Personal

Today I handed in my Orange badge to Avanade and signed out of my Avanade account. It’s been a six and a half year long adventure where I had the opportunity work with amazing colleagues and exciting clients. I’ve been given the opportunity to grow my career and skills in directions I did not think about, and I’m very proud of what we achieved and what we delivered to clients.

I’m incredibly proud to announce that I’ve been accepted into the Microsoft Regional Director program. The Microsoft Regional Director (RD) program is a global community of passionate technology thought leaders, where Microsoft once a year appoints a small set of leaders as Regional Directors, to serve on a two years basis. It’s a fantastic opportunity for me to play a small role in this group of people - that I look up to as leaders, superstars, humans.

Eventually time caught up with me, and with the help of some isolation, boring weather and some recent announcements from Microsoft Build, I had to go and update my/this web site. It was way overdue and it’s been on my to-do list for far to long - for a number of reasons. First of all this site has been hosted on Orchard on Azure since 2012 - without any hiccups. The setup was a dynamic web site, using Orchard, which was a state-of-the-art web and blogging CMS at that point in time.

Today is the day where the Microsoft community officially award the community with the Microsoft MVP award. We will all receive some new friends and old friends and also we loose some dear friends (that we of course hope to see back into the program again). I’ve been fortunate to be re-awarded with the Office Servers and Services Microsoft MVP award, for the 8th consecutive year. Thank you Microsoft! As usual, being an MVP is not something you can take for granted and you have to work hard to stay in the program.

Wow, 2015 has been one really interesting year for me! For the 9th year I will do my summary post (here’s the olde ones: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006). 2015 started really cool with me joining Avanade here in Sweden and boosting the Collaboration efforts. It is an incredible team we have here and some amazing customers and opportunities ahead and I don’t regret this move for a second.

I’m very excited and glad to announce that this is my last day at Connecta/Acando and starting on Monday I will be joining the Avanade forces here in Sweden. I will take the role as the Collaboration lead, continuing my passion for SharePoint and the future of collaboration on the Microsoft stack. Joining Avanade and in this role seems like one of the most exciting things I could do at the moment.

The time has come for me to do, as I’ve done now for eight years (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006), my annual post to sum up the year. It is always fun to look back to what happened the past 12 months. This past year has been a somewhat “in-betweeners” year. We (me, my clients, colleagues etc.) are standing on the edge of something big and the bridge over to the other side is really, really long.

Wow, 2013 was an interesting year and the time has come for my annual blog post to sum up the year that soon has passed us and looking a bit into the crystal ball for the next one. This is my seventh summary post and it is always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006). For me the year has been really intensive on all levels; I don’t think I´ve ever experienced such a huge demand for my professional services as of now, there is so much new stuff to learn and it´s harder and harder to keep up, I have a hard time resisting doing tons of community stuff and at the same time we had a huge construction work at our house, and of course having two soon-to-be teenager girls takes its toll!

I just received the confirmation that I am renewed as SharePoint MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) for my fourth consecutive year. It’s an honor being chosen among all the professionals around the world, especially now when SharePoint is getting more and more widespread and is being adopted by more and more companies worldwide. I’d like to take the opportunity to say thanks all my colleagues at Connecta, that put up with me, and all my friends around the world that I’ve learnt to know throughout these years.

Only one day and a few hours left of the year of 2012 and the time has come for me to make my (now traditional) summary post. I’ve done it now for six years (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006) and it’s always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months. This year has been an interesting year to me and contained some really interesting milestones, happenings and events.

YES! I’m finally alive with a new hosting provider - this time it’s Microsoft (who could have guessed that!). Thanks to the just released Azure Web Sites I have now moved my blog from my old custom blog implementation (that has been a fun project though), to running Orchard on Azure Web Sites using SQL Azure. This finalizes my cloud migrations - last year I moved e-mail and everything but the site to Office 365 and started with a hosted service for this site, but for running this little blog that was a bit to expensive (you’re not clicking the ads enough).

Last Friday I got the fantastic message that I had successfully passed the Microsoft Certified Architect - SharePoint 2010 (MCA) certification, something I’m really proud of - but something most of the community never ever heard of. During this weekend I’ve been pinged and messaged by a lots of people asking the question “What is a Microsoft Certified Architect?". In this post I intend to answer it as thorough as possible, including my own personal aspects of it.

