Thursday, April 19, 2007
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I've been talking to some folks about Windows Presentation Foundation and the new Silverlight that Microsoft just announced (previously known as WPF/E).
There seems to be some confusion about exactly what Silverlight is. It seems that some believe Silverlight will be an enhanced version of WPF to allow for 3D graphics and other visual elements - sort of a superset of WPF.
Actually, it's the opposite. The purpose of Silverlight is to provide a unified way of authoring presentation for any platform. You might be surprised to learn that many basic controls are not available in Silverlight. Something as simple and basic as a button isn't in Silverlight.
So what do you think? Is there a market for Silverlight? Will companies begin to ebrace this technology? Is it just a Flash replacement?
Check out http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight to download Silverlight as well as the SDK and sample projects.
Friday, September 29, 2006
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I saw Jeff Julian this morning at an event where he was presenting on Windows Communication Foundation.
Seeing him reminded me of his awesome blog site, geekswithblogs.net. I had Jeff set me up with a blog on the site over a year ago. I posted a few blogs to it, but then kind of forgot about it.
Surprisingly, my site is still here and I still knew the username and password. I'll try to start posting here. I've been doing some interesting stuff lately that I'd love to share.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
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I am a member of SABR (The Society for American Baseball Research). We have a list server where members can post messages to ask questions or make announcements. A fellow name Dave Smith runs an outstanding web site called Retrosheet.org. There you can find data for many baseball games dating back to the 50's and 60's. The Retrosheet site has been down for about 5 days now. Dave posted a messaged to the SABR list explaining the blackout:
Since the Retrosheet server went down last Thursday, I have received several very nice messages of concern. I am writing now to bring you up to date as well as I can.
Last Thursday we had a large tree removed adjacent to our driveway (white pine, about 80 feet tall). During the process, two branches were dropped across the power line and phone line/DSLcables leading to the house. Power was not lost, at least partly because the power line is braided with a steel support cable. The other line carries our two phone lines and the DSL. Amazingly, the one phone line never went out, but the other one and the DSL did.
Since that time, I have had many (I believe the total is now 7) conversations with my long distance provider, the company that owns the wires and the ISP for the server. As of this moment (around 8:30 PM on Monday night, June 13), there is still no resolution. After two more hours on the phone this afternoon, I believe (I really hope this is
true) that two separate technicians will visit tomorrow to repair the phone and DSL. Of course as we all know, waiting for that to happen is one of the least joyous events of modern American living. Assuming they are telling the truth, we will hopefully have the server restored sometime on Tuesday. I will make the appropriate announcement as soon as it happens.
Dave Smith
Monday, June 13, 2005
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I think my favorite sessions at this year's TechEd were John R Durant's sessions on programming Office using the new Visual Studio Tools for Office.
John is a very entertaining speaker and is very passionate about the VSTO tools. I loved his session on Outlook where he demonstrated creating an Outlook add-in. It's very easy to extend the functionality of outlook using these tools. I can see a lot of good uses for this.
For example, a company may use email for its business, and one of its needs is to save email messages to certain folders on a file share. The folders are related to the type of email and the customer. Using VSTO, I could easy create a menu item or toolbar button that runs some code to determine where the message should be saved, and save it.
Check out this MSDN article on working with tasks in Outlook. Very cool stuff.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
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Last night, I participated in the Mobilizer game, a scavenger hunt where teams compete to win a portal media center device. The game involved solving puzzles based on clues around the convention center. Each team was given a VX6600 Pocket PC Phone to use for the game. On the phone, teams accessed various web pages that provided clues. Based on the clues, the teams had to answer questions to complete the game. Finding the answers involved running around the convention center, as more points could be earned by answering the questions quicker. Our team was running all over the convention center, from one end to the other. We gave it a valiant effort but finished in 5th place.
Crews were there filming the event for the Tech-Ed PodCasts. It's easy to spot these guys, they're cruising around the convention center on Segway HT's. They were nice enough to let a couple of us take these things for a spin. What a blast! It takes a second to get the hang of it, but then you're off and rolling. Lean forward and off it goes...
Monday, June 06, 2005
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Ari Bixhorn just did an excellent demo showing some of the capabilities of Indigo. He wrote a service that sends a message to his Pocket PC device based on events in Windows Media Center.
For the demo, he used an example of his second grader watching Jerry Springer at home while he's at work. When the Springer show came on, he recieved a message on his Pocket PC based on the rating of the show. He then sent a message back to the television, “Your busted!” and changed the channel to Spongebob Squarepants.
To take the demo further, an Indigo service then polled the Amazon web services to see if they had items related to Spongebob. They did, and so while watching his show, little Jake can select items from Amazon and place them in his wish list. When Ari's at the toy store shopping for his birthday, he can access Jake's wish list on his PocketPC and purchase the items.
Other Media Center demos included a service that retrieved weather information when it detected that golf was on, and another that allows the viewer to purchase all of the materials needed to complete a project shown on a home improvement project.
Cool technology, but it's easy to see the future of combining television viewing and marketing.
My week at Tech-Ed began this morning with Steve Ballmer's Keynote presentation. In it, he discussed the “New World of Work.” One highlight was the new features for Windows Mobile including “remote wipe.” This allows a company's admin to order a mobile device be wiped of all data if it is lost. Pretty cool.
