Hanging at TechEd This Week

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Hi All,

It's been a while since I posted. Well there are two really good reasons for that

1) I've was working on two really big development projects

2) I left the Project team a few months back.

On the leaving, I'm still doing some part time work for the Project team through the end of June till a replacement is in place. One of the things I agreed to do before I took my new job was speak at TechEd. I'm here all week in Orlando working the booth, and I speak Friday morning on developing in Portfolio Server and Project Server. If you are in sunny Orlando for TechEd this week look me up in the Project booth. Also I'll be posting all my samples that I'm using Friday in some posts later in the week.

On the big projects, the first one is the EPMSync tool. If you have the EPM virtual machine you may have seen this mysterious tool. In a nut shell it does an item level sync from Portfolio Server to Project Server. Final release of the tool should be in the next month if we post it to codeplex (https://www.codeplex.com/) or a bit longer if it gets published as an MSDN solution starter. In any case there is some pretty detailed code in there for handling Project updates, specifically around custom fields and lookup tables. Sorry to you VB.Net guys, it's all written in C#.

My second big project is an installation tool for our demo database for Project Server 2007. This became a really big project because restoring a demo installation is a big job. Everything from restoring databases, creating shared service providers, relinking SharePoint sites to Project Server, etc... you get the picture. Doing this by hand takes patience and understanding. Doing this programmatically is a herculean challenge. I stalled for a month because the code for restoring WSS sites quit working. To make a month long story short I found out that some calls to STADM get a new signature when you install MOSS. Again this will either go with the SDK, TechNet, or Code Plex. There hasn't been a decision if the source code will be published. But if it is the code is published, its C# with lots of good tips built in.

It's almost midnight here, and I'm still on Pacific time (i.e. not really tired). But off I go to try to sleep. Watch for the TechEd sample in later posts.