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Early Impressions on Surface Pro

[Update 3/26: I got a tweet from the @Surface people asking if they could help me with anything, so I made a plug for Swype, which they acknowledged with an “Interesting – Thanks for the feedback, Paul!”  I really think that Swype would make this device much easier to use for casual productivity.  (Also, fixed a typo pointed out to me by an old friend – thanks, Mike!)]

My office won a contest earlier this year with a small cash award attached to it.  I used the money to subsidize the purchase of a Surface Pro (128GB with the 2-year insurance plan) and I’ve been using a good deal since then.  I bought it from the Microsoft Store at the mall by Columbus Circle in Manhattan.  Total price was about $1300 USD with the better keyboard and the sucker’s insurance 🙂

I only got it 4 days ago and already I can hardly imagine not having it.  I brought to bed to read the so-far excellent Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and it was the first thing I reached for when I woke up.

Here are some impressions, in no particular order:

How touching: I want to touch every screen I see now.

Windows 8 is for touch devices: I have a much stronger appreciation for Windows 8.  This O/S translates much better to a touch device than it does a keyboard.  At first, I didn’t know how to barely get started but it quickly became second nature for me. And it’s very fast and responsive, so you don’t feel like you’re lagging around or paying a penalty for a mistake.  I’m not an expert with the UI (mystery things still happen) but I’m flying all around the place with a good deal of confidence after a relatively small handful of hours on it

At the same time, now that I’ve been using touch, I have a much better understanding of the O/S from a Dell laptop perspective.  The mouse pad on my E6430 doesn’t compete with the Surface’s multiple points of contact, etc., but it does do a good job with some of the gestures.  But regardless of the mouse pad, having worked with the surface now, I know what’s happening when I move my mouse cursor around and various little cues pop up in the corners and such.

I also want to point out a line from this blog post by Brandon Carson:

Along comes Microsoft with a different perspective of how an operating system should support its users. Instead of two OS’s and a fragmentation between devices, Microsoft builds a new OS to blend the lean-back experience with the desktop experience and give the user control over how to interact with their device."

That line crystallized for me the whole point of Win8 as an O/S.  It’s an iPad and it’s laptop.  I like that.  I like that a lot.  I don’t bring my laptop to bed very often and when I do, it’s a novelty and a pain.  This thing can go everywhere with me, including work.

The windows store is awesome!  I just assumed, when I bought the Surface, that the windows app store would be a complete waste of time, a barren waste land of half-hearted apps clinging to the rocky soil, sad and pathetic.  I think that the various anti-Microsoft peoples are winning the hearts and minds argument here.  Although it’s empirically true that Apple and Google have bazillions more apps in their stores, dwarfing MSFT, MSFT still has a goodly selection and it’s growing.   My point isn’t that MSFT’s store is “better” than those, but that it’s not as bad as the intertubes will make you think.  Give it a look. There are many interesting apps out there.

Pen is awesome!: I have wanted the ability to write and sketch architecture diagrams FOREVER.  All the 3rd party things always felt kludgy unless you bought one that was expensive and I just didn’t feel like it.  With the surface, it’s totally natural and quick, plus lots of interesting apps available.  These include paint.net, something interesting from Evernote (Skitch), Onenote (which has first class support for the pen), PowerPoint (allows annotating and drawing during presentations).  I have barely scratched the surface here and I am loving it.  Check out this blog post for a more professional opinion on how Surface can be used for more industrial strength art.  I can’t wait for my next PPT demo.

It plays Civ5! (with a little help from some friends):  Civ with touch is really neat 🙂

Some annoyances:

  • Battery is not great.  No better than my laptop.  I have this vague notion that batteries need to be “conditioned” (but that’s probably nonsense) so if that’s the case, it may get better.
  • Keyboard is tiny.  But, I have been getting used to it.
  • No Swype! I just started using Swype a few months ago on my Galaxy S3 running Android and I can’t believe how productive it made me.  Not having that on Win8 is really frustrating and it seems like it will be a long time, if ever, before Swype is available.  Some other 3rd parties are working on it but my 30 seconds worth of research implies that the O/S jsut doesn’t support it.  (If you aren’t using Swype or one of its cousins you should stop reading this blog post and give it a try; this post will almost certainly still be here once you get back).
  • Overall form factor – still getting used to it.  It’s a beautiful screen and Netflix is great on it.  Web browsing is great on it. But, MS Word – kind of hard and not very touch friendly (to me, so far).  I’ve seen screen shots of people using visual studio on it – that seems like a stretch.  But I’m going to give it a try at some point.

