[FUN] Site down - hilarious error message

Definitely an interesting error message:

My host, being satan incarnate, messed up the database. Im in Orlando still, so i shall be diligent and fix it when I return.

Tags van Technorati: error+message,fun

Musings about Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009

I did a practice session about integrating Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 and the Business Intelligence capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server a couple of weeks ago.

I'm mostly a SharePoint guy but I  was pretty impressed with the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009. Since Dynamics AX 2009 finally RTM'ed (Download on partnersource - https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/support/selfsupport/productreleases/DynamicsAX2009release.htm

For more info check out these links:

• What's new in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 (Partnersource login required) - powerpoints of both new technical and functional aspects in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009
• What Will Be the Most Important Performance Enhancement in Dynamics AX 2009? Try Scaling of the AOS
• What's new in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 - technical resource (Partnersource login required)
• AX 2009 - Quick overview - Great blogpost from Arijit about MS Dynamics AX 2009.
• Channel 9: a preview of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 with the Dynamics Team (mp4) - (lowres version)
• Solution Monkey : AX 2009 Enterprise Portal architecture
• Dynamics AX 2009 : The Halo for Microsoft's app platform

The coolest thing for SharePoint developers is probably the ASP.NET based Enterprise Portal - everything is basically an ASP.NET web part which makes it a lot easier to develop a light-weight web access for your Dynamics AX back-end.

Something which still strikes me as odd though is the fact that almost all of the documentation is partner-access only - so you will need a Partnersource logon to take a look at the most interesting bits of info. I truly believe that the key to the success of a platform is the community which drives it  ... and it seems as if the Dynamics AX platform solely relies on its partner platform. Too bad ... [This is my personal opinion and not necessarily this of my employer]

Tags van Technorati: microsoft,dynamics+ax,axapta,axapta+2009

Interactive Media Manager (IMM) and SharePoint Server 2007

Interactive Media Manager is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system built on top of SharePoint Server 2007. Some interesting features:

• Media (MPG,WMV, ...) is not stored in a SharePoint list, the media asset storage is completely separate which allows you to store in a SAN or leverage 3d party solutions such as Aspera and Telestream through a web services layer
• Provides an extensive metadata management layer which supports W3C Resource Description Language (RDF) as well as the Web Ontology Language (OWL)
• Web parts to handle rich media such as IMM import web part, a media viewer web part with support for annotations/comments, Silverlight based Rough Cut editor and the Media Library
• Adds extra IMM specific workflow activity blocks

For a great demo of the capabilities - check out IMM@NAB 2008 (Video)

Related links:

• Channel 9: Interview with Mark Kashman, Product Manager Interactive Media Manager
• IMM on Codeplex
• Interactive Media Manager - link to Starz Entertainment case study
• IMM Team Blog
• IMM MSDN Forum
• IMM Developer center on MSDN

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint+2007,sharepoint+server,MOSS+2007,MOSS,IMM,DAM,Interactive+Media+Manager,microsoft

Enterprise 2.0 and organizational culture

Enterprise 2.0 is probably one of these buzz words you have heard a lot lately. It is also a term which is surrounded by confusion. The simplest definition of Enterprise 2.0 would probably be "...the application of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise." . This is similar to the definition which has been put forward by AIIM in one of their studies recently.

Enterprise 2.0: A system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.

Another cool one - probably my favourite:

Enterprise 2.0 is about empowering your end users to connect and collaborate.

Now let's talk about the key thoughts in the presentation.  The red line in the presentation is the link between organizational culture and Enterprise 2.0. But  what is not clear is whether your organizaiton needs a "culture of collaboration" to successfully use wikis and other Enterprise 2.0 tools or that these tools can enable your organization to embrace a "culture of collaboration".

This might seem like the chicken-and-the-egg problem ... 

I think that you will first need to create a mindset within your company which is ready to embrace collaboration and knowledge sharing before you can start thinking about Enterprise 2.0 - a view which is confirmed by this guy  - Enterprise 2.0 - Culture required?  But on the other hand for those people in your company who get it, you want to provide the necessary tools - so you might want to take a look at a platform which might already be present in your company - guess which one? SharePoint offcourse  ... LOL.

Related links:

• Knowledge and talent in a people ready business
• Knowledge is power! So why share your knowledge?
• SharePoint and Web 2.0
• The value in social networks
• Colleagues, Social Distance & Relevance in People Search, and other Social Networking tools in SharePoint

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,microsoft,web2.0,enterprise2.0,organizational+culture,knowledge+management,knowledgesharing

Getting started with SharePoint and Silverlight - Part IIb

Silverlight 2 beta 2 has been released - so time to install the required tools fo finish my series about Getting started with SharePoint and Silverlight.

