Last weekend was the Philly Code Camp and Nas and I had a blast with the other 375 people that attended the event.  The one day extravaganza featured 50 different speakers and in many sessions it was standing room only.  If you work with Microsoft technologies on the dev side and local to the area or in driving distance then I would definitely try to make it out to one of their other two code camps this year.  My InfoPath 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 session went really well I think and I really enjoyed myself.  I would like to thank David Mann for letting me speak and all the other people that put together this great event.

When at the Philly Code Camp I got to meet a couple other great SharePoint speakers.  After my session I got to speak with Susan Lennon (http://wss.lennontechnologies.com/blog/default.aspx) who did a session on "Using SharePoint Designer to Build a Dashboard-type View of Lists" and got to sit in on the session by Tony Testa (http://www.tonytestasworld.com/) called "AJAX in SharePoint".  Susan and I didn't have a long time to talk but she seemed to be a great person with some interesting experience with SharePoint 2007.  I'm hoping to have another chance to talk with her while out at Office Developer Conference in February.  Dave Mann did his session after mine and it was a great session on you guessed it Workflow and SharePoint.

As promised my presentation and code solutions are up on my Code Camp and User Group page and I just sent them to Philly Code Camp organizers and should be posted on their site shortly.  If anybody has any questions about the code please fill free to email at ml@(nospam)bandrsolutions.com

Cheers

Over the last few months I've spoke at 4 different events and have really enjoyed myself but I hadn't got around posting my presentations and code projects because other things kept me busy and I kept forgetting to.  This week I'm at home finishing up some code projects and have found some extra time to spend on my blog and catching up on other things.

Today I got around adding a new page to my blog for the presentations and code projects and just a few minutes ago uploaded all my presentations.  You can find them at http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mdlotter/pages/code-camp-and-user-group-presentations.aspx and later this week I'll add my code projects to.  I've really enjoyed speaking at these events and meeting a lot of new people.  I'm hoping that I'll have a lot more entries on this page this year and mean years to come.

Cheers

The Philly.Net Code Camp is coming up on Saturday, January 12^th at DeVry University in Fort Washington, PA and I'm happy to say that I will be giving a presentation at the event.  The presentation is titled "InfoPath 2007 with Visual Studio 2008".  The session walks through building a new InfoPath 2007 form, Web Service, .NET Class, Workflow and LDAP query with Visual Studio 2008.  The form will call the web service on opening to retrieve the current user Active Directory information and State list from SQL 2005 database to populate an InfoPath form drop down list.   A simple workflow will be created and deployed with Visual Studio 2008 for sending an email.  This presentation will cover more details than what I usually do and it will all be using Visual Studio 2008 and not 2005.  Information on attending and a list of all the tracks for the code camp can be found at http://www.philly.net.

In my opinion the Office track is jammed pack with great sessions and we have Bob Fox doing a session on SharePoint Disaster Recovery and Backup (Wow can't what to see what type of code Bob has).  A full list of all the Office sessions is listed below.

David Mann - Delivering Modular SharePoint Workflow Functionality via Components
Bob Fox - SharePoint Disaster Recovery, Backup and more...
Tony Testa - AJAX in SharePoint
Michael Lotter - InfoPath 2007 with Visual Studio 2008
Russ Basuira - Programming Composite Applications that use the SharePoint Business Data Catalog
Gary Blatt - Using OpenXML to Access Excel and other Office 2007 Files

I'm really excited about this opportunity because it gives me another opportunity to meet new people and to work on my speaking and presentation skills.  The last 2 code camps were a blast and I'm sure this one will be to, please come out and join us for a great time talking about writing code (things we love to do) and meeting new people.

Cheers

The NJSPUG has launched a new website at http://nj.sharepointgroups.org/default.aspx and all the details and future details of user group meetings can found here.  As I previously mentioned that I'll be speaking at the December 19^th meeting and all the details are below.  Hope to see you there.

NJ SHAREPOINT USER GROUP: 

Wednesday, December 19

 https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=121800

  Creating InfoPath 2007 forms with InfoPath Forms Service for the enterprise

Guest Speaker: Michael Lotter MCP, MCTS

SharePoint Solutions Architect |

B&R Business Solutions, LLC

"With the new version of SharePoint and InfoPath being officially released this year the concept of building and using e-forms in the enterprise has officially become a reality by using InfoPath 2007, InfoPath Forms Services and SharePoint 2007 Enterprise.  This presentation will describe how to use InfoPath 2007 and InfoPath Forms Services (part of SharePoint 2007 Enterprise) to accomplish this with your existing or new SharePoint 2007 Enterprise installation. A demo will be given to show how to build and publish an InfoPath 2007 form to InfoPath Forms Services and how to active the forms from InfoPath Forms Services to a Site Collection."

