RSS Bandit Wolverine beta installed

I just installed RSS Bandit Wolverine, unfortunately some of my most wanted features are on the postponed lists (the NightCrawler release)
* NNTP Support
* Synchronizing state should happen automatically on startup/shutdown
* Applying search filters to the list view
* Provide a way to export feeds from a category

Rumors about CMS and SPS merging

Rumors on CMS and SPS merging on CRN: The company is moving toward converging SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) and Content Management Server (CMS) functionality into a single "server system," due in 2006, CRN has learned. ...
mscms

RSS, XML, SharePoint and other stuff last week

Let's compile another list of stuff which was delivered last week ( kind of as a personal reminder to check out later):

RSS 2.0 framework - this framework implements the RSS 2.0 specification as strongly typed class

Article about implementing IXMLSerializable

SPS Advanced Search Tools released by Matt Cosier, he also created a site for SPSAST

Useage statistics in SharePoint - Great article about all the hidden secrets of usage statistics

Article about SPS Calendar views

A discussion started after Scobles statement - You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed., Eric Peterson answered with Scoble, who I normally enjoy reading, says something typical of RSS evangelist and Gartenberg agrees with Eric Peterson. Scoble responds with It is not about the RSS, stupid (Well not exactly with these words, but that's what I would say) and then back to Eric with I guess I misunderstood Scoble but ...

Bryant Likes released Reporting Services webparts 1.3

Template switch for CMS released on Gotdotnet

Tim Heuers wrote a posting What SharePoint Consultants ought to know

Through Patricks blog - IBF 1.5 download and IBF 1.5 resource kit available. Read about Patricks demo of IBF 1.5 on DevDays 2005

Alternative search engines for CMS

I already blogged about some of the search engine alternatives for CMS (Microsoft Content Management Server)- here's a quick overview - for a previous comparison check out Musings about Search on the Server

MondoSearch - Commercial search engine for CMS - lots of features, easy to integrate into your .Net web applications (has a complete .Net SDK) but quite expensive. Other postings: Mondosoft .Net search kit and CMS Search with Mondosoft

Coveo Enterprise Search - Commercial search engine, if you have a small CMS site, less then 5000 pages, it is free. Again lots of features, but no direct .Net SDK. This solution becomes quite expensive when you have lots of documents/webpages to index. Related postings: Coveo Enterprise Search - my opinion

SharePoint Portal Server - You can use SPS to index CMS website as well as fileshares, Exchange, Lotus Notes,... But you probably won't buy SharePoint to simply index your CMS.

MCMS.Search - Free solution from Snowvalley, based on the DotLucene project (This is actually a port from the Java version Lucene)

Fulltext search for CMS - is a blogposting about how you can easily write your own CMS search implementation based on " target="_blank">DotLucene

Turning to the darkside - taking a Java programming course

I'm currently following a Java programming course, ... so maybe the next couple of weeks you will see some Java related postings. There are a lot of misconceptions about Java in the Microsoft development community and I hope that taking a course will allow me to do some Java bashing with a thorough understanding of what I'm talking about ( Just kidding ...) By the way, for some recent .Net bashing check out James Goslings comments about .Net and Don Boxes comments.

Some interesting links I'm going to explore the next couple of hours:

Javablogs

Spring Framework

Eclipse

Thinking in Java - Book from Bruce Eckel about Java programming

Pick up performance with generational garbage collection

PS Talking about the dark side of Java, check out Turn to the dark side Luke, it is your destiny

MVP.XML project

Mvp.Xml is a project developed by Microsoft MVPs in XML technologies and XML Web Services worldwide. It is aimed at supplementing .NET framework functionality available through the System.Xml namespace and related namespaces such as System.Web.Services. The complete project is available on the MVP.XML SourceForge site

Gates and Belgian Government about electronic ID card

Interesting stuff

"...We've now thoroughly researched the technical requirements, and I'm pleased to announce that we are moving forward to integrate e-ID technology into MSN Messenger. We're not sure yet when we will be able to deliver this integration, but developers here in Belgium and the United States have proven the concept and are working already on the actual solution. Thanks to the fine collaboration of people from Fedict [ Belgium federal ICT agency] and others in the government, we're making good progress...."

