Blogs

Today at //Build we at Microsoft announced that the long awaited support for Collaborative apps in Teams Personal Tabs and Messaging Extensions now is available for usage in Office.com, Outlook and Outlook on the web. This update to Teams apps is based on the new Promise based Teams JS SDK version 2.0 and the just published Teams Manifest 1.13. Announcing Yo Teams version 4 Through the Microsoft 365 Platform Community (PnP) we have also released a brand new (preview) version of yo teams that supports both this new Teams JS SDK as well as the updated schema. All so you can build Teams applications, on your terms, that also works in Outlook, Office.com and Outlook on the web.

Five years! It’s been five years seen I first published the Microsoft Teams apps generator - yo teams, and in a few days we also have the 5th anniversary for the official Microsoft Teams launch. It’s been five very interesting years that has changed how we collaborate and communicate. It all started long before March of 2017. I had the opportunity to work for an organization that was one of the early adopters of Microsoft Teams, and driven by my curiosity I immediately saw that with this new tool had some amazing opportunities to create even better experiences for my customers. Without essentially any documentation, and without no tooling whatsoever I handed responded to a couple of call for papers for conferences during 2017 on the topic on how to extend Microsoft Teams (at that time only with Tabs, Connectors and Bots). And that’s where my struggles started - I had to build everything from scratch all the time, working on plumbing, packaging, deployment and it took ages before I could create the real solution. With the experience from the beta and the version 1 release of SharePoint Framework in February that same year - I decided that why don’t I use the same tech stack as SPFx and create a generator to scaffold out all that plumbing for my Teams tabs. That would be a great challenge, and something that would allow me to create demos for conferences and customers faster as well as something I could share with the broader community. And that’s how the Yeoman generator for Teams Tabs was birthed.

Today I thought that I should step out of my normal blogging content and share some of my personal pet project and hobbies. I always been keen of tinkering, testing and building things - being software, hardware, or our house or garden. Over the last few years I’ve been trying to make as much things as possible “smart” in our houses, and particularly in my home office. This home automation project consists of tons of different third party options, but also quite a few devices and gadgets that I built myself. A couple of examples; I’ve built quite a few temperature and humidity sensors that are placed around the houses, door sensors, I have a few old refurbished computer fans that are controlled by these sensors to force air in or out of the rooms, I have a custom built “meeting traffic light”, a purpose built screen with sensor details and notifications. Most of these custom devices has one thing in common - they are based around the ESP8266/ESP32 chip, programmed with ESPHome and orchestrated by Home Assistant.

We’re getting closer to the holidays and we all like to both give and receive gifts at this time of the year. Here is an early Christmas gift from me, and the amazing Microsoft teams that’s been building out these new features, to all of you fantastic people out there. A few months ago Microsoft announced the capabilities where we can deploy Microsoft Teams apps and use them across other high-usage areas of Microsoft 365 and now those areas has been extended even further and covers Office.com, Outlook web and the old fat Outlook client. This great feature allows us to create a personal tab, that when deployed can be used inside Microsoft Teams just as normal, but also in the Office.com portal (if you haven’t visited that portal in a while - do it, there’s some great new features in there) and Outlook (both web and desktop).

When building applications for Microsoft Teams, the very first hurdle essentially all developers will try to jump over is the one with getting an access token to be able to communicate with Microsoft Graph. This is something that can be done fairly easy, if you know what to do, but requires you as a developer to connect a few dots. Over the last year this has become way easier, and there are a few great examples out there - you can find some great ones in the PnP Teams Samples.

Today I handed in my Orange badge to Avanade and signed out of my Avanade account. It’s been a six and a half year long adventure where I had the opportunity work with amazing colleagues and exciting clients. I’ve been given the opportunity to grow my career and skills in directions I did not think about, and I’m very proud of what we achieved and what we delivered to clients. It has been so much fun representing Avanade in client meetings, and at conferences. And I’ve been working with some great teams that delivered solutions that literally changed peoples lives. I’ve also had a blast for the last two years taking a crazy idea about a revolutionary service into something real, a new service for Avanades client that will impact their workplace experience for the next few years.

I’ve been using Ring cameras for several years now and a while back they introduced the option to have the cameras take snapshots periodically. This is awesome as you can fire up the Ring app and see a timelapse of your cameras. However, this only works in the app, you can’t export a timelapse! But, as a proud geek this should not be a problem to me and can be solved!

Yesterday Microsoft released the anticipated set of scripts required for you to add the Microsoft Viva Connections app to your Microsoft Teams environment. It’s a very simple approach that only requires you to download a PowerShell script, install the latest Microsoft SharePoint Online PowerShell module and then answer a set of questions, and voila you have the Viva Connections Desktop app ready for installation in Microsoft Teams. Note: as the time of writing this and testing the PowerShell script, I was not able to download the required SharePoint Online PowerShell module and received an error while running the script. The latest module I could install/find did not have the Get-SPOIsCommSite cmdlet. However, it’s only required for validation that the site you specify is a Communications Site, and if you’re sure about this you can safely just comment out those lines in the beginning of the script.

When building software the most common scenario is that you have a team building the solution, application and/or service. You typically have front-end, back-end and full-stack developers, you have testers and designers, and more. However, working in a team is not always easy. Back in the days we could all have our software running locally and we just grabbed the latest version/commit and hacked away. For web applications the use of localhost worked just fine for almost everyone. But with cloud based solutions where you have a strong connection to one or more cloud services, it becomes a little bit more complex - you might have connections to cloud services such as storage, databases, web service and more. In most cases these resources can be spun up by each developer or shared and then managed by a configuration/environment file.

The growth of using Yo Teams - the Microsoft Teams Apps generator - has been tremendous over the last year, and I can really tell that it’s not just being used for development and testing by the number of questions and requests I get on how to make a proper deployment of the solution to Azure. In this post I will share how I most often do it. The initial version of Yo Teams shipped with simple instructions on how to do Git deploy of your application to Azure. A method that worked most often, but was very error prone and very slow. This is still in the documentation of any generated project (yes, will change in 2.17 and later). That method was never intended for any production scenarios, but more as a quick start for developers to get going. But now, with Azure DevOps pipelines being available to almost everyone, and with Github Actions, I think it is about time to document this down so I have something to share when this question comes up.

ngrok is a fantastic tool, that I use on an everyday basis when building solutions cloud. It allows me to host and debug an application locally and at the same time host the website or API’s with a publicly accessible https endpoint. As I work quite a bit with Microsoft Teams development this is essential when building bots (Azure Bot Service cannot talk to localhost) or building out Teams Tabs with SSO. However, how good this tool might be, there are several firewalls, security clients and companies that actively block ngrok. Ngrok does establish a tunnel from the public internet to your machine, and you should be aware of that - it is a security risk. Most notably ngrok has been used as tools for malicious attacks.

When you’re working with building applications or services there’s always a need to store configuration. For Azure there’s a great service called Azure App Configuration that allows you to securely store, manage and retrieve configuration settings. It’s a perfect service for both smaller and larger projects and it keeps your configuration in control, and of course secured and audited. When I’m building solutions using node I typically start with storing my configuration in a local .env file and then use the dotenv package to import those settings into process.env properties. That makes it super easy to work with configurations, settings and change them as needed without fiddling through all the code and replace. Since I always add the .env file to my .gitignore I also reduce the risk of sharing secrets and passwords. When moving this from my local dev machine into Azure I have historically just used the Web App application settings. That works really great and is a simple solution to have these settings being read runtime, the web app only needs to be restarted to pick the new changes up.

Such a great week this is, after being accepted into the Microsoft Regional Director community earlier this week, today marks the 11th time I’m awarded with the Microsoft MVP for Office Apps & Services. Dear Wictor Wilen, We’re once again pleased to present you with the 2020-2021 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in recognition of your exceptional technical community leadership. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in the following technical communities during the past year:

I’m incredibly proud to announce that I’ve been accepted into the Microsoft Regional Director program. The Microsoft Regional Director (RD) program is a global community of passionate technology thought leaders, where Microsoft once a year appoints a small set of leaders as Regional Directors, to serve on a two years basis. It’s a fantastic opportunity for me to play a small role in this group of people - that I look up to as leaders, superstars, humans..and friends.

While migrating my site from Orchard to Hugo I wanted to add some JavaScripts. Specifically I wanted that to power the search experience using some simple JavaScripts. However, I’ve grown quite fond over using React (and TSX/JSX) to any kind of user experiences for the web and I did not want to go back to pure JavaScript or use some DOM manipulation scripts such as jQuery. Hugo, that I use for my static site, does not directly have support for transpiling React. But with a few small steps you can make React transpiling as a part of your Hugo build and use React for your user experiences. Yes, this might not be new to everyone, but I did not find a direct guide on how to set this up - specifically for Hugo noobs such as me. So here’s a quick guide on how to get started with Hugo and React.

