Antarctic pictures

I promised some people I would publish some pictures my girlfriend brought back from Antarctica, so here you are.

Off topic- do you like pictures? see my other blog

In case you don't know, I have a private blog in hebrew, where I post pictures that I take of my life in Australia (and around the world).
Even though the description of what is going on is in hebrew, the pictures are in english (joke) so if you want to see - check it out at http://ishaisagi.blogspot.com/
Or, if you dont want to see the hebrew, just look in my picasa albums: http://picasaweb.google.com.au/ishaisagi and http://picasaweb.google.com.au/DontWantSpamHere/

Here are some samples of my attempts at photography:

April's Fools! I am still an MVP

Hope you didn't buy into the post from yesterday where I sounded a bit down for not getting the MVP award. While everything written there was 100% true, the tone was the joke - I wasn't really worried, and only wanted to see who will bite! hehehehe...
Anyway, during the night I got this email:
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way to say thank you for promoting the spirit of community and improving people’s lives and the industry’s success every day.
So I am an MVP for one more year. I hope to earn it again next year - so I'd better keep posting here, answering in the MSDN forums and improve the Canberra SharePoint User Group!

Not an MVP anymore, but going to the summit and to TechEd Israel

Well, unless I get an email in the next couple of days, I am no longer an MVP. Exactly one year ago Microsoft granted me the MVP award for my contribution to the sharepoint community. I am hoping that this will be the same this year as well - but so far I hadn't heard from them. Then again - it is too early in the United states, and it could be that they are taking my advice from last year that sending the "you are an MVP" email on April's fools day is not a good idea...
I think I contributed quite a bit this year. True, I didn't blog as much, and I didn't start any new open source projects - but I am still leading the Canberra SharePoint User Group (and spent some time on developing the site and the user base. The last meeting we had 32 people come in - and that is in Canberra!). I have also answered quite a bit of questions on the SharePoint developers' forums in MSDN. Look at today's log of top answerers from the last 30 days:

If the award gets renewed, I'd be sure to let you know. but for now, I will remove the MVP logo from this site and from my email signature. If not, then I will try harder next year!

So next week I will be in Israel for the Israeli TechEd. I will be presenting a most difficult presentation on how to create a community site solution, integrating office 2007 open XML and sharepoint, with web services, VSTO and even windows presentation foundation thrown in for good measure.
The week after that I will be in Seattle for the MVP Summit where I will meet the SharePoint team, listen to lectures and mingle with other MVPs. If you are an MVP - look me up - I am the guy with the horribly big hair style and the stubbly facial hair:

Back from Leave

If you had been wondering about my absense, I was in Tasmania for the last week. Want to see some pictures? click here

Tools of the trade

Some people ask me what I am developing on, so I guess I will post my hardware\software list every now and then.

Hardware

I am currently using a Dell XPS M1330 with T7700 (they now have a penryn processor option...I missed out!) with 4GB RAM and a 160GB 7200RPM hard drive.

I use a Western Digital Passport external drive for my virtual machines (see software).

Software

1. Vista 64bit SP1 enterprise edition
2. Office 2007 ultimate
3. VPC 2007 (for the virtual machines I use at work)
4. VMWare workstation 6 (for personal development and presentations I find it faster, and it supports 64Bit guests! excellent!)
5. Free Download Manager
6. Roboform (to manage all my passwords)
7. 7-Zip for all my archiving needs (although every now and then I need winrar
8. Total Commander which is the most comfortable file manager I have used since Norton Commander
9. Snag It and Camtasia for easily capturing my screen for presentations or web casts
10. Skype to make overseas phonecalls (I use skypeout)
11. Acronis true image for backup
12. Winamp for my MP3 (I used to use musikcube, but it crashed too often for me to enjoy it)
13. Google toolbar (and google.com.au as my home page)

In the future I will write about what I have in my virtual machines -which is more interesting - what I feel is a must on a development sharepoint machine.

SharePointology

Last Updated: 29/02/2008

here is something me and a couple of other MVPs have been toying with. The ten (or more) commandments for sharepointers:

1. Thou shalt collaborate!
2. Thou shalt develop on a server!
3. Thou shalt not use smart part unless you understand what it does and it's ramifications.
4. Thou shalt reverse-engineer undocumented API calls and internal classess of SharePoint OM
5. Thou shalt not ask if CAML can make WHERE UNIQUE queries
6. Thou shalt hold no other compression utilities before makecab
7. Thou shalt add C:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin to your system PATH variable
8. Tony Bierman says : Though shalt not deploy DLLs to the GAC unless absolutely necessary. Ishai Sagi says: Thou shalt deploy DLLs to the GAC unless absolutely necessary. (I forsee a bloody row about this)
9. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s MacBook Pro
10. Thou shalt use CreateChildControls when you want asp controls in your web part.
11. Thou shalt always create WSP solutions as part of your build. (Daniel Mcpherson)
12. Thou shalt always test with accounts that DO NOT have administrator rights on the box.(Daniel Mcpherson)
13. Thou shalt always test with accounts that DO NOT have administrator rights on the site.

So, do you have anything to add to the list? comment here, and I will add it if it is worthy of SharePointology!

And while I am at it, here is an original one: How do sharepoint MVPs communicate?
...
...
By MOSS Code!

This is customer support!

Sorry - another non-sharepoint post. I promise to post something good later today.