It’s that time of the year, when you’re thinking about what you’ve done and accomplished the last twelve months. I’ve been writing a summary for the last five years (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010) and I always think it’s fun to look back at the year gone and do some predictions for the upcoming one. This year has been totally crazy - I’ve been enjoying my work and clients/projects at Connecta and I totally love that we have such a strong team and offering.

The 65th SharePoint Pod Show is out featuring…tada…me :-) The SharePoint Pod Show is THE podcast about SharePoint and is done by Rob Foster, Nick Swan and Brett Lonsdale and has featured a lot of great SharePointers from all around the world throughout the years. If you haven’t already listened to the podcasts, then you got 65 episodes to catch up on! There are some epic ones, such as my favorite one #50 - which is about performance tuning.

Now with the Microsoft Certified Master course two and a half weeks behind me and the great news that I accomplished all the exams, and might call myself a Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2010, only a few days old I thought I should write something about the program, experience and value of it. Recent blog posts about the Microsoft certification programs also put some extra fuel onto the urge of writing about it.

Earlier today Jeff Teper, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, wrote about the 10th birthday of SharePoint. This post made me lean back and close my eyes for a while and think back of what has happened during the last decade - and it is a lot of stuff! And I’ve playing with SharePoint more or less since then! The SharePoint story for me started back in 2000. I was running my own company, iBizkit, and we built a “SharePoint like” Intranet portal product.

The 1st of April is one of those days when a fourth of all MVPs just waits for the renewal e-mail from Microsoft. Luckily I got mine this year, just before heading home from work this afternoon. This means that I will do my second term as a SharePoint MVP and I’m already looking forward to the paintball in a cold a rainy Seattle! Congrats to all other renewed and new MVPs all around this globe.

The time has come for me to do my summary post of 2010. This is my fifth summary post (2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009). This year has been truly amazing. Working in the SharePoint world has been so interesting and challenging with the brand new Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 products. I have been knee-deep in SharePoint 2010 work both for my employer (Connecta) and for personal reasons (pure fun, book, learning…).

I’d like to take the opportunity to tell you about some of my upcoming engagements this spring. SharePoint 2010 - the Developer Tour - May 17th, Stockholm A half day introduction to SharePoint 2010 development arranged by Microsoft in Stockholm. If you are new to SharePoint development or a skilled SharePoint 2007 developer you should not miss this out. Together with Microsoft we will dive into the wonderful world of the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools and SharePoint Designer 2010.

While commuting home this beautiful afternoon I received an e-mail from Microsoft containing the following: Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Server technical communities during the past year. I am very, very proud of receiving this award and it gives me a real boost to continue exploring the SharePoint world…

This is the first post for the year of 2010 and what could be better to start with than announcing that I’m writing a SharePoint 2010 book. More specifically I’m writing a book about SharePoint 2010 Web Parts development with the working title SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action. This is a dream come true to me and I have been thinking about writing a book on and off for quite some time.

The year of 2009 is about to close and it’s time for me to summarize this year, as I’ve done for the last few years (2006, 2007 and 2008). This year has been one of the most inspiring and exciting years for me in a very long time. I have been doing so much fun stuff this year. The most significant change has been starting to work for my new employer Connecta (after nine years at basically the same employer).

I’m glad and proud to tell you all about that next month I will start a new job. I will start as a SharePoint Architect at Connecta. This is a fantastic opportunity for me and it will let me work with some of the finest SharePoint minds and developers here in Sweden as well as some really awesome customers. I’ve been working with basically the same company now since 2000, when I and two good friends founded it, iBizkit.

Yesterday SharePoint Community Sweden was launched, initiated by Andreas Kviby. This is a new community site for Swedes and those who speak Swedish about the SharePoint platform. There are a lot of great SharePoint sites and communities out there on the web, but none in Swedish. Having a great community “nearby” will enable the personal interaction to be even better and it will create a lot of interesting spin-offs. I’m glad to be onboard and I will put some effort into this new community and helping out new and old SharePointers as good as I can and I will try to do some blogging about interesting topics in Swedish there - once in a while I will probably double post information here and on the community site (long sentence…).

