I recently attained the Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2010 certification.  I have long wanted to write about the experience, but honestly didn’t know how to begin.  After quite a few conversations with friends and colleagues, I thought I would share some insight about the process...

This post demonstrates how to use the JOIN syntax in CAML. A customer pinged me asking about how to write a JOIN query in CAML.  Honestly, I haven’t done this since in a long time, so it took awhile to shake off the cobwebs.  I tried to make things explicit and easy to reproduce in your environment...

I recently got a question from a customer about utilities to include on their development machines.  My view is that you should trust your developers and let them install the tools they need.  However, some devs don’t have managers who trust their developers to do the right thing and they need...

Had a weird scenario that I saw in some code today.  A weird structure was being used that we wanted to query for distinct items across a list of lists.  Lemme explain. Imagine a list of items represented as an IEnumerable<SomeType>.  Now, imagine a bunch of those contained within...

The great folks at Packt Publishing contacted me to ask if I was interested in reviewing a title for them.  When I saw the title, I said “heck yes!”  The book is WCF 4.0 Multi-tier Services Development with LINQ to Entities .  I have closely followed WCF since its early days as “Indigo...

Thanks to everyone who attended the SharePoint 2010 Developer Best Practices talk at the SharePointPro 2010 Summit and Expo conference.  As promised, the deck has been uploaded.  Get it here . http://cid-09d5ededfee6c24b.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Presentations/SPPro%20SharePoint%20Development...

I had the pleasure of speaking at the SharePoint TechFest 2010 event today in Dallas, Texas.  Over 650 people at this event, holy smokes it was a great time.  I had the first time slot of the day, and when I first started the talk the room wasn’t even 1/4 full (maybe about 30 people). ...

Register today for the free SharePoint Live Virtual Conference & Expo ! Hard to get out of the office? Training dollars are limited? We're bringing you a FREE virtual event on one of the most anticipated software releases - SharePoint 2010 - live from the convenience of your office. We're kicking...

Today, we’ll show off a bit of WCF for working with Twitter.  The last time I posted on using Twitter with WCF, I showed how to update your Twitter status using WCF .  The rest of the Twitter API is just as easy to work with when you are using WCF.  Since the last post on that used an...

I’ve been working with Microsoft’s database connection technologies (ADO.NET, ADO, and ODBC) for many years now.  A customer pinged me with an interesting question about LINQ and database connection pooling in an ASP.NET application.  I thought I would simply copy and paste and hope this helps...

This is just way cool.  Check out Eric White’s blog for a slick use of extension methods to make it easier to convert types in the System.Xml namespace to types in the System.Xml.Linq namespace , and vice-versa.  Here’s a quick teaser: XElement e = new XElement( "Root" , new XElement...

Awhile back, I posted about creating an image handler to render images stored in a database .  Someone pinged me and asked how you could use that with ASP.NET Dynamic Data web sites.  Hmm… I haven’t looked at Dynamic Data very deeply yet, so I decided to give it a shot.  I was surprised...

We are about to start a great day showing technologies like .NET 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, and SharePoint technologies. I thought I'd be proactive and post the materials beforehand. Make sure to check out Rob Cameron's blog for additional information. Just about everything shown today came from the VS2008...

I had a great time visiting with a great team at Verizon this week. I was able to present on a number of technologies, including ADO.NET Sync Services, WCF, WF, and ClickOnce. I was going to send this in an email, then I realized that there are some great bits in here that would appeal to a broader audience...

I was lucky enough to take a SharePoint development class with Ted Pattison almost a year ago. Unfortunately, I haven't developed much anything with WSS or MOSS since then. I did retain some concepts and knew what I wanted to achieve, but it's not as simple as opening up Visual Studio 2008, dragging...

I met with a customer the other day who had an interesting question: how do I databind a WPF app to a WCF service? I thought this was going to be a really quick answer, it turned into another really long blog post. For the service, I am using a slimmed down version of the default service generated...

OK, maybe not a smackdown... but it sure sounded like a good title. There's a great paper on MSDN that describes the similarities and differences in LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities from the Entity Framework. I have done a bunch of LINQ demos recently, a lot of people are really fired up about...