1. Delete all items using the content type
2. Go to the site level recycle bin (typically accessible from the link toward the bottom of the left navigation bar) and delete items from there.
3. Go to site collection recycle bin (accessible from the Site Collection settings

When these steps were completed, I was able to delete the content types and site columns successfully.

My father came out from California to support me and be my “sherpa”, agreeing to hold my sweats and things for over four hours.  (Thanks dad!)  The alarm went off this morning at 4am with plans to leave by 5am.  I made a checklist and got everything organized the night before, so I was pretty ready to go this morning.  I made my customary pre-workout bagel with butter and jelly, and my Gatorade Pre drink.  We drove to my favorite secret parking garage, fully expecting for it to be filled up.  As luck would have it, my secret garage is still a secret.  Yay!  Now, all we needed to do was collect our things and catch the free bus to the start.  Problem was, there was no bus.  I don’t know what the web site was talking about when they said the busses started running at 5:15, but we didn’t see one bus.  So, we walked the mile up to Civic Center park.  Luckily, that was only one of two issues for the whole day.

The Runner’s Edge of the Rockies running club is the group I trained with all summer.  What a great bunch!  My pace group, 4:30, was full of support and positive vibes all year, and this race was no exception.  We met a small group of 4:30ers at our designated meeting area.  They were as excited as I was, and the majority of them were only running the half!  Kari, Glenn, Amy (otherwise known as Marathon Barbie), and Carrie were as excited for me as I was, offering tons of support which I really appreciated.  Thanks guys!

So, about 6:30, we made our way to the corrals.  This was a cluster, if I do say so myself.  I think they’re called “corrals” for a reason.  By the time I made my way to corral 8, the gun went off.  About 5 minutes later I crossed under the big starting arch and was off on my first 26.2!

So this is how my race went.  I had been advised to be conscience of starting too fast, so I looked at my Garmin frequently over the first couple miles.  I had decided to try and run a pace that would get me a 4:20 time, which was my first of many mistakes.  Looking back, I have no idea why I was thinking I could run that fast, since I was training for 4:30.  I thought, “what’s 10 minutes?”.  As it turns out, a lot.

Three miles into it I was right on pace with my 4:20 pace band and feeling great.  I hit the 17th street hill and powered up it like it was a downhill.  I was cruising mile after mile, feeling like I owned this race.  The race went through numerous parks in the Denver area, from City Park to Cheesman to Washington Park.  I got to Wash Park and the wheels fell off.  I had never experienced the runner’s “wall” before, but I know now what it feels like.  My ankles, knees, hips and calves started screaming at me.  My heart rate was decent, but by that time I knew my great start had come with a price.  I should have backed off a lot more at the beginning.  My cockiness of trying to run faster than I had trained had caught up with me and my body let me know it with a vengeance.

My pipe-dream goal of running a 4:20 marathon had turned into just finishing the race.  For the last 6 miles, I plodded along with a run/walk strategy that got me to the finish.  I will say though, that I had a little, well let’s say “motivational” conversation with myself for the last mile (I think it started with a “get your a$$ moving” statement), so I did run the last mile.  I crossed the finish line with a time of 4:51:36.  So, taking the positive out of it, I finished AND  broke 5 hours.  I’m happy with that.

Now, here I am at home, after taking a well needed ice bath and a few Tylonol.  My legs are still screaming and I’m assuming they will tomorrow as well.  All in all it was an incredible experience.  I’d like to say that this won’t be my only marathon experience, but it’s too soon to tell.  I’ll make that decision after the dogs stop barkin’.  I had so much fun with my training group this summer and would really like to run with them again.  I met some great friends, had some great times and ran more than I ever had dreamed.  Thanks to everyone for their support and comradery, and special thanks to my wife and kids for putting up with my Saturday morning long runs, my Monday evening boot camps and “brain” camps.  You only run your first marathon once, and I’ll never forget my first. 

