It's my pleasure to announce a new addition to the SharePoint Experts family: Cornelius (Corné) J. van Dyk!  A SharePoint MVP since 2005, Corné brings a varied and comprehensive skill set to our team.  Beginning immediately, Corné will be taking on numerous SharePoint branding/design projects for our clients, and will soon begin delivering the "Original" SharePoint Bootcamp for MOSS 2007 / WSS v3.0. 

We are very excited and proud to have Corné join our team, and we're looking forward to many years with him!

Wow!  My session was on the last day, I had a fever, and my voice was breaking and cracking like I was twelve years old.  But I knew, deep down, that I had to continue spreading the news... SharePoint Designer: I didn't know it could do that!  Indeed, based on the feedback I got from this session, a lot of people didn't know just how powerful the Data View Web Part can be!

The attendees completed evaluations of the session, provided some awesome feedback that I will be using to make future sessions even better, and ranked the session overall, the content, and the presentation.  A week went by (during which a few more evaluations trickled in), and it was a fierce battle for first place between my session and a Joel Oleson / Shane Young tour-de-force.  Shane and I traded a few e-mails, each of us gently reminding the other that paying for votes only works in Chicago council elections.  It was a tense seven days!  But finally, the last tally came in.  You guys voted my session #1 for the entire conference (Joel and Shane's session was a VERY close second).

I'd like to say a heartfelt "thank you!" for not just taking the time to attend my session on SharePoint Designer and the Data View Web Part, but to sign on to the evaluation site and complete the online evaluation form.  It means a lot to me, it really does!

So what's in the future for this session?  Well, the last demo (the Amazon.com web services demo) was exclusive to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference, so that demo will be retired.  Every time I do this session at a conference, you can expect a few changes to the early demos, and a totally new final demonstration.  Could be web services, could be AJAX, it's hard to say. :)  Next up?  Well, that depends...  If my session is selected for the SharePoint Connections conference in Vegas, that'll be my next public appearance with a SharePoint Designer session (I think, anyway), so you can plan on seeing a demonstration of a Windows Live service being integrated with your SharePoint data.

Maybe you have some suggestions?  I'd love to hear them!  If I use your suggestion, I'll give you credit during my presentation.

Thanks again for all those who attended and voted on my session at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference.  I had a blast there, in spite of my fever-induced hallucinations of Bob Fox and Eric Shupps singing karaoke, and I'm looking forward to seeing many of you at future conferences!

One last thing.  The picture on this post is one of my favorites from the conference.  Master Chief came by our SharePoint Bootcamp booth in the exhibit hall (after having lobbed a few frag grenades into some other booths, just for grins), and held up a fistful of dog tags like a war trophy collected from a deposed despot.  Just marvel at how inspired he looks -- he's ready to enlist, for sure! :)

I've been looking forward to this conference for a long time, and I'm very excited that it's just around the corner!  I'll be presenting an all-new SharePoint Designer session at the conference; it's called "SharePoint Designer: I Didn't Know You Could Do That!"

The abstract: "In this Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer session, learn how easy it is to create custom views of your data using the Data View / Form Web Part, even if it is in an external database or accessible only by Web services, without writing any code. See a rapid-fire demo designed to show how this powerful component can display data from Microsoft SQL Server and render relational data in “sub views”. Then, settle in to your chairs for one demo after another: First, learn some creative applications for conditional formatting. Then, watch as this so-called “Swiss Army Knife” of Web parts slices across multiple sites to roll up list data. Finally, this session includes two amazing demonstrations of no-code connections to Web services, including an exclusive demo, created just for the this conference. You won’t want to miss it! This session is designed for anyone who wants to get a taste of the hidden power of SharePoint Designer!"

If you enjoyed my previous session, "SharePoint Designer: It's For Developers, Too!", you'll LOVE this one!

SharePoint Experts is proud to sponsor the Ask The Experts lunch and the Game Night evening event, both to be held on Wednesday.  You can also visit our booth, #710, and pick up your own set of SharePoint Bootcamp dog tags!  If you get 'em, be sure to wear 'em -- If we see you wearing your dog tags in the halls or in the city, we might just give you a prize! .  I'll be joined at our booth by Todd Baginski, Matt Passannante and Heather Solomon, but that's not the only place they'll be!  All four of us have sessions at this conference.  If you want to know what it's like to attend one of our SharePoint training events, be sure to check out our sessions at the conference!

I can't wait -- see you there! 

When?  May 12-16, 2008.

Where?  Hyatt Regency Orange County, in Anaheim, CA (technically, Garden Grove) - Just a short free shuttle ride from Disneyland!