When refurbishing my site and setting up Github workflows and actions I wanted to have a way to correlate any of my deployments of code to the statistics I have on the site and any telemetry/data in Application Insights. Application Insights has an API to add Annotations in your timeline. It adds an entry into your Application Insights instance at a specific time with a set of comments. This annotation is visible throughout many reports such as Sessions, Failures, Events and more, see below.

Eventually time caught up with me, and with the help of some isolation, boring weather and some recent announcements from Microsoft Build, I had to go and update my/this web site. It was way overdue and it’s been on my to-do list for far to long - for a number of reasons. First of all this site has been hosted on Orchard on Azure since 2012 - without any hiccups. The setup was a dynamic web site, using Orchard, which was a state-of-the-art web and blogging CMS at that point in time. I loved the architecture and how they built it on .NET! However this setup required me to do upgrades once in a while, and eventually I stopped doing that due to some big changes, that I did not have time to mess with. So I let it be. Secondly this was running on Azure Web Site and using Azure SQL Server for backend - although fairly cheap, not optimal for my blogging cadence and the content. The interwebs has moved on and there are also more or less requirements to have your site on HTTPS, which I did not have previously. And last but not least I suck at design so I cringed to do an update.

Hey, I’m back. Long time since I did some writing on this blog. But I needed to get this one out. As you all know I’m a huge fan of the Microsoft Teams extensibility model and now with the SSO support for Tabs, it’s even easier to create integrated experiences for your end users where they can consume data and information from the Microsoft Graph or LOB systems. I recently did a small appearance at the Microsoft 365 PnP webcast showcasing how to configure and scaffold a Microsoft Teams project that uses this new SSO Tab feature. You can watch the recording here:

Happy Easter everyone, I have fantastic news. After seven preview versions (and even a skipped version - 2.6) the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator 2.7.0 is now available for you to use! Just like tons of others do; there’s been over 6.000 downloads of the generator, it’s generating a handful of new Teams projects every day and it’s done from all parts of the world! Join the movement!

I’m excited to be returning to Las Vegas in May of 2019 to speak at the SharePoint Conference 2019 in May 21st to 21rd, at the MGM Grand. This event is one of the two major events, second one being Microsoft Ignite, that the SharePoint, OneDrive and Yammer product groups are announcing their greatest and latest features and also where you will meet some of the finest speakers and community members of our great SharePoint family.

Imagine you want to create a chat bot for Microsoft Teams in order to automate tasks, enhance the discussion or just feeling lonely and want someone to talk to. There’s many ways of doing this; you can start from scratch building a bot, using the Microsoft Bot framework and/or using the Microsoft Teams Yeoman generator, you can use the Azure Bot Service, you can use the FAQ bots to essentially create a no code solution.

A long overdue update of the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator – we’re now up to version 2.5.0! It’s a fairly substantial update both in the generator and in the generated code – this update will make future updates a lot smoother and will allow for enabling more features going forward. Thanks to all who provided feedback and input and has tested the generator over the last few months. You can get the latest generator by running

SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is a fantastic development model on top of (modern) SharePoint, for user interface extensibility, and it have evolved tremendously over the last year since it became general available. The framework is based on JavaScript extensibility in a controlled manner, compared to the older JavaScript injection mechanisms we used to extend (classic) SharePoint, that comes with a lot of power. Using SharePoint Framework our JavaScript has access to the whole DOM in the browser, meaning that we can do essentially what we want with the user interface – however, of course, we shouldn’t, only certain parts of the DOM are allowed/supported for modification. These areas are the custom client-side Web Parts we build (that squared box) or specific place holders (currently only two of them; top and bottom). For me that’s fine (although there’s a need for some more placeholders), but if you want to destroy the UX it is all up to you.

Microsoft Ignite is just around the corner and the sheer number of new announcements for SharePoint and SharePoint Online has been almost overwhelming. The team is making such a tremendous job right now! One of my favorite features, that I have requested both privately and openly with Microsoft, is the ability to have custom themes for SharePoint. Yes, we had the old “look and feel” thing, custom CSS thing, Office 365 suite bar branding, but there has never been a good way of using this in Modern sites or even the possibility to turn of the default themes. And now, last week, Microsoft announced a new set of features that can do all of this for us – create custom themes, a nice theme designer and the ability to hide the default themes.

I’ve been building chat-bots for a while now and I’m seeing more and more requests of building these bots for enterprises. For bots targeted at the enterprise, perhaps being hosted in Microsoft Teams, one of the first requirements is that they should get data from their internal systems and most specifically from Office 365, through the Microsoft Graph. The problem here is that we need to authenticate and authorize the user, through Microsoft Azure AD, to be able to access these resources. A Microsoft Bot Framework bot, does not inherit the credentials or security tickets from the application the bot is being invoked from, so we need handle this ourselves. For instance, even though you have logged in to Microsoft Teams, or Skype for Business or your Intranet – your security token cannot (and should not) be passed to the Bot.

Today is the day where the Microsoft community officially award the community with the Microsoft MVP award. We will all receive some new friends and old friends and also we loose some dear friends (that we of course hope to see back into the program again). I’ve been fortunate to be re-awarded with the Office Servers and Services Microsoft MVP award, for the 8th consecutive year. Thank you Microsoft!

A couple of months back I started creating a Yeoman generator to make it easier for me to scaffold, build and deploy the Microsoft Teams extensions (now apps). I’ve received very good feedback on it and had some very nice contributions to the project, which was hosted on my public Github account. To really make this available for everyone to use I’ve been discussing this project with the Microsoft Teams team about having it “officially backed” by the real team and nut just me as an individual. After some interesting discussions the Microsoft Teams generator now have a new home.

If you are an ISV or SI with multiple clients and are interested in building SharePoint Framework (SPFx) solutions that you would like to re-use you will face a huge issue when it comes to reference SharePoint JavaScript files and reference your SharePoint Framework bundles. All these URL’s are hardcoded into your solution configuration files and requires you to update these files and rebuild for each and every client environment. And not only that even in your own development team this will cause issues if you don’t have a shared development environment.

A couple of weeks back I published a Yeoman generator to build Tabs for Microsoft Teams. Since then I’ve continued to add stuff to it as the Teams team has continued to add features to their extensibility story. So, this generator is not only for creating Tabs, but now also for adding Bots and Custom Bots to Microsoft Teams. With that I decided to rename the generator to yo teams (generator name is generator-teams).

A big round of applause for Microsoft and the team behind Microsoft Teams for now being general available (GA) worldwide. Today, they lit up the Teams icon in the Office 365 waffle for all tenants (unless your admins are being boring and has turned it off). It’s been awesome to be a part of this preview journey, which started last summer. Avanade was selected as one of the TAP members, in a preview program shrouded in a secrecy I’ve not seen at Microsoft before. Our IT department slowly trickled it out, so that we had a chance of learning how Microsoft Teams could fit into our organization and our way of working. A big thanks to David who have mastered the preview program internally.

I’m happy to announce that today at SharePoint Saturday Munich I presented a new Yeoman generator for building Microsoft Teams Tabs projects. Tabs in Microsoft Teams is a great way to extend the user interface and to do integrations to other systems and provide visualizations. Tabs are based on a JavaScript framework, a set of web pages and a manifest describing the Tab. It requires a set of manual steps to both build out the pages, configuring CSS, hooking up the JavaScripts, deploying it all to a web site hosted in the cloud, writing the manifest, packaging the manifest into a zip file and more.

Let me start with congratulating the SharePoint Framework team on an amazing job and an amazing journey reaching this GA milestone. A Big Thanks from the team here in Redmond to everyone who helped us to get to GA! #SPFx #SharePoint #SharePointFramework pic.twitter.com/czo2Duon7z — Chakkaradeep (@chakkaradeep) February 24, 2017 The SharePoint Framework plays a significant part of the SharePoint future, yes - this is only the first version with a lot of new features on the way, and it is a part of the new SharePoint wave. I’ve haven’t seen this interest in SharePoint for many years and I’m glad I’m still in this business. Delivering top notch collaboration solutions for our clients at Avanade. The SharePoint Framework will make it easier for us to customize SharePoint and it will also bring a lot more value for our clients in the end allowing them to stay evergreen and not being tied into “workarounds” and pesky SharePoint Designer hacks or arbitrary JavaScript snippets.

Over the last few days the issue on how to prevent users to create Office 365 Groups has popped up in all sorts of conversations. This blog post will show you how to do it in the correct way, and serve as a future reference. I’m not the only one who have blogged about this, it’s in many places including official documentation. But in many places both scripts and some caveats are either wrong or outdated. One post covers this topic really well, and in a good and correct way and it’s this post by John P. White - Disable Office 365 Groups, part 2. Read it! This post however will show you how to do it in a more direct way, using PowerShell.

One of the key parts of SharePoint Web Parts is the ability to have them configurable using the Web Part properties. This story is still true with client-side Web Parts in the new SharePoint Framework. In this post I will show you one of the more common scenarios; how to populate drop downs (and other fields) in the property pane dynamically. But also show you how what’s wrong with the current implementation.