I've seen a couple of SharePoint sessions that did really provide me with much information that I wasn't already aware of. I'm sitting in an Indigo session now.
The Orange County Convention Center is HUGE! You walk and walk and walk and walk, then you look up and you're not even half way there. Tech-Ed is a first class event, and so far I'm enjoying myself. The wireless network could be a little more stable, but I'm sure they'll work out the kinks before long.
Friday, June 03, 2005
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My flight leaves Kansas City Sunday evening. I'm excited to arrive to Orlando for this year's Microsoft Tech-Ed Conference. I've already picked the sessions that I would like to see, and I'm looking forward to seeing some GrokTalks as well.
Friday, May 13, 2005
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If you're intersted in Service Oriented Architecture and in particular, making it happen in the real world, check out Dan Fox's
Making SOA Real Blog. He's documenting his
organization's efforts in moving to SOA. Very interesting reading.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
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Scenario: You want to deploy multiple Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) Sites in your organization, and each site should have its own domain name. You do not want to create a new IIS Virtual Server for each site. Can WSS handle this configuration?
Yes, but this configuration is not entirely intuitive. The most important aspect of this configuration is creating the configuration database to handle host headers. The only way to accomplish this is to create the config database using the stsadm.exe command line tool. If you use the SharePoint adminstration pages to create the config database, it will not be created in host header mode, and this configuration will not be possible.
After installing WSS but before doing anything in the Administration pages, go to the command prompt and navigate to the Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/web server extensions/60/bin folder. Run the stsadm.exe tool to create the database using this syntax:
stsadm -o setconfigdb -ds <database server name> -dn <database name> -hh
If you are not using integrated security for SQL, you must also include a username (-su) and password (-sp) in the command. The important piece is the -hh parameter which specifies Host Header mode.
Once the configuration database has been created, you can then create the sites. Make sure the server's hosts file is updated to specify the domain names you would like. For example, a hosts file for three team sites might look like this:
xx.xx.xx.xx www.site1.com
xx.xx.xx.xx www.site2.com
xx.xx.xx.xx www.site3.com
Where xx.xx.xx.xx is the IP address of the server.
Then, create the sites using the stsadm.exe tool:
stsadm.exe -o createsite -url http://www.site1.com -ownerlogin <domain>\<username> -owneremail <email address>
Do this for each site. Navigate to the URL to select the template and your site will be created.
More information on this configuration can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/wss/2/all/adminguide/en-us/stsc03.mspx
BEWARE: This configuration will be broken if you install SharePoint Portal Server on the server. While Portal Server can be installed and reconnected to existing WSS Sites, this is NOT supported when using Host Header Mode. Portal wants all WSS sites to be addressed http://<Portal>/sites/<Site Name>.
To implement this configuration along with Portal, I suppose the best way is to install Portal on a separate server. Then each WSS Site can be linked to the Portal, and the Portal's Site Directory can be updated to link to the existing WSS Sites.
If someone is aware of a better implementation, please, let me know.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
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In investigating OnFolio (thanks to Spike's comment), I found that I could give it a URL to a web service. In OnFolio, you can specify your blogger settings. It supports standard blogging environments like blogspot, or, it can take a custom command.
I created a web service that in turn calls SharePoint's Lists web service to create a new item in a SharePoint list (my 'Blog' list, in this case). I did this because the lists web service takes some fairly complex parameters in its "UpdateListItems" method.
My web service simply accepts a Title, Body and URL. It then formulates the correct parameters for the UpdateListItems method and calls the method on the proper WebService.
This is just a proof of concept and would require quite a bit of work to get it robust enough for the real world. For example, here's an issue that would have to be resolved:
The lists web service simply takes a ListName to know which list you are working with. Question is, which site contains the list you want to work with? That is determined by the web service you reference. If I'm working with a team site called "MyBlog," I would have to reference this web service:
http://servername/sites/MyBlog/_vti_bin/lists.asmx
If I want to work with a list in my “InvoiceProject“ team site, I'd use this one:
http://servername/sites/InvoiceProject/_vti_bin/lists.asmx
Well, if I want my web service to be able to post to any list in any site, we'd have to create a way to dynamically bind to the correct web service. Hmmm.....
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
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I have a client who is interested in creating a Blog using SharePoint. I've got that part down, but another requirement is to integrate with OnFolio. OnFolio is a cool tool, but it seems to be mission SharePoint integration. It can take content and post it to a blog (blogspot, for example), but our client would like this functionality to feed the information right into a SharePoint list.
Ideas anybody???
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
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This is so cool!
Have you ever struggled with customizing the look and feel of your SharePoint Portal site? For example, which CSS class controls the background color of the navigation bar? Well James Milne is here to save the day.
James has created a GUI-based skin designer for SharePoint. Just go to the site, and plug in different settings for colors, fonts, etc. Each time you change something, the site refreshes showing you the result. Once you get it looking just the way you like, you can view the stylesheet and copy it to your clipboard. The site also lets you submit your skin to be reused by others.
This is very cool! I wish it existed last summer when I was struggling with customizing some SharePoint sites for a client!
Saturday, April 30, 2005
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