Wednesday, May 16, 2012
#
So as you know I am yet again involved in SPS NYC with my awesome teammates, Greg Hurlman, Jason Gallicchio, Tasha Scott, and Tom Daly. The speakers have finally been picked and a first draft schedule has been posted at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ny. We are also still looking for sponsors if you guys are interested you can also click on the link to grab the form, sign it, and send it to sponsors@spsnyc.com. We are also looking for volunteers and you can fill out the form at the same place listed above. We are offering a t-shirt and a gift card for those who dedicate a couple hours of service to the event. I believe this year will be the best event yet. I am also considering wearing a Viking Helmut with horns if at least one other person will wear a similar item. I would consider dressing up if I could get another person to dress up, but I think that’s asking for too much. Also, I need to run around and help the others put out fires, so I’m not so sure full on dress attire would work out.
Anyway, registration is not yet posted for those of you guys who wish to attend. We might post it more towards the end of June. I am not yet sure what the decision was on the exact date, but normally we post about 6 weeks prior to the event. I hope to see you all this year at the event. Yet again my dad is going to show up, so stop by, attend a few sessions, and say hi to everyone.
So as you can see this blog has not been the best in the world lately. Life changes and burn out are killing me lately. Don’t get me wrong I love my job. I love writing things in Visual Studio, in fact this week I got to work with MVC3 for the first time ever. I am completely hooked on MVC3 and will further explore that in the upcoming months. I have entertaining a completely different idea, because I think it would be fun and interesting. The downside is it involves me buying an Apple computer.
I have been fighting buying a Macbook Pro for ages. I love building Windows PCs from scratch. I love knowing that I built the computer that I am using. I guess it stems back from my grandparents teaching me that hard work leads to a more fulfilling accomplishment. Anyway, I am not switching over to the darkside. I just built myself a gaming PC (core i7 process, 24 gb of ram-32 when I RMA the last two chips, 4 hard drives – main being an SSD, and an NVIDIA GTX 570 card). I just want to branch out and learn some new tech, so I figure if I have some spare time (which is like asking for a unicorn), I will start posting more about my new development. Anyway, I am waiting for the WWDC and then I am going to decide on what flavor of Macbook Pro to purchase. It turns out a Macbook Air won’t get me what I want programmatically the processor might not be quite up to par for hardcore development. I wouldn’t want to limit myself to anything softcore right?
So check back here periodically or on twitter. I’m sure I will post something about my endeavors. In the meanwhile I am still working on my personal life and I am happy to say I have friends in the area. For the first time in a very long time some of them are actually female. As you all know my friends for the longest time were members of the SharePoint and .Net Community mainly and of the male breed. So things are working out. I still love every single day in NYC. It is the first city I can 100% say I belong in. If I have my way I will stay in the metro area for a long time. Anyway, I hope you all are having a good time and goodnight.
Monday, May 14, 2012
#
So I have decided to hold a community dinner the first week of June. I invited a bunch of MS community members who run user groups or contribute a lot in the NYC Metro area. If anyone is interested drop me comment on this blog with your email address. I won’t publish the comment with your email in case you don’t want everyone to see your address. I just figured that some people might see this blog that I missed via email. I am also going to spam the main community list for njny metro area. Hopefully, we can get a good turn out from the community at large and have some good dialog discussions on events we are running. I am sure a lot of don’t see each other often so I figured why not. Anyway hope to see you all at the dinner.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
#
I got sick about certain things that were hilarious and decided to put up another blog at www.nerdcourting.com on wordpress and created a twitter account you can all follow at @nerdcourting. I am going to post hilarious dating messages from potential suitors and other such information. I figured it’s about time I blog about my nerdy dating experiences. If you want go over to that blog and read it and follow the twitter account.
Monday, April 16, 2012
#
So if you’ve noticed I have not really been blogging for a while. The reason being is a new focus on my personal life. You all know things were jumbled and turned around last year. I am just trying to explore my new surroundings and meet new people. I have cut back substantially on my community involvement, which is still a ridiculous amount if you think about it. I’m going to try and submit to SharePoint Saturday Toronto and Atlanta. I will be at KC Developer Conference and The Expert’s Conference in a few weeks. I will definitely be at SharePoint Saturday New York City. We are toying with the idea of resurrecting a give camp in the area potentially. In between all that stuff I am joining meetups and attempting to play roller derby. I have met a few good friends and we have watched some really cool things and done some really cool things together. I am attempting to wade the horrific waters of online dating. Throughout all this stuff I am finding it hard to keep up with the 800 events I was doing last year. I am also trying to stay at home and local more often. You will rarely see me outside of the northeast realms and frequenting anything past Ohio much. I am trying to focus on friends and family too and that’s keeping me incredibly busy. I finally visited my friends in Portland and I have a bunch more people to visit this year. With that said I’m really sorry if I am bad at responding to anything extra or helping out with anything outside of my main priority – having a personal life outside of the SharePoint Community. I think that I did a good job in the past few years and met a ton of great people, but I am missing a work/life balance. If I don’t see you around don’t worry I’m still online. No one killed me and hid the body. You can try and ping me I just might be a slow responder.