Today, Mr Vesa, announced the availability of the (long awaited) CDN features for SharePoint Online. The SharePoint Online CDN features allows you to turn one or more libraries in your SharePoint tenant into a repository for assets that you want to store in a CDN for performance reasons and geo-distribution reasons. How to set things up I’m not going to rehash everything that is outlined in the announcement post, but rather highlight a few important things.

SharePoint developers - we do like GUIDs, don’t we. We all read RFC4122 both once and twice. And now with SharePoint Framework and the goal to embrace all them Macintosh and open source people - they gotta have their fair share of GUIDs. And to aid with that the SharePoint Framework got some really nice GUID features, although a bit unpolished as you might notice - but this is all preview bits at the time of writing.

I guess that almost every application or solution you ever built has contained some portions of a logging mechanism. And how many of you have written your own - yup, all of you! But what about the SharePoint Framework - yes, it has built-in logging! How to log in the SharePoint Framework Logging is a very convenient and easy way to keep track of events happening, instead of having breakpoints, or in JavaScript even worse - alerts. The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) has as all decent frameworks a built-in logging mechanism, albeit very simple, but still yet valuable. It’s contained in the @microsoft/sp-client-base module and the class is called Log. To use it in your SharePoint Framework solutions you need to import it as follows:

Do you write code that potentially can throw an error or an exception? Oh, you don’t - but sure you use a web service or external service or something that can throw an error. Well, it is you responsibility to handle the error and make sure to inform the user in a good way that something bad happened. With that I mean, do not show just a Guid. With the SharePoint Framework being all client side I think it is important to have control of your client side Web Parts and make sure that you properly handle and display error messages in a consistent way. In this short post I will not go in to the JavaScript error handling details, but rather show you another nugget in the SharePoint Framework that helps you render error messages in a standardized and consistent way.

SharePoint Framework is all about rendering stuff on the client side, avoiding the long overdue ASP.NET Web Forms technology that SharePoint (Online) is still fundamentally based on. When rendering things client side everything is done asynchronously, to avoid locking down the UI threads and having a user experience that is fluent. In order to give the user good feedback that things are happening in the background, you need to have some kind of visual cue that tells the user - hey I’m doing stuff now, gimme a minute. There are thousands of different ways to do this and everyone does it differently; ranging from animated gifs to “loading” texts. And everyone using different methods does not always help with the user experience - so why don’t we have a common way to do this?

Summer is over, slacking time is over, it’s time to get up to speed and learn some new stuff. There’s very much to talk about this fall if you’re interested in SharePoint. And this fall I will do a couple of conferences as a speaker, which I very much looking forward to. TechDays 2016, Amsterdam For the first time I will attend and present at the TechDays 2016 in Amsterdam, the 4th and 5th of October. A local conference hosted by Microsoft. I will present three sessions:

At the Future of SharePoint event in San Francisco on May the 4th Microsoft announced the new and improved customization option and/or development model called the SharePoint Framework. This is a development model that solely focused on client-side development. There’s been some confusion going on on Twitter and other social medias and podcasts and I thought I should put together an Q&A post for this.

Today is the day many of us have been waiting for since the big SharePoint event at May the 4th. The highly anticipated SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is here and announced in at the SharePointFest, in this blog post, as well as in the new Github repo for SharePoint. Personally I’ve been waiting for this even longer after being involved by the product team to give early feedback and also attending the first top secret DevKitchen “hackathons” where we could try out very early bits.

Here’s one of these real life stories that caused some headache for quite some time but was in the end very easy to resolve. I’ll write it down and hopefully some of the search engines pick it up and help some other poor soul out there. Background We have a solution that uses publishing pages to manage news articles and information pages in SharePoint Online. These articles and pages have a custom page layout with a custom content type, so they look decent and have proper metadata. They are all deployed using the PnP PowerShell cmdlets.

I have long thought that GUIDS are unique, well GUID actually stands for Globally Unique Identifier. And SharePoint is one unique product using GUIDS everywhere. There are 2^128 possible GUIDs to choose from, so there should be no need to reuse GUIDs as long as I’m alive methinks. SharePoint uses GUIDs to uniquely identify Site Collections and Sites, and more, and this is for instance exposed through the ID property of the SPSite and SPWeb objects. If you take a look at the documentation for SPWeb.ID it actually says: “The globally unique identifier for the website” - which I interpret as this ID is unique, globally! Period.

This is by no means an official support statement from Microsoft, rather an unofficial compilation of official statements. Last week the SharePoint Online team rolled out the preview of the Modern SharePoint lists. Modern Lists are the new incarnation of ye ole Classic SharePoint lists that we all loved and hated over the last decade or so. The Classic SharePoint lists and libraries has been one amazing and powerful tool and I would say that they have been a big part of the success SharePoint has had. Customizations using XSLT, SharePoint Designer and JSLink has all contributed to its success.

As many of you have noticed I have not been posting my What’s new on the Office Roadmap updates. Well, I’ve been on a vacation not trying to think of Office 365 to start with, and then also, I’m ending my series of these posts. Sorry. I have to start with saying that I love the amount of changes we see now in the Office 365 service. The team(s) is/are doing an amazing job with kicking out new features and updates in some areas. Our favorite SharePoint is killing it with features at the moment, and more is to come. And do believe this will continue for the foreseeable future.

Happy Friday and welcome back to another Office Roadmap update. This time the day before the big SharePoint Saturday, here in beautiful Stockholm, where we all are going to indulge on the goodness that was announced a couple of weeks back at the SharePoint Futures event. Lot of new stuff in the mobile space this time around. Changes 2016-05-20 Launched Windows Universal App: OneDrive UWP (Universal Windows App) are now launched and live (new) User Activity Reports: Compliance center improvements for OneDrive/SharePoint on document views/edits/downloads etc (from in development) Intelligent Discover for Android: Discover (Office Graph) view in the Android OneDrive app (new) Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for iOS: Access your SharePoint files from the OneDrive app (new) Office 365 Groups: easily add users from a distribution list to a group: this is cool, now you can add all members from a DL to an O365 Group instead of one user at a time (new) Self-service NGSC setup and goove.exe takeover: Simplified setup for NGSC (Next Gen Sync Client). Finally. Goove.exe (giggles) (new) Rolling out Office 365 Groups: scripts to migrate Distribution Lists (DLs) to Groups: Some sweet scripts for migrating DL’s to O365 Groups (new). Funny it’s listed as rolling out, the script is there! What’s missing. Project Online - Developer Samples: Project Online goes Github: http://aka.ms/pppmapisamples (new) Project Online - OData performance improvements: and when they have some sample code, they of course want it to perform (new) SharePoint home in Office 365: the new SharePoint Home tile is being rolled out. Check /_layouts/SharePoint.aspx in your tenant. (from in development). Office integration added back to NGSC: improved office integration in the NGSC (Next Gen Sync Client) (new) Improved image attachment viewing in Outlook on the web: Always nice to see improvements to the web client, it’s now way ahead of the desktop one, this time big thumbnails and side by side view (new) In Development Annotating and inking for Mac: Draw using your mouse on you Mac - cause you suck and don’t have touch on that shiny thing (new) Copy and move to SharePoint: Intelligent Discovery for iOS: Discover (Office Graph) for the iOS OneDrive app (new) Intelligent Discovery for Windows Phone: Discover (Office Graph) for the Windows Phone OneDrive app (new). Anybody want to buy a couple of Lumias, I have several as paper weights. Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for Android: Access SharePoint files and not only OneDrive on your Android OD4B app. (new) Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for Windows Phone: Access SharePoint files and not only OneDrive on your WP OD4B app (new) Office 365 Groups: Exchange Admin Center (EAC) UI for migrating Distribution Lists (DLs) to Groups: Evolution of the migration scripts mentioned above. You will soon be able to migrate from DL’s to Groups using a single button in the Exchange Admin Center. Nice! (new) OneDrive for Business Shared folder Sync: this is a nice new feature. If someone shares a folder with you from their OneDrive you will be able to sync them (new)

