The next one of these is this coming Wednesday, July 21, 9am PST / 12pm EST.  We have a great bunch of people slated to be on the call.  In addition to myself we have Adam Buenz, Alex Pearce (UK), Amanda Perran (Canada), Arno Nel (UK), Bryan Phillips , Dan Attis, Darrin Bishop, Eli Robillard (Canada), Jason Medero, Matthew McDermott, Muhanad Omar (Jordan), Randy Drisgill, Sahil Malik, Sean Wallbridge (Canada), Serge Tremblay (Canada), Shane Perran (Canada), Shane Young.  So dial in, ask a question, listen on about all things SharePoint.

Twitter tag: #spmvpchat

MSDN Live Chat link

Thanks! - M

Remember when (days long ago...) you tried to instantiate to a list in SharePoint via either SPWeb.Lists["List Name"] or SPWeb.GetList("list URL"), you'd not know if the list was truly there until your code went along it's merry way, or it exceptioned out?  Well here comes SPListCollection.TryGetList().  Passing in the title of the list will either return the SPList itself or null.  At this point you can then do a null check and address it accordingly, instead of relying on an exception.

Something a little cool I just came across... - M

SPListCollection.TryGetList Method

Ben Curry (SharePoint MVP extraordinaire, CISSP, MCT, MCP and all-around great guy) asked me to help contribute to this book (scheduled to now be out on July 4th) and let me tell you, what a learning experience this was.  It was my first foray into the realm of publishing and it was a lot of work for something relatively small (in terms of amount of pages that I was responsible for) and while it took up a ton of time (as you could tell from my lack of recent blog posts) it was an exceptional learning experience.  My contribution was the My Sites / User Profiles chapter and while it's a bit of a what/how-to, there are a couple "whys" thrown in there as well.  I'm really looking forward to checking out the finished product.

Big/huge thanks again to Ben for letting me help out on this! - M

Amazon link to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator's Pocket Consultant

Back up for air!  And with that, I'll be presenting my SharePoint 2010 Features and Solutions with Visual Studio 2010 at the upcoming SharePoint Saturday - NYC event, coming up on July 31st.  Remember, there's no better place to find a wealth of knowledge on all things SharePoint at these SharePoint Saturday events.  We're talking networking, SharePoint, speakers, SharePoint, MVPs, and did I mention SharePoint?  Again, come on out for a day of all things SharePoint with industry experts, learn a bunch of great stuff, and to top it off, it's FREE!  Head on over to the SharePoint Saturday - NYC site and register!  It'd be great to meet you all.

- M