• Getting started with SharePoint and Silverlight - Part I
• Getting started with SharePoint and Silverlight - Part II

First uninstall Expression Blend 2.5 March preview, Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008. Next install all of the new components:

• Silverlight 2 Beta 2
• Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 - this will install  Silverlight 2 Beta 2, Silverlight 2 SDK Beta 2 , KB950630 for Visual Studio 2008 RTM or KB950632 for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta  and Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008
• Expression Blend 2.5 June CTP
• Deep Zoom Composer June 2008 Release (Version 0.9.0.3) - if you don't know deep zoom you should definitely take a look at  Hardrock memorabilia which is an excellent show case

Interesting about Silverlight 2 Beta2 is the fact that it has a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications.

Interesting links:

• Silverlight Beta 2 tutorials available in PDF
• Silverlight 2 - now with more controls
• Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Released (Blog Scott Guthtrie) - excellent overview of new features

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,silverlight,expression+blend,blend,deep+zoom,microsoft

Silverlight 2 Beta 2- annonying popup and the Silverlight XBOX Gamercard

I noticed this really annoying popup today on my blog  -

"The evaluation period for Silverlight 2 Beta 1 has ended. You can visit the Silverlight web site to download the latest version. Do you want to go there now?"

So I uninstalled Silverlight and saw this  "Install Microsoft Silverlight to view My XBox Gamercard". But when I clicked this - it redirected me again to the Silverlight Beta 1 download. Therefore I remove the XBox Gamercard silverlight app untill it has been upgraded. Too bad, I hoped that upgrades would be seamless from an end-users perspective.

Tags van Technorati: silverlight,xbox,microsoft

Where is WinFS now?

Interesting interview with Quentin Clark who led the WinFS project from 2002 to 2006 ... This is something which you should read, it also puts the evolution of the Entity Framework, Filestreams in SQL Server 2008 (Take a look at Managing unstructured data in SQL Server 2008 ) ,  LINQ and the Microsoft Sync Framework into perspective, ...

Tags van Technorati: microsoft,development,sync+framework,winfs,linq,sqlserver+2008,entity+framework,ado.net

Euro 2008 webparts

Check them out - http://www.euro2008webpart.nl/ 

Best indoor soccer goal ever ....

Number 12 on Top 100 SharePoint blogs Spring 2008

Joel Oleson compiled a Top 100 of SharePoint blogs using Technorati ranks, Google ranking, etc ... I made it  on number 12 - thanks a lot ....

Tags van Technorati: microsoft,sharepoint,blogs,sharepoint+2007,wssv3

Getting started with SharePoint and Silverlight - Part II

In the first part I talked about how to get your first Silverlight app up and running. Now let's see how to get this into SharePoint. Patrick has created an excellent checklist about How to configure your SharePoint extended IIS Web app for working with Silverlight 2 applications. 

For step 4 - if you need to add System.Web.Silverlight.dll to the GAC - you will find this file underneath C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v2.0\Libraries\Server (default installation folder for the Silverlight SDK).

For step 6 - I used  the 3.5 Config feature from Codeplex - http://www.codeplex.com/features  which works pretty good.

To test everything out - let's start of with one of the samples in the  Silverlight BluePrint for SharePoint - which contains six sample applications:

• A simple “hello, world” sample showing Silverlight in a Web part.
• A Silverlight slider control as a SharePoint custom field type.
• A navigation control.
• A Colleague Viewer
• A Silverlight picture viewer for a SharePoint picture library.
• A visual how-to center, created in Silverlight and based on a SharePoint list, for viewing videos.

Let's start off with the Silverlight "Hello world" example. Steps that I took:

1. Extracted the setup project and ran the installation - after this I could see the HelloSilverlight appear but it would not load the Silverlight app
2. Next I recompiled the Silverlight app using Visual Studio 2008 and copied the XAP file in the clientbin directory over the existing XAP file.

Another interesting webpart which is packaged together with the "Hello world" sample is the SilverlightPart which is basically a webpart which can host a Silverlight application (1.0 or 2.0). You can select the Silverlight app to host by selecting it using the webpart properties.

