Speaking Schedule

One of my favorite things about technology is having the opportunity to speak about technology.  For whatever reason, it always seems like this time of year always keeps me busy.  Here is a list of speaking engagements I’m scheduled for over the next few months:

• October 21st – presenting on Silverlight 3 at an internal user group within Farm Credit Services of America (my employer)
• November 3rd – presenting on VSTS 2010 – What’s in it for me? at the Dubuque, IA .NET User Group.  I gave this presentation for the Omaha Team System User Group last month and am looking forward to giving it again.
• November 7th – presenting at Tulsa TechFest on TBD (something related to VSTS, I’m sure :-)
• November 13th – presenting on C# and Team Build at an internal .NET Developer’s Conference for Tyson Foods in Springdale, AR.

The last two events in November are all within about an hour of my sisters and parents so I’m really looking forward to the trips.

Omaha Team System User Group RSS Feeds

Due to a recent server failure/web site makeover, the RSS feeds from the Omaha Team System User Group web site have changed.  The new RSS feeds are as follows:

• Announcements – OTSUG announcements
• Events – OTSUG and other events

As always, please contact me if you have any questions regarding the Omaha Team System User Group or if you are interested in presenting a topic at an upcoming meeting.

Omaha Team System User Group Site is Back!

If you have visited the Omaha Team System User Group site within the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably noticed one of two things - the site was either down or the site looked a lot different than it used to.

A couple of weeks ago, the server that hosts the OTSUG web site crashed and took everything with it.  Although I had various backups of various files, I did not have any (recent) backups of the entire partition.  After bringing a severely out of date backup on-line (it was four years old!) I had quite a bit of configuration to take care of.

The OTSUG web site was originally hosted within Microsoft SharePoint utilizing the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS): User Group Edition.  In fact, this was the only site on this server that made use of SharePoint.  Rather than install SharePoint and CKS to host a single site, I decided to look for something simpler and easier to maintain.  I decided to give DotNetNuke a look.

DotNetNuke has a little bit of a learning curve, but once you get past that, it’s very quick and easy to add and configure new pages to the web site.  Specific functionality, such as support for Announcements, Document Management, Links, etc., are provided via DotNetNuke Modules.  There are quite a few of these modules readily available for download with the ability to create custom modules if so needed.  In my case, I was able to get by with the modules currently provided.  Another great thing – it’s open source (under the MIT license).

So, I’ve learned (at least) two things with this experience:

• Sometimes, simpler is better.
• Backup, backup, backup!

At least I got to learn something new from this experience!