After running my blog for the past two years on Subtext, I finally decided to move everything over to the new BlogEngine 1.4 platform.  What a great idea that was!

Check out the new look!  Marvel at the clean lines and smooth transitions!  See how responsive the pages are?  Nice.  

The main reason I'm excited about this product (other than the fact that it's free) is the elegant simplicity of the BlogEngine design, which makes it a breeze to customize and add your own extensions.  Kudos to Mads Kristensen and the entire BlogEngine team for producing a truly great blogging platform.    

If you haven't heard of BlogEngine, and you host your own blog, then you should definitely check it out.  It's based on ASP.NET 2.0, and therefore takes full advantage of all the latest .NET features, like master pages, page caching, etc.  It also uses XML files to store the blog posts, which makes it much easier to manage since it doesn't rely on a SQL database.  It also has a drag-and-drop "widget" framework (a lot like web parts), and built-in support for semantic processing via APML and other similar formats.   There are lots of other features that I won't go into here, but you get the idea - I like it much!

You'll notice that things have moved around a bit and I've streamlined some of the pages to make it easier to navigate the site.  If you find something is amiss - broken links, or other problems, please drop me a line so I can straighten it out.  I'm planning quite a bit of new content for the coming months, so I need to make sure everything is working the way it should.  So far, it's looking pretty good.

This week, Bill Gates will retire from Microsoft, so there is a lot of additional attention being focused on him right now, but a couple of weeks ago I got a rare opportunity to see for myself why everyone is so excited about his upcoming transition away from software development at Microsoft towards human development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

During the TechEd Developers 2008 Conference in Orlando, I was invited to attend a private luncheon called the "influencer's roundtable".  This was a great honor for me, as I got to share a meal with Bill Gates and a group of about 15 other people.  We spent the hour talking with Bill about his retirement and upcoming activities and I have to tell you, I now have a much better understanding of why Microsoft has become the powerful market force it is today.  I came away filled with a mixture of awe and admiration for Bill, the way he thinks and the way he approaches problem solving.

First of all, Bill is one of those people who is 100% "present" in whatever he does, and his passion is now squarely focused on human development.  Finding better ways to educate people.  Finding better ways to feed people.  Finding better ways to improve access to vaccines and other technological advances.  I was utterly impressed by the sheer breadth and depth of his knowledge on a wide range of issues and also by his uncanny ability to focus in precisely on the essential elements of any given problem.

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is that Bill Gates is truly a phenomenon and I was at once both humbled and inspired by our meeting.  So much so that I feel a renewed sense of commitment to my own philanthropic work.

Being "rich" is not always about having a lot of money.  It can also be a feeling.  A feeling of empowerment.  A feeling of hope.  A feeling that we can actually make a difference in the world.  Being with Bill for that short time - listening to his plans for changing our world, for making it better - filled me with that sense of hope and empowerment and I could tell that others in the room felt it too.   For those few moments I felt like I was the richest man in the world, because there I was, talking with the architect of a new vision for humanity.  A vision I could completely buy into, and one that I truly believe can be achieved.

I just want to say thank you, Bill Gates.  The world is already a better place because of your work, your passion and your commitment.  We need more like you, and although you're moving into a new arena, I'll look forward to the same innovation, excellence and success we've all come to expect of you.

JFH

Ever wished you could use a MOSS List as a mechanism for storing business data, but found yourself limited by the built-in WSS field types?  WSS 3.0 includes the ability to define your own custom field types.  Custom field types allow you to control the initialization, rendering and data validation behind your columns.  In this session, Dylan will walk you through creating and deploying custom field types and content types.

Meeting Details:

• Speaker: Dylan Phillips
• Date: June 19, 2008
• Location: Bank of America, Buliding 500, 9000 Southside Blvd; 2nd Floor; Sea Oats room
• Location Map:http://floridaofficegeeks.org/JOG/Pages/Meeting%20Logistics.aspx
• RSVP Required: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=129175

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer gave a recent demo of the new Windows 7 user interface at the D6 "All Things Digital" executive Conference put on each year.  Here is a first glimpse, compliments of YouTube.  Enjoy.

Microsoft announced today that a future version of Office 2007 (due out in early 2009) will include direct support for popular document formats including PDF.  The list of supported formats will include ODF (the standardized Open Document Format), XPS (XML Paper Specification), and PDF (Portable Document Format).  It doesn't look like we'll be able to open and edit PDF files - only save them.  The big news is the native support for ODF, which will greatly extend the interoperability between Office documents and many other productivity suites, including Google Docs, IBM Lotus Symphony and Corel WordPerfect Office X4.

