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Out of the darkness

If anyone has noticed that the blog activity has decreased, they’re right… It’s not because I’m abandoning the concept, It’s really just a concurrence of a few things …

1) I stopped doing the TechRepublic Stategies that Scale newsletter.  That was four postings a month (one a week.)  I really enjoyed writing the content for the newsletter but it wasn’t aligned to the things I was doing on a day-to-day basis so I had to let it go.

2) I’m transitioning between series at Developer.com.  Whenever I transition between series it disrupts the writing schedule.  We should be back on track this month but it means that I didn’t have the two posts per month I normally have announcing those articles.

3) I’ve been busy trying to figure out the eCommerce portion of the software development factory that I’m doing.  You’ve seen some announcements for betas…  I’ve got one issue to take care of in one of the products but otherwise the feedback has been good.  The net effect of which is I need to figure out how to start selling them.  I’ve taken a few wrong turns (www.windowsmarketplacelabs.com) and the delay has caused me to decide that I want to build the new site on ASP.NET 2.0 which has turned out to be a giant gravity well which my time is falling into.

4) .NET 2.0 is really cool.  I’ve been playing with generics and how they can take typical problems and make them easier.  The obvious answer is collections.  However, I’m also very interested in taking the factory pattern and making it strongly typed and generic…  Unfortunately, I’ve decided that I’m starting from scratch so that means new database access code, new configuration management code, new collections code, and the new factory code … That’s meaning that it’s consuming a lot of time.

5) I can’t stop developing products.  It’s sort of like an addiction.  I see more needs than I can fill … I wrote a tool to manage web parts on any web part page in SharePoint (here’s a hint, almost everything is a web part page — including list pages).  It will allow you to add, delete, extract, and enumerate web parts.  (It’s done if anyone wants to play with it.)  I’m finishing a Url Administrator that allows you to change SharePoint List Fields which are of type URL.  The idea is that users sometimes use URLs in the portal that you wish they hadn’t — or you need to change.  This tool will go through the entire portal and organize all of the links for you.  It’s about 50% done.  I also have a tool which will go through and trim the versions in document libraries — more than a few clients have accidentally turned on versions in their document libraries and now aren’t sure how to get the versions trimmed.  That’s about 40% done…

6) I’ve been sleeping.  I try not to but occaisionally I’ve just got to.  My favorite catch phrase is “Sleep is optional.”  I’m being reeducated that it isn’t.

By the way, I’m looking for a mentee, protégé, coachee, who would be willing to work for a little bit of money and some good experience.  I need some help clearing some of my development tasks since I just can’t seem to get them all done.  If you’re interested drop me a line.

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