The time has come to make a summary of the past year and have a look into the future – the year of 2009. About a year ago I made a similar post with a summary and some predictions. This year has been a fast year and I have made so much, both personally and at work. For a few months in the spring I was at home taking care of my daughters and tried not to work (which I find really hard).

I recently received my new HTC Touch Pro smartphone, which is by far the best phone I ever owned so far – it has all that I need to complete my daily tasks. Over the years I had a few phones, of course the latest one has nearly almost been the best for me at that time. I decided to take a look down the memory lane and see what phones I have owned and used for daily usage.

Today I passed the 70-542 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Application Development), with a score of 1000 (same as 70-541). It was a pretty tough test, but spending the last few days reading through the late Patrick Tisseghems book, Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 made me succeed. I dedicate this result to him – thanks! Technorati tags: SharePoint, MOSS

I have recently seen Wordle images here and there on blogs and sites and I could not resist creating one of my own site, to see what words do I write often here. As you can see it’s lot of stuff about Microsoft (surprise), SharePoint, Visual Studio and .NET. I also seems to like a lot of things. Have you created a nice Wordle?

Finally I have registered for PDC 2008. It will be awesome to head over to Los Angeles and attend to the conference. Since there has not been a PDC for a few years I expect some interesting stuff revealed, like what’s happening with C# 4.0 and the SharePoint team will also have a few sessions (Lawrence Liu has not revealed it’s content though). I will be staying at the Westin Bonaventure hotel, like some other Swedes.

It’s summer and time for some vacation, finally. This year has been hard work so far – and I don’t expect it to get lighter this upcoming autumn and winter. I’ve had fun though! Microsoft SharePoint has really been one thing occupying my work – it feels like everyone is not just looking at SharePoint, they want to use it now! We have a couple of cases that is really interesting and I hope that I have convinced them and proposed a nice solution.

Wow, two heavy-weight Windows Mobile phones; Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 and HTC Touch Pro. In a few months I am ready to get me a new phone. I currently use the HTC TyTN, which has been a very pleasant ride (except for the glitching screen right now, to many drops…). When Sony Ericsson announced XPERIA X1 in march I got so excited and decided to get me one as soon as it hits the stores.

Today I passed another SharePoint exam; the 70-541, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development, with a score of 1000 of 1000. This one was pretty easy, compared to the ones for WSS 2/SharePoint 2003. If you have had chance to do some advanced developing and knows the SharePoint class library and Xml schemas you should give it a shot.

Welcome to the new design, I hope you like this one better than the previous. Personally I got tired of the old one and decided to make a change. Please leave a comment if it behaves bad or does not look good on any weird browser (I’ve tried it on FF3b4, Safari and IE8b1). Tomorrow I’ll be back for work after a month and a half of parental leave, which was so nice.

Recently my laptop (DELL XPS m1210) has been really sluggish and I have had several BSOD’s when I have been working with it. I try to keep it pretty optimized and up to date so it will behave nice. I think I’ve read most of the optimize Vista articles and posts and I always keep track on which processes and services running and how much memory is used etc etc.

I found this pretty funny misspelling in the Office Server System Requirements today. Is it a tribute to Linus Torvalds?

Here comes another “it sucks” post about McAfee anti-virus products. I recently was forced into using McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, due to domain policies at my new employer. This was not what I have wanted! For years I have been using Grisoft AVG both at work and at home (they have a great free product for personal use). AVG is great, I have not had a single virus or similar on any of my machines for six or seven years (that has not been intentionally installed - to see what will happen), and I’m sad to not use it on my primary working machine anymore.

The year of 2007 is about to come to an end, and it has been a really exciting year. First of all I’ve had a great year with my family; my daughters turned four and one years old during 2007 and it’s so wonderful having them around giving me energy. My wife has been home with them the whole year and next year I will take a few months of parental leave and give them my full attention.

Apple just released their new version of Max OS X (10.5) called Leopard, which of course has a real neat user interface and really cool experience - the Apple trademark. I have seen a lot of people moving on to the Mac platform the last years, but then we talk about personal and niche users and so far the Apple OS X share is about 4% compared to XP’s 80% and Vistas 8%.

