Rix Bits

We’re back again with another year of the BDPA High School Computer Competition.  We’ve got some new students as well as our returning students, and we’re already well on our way to getting up to speed on web application development! Thanx to Devry University for donating space in their facilities for our class. 

In our classes, we learn web app development using Microsoft’s Visual Studio Web Developer Express tool – basically, a light version of the same industry-standard integrated development environment (IDE) that many .NET

• I expected my slate to give the same kind of sluggish performance that a Netbook is known for.  But in fact, it’s been very responsive, especially considering the hardware that it’s built on.
• Finger-scrolling is enabled in more places than I had anticipated.  This includes Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, and the Start Menu.
• Many apps that I wouldn’t have expected are allowing for pinch zooming, including the internet browsers and Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Speaking of PDF readers, I read a lot of ebooks on the Slate, and most of the PDF readers I use do a good job with full-screen reading modes, including good finger scrolling and flicks for page up/down. 

No, not a Pug – a SPUG. :)  That’s right, on Thursday March 17th I’ll be the guest speaker at the Buckeye SharePoint User Group (formerly the Central Ohio SPUG), discussing SharePoint 2010 development and ALM.

For those that have heard me speak on this topic before, never fear!  You won’t be bored, because this time I should have a little more time to do some nice demos featuring the ease with which you can deploy solutions to SharePoint from Visual Studio 2010, as well as showing some of the koolness you get when you incorporate TFS into your SharePoint dev festivities.

Hope I see you there!:

Buckeye SharePoint User Group
Microsoft Polaris Office
March 17th, 2011
5:30pm-7:30pm

This past week I attended the Best Practices Conference (BPC) for SharePoint in La Jolla, California. This is a 3-day conference that discusses not only “how'” to do things in SharePoint, but also asks the question “should you”.

Well, it looks like March is turning out to be a very big month for SharePoint in terms of conferences.  Seems like other geeks like myself just can’t get enough of that SharePoint goodness. :)  Here are the March conferences I’m aware of:

Well, it’s been a whole week with my HP Slate 500 table pc, and I feel like I’m starting to get my tablet swag back. :)  Initially the pen writing felt awkward because it’s been a while since I’ve used a tablet on a daily basis, but I feel my rhythm returning.

So, as any respectable geek would do, I started looking at ways to customize and personalize my Slate – in other words, what can I do to trick out my tablet pc?  In addition to picking a nice subtle wallpaper for my desktop, I decided to customize the native Flick Gestures that come with Windows 7.  These gestures allow me to ‘flick’ my finger quickly in 1 of 8 different directions, and perform a task as a result.

In my case, I’m often performing the following tasks, so they made good candidates to be added to the list of Flicks: