SQL Server is the No 1 focus within SolidQ and we have done a number of great things alone and partnering with Microsoft in the area of SQL Server. This is another achievement for SolidQ guys – getting a good quality online journal. I was dreaming for a long time to have my own good quality online journal for SharePoint and this is a great example for me.

There are plenty of online journals today and how SQJ differentiate from others is …… oh why don’t you download it and find it yourself. Be the 1400+ person to download it. Go and check http://www.solidq.com/sqj/Pages/Home.aspx 

SolidQ Journal - July

With the release of SolidQ Journal, our SolidQ Site started getting more than 1000 user hits per day and that shows how people recognize SolidQ Mentors all over the world. If you need to read content FREE from the people who wrote books for Wrox, Apress, Microsoft, etc… then this is what you should be checking every month.

SolidQ Journal

I did 02 wonderful sessions for Tech-Ed India one in Web track and the other in SharePoint track. I had very good level of participants and I was waiting to see my feedback ratings.

Here they come…

• Session 1 – Deploying Web Apps at the speed of your Thinking – 6.44 (no of participants-462)
• Session 2 – SharePoint 2010 Workflows – 7.21 (no of participants-244)

Overall average for the Tech-Ed India event was 7.13

Thanks a lot for the people who joined with me for those 02 sessions and really appreciated your feedback.

Hope to do couple more great session in year 2011.

MUGH – Microsoft User Group Hyderabad did Office 2010 Community Launch yesterday in Microsoft Campus. This was my 1^st community involvement after relocating to India and I was just an attendee.

It’s always good to be inside Microsoft Campus and we had 108 attendees inside that big MPR. We had good session lineup which covered Word, PowerPoint, Excel and SharePoint 2010. I didn’t know that people will turn-up for a full day event on a Saturday for Office launch. But this shows how well Office product is becoming most popular product around the world.

I’m writing this post with great pleasure to announce that our corporate site (http://www.solidq.com) went online today with SharePoint Server 2010. I’m really happy with that and this is going to be a very good example for other Microsoft Partners as well.

We see lot of organizations who do consulting on SharePoint, they have their web site running on either open source or any other technology. But we decided to set an example to our customers and partners by hosting our site with the technology we promote. We have our global site running on top of SharePoint Server 2010 and this exercise was started when the product was in beta.

I’m glad that now I have a real-life example to show to all my students apart from Microsoft SharePoint site. My salute to our IT Support team for their great effort.

Use of digital media in web sites has increased dramatically the last few years and SharePoint has made major investments to support the delivery of digital media in SharePoint sites in the 2010 product.

Introduction of new Video ContentType, Audio ContentType and Image ContentType was a great investment in the area of Digital Asset Support in SharePoint server 2010. Introduction of Silverlight media player and ability to seek, cache and progressive download was the biggest investment in the area of Digital Asset Support.

To have all the above mentioned features, the minimum requirement is installation and configuration of IIS 7.0 Bit Rate Throttling. Though BLOB Cache and Silverlight is not mandatory to have, IIS 7.0 Bit Rate Throttling is compulsory to provide Digital Asset Support in SharePoint Server 2010.

Great, how do we install and configure IIS 7.0 Bit Rate Throttling?

I found following blog post was really interesting and descriptive enough for anyone to get a clear picture about this:

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/148/bit-rate-throttling-configuration-walkthrough/

I thought of posting this based on the no of questions I got from my workshops during past 02 months.

Following are the minimum software requirements for installing SharePoint Server 2010:

• SharePoint Server 2010 is 62-bit only – we will not get a 32-bit version of SharePoint Server like the previous version.
• Windows Server 2008 with SP 2 64-bit or Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit – SharePoint Server 2010 will not support Windows Server 2003. We need the 2008 version of the Windows Server for installing SharePoint Server 2010. Anyway, R2 of Windows Server 2008 will come only in form of 64-bit and that helps us to make the right choice.
• SQL Server 2005/ 2008/ 2008 R2 64-bit – we can use any of the versions listed above as the database server and it should be the 64-bit. If we are going to use SQL Server 2005, we need to make we apply the SP3 and the CU3 (Cumulative Update) or whichever latest. If its 2008, we need to apply SP1 and the CU2 or whichever latest. If its 2008 R2, we don’t have to apply any other things on top of that.

Minimum Software Requirements for SharePoint Server 2010

Tech-Ed India is the largest technical event the region.  I have heard a lot about the event and this time I got a golden opportunity not just to attend to perform as a Speaker.

I was lucky to get 02 break-out sessions, one in Web Development track and the other in SharePoint Development track.

There were more than 2,000 attendees and it was very exciting to see all of them in a big hall waiting for Visual Studio 2010 launch. We were lucky to launch the Visual Studio 2010 before all others around the world due to our time-zone. Mr. Somasegar along with few other guest launched Visual Studio 2010 during Tech-Ed India 2010.

Talking about my sessions, this is was the largest crowd, venue I have addressed. My 1^st session was in Day 1 and it was in a very very big hall with 7 big projector screens. There were more than 500 people in the session and it was very interactive though it was the last session in Day 1.

