SharePoint Online and Windows Azure: Developing Secure BCS Connections in the Cloud Introduction Over the Christmas vacation, a few of us got together and started down the path of how to not only secure external data connections to SharePoint Online...

As many of you know, I’ve been playing in the SharePoint and Cloud sandbox for quite some time now. In my latest book adventure, I managed to find 3 friends to come along for the ride: Paul Stubbs, Donovan Follette and Girish Raja. The book, Professional...

Introduction You might have read an earlier post of mine where I discussed the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS) functionality in SharePoint Online (SP-O) and walked through how you can leverage jQuery and JavaScript to interact with an external...

This morning I had the pleasure of opening up the SharePoint Live Virtual Conference . I had about 1,500 of my closest SharePoint friends on the line to discuss ‘the cloud,’ a topic that I’m evermore involved with. As promised, I am providing those of...

I’ve been on the road this week attending the SharePoint Conference 2011 , but Donovan Follette, Paul Stubbs and I took a detour on the way back to Seattle to join ~3,000 developers at the Silicon Valley Code Camp (10/8-9). The code camp was held at the...

What’s New at SPC 2011 I’ve been hanging out here at the SharePoint Conference (SPC) 2011 in Anaheim, CA this week, and it’s been a blast. Earlier in the week, Jeff Teper announced a key innovation for the cloud: support for Business Connectivity Services...

For those of you SharePoint enthusiasts, you know that next week’s SharePoint Conference 2011 (or SPC) is the key conference for all of you SharePoint professionals out there—from the business, to the IT Pro, to the developer. It’s where you want to be...

This is pretty cool. You can use Windows Azure to build Windows Phone 7, Android and iOS applications! Given some of the conversations around extending LOB into the cloud (e.g. across multiple devices and Office 365), this is pretty appealing and cross...

While the summer here in Seattle has been short, we managed to ship an updated version of the SharePoint and Windows Azure Developer Training Kit for all of you wanting to explore how these two technologies come together. Below, you can find the updated...

I was recently asked what are the best ways to prepare for the 70-573 SharePoint Developer exam. I pinged a couple of folks who had gone through the process, and below are the responses I received from them. From Kirk: “I used the MeasureUp practice tests...

This week I traveled to the final leg of the Coast to Coast tour and also attended the SharePoint Saturday Conference in Washington, DC. In Chicago, I had the chance to spend some time with many developers who are learning SharePoint and we ran a boot...

In the C2C final tour stop in Chicago, we spent a lot of time in the demos and not too much time with the deck. So, I’ve posted the deck for your review post-tour. Also, a few follow-up notes from questions: 1. You can download the latest IW VM from this...

You’ve probably seen a few posts on my blog involving Windows Azure; more recently, I’ve been talking quite a bit about the integration between SharePoint and Windows Azure. However, of critical importance for the developer is to ensure you have access...

It seems there are quite a few folks heading out to the SP Saturday “The Conference” in the DC area next week. If you’re planning on going, it’s never too late to register. You can go here to get more information about the event and to register. The details...

Today, the SharePoint and Windows Phone 7 Developer Training Kit shipped. This is a great milestone because there is not a lot of good material out there on how to build phone apps for SharePoint 2010. The kit comprises a number of  units: Introduction...

A few of you have asked me how to embed PowerPoint decks in your blog so you get something that looks like the below:   There’s a great blog out there that walks you through how to do this here , but with one caveat: the new SkyDrive has changed...

So far, this week has been great; lots of connections with partners, colleagues from around the world and of course a couple of sessions in the mix to keep things interesting. I wanted to share the decks/code from the sessions I did earlier this week...

This is now the third release of the SharePoint and Windows Azure training kit, which adds four additional modules: Using Windows Azure Blob Storage with SharePoint 2010 This unit provides an overview of Windows Azure Data Storage and various Blob storage...

I’m sure if you’re reading this you probably know that one of Microsoft’s key directions in the future is Windows Azure; I’ve been writing and presenting on this for a while and have also been discussing how you can integrate SharePoint 2010 with Windows...

For those of you Office and SAP integration developers out there, you may remember the OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP v. 1.0. V1 was based off of Office and MOSS 2007 and leveraged the BDC to show you how to integrate with SAP. V2 has upgraded a lot...

For those of you that have been wondering where you can find more out about Windows 8, well the BUILD conference was just announced. It’ll happen this fall from September 13-16, and you can get more information here: http://www.buildwindows.com/ . And...

Last week I attended TechEd 2011, which was held in Atlanta, Georgia at the World Congress Center. It was quite the conference, with over 10,000 attendees and 465 sessions. In true content-blasting fashion, C9 has done an amazing job at very quickly getting...

OBAs, or Office Business Applications, are a breed of application that continue to be developed and deployed by many organizations. An OBA by definition is an Office or SharePoint application that integrates line-of-business (LOB) data into an information...

SharePoint 2010 is great for BI; you have a ton more options. One of these options is the native Chart Web part, which allows you to create and map data from a number of different sources. For example, if you navigate to your SharePoint site, click Site...

Just received my schedule for breakout sessions at TechEd USA, which is in Atlanta, Georgia. I’ll be getting a little crazy with Windows Azure this time around and will be covering Office and SharePoint integration with Windows Azure across two break...