Well, it's been a few weeks since I finished the SharePoint scalability work.  The storage whitepaper I wrote is going over well with customers and the public in general and the big daddy SharePoint Scalability whitepaper will soon be posted on TechNet.  Also, I'll be presenting material from the storage whitepaper at the Dallas and Houston SharePoint User Group meetings in May.

So it's wierd that I'm not totally slammed with work.  I had kind of gotten used to it.  For the moment I'm doing minor troubleshooting work and retrofiting the scalability recommendations into client environments.  So with a few moments to come up for air, I decided to take stock and retool a bit.

First up, what's the state of web development?  Man am I behind!  I've had my head buried in the SharePoint sand for so long that I hadn't even heard of LINQ!  And it came out like a long time ago!  I ran across it while working on a timesheet application.  I wanted a nice project to polish up the skills so I set my sights on a LINQ driven AJAX enabled timesheet application.  The app is coming along nicely and I really like LINQ. Talk about easy!  I spent a single day on the data model and BAM the data layer was done for me and I'm updating data tables.  Sweet!

Also, I got around to taking the rest of the SharePoint MCTS exams.  I've passed all 4 now!  I scraped by on one of them but I thought I did pretty good for not using exam cram materials.  I took the tests cold baby, with only real world experience to guide me.  I'm pretty stoked that I got those out of the way.

Finally, I took an evening and whipped out a quick site for a Harley Raffle for my church.  If you live in the US and you want to throw $10 into the ring to see if you can win a Harley, check out the site here!  I promise, it's on the up and up.  I've seen this SWEET machine in person and Frieze Harley-Davidson is holding the title and the keys to ensure it stays "new"! 

So I don't expect the calm to last long.  There are rumblings of a possible extension to the massive SharePoint scalability effort I had been working on.  I hope they pan out.  I love this scaling SharePoint stuff.

Cheers