I’ve ported my blog over to .Net Blog engine.  I don’t have any substantiated reason to do this except that I was interested in starting over.  I looked at a couple of different engines and decided that the .Net Blog Engine would be easy to customize and use.  Enjoy

New year's resolutions sounds a little like a cliche.  For that reason, I'm calling my post Personal and Professional Goals for 2009.  Each year, I like to take some time and identify what I'm doing well and what I'd like to do better.  After identifying things I'd like to do better, I quantify the desire with an end result.  Similar to project management, if there's no end result, you're never done.  While I like the idea of continuous improvement regardless, it's difficult to remain focused when trying to improve on several things.  Without goals, naturally, the less fun or less interesting items end up not improving as much as the entertaining and easy things in your life.  I've broken my goals into two general areas: Professional and Personal. 

Professional

1. Earn 3 Medals on the MSDN Forums
   • This goal came from a few different places.  First, I enjoy helping people but I usually get sucked into helping people that are geographically and professionally close to me.  With the MSDN Forums, I have an opportunity to expand my reach.  According to the Forum Help Page, that means I need 2001 points.  At the time of this post, I have 154 points.  I'm making this goal public because this is one that will likely suffer if project requirements get busy.  By making a goal public, I feel a sense of responsibility to achieve it.
2. Obtain a SharePoint Certification
   • I'm currently setting my sights on the 70-541 exam.  I've purchased the Inside WSS 3.0 book and hope this is something I obtain early in 2009
3. Speak at 3 community events
   • I haven't chosen the events yet but most likely, the topic will be SharePoint and things you can do in SharePoint. 
4. Read 6 technical books
   • I cheat a little here because my company (HMB) has a technical book club and we'll probably read 3-6 books in the next year as a group. 

Personal

1. Lose 40 Pounds
   • That's right, 40!  I've fluctuated between 185 and 225 for about 9 years now.  Well I'm up and the top of my range right now and I figure it's "Go Big or Go Home" time.  I've had a few health issues circulate in my family recently and at my age, I may actually have a chance to learn from older people in time to prevent some poor health later in life.  Eating right and exercising is a good start to that.  But my cardinal rule for goals is that there has to be a quantifiable way to measure the end result.  "Eating right" doesn't have an end result; but losing a specific amount of weight on the other hand surely does.  The other side of this goal is that I don't ever want to weigh more than 200 pounds again so I'm intending this goal to be a stabilizer for my life habits. 
2. Organize a Cruise for my Friends
   • Don't get your hopes up, I'm not paying for anyone but myself and my wife.  That being said, I figure it will be really fun to get a group of 20+ people to go on a cruise together.  With groups that large, people can mix and mingle with each other and you'll probably not get stuck hanging out with people you don't enjoy hanging out with.  I'm currently aiming for a 7-night, mid-November, Western Caribbean Cruise.  The expected cost is going to be less than $2000/couple including airfare. If you're interested in being part of this cruise, comment here or email me and I'll get you on the planning list. 
3. Read 6 non-technical books
   • In effort of life/work balance, I want to make an effort to read 6 personal books.  I enjoy reading when I'm reading but if I'm not reading, I seldom think about picking up a book.
4. Learn Spanish
   • I took 3 years of Spanish in high school.  With this I understand some of the basics.  I plan on buying some software and learning Spanish in 2009.  My sister-in-law is a native speaker and I hope to do some practicing with her.

I'll update my status throughout the year for the professional goals.  So Stay tuned!

Jeremy Thake was interviewed about SharePoint Team Development Best Practices.  In several interviews/blog posts, people have spread opinions about setting up a development environment but he addresses the need of a SharePoint development team.

Some of the topics that Jeremy addresses are:

• Creating a team development environment for SharePoint
• Developing SharePoint solutions using Team Foundation Server (TFS)
• Creating a build server for SharePoint projects
• Source control best practices for SharePoint developers
• SharePoint naming standards
• STSDev
• SPDeploy
• Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS)
• How to keep up with the SharePoint Firehose
• Why SharePoint is awesome

You can listen to the podcast here.

If you are creating a list with code, you'd do it like this:

   1: SPWeb web = properties.Feature.Parent as SPWeb;

   2: if (web != null)

   3: {

   4:     //create List

   5:     SPListTemplate template = null;

   6:     try

   7:     {

   8:         template = web.ListTemplates["Custom List"];

   9:     }

  10:     catch

  11:     {

  12:         throw new Exception("In ListTemplate 'Custom List' Retrieval", ex);

  13:     }

  14:     if (template != null)

  15:     {

  16:         Guid id = web.Lists.Add("My List Name", "My List Description", template);

  17:         web.Update();

  18:     }

  19:     else

  20:     {

  21:         throw new Exception(message);

  22:     }

  23: }

To determine what your list template name would be here are your choices:

• Document Library
• Form Library
• Wiki Page Library
• Picture Library
• Links;Announcements
• Contacts
• Calendar
• Discussion Board
• Tasks
• Project Tasks
• Issue Tracking
• Custom List
• Custom List in Datasheet View
• Survey
• No Code Workflows
• DataSources
• Custom Workflow Process
• Workflow History;

Recently Jeff Blankenburg blogged about his quick launch and what it contained.  Since he asked people to share their quick launch setups, here's mine:

Here's a list with names:

The way I construct my quick launch is that if I've use it more than once in a day, then I usually will copy it to my quick launch.  I also try to group my links together by functionality so that they are easy to find. 

Additionally, I create other tool bars for each of the projects that I am working on at a time:

So what does your list look like?