I just found out that Microsoft has just opened the beta of the Sky Drive service on Live.com. For free you get 500meg of storage, you can install an ActiveX component so you can drag and drop files. I love having some storage that I can access easily, while this service dose not have an API to it I hope we will get that soon.

By the way if you are looking for more space, a better client and better integration for a backup solution check out Elephantdrive they have a cool client that will keep files and\or folders that you specify backed up.

Southern California SharePoint User Group August Meeting

The Southern California SharePoint User Group is created as a free resource for the purpose of exchanging ideas and information related to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and related technologies.  Our meetings cover topics on Microsoft Office in general, and SharePoint in particular, that are of interest to Application Developers, Business Information Workers and System Engineers. 

In short, we encompass all aspects of Microsoft Office Server 2007.  The group is run exclusively by volunteers.  Our meetings are designed specifically to provide information that is of practical benefit to developers of any level of knowledge, from novice to expert.  Each meeting is normally structured with two presentations for a greater variety of information.  We also attempt to help with specific problems and questions outside of the main presentations in a one-on-one meeting with a knowledgeable volunteer. 

Meetings are held on the 3rd Wednesday of every month starting at 6:30 pm, and ending at 9:00 pm. 

Agenda for the August 15th meeting:

The August meeting is a special joint meeting of the San Diego SQL Server user Group and the Southern California SharePoint User Group featuring Bill Vaughn

Time
6:30 - 7:00 pm      Arrival, User Group Announcements, Networking, Pizza
7:00 - 7:50 pm      Part 1 of Bill's presentation
7:50 - 8:00 pm      Break
8:00 - 8:50 pm      Part 2 of Bill's presentation

The meeting will be held at the San Diego Microsoft Office:
9255 Towne Center Drive
Suite 400
San Diego, CA 92121

My good buddy Stephen Rose was the guest on the latest RunAs Radio show... well worth the time to tine in!

Last night I go to present to the San Diego Small Business Server User Group on PowerShell and IIS7. I had a great time, the group is extremely diverse group. We had a scheduling conflict with the San Diego SharePoint Users Group and I had to ask the SBS group to use a smaller room in the San Diego office and they were great about it, we had about 20 people packed in to the room and no complaints.

The slides I used are here as a pdf file. I am looking forward to doing more with this group.

all the links in the slides are below:
For PowerShell

Newsgroup:  Microsoft.Public.Windows.PowerShell
Channel 9 tag:  http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Monad
Team blog:  http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell/
Marc van Orsouw’s blog:  http://ThePowerShellGuy
Wiki:  http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.WindowsPowerShellWiki
Script Center:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx
O’Reilly book – Monad:  Introducing the MSH Command Shell and Language
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/msh/
Manning Press book by Bruce Payette: PowerShell in Action
http://manning.com/powershell/
Sapien Press book by Don Jones: PowerShell
http://www.sapienpress.com/
PowerShellAnalyzer tool
http://www.karlprosser.com/coder/?cat=8

For II7

Web site: http://www.iis.net
GoLive: http://www.iis.net/goLive
Developers: http://www.iis.net/developer

I was on a hunt for what Longhorn will bring and found this document titled Changes in Functionality from Windows Server 2003 with SP1 to Windows Server Code Name "Longhorn" you can get it for your offline or online pleasure.

While I am mostly interested in PowerShell and IIS7 on Longhorn you can see from all the changes that there has been a huge investment in this release. I can even see me moving to Longhorn as my desktop OS soon.

Well I did it I got pewitt.org off webhost4life.com and now have it hosted at godaddy.com my buddy Tim heuer uses them and recommended then quite strongly. It was a bit of a bad day on Wednesday when I was going through all the DNS issues to get the site migrated but that is now all history. Now I hope my blog will not be down every hour!

I recently able to help the Southern California DotNetNuke Users Group to host a virtual presentation by Shaun Walker the dotNetNuke projector founder. We used Microsoft Live meeting to project Shaun's slides and show is real time demonstrations to the group in Buena Park, CA while he was at his home in Canada.

To get all the information about the meeting and how you can view the recording go to Michael Washington's blog post entry about the meeting on the dotnetnuke web site.

The new nibbles tutorials site is a great display of what Silverlight can do as well as a great way to learn some of the basics of how to create Silverlight content.

My buddy in Phoenix Tim Heuer posted about a new Silverlight game that he helped\witnessed get created called Zero Gravity. What I liked was his description of the tools used and workflow between designer and developer. Read it all on his post silverlight: who needs inertia, introducing lt. bennett

I can't take any of the credit for the two new articles that were posted on how to work with WSS 3.0 as a developer other then to say I was one of the many who said WTF to the documentation about it.

Over all the articles don't make WSS development pushbutton but at least this documents the process much better. I hope you find them as good of a read as I did.

Development Tools and Techniques for Working with Code in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Part 1 of 2)
Development Tools and Techniques for Working with Code in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Part 2 of 2)