Hey, happy Friday the 13th! Here’s a small Office Roadmap update for all of you Jason fans! Not that many changes this time around, but still interesting, and a lot of Outlook 2016 for Mac releases. Changes 2016-05-13 Now Launched eDiscovery Case Management, Hold & Permissions: the new eDiscovery features are now fully rolled out (from in development) Enter full screen view in Outlook 2016 for Mac: the full screen view for Mac Outlook as announced in January are now out. (new) Find a meeting room in Outlook 2016 for Mac: and so is the possibility to find a meeting room on your Mac (new) Office 365 Groups: ability to update privacy type: you can now as a Group owner change the privacy type of your Groups (public or private) (from rolling out) One-click Archive: The on-click archive feature in Outlook on Mac are now also fully rolled out (from rolling out) Outlook 2016 for Mac two step authentication: And you can also log in using two factor authentication on your Mac (new) Rolling out New editor for Outlook 2016 for Mac: And if you’re lucky you might even be getting the new editor in Mac so you can use “more fonts and colors”. (new) Project Online - Removing the upper limit on number of PWA instances per tenant: after this update you will be able to have unlimited number of PWA instances, was previously only 7. (new) Right to Left language support in Outlook 2016 for Mac: and if you write your stuff from right to left you can now use Outlook 2016 on your Mac, without writing backwards (new) In Development FastTrack | Dropbox to OneDrive for Business Migration: If you are using Dropbox you can soon get help from the FastTrack center to get yer files out of there (new) New usage reports for SharePoint, OneDrive and Mailbox Storage: the new admin UI will get better and improved reports for storage usage in SharePoint and Exchange. (new) Office 365 Usage Reporting APIs: and not only that, you can suck that data into your own apps as well (new) SharePoint mobile app for iOS: Nothing new here, it’s just a rename from “The new SharePoint mobile app” to “SharePoint mobile app”

The Office Roadmap updates with the new announcements from the Future of SharePoint event has arrived (they arrived May the 4th to be precise). I’m back from the event and San Francisco and I’m full of the energy that the SharePoint team transmitted. You should specifically take a look at the In Development part here. That’s where we got the new and fresh stuff from the Future of SharePoint event. Changes 2016-06-06 Now Launched Delve Analytics: Do you want all the details on how and when you work Delve Details and an E5 subscription is all you need (from in development) Drive Shipping and Network Based Data Import for Office 365: Fast Track is getting more and more mature with import options (from in development) FastTrack | Box to OneDrive for Business Migration: Still using Box? Get your files over to OneDrive with Fast Track (from in development) FastTrack | Expanded language support: More languages available in the FastTrack (new) FastTrack | Power BI onboarding support: And Fast Track Power BI is now live (from in development) Multiple timeline bars in Project Online: This must be one of the features that’s been jumping back and forth the most on the roadmap (from rolling out) Office 365 Groups: multi-domain support: This is one of the most important feature releases of Groups. Read this article for full details and configuration options. (from in development) Office 365 Reporting Dashboard: Better reporting in the admin center (from rolling gout) OneDrive for Business Recent Files to Sway: Easier access to your OneDrive docs in Sway (from in development) Skype for Business App SDK: Get your coding skills on and build some Skype Apps (from in development) Skype for Business Mac Preview 1: The long awaited Skype Mac client is not out. Feedback on it has been moderate at best though (from in development) Updated people profile experience in Office 365: The Delve profile page is now fully rolled out. I wonder if Delve will stay as the document discovery feature or if it just will be renamed to “My Profile” or “People” or something, which would make total sense(new) Yammer user profile update from Azure AD: The one-time sync from Azure AD is now launched. Wonder if we ever will see a proper sync? (from in development) Rolling out Basic Chat: Basic Skype chat from the Skype icon in mail - it doesn’t say that it’s web based, but I guess it is(new) Office 365 Groups: usage guidelines: A very important update, this allows you to modify the usage guidelines for Groups (another feature copied from Yammer) (from in development) SharePoint Online - modern document library experience: The new doc lib experience, mayhaps rolled out a bit early and without any guidance (new) In Development eDiscovery Case Management, Hold & Permissions: more permissions control for eDiscovery and compliance stuff (from rolling out) New AutoCAD file format support in Visio: AutoCAD file support in Visio… (from rolling out) Office 365 Groups: search Groups files using Office Delve: Searching should now show documents from Groups (new) SharePoint home in Office 365: Finally Office 365 and SharePoint will get a proper home page. The Sites tile will be renamed and now point to this page. You can read more about this feature here. (New) SharePoint Online – Client-side Web Part for Existing SharePoint Pages: The new customization features announced at the Future of SharePoint Event. Client-side Web Parts created using the new SharePoint Framework on existing SharePoint pages. Read my post about it here (new) SharePoint Online - modern lists experience: A new lists experience, very similar to the new doc lib experience. A great and modern looking UX. (new) SharePoint Online - SharePoint Framework: The new client-side framework that will be used to make the future customizations and development of SharePoint. This is the Framework that Microsoft will build the new “NextGen” portals and the one we will use. There’s much more to read about this here. (new) SharePoint Online - Site activity and insights on the Site Contents page: Each site will get its own set of statistics that shows you how the site is used and what activities are going on (new) SharePoint Online – Webhooks on SharePoint Document Libraries: One of the first new extensions to the SharePoint APIs. I’m glad they are using standardized Webhooks, instead of some weird remote event receivers. Hopefully we’ll get the same for lists (new) The new SharePoint mobile app for iOS: Announced as the “Intranet in your Pocket”. The new SharePoint App will first come for iOS (actually I’m already using it) and then later for Android, and if Windows Phone is still alive by the end of this year those two users might get it as well (new) Cancelled Class Notebook: limit sharing and deletion of section groups: This is just weird, this was rolled out the other week and is now all of a sudden cancelled (from rolling out)

Today at The Future of SharePoint event Microsoft have announced the next iteration in SharePoint development - the SharePoint Framework. As one of the old ones who started with the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit, to the COM+ event handlers in SharePoint 2001, over to custom built DDFs, to WSP’s to Apps and Add-ins - this new framework is a very welcome change. For years SharePoint Developers have been forced to walk in shame in the outer rims of the developer guild. It’s been so hard to get over the threshold and once you were over it, there was very few who actually returned to a normal life. I’ve been struggling for years to get ASP.NET or web developers to get on over to SharePoint development with no luck. The Add-in model did not help in any sense here and just introduced new pitfalls and confusions.

About a year ago I wrote a blog article called SharePoint Team sites are dead. An article that stirred up many feelings in the community and started an interesting (and somewhat harsh) discussion - which was kind of the point. Fast forward to May 2016 and this is a totally different ball game! SharePoint Team Sites are back! Modern team sites Jeff Teper, CVP at Microsoft, writes in the just now published The Future of SharePoint blog post: “Team sites has always been at the heart of collaboration with SharePoint”, a statement I absolutely agree with. Team Sites is what made SharePoint such a successful product. The post I wrote about how Team Sites are supposed to be dead are still true though - Team Sites are not what they used to be, they have transformed and merged with Office 365 Groups into something more powerful - the new Modern Team sites.

Updates, updates and updates. This time around there’s a great deal of clean up on the Office Roadmap. Mayhaps they are adding space for all the neat SharePoint things we expect to see next week at the SharePoint Future event. There’s also a bunch of new stuff added to the In Development category, scroll down and learn something. Also worth noticing is that the Yammer team has started to catch up on the feedback they received over the last few years. I think that in just a few weeks they made more than they actually been able to do for years. Good job - now if you only could focus on some proper integration; with identities, search, threading and stuff that matters.

Here’s some really big updates of the Office Roadmap this time around. Two major themes of this update, part from the now more or less traditional copy paste errors; Planner - the Planner team have tons of nifty and neat stuff coming our way. Edu - Microsoft is all in on school and Edu features at the moment! Check the “In Development” section - you will like it. Wonder how much more good stuff they are saving for the May 4th event!!

I’m happy to just have recieved the e-mail that informs me that I’m renewed as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), for the seventh time. This time it’s in the Office Servers and Services category after last years change in the program. Previously I was awarded within SharePoint Server. To be honest with you, the last few years has been well…average, but this year will be epic in the history of SharePoint, Office and Office 365! Looking forward to all the continued co-operation with Microsoft and my MVP peers.

