COMMUNITY

As someone who’s been blogging about technical topics for years, I’ve always struggled with consistency. Some articles feel more conversational, others too formal. Some include helpful context and anecdotes, others jump straight into code. The voice varies depending on when I wrote it, how much coffee I’d had, and what mood I was in that day.

What if I could capture my writing style—the good parts—and have AI help me maintain that consistency across everything I write?

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 As we all know, an article that covered ground-breaking changes 3 years ago is now out of date and potentially misleading.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.

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.”

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.

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!

I am so exited to announce that I will be traveling to Slovenia this May as a speaker at the Thrive Conference! I will be presenting a session on “Custom List Formatting.”

Thrive is not as well known as some of the bigger conferences in Europe, but it has an amazing reputation for being a smaller conference where interactions with the speakers and sponsors are much easier to arrange. There is even rumors that some sessions are held under the trees in beautiful Lipica, Slovenia.