Consequently, I’ve actually been training since June.  I joined a runner’s club called Runner’s Edge of the Rockies, which has turned out to be the best move I’ve made in achieving the goal.  The club has given me a training plan, motivation in the form of Saturday long runs which are supported with aid stations every two miles.  The people in the group are first rate.  I’m running in the 4:30 pace group, meaning they work toward the time of 4 hours, 30 minutes for the marathon.  David, the club’s leader and head coach, is a great guy and really knows what he’s doing.  I’ve learned a lot about training and the mental aspect of endurance sports.  Being a volleyball player since high school, I am used to mentally preparing for a game that goes in spurts, and doesn’t last more than about an hour.  I’ve had to come up with new ways to stay mentally strong over a period of 1 to 4 hours.  At the beginning, it was difficult to maintain, and I found myself just giving up and walking part of the way.  But as I got used to it, I found ways to focus.

I had my first race test last week.  I ran the Georgetown Half Marathon as kind of a test, to see where I am physically and mentally.  I decided I wanted to run a 2 hour, 15 minute half as a goal, thinking that if I double it, I’d meet my marathon goal.  Well, I later found out (after I met my goal in 2 hours, 14 minutes) that this logic is flawed.  I can’t say exactly why, but for some reason it doesn’t work that way.  I’m not disappointed though – I set a goal and made it.  The best part was, I finished the run and really felt like I could go further.  I was amazed.

Anyway, these next few weeks will be the crux of my training.  Tomorrow, I’ll be running 12 miles and next weekend I’ll be running (gulp) 18 miles, which will be the longest I’ve ever run at once.  I think it’ll be a good test as to how I’m coming along.  The next few weeks after that, I have 2 weeks where I run 20 miles.  Wow, just saying that makes me cringe.  I’ve also been focusing on eating better and plan to do some cross training between now and the big day.  So, wish me luck, and I’ll be reporting in on how things are going.

1. Create a project in Visual Studio 2008.  (I used a console app for this.)
2. Open the Visual Studio Command Line tool.  Change the directory to the directory the new project is held in.
3. There are two things that you need to do to create the assembly.  First, you must create a class that represents the service and the methods within the service.  Second, you must compile the class into the assembly (dll).  To create the class, first get the URL to the wsdl of the service.  Then, type the following into the command line tool:  wsdl {the url to the wsdl}.  Example – wsdl http://myservice.data.com/service?wsdl.  To create the assembly, type the following:  csc /t:library {name of the class}.cs (assuming you’re using C#).  Example – csc /t:library MyServiceClass.cs.
4. After the command line steps, you should have the assembly in the directory of your project.  Next, go back to Visual Studio and add a reference to the dll you just created.
5. Now, you may use the methods that are contained in the web service. 

Creating a proxy assembly is an easy way to reference a web service and use the methods within it. 

As I usually do, I researched various blog posts, sites and books to determine a good way to modify the navigation template for custom page transitions.  I found a couple sites that helped me tremendously in understanding what controls I would have to implement and modify.  This blog posting was probably the most helpful.  It gives instruction on how to replace the Content Presenter Control in the navigation frame with a Transitioning Content Control, new in Silverlight 3.  This new control allows you to use 4 built in transition effects if one of them meets your needs, but you also can modify the template to create your own, which is what I did.  Jesse Liberty has a great video about the Transitioning Content Control available in the Learn section of the Silverlight.net web site.

So, in the end, we decided to create a site with 5 different “pages” for the user to navigate through.  The transition we thought would give enough impact would be a rotating transition, where the page seems like it’s rotating around an axis giving it a 3D type look.  The current page would rotate half way, then it would be replaced by the new page and then rotate back.  Obviously, this transition is not one of the 4 built in for the control, so I’d have to modify the template to create the effect.  The tools I used to do this were Visual Studio 2008, Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow (trial version), Silverlight 3 tools and the Silverlight 3 Toolkit, all available here.

The following steps will describe the technique used to create this custom page transition.