Here’s some more updates on the Office Roadmap. A couple of days late due to me being offline and chasing bunnies and chickens. Highlights of these updates are the awesomeness going on in the Office 365 Video team and also that the OneDrive sync team is back! Changes 2016-03-28 Launched Class Notebook Add-in for OneNote: The Class Notebook add-in for Onenote is released. (NEW) February Updates in Office Mobile Apps for Android devices: Android apps received some updates with auto-save and collab authoring in Word and PowerPoint (NEW) February Updates in Office Mobile Apps for iOS: And iOS got some as well with Box integrations (NEW) February Updates in Office Mobile Apps for Windows devices: And Windows Phone did too (these users can be counted on one hand nowadays); inking and Excel updates was on the menu (NEW) Office 365 Admin app - Group functionality: Group admin options in the admin app, nice but for me the UX works fine with 10-15 groups, imagine an enterprise with thousands (from in development) Office 365 Admin app - Push Notifications for Message Center: Get them push notifications from the admin app and always know when there is Office 365 issues. Great! (from in development) Office 365 Admin app for Windows 10: The Windows 10 Universal App for Office 365 is here. Currently in Beta, but (NEW) Office 365 Video - Choose Your Own Thumbnail: A great video addition (from in development) Office 365 Video - Improved upload experience: easier to upload videos, one step forward to a real video internal Youtube (from rolling out) Office 365 Video - Insert video from SharePoint edit page ribbon: use videos in your SharePoint sites (from rolling out) Office 365 Video - Upload your own subtitle files: Wow! Awesome addition to the video portal! (from in development) Office 365 Video - Video Viewer Statistics: I like this, but I’d like to see better overall statistics. Right now its a copy paste job from many sources (NEW) Office 365 Video - Yammer settings per channel: about time, and the best thing is that you can turn the Yammer integration off! (back from previously launched) Rolling out Manage Yammer licenses in Office 365: To Yammer or not to Yammer - that is no longer the question, but up to you! (from in development) Office 365 Reporting Dashboard: This new reporting dashboard is awesome! (from in development) Search on Yammer iOS app: giggles, not commenting on this one (NEW) In Development Allow/Deny list external sharing domains: long awaited feature (NEW) Bitcoin Currency Format Support: Bitcoins is back( NEW, well it was here before but disappeared for a while) Delve People Experiences - Praise: Prais feature is now back in development (from rolling out) Expiring Yammer Announcements: Instead of fixing the read item count issues (any of them) the Yammer team thinks, hey let’s focus on something else instead… (NEW) Improvements to Outlook Add-in Store: better in-Outlook experience when getting Add-ins (NEW) March Updates in Office Mobile Apps for Android devices: RTF support for Android devices and SmartArt editing (NEW) March Updates in Office Mobile Apps for Windows devices: RTF and Sway features in the WinPhone apps (NEW) OneDrive for Business Deny List of File Types for Sync: Allows admins to deny certain file types (NEW) OneDrive for Business Pause Sync: looks like the OneDrive sync team is back from the coffee break (NEW) OneDrive for Business Shared folder Sync: sync someone elses folder (NEW) OneDrive for Business SharePoint Online Document Library Sync: The end of groove.exe? (NEW) OneDrive for Business Windows 8.1 Support for Next Generation Sync Client: Anyone still on 8.1, slackers! (NEW)

I got some news for you. The Office Roadmap is updated, actually it was updated yesterday but I had other stuff to do. Let’s jump right into the changes and look at them Groups thingies!! Changes 2016-03-17 Launched Dark theme for Outlook 2016: Somehow someone thought this was important. Personally I’m not a fan of the dark theme in Office, specifically not in Outlook - it looks all weird and funky since e-mails have a white background. (from in development) Directory pictures in Outlook 2016 search suggestions: When searching in Outlook (on the desktop) you should see profile pics of people - I don’t, and I’m on the Office first release branch… (from in development) Learning Tools for OneNote: There are some new Learning tools in OneNote for people with learning needs. (NEW) Office 365 Groups: dynamic membership: Dynamic membership in groups should be rolled out. Love the feature! You configure the dynamic membership in the Azure AD portal and it also requires Azure AD premium if you wondered (from rolling out) Office 365 Groups: files quota management: File quotas for group - one of those things we waited for are here, anyone seen it by the way. The description still says “we plan to” - but it is marked as launched (from rolling out) SharePoint Online uses Exchange Web Services to send mail: SharePoint alerts and mails are no longer marked as spam (from rolling out) In Development Focused Inbox for Outlook for Windows, Mac and web: The focused inbox feature from the Outlook iOS/Android app will come to Outlook for Windows and Mac as well as web (NEW) Message Center improvements Spring 2016: some filtering features and a new weekly digest e-mail incoming for the message center (NEW) Office 365 Groups: guest access support: YES! YES! YES! FINALLY! (NEW) One-click Archive: archive your stuff in Outlook if our using Outlook for Mac with a single click (NEW) Outlook 2016 for Mac two step authentication: Modenr AuthN and two-FACTOR authentication for Outlook for Mac (NEW) Upload local Outlook attachment to OneDrive & OneDrive for Business: automatically upload your attachments to OneDrive when sending e-mail using Outlook for desktop (NEW) Moved off into the previously released list Skype for Business for Android

Ok, let me first start by saying that I might have overreacted in the last blog post about the roadmap. I still don’t think it is ok to have this kind of chaos on such an important and official document/page. But stuff happens, we all know that (I’ve done some pretty serious dumba** stuff with my blog posts over the years). So back to the good news. We have an Office Roadmap update. And this time around it looks all fine! It’s a bit long this time, due to stuff getting back to where they are supposed to be, but there are some really hidden gems in here. Have a nice read y’all.

Spring is closing in, astronauts are returning from a year in space, the US has an election going on and there’s update on the Office Roadmap. The roadmap mess saga continues…with Microsoft making even more fools out of themselves!!! Changes 2016-03-01 Launched No new things are rolling out…instead they are rolling them back! Rolling out All of the following was previously Launched but are now rolling out instead. Microsoft, you need to think about how you update this page. The last month or so has been ver unreliable. Please, if you need help in managing a proper list of changes you have my contact details. Actually in Sweden there is a law that what you publish on your web site is what is included in the service/product/offering (not exactly the legal text) at the time of purchase…

Updates! Updates! Updates! Yup, that would happen if Stevie B was still in the house rocking the Office Roadmap. Another round of updates, this time it looks like a fixup of the mess that happended last time. So some things are reported as NEW in here, but they aren’t really new, they just disappeared for a week or two… Changes 2016-02-13 Launched Apps for Project Pro for Office 365 write support: If you’re building Apps, sorry Add-ins, you can now do write back for Project Apps/Add-ins (from Rolling out) Auto Generated Project IDs in Project Online: more control of the ID’s generated in Project (from Rolling out) Cloud PBX in Skype for Business: Enterprise voice is now live (from In Development) Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in SharePoint Online: DLP features in SPO is now Launched, from Rolling out Designer: The new Designer feature in PowerPoint should be in your desktop application by now (from rolling out) DLP in SharePoint - Policy Management: It says private preview only and public in september 2015, we’re already way beyond that, so I guess nobody bothered update the text. Anyways - this is a great feature that allows you to control DLP and actions, triggers, reports etc for SharePoint Online and OneDrive. (from ROlling out) Events from email: Exchange Online will now automatically detect flight information (just like Cortana) and automatically block the time in your calendar (from In development). Note: this feature is ON by default but can be turned off. FastTrack | Data migration to OneDrive for Business from File Shares: File share to OneDrive FastTrack is live. (from in development) FastTrack | Data migration to SharePoint Online Team Sites from File Shares: File share to Team Sites is also live (from In development) FastTrack | FastTrack Center services coming to smaller customers: Great change for smaller customers, minimum number of seats are now 50 for FastTrack, instead of 150. (NEW) FastTrack | Office 365 ProPlus Upgrade Assistance: FastTrack for Office (from in development) First Release: Select People support for SharePoint & OneDrive for Business: SPO and OD4B is now first release enabled (from rollingout) Mobile offline files (read-only) for iOS: Offline support for the OneDrive app (from rolling out) Mobile PDF annotation support for iOS: Another great feature on IOS and not on Windows Phone (I’m just waiting for Satya to can this huge failed experiement). (from rolling out) Morph for iOS: Support for the new Morph PowerPoint animation on IOS (and not Windows Phone) (NEW) Multiple timeline bars in Project Pro for Office 365: I think this is one of the things that changes every time on the roadmap, it’s probably a huge deal for the Project people. (from rolling out) Next-generation OneDrive for Business sync client (PC & Mac): NextGen (LOL) sync engine is now fully launched. I sure hope they don’t think that this is a finished product!!! (from rolling out) Office 365 Groups: dynamic membership: Dynamic memeberships for Office 365 Groups. This is really awesome. It requires Azure AD premium though. (from Rolling out) Office 365 Groups: files quota management: support for file quota managment for the Office 365 Groups SPO sites (from In Development) Office 365 ISO 27001 and 27018 Audit Report: Some new reports in the Service Trust Portal, I’m not sure if they are new or just updated. Not that descriptive information (From Rolling out) Office 365 local datacenter in India: The 365 datacenter in India has opened its doors for tenants. Check your Message Center for information about when you are being moved (from In Developemnt) Office 365 Video - Yammer settings per channel: This new settings allows you to specify a Yammer Group for the Video Channel or even better you can disable it. (from rolling out) Office Online multi-user coauthoring in Yammer: Co-authoring in Yammer! When will they implement a feature that allows you to NOT store documents in Yammer? Prolly never. (from In Development) OneDrive for Business Web UX refresh: New UX in OneDrive for Business. It’s a great addition and I’m looking forward to see this new concept coming to other parts of SPO PowerPoint Designer - Desktop: This is exactly the same feature as above “Designer”. (from rolling out) PowerPoint Morph - Desktop: The Morpth animation on the desktop edition of PowerPoint. I actually like it (from rolling out) Preview_Office 365 Customer Security Considerations Refrence Guide: I’m not 100% sure on what this exactly is, but it’s a new “Security Consideration Guide” linked to the Service Trust Portal. Gotta find it and read it (from Rolling out) PSTN Calling in Skype for Business: US only, call real phones from Skype. (from in development) PSTN Conferencing in Skype for Business Online: conferencing dial in option, US only so far (from in development) Real time presence for PowerPoint: You can see in real time who’s editing the same doc as you in PowerPoint (I guess this is for online, and the next one for desktop). (from in development) Real Time presence in PowerPoint for desktop: see above (from in development) Red Alert Autoposting: automatic detection of issues in Office 365, about time (from rolling out) Set an expiry date for a guest share: This one has jumped back and forth from rolling out and launched. But I have yet not seen it in any tenant! SharePoint Online uses Exchange Web Services to send mail: SharePoint e-mails should no longer be spam (from rolling out) Skype for Business One-time search notification: First time a user does a search in S4B they will get a help message (NEW) Skype Meeting Broadcast: Skype Meeting Broadcast is launched! Love it! (From in development) Sway recycle bin: Get yer Sways back (from in development) Task Notifications in Project Online: notifications from project, title says it all (from rolling out) Rolling out Embedded video in Universal app: When pasting a YouTube, Vimeo or Office Mix Video in OneNote (the Universal app only) you can directly in OneNote check out the video. Sounds cool, couldn’t verify since it doesn work… (NEW) Manage Yammer licenses in Office 365: I’m should just shut up on this one since there are to many sensitive people that would sacrifice their kids for this emabarrasing service. You knwo what, you can unassign licenses now for Yammer and it just removes the Tile from the Waffle. Users can still go to Yammer. Epic failure!!! (from in developemnt) Office 365 Groups: multi-domain support: One more of my requested features for Office 3365 Groups are now being rolled out (from in development) Office 365 ProPlus Consumption Reports: awesome reports for Office, including Visio and Project, activations (NEW) Office 365 Reporting Dashboard: the new admin portal will contain a highly customizable reporting center (from in development) Search on Yammer iOS app: No comments… (NEW, well it was there, then it wasn’t and now it’s back) In Development Allow/Deny list external sharing domains: white/blacklisting of external sharing domains. A welcome addition (NEW) Bitcoin Currency Format Support: fire up your Azure VM’s to mine some bitcoins (NEW) Delve People Experiences - Praise: This is one of the features that is actually being rolled back from In development. This is a good thing. I hope they add features so that you can control the Praise experience; that is turn it on/off, and also that you can delete Praises from an administrative side (from rolling out) Expiring Yammer Announcements: This should reduce the number of unread items in your Yammer inbox (NEW) FastTrack | Expanded language support: the additions of simplified chinese, Thai and Vietnames to the FTC (NEW) Improvements to Outlook Add-in Store: an in-client experience for finding Apps/Add-ins for Outlook. Great new feature (NEW) Intune Mobile Application Management and Conditional Access for Skype for Business: More control of Skype for Business on mobile devices (NEW) Office 365 Groups: guest access support: My number one feature I’m waiting for for Groups. When finally launched I see no single reason whatsoever to use Yammer. (NEW) Office Delve updated profile experience: The profile part of Delve will be improved over the next few months (NEW) Removal of Delivery Reports from Outlook on the web: Delivery Reports will no longer be a part of Outlook on the web (who uses that anyways!?) (rolled back from Rolling out) Skype for Business Cloud Connector Edition: Connect your on-premises Skype for Business to the PBX/PSTN in Office 365! (NEW) Yammer service on by default: I complained about this stupid idea previously and now they moved it from Rolling Out to In Development! Not going to do a sarcastic comment this time, but if that is true that someone reconsidered this change it is a good thing for all enterprises that would like to control what their users use and what not to use. (From Rolling out) Cancelled Azure departmental template availability: Yup, it’s being cancelled over and over again (from in development)