Read the full announcement here: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/may08/05-21ExpandedFormatsPR.mspx

[ via Reza Alirezaei ]

Fellow MVP Reza Alirezaei has written a great article that provides a systematic approach to securing SharePoint applications.  What I like about this article is that Reza includes a well-written section on how to apply Threat Model Analysis to determine the appropriate level of protection for a given application.  Then he proceeds to lay out the different tools and coding techniques we have at our disposal to deal with the threat.

This is such an important topic, I highly recommend reading this article and then add it to your offline collection to refer back to again and again.  You can read the full article here:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns/secmvp/sv0408.mspx

If you want to beef up your Sharepoint developer skills, then here is something you shouldn't miss.  A new 10-part series of Live Meeting Webcasts by Andrew Connell and Robert Bogue covering the fundamentals of SharePoint development.  They will be broadcast every Tuesday and Wednesday from May 20 to June 18 at 9:00AM PST. 

Here is the list of topics and registration links:

Well, we're just a couple weeks away from TechEd 2008.  This year, I'm giving four presentations - three breakout sessions and one TLC session, so it should be a lot of fun.  Here are the dates and times:

• OFC10 - TLC 6/3/2008 3:00PM - 4:15PM
  Building Custom Routers for Records Management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

  This talk discusses developer aspects of records management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Custom routers are an important extensibility point for records management and this talk details the requirements for these components. It provides a demo of building a custom router, including deploying it to a SharePoint Server environment.
  

• OFC318 6/4/2008 8:30AM - 9:45AM
  XOML, XOML, Everywhere: Building Custom Workflow Editors for SharePoint
  

  XOML is the markup language behind Windows Workflow Foundation and is the same language used by Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to attach declarative, no-code workflows to SharePoint lists and document libraries. This session takes a deep dive into Workflow Markup and explores how you can use it to generate custom workflows from any client application, including Office clients like Word and Excel. The session also shows how to attach custom workflow markup to SharePoint lists using the websvcWebPartPages Web service provided by Windows SharePoint Services.
  

• OFC309 6/4/2008 4:30PM - 5:45PM
  Building Document Management Solutions Using SharePoint Content Types
  

  Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 introduces a new concept called "Content Types" that will dramatically alter the Enterprise Content Management landscape. On the surface, Content Types make it easier to encapsulate field definitions into a nice neat package, but there is a lot more going on under the covers. In this session, we take a deep dive into the world of content types and see how to declare them using XML and how to create them programmatically. Then we use content types to create a real-world document management solution with custom policies that we can use to control every stage of the document lifecycle. At the end of this session, you will have a thorough understanding of what content types are, with a deeper appreciation of the value they bring to document management solution development.
  

• OFC404 6/5/2008 10:15AM - 11:30AM
  Turning SharePoint Data into Microsoft Office Documents: A Deep Dive into SharePoint Document Assembly Using Open XML
  

  Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 introduces a new concept called "Content Types" that will dramatically alter the Enterprise Content Management landscape. On the surface, Content Types make it easier to encapsulate field definitions into a nice neat package, but there is a lot more going on under the covers. In this session, we take a deep dive into the world of content types and see how to declare them using XML and how to create them programmatically. Then we use content types to create a real-world document management solution with custom policies that we can use to control every stage of the document lifecycle. At the end of this session, you will have a thorough understanding of what content types are, with a deeper appreciation of the value they bring to document management solution development.

See you in Orlando!

When you have a lot of different content types attached to the same document library, it can be confusing for users.  Wouldn't it be nice to organize them into separate folders, so that users see only the content types they need to see?  Folder content types allow you to do just that. 

Fellow MVP Mikhail Dikov has written a very interesting piece that explains how to create and use folder content types to organize your document libraries.  Click here to read the full article: http://www.mikhaildikov.com/2008/05/sharepoint-folders-need-more-love.html

Come join co-founder Andrew Connell on Thursday, May 15, 2008 for an interesting session on CAS.  As we all know, Code Access Security gets much less attention than it deserves.  Part of the problem is because it seems so, well, mysterious.  Here's AC's take on dealing with CAS:

Understanding and Making Code Access Security Not so Intimidating

Ever dealt with that SecurityException error in the yellow-screen-of-death?  That's fun troubleshooting.  The easiest way to address it is to just bump the trust level up to WSS_Medium.  Full to throw your assembly into the GAC.  In this session, you'll learn how .NET's Code Access Security (CAS) works with respect to SharePoint, how to read policy files, and how to work with it in the most secure way possible.

Meeting Details:

• Speaker: Andrew Connell
• Date: Thursday, May 15th, 2008; 6p - 8p
• Location: Bank of America, Building 500, 9000 Southside Blvd; 2nd Floor; Sea Oats room
• Meeting Location Map: http://floridaofficegeeks.org/JOG/Pages/Meeting%20Logistics.aspx
• RSVP Required: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=127732

Jacksonville Office Geeks (JOG) is also known as the JAXDUG Office Developer SIG.