My 2^nd session was in Day 3 and it was about SharePoint Workflows. Though that was not such a big hall like the previous one, I had a room-full crowd for the session. Some people were even ready to scarify few minutes from their lunch to stay back and discuss some of the questions/ doubts regarding the technology.

This was my 1^st Tech-Ed experience in India and I will be definitely doing better in 2011.

My special thanks to Rushabh Mehta and  Pinal Dave for encouraging me all the time and very special thanks to Vinod Kumar and Harish Ranganathan for the opportunity to given to present in Tech-Ed India.

Keynote

Soma @ Keynote

Soma Announcing Visual Studio 2010

Demo of Visual Studio 2010

Demo of Visual Studio 2010

Kamal Announcing SQL Server 2008 R2

Me, Harish and Vinod

Microsoft Tech-Ed India 2010 is considered as the major Technology event of the year for various IT Professionals and Developers. This year Tech-Ed is very important and remarkable because we are going to launch Visual Studio 2010 during the event. This event will feature a comprehensive forum in order to learn, connect, explore, and evolve the current technologies we have today.

What I heard during the 2^nd week of March that they had more than 2500 registrations and they closed the registration in the last week of March. It shows how people are looking forward for this event and above all this is happening in the IT Hub in India-Bangalore.

I’m very much pleased to announce that I’m presenting at the Tech-Ed and I encourage attending both the sessions. Following are the sessions I have aligned for you:

Session 1: Deploying web apps at the speed of your thinking
Date: 12^th April                  Time: 05.00pm – 06.00pm

Visual Studio 2010 offers web deployment as an easy walk-through. With its one click deployment model, deploying your applications becomes a seamless experience. Walk into this session where we will take a pretty big application and get it deployed with all the dependent stuff easily, using Visual Studio 2010.

Session 2: SharePoint 2010 Workflows
Date: 14^th April                  Time: 12.30pm – 01.30pm

Workflow in SharePoint 2010 has been revamped with a new designer for building both reusable workflows and list based workflows. Forms and Workflows are important for automating business processes. Organizations usually rely on software developers to create these workflows using code. Not anymore! With SharePoint Designer 2010, you can create powerful data driven form composite solutions on your SharePoint sites. SharePoint Designer’s workflows let you design powerful multi-step workflows centered around the form collected data, building upon the out-of-the-box reusable workflows and even import workflow designs from Visio! In this presentation, you will see how these tools come together to design workflows and route forms across your organization for task assignment and approval, and also how you can reuse your workflows in other lists and libraries on your site and how to prototype workflows in SharePoint Designer for further development in Visual Studio 2010.

Come and join with me for this big, challenging event and let’s Learn, Connect, Explore what’s going to come in this year 2010.

This is my 2nd Tech-Ed speaking engagement in year 2010.

I always enjoy presenting in .NET Forum and I got another opportunity to present before I take off to Tech-Ed India. Today I presented the session on “Data-Tier Application Project in Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2“.

Though it’s kind of holiday season there was an average crowd and it was very interactive session too. Lot of guys were impressed about this new feature and there were lot queries about the technology.

I covered all the aspect of this new “Data-Tier Application Project in Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2” and planning to talk about it again when the final release available for the public.

If you are interested about the PPT deck here it is for your further reference.

Month of March was a very busy month for me. I got only 5 days to stay with my family due heavy travelling in India.

I visited 06 cities and conducted 01 SharePoint 2010 training and 05 SQL Server 2008 R2 trainings. I visited Kolkata, Pune, Bangalore, Gurgaon, Mumbai and Chennai.

India Trip March

March/ April are the months of MCT renewal.

I have successfully renewed my Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) credentials for year 2010.

As you remember last year i blogged about the new experience of MCT renewal and even this year they have done the same thing. We now have option to pay by credit card and renew. Hope MCT team will improve it a lot by year 2011.

Are you looking for a Virtual Image for the purpose of evaluating SharePoint Server 2010 and related products?

Microsoft provides you 02 Virtual Images which we can run in Hyper-V and these 02 Virtual Images will have all the required components loaded and configured them with the recommended configuration.

Only problem is, we need more RAM and Hard Disk space and also Hyper-V enabled machines in order to use these Virtual Images. And the biggets issue is the download size. It’s almost 14GB.

Thanks a lot Chandana for getting it downloaded for me on time.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0c51819b-3d40-435c-a103-a5481fe0a0d2&displaylang=en

Douglas McDowell (CEO-North America-Solidq) pointed out this article.

I hope this is something we all should read.

http://www.sqlmag.com/Articles/ArticleID/103612/103612.html

I have been using Windows 7 RC in my home Desktop until today. And it started giving me a warning to backup my data since it’s going to expire in 12 more days.

Awesome, I can’t believe that I used RC for such a long time. To be honest I didn’t have any reason to upgrade to the RTM version since I didn’t see any problems with the RC release.

Today I will be installing RTM to my Desktop. How many of you still on Windows 7 RC and used it till the last few days?

Guys, I’m really impressed with the feedback you gave me for my TechEd sessions.

Thanks a lot for all of you who took some time to give me your valuable feedback.

