I'm a Microsoft Certified Professional, a professional member of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a double graduate of Case Western Reserve University. I've had an interest in computers and technology since the early 1990s. It all started with QBasic and I haven't looked back since. I completed my master's thesis - Advanced Interface for Querying Graph Data - in January 2008. Since then, my professional career has spanned development, architecture, and management. My primary focus is on web-based technologies and public cloud solutions. I have over a decade of SharePoint development experience, with my more recent experience in Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and G Suite. Through my blog - Navigating the Maze - I hope to give back to the community that has supported me.

Recent Posts from Navigating the Maze

What's that IIS Process ID again?
Sunday, August 18, 2013

This one came up during a recent sprint of coding in which I was debugging a SharePoint 2013 farm solution (I know - apps are the way to go now!) with Visual Studio 2012. Let me say, since first starting development in MOSS 2007, this is a totally different and much smoother experience. I switched back-and-forth between using Visual Studio’s “Play” button - also known as “Start Debugging” - and a more traditional Build, Deploy, Attach to Process method.

VirtualBox and Multiple Monitors
Thursday, July 26, 2012

As a SharePoint consultant, I really enjoy having a local copy of a full SharePoint server on my laptop. As I am patiently waiting for Windows 8 to release with Client Hyper-V, I’m continuing to use Oracle’s VirtualBox software to host my SharePoint development environments.

Extracting Zip Files using PowerShell
Tuesday, July 17, 2012

To help troubleshoot some SharePoint issues, I had a need to analyze some log files that were contained in multiple zip files; one log file per zip file. Since there were several hundred zip files to extract, I figured PowerShell could help! There are several posts I found with example scripts for how to perform this operation. I took pieces from many posts, added some COM object clean-up code, and wrapped this in a function. I hope it helps you in your scripting activities!