Technorati Tags:
Personal Lif e
Just like Men In Black we’re back again for another year of SharePoint Saturday New York City. Speakers, sponsors, and volunteer submissions are open at: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ny. If you are a local speaker and you are afraid to submit a full session, then you have the option this year to submit a lightening talk. Everyone has the ability to submit talks for full lectures until the beginning of May. We will keep sponsorships open until they are gone this year. We cannot continue to take money past the sponsorship amount on the document. So go the site download the form and submit a few sessions. Or if you are interested in sponsoring fill out the form. I believe we might have a few of the top tier sponsorships left, but I am not entirely sure. If you don’t feel like doing either sign up to volunteer and help out for the day. We are giving volunteers a shirt and a gift certificate in appreciation for there help. I also promise that I will wear a ridiculous hat this year to the event (who would miss that type of humiliation and hilarity?). Hopefully, I will see you all there at the event, unfortunately we do not have an open registration form on eventbrite yet. Check back around June for registration information. I hope to see you all there again this year.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
#
I know I am not a wise old sage like some people in the community. I just turned 30 however I feel like all my years looking back have changed me. My collective experiences and thoughts have given me a different perspective on life recently. Seven months ago my head was in a gutter and since then a lot of things have happened. I was always the weird kid in the corner reading Star Trek books. When I was in elementary school I thought that kids would throw me birthday parties out of pity because I was the poor kid who everyone hated. I am no longer that person. I realized that during the worst possible period between my 29th and 30th year when I hit rock bottom. You all know the insane story as I’ve told it two billion times over. Honestly it was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life time, because many things would not have happened. My friends came through for me at every given moment people from all over were checking up on me all over the world. I fell and I landed on a bunch of people it was awesome. I landed on family and friends who I thought I was never close enough to talk about these things. They helped me realize I had a ton of unfulfilled dreams. I got to move to New York City one of the greatest cities in the universe. I got to do whatever I wanted without judgment from anyone. I got to meet some great people at a few meetup groups in the past few months. I got to meet an awesome person that I have been dating for 3 months. I am trying to run for the 8 billionth time and keep up with it. I got to go to Europe and next week for the first time New Orleans. I got renewed for MVP for 2012. I am grateful for all the people and things in my life. I understand that sometimes when things seem bad you can always seek friends and family. They will always help me. I have to learn to lean on people sometimes just how they occasionally lean on me. That is the biggest thing I have learned from the decade of 20 to 30. I hope that 30 to 40 will be the best decade. I hope that I can continue to grow. I will catch you all later.
Technorati Tags:
Turning 30,
Wisdom
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
#
I don’t like to own tons of things really. I don’t need stuff in my life. I’d rather collect solid awesome friends and people in my life. So I keep telling people I had a bad year obviously. 2011 was the worst year ever. I feel incredibly bad because a lot of people helped me out in amazing ways in my time of need last year. The holidays to me have just not been right for a long time. I never liked Valentine’s Day it has always felt like the most miserable time of the year. The reason being I just felt under appreciated for such a long time. Thinking about the under appreciation I feel better when someone tells me how awesome I am. People don’t say that enough in my opinion, so for those people who I feel are close enough to me and I want to offer a service. I want people to send me there address in email, on facebook, or on twitter. I want to write appreciation cards for all the people that matter. Some people outright I will just ask and some people you can just send me your address straight off the bat. I am going to purchase some blank cards and put out the effort to let people know within the next month or so that they matter in my life and why.
