Paul Andrew

TechEd North America 2013

Paul Andrew — Fri, 17 May 2013 00:06:40 GMT

Hey, I'm presenting at TechEd North America 2013 for Office 365 on Security and Identity Management.

Here's the talks that I'm involved in.

1. Overview of Office 365 Identity Management

2. Security in Microsoft Office 365

3. Microsoft Office 365 Directory and Access Management with Windows Azure Active Directory

My SharePoint Conference Talk on SharePoint Scalability

Paul Andrew — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:18:26 GMT

It's posted here: http://www.youtube.com/user/sharepointconference#p/search/0/w3bxy5UbCro

Platformer Move Left Glitch Fix

Paul Andrew — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:49:00 GMT

I have been trying out code samples on Windows Phone. The platformer game sample moves a player left and right by tilting the phone in the direction to travel. The sample code as published on 10/4/2011 has a problem where the player gets stuck when you tilt to move left until you tilt a lot and he flys over left. This happens because the collision code detects a collision with the ground tile at low speeds. Here is my update for the HandleCollisions() method which avoids the problem.

 /// <summary>
 /// Detects and resolves all collisions between the player and his neighboring
 /// tiles. When a collision is detected, the player is pushed away along one
 /// axis to prevent overlapping. There is some special logic for the Y axis to
 /// handle platforms which behave differently depending on direction of movement.
 /// </summary>
 private void HandleCollisions()
 {
 // Get the player's bounding rectangle and find neighboring tiles.
 Rectangle bounds = BoundingRectangle;
 int leftTile = (int)Math.Floor((float)bounds.Left / Tile.Width);
 int rightTile = (int)Math.Ceiling(((float)bounds.Right / Tile.Width)) - 1;
 int topTile = (int)Math.Floor((float)bounds.Top / Tile.Height);
 int bottomTile = (int)Math.Ceiling(((float)bounds.Bottom / Tile.Height)) - 1;
 
 // Reset flag to search for ground collision.
 isOnGround = false;
 
 // For each potentially colliding tile,
 for (int y = topTile; y <= bottomTile; ++y)
 {
 //
 // The y loop checks all tile rows that the player intersects with from top to bottom. The x loop checks
 // each tile that the player intersects with on that row depending on the players direction of travel.
 // The collision tests are required to go in the direction of travel so as to avoid detecting collisions
 // with the platform that the player is running on in the horizontal direction. Instead a ground
 // collision will be detected and corrected first in the vertical direction and since the player position
 // is moved back up and is no longer in line with the platform when the horizontal collision check occurs.
 // This direction of travel identification is only required because the collision correction assumes that
 // the axis to bounce the player back is the axis with the smallest overlap. This isn't always 100% true.
 //
 if (velocity.X < 0)
 for (int x = rightTile; x >= leftTile; --x)
 HandleTileCollisions(ref bounds, x, y);
 else
 for (int x = leftTile; x <= rightTile; ++x)
 HandleTileCollisions(ref bounds, x, y);
 }
 
 // Save the new bounds bottom.
 previousBottom = bounds.Bottom;
 }
 
 /// <summary>
 /// Calcualtes and corrects collisions of the player position with items on the level map. This method identifies the depth of the 
 /// collision in the x and y axis and moves the player position back to a location that would not overlap with the object it
 /// collided with. It does this in the axis with the smallest collision as a guess as to the direction the player should bounce
 /// off the object being collided with. This method does a nice job of having common code for collisions regardless of the
 /// direction of travel on the axis as one way is +ve and the other is -ve.
 /// </summary>
 /// <param name="bounds">the bounding rectabgle in pixels for the player sprite as calculated by the GetBoundingRectangle property</param>
 /// <param name="x">the x location of the tile on the map in the range 0 - 19</param>
 /// <param name="y">the y location of the tile on the map in the range 0 - 14</param>
 void HandleTileCollisions(ref Rectangle bounds, int x, int y)
 {
 // put the code in here from within the for loop in the original HandleCollisions() method
 }

System Reset, Hello World Windows Phone Development

Paul Andrew — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:02:36 GMT

On Monday this week I just started a new job on the planning and strategy team in the Windows Phone division at Microsoft. I’ll be working on the developer platform for the team and the work will likely be a lot of research, analysis and coding. Right now, I’m brand new to phone development so I’m trying to learn as much about writing phone apps ASAP. I am also very much looking forward to all the new stuff I have to learn.

I have really enjoyed my time working in the SharePoint team. It’s a great team with really good people and a fantastic product. I hope a lot more people will get good value from all of the technical content that I’ve been involved in for SharePoint. Thank you to all the people I’ve worked with in the SharePoint community. The SharePoint MVPs have been really great to work with especially and I’ve made lots of friends from this group.

