COMMUNITY

Where is Don?

Where is Don?

I am still around! As with so many people, life happens and keeping my blog up to date dropped below the active line. Rest assured, I have not been inactive during my “absence,” just not updating my blog as much as I would like. I know I have a couple of historical articles that people still come up to me at conferences and tell me they use them all the time, which makes me proud, but also guilty that I have not been keeping those updated. As we all know, an article that covered ground-breaking changes 3 years ago is now out of date and potentially misleading. So, I will be working on updating those articles over the next few months.

Using Teams Toolkit in WSL (updated)

Using Teams Toolkit in WSL (updated)

I recently started a training course with the amazing Andrew Connell through his company Voitanos. The subject for this course is Microsoft Teams Development. This is an area I have wanted expand my professional expertise in for a while, so I am very excited about the course. We are using the Teams Toolkit to develop all of the project types available in MS Teams. Our first project is an app to be surfaced as a personal tab and since we want to build a modern UI, we are using the Tab option for “React with Fluent UI.”

Using Multiple Desktops for Presentations

Using Multiple Desktops for Presentations

Have you ever sat through a presentation, watching the presenter struggle to find the next browser tab, code window, slide deck, etc., to continue the show? Or watch that awkward transition from slides to demos and back? Or the presenter uses Alt-Tab, but has dozens of apps open and struggles to find the right one? I know you have and it might have been one of my sessions! I learned a while back about a technique to make your presentations just flow from one section to the next. If you are using Windows, multiple desktops make these transitions fast and seamless.

Microsoft 365 Conference 2023

Microsoft 365 Conference 2023

updated from 2022-01-22

I am thrilled to announce I was selected to speak at this year’s Microsoft 365 Conference in Las Vegas on April 30th-May 5. This is always one of the premier conferences, with a large supporting cast from Microsoft and the MVP community. I am really looking forward to connecting with attendees and learning how they are using Microsoft technology to make the world better.

As I came to update this post with my latest banner (that includes a code for $100 off at registration,) I decided to have some fun and see what BingGPT had to say about the event and my participation. Here are the results, straight from BingGPT!

European Collaboration Summit 2023

European Collaboration Summit 2023

Wow! After several attempts, I was finally selected to speak at this year’s European Collaboration Summit (ECS) in Düsseldorf, Germany! This is considered by many to be the premier conference on Microsoft 365 and relate technologies and I have wanted to attend or speak for several years. (Full disclosure, I was selected to co-present in 2021, but Covid-19 caused the conference to be cancelled.)

At ECS, I will be presenting a session titled “Simplify SharePoint Development with Containers”. In this session, we will explore how containers can be used to reduce some of the pain points associated with needing multiple development environment available on a single device. We will look at both Docker Desktop and Github Codepsaces and how to automate environment setup right from your project solution.