1)  Open Visual Studio 2008 and create a new Silverlight Navigation Application project.  When asked to create a web project, click OK.

2)  The site should open to the MainPage.xaml page.  If not, open the MainPage.xaml file and find the tag <navigation:Frame….  This is the control we are going to modify to implement the custom transition.

   1: <Border x:Name="ContentBorder" Style="{StaticResource ContentBorderStyle}">

   2:  

   3:     <navigation:Frame x:Name="ContentFrame" Style="{StaticResource ContentFrameStyle}" 

   4:                       Source="/Home" Navigated="ContentFrame_Navigated" NavigationFailed="ContentFrame_NavigationFailed">

   5:         <navigation:Frame.UriMapper>

   6:           <uriMapper:UriMapper>

   7:             <uriMapper:UriMapping Uri="" MappedUri="/Views/Home.xaml"/>

   8:             <uriMapper:UriMapping Uri="/{pageName}" MappedUri="/Views/{pageName}.xaml"/>

   9:           </uriMapper:UriMapper>

  10:         </navigation:Frame.UriMapper>

  11:     </navigation:Frame>

  12: </Border>

3)  In the Solution Explorer, right click on MainPage.xaml and select “Open in Expression Blend…”.  If not already viewable, click on the Objects and Timeline tab to view the controls on the MainPage.xaml page, as shown below.

3)  You’ll notice that the page contains many controls.  The one we’re concerned about is the ContentFrame control.  Under [UserControl] –> ContentBorder there’s a frame control called ContentFrame.  Right click on this control, hover over Edit Template and select Edit a Copy…

4)  A box called Create ControlTemplate Resource will appear.  In the Name(Key) box, type CustomTransitioningNavFrame.  In the section labeled Define In, select the radio button next to Resource Dictionary.  To the right of the drop down box, click the New button.

5)  Clicking the New button should bring up another box named New Item.  In the Name box, replace the contents with CustomControls.xaml and click OK.  What we’re doing is creating the file that will hold the styles and animation storyboards for a new control based upon the existing control.  This file can also be used in the future to hold any styles and storyboards for additional controls that are customized within the site.  You do have the option of storing this code in the existing page as well.  I decided to do it this way because I believe it’s cleaner and gives you the opportunity to used the code in additional pages throughout the site.

You’ll now notice that the Resource dictionary drop down says CustomControls.xaml.  If not, pull down the drop down and select it.  If it’s not there, repeat step four to create the file.  When finished, click OK.

6)  When you click OK, you’ll be taken back to the Expression UI and will notice there is a black rectangle with “Frame” in the upper left corner (or somewhere within the rectangle).  In the Objects and Timelines tab, you should see ControlTemplate –> [Border] –> [ContentPresenter].  The Border and the ContentPresenter make up the structure of the navigation frame.  What we want to do now to implement a page transition is to replace the ContentPresenter control with a TransitioningContentPresenter control.  This control is available in the System.Windows.Controls.Layout.Toolkit.dll assembly.

Right click on the [ContentPresenter] control in the Objects and Timelines tab and click Delete.  Click once on the [Border] control to highlight it.  In the rectangle, you should see an arrow pointing down and to the right.  Click and drag this arrow all the way out to the border of the rectangle.

7)  Click the [Border] control once to highlight it.  To the left of the Expression Blend window, you should see the toolbox with the various controls available.  On the bottom of the tool box, you should see a button with two arrow-like shapes pointing to the right.  If you hover over this button, it should say Assets.  Click on the Assets button.  You’ll now see a menu-type list on the left side of the box that opens, as well as control names on the right.  At the bottom of the list on the left, you’ll see an option called Locations, with an arrow to the left of it.  Click this arrow.  You’ll then see (eventually – it may take a while to load them) a list of DLL names.  This list of assemblies will load and eventually you should see an assembly named System.Windows.Controls.Layout.Toolkit.dll.  Once you click on this assembly, a group of controls will appear to the right.  One of them should be the Transitioning Content Presenter control.  Double click this control – you should then see the control’s icon appear under the Assets button.  Double click on the icon to insert the control under the Border control in its default size, which should stretch the control to the dimensions of the border.

