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Hello Again, World!

 

So, quite a few of you (2 people in fact, including my Mum) have been asking what the heck's going on with this blog, especially after such a flurry of activity before Christmas (you do remember the one-blog-per-day-until-Christmas saga, don't you?)

 

Well... as it turns out I have quite a few things to communicate to the world.  Might as well get started with the big one:

 

 

This has been in the planning for over six months now, and has nothing to do with the MVP award (in fact, it's terrible timing, as I will explain below).  We leave on March 27, and have three months of travel planned through (in this order): Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, China, Mongolia, Russia, and then Europe.  I've never been to any of those places, let alone anywhere else for longer than a month - suffice to say I'm excited, a bit nervous, (lucky), and, well, did I mention excited?

 

It's likely we will be in London for at least a year, but it could be as much as five.  As Shihad would say, "I guess we'll have to Wait and See".

 

Next up:

 

 

I'll be at the summit in Seattle in a couple of weeks.  I'm really looking forward to meeting everyone, participating in the infamous paintball event, and checking out the Office 14 goodness.

 

As an aside, one of the impacts of attending the summit is that we were forced to move out of our house earlier, last week in fact.  I'm sure those of you who have done it before could have told me this, but the sheer amount of crap one builds up over the years is absolutely ridiculous.  It's also incredibily easy to underestimate the time, effort and stress involved in shifting, rennovating for a shift, selling, packing, and so on... ugh!  I've definitely learnt a thing or two about minimalism after this experience.

 

 

 

With all the tasks and minutae of the shift, the added time out of the summit, and the global recession (compulsory mention, isn't it?), I made a decision a few weeks back that it wasn't going to be possible to blog much, if at all, before I left for the UK.  This was a difficult choice, as I have some pretty ace content backlogged that I'd love to share with you, but I hope you'll agree that spending some quality time with my family before the shift is a much higher priority, aside from all the other organisational tidbits.  Nevertheless, I'm sorry I haven't communicated this earlier, especially after all those promises before Christmas.

 

So... this blog will now be on hiatus until June, when I land in London.  I will be blogging my entire trip on a personal blog if any of you are interested, and I'll provide the URL closer to the time :)

 

 

As mentioned above, the timing of the MVP award wasn't ideal, as I have a strong desire to continue contributing to the community, and to get a few new community projects underway.  The shift and in-the-wilderness-OE has limited what I'm able to do for this first half of the year.

 

Despite the blog being on hiatus, my focus for contributing in Q1 has/will be to present as much as possible.  I'm speaking at the following events:

• Christchurch SharePoint User Group, Tuesday 24 February: Becoming a SharePoint Hero with SharePoint Designer and the Data View Web Part
   
• Dunedin .NET User Group, Thursday 19 March: Introduction to SharePoint and SharePoint Development
   
• Invercargill .NET User Group, Friday 20 March: Introduction to SharePoint and SharePoint Development
   
• Christchurch .NET User Group, Wednesday 25 February: New Features of Visual Studio Extensions for WSS 1.3 (Lightning Talk)

• Quick Deploy menu
• Package/Retract commands
• Deployment Conflict Resolution
• Less magic in Site Definition projects

It's certainly comparable to community tools such as STSDEV and WSPBuilder in the "productive builds" category now.  However, the fundamental architecture and structure of VSeWSS projects remains the same... so there's still no replication of the 12-hive structure in Solution Explorer.  Some folks like that, and some folks don't.