Read more

Sample Chapter Microsoft SharePoint 2003 Unleashed

I just stumbled upon a sample chapter from Microsoft SharePoint 2003 Unleashed, check it out

MSDN Newsgroups down...

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Why blogs rule - Synopsis from On the pod with Scobble

I finally got around to listening to some of the stuff I downloaded - here's a quick synopsis about one of the podcasts I listened to, "On the Pod with Robert Scobble" (Check out other podcasts on GDayworld from the Aussies down under Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic). At a certain point he's talking about the 5 pillars of conversational software or more specifically blogs:

Easy to publish - Traditional publishing software such as CMS is deeply engrained in corporate processes, blogs are more relaxed in the way it allows to publish information

Discoverable - It should be easy to discover new information - if you want to know if new information is published on a website, you have to actively surf to the site, with RSS feeds the information is coming to you

Linking behaviour - If you go to Technocrati you can find a subset of bloggers which talk about a certain topic and it becomes very easy through all the interblog links to find the most relevant information about the topic you are interested.

Permalinking - Each piece of microcontent on your site will have a permanent link, so you can reorganize the information without people losing the link to this information

Syndication - You can follow up on information a lot faster by using a RSS aggregator instead just using a browser to surf to the individual sites - the RSS aggregator will remove all the visual clutter on websites - it will automatically show new information - you can easily track them (add them items to review, for followup, etc...)

Unfortunately not everybody seems to share his viewpoints - check out his recent posting
"I am so pissed.
Yesterday I ripped the head off of a coworker. He works in marketing on a major Microsoft product. I'm not going to identify it or him.
He called me yesterday and said:
"Hey, Scoble, we've done a fun site but no one is linking to it."
My first question?
"Do you have an RSS feed?"
"No, this site is for non geeks."
At that point I just lost it. I think I swore a bit. I am so mad 20 hours later that I can't even remember what I said.
That demonstrates an utter cluelessness about how hype gets generated. If you don't have RSS, how will anyone who is a connector build a relationship with your site?
"Why don't you get your non-geek friends to link to it then?"
I think he had heard that lots of press was reading blogs and wanted to get Walt Mossberg or Steven Levy to talk about this marketing site and figured he'd use me to drive traffic.
Sorry, if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired.
I'll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed." Read more ...

Sarbanes-Oxley, some more news

Last month I wrote my first posting about Sarbanes-Oxley, which mostly talked about all the requirements associated with this legislation. I also mentionned some IT solutions which could speed up the adoption process for SOX, well it seems that more and more ECM vendors are adding SOX support to their tools, well 2 weeks ago Stellent announced the release of version 7.5 of their content management solution which promises better support for SOX (Read some more about it on CMSWire).

Last week, one of business magazines here in Belgium, Trends/Tendances, had an article about Sarbanes-Oxley as well so I guess the interest in Sarbanes-Oxley is definitely hitting mainstrain. The comments about the implications of Sarbanes-Oxley definitely seem to be very varied:

Sarbanes-Oxley good for IT - in this article one of IT managers at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein talks about how SOX has speeded up the effort to connect different information silos within their company. I definitely think that this will be the most important challenge of the coming years, we have developed a lot of different systems and now we have to find a way to connect these and to build upon current investments. This is why things like XML, web services, SOA and Information Bridge Framework are very important.

In Making Compliance Sustainable - I think another important lesson is shown - developing a solution which supports compliance efforts such as SOX should be embedded into the corporate vision about how you go about knowledge management, document management, records management, information life cycle management, etc... If you develop a solution for a specific problem it should fit into your global vision.