A few weeks ago I met a friend of a friend at a party who started to work for Accenture as a programmer a few months a go. After some talking we started discussion jobs, and I was wondering what she did at Accenture; what kind of development and projects. As a programmer I was eager to know what she was programming and stuff like that, I know that she had studied C++ at the university and that she had worked with that for a while.

I start every morning on the commuter train checking out the Technology news on Tailrank, using my HTC TyTN (at http://tech.mobile.tailrank.com/) , to see what has happened in the world of technology during the night. Most of the cool stuff happens when it is night in Sweden… But now the technology news has been down for days, it has happened in the past that it has been down for a day or so, but now I have not been able to read the news on Tailrank since monday.

To this site: www.wictorwilen.se! This site and blog has been up an running for a year now and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I’m really looking forward to the next one! The number of subscribers is constantly climbing and the highlight for me has been the msfeedicon application and the Dissecting XPS series. You, the readers and web searchers, have these top five articles: Add Office 2007 icons to SharePoint 2003 Windows Live Writer 1.

Finally the winter is over here in Sweden, the spring is here! I’m currently sitting in the car and the sun is shining outside and the temperature is close to 20 degrees celsius outside. I really like travelling in the car when the sun shines, and it’s even more fun when you are online on the highway - using bluetooth and my HTC TyTN with 3G connection.

I have for a while thought about why are there no standard in Microsoft applications on how a MDI interface should look like, why do the document tabs look different in (almost) all applications. Examples Below are some examples taken from recent Microsoft applications. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Nice and clean layout, the cross to the right closes the current open document. The down-arrow displays a drop-down of all open documents.

Robert Scoble is writing about that the analog TV will be turned off (Turn off analog TV? It’ll never happen) in two years and that he thinks this is not going to happen. This is exactly what’s happening in Sweden right now, by the next few months the last analog terrestrial broadcast is turned off. I think this is great except for that almost every TV has analog recievers and you therefore have to buy another box, with a new remote etc etc.

Scott Watermasysk led med to this article by Nick Wilson on why you should not have Snap Preview Anywhere on your blog and I’m now joining the bloggers who remove the preview features. I agree with Nick on that the preview is pretty annoying and that it’s not problem free (more than often you have to click more than once on a link). Byt why did I put it up in the first place?

Happy new year to all of you and thanks to all readers of my blog. The number of readers is increasing and I hope it will continue on the other side of the bell tolls tonight. See you in 2007!

Yesterday I abandoned my streak of Sony-Ericsson mobile phones which started many years ago. In fact it started when I was studying and working for the summer at one of Ericssons mobile phone assembly lines with the GH-688. Since 1996 I have been using them, except for a short period when my employer forced me to use a Nokia. I was choosing between upgrading my Sony-Ericsson P910i to a Sony-Ericsson P990 or the HTC TyTN.

Bredbansbolaget, one of swedens largest broadband provider owned by Telenor, has a remarkable lousy password policy. The password has to be between 5 and 8 characters, and valid characters are a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and _ (underscore). With your username and password you can access your personal information, your e-mail, buy music, videos and lots of stuff and have it all on you internet bill. Having this bad password policy goes against all recommendations nowadays and I think they really should consider changing it.

It’s snow in Sweden to everyones surprise! Yesterday Stockholm in Sweden received a few centimeters of snow and the quicksilver reached a few knots below zero degrees Celsius and the whole town went crazy. Cars in the ditches, cars in the wrong lane, busses burning rubber on the ice, frozen train switches…you name it! The thing that amazes me is that it comes as a surprise every year, we have been having snow and winter here in Sweden for the last 10.

Demonstrating applications for customers is a haunted task. When doing a demo for a customer at least one thing will fail or result in an unexpected result; a brand new error, a debug dialog box with unwanted text, test content that should not be read by the ones you are demoing for etc. If it’s not the application then you have some other things messing up; no connection between the laptop or projector or no connection to the network.

