlooked. I often ask my clients how someone in their organization would go about creating a new site, say, to manage a project. The answer is typically that the person making the request would send an email to their manager, where it would eventually be forwarded to IT after a couple of emails going back and forth for approvals and information gathering, an IT staff member would then go and manually create a site for the requestor. My reply usually goes something along the lines of "So, you gather some required information, invoke a workflow with steps for approvals and further data collection, and create a site based on the data. Why isn’t that automated in SharePoint?" By using SharePoint to manage SharePoint, you can establish a more consistent structure and daily routine. In the above example, the data can be collected via a list. Workflows can be initiated for the approvals and further data collection and in the end a site could be created automatically as the final successful step in the workflow process. The result would allow IT staff to be involved less, the results more consistent since we reduce the amount of manual steps, and the process to flow much faster. Managing IT requests are also business procedures so don’t ignore them when developing your Use Cases for SharePoint.

Next week part 3 Information Security…

This blog is also on the Developer connection

If I can build a phone app anyone can: Controls, and more controls…

In this blog I create my project and have to learn the different controls I can choose from to build my app

As I continue my series on building my first phone app, I have chosen the Windows Phone application template and I am ready to start adding controls to my first page. If you missed any of the earlier posts in the series, you can access them here.

As I look at the Toolbox, I realize there are a lot of different controls to choose from, so in this post I’ll try to figure out what they do. There are so many controls I broke them into three groups for my quick description of each control just scroll down, I’ve also tried to hyperlink to documentation on the controls as I researched what each control is for.

Controls for entering and displaying data

• Checkbox
• ListBox
• Map
• PasswordBox
• RadioButton
• Slider
• TextBlock
• TextBox

Controls that do stuff

• AdControl
• Button
• HyperlinkButton
• MediaElement
• WebBrowser

Controls to make things look pretty

• Border
• Canvas
• Ellipse
• Grid
• Image
• Rectangle
• StackPanel

Controls for entering and displaying data

CheckBox

A Checkbox is a great way to let a user enter a Yes or No | True or False value. You’ll need to set the Content property to change the text that appears beside the textbox. The IsChecked property tells you whether the checkbox is checked or unchecked. There is also a IsThreeState property which allows you to have a checkbox represent something 3 different values like Yes/No/Unknown. IsChecked will be true if the checkbox is checked, false if the value is unchecked. If you enable the IsThreeState the unknown/undetermined state of the checkbox will return a value of Nothing for IsChecked.

ListBox

Allows you to give the user a list of items to choose from. Specify the values to show in the list using the Items property, or I am sure you can set up data binding as well to read the data to display from some form of data source. This is the sort of list that takes up a lot of space on the screen, it’s not a drop down list. When you select one of the values it will be highlighted. I don’t see an option for allowing multiple selections, and it’s really hard to select the listbox after you create it, whenever I click on the listbox, it keeps selecting the Listbox items instead which is kind of annoying.

Map

I guess you use maps to display data, data such as where you are, or where something is located! Looks like using this control is a bit more involved! There is all sorts of extra stuff they talk about like if you want to use a Bing Maps Silverlight Control you need a Bing Maps key which you get from the Bing Maps Account Center. I get the feeling the map control would be a blog unto itself! So for now I’ll just say, yes you can display a map and highlight locations on a map or directions on a map. I know the Where’s Timmy app from Tim Hortons has a map!

PasswordBox

This is like a text box where you can enter data, but no-one can see what you are typing, perfect for entering passwords! Instead a character appears on the screen. You can control what character appears with the PasswordChar property.

RadioButton

Great to give a user selection between 2-5 choices on the screen and only one can be selected at a time. Use the Content property to change the text displayed beside the radio button. The IsChecked Property will tell you if a particular radio button is selected. When you add multiple radio buttons to a screen by default they all become part of one group, so as soon as you choose one radio button, all the others are deselected.

Slider

A slider is great for getting a user to choose a value in a range. You specify the highest and lowest values for the slider control with the Minimum and Maximum properties and then the Value property will tell you the value selected by the user.

TextBlock

This is your label control for displaying text. You specify the text to display with the Text property.

TextBox

This is your control for letting users type in data with the on screen keyboard, the Text property will tell you the value entered by the user or can be used to set a default value.