8)  So, at this point we’ve replaced the ContentPresenter control with the TransitioningContentPresenter control.  If you didn’t want to create a custom transition and wanted to use one of the built in transitions of the control, you could stop here.  All you’d have to do is modify the xaml of the control and set the Transition attribute of the control to one of the four existing transitions (which are DefaultTransition, Normal, UpTransition and DownTransition) and set the Content attribute to {TemplateBinding Content}.  But, we wanted another type of transition, so now we must edit the template of the TransitioningContentPresenter to create a new transition and set some values so that it works the way we want.

Right click the [TransitioningContentControl] and select Edit Template –> Edit a copy….  In the Create Style Resource box that opens, under Name(Key), type CustomTransitioningContentCtrl.  Under the Define In section, select the radio button next to Resource dictionary and in the drop down box, select CustomControls.  This will ensure that the styles and storyboards we’re going to create will be kept in this file.  Click OK.

9)  You’ll now notice that under the Objects and Timelines tab under the Template heading, you have [Border] –> [Grid] –> PreviousContentPresentationSite and CurrentContentPresentationSite.  The Previous and Current controls are Content Presenter controls that make up the Transitioning Content Presentation control.  These controls represent the content (or “page”, in this case) that was being displayed previous to the transition being implemented and the content that will be displayed after the transition is complete.  These two content presenters are the key players in the Transitioning Content Control and will be what the animations and storyboards will be manipulating during the transitions.

We have to make a couple changes to these two content presenters to get them to act the way we want them to.  These changes need to be done the same way to both content presenters.  First, we have to resize the Grid and center both presenters in the Grid.  Second, we have to set the center points of each presenter so that the will rotate around the middle of themselves when we implement the transition.

For the first change, click on the Grid control under Objects and Timelines.  In the design window, drag the lower right corner of the grid to lower right corner of the black rectangle.  Doing this will statically set the dimensions of the grid.  Now, under Objects and Timelines, click on the PreviousContentPresentationSite control.  On the right side of Expression Blend, you should see the Properties tab.  If Layouts is not expanded, go ahead and expand it.  At this point, you’ll notice that there is an orange border around the Horizontal Alignment and Vertical Alignment options.  These borders indicate that these settings are fixed in the control, but we can manipulate them by changing it to a local value.  To do this, click within the Horizontal Alignment border.  A menu will pop up and you should see the option Convert to Local Value.  Click that option and the orange border will disappear.  Do the same for the Vertical Alignment option.  Go ahead and click the Center option in both the Vertical and Horizontal sections (should be the second one from the left).  The content will now appear in the center of the grid for both the Previous and Current content presenters.

10)  The next step is to set the center point of each Content Presenter.  To do this, select the PreviousContentPresentationSite content presenter by clicking it once in the Objects and Timelines tab.  Go to the Properties tab to the right of the designer and expand the Transform section.  Within the Transform section, you’ll see Render Transform and Projection areas.  Under Projection, there are 4 tabs.  The second tab should be Center of Rotation.  Click on this tab and you’ll see boxes with X, Y and Z next to them, which are probably filled with 0s.  Change the 0s to 0.5 for all three boxes.  Doing this will set the center of rotation directly in the middle of the content presenter control you’re working with.  Repeat these steps for the CurrentContentPresentationSite content presenter.

11)  We still have to make sure that our content presenters show the content of the pages we want to display.  To do this, select the PreviousContentPresentationSite content presenter by clicking it once in the Objects and Timelines tab.  Again in the Properties section, find the Common Properties area.  Within this area, there’s a Content box which has a small white square to the right of it.  Click on this square and you’ll see a menu come up called Content with an option for Template Binding.  Hover over this option and another menu will come up.  Find the Content option and click it.  This tells the control to look to the Content template for the content of the control.  Do the same thing with the CurrentContentPresentationSite content presenter.