This will be somewhat of a reset for me. This is not SharePoint, and it’s not Windows Workflow Foundation that I worked on before that. So, I’m looking to collect pointers to guides for trying out all the things available to developers of Windows Phone apps. I’ll publish what I learn and some Windows Phone developer getting started references as I go. If you have a favourite code sample on Windows Phone, please send me a link!!

Video published of the Full Farm Failover demo in the SharePoint 2011 Conference Keynote

Paul Andrew — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 05:02:07 GMT

You can watch the demo that I worked on here: http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/keynote.aspx

Skip through to 42 minutes to see the 10 minute demo.

Watch as SharePoint 2010 handles the network cable to the SQL Server being disconnected and fails over to a secondary SQL Server machine thanks to SQL "Denali" Always On.

SharePoint Scalability Report and the SharePoint Conference 2011 Keynote Demo

Paul Andrew — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:45:00 GMT

We just published the Scale Test Report for Very Large Scale Document Repositories on Technet. This is all the details of the scale tests we did to help support the increases that we made in the SharePoint Limits and Boundaries document.

The first keynote demo at the SharePoint Conference 2011 used the same SharePoint farm and we've spent the last 3 weeks setting it up with SQL Server "Denali" CTP 3 for the conference.

Alternate link to the paper as the LinkId is currently broken:http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27573

New SharePoint 2010 Implementers Courseware, Two Courses: Internet Sites Implementers and Enterprise Content Management Implementers

Paul Andrew — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:00:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce that TechNet have published two new Training Courses for Implementing SharePoint Solutions. Each of these courses contains 15 modules representing 5 days of instructor led training and each module includes video lessons, hands on labs, and a quiz.

SharePoint Enterprise Content Management Implementers Course

This course teaches implementers how to leverage features in SharePoint Server to implement an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. ECM systems are designed to manage large amounts of content, including content in the form of documents and content in pages, wiki libraries, blog posts, and other types of non-document content. Document management is the heart of ECM. Document management in SharePoint Server consists of a rich feature set that includes tight integration to Microsoft Office client applications, standard version-control features, and innovative features that allow SharePoint Server to bridge the gap between a folder-based mindset of the typical user and the metadata-based mindset of a records manager. This course develops the key skills that are necessary to deploy SharePoint Server for ECM solutions at organizations of any size. Larger organizations should start with this course and supplement it with expertise in large-scale ECM implementations, whereas medium and smaller organizations may find all they need in this course to implement their systems successfully.

SharePoint for Internet Sites Implementers Course

This course describes how to implement and brand a SharePoint based public web site using SharePoint web content management (WCM). Once the course is completed, you will be able to implement a SharePoint deployment of a branded web site with structured content management. You will also be able to successfully plan, deploy, monitor, and maintain an Internet site on SharePoint. No development experience is required, but experience with HTML and CSS is recommended.

New Demos of SharePoint 2010 web site capabilities

Paul Andrew — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:36:16 GMT

We have two new demos of SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites capability demos.

The first one shows a SharePoint 2010 based web site that includes search, web analytics, social networking integration, and web content management.

http://www.demomate.com/content/SharePoint/SharePoint_2010_Customer_Engagement_Demo.html

The second one shows the same web site, calling out additional search features, showing a mobile view of the site, and showing integration with WebTrends.

http://www.demomate.com/content/SharePoint/SharePoint_2010_Customer_Engagement_2.html

For more information about SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites see: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/internetsites/Pages/Home.aspx

Articles about Scaling SharePoint to Large Content Database Capacity

Paul Andrew — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 19:46:38 GMT

Today we announced new scalability limits for SharePoint content databases. SharePoint 2010 implementations can make use of scale up and scale out. Scale up means increasing hardware resources available so that the software can do more. Scale out means increasing the number of servers that you are loading up and for SharePoint this also means increasing the number of SharePoint Content Databases that you work with.

With the new content database capacity limits we have guidance for scaling up with SharePoint and using more hardware resources:

Read the detail about SharePoint 2010 and Remote Blob Storage

Paul Andrew — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 19:28:00 GMT

What is Remote Blog Storage (RBS) and what can it do for me? View the second part of this SharePoint Team Blog article.

Additional articles on RBS with SharePoint 2010:

It's also important to note that using an RBS provider, whether the Microsoft one or a third party one, does not increase the data size scalability of SharePoint. All the limits numbers apply whether your data is all in SQL Server or if BLOBs are moved out using an RBS povider. Although there are many benefits of RBS providers, they do not break through the SharePoint supported content database size limits.