Community & Events

Keep Focused

Dennis Bottjer — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 03:01:13 GMT

While at the Tyson Developers Conference last week I attended a productivity session by Claudio Lassala. During the session he introduced us to a time management technique known as Pamadoro. Essentially, tasks are performed in 25 minute blocks with a five minute break between each work block. Today, I found a tool called Keep Focused on CodePlex.com. The tool allows a task to be entered then the 25 minute timer count down is started. I used Keep Focused all day and really felt quite productive.

Give Keep Focused a try and see if your productivity doesn’t improve.

Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group April 12 Reminder

Dennis Bottjer — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:12:48 GMT

The Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group is having it’s monthly meeting tonight Monday April 12th @6:00 PM.

Come see Corey Roth’s presentation on SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services.

GREAT Prizes:

XBox 360 – Halo 3 ODST

Telerik Premium Collection ($1,300.00 value)

ReSharper ($199.00 value)

SQL Sets ($149.00 value)

64 Bit Windows 7

Infragistics NetAdvantage for .NET Platform ($1,195.00 value)

You can click here for more information.

You can click here to RSVP for the meeting.

MSDN Events: Launch 2010 Highlights

Dennis Bottjer — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:48:15 GMT

Tuesday May 04, 2010

Renaissance Tulsa Hotel and Convention Center

Seville II and III

6808 South 107th East Avenue

Tulsa Oklahoma 74133

For the Developer

1:00 PM – 5:00 PM

Event Overview

MSDN Events Present: Launch 2010 Highlights

Join your local Microsoft Developer Evangelism team to find out first-hand about how the latest features in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 can help boost your development creativity and performance. Learn how to improve the process of refactoring your existing code base and drive tighter collaboration with testers. Explore innovative web technologies and frameworks that can help you build dynamic web applications and scale them to the cloud. And, learn about the wide variety of rich application platforms that Visual Studio 2010 supports, including Windows 7, the Web, Windows Azure, SQL Server, and Windows Phone 7 Series.

Click here to register.

For the IT Professional

8:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Event Overview

TechNet Events Present: Launch 2010 Highlights

Join your local Microsoft IT Pro Evangelism team to find out first-hand what Microsoft® Office® 2010 and SharePoint® 2010 mean for the productivity of you and your people—across PC, phone, and browser. Learn how this latest wave of technologies provides revolutionary user experience and how it takes us into a future of greater productivity. Come and explore the tools that will help you optimize desktop deployment.

Click here to register.

Presenting @ Oklahoma City SharePoint User Group

Dennis Bottjer — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:18:35 GMT

Last month Cory Roth spoke at the first meeting of the Oklahoma City SharePoint User Group. On Monday April 26th I will be presenting at the second meeting.

What:	Oklahoma City SharePoint User Group OKCSUG is excited to host Dennis Bottjer as our April speaker presenting “SharePoint, A DBA’s Nightmare!” For many organizations the question is not if SharePoint but when. SharePoint requires SQL Server to function and stores everything from content to configuration with SQL Server Database. Yes, this means Word, Excel documents, and even images are stored within a SQL Server Database. Perhaps, even more frightening is the way SharePoint often grows like a weed within an organization. A healthy and well-tuned SQL Server Environment is crucial to successful operation of a SharePoint farm. This talk will begin by providing an overview of how exactly SharePoint uses SQL Server. It will then detail SQL Server best practices as pertaining to SharePoint. Finally, the talk will provide performance-tuning tips for SharePoint that will reduce the load placed on the database.
When:	Monday, April 26, 2010 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Where:	okcCoCo 723 N. Hudson Ave Oklahoma City, OK 73102

First Annual Northwest Arkansas Techfest 2010

Dennis Bottjer — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 03:41:25 GMT

What:	NWA TechFest Tulsa TechFest has been a growing success year over year for the last four years. We are PROUD to be bring this successful event to NWA!
When:	Thursday, July 8, 2010 (all day)
Where:	Center for Non Profits @ St Mary's 1200 West Walnut Street Rogers, AR 72756

The Tulsa Tech Fest has been an annual event for several years. Northwest Arkansas is a short drive from Tulsa and is very scenic. The NWA Techfest is a great opportunity for the Oklahoma User Group Community to support the Northwest Arkansas User Group Community.

Action Items

1) NWA Techfest is excepting speaker submissions. If you have expertise in areas such as C#, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, SharePoint, Agile Development, Hyper-V, Silverlight, WCF, WF, please consider submitting a session.

2) Mark your calendar and commit to attending.

Announcing Oklahoma City User Groups!

Dennis Bottjer — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:55:35 GMT

Oklahoma City now has two SharePoint User Groups. The group may eventually merge to form a single group but that is still being discussed. For more information visit www.OKCSUG.org and www.OKSUG.org.

Corey Roth, Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group, VP will be presenting at the next www.OKCSUG.org meeting on March

Meeting Info:

Introduction to SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search

Corey Roth, Stonebridge Consulting

This intro level talk will teach you the basics of Enterprise Search in SharePoint. Here you will learn about the basic building blocks such as content sources, crawled properties, managed properties, and scopes. We will also cover what types of data can be indexed. We’ll use demo search using SharePoint 2010, but all of the topics apply to MOSS 2007 as well.

