Andrew Coates ::: MSFT

SharePoint Saturday Perth event

acoat — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:57:58 GMT

SharePoint Saturday has reached Australia recently with the efforts of Brian Farnhill and Ben Walters in both Melbourne and Sydney. Jeremy Thake from Perth SharePoint User Group thought it was about time it happened in Perth with the help of other volunteers.

The event is provisionally announced for the 6th February 2010, awaiting confirmation from the Venue management team at Cliftons in Perth on the Terrace.

Please contact the #SPSPerth committee by sending an email to spsperth@made4the.net.

They are currently looking for expressions of interest to both attend, speak and sponsor the event by filling out this survey.

Please bookmark the site, subscribe to the announcements RSS feed and follow @SPSPerth on Twitter, keep track of the #SPSPerth hash tag on Twitter to keep up to date with announcements!

SharePoint 2010 Extravaganza at SBTUG This Wednesday

acoat — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:31:08 GMT

Craig Bailey’s Sydney Business and Technology User Group has a great line up this week, especially given all the goodness that was revealed at the SharePoint Conference last week.

SharePoint 2010 at SBTUG

Where: Microsoft, North Ryde

When: 6pm, this Wed 28 October

What: 2+ hours of SharePoint 2010 goodness

Who: Presented by Kathy Hughes, Aaron Saikovski and Alistair Speirs

Web: Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG): www.sbtug.com

Description:

Whether you’re a seasoned SharePoint Server 2007 user or new to SharePoint, you’ll have the opportunity to learn about some of the new features in SharePoint 2010 and also to ask questions.

We plan on making the evening a 'demo intensive' and interactive one. We’ll cover several functional aspects, including operational, some developer and design/user interface.

Agenda:

6:00 – News & Intro (Craig Bailey)
6:15 – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 (Kathy Hughes + Aaron Saikovski)
7:15 – Pizza break + networking
7:30 – Overview of Office 2010 SharePoint Integration (Alistair Speirs)
7:45 – SharePoint Workspace (previously known as Groove) (Alistair Speirs)
8:00 – Diving into SharePoint 2010 (Kathy Hughes + Aaron Saikovski)
8:30 – Visio Integration Services + SharePoint 2010 (Jamie Hutchins)
8:45 – Final demos + Panel Session Q+A
9:15 – Finish + networking

You can RSVP on the Facebook event, OR email Craig to let him know you’re coming.

There’s more details on the SBTUG site.

Turning off Proofing and Autocorrect in Word 2007

acoat — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 02:28:54 GMT

This is the second time this question has come up in the last week or so, so I thought I’d answer it here.

Sometimes, you want to turn off proofing (spelling and grammar checking) and autocorrect in Word, either globally or for some parts of your document (for me, that’s often in code blocks). The easiest way to do this is to update the style on which the relevant section of the document is based.

By default, most styles in Word inherit from Normal, so if you want to switch it off globally, switching it off for the Normal style will switch it of for any child styles in which the option has not been explicitly overridden. Here’s how to do it for Normal in ~~six~~ four easy steps:

1. In the Styles group on the Home Tab, Expand the styles list by clicking the More button in the bottom right-hand corner of the of the list.

2. Choose Apply Styles from the menu at the bottom of this drop-down

3. Make sure Normal is selected in the drop-down and then click the Modify ... button

UPDATE – my son has just told me that you can concatenate the first three steps into one by right-clicking on Normal in the style group on the home tab and choosing Modify from the pop-up menu.

4 (2). Choose Format in the Modify Style dialog

5 (3). Pick Language from the pop-up menu

6 (4). Check the box that says Do Not Check Spelling or Grammar

Click OK and now any style that inherits from Normal (that doesn’t have a explicit setting for this) will have proofing and autocorrect turned off.

Windows Mobile Development – Live Meeting and Competition

acoat — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:20:13 GMT

Don and Dave have been running Windows Mobile development jumpstart training via Live Meeting along with James McCutcheon.

Live Meeting 3 is coming up – Don has more details.

In parallel to this, we’ve started the Code Mason’s Guild for mobile developers. Check it out for local initiatives, competitions and developer news.

Finally, We’ve just opened a world-wide competition for mobile developers to be judged by the public. That is, the apps with the most downloads from Windows Mobile Marketplace and the most revenue from Windows Mobile Marketplace will be the winners in the Free and Paid categories respectively. Pretty nice prizes too.

Check out the details on the competition home page.

New Aussie Community Blogger

acoat — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 09:41:02 GMT

Jake Ginnivan’s been hassling me on and off with difficult VSTO questions for the last year or so. It looks like Jeremy Thake’s finally persuaded him to start blogging.

He’s kicked off with the first post in a 2-part series

Writing a Facebook event synchroniser for Outlook 2007+ Part 1

Looks good so far.

Subscribed.