Another SharePoint blogger

Another SharePoint blogger hits the blogosphere, Ed Hill - great first article about SSO by the way... Updated 23/02/2005 - just found another one through Daniel - Dan Winter is blogging, he's a SharePoint escalation engineer.

Office 2003 and XML, MSCMS and SharePoint

A lot of cool tools, articles and other stuff were released last week - here's a quick overview:

Office 2003 and XML

XML tools addin for Word

XML tools addin for Excel - simplifies some tasks such as converting ranges to list with some quick customization, creating an XSD for a schema behind an active cell, refreshing XML maps in the workbook, or viewing the XML properties of a given cell

Word 2003 Sample: Transforming Word Documents into the XSL-FO Format - Transform word documents into XSL Formatting Objects, XSLFO can be used to transform the documents into html or pdf

Word 2003 Sample: Automating Word Tables for Data Insertion and Extraction -
Use these sample files to learn how best to automate the creation and formatting of tables in Word. Get information about optimizing performance, populating a table with data, formatting table structure, linking table data, and extracting data from a table.

Using Excel 2003 XML tools addin version 1.1 - Article about the downloadable tools addin for XML

MSCMS(Microsoft Content Management Server)

MCMS Rapid Launch (Blog) and MCMS Rapid website - this tool allows for rapid development of MSCMS sites

Free online edition of Building websites with CMS (2 complete chapters in pdf format and a summary for all the other chapters)

SharePoint

Building webparts the smart way - Article about how to build webparts with Smartpart. One of the major disadvantages of traditional web part development steps is that building web parts this way requires extensive coding with respect to the UI you want to provide within the web part. At the time of writing, there is no designer available for developers to create the body of a web part in a very WYSIWYG manner - SmartPart provides you with a way to develop webparts through the use of usercontrols

UGS TeamCenter - these guys have a lot of webparts and some of them you can even download for free

U2U released their RSS feed generator for SharePoint

Digilink Revelation 1.5 released - this tools allows for offline usage of SharePoint libraries

I will probably updated my SharePoint Tools Galore list with all of the tools mentionned in this posting.

Project scope groupware...

Picked this up from Joels blog -
Jamie Zawinski on Groupware: “So I said, narrow the focus. Your ‘use case’ should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?”

Coveo - February enterprise search promotion

A while ago I wrote a posting about the features in Coveo Enterprise Search, it seems that these guys have some temporary price reductions (got it from Angus Logans blog):

50.000 document license for 4999 USD

100.000 document license for 9999 USD

Connected systems, Office 2003, SharePoint, InfoPath and XML

Building connected systems with Office 2003 seems to be one of the new ways Microsoft is using to convince customers that they need to upgrade to newer versions of Office (Bill Gates even did a webcast Connected Systems and Office System). Microsoft is trying to revive developer interest in Office 2003 - they even had the first Office Developer Conference in Redmond (Read more about the reason behind it) Microsoft will try to use its partners resource to establish this goal - and it seems to be working - read SalesForce.com woos Office developers.


Some things I picked up from different blogs and reading articles about this whole hype:

XML will be everywhere - it is the glue that will connect everything together- so be prepared. The new development tools for Office will show developers why XML really matters - Office uses XML in the core with its own reference schemas, with smart tags, schema attached documents, with IBF. InfoPath is probably the best example of how you can use XML to create electronic forms - InfoPath is really a very smart XML editor. Learn XML, building XSDs, XSLT, XPath and XQuery, you will need it....

While building solutions with VSTO (Visual Tools for Office) - security is a key point. So you will need a solid understanding of digital signatures, code access policy, ...

