Vallery.net » jvallery

What tools to install on a SharePoint 2010 developer box

jvallery — Thu, 17 May 2012 05:00:48 +0000

I’ve built out SharePoint development environments many times but I’ve never really sat down and made a list of the tools I use before. A good friend emailed me today and asked what tools I have on my SharePoint development box and it prompted me to put a list together. I thought I’d share what [...]

Comparing Office 365 and Google Apps

jvallery — Thu, 17 May 2012 04:41:39 +0000

I’ve used Google Apps for many years given that it is a reliable way for me to host my personal email for free. I own my own domain (obviously) and I enjoy having the address jason@vallery.net. Since the surname Vallery isn’t terribly common I’ve also had the occasion to setup email addresses for close and [...]

Terrible customer service from Microsoft

jvallery — Thu, 10 May 2012 00:04:13 +0000

I’m obviously a big proponent of Microsoft and the Windows Phone platform. I’m not one to badmouth them usually but I’m very upset at the moment. Since I’ve been developing WP7 applications I convinced my wife to help with testing by swapping her phone. During the recent Smoked by Windows Phone Challenge she reluctantly exchanged [...]

Organizing your music with Powershell

jvallery — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 23:27:38 +0000

So my wife just swapped her iPhone 4 for a new HTC Titan Windows Phone thanks to the recent Smoked by Windows Phone challenge. The first thing she asked me about is how to get all of her music over to the new phone. I’ve been using Zune Pass quite happily for a while however [...]

Organizing lots of pictures

jvallery — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 06:36:02 +0000

If you’re anything like me you’ve been taking digital pictures for a long time now. You’ve used various strategies and tools for organizing them over the years. You’ve gone through several computers and moved the files around countless times. Where does that leave you? With an unorganized mess. With library software like Picasa you can [...]

Building a near silent PC

jvallery — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:15:30 +0000

I spend 12 to 14 hours a day in my office on any given weekday. My productivity on my PC is vital and as a result I’m not afraid to invest in good equipment. For the last several desktop workstations that I’ve used I’ve assembled the computer myself from various components. One of my challenges [...]

And we’re back…. On wordpress

jvallery — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:06:08 +0000

So my fairly short lived experiment with migrating my Blog to SharePoint is over. As much as I love SharePoint it really isn’t a great platform for public blogging, at least using the out of the box blog template. There are some major limitations that caused me to switch back: Because the solution runs [...]

Blog migration to SharePoint

jvallery — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:30:49 +0000

You can find the source code for this entry at: http://vallery.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/ValleryBlog.zip So I decided to migrate my blog from WordPress to SharePoint. The motivation was driven primarily out of wanting to “eat my own dogfood”. Given that most of the work I do and the posts on my blog all have to do with [...]

Disable email notifications in SharePoint 2010

jvallery — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 17:36:42 +0000

Out of the box in SharePoint 2010 all users who have a profile are also defaulted to having email notifications set to “on”. This might make sense in a small scale implementation but for my customer that was unacceptable. I created a powershell script that iterates through the user profiles and turns the notifications off. [...]

My 2010 travel statistics

jvallery — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 05:49:40 +0000

Now that the year has drawn to a close I took a few minutes to tally up all of my nights away from home. I was surprised to learn that I actually spent LESS time away than I initially would have assumed. It certainly was a grueling year of back and forth across the country [...]