From now on my feeds are published through FeedBurner to get better statistics, yeah I’m a fan of stats. I’ve been using Google Anlytics for this site and others for some long time now and are very satisfied with it - but the lack of tracking feeds or any other type non-script-enabled stuff annoys me. From what I can understand Urchin (the company Google turned into Google Analytics) had that possibility before when making e-mail campaings, but I can’t get it to work.

Last week I recieved my brand new laptop, an Dell XPS M1210. The time had come to throw my Dell Inspiron 9100 through the window! The 9100 has been a great laptop through the last two and a half years but my machine was a monday sample. I was on my third power adapter, one blew up with the smell of gun powder and the second stopped working. I had to switch battery once, when the old one could last for nine minutes.

There has been a lot of discussions around the net on the non-customizable and non-removable Windows Vista startup sound. Robert Scoble has a post that explains why the Vista team decided to design it like that. My personal opinion, like Roberts, is that I would like to decide for myself if I wan’t a startup sound when I turn my computer on. For example; at home I have Windows XP Media Center which would benefit from having that sound, it lets me calibrate the volume before I put on a movie and it makes me aware of when the machine is up and running.

This is just me testing my own implementation of MetaWeblog API made in C# and ASP.NET 2.0. This post is created using the Windows Live Writer (beta) which of course did not work directly. I had to do some special fixes to get the MetaWeblog API to work according to the specifications I read through. I’ll get back about that another day. Now I got to go home to put my daughter to bed.

Google has introduced a new Video Search which can be reached from the menu at the Google web site, read about it in the Google Blog. This is a nice new feature in which you can upload and share your videos but this post is not about that feature it is about that the Video link has replaced the nice Groups search link!! When stumbling upon a problem or whenever I try to find help on something I Google for it, and browse throught the first ten hits - then I just click on the Groups link to make the same search in the news groups, where most of your questions are answered.

Microsoft Windows Vista contains Windows Media Center (in Home Premium and Ultimate) which is a great upate from the Windows XP Media Center Edition. Finally the user interface is taking advantage of widescreen and the navigation is faster and smoother. But I think one big thing is still missing in the Media Center interface - editing, sorting and searching pictures using metadata; today you can sort them on date taken! I would find it more useful to search for all images containg images of my family, my vacation in Spain or winter images from our summer house.

Sitting here in the halftime of the Brazil vs Croatia World Cup Soccer game and enjoying a good game. During this FIFA World Cup tournament a must have application is the Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard. It’s a nice little application with direct results, standings and schedule of all games and teams. You can also use the application to be your football news RSS reader and Microsoft provides us with a number of interesting football feeds.

As Microsoft OneNote 2007 will be a part of the Office Home and Student 2007 suite OneNote will and can be used by students. And it’s a great tool for that! I remember when I studied for my M.Sc. and all the notebooks and pens I used, making notes was very important for me and helped me remember things better. And it still is, I have used OneNote for a few years and been satisified with that, but the new OneNote is so great.

I have moved this blog to my own domain, http://www.wictorwilen.se/ and I decided to have it hosted at DotNetPark. DotNetPark has an excellent service at great prices. For me it was important to have ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server where I hosted my site and they have all that and more. I can easily publish the site using FTP from Visual Studio and connect to the SQL Server using the Enterprise Manager or Visual Studio.

Welcome to my new space and domain at www.wictorwilen.se. This new place will host my blog (previously at http://dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/wicwil/).During the next few days all old posts and comments will be moved to this location. Having my own place will make it more easy for me to create what I want and to present and blog about more stuff. This site will be an experimental playground for me and I will blog about some of the interesting stuff that I stumble upon.

So, after some installation trouble the Microsoft Expression Web Designer was installed, read more about it in the EWD Discussion group.The Expression Web Designer is for me a new and improved FrontPage more focused on the layout. I made some initial pages/sites and I feel that it works pretty smoothly to work with. The target group for this product is purely front-end/html programmers.The EWD will complement the Visual Studio development but the lack of source control integration is not just irritating - it’s a “application breaker”.

Just came back from the training center with a passed 74-132 (Designing a Portal Solution with Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies (including Microsoft Content Management Server) certificate. It was quite easy to take even though I never worked with Content Management Server or Commerce Server. Most of the questions was about MCMS and Commerce Server, more than I expected.