Joy's Blog

.NET Forum April 2012

Joy — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:35:04 +0000

I have been busy and avoiding number of requests from .NET Forum members. Finally got some time today to invest on the community.

I delivered a session in .NET Forum today targeting about 60 attendees. I decided to talk about HTML 5 hype and that could be a reason why we had lot of attendees.

I talked about what HTML 5 is and how the new markup and JavaScript libraries together bring the light of HTML 5 into web development arena.

I demonstrated the new markup style and some of new tags such as header, footer, datalist and aside.

I was very much privilege to introduce HTML 5 discussions within the .NET Forum and hope to do few more sessions around same.

Workshop on “How to become a 1st class SharePoint Consultant”

Joy — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:51:34 +0000

I have been delivering SharePoint trainings for the past 5+ years through NetAssist International which is the No 1 certified partner for Microsoft learning solutions. I have trained lot of students and most of them have found better opportunities in the country as well as outside the country.

We get massive SharePoint projects every quarter and there is a huge vacuum for good SharePoint resources. We advertise and get lot of resumes but most of them end up in deleted items folder simply because they don’t have the right set of skills which we expect from a good SharePoint consultant. We interview few and reject a lot just because they don’t have skills to articulate their experience during the interviews.

With NetAssist sponsorship, I did a free workshop on 28th Feb targeting all the major universities, ISVs, customers to talk about how to become a 1st class SharePoint consultant.

We had nearly 125 attendees and I managed to demonstrate the value of SharePoint as a 1st class business collaboration platform and discussed few case studies based on my past experience on how to become a 1st class SharePoint consultant.

At the end, I spent few minutes to explain the courses offered by Microsoft for enhancing skills on SharePoint and explained the value of certification and certification path for SharePoint.

Attendees

Joy presenting @ the workshop

SharePoint Forum December 2011

Joy — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:08:38 +0000

This is the last SharePoint Forum Sri Lanka gathering for this year. I was fortunate to present a session on BCS. There were lot of sessions around introduction, branding, object model, workflows but LOB system integration is one of the key requirements for every medium to large enterprise customers. I decided to do a session around BCS and I started introducing the BCS, demonstrated on creating an ECT, configuring BCS in Central Administration site, setting security, BCS Actions, etc…

We had more than 35 attendees and I found the topic I choose very interesting based on the number of questions I had to answer at the end of the session.

Article – Configuring Forms-based Authentication in SharePoint 2010

Joy — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 04:41:29 +0000

All of us will have to go through this one and I though it’s always better have this documented so that anyone get stuck on the way can refer to this.

http://www.sharepoint24x7.com/2011/10/configuring-forms-based-authentication-in-sharepoint-2010/

Southeast Asia SharePoint Conference 2011

Joy — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:02:11 +0000

I was fortunate to meet and collaborate with the SharePoint fans in Southeast Asia for the 2^nd time during SharePoint Conference 2011. I have been having a very tough time with my projects and personal life, but I still wanted to go and present @ SEA SharePoint conference this year as well.

I flew 7^th midnight from Colombo to Singapore and reached there just before they start the key note. It was very exciting to see such a big crowd for the 2^nd time in Singapore and I was very happy that I made it to the conference.

I presented 02 sessions and 1 of them in the technical session and the other one is in Voice Of Customer track.

Day 1 Session 1 – Deep Dive on Business Connectivity Services
Level – 300
Track – Developer
This session was targeted for developers who have some experience in using BCS. This session talked about advanced topics such and adding behaviors to ECTs with BCS Actions. This session also demonstrated how to surface LOB data using SharePoint Search and how to make them more meaningful using Profile Pages. Finally this session demonstrated on how to configure User Profile Services to supplement User Profiles with LOB data.

Day 2 Session 2 – Creating Internet-facing Sites Simplified
Level – 200
Track – Voice of Customer
This session was targeted for non-technical audience and this was the 1^st time I was doing a non-technical session on a conference. I demonstrated how Virtusa Pvt. Ltd. simplified the way we build internet-facing sites using a Framework we built with bunch of re-usable components.

Introduction to SharePoint Development – UOM

Joy — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:28:02 +0000

As usual our DPE – Wellington Perera requested me to do a session at the 11^th hour. Microsoft and University of Moratuwa has organized a 2 day event for all the students in the Faculty of IT. I did a session today to introduce SharePoint development and it was a very fruitful session for them since most of them were keen on moving into SharePoint technology.

I started the session on comparing ASP.NET web development and SharePoint portal development and then demonstrated some of the cool features in the area of collaboration and communication. Next, I demonstrated few OOTB Web Parts and introduced them the concept of Web Parts. Finally I demonstrated the Web Part development and explained them the key concepts on SharePoint development.

This 1 ½ hour session was targeted to all 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd year students and it was very interesting to see around 100 participants early in the morning.

Student CTP

Joy — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:36:33 +0000

Microsoft Sri Lanka organized an event-Student CTP today targeting for Students in all the universities in Sri Lanka. Objective of this event was to showcase bleeding edge Microsoft technologies to students and make them aware of those new technologies.

We had few interesting sessions lined up and most of them Wowed the crowd. I did a session on Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 and demonstrated how easy it is to develop data-driven business application without writing code. I had only 30 minutes and couldn’t showcase what I really wanted, and I wish I had more time.

Windows 8 Developer Preview, Virtualization using Windows 8 and Lync were some of the other cool sessions we had in the agenda.

I’m waiting for more and more events like this and talk more about latest technologies and make students aware of them.

SharePoint Forum September 2011

Joy — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:12:40 +0000

After 09 months from the start of the local SharePoint forum, today I got an opportunity to present. I did Part 1 of 02 parts sessions on workflow development. I wanted to fill the vacuum in the area of developing SharePoint based workflows using WF and SharePoint but I wanted to start with the basics so that everyone can get the maximum out of forum sessions and also to make sure I address all different levels in the audience.

In this first part I covered OOTB workflows, Visio workflows and SPD workflows. I also talked about the enhancements in the workflow services and discussed about the enhancements in SPD in the area of developing workflows.

There were nearly 30 attendees and I was not lucky enough to have someone to take pictures. I will be doing the part 2 of this series and please join with me to explore the capabilities in developing workflows with Visual Studio 2010, WF 3.5 and SharePoint 2010.

.NET Forum August 2011

Joy — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 17:26:43 +0000

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 is the latest member to join Visual Studio family. Visual Studio LightSwitch is designed to simplify and shorten the development of typical forms-over-data business applications.

What Microsoft says “With LightSwitch, you can use databases which you create or point to an existing data source. Either way, you do not need to write code. To help with the user interface, LightSwitch provides screens that are based on predefined templates and display data automatically by simply specifying which elements you want to show.“

I was privileged to unveil Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 today in .NET Forum August meet up and we had over 30 attendees to hear/ learn about Visual Studio LightSwitch.

.NET Forum August - LightSwitch Session

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 Products is Now Available for Download

Joy — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 04:49:16 +0000

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 Products is Now Available for Download.

Service Pack 1 includes stability, performance, and security enhancements that are a direct result of customer/ partner feedback. Read more about installing Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 and Language Packs from the SharePoint Team Blog.

SharePoint Team Blog: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=984

Download Service Pack 1: http://technet.microsoft.com/office/ee748587.aspx