In case you had missed the news, Microsoft have announced The Appies, a competition around creating an awesome app for SharePoint, Office 2013 or our favorites, Project Server, Project Online or the Project client (Jeremy had the scoop a few weeks ago and coined the Appies name which I think is pretty apt). To qualify for the Appies, all you need to do is submit a new app or update an existing app between November 25th 2013 and January 31 2014 to be automatically entered.

Tech Ed Australia is being held on the Gold Coast between the 3rd and 6th September this year. I am happy to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia this year with my partner in crime, Mr Brian Farnhill with an awesome session entitled…. The SharePoint 2013 App Playbook – Your Guide to Building and Publishing a Great App Office 2013 has brought an amazing new platform for developers to take advantage of, in the format of apps and the online app store.

One of the most obvious differences between Project Server 2013 and 2010 is the look and feel, specifically the new modern UI style tiles to help you perform tasks / find options quickly and easily called ‘The Carousel’. On a un-customised PWA site you will see two rows of these tiles, the ‘Getting Started’ and the ‘Track your work’ options. For a while I have been thinking about how powerful one of these carousels would be within your own organisation, perhaps providing a direct link to view the queue, a link to that report everyone uses, a central lessons learned register, a PMO site, or even your favourite EPM / PPM blog.

In this fourth post, I thought it would be fun to go through the process of getting your app up into the Office app store so you can start making millions. Before you decide to submit your app to the store, you need to do a few things: Read the app store submission guidelines at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj220035.aspx. These highlight the conditions your app must meet before it will be accepted. Register for a Seller account.

In this post, we will take our app that we built in Napa and successfully tested and export it out to Visual Studio to enhance the app, specifically we are going to add a ribbon button so our app can be invoked directly from the PWA ribbon. Exporting the Napa solution out to Visual Studio Whilst Napa is a great tool, at the moment it is not possible to add a CustomUI Action at present, so we need to use Visual Studio.

In this second post covering how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will take a look at a new component of Project Server, the JavaScript Object Model or JSOM. In the past when you wished to interact with Project Server the only real option you had would be to use the PSI, or Project Server Interface, a set of API’s that could be called that would perform tasks within the project server instance like reading a project, creating a resource, or adding a job to the queue.

In this first post on how to build an app for Project Server to publish all projects, we will look at setting up your development environment. Before we start, for the purpose of these posts we are going to leverage an Office 365 based Project Online tenant. Using Office 365 takes away some of the pain of setting up your own server environment and can be provisioned in a fraction of the time.

One of the many exciting additions to Office 2013 was the introduction of apps, through these apps it is possible to add, extend and enhance the functionality available to users, for example you could have an app to help track election results, add Facebook social to your sites or build workflows. The apps themselves are available for a number of the desktop clients, as well as SharePoint 2013 and Project Server 2013.

Project workspaces are awesome. There I have said it. But one thing that has always frustrated me and other users is how hard it is to determine what project the workspace is linked to. The only reliable way of determining the ProjectUID is to look in the Property Bag of the site where Project Server stores the association. There are a couple of tricks that will let you find out the ProjectUID, one of them being developing a custom web part like I did a while back, or using the CSOM in 2013 as Giles Hamson posted a while ago,