What?  "The Original" SharePoint Bootcamp (taught by yours truly), the SharePoint Development Bootcamp (taught by SharePoint development rock star Todd Baginski) and the SharePoint Branding Bootcamp (taught by the SharePoint branding diva, Heather Solomon).

As of the first day of the new class, it's been over a year since I've delivered the SharePoint Bootcamp as a public event.  It's been a crazy year full of travel for on-site deliveries, conferences, and the birth of my new daughter.

But now, it's 2008, and I've made lots of changes to this course.  Consider it the SharePoint Bootcamp: Reloaded!  I've added new modules on the Data View Web Part, new modules for Visio, InfoPath and Access, and more.  It's going to be a very exciting week in Anaheim, CA!  I'm sure this class will sell out quickly (in fact, I expect all the classes to sell out -- they always do!), so if you're interested in signing up, you should get your approvals taken care of right away!

What a Thanksgiving it was this year!  My new daughter, Daphne, was born!  Pictures and details will be posted later, but for now, I'm letting everyone know because I'm going to be mostly away from the computer for a week or two.

Nick recently blogged about a new web part available for users of his BDC Meta Man tool that allows users to use BDC data to generate a map via Virtual Earth.  Cool stuff, but it's $300 if you want to buy it.

Did you know that it's really quite simple to include dynamic Virtual Earth maps to information stored in any kind of source in your site's Data Source Catalog (by the way, that includes BDC sources!) by using a Data View Web Part in SharePoint Designer?  Greg Chan, one of the Program Managers on the MS SharePoint Designer team, blogged about this back in June, and included a step-by-step walkthrough.  It's a great example of just how powerful SharePoint Designer is!

Check out the post here, it's definitely a keeper!

You can.  Right now.  As in NOW.  My session is now online.  The recording starts after my pre-roll deck, which had the entire room up and out of their seats, doing the wave.  No kidding!  That's just how fun it was to be at Tech Ed this year.  In this session, you'll see my Colbert-like "The Word" sketch.  I even got special permission from a few kind MS folks on the SharePoint Designer team to poke a little fun at the old FrontPage.

Set aside 75 minutes or so and watch the presentation, then come back here and let me know what you think!

If you're aggregating my blog in a "smart" enough newsreader, the change should be relatively transparent, as a redirect is in place from the old RSS feed to the new one.  If you choose to subscribe by hand, my feed URL is now http://feeds.feedburner.com/spdustin

Of course, my posts still show up on SharePoint Blogs and its main feed!
 

If you have a blog related to SharePoint Products and Technologies, but don't want to move your blog to our servers, have I got news for you!

You don't have to move your blog to benefit from this site.  We are now offering a "blog mirror" service, no strings attached.  Your blog will be indexed by our server and will appear on the SharePoint Blogs home page and RSS feeds.  By default, we'll mirror an excerpt of your posts (just the first 250 characters), but if you want, we'll mirror the whole thing.  You remain the owner of your posts, and all links to the post's details will go directly to your blog.

To get your external blog mirrored, just visit this page and follow the instructions! (they're listed under the heading "Do you already have a blog, and you want it to show up here?")  Enjoy!

My Tech-Ed session on SharePoint Designer was a huge hit.  Hundreds filled out their evaluations, and voted that session the best in the Office track!  All while fighting a horrible server crash, too!  I was thrilled to hear the result, and I wanted to thank everyone who attended for their review.  If you attended and want to see a playback of what I did, sit tight -- the Tech-Ed DVDs will have a VIDEO of my session!  You can walk through the whole thing!

I guess the guys on the SharePoint Designer team really enjoyed the session, too -- I've been asked to present this session at TechReady 5, an internal Microsoft-only conference held in Seattle in July.  It's a bit like Tech-Ed for blue badges (MS employees), and from what I understand, they're expecting thousands to attend!  I'm honored to be chosen to speak at this event, and I promise to do Joel Oleson proud.   That's right, Joel: There will be another wave.  Oh, yes.  There will be another wave!

If you're a softie and you're planning to go to TechReady 5, check out my SharePoint Designer session, OCF306.  It'll be on the 24th at 2PM, and it'll be the room with the raucous laughter and the awesome SharePoint Designer demos on the big screen.

Thanks again to all who attended my SPD session at Tech-Ed.  I had a blast, and I hope you did, too!

(and if you attended my birds-of-a-feather session on ADD, thanks for coming to that, too!)

<reposted from May 18, 2004> 

A technique we used extensively in STS still applies to WSS: How to get data from your SharePoint lists in XML format. It's actually quite simple, and you don't need to use web services to get it.

