Friday, December 30, 2011

A new role in SharePoint, better toys, and all that good stuff

Starting in January 2012, I’ll be taking another step in my career by joining the Improving Enterprisesimage team as their new SharePoint Practice Lead. Improving is a firm that focuses on Agile software development as well as certified Microsoft training, and I look forward to continue providing SharePoint consulting to clients, as well as helping to teach Microsoft Official Curriculum training to users as well.

Here’s the interesting difference between this post and the last time I posted about a career change almost 2 years ago – the tools.  Back then, I complained about how SharePoint’s new 64-bit requirement made it hard for developers like myself to create VM’s for training and prototyping. But today, I have no complaints – thanx to CloudShare! : )  Yep, now I’ve got a virtualized SharePoint environment waiting for me in the cloud whenever I need it. And I no longer have the headache of dealing with local PC settings or slow-running servers that depend on the number of CPUs on my laptop. Ahhh, the cloud…

More on my CloudShare experiences in future posts.  What about you – what SharePoint virtualization strategy will you use in 2012?

Thursday, December 29, 2011

SharePoint and the Team Foundation Service Preview… in the Cloud!

{my article published at CloudShare Community Blog – Dec 30th, 2011}

In September 2011, the Team Foundation Service Preview (TFS-P) became available on an invitation-only basis. In a nutshell, it’s the beta version of Team Foundation Server (TFS) 11, but hosted in Azure (Microsoft’s cloud-based storage, computing and networking infrastructure imageservices).  While popularity for TFS has grown over the years as an on-premise server technology, the idea of a hosted version of TFS has taken a little longer to materialize.

As a SharePoint developer who focuses on application lifecycle management, I’m a big fan of doing SharePoint development using TFS. So I decided to get a TFS-P account to see what it was like to work with SharePoint and TFS in the cloud.

imageTo see the details of my experience, jump over to the CloudShare Community Blog, where I’ve written an article regarding using CloudShare as my virtual environment to try out the Team Foundation Service Preview…  [ http://blog.cloudshare.com/2011/12/30/using-sharepoint-and-team-foundation-service-preview-in-the-cloud/ ]