SharePoint resources continue to see exponential grow
Just 2 days ago now the SharePoint Pod Show pushed their very first podcast. It was definitely great to listen to it and am very excited about the upcoming shows! They've created a SharePoint Pod Show FaceBook group so you can let them know what you want to hear as well!
A few weeks ago one of the hosts, Rob Foster instant messaged me that he was starting up a SHAREPOINT NATION! FaceBook group and wanted me to start up a SHAREPOINT NATION! LinkedIn group, so I did. It's a term, a chant, a life style, that Rob coined around the time frame of the MVP Summit. You can find some of the history about it on his blog, We are SharePoint Nation!!! In my opinion it is the difference between a "social networking" thing and a real life group of motivated and enthusiastic individuals working together as a community, a REAL community, a NATION.
Since then, SharePoint MVP, Amanda Murphy found the time to create the awesome logo that's now on all the groups and sites and simply says it all: Virtually Everything you need for SharePoint.
On July 16th, 2008, just a few short weeks ago, Bob Fox and crew launched the International SharePoint Professionals Association (ISPA). You can find out the details and plans on his blog post Announcing it.
SharePoint Magazine launched it's first "issue" within the last couple weeks as well. Although, if you follow me on Twitter @DavidWalker you already heard me razz them for running it using WordPress. That is definitely no reason to not read it! They already have some great information. There's many sites that fall victim to this type of technical treachery - SharePointBestPractices.com is built with PHP.
Finally, the open source project that SharePoint MVP - Stacy Draper and I have been hard at work on became publicly available around July 14th, 2008. We still have just a little more work to wrap it up for Release 1.0, typical scope creep issues with guys who are very excited about the project and the functionality that it can provide. The day before we had to make it public, CodePlex forces projects to be public within 30 days after creation or they will be deleted, we added a bunch of stuff that broke the deployment script at the moment. I hope to get his resolved as quickly as possible, so we can release version 1.0. In the mean time, check out the project and what it can do at CodePlex.com/PowerQueryWebPart. Once, Release 1.0 goes live I'll post more details about the making of the project and how this swiss army knife can be a must have in your WebPart Gallery in any SharePoint site.
Comment Notification
If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here
Subscribe to this post's comments using
Comments
Leave a Comment
About dwalker
David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.
His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.
After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.
Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.
He is the current President of the
Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.