TechEd Sessions Posted and some useless Stats

acoat — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:55:03 GMT

Sessions Posted

The first pass of the sessions at have been posted and if you're a delegate you can login and vote for your favourite sessions (to help us with timetabling and room allocation). Your votes will be automatically migrated to your agenda when we finalise the time and room stuff.

If you're not yet registered (better hurry up, see below), you can still see the session catalogue which will continue to be filled in as more information is finalised.

Netbooks

I was away when we announced this and I missed out on the fun of the frenzy as news got around. In case you missed it too, we announced that we're giving (yes giving) each paid delegate an HP MiniNote 2140 running the latest build of Windows 7 (and a bunch of other stuff). Captain of the NetBook ship, Nick Hodge has lots more info. He's also calling for suggestions from you as to what we can do with these to really make the experience a ripsnorter.

Great new Blogs

While on the subject of blogs:

Andrew Dugdell has a cool blog tracking the experience of sourcing, provisioning and distributing two and a half thousand-odd netbooks.
Jorke Odolphi and our Partners at Joma Blue and Codify have been documenting the more general technology journey.

Both well worth a read.

Twitter

There's a Twitter account, @auTechEd, for all the breaking TechEd Australia news, and the hashtag for other people talking about TechEd is #auteched.

There is a whole bunch of other social networking options on the TechEd Connect page.

Useless Stats

And now for some Excel fun. As I alluded to above, things are going very fast on the registration front (see the curve below) and if you're thinking of going to TechEd, now would be a good time to register (of course, if you're a member of a user group, you may want to chat to your User Group leader before you pay full price, or even the Early Bird price – 'nuf said).

This means that I've got a lot more stats to play with than I had last time I posted about this stuff.

Percentage of delegates by State

QLD	28.23%
NSW	23.52%
VIC	20.70%
ACT	11.42%
SA	6.65%
WA	5.24%
TAS	2.55%
NT	0.67%
(blank)	0.54%
NA	0.13%
TAURANGA	0.13%
AUCKLAND	0.07%
KAITAIA	0.07%
WAIGANI	0.07%

Top 10 Names

David	3.70%
Michael	3.23%
Chris	2.22%
Paul	2.15%
Peter	2.08%
John	2.02%
Andrew	1.95%
Mark	1.81%
Matthew	1.61%
Richard	1.55%

By the way, the first lady's name comes in at equal 55th

Simone	0.34%
Neil	0.34%
Carl	0.34%
Jamie	0.34%
Ray	0.34%
Aaron	0.34%
Russell	0.34%
Brad	0.34%
Shaun	0.34%
Timothy	0.34%
Glen	0.34%

Countries Represented

AUSTRALIA	98.86%
NEW ZEALAND	0.60%
PAPUA NEW GUINEA	0.13%
(blank)	0.13%
FIJI	0.07%
SWEDEN	0.07%
SRI LANKA	0.07%
PAKISTAN	0.07%

Developer training in Darwin in August

acoat — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 01:15:00 GMT

Got a note in may inbox over the weekend announcing some developer training happening in Darwin. I see Dave's beaten me to it, but I'll repeat here because I reckon it's worthwhile encouraging these kinds of things especially in our more … regional … locations.

There are four courses being run, some Microsoft Official Curriculum and Readify's Professional .NET.

All this is being hosted by local training company, Crimson Innovations

If you live in or near Darwin or know someone who does then be sure to let them know about these training opportunities!!

Dates	Crimson Courses
August 10-14	5 day professional .NET 3.5
August 18-19	Visual Studio ® 2008 ASP.NET3.5 (6463A)
August 20-21	Visual Studio ® 2008 ADO.NET 3.5 (6464A)
August 31-September 2	Implementing a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (5061A)

I’m looking for a boss – is it you?

acoat — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:24:36 GMT

We’re looking for a new Audience Lead at work. You will be managing many of the evangelists (including me) and marketers in DPE. This is a great job, with great responsibility and frankly we want to ensure we get the right person for the gig.

The formal job description can be found here.

However, Michael Kordahi and I have put together a video to talk about what we expect from a lead. If this is you, please apply for the role or contact your friendly evangelist.

Michael's also put together this cool Wordle in case you're more of a spatial learner.

Here's your opportunity to join our team – this is the second-best job in the world (after mine)!

Thanks to Mike for editing the video, doing the wordle and writing the text :)

Introduction to VS2010 and Framework 4.0

acoat — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:47:48 GMT

I had fun last night presenting to the Sydney Business and Technology User Group. We chatted about the productivity improvements that we get as developers and managers from the professional version of Visual Studio and the great enhancements to the platform provided by the new version of the .NET Framework.

I've posted my slides on skydrive, but as I said last night the slides and demos were shamelessly stolen from the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit. That's what you really want to download.

Thanks to Craig and Nick for inviting me to present.

TechEd ANZ Call for Content Closed

acoat — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:16:56 GMT

As I said in my update, we've had an overwhelming response to our Call for Content for TechEd Australia and New Zealand. Submissions are now closed and the Track Owners are beavering away making final decisions about which of the huge selection of content they have to choose from they can actually fit into the schedule.