Having heard that I’m having the 3rd highest feedback rating (among lot of other world-class speakers), I’m ready to do more and more sessions for you guys to stay aligned with the cutting-edge technologies which Microsoft provides.

Following are the feedback ratings I received from you guys:

• Session: New Language Features in C# 4.0 – Rating: 8.6
• Session: SharePoint Development jus got better – Past, Present & Future  – Rating: 8.0
• Session: SharePoint Server 2010 – Rating: 7.4

Once again thanks a lot for who those who gave me your valuable constructive/ destructive feedback and hope to do better in next TechEd.

And thanks Wela, for giving me the opportunity to wave the Sri Lankan flag.

Today was the busiest day in the TechEd event. I had 02 session, one in the early morning – “New Language Features in C# 4.0“. I had a very good crowd and it was more than the 1st session I did on day 1.

The famous session I did in the afternoon-”SharePoint Development just got better – Past, Present & Future” and it was in the Grand Ballroom-the biggest room we had. It was really interesting to see room-full crowd. I felt very proud and it was one of the best session I did on SharePoint.

Joy @ TechEd 2010

Joy @ TechEd 2010

Joy @ TechEd 2010

Joy @ TechEd 2010

Joy @ TechEd 2010

Microsoft Sri Lanka invited me and few other TechEd speakers to present at the event they had organized in Virtusa.

Brian Puhl did a session on Security and I did 01 hour session on Visual Studio 2010 and the enhancements in the area of SharePoint Development in the upcoming release. There was a good crowd around 100 people and apart from the Virtusa guys, there were some invitees from APIIT, Universities, etc…

I managed to showcase most of the IDE features in Visual Studio 2010 and gave them an introduction on how easy it is the development for SharePoint 2010 using Visual Studio 2010.

I didn’t have any sessions scheduled today. I wanted to attend few of sessions. So I was there for the session conducted by my friend-Prasanna.

I spent some time with my MVP colleagues in the MVP stall and then went to do the session at Virtusa.

We started our great Conference – TechEd 2010 today and I presented my 1st session in the evening.

I did “SharePoint Server 2010” session and there were 154 attendees and the room was full. It was very exiting to see such a crowd and I covered few demos during 1 hour session.

My special thanks goes to Wellington Perera for giving me the opportunity to present at this event and also special thanks to Arpan Shah and Inder Rathore for helping me with preparing the PPT.

And the other specialty of this TechEd 2010 Sri Lanka is today 03 SolidQ presenters were presenting and this is for the 1st time in this part of world that 3 SolidQ Mentors participated as speakers in a TechEd.

Joy @ TechEd 2010

Joy @ TechEd 2010

Rushabh & Pinal attending Joy's session @ TechEd 2010

Just 01 more days left for the big IT Conference in Sri Lanka after 3+ years. I’m damn busy with preparing for my sessions though I’m suffering with cold.

I though it’s better if I could share the agenda of my sessions just in case if it’s confusing or difficult to locate my sessions in the agenda.

Come and join with me to discover the power of new technologies.

University of Wayamba is located in Kuliyapitiya-around 02 hours away from Colombo. They organized a 02 days .NET Workshop on 8th and 09th and I did a session on C# Language Features including Visual Studio IDE Features.

There were nearly 25 participants and all of them from 1st & 2nd Year batches. I did a 04 hour session and laid the foundation for them to take it to next level.

Joy and the team @ University of Wayamba

Joy @ University of Wayamba

Sri Lanka is getting ready for another presidential election. And we have stepped to new year-2010. Sri Lankan government announced year 2009 as the year of ICT and English.

In year 2010, Sri Lankan government will continue their investments in the area of ICT and English. As recognized individual in the industry we have been invited to share our ideas with the responsible individuals in the government and today is the 1st of series of Tech Colloquiums going to happen in this year.

Mr. Lalith Weeratunge, Mr. Gotabaya Rajapakse and Major General Shavendra Silva joined from the government while Mr. Sriyan de Silva Wijeyeratne joined from Microsoft Sri Lanka.

The event was held at Cinnamon Lakeside from 5 pm to 8 pm.

Tech Colloquium

January 1st was a very long day because I was waiting for the email from MVP Administrator but it didn’t not reach my inbox. Oh it came on the 2nd.

As I expected they have renewed my MVP status and this is the 3rd time in a row I’m getting nominated as a Microsoft Most valuable Professional (MVP) and the other important thing is they have changed my MVP criteria from Visual C# to SharePoint Server. So that’s it.

I’m very much proud to say I’m the 1st and only SharePoint Server MVP in Sri Lanka.

It’s been a very very long time (3+ years) that we had a TechEd Sri Lanka due to various reasons. Our guys missed a lot of stuffs and it’s time to have one. For those who are not capable of flying out of country and attend any other TechEd events, it’s time to have a TechEd locally.

Guys, get ready and stay tuned…

TechEd 2010 Sri Lanka

Microsoft launches Business Intelligence Developer Network (BIDN) Beta site today. BIDN is a FREE ocean of information starting from novice BI guys to experienced BI guys.

Come and join : http://www.bidn.com/