We also have to set the navigation frame control that contains the Transitioning Content Control to get its content from the same template binding setting.  To do this, close the CustomControls.xaml file and return to the MainPage.xaml file.  Right click again on the ContentFrame control under the ContentBorder control and hover over Edit Template… and select Edit Current.  You’ll again see the [TransitioningContentControl] under the [Border] control (look familiar?).  Follow the steps above to change the content to read from the TemplateBinding content setting for this control.  When finished, right click on the [TransitioningContentControl] control, hover over Edit Template… and select Edit Current to go back to the contents of the Transitioning Content Control.

12)  We have now prepared our Transitioning Content Control and its parts for the animation we want.  The next thing to do is to create the visual state for the effect we want.  Showing exactly how to do this in Blend using the Timeline would take a lot of time, so I think it’s better just to give you the code to implement it.  If you open the CustomControls.xaml file in xaml view, you’ll see the Visual States that are built into the Transitioning Content Control – DefaultTransition, Normal, UpTransition and DownTransition.   Find the closing tag of the DownTransition visual state (</VisualState>).  Position your cursor at the end of this tag and press enter on the keyboard.  Copy and paste in the following code:

<VisualState x:Name="Flipper">

    <Storyboard>

        <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00" Storyboard.TargetName="CurrentContentPresentationSite" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.Opacity)">

            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00" Value="0"/>

            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00.9000000" Value="0"/>

            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:01" Value="1"/>

        </DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>

        <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00" Storyboard.TargetName="PreviousContentPresentationSite" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.Projection).(PlaneProjection.RotationY)">

            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00" Value="0"/>

            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:01" Value="90"/>

        </DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>

        <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00" Storyboard.TargetName="CurrentContentPresentationSite" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.Projection).(PlaneProjection.RotationY)">

            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:01" Value="-90"/>

            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:02" Value="0"/>

        </DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>

    </Storyboard>

</VisualState>

Now, find the Control Template tag that defines the navigation frame.  Within this tag, you should see the TransitioningContentControl tag defining the control.  Add an attribute to the tag after the Style attribute for the Transition type and give it a value of “Flipper”.  It should look like this:

<!-- Resource dictionary entries should be defined here. -->

<ControlTemplate x:Key="NavFrame" TargetType="navigation:Frame">

    <Border Background="{TemplateBinding Background}"

        BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}"

        BorderThickness="{TemplateBinding BorderThickness}"

        HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}"

        VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}" d:DesignWidth="639" d:DesignHeight="432">

        <layoutToolkit:TransitioningContentControl 

            Content="{TemplateBinding Content}" 

            Style="{StaticResource TCCCustom}"

            Transition="Flipper"/>

    </Border>

</ControlTemplate>

Save and close the file.  Switch back to Visual Studio and accept the changes if it asks.  Go ahead and press F5 to run the application.  You should see the content of the pages flip one way then flip back with the content of the new page.

This is the technique I used to create a customized page transition for use within the Navigation Project template for Silverlight 3.  There are many other types of transitions you can implement and play around with, so I hope this has given you a look into what’s possible for this type of animation.  In my next post, I’ll go over how I created an animation for displaying a life cycle type graphic using Expression Design and Expression Blend.  Hope you found this useful!  Thanks for reading!

After some research, I found a couple articles here and here that outline an issue that is solved by installing .NET 3.5 SP1.  From my understanding, from .NET 1.1 through 3.5, if you put a URL value in the Action attribute of the ASP.NET form, the code was ignored by the framework and posted back to itself.  Unlike the days of classic ASP where you could define the POST event, .NET adopted the model of single post back.  This means that regardless of the URL you specify in the Action attribute of the form tag, the page will always post back to itself, rendering the Action attribute useless and dead.  You’d have to use the Response.Redirect method or the Server.Transfer method (under certain circumstances) to get to another page.  Unfortunately, this didn’t actually post the data in the form – it just redirected the user to the new page, without logging the user in.  (Server.Transfer would probably work if you were posting to a site on the same server, but in this case we were not.)