Look out for a first pass at about 75% of the content by the first week of July.

Thanks to everyone who's submitted content – I really believe our TechEd this year will be the richer for it.

Lighting up your Apps with Windows 7 - User Group Sessions

acoat — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:25:18 GMT

Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting at the two Canberra .NET User Group meetings (I'll be presenting the same session tomorrow night at the Sydney .NET User Group).

My topic was an introduction to developing on Windows 7. We discussed the value of the platform and I reiterated the benefits of leveraging the huge amount of work done by the Windows 7 team, not just in the programming of the operating system, but also the enormous investment in usability testing and user experience design. There's some great explanation of all of the work being done in Windows 7 on the Engineering Windows7 Blog.

The slides and demos came from the excellent Windows 7 Training Kit.

I talked about the importance of using the Application Quality Cookbook to guide your development of Windows 7 applications.

The demos used the managed wrappers from the Windows API Code Pack.

I also showed off some little known windows shortcut keys, some shamelessly pinched from Jeffa's blog.

I've uploaded the deck I used to my SkyDrive.

Why should Partners come to TechEd?

acoat — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:39:54 GMT

Kim Partridge, from the PartnerTV team interviewed me last week about TechEd and why partners, in particular, should make sure they're there.

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=0a29d41b-84cf-42dd-ba3e-7ecf9137aa32" target="_new" title="Partner-TV: Andrew Coates on TechEd">Video: Partner-TV: Andrew Coates on TechEd</a>

Check it out

TechEd Registrations Streaming In

acoat — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:00:13 GMT

We opened the TechEd registration flood gates a couple if weeks ago and I've just been having a look at the registration data. Proving that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Here's a little teaser:

Top 10 Names

1	David
=2	Matthew
=2	Peter
4	Paul
=5	Daniel
=5	Andrew
=5	Richard
=5	Simon
=9	Michael
=9	Stephen

Don't forget that the Early Bird offer expires on July 14 (notice how we've made it span the Financial Year so you can do the expenditure in either).

TechEd ANZ Call for Content Update

acoat — Fri, 22 May 2009 09:36:23 GMT

We’ve had a great response to the TechEd ANZ Call For Content we announced a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the submission count as of this morning:

Track	Breakout	BoF	Total
ARC	4	0	4
AZU	2	1	3
DEV	25	4	29
DYN	3	0	3
MOB	4	0	4
OFC	31	4	35
SEC	2	0	2
SOA	2	1	3
DAT	12	1	13
UC	7	0	7
VIR	2	0	2
WEB	11	1	12
WCS	10	1	11
Totals	115	13	128

I’ve had a couple of questions around this and while I’ve answered them directly, I’ll also post the answers here.

When do submissions close?

The answer is "it depends". Track owners will close off their tracks for submissions when they feel like they’ve got enough submissions. Having said that, we’ll leave all tracks open until at least the 1st of June, so you’ve still got a week or so as a minimum.

What’s the difference between a Breakout Session and a Birds of a Feather Session?

A breakout session is one of the main sessions that are held during the conference. There are 9 rooms available in each of 15 time slots across the 3 days. You can expect anywhere between 20 and 1000 people at a breakout session. The content and presenters for these sessions are determined by the track owners.

Birds of a Feather sessions are designed to be informal gatherings of like-minded people. This is a community-driven session held outside the timeslots for breakouts. It's likely that there will be perhaps as many as 10 BoF sessions and they’ll be scheduled for lunchtimes and perhaps on Wednesday evening. We're planning to make the BoF selection something that attendees can contribute to. The current proposal (subject to change, no promises etc) is to publish a list of the submissions and have people vote.

How Many Submissions Will You Accept?

There are only 135 slots for TechEd this year and so there are obviously going to be many more public submissions than available slots. There's no hard number we're aiming for, but please don’t be too disappointed if your session isn't selected this time. One of the things I’d love to do though is publicise the sessions that weren't selected with a view to local User Groups picking them up as presentations through the year. I won’t do that without the submitter's permission though.

Are You Paying Presenters?

No – there's been some confusion because the link from my original post to the rules for submitting content was a generic link that triggered some "smart" stuff server-side to determine where you were submitting from and displayed the rules appropriate to that region. A number of people got the TechEd North America rules (it explicitly said that at the top of the page) and they do have a stipend for speakers. We don't have the budget for that.

So there's no more confusion, here are the rules for submitting content for TechEd Australia and New Zealand.

TechEd Online – Chat with Michael Kleef

acoat — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:01:28 GMT

I had a chance to catch up with former IT Pro Evangelist Michael Kleef yesterday at TechEd in LA and we had a chat about what he’s doing now, how he’s found the transition from a customer facing role in Australia to a corporate role in the US and about a bunch of other things.

The interview’s up on TechEd Online. Check it out.