Tag: NHSPUG

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP)

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)
Jim Wilcox – 2019-2020 Microsoft MVP – Developer Technologies

This showed up in the mail today! Despite the April 1st date, it’s not an April Fools’ gag after all! I’ve only ever seen one of these trophies in person before this one. I’ve been trying to stay chill about it…. but heck, here it is…

I’m profoundly honored and thankful to say that Microsoft has chosen to award me with this 2019-2020 “Most Valuable Professional” (MVP) award, in the category of Developer Technologies!

If you’re not familiar with this award program, check out the program’s official web site: https://mvp.microsoft.com

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Cobbler’s Shoes

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed the holidays!
 
I took time off for the holidays… not as much as I’d have liked to, but enough to enjoy it.

What’d I do?

The cobbler finally got a chance to tend to his own shoes, at least infrastructure wise.

A few years ago, I caught that MS was giving away a license to Windows System Center Core, and I realized I had enough retired hardware to cobble together a hobby-level host. I then did a Physical->Virtual on my small network of Windows 2003 based servers that I ran the NHSPUG website from.

The setup was nice, actually… all three virtual machines ran with room to spare on what was originally an old client-class PC. With dynamic RAM turned on and all three VMs cranking, they occasionally managed to consume nearly a third of the host’s 8GB of RAM.

Having recently had opportunity to get a hold of platform MSDN licensing, I upgraded my entire home network infrastructure by two platform generations across the board.

Seriously… Windows Server 2003 ->  2012 R2 64, SQL 2005 -> 2014, SharePoint WSS3 -> SharePoint Foundation 2013.

Almost all of it was build, replace, rip… build new VMs, integrate them into the domain, migrate data & config as needed, then shut down the systems they replace. The fun one was SharePoint WSS 3.0 upgrading to Foundation 2013. I had to bounce the content databases off a spare 2010 farm I had left over from a project at work. It was nice that it was possible to do that, given that the 2010 farm was a different domain. It’s amazing how much you can get done in short order when you are a one-man IT shop… the communications overhead savings alone is unreal.

The hard part is that newer software in the 64bit range uses much more system resources, so I have extended hosting not just to my System Center, but also to two Windows 8.1 Pro systems running Hyper-V, just to spread out the necessary load and provide some critical system redundancy.

With that, only obvious thing externally is that the Granite State NH SharePoint Users Group website ( http://www.granitestatesharepoint.org ) is now SharePoint 2013 based.

Internally, things generally seem a touch faster, smoother… maybe that’s just psychological, but I notice the difference, even if my wife & kids think it just functions as always, as expected.

I guess the irony in this is that my hobby infrastructure backlog is knocked down a few more notches than I thought I would ever get to… (yes, I took time off from work, and, to chill, I did some of what I do at work.) now my hobby development backlog has new possibilities and subsequently grown substantially.

One of the first things I’ve got to take care of is the few services the SharePoint upgrade has caused… the NHSPUG site still has some cosmetic issues I want to sort out. My Windows Phone apps that integrated with the WSS3 site are now broken, and I have some jiggering to do with my dev environment before I can even diagnose them. That doesn’t even cover some of the things I want to do with the NHWPAD group and my hobby/portfolio projects (e.g. Jimmy Sudoku).

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Granite State 2014 Q4 Events – SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire, and the Users Groups

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire 2014
Better late than never.   SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire 2014 is happening just over a week from now at the Radisson Nashua Hotel in Nashua, NH on October 18th.   (We traditionally have held this event in mid September, so we’re essentially a month late.)

The SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire theme for 2014 is

“Cloud First” means SharePoint developments don’t wait for major releases.

It’s very true, with developments implemented in SharePoint Online, including Delve and social graphing, there’s lots to talk about.  Incremental changes they may be, but increments happen at a more rapid pace than they did in the Pre-SharePoint Online world, and of course that has implications for SharePoint on-prem, on premise.

http://www.spsevents.org/city/nh/2014

Granite State NH SharePoint Users Group
Regarding the NH SharePoint Users Group, our schedule remains on the 1st Thursday of the month thru the end of the year with the December meeting being held at the Microsoft Store in Salem.  Our speakers and topics remain to be determined.

