A place for Sharepoint and rantings
Archive for September, 2005
New Skin New Engine
Sep 27th
Finally got round to upgrading to the next version of dasBlog. I also chose a new skin, thanks to Steve for the banner logo.
Soon I migrate hosting suppliers so things may go a bit funky for a while but I’m hoping for a smooth transition.
NakedCleaner
Sep 22nd
This is nothing about cleaning or nakedness but a colleagues new blog. So far it has content about PSP’s, formula 1 and other gadget and car related subject.
So take a look www.nakedcleaner.com
Is UDDI dead
Sep 17th
I said it a couple of times at the PDC to people, is UDDI dead. In lots of demos more and more of the MS product range InfoPath, Sharepoint and let’s face it the whole of office are using Web Services. Not once, NOT ONCE did I see a tModel key to make use of UDDI’s indirect addressing.
From an Ops point of view If I host a bunch of Web services on a server then all of a sudden one service gets to be well know and needs isolating, perhaps to its own machine(s). I don’t want to have to change the end point on all the clients. That service may have started small but became really useful, it never got a unique name in DNS and it was just hosted as part of a collection of sites and services, now it’s got big and I have to move it, when I move it all the clients die.
So please guys, you have UDDI services in the 2k3 product so start making use of them.
PDC Last day – People
Sep 17th
Well it was the last day of the PDC, I had a good time and met some great people.
First two guys who stopped at my hotel who became my traveling companions and friends throughout the week, Joseph and Tom. Joseph works with web and Tom with Marine software and GPS. Had some fun at universal and they had some fun taking the mick out of me and my jet lag and sticking to the water instead of drinking the free beer, which lets face it a Brit turning down free beer is un heard of.
Second I got the chance to meet two guys from Mindsharp, who provide training for Sharepoint and Bill English works for them and wrote the Blue Sharepoint bible. I met Todd and Mark. I spoke mainly with Todd who is a highly energetic personality and great fun to talk to about anything but especially Sharepoint. Todd showed me his implementation of a Recycle Bin which was very cool. Todd tells me that he’s about to blog a lot of this stuff so for those who have not heard of Todd or have him in your RSS readers here’s the link
http://mindsharpblogs.com/todd/
So watch that space. It’s easy to More >
New Sharepoint
Sep 16th
The new version of office 12 WSS is at the core of all the developments based around the office server range. What is meant by office servers is currently unsure and as for marketing and matching and costs there is no information but the design model is WSS at the core with various office servers being based on top of this, search, content management, business processes, portal, CMS.
To give you a clue as to how clueless people are about the marketing of the office servers I was told that SPS may not be shipped in that guise for the upgrade, its there as part of the design but you might not purchase it like that it may be that to achieve the goals required you may have to buy several parts of the solution or those parts will be marketed as something else, but I’m guessing here based on the woolly replies I received.
Its the core changes to WSS though that make everything possible.
WSS is built on top of ASP2.0 not built with built on. Before Sharepoint in its evilness took control of the default application and processed aspx pages itself unless it didn’t belong and exclusions had to be More >
PDC Tues
Sep 14th
Hmmm, seemed like i managed to pick all the wrong tracks on Tuesday. I went to what I thought would be best for work and not what Im intersted in, this prooved a bad Idea. I looked at groove but within minutes found out groove is a client application that integrates to sharepoint. That was a major leave now signal to me so I did and moved to an office customisation session which sounded good but was about the ease of customisation of the new RibbonX bar using XML, this needs 5 minutes to explain it not a whole session, but I was miles from the other session. So I stayed.
Its nice is all I can say tey finally simplified tho whole office addin capability and integration into the office menus and all the apps work the same way and it takes care of removing you in the right circumstances so a lot less work for office integrators. Not something I see us doing a lot of but maybe.
Then I went to a lap around WPF which was a demo of creating an applicaion in xaml and c#. There are some great things in this area what was concentrated a More >
PDC 05
Sep 13th
Well I arrived in LA, some 12 hours later, then another 2.5 hours to get thru customs and traffice before I could get my room. For one moment I thought I’d managed to book a real dodgy hotel the way the shuttle bus drove us to the hotel but after a few blocks of Frutas Y verduras we appeared as if by magic on a street full of towers and palms in Downtown LA.
Traffic was bad as some muppets had took out the powergrid when they wired it wrong and it hit all LA in the morning and they are now rebooting traffic lights by hand so the radio told us, and told us, and told us, yeh yeh once was enough lady.
From my room I can see the Hollywood sign, but due to the smog you cant see it all that well, certainly not with a simple 2mpix camera phone.
Apparently the subway is the best way to travel to the convention centre, so oh my I think Im in trouble tomorrow. err Taxi!!!
I best set the clocks or something cos f. knows what time it really is.
PDC Keynote
Sep 13th
Wel I saw bill Gates this morning and some other guys (some I knew like Don and Scott and heard off others).
But Wow Gates realy good pitch I find Bill great to watch anyway I have a lot of respect for the guy. This pitch obviously is about vista and office and there was some good demos of whats coming with office12. I saw some great interation with the new sharepoint product.
Office was very pretty and the new interface is good.
I only saw a glimpse of the new sharepoint product but there were two things I thought good, a recycle bin for documents and offline integration into office12.
What I didn’t see was integration with existing office for this stuff, probably as its likely to be RSS based as sharepoint has RSS capabilities and so does office12. What was also missing was whether there was updates to those offline files or notifications.
I also saw some great comminication collaboration, a peer to peer connection was created and a powerpoint demo was “projected” onto the other client and then shared and edited and updated by the other client, again what seemed to be missing was there was no notification that the file had More >
Dan’s article on Web Part Versioning
Sep 8th
My colleague Dan has finally started a blog, although not a technical blog he is posting some technical articles.
The first of these is on Versioning wep parts in sharepoint. This article details all the different ways and problems we encountered and explains why we picked the method we did, as contained in previous posts with code.
The article lives here