Controls that do stuff

AdControl

This is the new control that came out which allows you to include advertising in your applications. Adding the control is pretty straightforward, drag and drop. You can set the height and width properties to resize it. But it takes more than just dropping the control on your form to get advertising working according to this site. You have to register your mobile app using Microsoft pubCenter and then you have to set the Application Id and Ad Unit ID properties in the ad control then you will have an ad enabled app in the marketplace to make money.

Button

Buttons are what you expect, buttons a user can tap to do something. You’ll want to set the Content property because that controls the text that appears on the button. At some point you will create Click event handlers for the button as well where you can write the code that makes stuff happen when a button is pressed. One thing I noticed about the button control on the phone is the buffer around it. It turns out this is deliberate so you don’t accidentally put buttons really close together and make it hard for someone with fat fingers to tap the right button.

HyperlinkButton

Is exactly what it sounds like: it’s a button that looks and acts as a hyperlink. You will want to set the NavigateUri property to specify where to go when someone clicks it, and the Content property to change the text that appears for the button.

MediaElement

This control lets you add audio or video. You specify the audio or video to play in the Source property. I found a little article here that describes how to use this control.

WebBrowser

This control could display HTML content you generate in your code if you want to get fancy, or you can use it to display content from a website specified by the Source property.

 

 

Controls to make things look pretty

Border

Allows you to draw a pretty border around other controls on your form. You can set the properties you would expect like BorderThickness and BorderBrush to control the color and thickness of the line around the border, Background to change the background color within the border. CornerRadius is kind of cool so I can make rounded corners. Wow, I could make some really ugly apps with this. Check out my green and red border with rounded corners! Did I mention, I am not known for making elegant looking pages.

Canvas

According to MSDN: “A canvas defines an area within which you can explicitly position child objects by using coordinates relative to that area.” Okay then I guess I would use a canvas if I want to be able to move something around on the screen with my code. I guess I could make one of those annoying pages with a button that says “Click here to win one million dollars” and whenever you tap on it it moves. You can set the Background property to set the background color.

Ellipse

This just draws an ellipse on the screen. The Stroke property controls the color of the outline of your ellipse. StrokeThickness controls the width of the line. Fill controls the background colour of the ellipse. Weird how all the property names are different for Ellipse than they are for Border and Canvas eh? I made an ugly red and green ellipse to go with my ugly border.

Grid

A grid is an area made up of columns and rows, so this would be great for displaying a table of data. You’ll need to go to the ColumnDefinitions property and add ColumnDefinitions for each column you want in the table. For each column you can specify a MinWidth and MaxWidth property. Then you need to go to the RowDefinitions Property to add a RowDefinition for each row. There is also a ShowGridLines property that controls whether you see the lines on the grid between columns and rows. You can then add controls in the different squares of the grid. Here’s my 3 row, 2 column grid with the grid lines displayed.

Image

Okay I know Images can be used to display data or to make things look pretty, I had to pick somewhere to put it! The image control allows you to display images. Use the Source property to specify the image to display. If your images aren’t the same size as your image control, play around with the Stretch property to control whether it clips, or resizes the image for you. It looks like JPEG and PNG formats are supported

Rectangle

This just draws a rectangle on the screen. The Stroke property controls the color of the outline of your rectangle. StrokeThickness controls the width of the line. Fill controls the background colour of the ellipse. Weird how all the property names are different for Ellipse than they are for Border and Canvas eh? I decided to go with blue and green for my rectangle

ScrollViewer

The ScrollViewer lets you create a scrollable area, great for letting users read large amounts of text that might not fit on the scree, the user can then scroll to see all the content. It can have a horizontal or vertical scroll bar which you control with the HorizontalScrollBarVisibility and the VerticalScrollBarVisibility properties. Now what’s interesting is when I did a little searching I found a few articles that said you need to use Blend to create a ScrollViewer, those were pre 7.5, but when I tried to dig into 7.5/Mango I found comments about performance improvements so maybe you still need to use Blend to create this, still not sure. I could see this control being very useful though!

StackPanel

A StackPanel lets you nicely line up child controls horizontally or vertically, for example you could make sure all your radio buttons are nicely lined up. I like this one, easy to use and helps me make my form look much cleaner!