Bits and Pieces #1

Mads Nissen from Oslo, Norway has a very cool .Text template, and interesting posts to boot!

 

Jonathan Hodgson pointed me to an article he has written on Generating Thumbnail Images from PDF Documents using VB.Net

 

Tommy wonders "I wonder why you have to restart IIS. Isn’t there a SharePoint “worker process” similar to (or even the same as) the ASP.NET worker process? " Anyone know the answer?

 

Thanks to Amanda Murphy for the link and suggestion! And wow, what a great blog! Subscribed and added directly to the daily reads folder :)

 

And how I could have missed Sam Gentile in my MVP congrats, I'll never know! Color me embarrassed ;-) Sam, can I buy you a latte in April?

 

Scott Hanselman has a funny story about his MVP award. I had a similar problem the other day, although it was with my hotmail account. I was waiting for the mail with the link to confirm to get access to a site. I checked, not there, checked again a while later, not there. Requested a resend. Checked a little while later. Another resend request, and I went straight to Hotmail. While I was waiting for it to arrive I thought "well, I'll just see what's in junk mail". Of course there were the three confirmation emails. Duh. Anyway, congrats to Scott, too, and all the other new MVPs.

 

Hey, the Technical Product Manager for MCMS and SPS is a blogger!

 

SharePoint MVP Jim Edelen's comments don't work, so even though he asked for feedback, he probably doesn't know that everyone wants him to keep blogging about SharePoint!

 

I missed the Seattle Blogger Meetup tonight. My friend Betsy says it was fun and she'll blog about it tomorrow. Want to play the shoe guessing game

 

Daniel Cazzulino hates the MSDN print feature. I'd never used it, so I checked it out today. It turns out that we just pass the request to IE (using IDM Print, I think), opening the Print dialog. And the right margin truncation problem in IE is well known. I was able to get the article he was referring to to print without the right margin truncated, but man, what a pain (you have to use File | Page Setup to set the left and right margin to 0 (or as close to 0 as it will let you), but that's not a good solution, because Page Setup isn't accessible from the Print dialog, which is where we send you.) Clearly the right answer would be to create a print template, but if we didn't do that, would it be a better experience to send you to Print Preview? The upside is that the Print Setup dialog is accessible from there, but then it's another step to print. Comments anyone? (Oh, and by the way, most other articles that I tried printing, didn't exhibit the truncation problem.)

 

Duncan said today that he was going to watch my blog to see what I said about him. So hmm, what to say. Damn, I can't think of anything witty OR mean to say. Sorry Duncan.

 

But speaking of Duncan, we had an email conversation recently about needing a tool to maintain FAQs for the Dev Centers. Here's what the C# one looks like today. It's maintained by the C# team, and I guess it's kind of a hassle. So, I was thinking... what about using an InfoPath form in a SharePoint Library on our Intranet for the entry, and then using Merge Forms to aggregate it? Once all the FAQ items were in the same XML file, we could ship it out to the site. Okay, so I'm doing some hand-waving here, but there is a sample in the SDK, so I wouldn't be starting totally from zero. And I'm sure Duncan would LOVE to help ;-)

 

Did you know that there's a way to suggest "How To" articles for the Microsoft Knowledge Base?

 

And last but not least, a big THANK YOU to RobertK who sent me a bunch of links and SharePoint bloggers, but didn't leave a website address. Lots of new entries from RobertK and others in the right nav.