BinaryJam

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.

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

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.

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 see why Mindsharp are up there in
the Sharepoint league with People like Mark and Todd and the
others, just wish they were in the UK when we were getting our SPS/WSS installation going.

This links is for you guys , ADS Automated Deployment Services, not as I said Advanced Deployment Server.

Also
this morning I spoke with Ontolica guys who showed me the search
product they do, this is cool stuff, also saved searches in web parts
that can be put all over.  Will be plugging this hard when I get
home. 

Then
I got to speak to a host of Microsoft Personnel, when certain product
managers were not interrupting (nearly all the time, and not just at
the stalls, this guy could not help but butt in while the speakers were
taking a breath in session)  I jest, well slightly.

Mike
Amerlaan did some great presentations on WSS and happily took my
questions, and on meet the experts night I got to speak to the BDC
expert, whose name I will insert here once I found it out (so sorry I
missed it in the session and never asked when we spoke).  I
love BDC. I love that I can connect it directly to my user profile
database and add to it from something other than AD.

I
also was told that they are trying much harder to conform to section
508 compliance, obviously this is hard with the amount of JScript in
Sharepoint, but if those guys can cover off the rest then fantastic,
one less job for me to do on my customizations.

MS guys please hurry along with that demo.

What
was also great was just walking past people like Don Box and Chris
Sells, I didn’t speak to them I felt too stupid, I mean I develop web
apps and customize Sharepoint in a small way what can I say to Don
?  “Errr hello?”  would be about all I
could manage before I started to show my ignorance.  I also saw,
Beat Schwegler, who’s BOF with Christian Weyer I went to at TechEd 2004
and I also saw Jan Tielens (from U2U Smart Part) being swamped by
people.

You
know who else was at PDC, MicroFocus!  yes the Cobol people, I met
a nice chap from England from Microfocus and they are still living the
dream developing COBOL for .NET (they already do) so you COBOL guys if
you have Cobol and want to expose your data using Web services then
look into Microfocus, I tell you when I used it, it was the best damn
compiler and complete development debugging environment I ever used and
even in VT220!!!!

Last
thing, is it just me or when everyone else saw the sparkle demo with
XAML and timelines and 3D rotation, did any one else thing Flash
Killer????

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 set.  Now it doesn’t do that.  ASP2 controls aspx pages for apps and Sharepoint plays nice. Any content for Sharepoint is passed to Sharepoint not intercepted by it.

WSS is designed to be a platform for building, out of the box come blogs and wiki, blog support should not be a surprise as now content from WSS can be surfaced as an RSS feed.  Any list you have or doc lib or all of the site can be published as an RSS feed.

What look particularly good but I need confirming was that Office 12 outlook has RSS built in and RSS feeds from a doc lib will auto update and a click on the doc opens it in office so a save auto updates it back to the doc repository.  The usual WSS alerts will also come into force, and perhaps the RSS properties will change and also indicate modifications (not seen this but this is standard RSS reader behavior so I expect this).  What this actually means is offline document storage via outlook.

There is support for user controls with ascx, infact some new capabilities require ascx’s

There is support for resources for globalization.

Web parts are fully backwards compatible. Although considering what I did to them seeing is believing.  ASP2.0 has the idea of a web part for web part pages, this is not specifically a Sharepoint thing but a 2.0 thing and these same web parts can be deployed into Sharepoint.  Were you would inherit from the Sharepoint base class though is when you want access to specific web part caching.

There are a host of controls that can be used in web parts like the SPGridview this is a funk grid that does sorting automatically etc.

There is an SPSiteDataQuery that can query across lists.  an auditing model so hits against items are stored, this can also be queried and displayed.

WSS now utilizes master pages so areas can pick a master page (like asp master pages) even after site creation and change the branding of a site.  However the default.aspx page still exists in the area templates and the web part zone layout lives there, this makes sense as you wouldn’t want to lose zones on a quick change of design.

More features like workflow, special content types and features are the really cool parts that all other things seem to stem from.

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 lot on was the Zoom features built in to the WPF something that would go great with the accessibility crowd, something that windows applications have not been great on ,  also this auto scaling makes it transfer to all the other platforms easily like media centre and the pocketpc.

I wnet out for Pizza last night bu this damn jet lag is making me so sick did not sleep well at all till I lost the pizza, probably more info than you needed but for the guys back home Im sure its nice to know Im suffering a little out here.

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.

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 been changed no popups no warnings nowt.

I missed out on the cheap phone offer by minutes.  DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN.

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