So, there you go!  Hope this helps someone thinking about about it.  It’s too early for me to say “buy it!”.  I’ll revisit this post in a week or so and follow up.

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SharePoint Web Part UI Design Pattern Using XSL

I’ve been giving a talk this year on on a design pattern for SharePoint web parts where the UI is entirely managed via XSL. 

I plan to write this up in greater detail over the next period of time.  In the mean time, here is the PowerPoint.

The source code for this project is up on CodePlex here: http://webpartsxsl.codeplex.com/.

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MVP Again

Microsoft re-awarded me with SharePoint MVP on July 1st this year and it’s no less exciting than it was the first time four years ago.

The SharePoint community is just an amazing place.  I remember when I was first introduced to SharePoint by my old employer, Conchango.  I was not happy about it Smile.  I had been living in a BizTalk world for a year or two leading up to my job there and before that, worked in another insular world of people and companies that made a living off of Progress Software.  I say “insular” because the SharePoint world is anything but!

I’m continually glad and excited to be part of this bizarre online community of people that feel strangely compelled to blog endlessly, give up their Saturdays for free conferences, haunt online forums, build all kinds of whacked out free products to put up on CodePlex and a myriad of other community efforts of all shapes and sizes. 

I don’t know what it is about this product that inspires such volunteerism and immersion, but I hope it never changes.

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SharePoint 2010 KeywordQuery and Anonymous Users

I enabled anonymous access in my site to test out a search web part I’ve been developing and to no great surprise, it didn’t quite work.  Anonymous access is pretty much always a challenge for me.

In this case, the initial search wasn’t running for some reason.  I should say that it was running but it was not returning any results.  I’m using the KeywordQuery for that initial display.

I did a quick search and this blog post by “sowmyancs” came up fairly quickly: “SharePoint 2010 Search: not showing any results for anonymous users?”  That blog entry describes the problem from an out of the box keyword search perspective but the behavior was similar to mine – it worked for authenticated users and for anonymous users, but anonymous users got no results. 

I followed the instructions and bang!  It solved my issue.  I’m not sure what side effects this will have and they may prove to be a problem, but the short term result is helpful.

Click on through the blog:

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SharePoint MVP Chat on Wed 04/20

I’ll be participating in one of the period MVP chats next week, 04/20.  Here’s Microsoft’s write-up and link to the registration:

Do you have tough technical questions regarding SharePoint for which you’re seeking answers? Do you want to tap into the deep knowledge of the talented Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals? The SharePoint MVPs are the same people you see in the technical community as authors, speakers, user group leaders and answerers in the MSDN and TechNet forums. By popular demand, we have brought these experts together as a collective group to answer your questions live. So please join us and bring on the questions! This chat will cover WSS 3.0, MOSS, SharePoint Foundation 2010 and the SharePoint Server 2010. Topics include setup and administration, design, development and general question.
Please join us on Wednesday April 20th at 9am PDT/noon EST to chat with MVPs from around the world. Learn more and add these chats to your calendar by visiting the MSDN event page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/aa497438.aspx

I joined in one of these last year and it was a real blast.  It’s just a crazy kind of open question/answer extravaganza. 

Here are some of the (currently) scheduled SharePoint MVP participants:

Cornelius van Dyk
Dan Attis
Daniel Wessels
David Martos
Ivan Sanders
Jeremy Thake
John Ross
Kris Wagner
Mike Oryszak
Randy Drisgill
Woody  Windischman
Zlatan Dzinic

That’s a wide spectrum of interests and specialties.  I think this will be a fun time and good use of your lunch hour (or any hour during the day Smile )

Sign here here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/aa497438.aspx).

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Quick Fix For “There has been an error while loading the form”

I’m testing a custom SharePoint Designer 2010 activity this fine Sunday afternoon and I was unexpectedly hitting a “Critical Error” when trying to launch the workflow:

There has been an error while loading the form.

Click Start Over to load a new copy of the form.  If this error persists, contact the support team for the Web Site.

Click Close to exit this message.

Show error details

Of course, if you click the “Show error details” button all it does is show you a correlation ID:

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In my case, this turned out to be an Alternate Access Mappings problem.  I looked at the log file in the 14 hive and saw that InfoPath was complaining about an AAM issue (since I was hitting localhost instead of the server name).  I changed my URL and that solved it.