When I started fiddling around with these Silverlight apps - I regularly noticed this error message "Internet explorer has encountered a problem with an add-on and needs to close. The following add-on was running when this problem occurred
npctrl.dll" - luckily I found this post - IE crashing with Silverlight 2 - Part II - It was not fixed ! But it's now! and this did the trick - apparently Silverlight tried to go online to get an update but my VPC had no networkconnection.

That's it for today, in a next posting I will try to explain what the code in the HelloSilverlight webpart does.

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,sharepoint+2007,silverlight,ria,wssv3,development,microsoft

SharePoint CustomAction feature - overview of CustomAction identifiers

Today I needed to create a SharePoint feature which would add a link on the Site Settings page within the Site Administration section - in SharePoint this is done by defining a CustomAction feature. A colleague of mine pointed me to two invaluable resources if you need to build a CustomAction feature:

• SharePoint CustomAction identifiers
• Default Custom Action Locations and IDs

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint+2007,sharepoint,moss+2007,wssv3,microsoft,features,customaction,development,sharepoint+development

Presentations for BIWUG session on 22-05-2008 available

I uploaded the slidedecks and democode for the BIWUG session of last week - have fun:

• Code samples workflow deep dive
• Biztalk and SharePoint integration
• Workflow deep dive presentation
• IBM Team Collaboration Software - Lotus Software

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint+2007,biztalk,workflow,workflow+foundation,microsoft,ibm,team+collaboration,biwug,lotus+quickr,quickr

ODF support in Office 2007 SP2

 

This is the most interesting part of the press release - Microsoft Expands list of formats supported in Office

With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.

When using SP2, customers will be able to open, edit and save documents using ODF and save documents into the XPS and PDF fixed formats from directly within the application without having to install any other code. It will also allow customers to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007. To also provide ODF support for users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office (Office XP and Office 2003), Microsoft will continue to collaborate with the open source community in the ongoing development of the Open XML-ODF translator project on SourceForge.net.

As I stated before (Microsoft support ODF through Sourceforge project - ODF addin for Word 2007) - this is quite important here in Belgium where the Belgian government decided to standardize on ODF starting on September 2008 (text in Dutch).

Tags van Technorati: office+2007,ODF,XPS,microsoft

The Document Information Panel and InfoPath - the devil is in the details

I recently took a look at the Document Information Panel functionality in Word 2007 which allows you to provide a custom form to enable metadata editing for documents stored in SharePoint and encountered something unexpected.

You can actually customize this Document Information Panel by plugging in your own Document Information Panel (DIP). A Document Information Panel is actually nothing more then an InfoPath form - see InfoPath 2007: Customizing the default Document Information Panel.

SharePoint autobuilds a DIP for your document metadata and seems to work without an installation of InfoPath on the client. But what if you want to build your custom Document Information Panel using InfoPath? This where things get ugly - like this guy noticed as well - All about the Document Information Panel and InfoPath issues. Whenever you are going to use a custom Document Information Panel - you will need to have InfoPath installed on all the clients.

This is actually explained on this page - Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 Suite Comparison - all the way to the bottom - there is a footnote which contains some very important information.

Features and Benefits	Office Standard 2007	Office Professional Plus 2007	Office Enterprise 2007
Complete, collect, and organize Office InfoPath e-mail forms in Office Outlook 2007.2
Host embedded, fully customizable InfoPath forms in Office Word 2007, Office Excel 2007, and Office PowerPoint 2007.2
Complete forms in Programmable Task Panes. 2
Complete custom fields and execute custom business logic in Document Information Panel forms.2

² These capabilities require that Office InfoPath 2007 be installed on the client computer. Office Professional Plus 2007 and Office Enterprise 2007 include Office InfoPath 2007. Organizations that acquire other suites can purchase and install Office InfoPath 2007 separately.

As I stated in the title - the devil is in the details ... sometimes even in a footnote.

Tags van Technorati: infopath,microsoft,sharepoint+2007,sharepoint,moss+2007,moss,wssv3,office,office+2007,infopath+2007

Getting started with SharePoint and Silverlight - Part I

This is the first part of a series of postings about how you can use Silverlight and Office SharePoint Server 2007 together. I'm new at Silverlight development - so I will take it one step at a time.

Things you will need to install to get you started right now:

• .NET 3.5 - install this before you install Blend
• Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1
• Silverlight 2.0 SDK Beta 1
• Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 Documentation
• Source code and Unit tests for the Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 Controls
• Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview
• Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 - Add-on for Visual Studio 2008 for developing applications for Silverlight 2 Beta 1  

First I took a look at one of the videos on Silverlight.net  - the one with the smiley - Getting started with Silverlight and followed the instructions to create my first Silverlight project. There are some differences with Silverlight 1.0 though. One of the things you will notice immediately is the fact that with 2.0 - Silverlight applications are basically compiled into a .xap file (For more details: take a look at Silverlight: Anatomy of an .XAP file).

