Federated Search at Nashville SharePoint Users Group last night

I visited the Nashville SharePoint Users Group last night to talk about Setting up Federated Search. Unfortunately I was informed I could not use anything or say anything about my former employer... so I just decided to on a wing and a prayer to tell a story 'bout a Federated Search implementations from an anonymous aspect, without any props.

I talked about Search & Shared Service Provider (SSP) in the Central Admin web-kiosk.
But I couldn't show the clicks thanks to former employer X.
I talked about the local location - for indexing SharePoint itself normally - and the OpenSearch location - where you specify the url to perform the search and the XSLT for instance.

I told about how to put together the search pages, the search result pages, how to edit the webparts on the search results page to show more results. Once everything is setup and QA'ed, the idea for easy deployment is to use the export and import functionality for the webparts and locations.

So you get something working in staging and put it into production fast, exactly and safely by importing into production various settings files that you just exported from staging. This way you avoid debugging typos. Normally you can't know 100% everything. You ultimately have to edit something, either in an exported settings file or once it's imported.

Well, it went well with lots of questions and participation from the audience.

Dan

Good Day Sunshine, fun last week

I'm fired up today, working sitting on my poarch in the dim semi-cloudiness - good for seeing a laptop screen. I've got tons of Silverlight to code today, yardwork-as-usual, and tada! I've got a new laptop from my new job to do some remote-desktop'ing with, YEAH!
I'm such a geek. But I love to fish as well and I'll do that later by the glory of our beautiful 100% all-natural Universe, I'll hit the trail ney'on sunset, assuming 20% chance of rain means none, and take one or both sons with me, and we _will_ catch that bigun'... the _infamous_ big river-bass, a badass bass who lurks and hides behind twiggs thinking we can't comprehend his location.

We will haul in that bigun' and and and.. well, we'll shoot him. Yep, we'll take a snapshot with the phone and let em' go back to the waterways to live, prosper and fight another day. I'll post a few pix from last fishing trip later on.

But back to biz - bizspark, websitespark, dreamspark - on Thursday I presented to the Web Developers Users Group for the Nashville .Net Users Group on Power Programming. It went great (and we talked about BizSpark at one point)! The group was so excellent and interactive... I couldn't ask for a better group of dedicated-to-improvement developers. Nashville in general ROCKS for .Net developers; some really great folks here - true brainiacs! many many of them. It's great working here because of that; the people in this small "big-town"really make it comfortable and I like the learning as well. I usually work with some super bright ones here, as well as Huntsville Alabama (good ol' Rocket City USA!).

But this meeting was nice - met a few new friends too! one was the new sponsor FireFlyLogic.com, a network partner for the BizSpark program. I'll post about my experience with that, as well as the contents of the Power Programming presentation as I find time this week.

Thanks for having me speak Nashville, Very Respectably,
Dan Wygant

Speaking Th 4/15/10 6pm on Power Programming with Visual Studio .NET and Silverlight

This is the April meeting of the Web Dev UG here in Nashville.
We start with pizzza at 6pm and I'll start talking to you at 6:30. It will run until 8pm.

Here is the meeting specifics: http://tinyurl.com/nashdotnet041510

The meeting is in Nashville up by the airport across I40 in Century City.
Here are directions:
http://tinyurl.com/pwrprgrmn


Start Date/Time:
Thursday, April 15, 2010 6:00 PM
End Date/Time:
Thursday, April 15, 2010 8:00 PM

Description:
Power Programming with Visual Studio .NET and Silverlight