Here we go again! The Office team keep a steady pace of updates coming to the Office Roadmap. This time it’s a bit weird, but we have a lot of things being rolled back!? Also I noticed that the site was down today for maintenance. So, is this just a DR solution and they lost data or have they just messed things up? I smell that someone actually MANUALLY updates this list, but hey, they can’t be that crazy, can they?

Time for some updates on the Office Roadmap again, these updates was actually published yesterday, but since writing these blog posts isn’t what pays for the bread on my table I needed to do other stuff before writing this. Last week the location of the Roadmap changed and today there seems to be some issues with the site; you can now find it at https://fto365siteprod.azurewebsites.net/roadmap. There are some real highlights here and as usual some Yammer funkiness…

Hello and welcome back to an awesome new year – 2016 is here and we have our first Office Roadmap update. First things first; the Office Roadmap URL has changed. The new home for the Office 365 Roadmap is: http://fasttrack.office.com/roadmap. As usual when it comes to changes on the Office level - the communication is kinda poor. Ye olde URL just now gives you an error. Didn’t someone think about having a redirect or something from success.office.com to the new home at fasttrack.office.com. Anyways, let’s take a look on what has changed since the last post in December.

Wow, 2015 has been one really interesting year for me! For the 9th year I will do my summary post (here’s the olde ones: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006). 2015 started really cool with me joining Avanade here in Sweden and boosting the Collaboration efforts. It is an incredible team we have here and some amazing customers and opportunities ahead and I don’t regret this move for a second. And now in December I internally switched role to an even more interesting position – Nordic Digital Workplace Architect. Avanade has really understood what a Digital Workplace is and I’m really looking forward to focusing even more on this. Enough of Avanade talk, but if you’re interested in working in the front line of the future Digital Workplace and with us, contact me!

A christmas update to the Office Roadmap! It looks like Microsoft has abandoned their bi-weekly update schedule and is now updating whenever they can (please, I got a job to do!). This time it’s a few new thingies but mostly a clean up of old released stuff. Happy holidays everyone! Changes 2015-12-18 Now Launched Analyze Office 365 data with Equivio Zoom: the eDiscovery features now allows you to integrate Equivio machine learning capabilities. This is some cool stuf that I need to experiment with. The compliance and eDiscovery fetaures of Office 365 is just getting stronger and stronger. (From in development) FastTrack | Improving Intune onboarding with MDM: Get on board the Office 365 train even faster with improved Intune onboarding stuff (from in development) Rolling out Office 365 Protection Center: The Compliance center is renamed to Protection Center. A very good move since the features of the Compliance center is expanding so much. Also a new and improved UI is on the way. (New) Removal of Delivery Reports from Outlook on the web: Delivery reports of mail will be removed from OWA. It will remain in the Outlook client though. I don’t mind if they kill of this feature totally. It’s just annoying and since you can always decline to send a delivery report it has no purpose. (new) Unlimited storage for OneDrive for Business: Unlimed, limited, unlimited…the story goes on. Read the full post here. That post is written by the Office chieftain Jeff Teper, compared to previous OneDrive posts, so it might be true… (from in development) Work Management in Office 365: Planner is rolling out to all First Release customers. Wohoo. Note that it is a preview rolling out. More info. (from in development) In Development Manage Yammer licenses in Office 365: Yammer licensing on a per user bases. I interpret that as we can turn off Yammer for most of our users. This is not a new thing or changed thing, just a rename of the title and description. New Yammer User Onboarding and Sign Up Experience: Yet another of the things we complained about for years are now being fixed in Yammer. Somehow I think the Yammer team are feeling how they slowly are being drowned and now finally with the last bits of air they have are trying to get their head over the surface, trying to survive… (new) Office 365 Groups: Outlook on the Web and Outlook Groups app user interface improvements: A better UX for Groups – very welcome, especially for large organizations (new) Real time presence for PowerPoint: No description available (new) Real Time presence in PowerPoint for desktop: No descriotion available (new) Skype Meetings: This one is interesting. “Free online meetings from Skype for Business…”. What does this mean? At least I can set up meetings using Skype today…Anyone? (new) Moved off into the Previously Released list Add-in deployment via Click-to-Run Automatic Relationship Detection Automatic Time Grouping Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) integration for Click-to-Run Click-to-Run manageability gaps addressed for IT pros Clutter for your inbox on by default Create and collaborate on Visio diagrams using Office-like experience Create and Edit Comments in Excel Modile for iPad Custom Tiles Deferred Updates ExpressRoute for Office 365 FastTrack | Providing the customer success service FastTrack | Request Service Onboarding Getting started experience in Visio Improved sync slider and lean storage footprint on small devices in Outlook 2016 Information Rights Management (IRM) protection now added for Visio files Keyboard access for Pivot Tables and Slicers in Excel Keyboard access for Shape Panel in Visio Mark emails as Clutter in Outlook 2016 Modern Attachments in Outlook 2016 New and Modern Charts New capabilities for Yammer iOS app October 2015 Improvements in Excel Mobile for Windows October 2015 Improvements in Excel Online Office 365 Groups: mobile app Office 365 Help Pane Office 365 Notification Pane Office 365 Video Office 365 Video – Embed Office 365 Video Update OLAP Connection Support in Power View Optimized file picker in Outlook on the web Organization support card Outlook for Android opens IRM protected emails Outlook for iOS opens IRM protected emails PivotChart Drill-Down Navigation (this one was never on the list previous to this) PivotTable Field Search Producer controls for Skype Meeting Broadcast Purchase & Subscriptions Experience Refresh Quick data linking in Visio Real-time Co-authoring in Skype for Business Real-time Yammer group activity indicators Refreshed stencils and smart shapes in Visio Search Refiners in Outlook Web App SharePoint Online will start to transition to using TLS to send email securely in our datacenters Skype for Business for iOS Smart Rename in Power Pivot Subscription Management Experience refresh Support for small screen portrait layouts in Outlook 2016 Sway for Windows Document Import Top teacher-requested features added to OneNote Class Notebooks UserVoice coming to Outlook on the web Video Based Screen Sharing Yammer for Apple Watch Yammer Next Group Notifications Yammer to use Azure Media Services for Video Encoding

