Tonight I was changing some settings on my personal blog when I was prompted to type in a CAPTCHA word to verify I’m not a spamming bot.

Normally the words are meaningless words such as “BRASSI” or “LILLI”. This time the word was a bit more recognizable:

The word was actually “Licksak” if you can believe it. I can picture the person who built the CAPTCHA functionality for Blogger throwing in a few words like this to amuse himself/herself. Vulgar enough to be funny, but not too vulgar that it won’t get past QA.

I know what you’re thinking, CAPTCHA words are computer generated. But I still prefer to picture a computer geek, alone in a dark, closed room deviously thinking of vulgar terms to sneak in.

Thanks to everyone who made it out to our Advanced InfoPath Development session yesterday at the Toronto SharePoint Camp. We had quite a good turnout; so I’m glad to see there are lots of other people out there using browser-based InfoPath forms using Forms Services on SharePoint.

InfoPath makes it easy to quickly develop forms, but it doesn’t come without its limitations. It’s very heavy on JavaScript, thus performance isn’t great when you have a lot of fields and rules. It doesn’t support multilingual, and it’s not very good at field validation. In this session we showed the audience how to get around these limitations by writing some simple C# code.

I’ve posted the PowerPoint slides as well as the source code for the InfoPath form, the Web Service, the Web Part, and the NAnt XML build definition.

If you’re interested in learning more about NAnt, send me an e-mail because I’m thinking about organizing a NAnt lunch and learn session at the imason office open to all Developers. We’re located in downtown Toronto on Adelaide Street near Peter St.

Download the source code (SharePointCamp.zip), and PowerPoint slides (SharePointCamp-2009.pptx) here.

On Saturday, January 24th, four of us from imason will be presenting at the 2009 Toronto SharePoint Camp at the Manulife Corporate Headquarters @ 200 Bloor St. East. If you’d like to come out to see our sessions, register here. There will be lots of free giveaways and prizes. Here are some details about our sessions:

Upgrading your SharePoint platform from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007

Bob Brown

Time:   9:00 AM to 10:15 AM  Room: Holmes B

With SharePoint 2007 taking on widespread adoption, many enterprises are starting to take advantage of the new and improved features of the new platform; but what about administrators and developers that are still supporting a growing business critical SharePoint 2003 environment and have been assigned the daunting task of upgrading? There seems to be an endless list of things to take into account before taking the plunge and upgrading.

In this session, I will walk through how to assess your system to make an educated migration path decision, draw up the high level upgrade steps, and then dig in on some specific snags you'll likely encounter (including custom web parts, FrontPage and unghosted pages, broken permissions, site themes, and legacy templates)

Advanced InfoPath development with SharePoint

Jim Schwartz & Boyan Tsolov

Time:   2:30 PM to 3:45 PM  Room: International B&C

InfoPath 2007 has many limitations and doesn’t scale very well with complex forms. Using a custom solution built on SharePoint, we’ve extended InfoPath to support very complicated form functionality. In this session, we will describe to you how we overcame several InfoPath limitations, including multilingual support, pre-populating form data, field validation, and support a flow between several forms.

Effective Deployment of SharePoint Publishing Sites

Ivan Neganov

Time:   4:00 PM to 5:15 PM  Room: Holmes B

SharePoint implementation presents many challenges to development teams with deployment often viewed as an area of the primary complexity and importance.

Over time we have accumulated a rich set of utilities which allow deploying SharePoint sites in a fully unattended fashion or close to it, by using custom logic interacting with SharePoint API.

Efficiency of deployment has a dramatic impact on practical aspects of agile and team development using SharePoint, which makes us invest in building comprehensive tools for SharePoint deployment.

Having 2 separate blogs sometimes makes it difficult to decide which blog to post to; especially when writing on a topic that applies to both.

I decided to post today’s article to The Urban Country, but I still wanted to capture it here because it’s about Technology. Here’s an excerpt:

“I'm confident that humans are intelligent enough not to succumb to the form of extreme laziness illustrated in Wall-E, but the movie should indeed be a wake-up call for what could happen if we embrace technology for all of the wrong reasons.”

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