<form id="form1" runat="server" action="http://www.myurl.com"></form>

With the release and implementation of SP1 for .NET 3.5, this issue has been addressed.  You can now enter a URL to post to in the Action attribute and then use the submit() from within a RegisterStartupScript call to submit the form data to the target URL.

ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(this.Page, this.Page.GetType(), "myScript", "document.forms.form1.submit();", true);

So, if you ever have to post data to another web site for anything, this is an easy method.  Just make sure the server the code is running on has .NET 3.5 SP1 installed and you shouldn’t have the problem we did.

After the player was created, I started thinking about the situation that would arise when the user didn’t have Silverlight installed on their machine.  We all know the standard image and link that is displayed when this is the case.  Tim Heuer has a great video on how to customize the installation experience for pure Silverlight applications, but I wondered how that would apply to a SharePoint Web Part.  After scouring the internet and a couple of emails to Tim regarding this caveat, I figured it out.  Of course, like most things that take me a while to figure out, it’s actually quite simple. ":)

What the web part was doing was declaring an ASP.NET Silverlight control and setting the properties to it in the Web Part’s CreateChildControls overridden method.  The basic, necessary attributes of the control were then set (ID, Version and Source in this case) , excluding the PluginNotInstalledTemplate property.  Without setting the content of this property, the default image/link appears for the client by default.  Example is below:

   1: // instantiation of the silverlight control

   2: System.Web.UI.SilverlightControls.Silverlight silverlightControl = new System.Web.UI.SilverlightControls.Silverlight();

   3: silverlightControl.ID = "MediaViewerBeta2";

   4: silverlightControl.MinimumVersion = "2.0.30523";

   5: silverlightControl.Source = "/ClientBin/XAP/SLSP_MediaViewer.xap";

   6:  

   7: // Define the width and height based on the webpart height

   8: Unit height = new Unit(425);

   9: Unit width = new Unit(600);

  10: if (!this.Height.IsEmpty)

  11:     height = this.Height;

  12: silverlightControl.Width = width;

  13: silverlightControl.Height = height;

To set this property, I overrode the Silverlight control class and declared a new class called PluginTemplate that inherits from the iTemplate interface.  The PluginNotInstalledTemplate property type is of iTemplate.  Within the new PluginTemplate class, I created the InstantiateIn method to set the custom installation verbiage within an asp.net label control via a StringBuilder.  Obviously, this can be done in different ways depending on the experience you want the user to have.  I just chose this for simplicity sake – it may require some jazzing up later.  The two new classes are below:

   1: /// <summary>

   2: /// Custom control class representing the SilverlightControl - will be used to provide a custom installation experience for the client if

   3: /// Silverlight is not installed.

   4: /// </summary>

   5:     public class SilverlightBase : System.Web.UI.SilverlightControls.Silverlight

   6:     {

   7:         public SilverlightBase() 

   8:         {

   9:             base.PluginNotInstalledTemplate = new PlugInTemplate(); 

  10:         }

  11:     }

  12:  

  13:     /// <summary>

  14:     /// ITemplate class to add to the custom Silverlight control

  15:     /// </summary>

  16:     public class PlugInTemplate: ITemplate

  17:     {

  18:         #region ITemplate Members

  19:  

  20:         public void InstantiateIn(Control container) 

  21:         {

  22:             StringBuilder str = new StringBuilder();

  23:             str.Append("<h2>Get Microsoft Silverlight 2</h2>");

  24:             str.Append("<p>This application requires Microsoft Silverlight 2 to " + 

  25:             "provide a rich integrated media experience. Silverlight is a small, " + 