#NHWPUG is dead…. long live #NHWPAD!
The Granite State Windows Phone Users Group is in the midst of some bit of reorganization.   We had long discussed the idea of broadening the focus of the group to include Universal platform app development, and the topic got some hot debate when 8.1 was announced.   With the announcement of Windows Threshold as the unified version of Windows that will run on all hardware form factors (pc’s, laptops, tablets, phones, and even Xbox consoles) it’s become clear that we need to redefine our group and refocus it.  

With this post, I’ll announce that the group will be called the “Granite State (NH) Windows Platform Application Developers”.  I’ll begin re-branding the existing LinkedIn, Facebook, Eventbrite and Meetup sites, and the community app.  We’ll continue to support Windows Phone 8 app developers, but our focus will move to supporting community evangelism of developers in the Windows App Store space. 

I want to thank the my new teammates at BlueMetal for putting up with my agonizing over this change somewhat openly within the team’s internal discussion, and for their support.   I’m not worthy, but I can’t help but think it’s a huge win for the Granite State SPUG and WPAD groups, and the greater New England technology community.

Our next meeting will be in November, but we’ll get that announced soon.

Regarding the SPSNH schedule change…. To make a long story short SharePoint Conference 2014 pushed off SharePoint TechCon SF, which then push SPTechCon Boston right into SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire’s traditional 3rd Saturday of September space.  Our choices were to have SPSNH before or after SPTechCon, and going after seemed reasonable.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Late Summer/Fall 2013 in Granite State Users Group Events

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)
Fred Brandon Presenting at SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire 2012

Something I haven’t been doing enough of, ever, is blogging about upcoming events for the two users’ groups I help co-organize.   I generally think of this as a technology blog, and while I often like to blog about everything from nitty-gritty technical details to architectural level development stuff, I think I can spare a label for community involvement.  🙂 

While SP Tech Con is rolling along down in Boston, here’s what’s rolling just a smidge north of there.

We just had our August 8th meeting for the Granite State NH SharePoint Users Group at Daniel Webster College in Nashua.   Due to a scheduling conflict Rebecca Isserman couldn’t make it… thankfully Kris Huggins stepped up and presented on MS Project integration with SharePoint 2013 (as opposed to Project Server itself).  

We also organized a bit for volunteers for SharePoint Saturday, New Hampshire, 2013 as well as went over topics for SPSNH speaker selection.   All in all, we had a great meeting… those that attended really got to take part in what is becoming a special tradition for the users group and SPSNH.

Granite State SharePoint Users Group Meeting at the Microsoft Store in Salem

Our next meeting for the Granite State SharePoint NH Users Group meeting will be September 12th, with Richard Harbridge, from Microsoft!   In fact, we will be meeting at the Microsoft Store in Salem, NH, as well.  I believe this will be a fun easing-in “back to school” atmosphere event!  🙂

Richard’s visit should also be an excellent last call before SharePoint Saturday NH on September 21st.  We’re really psyched to have a new location for SPSNH:  the Radisson Nashua.   It has been host to bunches of great events I’ve personally attended… so I’m really proud that SPSNH has grown to this level!

We have a fantastic lineup of speakers and topics and even great vendors with cool stuff to show off there.

If you haven’t gotten your FREE SPSNH attendee ticket, please do so…  they are limited, and we won’t get much notice before we run out.   You can knock that off your to-do list at http://spsnh2013.eventbrite.com


As far as my other group, the Granite State NH Windows Phone Users Group goes, our next meeting is this week, August 15th.  We’ve got Roman Jacquez, UI Developer Lead of Qvidien, with

“Creating Multiplayer Turn-Based Games with Windows Phone and Windows 8”, again, at the Microsoft Store in Salem. 
 
Going out through September, the NHWPUG’s meeting will be September 19th (just days in front of SPSNH!) with Gary Ritter, who will be chatting about “Favorite Windows Phone Development Tips ad Shortcuts for Beginners”, also at the Microsoft Store.

I’ll also take this opportunity to thank Daniel Webster College, the Microsoft Store, and Alexander Techology Group for their steadfast support of the users groups, and Edgewater and Atrion for their core-team support of SharePoint Saturday!