Third update in about a week on the Office Roadmap, and just as the last update this one isn’t that big. A couple of “fixes” and two new things Changes 2015-12-11 Rolling out Multi-select Attachments in Outlook 2016: This was “Launched” a couple of weeks ago, but now it’s not. Perhaps a new category – “Rolling Out”? (from Launched) Public Folder eDiscovery & In-Place Hold: Compliance search on public folders. Wasn’t public folders dead? (from In Development) In Development Office 365 Connectors: One of my absolute favorite new features as of lately. I blogged about this one a couple of weeks back. Keep an eye on this one peeps! (new) Yammer user profile update from Azure AD: “All key properties from Azure Active Directory users will be one way synchronized to Yammer. “. I quoted it directly. So, is this a one way, as in one time, or can you override the profile properties? At least they are listening on stuff we asked for years ago… (new)

More updates on the Office Roadmap! This time around just a few ones but also some interesting things to notice. But before we list the updates let’s take a look at the actual roadmap site that has received an update which should make it easier for you to filter and find out what’s new. This is a very welcome update and could possibly make the roadmap site useful, but I’m sad to say unless they have a proper change log. I’m not going to bother that much but instead rely on my own blog :-)

December updates incoming! The Office Roadmap has once again been updated and this time with quite a few new additions to the roadmap. Note that there is very anticipated and important updates to Office 365 Groups - have a read and enjoy!! Changes 2015-12-14 Now Launched Capacity Management capabilities in Project Online: Colored heatmaps and stuff in Project Online (from Rolling out) Compliance Search Conditions: Improved search experience in the compliance center (from Rolling out) Data Loss Protection (DLP) for Office desktop: Data loss prevention features in the Office client (Excel, PowerPoint and Word). Cool! (from Rolling out) DKIM Outbound for Exchange Online Protection: outbound validation of e-mails (from Rolling out) FastTrack | Data migration to OneDrive from Google Drive: Fast track center now offers migration from Google Drive to OneDrive (from In Development) FastTrack | Skype for Business Onboarding Expansion: onboarding guidance for PSTN Conferencing and Calling Plans, Cloud PBX etc (from In Development) FastTrack | Azure Rights Management Onboarding: RMS Onboarding, isn’t this just checking a check box? (from In Development) FastTrack | Project Online Onboarding: Get them projects in the cloud (from Rolling out) New per-user licensing for Sway: license Sway per user! Which essentially means, we can now shut down Sway on a per user basis. (from In Development) Office 2013 Windows client modern authentication public preview: ADAL based sign in for ye old Office client (2013) is now in PUBLIC PREVIEW. (From Rolling out) Office 365 Groups: auditing: Office 365 audit reports now includes changes in Office 365 Groups. This is huge in making Office 365 ready for enterprises. Go Groups! (NEW) Office 365 Groups: Support compliance requirements: Another awesome Groups update. You can now put holds on Groups - which will put a hold on mailboxes, files, calendars etc in the Group! (From In Development) OneNote Online: Record Audio clips & Insert File: OneNote Online is a bit more pimped with Audio clips (NEW) Project Online content pack for PowerBI: Project Online data in PowerBI - a match made in the clouds (from In Development) Resource Engagement Workflow in Project Online: improvements for Resource Managers in Project Online (from Rolling Out) Sway admin controls over Insert tab content sources: Important enterprise focused update of Sway that allows admins to control from where the Sway users can insert data (from In Development) Sway in Service Health Dashboard: Sway traffic lights in the admin portal (from In Development) Rolling out Multiple timeline bars in Project Online: a new and pimped and more efficient timeline bar in Project Online (from In Development) Office 365 Groups: creation policy in Azure Active Directory: A new policy option in Azure AD that allows admins to restrict group creation to certain users. Previously this could only be controlled through the Exchange policy settings - but that policy only affected creation through Exchange, Outlook and the Outlook Groups app. This new policy applies to all endpoints (read Microsoft Graph, PoSh etc). (NEW) Office 365 Groups: dynamic membership: AWESOME! We will be able to create Office 365 Groups and base them on dynamic memberships, for instance have all users with the value “Project Manager” in their title in one group etc. (NEW) Office 365 Groups: naming policies for aliases: the naming policies only applied to the display name of the group previously, now it will also apply to the e-mail alias. (NEW) Office 365 Multi-Channel Catalog Support:: Improvement to the Education, Government (Public), and Charity sections allowing them to purchase any commercial service (NEW) In Development FastTrack | Office 365 ProPlus Upgrade Assistance: Onboarding center will help ProPlus customers to upgrade to the 2016 version. **giggles** (NEW) Office 365 Admin app - Group functionality: Group Administration is coming to the Admin App (from In Development, previously this one was called Office 365 Admin app updates October 2015) Office 365 Admin app - Push Notifications for Message Center: opt-in or out to push notifications (NEW) Office 365 Groups: data classification & extensible policy: This one is HUGE folks. And it just explains how important Office 365 Groups is for Microsoft and Office 365. This update states that we will be able to classify Groups (secret, confidential, unclassified etc) AND we will have the option to specify an endpoint that is called whenever a Group is created! BOOM! Take that Yammer! (NEW) Office 365 Groups: deletion recovery: get them Groups back from the dead with a single click (NEW) Office 365 Groups: expire inactive groups: Awesomeness just keep coming! (NEW) Office 365 Groups: files quota management: Get better control of the amount of data your groups use (NEW) Office 365 Groups: general usage reporting: Usage and Engagement reports in the Admin Center (NEW) Office 365 Groups: hidden membership support: Currently the membership is open, this update will allow you to have hidden memberships, very good for privacy reasons (NEW) Office 365 Groups: mobile application management: The Outlook Groups app will be a managed app in Intune (NEW) Office 365 Groups: multi-domain support: This one has been high on my whish list. Have control of the e-mail domain used by the Groups (NEW) Office 365 Groups: naming policy in Azure Active Directory: the description on this one is a copy of the dynamic membership one, see above, but I do think it is about having the naming policies not only in Exchange but also in AAD. (NEW) Office 365 Groups: Office Delve discovery & insight: Groups in Delve! Can’t beat that! (NEW) Office 365 Groups: usage guidelines: Better options for you to have guidelines about the usage of Groups within your organization. I’m thinking like the TOU in Yammer. So one more feature from Yammer is moving into Groups (NEW) Outlook on the web: Addition of “Distribution Groups” Option and Removal of “Other” link: Just a re-org of the menus in OWA. (NEW) Per user licensing for Yammer: I see this as we can now turn of Yammer and only let the handful of people that still likes it use it… (NEW) Project Online - Portfolio Dashboard: More reports based on best practices and industry standards (NEW) Project Online - Portfolio Dashboard for iPad: Same as above but for the illiterate. (NEW) Skype for Business Mac Client Preview: Them Appleheads will love this, we gotta give them a chance to participate in our meetings sometime :). (NEW)