  26:             "safe, cross-platform browser plugin created and supported by Microsoft.</p>");

  27:  

  28:             str.Append("<p><div style='position:absolute;'>" + 

  29:             "<a href='http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=124807' " + 

  30:             "style='text-decoration: none;'><img src='http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108181' " + 

  31:             "alt='Get Microsoft Silverlight' style='border-style: none'/></div></p>");

  32:  

  33:             System.Web.UI.WebControls.Label txt = new System.Web.UI.WebControls.Label();

  34:             txt.ID = "lblMess";

  35:             txt.Text = str.ToString();

  36:             

  37:             container.Controls.Add(txt);

  38:         }

  39:  

  40:         #endregion

  41:     }

  42: }

With the new Silverlight control class built with the new instance of the PluginNotinstalledTemplate, I changed the declared instance of the Silverlight control in the Web Part from the System control to the custom control.  Now the installation experience for the client is customized according to the content of the PluginTemplate class.  The resulting display is below:

Not a totally exciting result, but it is better than just the image, no?  Hope this helps someone!

-G

Thinking about it some more (probably way too much, actually), I started trying to define what and “expert” really is.  My view of an expert has always been someone who knows all there is to know about a subject.  My definition has always just stopped at that point, but lately, I’ve been thinking about it in more philosophical terms.  Taking that definition, one could come to the conclusion that an “expert” couldn’t learn anymore about a subject.  If that were true, is there anyone on this planet that is naive enough to think they can’t learn anymore about something?  Unfortunately, the answer is yes.

Now I realize that people claim to be experts on a variety of things.  The field of Information Technology is filled with people that consider themselves experts on all kinds of subjects.  Some are considered by many others to be experts in their particular field, and rightfully so.  There are people out there with tremendous knowledge, skill and experience.  I attended a DevConnections conference last year and met a lot of these people – most of them were presenters, but some were attendees.  The one thing I notice about all of them was that they were all students of their trade – extremely bright, curious, determined and exited people that loved what they do.  Talking to them, I never got the sense that they knew everything about their particular subject.  What I did get was an eagerness to learn more about it.

According to the definition of “expert” stated earlier, I know I’ll never become one.  No one will.  Yes, there will be some people that will think they know everything about something, but that just proves that they are NOT experts.  My new view of what the term “expert” means is modeled after the type of people I met at the conference.  They may know a lot about their subject – they may even have created it.  But they will always be the first to admit that they don’t know everything about it.  It’s these kind of people that I look up to, because they will always be the ones that strive to know more.  And, with that attitude, they always will.

1. SharePoint Workflow Development in VS – This is the first of a series of walkthroughs written by Eilene Hao for creating workflows with Visual Studio.

   http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/11/18/developing-workflows-in-vs-part-1-workflow-objects-and-a-crash-course-on-mechanics.aspx

2. Introduction to Workflows – One good basic introduction into Workflows in an Office environment

   http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101544241033.aspx

3. Information on Translation Workflows

   http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101544301033.aspx

4. Writing Workflows in VS 2005

   http://blah.winsmarts.com/2007-8-Writing_SharePoint_Workflows_in_VS2005_-_Crawl_Walk_Run.aspx

5. How to Debug your Windows SharePoint Services Workflow

   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms455354.aspx

6. SharePoint Advanced Asynchronous Workflow Messaging – Video presenting advance techniques for creating workflows with asynchronous functionality

   http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB47/

7. Delete Files with Workflow Using Duration

   http://www.sharepointblogs.com/holliday/archive/2007/07/26/delete-files-using-workflow-using-duration.aspx

8. Deactivate and Delete a Workflow Activity from SharePoint

   http://russellmccloy.blogspot.com/2008/01/deactivate-and-delete-workflow-feature.html

9. Developer Introduction to Workflows for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007

   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa830816.aspx

10. K2 Underground – Third party company specializing in providing workflow engines for SharePoint and beyond

    http://www.k2underground.com/