Also, as an addition for those of you considering getting me a birthday card or a present in my family or friends. Do me a favor do the same for me or at least add on something silly as a present. I don’t need a new book or a giftcard or a new piece of electronic equipment. I just want to know why I’m important to you. What I’m going to do is collect all these cards and keep them for the future. For days that I’m down for rough times I am going to pull out these and look at them. I know it’s difficult to write a paragraph to someone that’s emotionally charged, but it means 10x more to me than actually giving me a dvd. If this is hard for you maybe do something else make me something cool do it in your own way. I don’t need you to spend any money on me. All I need to know this year is that people care. That’s the kind of year I need to have this year. Thank you again for all your devotion and support. This is not a forced task. I would just appreciate it a lot 
Technorati Tags:
Personal
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
#
I just spent a good portion of today of part of yesterday on a really weird issue. Our sites had some custom branding for a client and the quick launch displayed perfectly for the root site. When you clicked on all the subsites the quick launch bar would not display. Myself and one of the branding guy’s at Planet, Jaimie Luetjen, were spinning our wheels (and I don’t think it helps that I have a cold). Finally Jaimie is able to login to the site and he threw up a live meeting, so we could figure it out. After several hours we decide to create another page and see what happens on one of the subsites. The quicklaunch existed on that page, but not on the default page. So we started playing around and Jaimie realized that the settings for the template for subsites was set to only include a page layout with body and no quicklaunch. He set this so that the webpart page would display instead and I went back and reset all the page layouts. So morale of the story if you see the same issue make sure the default for that template for all your subsites is set to a page layout that includes a quicklaunch. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been steamrolled by SharePoint and other days I feel awesome. Today I think I learned something, but I feel like I spent hours spinning my wheels around in circles. Hopefully one of you guys learned from this blog post.
Monday, January 16, 2012
#
So lately I have been back in the dev arena more so and working from home. I find that I have some spare time because sometimes I pile directly through lunch. Today I was playing around with a control that I felt I had tested thoroughly. I was completely wrong. So here is an explanation of how to build out the accordion control in a webpart without having the same issues.
First off go here and download the jquery-ui-1.8.16.custom.min.js and jquery-1.6.2.min.js. Then what I want you to do is create a blank solution file in Visual Studio 2010 and sandbox it. Now create a module and in this module you want to drop these files into the Style Library or another document library where you can reference the location. Then you want to drop a scriptlink in using a custom action or create a brand new webpart and drop in the script directives as you would with any javascript files. I am not going to go over these details if you have worked with jQuery or you read Mark Rackley’s blog you should know how to do basic stuff like so.
The next piece you want to do is create a Panel to drop in all your javascript code in the webpart like such:
Panel pnlAccordion;
Then in your create child controls instantiante that Panel and create a string right after the instantiation. Now for the accordion piece I would create a function that passes back a string into this string you just created, then you will do something like this:
pnlAccordion.Add(new LiteralControl(YourAccordionString));
In your function you need to create a string for the Accordion build out that will return back to the CreateChildControls. At the start of your string you want to put the following piece of code:
YourAccordionBuildOut = @”<script type=’text/javascript’>
$(document).ready(function(){
$(‘#accordion’).accordion({ //this is the name of your div below
navigation:true,
event:’click’, //the property above and below can be changed
animated: ‘easeslide’ //go to the jquery site look at the properties
});
});
</script>
<div id=’accordion’>”;
Now you have the opening div tag for your accordion control you need to build out the headers and such. At this point you will create a fantastic function pulling list data, profile data or something other data. The thing to keep in mind is make sure your header tags are enclosed in the following tags:
<h3>Your Text</h3>
Also, the mistake I made with the next part is dropping a div tag for each element inside each heading. You can drop a div tag and span tags around each element, however what you want to do is make sure there is a single div around the entire block of elements like such:
<div>
<div>Element1</div>
<div>Element2</div>
</div>
If you do not drop that extra div tag around your elements inside the string, then you will have the issue where it hides the first item in your list of elements and when you click the accordion header it exposes just that one item. You will spend hours wondering what’s going on trust me. It’s worth it to just make sure there is a single div around all your elements and be done.
The other thing to keep in mind is that at the end of all your elements build out you need to close the div tag for the accordion control too. When you are done building out your tags dynamically and you have deployed your webpart and you should see the code above for the script followed by something that looks like this:
<div id=’accordion’>
<h3>Header1</h3>
<div>Elemen1</div>
<div>Element2</div>
<div>Element3</div>
<h3>Header1</h3>
<div>Elemen1</div>
<div>Element2</div>
<div>Element3</div>
<h3>Header1</h3>
<div>Elemen1</div>
<div>Element2</div>
<div>Element3</div>
</div>
If for some reason a div or a header is wrong check the function and the string you created by stepping through and attaching to the user code services process. Sometimes a rogue tag happens. Good luck guys and hopefully you will not run into the issues I’ve had. I hope that you are enjoying the blog posts while they are still coming if I’m lucky I will continue to write one a week for you guys that is semi-technical.