Now, let's get this deployed on a VPC which has both SharePoint Server 2007 and Silverlight installed. To make things a little bit easier let's test this first in a separate web site which hasn't been extended by SharePoint.

It is important that you first add both the XAML and XAP MIME extensions to IIS  (See Configuring a web server to host Silverlight Content as well as Configuring MIME Types (IIS 6.0) for more details ...) otherwise your Silverlight app won't work. (Do an iisreset after you added the MIME extensions)

So open up the IIS MMC, create a new website and map it to a folder on your filesystem. Next copy Testpage.html as well as the xap file into this folder. Et voila, your first Silverlight application is deployed ....

In a next posting I will take a look at how to get this same Silverlight app loaded within SharePoint Server 2007.

Tags van Technorati: Microsoft,silverlight,sharepoint+2007,sharepoint,development

BIWUG on Biztalk, Quickr and Workflow Foundation

We will organize another BIWUG meeting on May 22th:

18:30-19:00  Registration and welcome

19:00-19:45  Biztalk integration with SharePoint and InfoPath forms using the Biztalk 2006 R2 SharePoint adapter 

In this session you will be introduced to Biztalk 2006 R2 as an Enterprise Application Integration engine and get an overview of the integration possibilities with SharePoint by using infopath forms based on XSD schemas and the Biztalk SharePoint adapter. A demonstration will be given how Biztalk can run orchestrations that are bound to receive and sendports which are connected to SharePoint document libraries.

Speaker: Kurt Claeys, http://www.devitect.net

19:45-20:15  IBM Team Collaboration Software – Lotus software

Introduction to Lotus products. Positioning of IBMs offering for communication and collaboration.

Speakers: Koen Renders en Tom Van Aken

20:15-20:30 Break

20:30-21:15  Windows Workflow Foundation – deep dive

Windows Workflow Foundation is one of the three pilar technologies of .NET 3.0. As it is designed to model business processes, it is probably the most abstract .NET 3.0 technology. In this technical presentation we'll deep dive in Worflow Foundation and explore some of the new terms it introduces. Terms essential to fully grasp what your workflow is doing and what it is not.

Speaker: Tom Nys, http://tomblog.insomniacminds.com/

Event location: Real Software, Prins Boudewijnlaan 26, B-2550 Kontich http://www.realsoftwaregroup.com/Commercial/Default.aspx?id=490

Win Free versions of Windows Vista Ultimate

We will give away 2 Windows Vista Ultimate to one of the attendees of this BIWUG event.

Register for this event

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint+2007,sharepoint,biztalk,biwug,collaboration,ecm,eai

Knowledge Management 2.0

Lawrence wrote a great posting about Knowledge and Talent in a People-Ready Business on the SharePoint Team blog. Empowering people in your organization is a key part to the success of your company and its ability to innovate... Some people however see this different - check out Knowledge is power! So why share your knowledge?

Tags van Technorati: enterprise2.0,knowledge+management,KM,web2.0

Fun: Kids getting smarter all the time ...

http://blogs.msdn.com/williamcornwill/archive/2008/05/08/son-of-grumpywookie-to-be-a-young-web-developer.aspx

 

Tags van Technorati: csharp,microsoft,sharepoint,fun

Started trying out Twitter

Hype, fad or something else ... still not sure yet - there probably are some uses to it but since I'm not convinced  I decided to try it out myself. If you want to follow me - check out http://twitter.com/jopxtwits. If you new to Twitter, you might want to look at the Newbie's guide to Twitter and if you are not convinced you might want to take a look at  12 reasons to start Twittering ... Twittering seems to enable you to disseminate those little thoughts/feelings (from brilliant to just plain meaningless) which seem to pop up in your head (but are gone a minute later). So a lot is just that - plain meaningless chatter but sometimes there's a little gem in there ...

Some interesting tools to check out  as well:

• Twessenger: This essentially means that you can update your Live Messenger status from wherever you are, since Twitter supports updates via the web interface, IM, and SMS messages from your cellphone.
• Twhirl : very nice looking Twitter client which uses Adobe AIR.

Not sure if this correct but to use a new interesting word that I recently heard about ... stop bogarting your knowledge/thoughts/whatever ... and share it on Twitter :-)...

Tags van Technorati: twitter,web2.0,fun