Corey Roth is a consultant at Stonebridge specializing in SharePoint solutions in the Oil & Gas Industry. He has ten plus years of experience delivering solutions in the energy, travel, advertising and consumer electronics verticals. Corey has always focused on rapid adoption of new Microsoft technologies including Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, LINQ, and Silverlight. He also contributed greatly to the beta phases of Visual Studio 2005. For his contributions, he was awarded the Microsoft Award for Customer Excellence (ACE). Corey is a graduate of Oklahoma State University. Corey is a member of the .NET Mafia (www.dotnetmafia.com) where he blogs about the latest technology and SharePoint.

COME JOIN US ON MARCH 29! All meetings are FREE to attend! We meet from 6pm to 8pm at the Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative. Pizza and drinks will be provided.

Thanks to Accelebrate for sponsoring the door prize for the March OKCSUG meeting! Accelebrate is a national and international provider of SharePoint training, as well as ASP.NET training, C# training, and VB.NET training.

TCC Configuring MOSS 2007 Certification Prep Class

Dennis Bottjer — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:06:37 GMT

Tomorrow I begin teaching an 8 week Configuring MOSS 2007 Certification Preparation Class at Tulsa Community College. The class will be every Thursday night at the northeast campus.

Details:

Course:	CSCI 2993-24212
Title:	SharePoint Administration in MOSS 2007
Delivery:	Blended (Class / Online)
Meeting:	Thursday
Times:	6:00p – 8:50p
Dates:	03/11/2010 – 05/06/2010
Campus:	Northeast
Room:	Academic Building, RM 2421
Book:	Click To Buy (Amazon)
Fee:	Free
Certification Exam:	Free (First Attempt)
TCC Sponsor (Please contact for enrollment assistance)	Brian Hall (918) 595-7444 Tulsa Community College bhall@tulsacc.edu

Southern Developers Live Group

Dennis Bottjer — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:06:37 GMT

Do you live in the South? Are you a developer or do you generally consider yourself a geek? Then you should consider joining this group: http://southerndevs.groups.live.com.

The group was started by Keith Elder as a way to connect developers across the south. The group is a way to share event information, share knowledge and stay connected.

Call to Action:

1) Please join this group after reading this post.

2) Please spread word of this group.

Technorati Tags: Southern Devs,DotNET Community

Continue Learning, Write Down Goals, and you will Succeed!

Dennis Bottjer — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:39:27 GMT

For most of my life I’ve been a fan of goal settings. Furthermore, I usually like writing goals down. However, I must admit that although a fan, I have not remained consistently faithful to the practice year after year. I can tell you though that the practice does work. Sure it may sometimes take a little longer than planned. But the process of setting a goal, writing down, and then periodically checking progress is a good thing.

Last year I set a goal to read six books. The logic was simple. Surely, I could read at least one book every two months. At the end of 2009 here were the results:

Why is this Important?

To some a reading list of fifteen books may seem like a lot. To others laughable. I believe Teddy Roosevelt read a book per day. This blog post and list is not intend to gloat but to simply share a few key believes.

Software Development is a career where our skills become obsolete rapidly. So how do we stay valuable? We read about the latest technologies and never stop learning.

Wisdom beyond ones own experiences can be gained, to some degree, through the shared experiences of others. Remember, success leaves clues for us to follow.

It’s important to have an understanding of business environment, because many of, dare I say most of us, don’t design and build operating systems or development environments. Most of us develop software solutions for business users and they don’t speak GEEK!

Unexpected Find:

Secrets from a Creativity Coach – This book was a birthday present from my mother. The book was a quick read and a book I couldn’t put down. Any Geek that believes development is an expression on his/her creativity will find value in this book.

The Book Every SharePoint Developer Should Own!

Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Pro Developer)

Favorite Business Book:

The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Library Edition) - One of the core messages of this book is not work for work sake. Think of Office Space and the TPS Reports. How many employees are involved in creating, reviewing, approving, etc. those TPS reports. This book has value to the employee that wants streamline his / her workday and to the self-employed.

Should have read long, long, ago:

Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction – I’ve read bits and pieces of this book over the years but kept failing to read it cover-to-cover. This book is a cornerstone in good development fundamentals. I plan to review it again this year.

Share Your Recommendations:

If you are reading this and have any goal setting tips or experiences to share, please leave a comment.

Also, I am looking for some new reading material for 2010 so recommendations are welcome. :)

MSDN Webcast: Knee-Jerk Reactions to Proactive Solutions: Improved SharePoint Performance

dbottjer — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:34:18 GMT

What:	MSDN Webcast: Knee-Jerk Reactions to Proactive Solutions: Improved SharePoint Performance Attend this webcast to learn one dozen easy-to-implement performance tips for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. We discuss a wide range of topics from adjusting out-of-the-box settings to identifying memory leaks in custom code. We also describe several ways to proactively improve the user experience and squeeze more performance out of a SharePoint Server farm. Anyone currently designing a SharePoint Server implementation can benefit from this webcast.
When:	Friday, July 10, 2009 12:00 PM
Where:	MSDN Web Cast Live Meeting

Technorati Tags: Presentation,SharePoint Performance,MSDN Web Cast,ASP.NET MVP