Kit Ong's News Pick Of The Day

About XPS file - I have updated the following blog posting with additional details on XPS file
http://geekswithblogs.net/kit/archive/2005/10/31/58601.aspx

Indexing XPS documents with MOSS 2007
http://blogs.msdn.com/ifilter/archive/2007/03/24/indexing-xps-documents-with-moss-2007.aspx

XPS Viewer, printer drivers, IFilter
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx

Microsoft XPS Document Writer - a printer driver that allows you to do "Print to file" to save webpage as a XPS file
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa964988(VS.85).aspx

Microsoft Office 2007 Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

Feel free to add to my comments with any useful XPS and/or SharePoint related links and I will include them here.

An update to my previous post on storing SQL BLOBs in SharePoint. Since MOSS SP1 it seems that you can do this in a supported way by implementing the ISPExternalBinaryProvider COM Interface. More info can be found in the WSS SDK. Limitations around using BLOB store provider (EBS) should be noted. Thanks to Itay for blogging about this!

This is an update to my previous post on Gantt chart web part by Teun. WSS 3.0 version of this web part can be found here. Although MOSS has an out of the box Gantt view for lists as can be seen below the SharePoint Gantt view is bloated compared to the Gantt chart web part. Not only do you get the nice rounded corners for the chart but it will pick up Group by settings of the tasks list and display a black container around the grouped tasks.

Many people have reported problems activating this web part on the site, to resolve this try running the following 2 stsadm commands after you have used the install scripts, these commands will run timer jobs and activate the features on your site collection.

The web part should appear under 'miscellaneous' section in the gallery with the name 'Gantt chart'

stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs
stsadm -o activatefeature -name Duynstee.GanttChart -url http://<site url>

I recently saw a very well put together code walkthrough presentation by Oliver Sturm on how he built a Connect Four network game using WCF and WPF. You can download the entire source code for his application here. If you haven't got a .NET 3 or above IDE then see below to get all the free resources to set this up. I find downloading and installing the Orcas DVD image much quicker than downloading the VPC image which can be very large. The Orcas express DVD image is 849MB (whereas the current VPC image is 5GB!)

Here's a set of materials to get started with the next generation development tool Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) using .Net 3.5.

Go here to download a free DVD image copy of Microsoft® Visual C#® Codename Orcas Express Edition CTP. http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/future/downloads/default.aspx#files (VB.Net version is also available)

Once Orcas is installed you will need to apply a patch that will enable VB Express and VC# Express April CTP to create WPF applications. OrcasVCSAprilCTPWPFPatch.EXE @ http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=89415&clcid=0x409

 

Suggestions for Julian:

How about another GeeksWithBlogs Member Game Design Contest with Vector based graphics using WPF or Silverlight and perhaps network enabled using WCF with a prize such as XBOX 360, Zune, Windows Mobile, <add wishlist here>

 

Donn Felker has wrote a good step-by-step article on how to access and search SQL BLOB Data from MOSS 2007. SharePoint can already search Office file formats stored in the database, this article can be used as a starting point for developing a separate database that hosts binary data readable by SharePoint. In large enterprises there is always a need to put in SLAs for various data contents, it is good practice to have a separate database containing BLOBs that could amount to significant storage space and that could be taken offline without affecting the SharePoint application critical data such as templates, sites and services meta data.

It seems that the web based eventlog viewer have been taken out of SharePoint Central Admin in MOSS RTM as the EventLog.aspx page is missing. It is a shame as I find it useful to see the last 25 event log message output with their full description on a single page. It is annoying when you have to click on each individual Event to see their description in Windows Event Viewer, the up/down arrow doesn't help much either since after clicking a number of times you tend to forget what the description for the previous Event was.

Although the Event log viewer in MOSS Beta is quite simple, it does have a lot of potential for becoming an essential tool. Although it's stepping into the MOM territory I feel that this feature would be very useful for cases such as checking the status of the last submitted timer job. You wouldn't want to be presented with hundreds of performance counters or logs just to diagnose a problem. The SharePoint team has already done a fine job in webifying the whole MOSS deployment experience that will revolutionarise the way server products and components are deployed, configured and monitored.

