Rehash Tuesday
It’s Tuesday and rather than bring you original content like any good-minded blogger would, I’m here to rehash a bunch of other news that everyone else has already told you 3 times over (and rip through my inbox fulfilling everyone’s shout out requests). God I feel dirty.
Joel does Calgary
Joel Semeniuk, Microsoft Regional Director and Visual Studio Team System guru, will be in Calgary giving a talk on Wednesday, January 25, 2006 from 5 to 8pm about Visual Studio Team System. This will be a great opportunity to hear about what Team System promises to bring to our world. If you're a current MSDN Universal subscriber, you'll be getting a free upgrade to VSTS Developer. So might as well learn what you'll be getting.
http://www.jameskovacs.com/blog/VSTSAndJoelSemeniukComeToTheCalgaryNETUserGroup.aspx
Registration is available on the Calgary .NET User Group web site: http://groups.msn.com/dotnetCalgary. (Please register ASAP)
First UK SharePoint User Group Meeting
The SharePoint User Group UK would like to invite you to the first user group meeting hosted by Microsoft at Thames Valley Park in Reading. Held on the evening of Monday 13th February, talks will be given by Steve Smith and Brett Lonsdale of Combined Knowledge on the topics of SharePoint Farm Design Best Practices, and Developing WebParts using User Controls. Attendance is free, with Microsoft supplying refreshments and nibbles at half time. Please check the forum for the full agenda, and post a reply there to register your intent on attending.
http://suguk.org/forums/72/ShowThread.aspx
Be like the Fox
Bob Fox has been an avid reader of my blog (or so he says) and he’s been a great help in the SharePoint community. His web site and blog has a lot of great SharePoint info so you might want to add him to your blog roll. Hey, and its just cool when your name is Bob Fox. The marketing for that just writes itself.
Web Site
http://bobfox.net/spnj
Blog Site
http://www.mycblog.com/blog/Foxhole
Now re-entering… CTP Hell
Microsquishy has put out (yeah, like you wouldn’t want that to happen) the Community Technology Preview releases of Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer (Acrylic) and Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer (Sparkle). There’s also a couple of other designers coming shortly and sometime after the release of the public beta of Office 12/SharePoint V3/etc. they’ll probably be more.
Is it just me or has Microsoft gone goofy with all this naming. First they come up with some pretty cool code names (Avalon, Acrylic, Sparkle, Indigo, etc.) but then turn them into 10 syllable phrases that are sure to take up more than a few lines on DVD packaging. What brain child dreamed this design up? Can you imagine the marketing boardroom pitch on this?
Marketing Guy #2: Okay, we’ll come out with all these products with cool names like Avalon and Indigo
Stuffy Executive Type: Yes, sounds good. Make me money, make me money.
Marketing Guy #3: And we’ll release early builds so we can convince all the droogs out there to log our bugs for us and save us having to hire teenage Haitian workers for 6 cents a day.
Stuffy Executive Type: Go on!
Marketing Guy #1: And just when things are ready to go out the door, we’ll turn those crafty code names into extremely long winded phrases that will confuse buyers and make presenters mispronounce them in public. It’ll also mean you’ll need two slides in a powerpoint deck just to show the name of the product.
P.S. Bought a copy of BlogJet as it’s really working out well. Hopefully it’ll stop the spam I keep getting from Dmitry about new features and cool things you can do with it. Ahh, the price of freedom.
P.P.S. Will be releasing a raft of software shortly (I’ll leave it up to your imagination to define “raft”) and will be using cool codenames as it’s all the rage now. Watch for SharePoint Builder, the “Twinkie” build soon (and feel free to suggest some codenames as I’m the last person to come up with an original idea).