SharePoint was mentionned a couple of times, I think it will be positioned more and more as the central information hub for all of the data in your company. I expect tighter integration with Biztalk for next versions so SharePoint will perform as UI on top of Biztalk or the newly announced WINOE workflow engine. For more info read Gates pins hopes on SharePoint. My favorite part of the article:
"The SharePoint team is working on its next release of both SharePoint Services and SPPS. On tap is more and better integration between SharePoint and other business applications, especially content management, Microsoft officials have said. Microsoft also is working to deliver a Visual Studio Team System 2005 template for SharePoint team collaboration/team development by the time Visual Studio 2005 ships this summer. "

You should see the comments made in this posting -Application Suites versus Best of Breed Still Alive, in the same context. Microsoft is willing to compete head on with other portal solution vendors. I think we can expect a lot more out of the box functionalities in the next version of both SharePoint and CMS.

The last signicant announcement was the one about InfoPath, Mark Bower already talked about it, Gates went on to add more detail: InfoPath ‘with rich controls, on top of the Avalon runtime’, but also with the ability to ‘project onto classic HTML’. So InfoPath is likely to evolve into a Forms package that can target thin-client HTML delivery and rich client Avalon delivery. Finally a Microsoft forms solution which doesn't need extra CALs for every user - I guess this will finally make it an equivalent solution for Adobe Forms.

Valentine Poem for Geeks

Check it out - .Net a love story - here's a little fragment... I have a managed heap of memories regarding you - none of which are IDisposable. ...

Stuff I downloaded today

Office 2003 XML reference schemas

Exploring ASP.Net with Visual C# 2005 - a complete ISO with videos, courseware in pdf format and other stuff

SharePoint Configurator Tool

Final presentation

This must be a joke or not ? Project manager explains suicide with Powerpoint....

Distributed applications do and dont's (DevDays 2005)

The last two presentations I saw at Devdays where "Distributed .Net applications Today and Tomorrow Part I&II" by Ingo Rammer (check out his blog), I have to say, these were definitely topnotch presentations. Ingo mainly talked about the technologies we are using today for distributed applications : ASP.Net webservices, .Net Remoting, Enterprise services and MSMQ. He talked about things you should be aware off when using these technologies and gave some practical tips & tricks - here a some of them.

When doing .Net remoting don't simply use a configuration file with the overloaded "new" operator. It is important to know if an object is created remotely, so make this visible within your code with the use of interfaces and a remoting helper object.

If performance is important maybe try Enterprise Services, 40000 calls/second on single CPU box vs 1500 in a .Net remoting scenario - Enterprise services is however slower in multiuser scenarios because of the way it enforces transaction locks (ES uses shared locks)

Disable http keep alives in IIS for maximum scalability - http keep-alives is reused by IIS to reuse existing http connections, it will disrupt transparent failover in a clustered environment

Do not use remoting of events to broadcast information - you will have the risk of deadlocks especially when you are broadcasting to more than 25 clients

When you need to develop SOAP based applications use ASP.Net webservices and not .Net remoting. .Net remoting uses a non-future proof version of SOAP (rpc-encoded) vs the document/literal SOAP for asmx (WSI compliant

Do not use WSE if you do not need to - WSE does not use the same model as Indigo and is not compatible between different versions

The preauthenticate property for webservices does not work when using windows challenge/response - with every response you will need to be authenticated again. A solution is the use of connectionsharing of requests. Look at unsafeauthenticatedconnectionsharing and connectiongroupname.

The impact of SSL as a security mechanism for webservices on performance is negligible, you will only get a performance hit on the first request (when performing the assymmetric encryption), the following requests will use symmetric encryption

Design your distributed applications from the standpoint that errors can occur

When using an NLB cluster watch out for the class C network affinity.

Avoid datasets and OR mappers in high load application scenarios, but they are helpfull in about 80% of all development tasks

Datasets are very memory intensive - using objects vs datasets, can be an in memory difference from 300 bytes (for objects) to 55 MB (for datasets)

...

Amazing how much stuff was packed in one session (This guy seemed to agree - My impressions after the Developer Days in Belgium.)

Well it seems that Ingo Rammer is doing a tour around Europe - check out - Ingo Rammer in Dublin - A great event :-), mmm Guiness....