It does to show that with all the linkings of the various bits now in SP 2010, the thing you naturally this is a problem (SharePoint Designer workflow in my case) is actually totally unrelated to the core problem.

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Where is Microsoft.CSharp Anyway?

I was handed a .zip file with a moderately complex project structure and which had been ripped out of subversion.  The code is referencing Microsoft.CSharp, as in:

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As you can see, visual studio was missing the actual DLL. 

I don’t normally think about where these things are physically located.  I dug around here, created a new console app (after following reading through this little exchange) and found the DLL on my environment at: C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.0\Profile\Client\Microsoft.CSharp.dll.

This actually gave rise to an issue with visual studio complaining that I was targeting the wrong environment, “Microsoft.CSharp.dll or one of its dependencies requires a later version of .NET blah blah blah”.  In the end, I remove the reference altogether and that seems to have solved the issue.

It’s just another one of those oddly difficult things to figure out and the sort of thing that is less interesting than an argument with your wife over whether there are too many women’s coats in the closet Smile

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Very Cool BrightStarr Video

Having just started working here at BrightStarr, I’m pretty psyched that we’ve put together this very cool video up on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/user/BrightStarrSP

I wasn’t involved in producing it and I’m not personally big on these kinds of promotional efforts, but this one is quite cool to me.

Cool BrightStarr Video

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Goodbye CGS, Hello BrightStarr!

Tomorrow, I officially start my first day at BrightStarr (www.brightstarr.com), a UK based company with a US office that is, incredibly, a mere 6 miles from my house.

It was an easy decision to leave CGS, but a hard decision to make Smile.  Let me explain.

I joined CGS just over a year ago (December 2009) and joined as the Director of a SharePoint consulting practice.  This seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.  Here in the US at least, it’s quite common for people to start out as a junior dev type person, writing reports and tracking down annoying rounding error issues (I don’t miss those days at all!).  You gain increasing levels of responsibility and associated development awesomeness.  I had unbelievable opportunities over my career to some very cool stuff.  I got to write an invoicing system from scratch.  I got to work with smart people, including my brother of all people, to develop a complete web based development app for a 4GL called Progress.  Fun, fun times.

Of course, you progress from the Sr. Dev type to a technical team lead, bordering on being that most hallowed of technical things – an Architect.

The conventional wisdom on this progression is that the next step from Architect is to some kind of more senior management role.

I had bought into and accepted that progression.  When I joined CGS in one of those more senior roles, I anticipated, to some extent, that I’d be stepping “beyond” architect and into some kind of “super architect” kind of role – one architect to rule them all Smile

For me, that turned out to be less than successful.  It’s not to say that I didn’t have some good success in the role, but in the end, I’m not a classic practice manager.  Asking people on a weekly basis whether they have entered their time into the timesheet system just isn’t very interesting to me.  Scheduling out “resources” (or people, really) months in advance is just boring.  Pouring over SOWs and looking for and closing potential loopholes that may bit us in future is a real horror.  Yet, these are important things and given how important they were to the CGS role, it was obvious a change had to to be made. 

It was only obvious to me after a lot of thinking, however.  Thankfully, the evidence was clear enough to me that once I did really think about it, it became obvious. 

That got me to looking for open positions and I found BrightStarr.

I’ve signed on as a SharePoint architect and I can’t wait to get started.  So far, they are a very impressive crew and I think that they (we!) are poised to make a real name in the market.  I’ll be posting more about what I do there and I am really looking forward to it.  Have a look at their web site – www.brighstarr.com – it’s an impressive piece of work.

I consider myself very lucky in all of this.  We have all seen various mid to senior level managers who are sort of stuck in a mire, unable to really excel or move forward quick and with confidence.  That was where I was headed and I’m very glad to have escaped it so easily. 

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Backup-SPSite cmdlet Silently Fails When Executed with Wrong Permissions

I was on a server and running a boring site collection backup command with the Backup-SPSite powershell cmdlet and got the following error:

Backup-SPSite : Cannot find an SPSite object with Id or URL: …  (full message below)

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I’ve had issues with this server so it made me think that the server was sick or something.  I switched over to good old stsadm and this time I got a different error:

This operation can be performed only on a computer that is joined to a server farm … (full message below)

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Of course, it it on the farm and all that, but it did occur to me that I was logged in with my own account and I normally log in as a system account onto this server.  I did that and the backup succeeded.  What I find interesting is that the cmdlet gave me a security trimmed error message.  That’s kind of neat but didn’t help me much :) 

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