Kirk Evans Blog

I’ve posted a new video to Channel9… SharePoint Visual Studio state machine workflows for escalations and timeouts . After I went through the learning process of creating a set of screencasts focused on SharePoint development, a few things became evident...

Man, I am spoiled.  I am spoiled by how simple the free edition of SQL Server 2008, SQL 2008 Express , is to set up and connect to.  I found myself needing to connect to an Oracle database this week.  I haven’t had to connect to an Oracle...

I’ve built application pages plenty of times, but admit that they never look like other application pages (particularly the ones in the Site Settings section).  OK, I can admit when I’m wrong, and this is another one of those times.  Turns out...

I have been doing a lot of screen cast production lately (I promise I’ll they’ll be posted shortly), and I am using Camtasia for screencasting.  It does a fantastic job of capturing the screen and allowing me to make simple edits (zoom in and out...

The first ever SharePoint Saturday Dallas event is filling up fast!  We’ve announced the speakers and agenda, and have an incredible lineup of sponsors for the event as well.  This will be a great day to immerse yourself in one of the hottest...

I was fortunate last fall to attend a week long training class by the amazing Mr. Todd Baginski that showed off the AdventureWorks Travel Site sample.  This is a fantastic sample that shows various extensibility points needed to build SharePoint...

I just posted a new Channel9 interview about NewsGator Social Sites.    I had the pleasure of talking with Brian Kellner, VP of Products for NewsGator Technologies , about the capabilities of NewsGator Social Sites .  Social Sites is an...

This is a wrap-up of days 3 and 4 of the SharePoint Administrators Survival Camp training class by CriticalPath Training that I am attending this week, presented by Shane Young of SharePoint911 . You can see recaps of Day 1 and Day 2 . I’ll admit, I missed...

Today was day 2 of the SharePoint Administrators Survival Camp training class that I am attending by CriticalPath Training , led by instructor Shane Young of SharePoint911 . In a word… wow. Seriously, I work at Microsoft.  I have access to tons and...

Eric Shupps did such a great job with the first SharePoint Saturday Dallas announcement that I am going to borrow his text … Today we are officially announcing the first ever SharePoint Saturday event to be held in Dallas on July 25th, 2009. SharePoint...

I am fortunate to be attending the SharePoint Administrators Survival Camp training class by CriticalPath Training this week, presented by Shane Young of SharePoint911 .  The class is being taught at the Microsoft Las Colinas MTC.  Although...

I've had several conversations with customers lately about creating some type of gadget gallery for their intranet, something that will allow users to create their own widgets that can be reused by others within the organization. Folks are familiar with...

There’s a very cool blog post over at The Amazing Adventures of Geek Girl : Trying and Buying BPOS - It couldn't be easier!   This post shows you how to sign up for the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS).  BPOS delivers...

Looks like there is a really cool interview series called Bytes by MSDN where interviews with community influentials were taped at TechEd, each will talk about their recommended must-have resources.  The interviews will be posted between now and...

This is really cool.  Just got an email about an app that lets you see the updates to Bing Maps. http://bingmapsupdates.cloudapp.net/ The Bing Maps platform gets a makeover just about every month.  We add new places, even better imagery and...

Laura Rogers has posted some great screencasts to introduce you to the Data View Web Part , showing how easy it is use SharePoint Designer to consume data from a data source and provide a UI to insert, update, and delete items… all with no code. ...

I love blog posts that show features of a product that I use frequently that I didn’t know existed.  Excel@Work has a great blog post “ Do you know these Excel 2007 Productivity Secrets (Hint: Coffee is not one of them) ”.  In that post, I found...

Back in the early beta days of “Indigo”, before WCF, I saw an early demo using WS-Discovery.  The feature obviously was not included in .NET 3.0 or .NET 3.5, but looks like it is in the list of features targeted for .NET 4.0.  Very cool. WS...

Don’t let the “R2” name fool you, there’s a lot packed into Windows Server 2008 R2.  Head over to the ISV team blog to see how to get started leveraging Windows Server 2008 R2 features .  For instance, I found out that you can you use the Windows...

Steve Pietrek has a great link blog ( Steve Pietrek - Everything SharePoint and Office ) that aggregates blog postings on SharePoint and Office.  If you are at all interested in seeing what’s possible with SharePoint, I highly recommend you subscribe...

Last year, my friend DonXML issued a challenge to me: No more Console.WriteLine demos , from now on replace those demos with unit tests. Jim Holmes posted about his desire to see more focus on unit testing from the evangelists as well. Don and Jim...

Part 6 of the SharePoint for Developers series is posted to Channel9, this one focusing on creating custom web services in SharePoint .  For reference, here are the links to the previous 5 screencasts in this series so far. Introducing Visual Studio...

Part 5 of the SharePoint for Developers screencast series is posted to Channel9, this session focuses on creating custom field controls, content types, and lists . Previous screencasts can be accessed at http://channel9.msdn.com/niners/kirke .  Honestly...

Part 4 of the SharePoint for Developers screencast series has been posted to Channel9… this one focusing on calling SharePoint Web Services from a Silverlight client application . Show Me the Code! I started by creating a list in SharePoint based off...

Part 3 of the SharePoint for Developers screencast series is posted to Channel9, “ Expression Blend and Silverlight ”. In part 1 of this series, I introduced Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 1.3 (VSeWSS).  In part 2 , we used...