WSS supports a number of protocols to interact with the data. SOAP and WEBDAV immediately come to mind for most of you, but you may be forgetting the elusive URL Protocol (GET). Luckily for you, it's simple to use, and returns data in the MS-standard rowset stream format.

Rather than go into a bunch of detail, let's put ourselves to work, shall we? Follow along with these steps, and you'll be pleased with the results, I'm certain.

1. Determine the GUID of a list whose data you need in XML.
• Navigate to the allitems.aspx view of the list in question
• Click the "Modify Settings and Columns" link on the left side
• Copy the List's GUID (including curly braces) from the address bar
2. Construct the URL to retrieve the list's data in XML format (it's case sensitive, be careful!)
   • The requested object is http://servername/sitename/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll
   • The object will expect three parameters: Cmd, List and XMLDATA (case sensitive)
   • Since we're displaying items (in XML format), the value of the Cmd parameter should be Display
   • We want to grab the list whose GUID we determined in step one; the value of the List parameter is this GUID (including curly braces)
   • Of course, we want XML data to be returned; the value of the XMLDATA parameter will be TRUE
   • Putting this together, we get a URL that looks like this:
   • http://server/site/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?Cmd=Display&List={E1D9FED5-2531-413F-8C0F-CAA5C6280E51}&XMLDATA=TRUE
3. Sit back and marvel at how easy it is to get a rowset out of SharePoint without using the Object Model or the Web Services. You can point a Data View web part to this URL and grab data from another SharePoint site without adding the whole site to your DV catalog listing.

You may find that it doesn't return EVERY field. That's right: It returns fields that are defined in the default "allitems" view of that particular list. If you want more fields, you have two choices:

1. Modify the allitems.aspx view to show more fields (easy)
2. Pass an additional URL parameter, View, with the GUID value of the view whose fields you want to return (a little more involved/tedious)

Did you like this tip? Comment!

How does it go again?  "The worst thing will happen at the worst possible time."  That's the most often-seen definition of Murphy's law, right?

Right.

So, imagine if you will.  You've been selected as a speaker at TechEd in Orlando, Florida.  You arrive on a Sunday, have a nice dinner and some drinks with friends you haven't seen in months (and may not see again until the next big conference), and unwind.  The hotel?  It's nice; it has its quirks, but it's Orlando and the hotel has lots of flowers around it and a nice fountain and ... you get the point.  That first day, the tension is already melting.  Good friends, good food, good drinks, good weather.  You go to bed the first night, ready and rarin' to start your week at Tech Ed with a bang.  The alarm is set for 7PM so you can shower and catch the keynote before hitting the expo floor for the morning's "swag tour".

Your phone, set to beep only if messages arrive from your spouse or from your server monitoring system, starts beeping before the sun even rises.

"Server down."

To quote Starbuck (and, well, pretty much every other lead character in Battlestar Galactica): "Frak me."

I don't know about you, but I hate waking up that way.  I prefer to wake up before the alarm goes off, slowly roll out of bed, and crawl into the shower.  I'm not a morning person at all.

I'll speed up the story now.  No sense reliving the whole tragedy.  Here's the fast-forward version: Server crashes, catastrophic RAID failure.  Backups, tested monthly (and last tested three weeks ago) are useless.  I rebuild the array and run some software that recovers files from their original stripes, and recover a surprising number of files.  They're all pretty mangled, and most of them are useless.  I don't really have the time or the focus to start new servers from scratch while I'm in Orlando.  Not that the servers were in my house or anything (they weren't, of course, we're not some fly-by-night operation here), but a hotel room with a slow network connection is not the best place to do your best technical work.

Thursday afternoon comes, and I'm dangerously close to a breakdown.  I've been knee-deep in server doo-doo for days.  Todd and Matt (two of the greatest trainers in the world, I should add) dive into the muck with me and both of them say (alternately), "Dude, take a break, we'll help you clean this up."  It's hard to let go, but I can see that I'm minutes away from a full-blown freak-out.  I quietly put down the laptop lid, put on some shorts and sandals, and drive to Epcot to ride Mission Space four times.  Then, off to the attendee party at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure.

Friday didn't seem as bad.  It got better, too, because my wife and son arrived to spend a long weekend with me in Florida.  We saw my mom and step-dad, went to a few tourist traps, and all-in-all had a great time.

When I get home, I have one full day before I need to leave again to teach a class.  SharePoint Experts and SharePoint Bootcamp come back online during that time.  Then, I spend my evenings and Father's Day weekend getting as much content back into SharePoint Blogs as possible (thanks again to Dan Larson and Glenn Barry from NewsGator for their help in recovering old content), and here we are.