I just got a response from the GPS company TomTom about a question I sent them. You see, my TomTom GPS is also a bluetooth hands free in my car, and has a microphone that you attach to the sun screen which allows you to talk with great sound quality. The problem is that tomtom never expected someone like me to use that - I broke the microphone clip after about 8 months use.
The annoying thing - they dont sell spare parts. In the UK you can buy another set of microphone+clip, but here in Australia it is not available for some reason. So I got to tomtom web site, and in the support section asked for help. within a day (!) I got a response that they are sending me a replacement!

This is the kind of customer service I like to see. I know that the next GPS I get will be a tomtom.

Side note - if anyone from tomtom is reading this - can you add an Israel map to your collections of maps? I really want to travel with my tomtom...

DELL XPS and 64bit operating systems

This has me angry enough to blog about. I have a Dell XPS m1330 laptop. Its a great laptop - fast, small, efficient and best of all - it is configured with all the best options available from dell (except for a solid state hard drive), including 4GB RAM - which dictates a 64bit operating system to take advantage of the juice.
The only problem is that you cannot install a 64bit operating system on it without turning off AHCI - which sucks. I called Dell, and a supporter named "Michael MG" confirmed that they (dell) do not know what drivers are needed to download to make this work (he advised me to "google it") and when I asked, if my laptop doesnt have a "A:" drive how do I install drivers during windows installation. Michael told me that I can't and therefore should only install windows 32bit or turn off AHCI support.
WTF?!
Does anyone know if the Apple machines support AHCI on vista 64bit?

MVP Night in Vegas

Text to come...

First night in Vegas

Yes!
I am there at last, Vegas for the sharepoint dev connections conference. It only took me 30 hours to get from home to here, and I landed only 12 hours after I left (confused? so am I...)

So far, Vegas stinks. I don't mean it sucks - I mean it stinks with cigarette smoke. Man, its like going back to eastern europe (or Amsterdam). One reason I love Australia so much is the anti smoking laws.

So just a reminder - If you want to meet, in two days (Tuesday) we are having the SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night event, with all MVPs having a few drinks and talking sharepoint with everyone who will stop to listen. Must be funny!
See you there!

Why be a sharepoint developer?

Sorry, can't resist posting the following link to Tony's post " I don’t care if you don’t want to develop on SharePoint, and neither does your boss". So true...
Bob Mixon also wrote a nice article about what is required from a sharepoint person Are You Ready For SharePoint

SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night @ SharePoint Connections in Vegas!

Andrew Connell posted an invite in his blog for an "informal SharePoint conversation" at the Coral Reef Bar in the Mandalay hotel during SharePoint Dev Connections in Vegas.
I will be there, so if you want to have a chat, come on in!

Blogrush - removed

After a few days evaluating blogrush, I reviewed it and decided that it is a more of a service for people with general BS blogs, and not professional, audience targeted ones. Why should people see links to blogs about starwars in a sharepoint blog?
So it is removed, and now my blog is more usable...

Joined BlogRush

Not sure if that will make any difference, but I joined this site (BlogRush) in hope of getting more visitors. I will let you know if it works!

Back from vacation

Hello my readers!
You may have noticed I didn't blog this month, and that was because I was on my annual leave, visiting my family and friends in hot Israel!
I took time in the trip to present at the Israeli SharePoint User Group in Microsoft Israel, and I was very surprised to see how many people turned up! We had more than 50 people there, a lot of past clients and past collegues.

Here is a picture of the lowest sharepoint expert in the world (me floating in the dead sea -416 meters below sea level! to get lower, you need to go on a submarine):

And here are a couple of pictures I took that I think would make great desktop backgrounds:

MCTS in MOSS configuration

Well, Tech.ED Australia 2007 is over (I will post some details soon) and I am happy to let you know that I took the "Configuring Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007" exam (70-630) and passed! I only got 3 questions (out of 51) wrong, so I am pretty happy with myself right now.
Now I only have to do the WSS configuration exam to have the entire set!

Live vs Google

Every now and then someone from Microsoft asks me why I don't use Live Search as my search engine. My answer is always the same - results are awful!

In my opinion Microsoft have a lot to learn before getting us a proper search engine.

GOOGLE
First - try searching for "sharepoint australia" (without the quotes) - in google, the first results is Angus Logan's blog and the second is the APAC conference from two months ago.
The third results is my post about me presenting at teched australia.
The fourth - my user group in Canberra.

LIVE
Now do the same with Live - first result is the APAC conference, next is the site for WISDOM - where they sell sharepoint related products. Next, a broken link to a page in obs.com.au that does not exist any more - another company that works with sharepoint.
Why is it broken? Well, the link under is is also to the same site, but this time the aspx page doesnt have an underscore and it works.
As we go down in the page, we see more and more sites of vendors trying to sell you something, or microsoft's own site. Not a single blog or user group site in sight.

My conclusion - Google results are quality based, while MS results are commercially based. And until they change that - I AM NOT USING LIVE.

Note - this was triggered by an old blog post by Arpan about how he uses Live search because it is better.

What a discount!

This is something a friend noticed when we went to look for an LCD screen for him. What a great discount!


I think you will find this is less then 0.1% discount.

How to lose customers with a publicity stunt? (off topic)

Take a lookm at what UbiSoft are doing...It started as a nice promotion for their games for the PS3, offering a free playstation draw. The terms and all the pages say that the winners will be declared on April 5th...
Here is a screen shot from today (April 9th) of the winner page:

It's hard to imagine what the people in UbiSoft were thinking. Is this how they want their potential customers view them?