Monthly Archives: March 2018

Blender

Very difficult to do your work without work arounds

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I have spent the last week learning more about InfoPath with SharePoint because I have not found any solutions using Power Apps for creating forms. Anything I see so far revolves around mobile solutions with Power Apps and I think Microsoft has seen the error of their ways and will continue to support InfoPath until 2026, almost a decade which will work for me.

SharePoint:

Now about the work around’s; reading and learning InfoPath has been great, I haven’t yet created forms for use however I was able to publish the exercise form on my SharePoint site. To do this I needed to enable InfoPath services on my site at the same time enabling the use of a browser for the forms. I could not, temporarily, open the forms in the browser but waiting overnight allowed the changes I made to take affect.

Work however has made this difficult. I can publish the form to a SharePoint library but the browser enabled forms is not available on our SharePoint. Everyone will need the InfoPath Filler application on their machine in order for the form to work as is. There might be a work around by publishing the form to email and then submitting to SharePoint letting custom workflows with SharePoint Designer to take over the process from there. Who knows when I can get this form flow to start working. I would prefer to ‘NOT’ use an excel spreadsheet as a document then process the flow that way.

Unity, C#, Python and Blender

The assets I need for reviewing the book need to be very basic. Stick people and boxes for buildings etc. This review has been a pain with chapters coming out of order and walls of text for the code with no explanation of the code.

This last weekend:

Last weekend was  just O.K. I did a great job on cooking some light meals in the sodium, calorie and fat content and actually pretty good. I was able to splurge on a burger Sunday but need to cut back on other things. All in all the weight loss is going good and my burger did not have any lasting impacts in that area.

Next weekend WILL be spectacular.

SharePoint 365

This RPG book is not written as well as others

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So far the book review is going well but they have sent me chapters two, three and then four and six thinking this is strange I asked the question, what about chapters one and five. I was told there have been issues with those chapters and will receive them when they are resolved. After reading chapter two it was obvious that chapter one was about the creation of game in general and Role Playing Games (RPG) specifically. I don’t know what kind of issues you can have with that sort of topic, strange. I’m not sure what chapter 5 is about.

Chapter two was fairly straight forward about the creation of the terrain concentrating on a free asset store item you can use to create terrain ‘easier’ and quicker than the built in terrain tools. I did not find that to be the case. In fact I found the terrain tool non intuitive and creating terrain from scratch much faster. They could have spent at least a little time explaining the build in terrain tools and the reader would get much more out of that chapter.

Chapter three was about bring in the player characters using another asset from the asset store, this asset is quite good. What readers of this book will need to understand is the author made no effort to create their own assets and if you would like to follow the book you will need to spend ~300.00 in the asset store plus the price of the book. At least the author could have provide some very basic assets for player characters, non player characters and the medieval environment for a small version of the level for basic playability.

SharePoint:

I think I have found the solution for the Change tracking in SharePoint (again) and it has nothing to do with Power Apps or Flow. I found PowerBI.  This tool from Microsoft creates the charts and list views that I was looking for. Unfortunately you still can’t visualize in real time but that was going to be a limiting factor no matter what.

I have decided to forget trying to find a solution to joining lists and doing workflows without SharePoint Designer 2013. I downloaded the program to all of my computers including work since there will be at least some support for the program for the next five or six years and it won’t be dead software for at least a decade. I’ll be long gone from Triumph by then. Probably retired and writing my own SharePoint books and training in Udemy and Lynda.com. I also loaded InfoPath for creating forms in all the same computers as well. More training ahead for me.

Unity, C#, Python and Blender

Starting to create some of my own assets for the book in blender but had to succumb to purchasing some of the asset store products to get myself up and running with what the book was trying to teach. I really should have my own assets ready to go for thing like this.

This last weekend:

This last weekend was the best yet. I spend most of it in Lynda.com learning SharePoint designer 2013 so I could get up to speed writing workflows using that tool. Not quite as intuitive as flow.microsoft.com and not nearly as powerful with the data sources you have using flow but definitely a powerful program once you learn the ins and outs.

Talk to you next week. I can’t wait for this next weekend coming up. It is going to be spectacular as Jeff Raley would say.

Blender

Book Review Time Again

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I was contacted by Packt Publishing again last week about a technical review of another book. This one titled Creating a RPG game using Unity 2018 Second Edition. As soon as I read that title I was all in. I started the first couple chapters this last weekend and have been surprised at how minimal the book describes some items. I’m glad to see they made a point to tell the reader, if you are not familiar with the Unity interface, stop reading now and get familiar. Diving head on into the deep end with this book could be very frustrating for people new to Unity. Looking forward to this book very much.

SharePoint:

Change tracking in the SharePoint site has been a big challenge for me. I, again, think I have a solution however it will take the use of some code in Access and a little finesse within SharePoint/Flow and maybe PowerApps to get this the way I envision it.

I upgraded my trial version of SharePoint Enterprise E3 to a full subscription with two users equaling 40.00 per month. I thought I would have to commit to a year but found I only need commit to a month at a time. I am very excited to do this and will be documenting everything I learn to do. Because I have been having so much trouble finding books on this subject, this just may be what I will be writing my books on. Can’t sit on my laurels to long though, someone might beat me to it.

Unity, C#, Python and Blender

With the new book review I will be starting up my activities in C#, Unity (of course) and possibly Blender by creating some of my own assets. As I create any assets I will most certainly post the pictures here.

This last weekend:

I loved this last weekend. Most of the evenings were very lazy watching movies. I finally was able to watch ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ and loved it which put me in the mood for some Iron Man. I also watch Beetlejuice (old one but good) and started ‘The Martian’. I haven’t watched movies in a while and I really enjoy it. I do have some free movie tickets the office gave me for ‘Awards’. I think I’ll put those to some good use.

SharePoint 365

Month 3 of 2018 has started

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The ‘Boss’ is gone this week at work and she graciously announced that I will be her stand in. Wonderful….

SharePoint:

Continuing on with the Engineering/ME change tracking has not been an easy task. Microsoft deprecated the Access Web app which would have made updating the lists with new items, setting old items as complete and adding the responsible Engineers name so much easier. So far have have not found a suitable method for doing those tasks. I’m sure there is a method, I don’t think Microsoft would leave its customers out in left field like that but I have not been able to fine the solution just yet but I will keep trying.

Unity, C#, Python and Blender

All put on the back burner while I concentrated on SharePoint but can’t let it stay there. I found if I don’t keep up with new knowledge you can get rusty fast.

This last weekend:

The weekend was great and we even had an earthquake on Sunday at 5:19 pm US central time. It seems that nobody at work felt it.