I hope the SharePoint team can bring back this feature in the next version/service pack. Here are some of my nice to haves list for a web based Event Viewer:

• Search - Ability to search across all fields and all log types. Currently this can be done in Windows Vista with custom views. In Windows XP you cannot roll up different log types and you can only search certain fields at a time.
• Event Log Type "All" that rolls up the latest Application, Security and System Events. It would help spotting cases where a System Event caused an Application Event or vice versa.
• Increase Page Size from 25. Seeing up to 200 Event descriptions on a single page would be nice.

After adding more memory and replacing some bits, my graphics card now seems a bit hyperactive.

Warning this website can be pretty addictive, it did a good job at getting my attention, quite innovative stuff, here's a clip of what's there....



Demetri Martin is the voice behind the animation at http://www.clearification.com

Thanks to Eric Schoonover and Mike Ammerlaan, we now have UpdatePanel working in SharePoint. To get UpdatePanel in your web part you can derive from Eric's AjaxBasePart (Note: In this sample Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart v2 is being used rather than the System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart v3 so you need .dwp instead of .webpart definitions if you are deploying your web part as a feature). For RAD development, head over to Jan Tielens' Blog for his SmartPart with AJAX support. It's great to see many people have caught the Ajax in SharePoint bandwagon, hopefully we'll see more flashy enterprise applications developed for MOSS/WSSv3 soon!

I have finally reinstalled my Vista Ultimate to RTM after running RC1 for some time. The installation went smoothly and took less than half an hour for a clean installation with all the essential drivers without me having to go rummaging through my CD collection to find any drivers. I chose to install the Ultimate rather than Enterprise version since I plan to use Vista for both entertainment and work. The picture below which I've expertly copied from the Windows Vista magazine sums up nicely the targeted audience for the multitude of Vista versions.



It was my first time seeing the Vista boot up logo and sound as there where some bug in the previous version that skipped this bit before the Vista welcome screen, probably due to incompatibility with my fantastic graphics card in Vista RC1. All credits to the Vista team, I'd like to think that the bug report I spent a lot of time and effort (15mins) in compiling contributed to getting this bug fixed for RTM. It wasn't an easy job trying to capture the error during the system boot up sequence.



There's already tons of coverage on the new features in Vista but I'd like to mention the two games that appealed to me, first is Chess Titans and comes as standard with Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate edition. It is great to have an alternative to solitaire and plus you actually learn how to move chess pieces. The second game I like is Texas Hold 'Em poker and comes as a free download with Windows Ultimate Extras. The days of making a fool of yourself when you bet big and lose are over, with Vista's Hold 'Em poker you can go all-in with your chips without having to think about remortgaging your house.



Another thing I'm looking forward to is Windows DreamScene, hopefully this will be available for download soon via Windows Vista Ultimate Extras. I can't imagine I will find any thing useful with having full-motion desktop backgrounds but if Vista does somehow allow cable tv to be displayed as desktop background I can imagine people's TV viewing habit will change, especially since IPTV is gaining momentum. I really like the approach Microsoft is taking to enhance the Multimedia experience on the desktop and putting the spotlight on designers rather than just developers and techies.


Demo of Full Motion Desktop

Google Analytics is now free, you can track stats for multiple sites (profiles) from a single Google Analytics account, the sites you wish to log traffic on does not have to be on the same domain as the one you registered your account with.

To log traffic couldn't be simpler, you are given a snippet of javascript to add to the web page that you want to collect statistics from.

See a screenshot below for one of the traffic stats page for my GWB blog.

 

For quick access to your site's stats you can use Google analytics module to display Google Analytic Stats on your Google Homepage.

http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2006/07/13/665263.aspx

Aaron Stebner have posted a list of hard to find official Microsoft knowledge base articles covering the following topics:

• Resolving crashes when launching Xbox 360 PC setup
• Most commonly used Media Center troubleshooting articles
• Articles about Media Center Extender for Xbox 360 setup
• Articles about using Media Center on Xbox 360

 

See a demo of the pessimistic and at times psychotic voice recognition engine in Vista :)

You can now 'kick' a SharePoint posting to raise it's exposure and increase it's rating, like you would 'dig' an article on Digg.com. Many thanks to Bil Simser for setting up this great community site called SharePointKicks.com.