Category Archives: Personal

Wouldn’t it be Cool if …

I was going through my huge pile of MSDN magazines to get my wife off my back for 30 seconds to make room for new MSDN magazines and I came across an older article about integrating MS Speech Server with workflow foundation and I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to integrate all that with SharePoint?  It would be kind of neat to be able to say “Create site named [cool site] in site collection [papa bear]” into my cell phone and have it do that.  I can imagine an architecture where speech server hands off the commands to a workflow application that does all the work.  That’s very easy logic to implement on the server side of the fence.

On the UI, you’d have to do something to get it rolling.  I’d probably go to a “speech monitor” kind of SharePoint site that has some jQuery running that monitors a queue that is updated by the workflow application and shows, in real time, what’s happening. 

That would be a pretty crazy technology train right there.  Cell phone dialing up to speech server on some machine.  Workflows bridging the gap between Speech Server and SharePoint.  jQuery enhancing a plain Jane SharePoint UI. 

Is there any practical component to this?  Who knows.  Who cares?

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Internet Explorer 8 Crashing // 64 bit Operating Systems

A comment from Bob Fox (via Twitter, @bfox11b) reminded me that I had meant to throw together a quick blog entry describing a problem and my solution to Internet Explorer crashing on me all the time.

A few months ago, I got a new laptop (Dell Vostro 1720).  This is my first 64 bit machine and I was running 64 bit IE8.  Over time, it started to crash unpredictably, but frequently (probably every day).  It’s pretty agile at recovering from all that, but it was a real nuisance. 

The problem seems to have been an adobe plugin, “Air” or their flash plugin – I don’t really know what it’s called or care all that much.  It turns out that it’s not compatible with a 64 bit environment (which is *totally* reasonable; it’s not like 64 bit is the kind of thing that anyone except ***crazy*** companies want to support or anything).  I tried to uninstall it but that experiment only lasted about 15 minutes.  It turns out that a ridiculous number of sites are using flash tech (I may be the last one to realize this on the planet).  So, I can’t live without it and I can’t use IE8 64 bit. 

My answer is to switch to 32bit IE8.  It’s been smooth sailing since then.

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Awarded MVP for SharePoint

MVPLogo

This morning, Microsoft emailed to tell me I have given the Microsoft MVP award!

It’s a lot to take in all at once.  When I’ve had a chance to properly reflect, I’ll share more of my thoughts on the whole thing.  I know it’s a subject of great interest to a lot of people. 

I’m bursting with excitement.  The SharePoint MVP crew is a great group of men and women dedicated to building and expanding the community.  I’ve only met a handful and look forward to meeting more and helping to expand and improve community resources over the coming year.  It’s going to be a while ride…

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