I said that I hate Murphy, and I do: His laws suck out loud.  But YOU guys are another story; the readers and bloggers here at SharePoint Blogs are part of the the greatest technology community on this planet.  Every e-mail I've received has been supportive and appreciative.  Every phone call and blog comment cheers me on.  I can't thank you guys enough for your patience, your understanding, and your support!  It's been a bumpy road, and we still have some ways to go, but the outpouring of support I've received by e-mail has given me the energy to keep going. 

So, from the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU.

You guys rock.

I'm really pumped about TechEd!  I've built up my session calendar (I can't miss some of the great sessions planned by Andrew Connell, Heather Solomon, and Shane Young), and I've been working and polishing my planned demos for my very own session.  If you've seen me present SharePoint Designer before, you should know: My TechEd session, "Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer: It's for Developers, Too!" has some all new material that you haven't seen before, and won't see again!  Be sure to arrive 10-15 minutes early to get a good seat and to have some pre-session fun with your fellow attendees -- I've got something fun lined up for the pre-show!  This session (OFC324) will be in S310A at 8:45AM on Wednesday, June 6.

I'm also moderating a "birds of a feather" session called "Geeks with ADD: It's an advantage!"  If you or a loved one has ADD (or AD/HD, which is either the same thing or a slightly different thing -- that depends on who you ask), and you want to learn how to manage the deluge of communications and tasks that a technology-driven life brings down, you should come by this session.  There will be no PowerPoint, just a group of like-minded ADDers who want to share their experiences and advice.  I will have my laptop there to show a few ideas for using Outlook 2007 to help with time and task management, if anybody is interested in seeing that.  The purpose of this session, though, is to better understand the positive role that ADD can have on a geek's life.  I'm hoping to hear some of your stories; how has your differently-wired brain solved a problem that stumped everyone else around you?  What creative endeavors do you pursue?  There are a lot of positive aspects of ADD, so let's learn how to take advantage of them!  This session (BOF69) will be in N220F at 7:45PM on Tuesday, June 5.  (Non-ADDers are VERY welcome to attend -- you'll learn a lot about what it really means to have ADD.  Here's a hint: It doesn't mean that you can't pay attention!)

See you in Orlando next week, everybody!

Thought I'd post here to let everyone know: the missus and I are going to have another baby!  (Well, she's going to have the baby; I'm going to bring the chocolates for the nurses. )  The kiddo is due to arrive around December 11, and we couldn't be happier!  We went for a Doppler yesterday to hear the baby's heartbeat, and the doctor couldn't find it.  He was concerned that we had misjudged the pregnancy length, and ordered an ultrasound.  So we got a sneak peek at the little one before we expected!  As it turns out, everything is fine with the mini-Miller.

You can get a better look, too -- the picture on the left is linked to the bigger version.

As you might expect, this will change a few things, most notably how often I'm traveling toward the end of this year.  Look for some job opening announcements in the next few weeks.  

(I'm not sure why this isn't showing up under my blog, but I'm working on it!)

Thanks to my good friend Jeremy McMahan for finding the suser_sid() function for me -- My original solution was a crazy mix of linked servers and the Directory Services provider for OLEDB!

Ever migrate your SharePoint site to a totally new environment and discover that your efforts to re-create your Active Directory were all for nothing, since all the users got new SIDs?  Symptoms like: The administrator of the server can log in, but nobody else can, even though you're SURE their usernames and passwords are right.

Here's a script that'll fix that up for you in a jif.  Open Query Analyzer and run it against the content database for your site, and it will update all the SIDs for your users to the SID that is reported for that user by Active Directory.

Big fat disclaimer: Microsoft does NOT support ANY modifications to your SharePoint databases.  That's not to say they won't support your SharePoint site, but if this operation breaks your server, Microsoft won't help you.  I'm not responsible for the results, either, while we're on the subject of passing the buck.  BACK UP YOUR DATABASE.

Okay, now that we've gotten that mumbo-jumbo out of the way, here's the code.

DECLARE @login varchar(40), @systemid varbinary(128)

DECLARE curUsers CURSOR LOCAL FOR 
SELECT tp_login, tp_systemid FROM userinfo where tp_deleted = 0

OPEN curUsers

	FETCH NEXT FROM curUsers INTO @login, @systemid

WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
	PRINT 'Resetting user ' + @login + ' to new SID '
	PRINT suser_sid(@login)
	UPDATE UserInfo
		SET tp_systemid = suser_sid(tp_login) WHERE CURRENT OF curUsers
	FETCH NEXT FROM curUsers INTO @login, @systemid
END

CLOSE curUsers
DEALLOCATE curUsers

GO