 AGENDA:

5:30 PM EAT + GREET
Networking, Free Food/Drink

6:00 PM Guest Speaker

"Creating InfoPath 2007 forms with InfoPath Forms Service for the enterprise"

6:45 PM  WRAP UP
discussion, prize giveaways

The Nova Code Camp is coming up on Saturday, November 17^th in Reston, VA and I’m happy to say that I will be giving a presentation at the event. The presentation is titled “Pre-populating Active Directory User Information InfoPath 2007 and C# and create a workflow with SharePoint Designer for routing”. This is the same presentation that I did at South Carolina Code Camp but I’ve modified it from the feedback that I got from the South Carolina Code Camp. The presentation is based off work that I did for recent project. Information on attending the code camp can be found at http://novacodecamp.org/.

I’m really excited about this opportunity because it gives me another opportunity to meet new people and to work on my speaking and presentation skills. My big dream is to get enough practice at speaking and then try to do one of the bigger conferences. Writing and speaking skills have always haunted me since being a little kid but I’m determined to improve these skills and have them as assets.

The last code camp was a blast and I’m sure this one will be to, please come out and join us for a great time.  Hope to see you there.

Cheers

After having such a great time at the South Carolina Code Camp I decided to look for other speaking opportunities to share my knowledge on InfoPath 2007, InfoPath Forms Services and SharePoint 2007 and since I've been in Newark/New York area I decided to talk with Jason Medero and Bob Fox to see if they could hook me up at either New York or New Jersey SharePoint user group.  After submitting a proposal I got accepted for the New Jersey SharePoint user group meeting and will be speaking at the December meeting.  I'm really excited to have this opportunity but little nervous because it will be my second speaking opportunity but I'm sure it will go just as smooth as previous one.  I'll be speaking on InfoPath 2007, InfoPath Forms Services and SharePoint 2007 and below is a description of what then presentation will be on.

With the new version of SharePoint and InfoPath being officially released this year the concept of building and using e-forms in the enterprise has officially become a reality by using InfoPath 2007, InfoPath Forms Services and SharePoint 2007 Enterprise.  This presentation will describe how to use InfoPath 2007 and InfoPath Forms Services (part of SharePoint 2007 Enterprise) to accomplish this with your existing or new SharePoint 2007 Enterprise installation. A demo will be given to show how to build and publish an InfoPath 2007 form to InfoPath Forms Services and how to active the forms from InfoPath Forms Services to a Site Collection.

After submitting the proposal description and being accepted I found out that somebody else is already speaking at the New York SharePoint user group meeting in November on the same subject and I'm hoping that they won't be to similar to each other.  I would change it around a little if I could attend the meeting in November to see what he is actually talking about but unfortunately I'll be at the Dev Connections conference in Las Vegas that week.  Jason said not to worry about it and just do my thing and everything will be fine.

Josh Carlisle a co-worker from Raleigh will be speaking at the December New York SharePoint user group meeting.  I'm not sure what he will be talking on but whatever it is it should be great.  I saw him speak at the South Carolina Code Camp on SharePoint development and it was outstanding.

Cheers

As I posted earlier I was attending and speaking at the South Carolina Code Camp this weekend and I'm proud to say that the code camp was a great success, at least I thought so.  I was able to meet a bunch of new people and some old friends.  It was a great time.

On a personal note the 2 sessions that I did on InfoPath, InfoPath Forms Services and .NET went better than expected from the speaking standpoint but had technical problems with my VPC image and Vista but I was able to overcome the hurdles.  Having this opportunity to speak exceed all my expectations and hope to have another chance in the near future.  I would like to give Murray Gordon a special thank you for giving me this chance.

Cheers

The South Carolina Code Camp is coming up on Saturday, October 13^th in Charleston and I'm happy to say that I will be doing a couple of presentations at code camp.  The presentations are titled "Pre-populating Active Directory User Information InfoPath 2007 and C# and create a workflow with SharePoint Designer for routing" and "Retrieving and submitting data with InfoPath 2007 and C#".  Both of these presentations will be based off work that I did for recent projects.  Information on attending the code camp can be found at http://www.sccodecamp.com/

I'm sort of nervous about speaking at this code camp because it will be my first public speaking engagement.  I've done a lot of informal class room type of training in the past and I'm hoping it will be a lot like that but I'm not 100% sure.  If anybody has any tips or examples on how to format Power Points for code camp presentations or anything else, I would greatly appreciate the advice or examples.

I'm really excited about this opportunity, attending this code camp and meeting some of the area InfoPath and SharePoint colleagues.  Hope to see you there.

Cheers