Welcome to SDM Aaron Saikovski

Aaron Saikovski has finally announced on his blog he's joining the team here at SDM.
While I'm always excited about new people coming on board I've got to say I'm more excited than usual about Aaron starting with us.
It's the first time I've been involved in hiring someone who's blog I've actively read and is so well known in the SharePoint community !
Looking forward to the new work year kicking off on the 7th of Jan.

Happy Holidays

Been offline for a while spending some awesome time away with the family in Tassie.
Nice to have a quiet family break. We spent a bunch of time looking around Hobart and Launceston and visiting all the usual sites.

My favourite bit was a visit to Seahorse world , for some reason I'm fascinated with these creatures so I loved it as I even got to hold one. Victor also loved them and all the fish as well.

Victor was really well behaved the whole time even on the planes and in the hire car except for a massive tantrum when we tried to do a tour of the cadbury factory. The reason for the tantrum was because he had to wear a hair net and he really hates wearing hats, must remember to check if hats are required for activities in the future. Luckily we still got to go to the shop to buy cheap chocolate :)

Also had a good Christmas with Victor getting far to many gifts as usual. He still didn't quite understand what all the fuss was about though.


Just what I needed a bit of time to chill out before what will be a pretty huge start to the working year.

I hope you are all having a great holiday too :)

DWS announces intention to acquire SDM

Here's the official press release to the ASX with details.
DWS looks likely to acquire my employer SDM which is very exciting news as it should help SDM grow more rapidly than we are currently able to.
It's very early days in the process so not sure entirely how it will work but so far it's all pretty positive :)
Update: Jan 3rd
It's officially completed, SDM is a DWS company

Mossig end of year event on Wed

I'm presenting as part of the end of year event for Mossig on Wed.

There are quite a few pieces of the night but the bit I'm presenting in will be where 5 solutions developers present on projects they have completed on the office system.

Will be a good night, details are here if you want to come along.

How development has changed

When I started in development out of uni I was doing vb 6.0 and asp development. I could write code ok but my ui looked bad. I was just not any good at making things look nice and didn't have any interest in it.

Now for most of my projects and presales demo's I actually spend time in SharePoint designer making things look right even when I don't have to and you know what it's easy. I can actually do it without much pain at all !

Now I'm playing with expression blend as well, not quite as easy as SPD but definitely keen to get a bit more knowledge on what I can do in there too.

When even someone as design phobic as myself starts spending a bunch of time working on making things look and flow right, perhaps all the articles on the user experience age are right on track. Plus I've got visual studio 2008 on my machine too, looks like I'll be doing some good playing over the xmas break :)

Catch-up Post

Yup still here, what I've been up to is no where near as exciting as the MOSS SP1 features posted here but enough to keep me busy.

Work wise have been flat out working on some good MOSS and .Net projects. The only one in the public domain right now is the water calculator here which uses the excel services web services to do all the behind the scenes calculations. It's took me a little while to work my way through how to do it, particularly to store values between pages for the final calculations but in the end worked out well.

One of the other main things I've been doing lately is heading off to the physio. A few weeks ago now I tripped on one step and did a bucket load of damage to my ankle which put me on crutches for a while. You'd think given I had to spend a bunch of extra time sitting around it would of given me more time on the computer, unfortunately it was not so. It took me so long to get around everywhere I spend most of my spare time just catching up.
Fortunately it's coming good now and I'm off the crutches just in time to start XMAS shopping.

Looking forward I'm excited about about a couple of new people we have joining the SDM team in the new year (more on that then now doubt), plus the Mossig end of year meeting.

Then I'll be off for a well deserved holiday to tassie :)