Updates! Yes, updates! After some awesome announcements at the Connect(); 2015 conference the Office Roadmap is updated with some news, and a decent bunch of additions, specifically some nice new stuff in the In Development bucket. Love the Yammer updates - looks like someone has been listening after all, or have they - read the fine prints… Changes 2015-11-20 Now Launched Contact sync for Outlook for Android: Outlook for Android now syncs contacts to the native contacts application. Finally, this is great news. (New) Enforce Office 365 Identity in Yammer: An important and long anticipated (it only took a couple of years) update to Yammer and identities. No need for separate Yammer SSO settings. Click here for more information. (New) EU Model Clauses and HIPAA BAA Availability for All Yammer Customers: Another Yammer update, also this one is VERY important. With this update Yammer is getting aligned with the rest of Office 365 in terms of customer data protection. (New) Likes Coming to Outlook on the web: No more +1 e-mails? We’re certainly on the right path at least (From Rolling out) Mentions Available in Outlook on the web: Make it possible to @mention people in OWA. (From Rolling out) Multi-select Attachments in Outlook 2016: Surprised this feature actually wasn’t in there. Use Ctrl to multi select attachments (New) Persian calendar support in Outlook 2016: More calendar options, now with Persian support (New) Set Automatic Replies in Outlook for iOS & Android: You can now set Automatic replies in Outlook on your fruitphones or droids. (from In Development) Rolling Out Designer: Described as “a feature that will essentially allow you to deliver beautiful and impactful presentations with little to no experience”. This is a bit weird, it is the same description as the new “PowerPoint Designer - Desktop” feature below. (New) New Office 365 Admin Center Preview: The new Admin center rolls out. For more info see Marcs great post on IT-Unity. (From Launched!) November Improvements in Excel Mobile for Windows: This is something you don’t see often, updates to mobile apps on Windows (New) Office 365 ISO 27001 and 27018 Audit Report: information security reports. I doubt any other cloud productivity provider are even close to what Microsoft and Office 365 is doing now (New) Office 365 Video - Yammer settings per channel: Finally! No more posts of secured video details onto public Yammer groups… (New) PowerPoint Designer - Desktop: The PowerPoint people get some love, it’s not all Sway yet. For more information see blogs.office.com (New) PowerPoint Morph - Desktop: The second part of the new PowerPoint awesomeness. For more information see blogs.office.com (New) Preview_Office 365 Customer Security Considerations Refrence Guide: A new part of the Service Trust Portal in form of a security considerations reference guide. (New) In Development Add-in only authorization policy for Project Online: AppOnly policies for Project Online. This opens up quite a few new Project Online opportunities. (New) Archive button in Outlook 2016: The Outlook 2016 client will get the same nifty archive button as the mobile Outlook clients have. Browse and join Groups in Outlook 2016: You will in the future not only see your Groups in Outlook 2016. You will now also be able to see the ones you have not joined, and then join them. Hooray! (New) Circular Yammer User Profile Pictures: One of these important Yammer updates! I’m glad they are spending money on A/B testing a circular picture instead of a square one. Seriously, just do it and move on with more important stuff, such as USING THE PICTURE FROM OFFICE 365!!! (new) Dark theme for Outlook 2016: Get your darker sides on in Outlook 2016. (New) Directory pictures in Outlook 2016 search suggestions: This is a nice feature, see profile pictures when searching for people (New) Exchange Online Protection- Zero Day auto-purge: The Exchange team continues to impress with handling different kind of threats. (New) New Yammer group experiences: More Yammer UX updates. Each Group will now have its own inbox - wow… (New) Office 365 Video - Analytics, phase one: Insights on your videos - awesome (New) Office 365 Video - Channel Recycle Bin: Channels are just site collections and we will be able to recover the channels just as normal site collections Office 365 Video - Choose Your Own Thumbnail: choose one of several auto-generated thumbnails or upload your own (New) Office 365 Video - Deploy in US Government zone (GCC) & China datacenters: China and US Government can soon build their own Video portals. (New) Office 365 Video - Improved upload experience: The video portal will get a centralized upload center, with more details about the upload (New) Office 365 Video - Owner and People Metadata: This will be great improvement to the service and hopefully make search even more interesting. (New) Office 365 Video - Upload your own subtitle files: Subtitles! Office 365 Video is becoming a real video portal (webvtt format). This will also be integrated with search so you can search in videos. Cool! (New) Optimizing Yammer Inbox for Team Collaboration: Yammers attempt to change the way the inbox works. Removal of the “Mark as Unread” and replace it with a “Read Later”. Holy crap! So they didn’t listen to the massive feedaback on a “Mark all as read” feature. I think I just the last little hope for Yammer… (New) Sites Tile Page Update - Recent and Suggested Sites: The Sites tile in the App Launcher and Sites page will get a long anticipated face lift with the inclusion of a “Recent sites” feature. (New) Yammer Group Administrator Onboarding: A Yammer group admin guide. Is this really necessary? If it is needed then something else in creating a group is wrong. (New) Yammer Group Inbox View: Third update on basically the same topic. Yammer is redoing the Inbox… (New)

Wow, what a day for developers in the Office 365 land! Tons of new features was announced at the Microsoft Connect(); 2015 virtual conference. We’ve seen the GA of the Microsoft Graph and a bunch of new API’s added to the Microsoft Graph beta end-point and more. One of the features that I really have been waiting for is the Office 365 Connectors for Groups and the Office 365 Connector Cards. The Office 365 Connectors for Groups allows users of Office 365 Groups to add integrations to their Office 365 Groups. Connectors can be seen as services and events that you subscribe to and then the services when certain events happens posts information to the Group activity feed. There are a set of pre-configured Connectors that anyone can add or you can create your own Connector and customize it for your needs. For instance there are built-in Connectors for Twitter, Github, RSS feeds and Trello. The possibilities for this is endless!

Office Roadmap updates again! This time I’m reporting this from the MVP summit in Redmond. A couple of new and exciting things added to the In Development list! Changes 2015-11-05 Now Launched Clutter for your inbox on by default: For tenants/users that have the Clutter feature it will from now on be on by default Create and collaborate on Visio diagrams using Office-like experience: Visio is getting even sexier with dark themes, Delve and High DPI support FastTrack | Providing the customer success service: Get Microsofts help to start your Office 365 experience Getting started experience in Visio: Visio n00b improvements Information Rights Management (IRM) protection now added for Visio files: We now have direct support in Visio to protect our most valuable assets Keyboard access for Shape Panel in Visio: use F6 to work faster in Visio Optimized file picker in Outlook on the web: Pretty soon OWA will be favored over Outlook Outlook for Android opens IRM protected emails: Really important feature rolled out for Android Quick data linking in Visio: Make your Visio diagrams rock Refreshed stencils and smart shapes in Visio: New and slick stencils for architecture draqwings SharePoint Online will start to transition to using TLS to send email securely in our datacenters: internal service change but a really important one Sway for Windows Document Import: Something with Sway Yammer to use Azure Media Services for Video Encoding: Ooops, a Yammer update Rolling out Compliance Search Conditions: Improved Compliance search is rolling out Delve People Experiences - Praise: The Praise features is now rolling out in the Delve experience. FastTrack | Project Online Onboarding: FTC will now start onboarding Project projects Inline OneDrive attachment preview for Outlook on the web: Awesome new OWA features Mentions Available in Outlook on the web: Another of the social features are now in OWA Office 365 detailed usage reports: Even more detailed reports are rolling out. I can’t wait to see how we can use this to improve the adoption rate Office 365 My Account updates: The new My Account page gives you great details and control of you Office 365 accounts OneNote Online: Record Audio clips & Insert File: New OneNote features are being rolled out. New on the Roadmap PowerPoint Online: Ongoing improvements: New on the road map and it promises to make formatting better, include more symbols and faster slide interaction Word Online: Improving feature capabilities: Also new on the road map. Improvements in Word that includes image resize handlers, improved autosave and more, but most interestingly a lot of improvements in co-authoring performance In Development Delve Analytics: Brand new addition on the road map and a really cool one. For E5 customers (or E1/E3 with an add-on) you will get awesome analytics on how you organization collaborates FastTrack | Data migration to OneDrive from Google Drive: New option get the h**l out of Google Drive FastTrack | Data migration to OneDrive for Business from File Shares: New FastTrack migration option from file share to users OneDrives FastTrack | Data migration to SharePoint Online Team Sites from File Shares: Same as above but for Team Sites (Groups?) FastTrack | Improving Intune onboarding with MDM: FastTrack will support Intune when doing onboarding. Multiple timeline bars in Project Online: I have no idea how this is supposed to work but it looks like you can add heatmaps and other stuff… (was previously called New Timeline view in Project) Project Online content pack for PowerBI: Bring Project Online data directly into PowerBI. Sounds neat SharePoint/OneDrive for Business file activity report: Admin reports that allows you to see what your users do in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business Moved off into the Previously released list Inline Service Health for Support Request Creation Proactive notification of Outlook version - weird, this is moved from In Development! Did it ever roll out?

I have to admit it I have succumbed to Visual Studio Code and now also Gulp tasks, well almost at least. I was working the other day with some display templates and page layouts and needed a more efficient way than uploading the files to SharePoint Online. Open with Explorer could have worked, but since I used a customers Office 365 tenant I did not want to store credentials and do all the required voodoo to get that to work. Instead I decided to explore Gulp and see if I could automate this, and the result is a Gulp plugin called gulp-spsync.

Almost a month has passed since we had the last update on the Office Roadmap and quite a lot of things has happened. There are some new things this time and also some clean up of the items. Make sure you read through the In Development section, there are some hidden gems as well as the stuff that has disappeared!! Changes 2015-10-20 Now Launched Automatic Relationship Detection: Make it easier to detect relations between two models with no relationships configured Automatic Time Grouping: All these new Power* are rolling out now. Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) integration for Click-to-Run: A great update to optimize network traffic for C2R. New. Click-to-Run manageability gaps addressed for IT pros: More of the Office 2016 updates to optimize C2R is now “officially” launched. Configurable push notifications for Office 365 Admin app: What no Apple Watch integration yet? Custom Tiles: A fantastic idea but worst implementation ever. Yes, you can create custom Tiles for the App Launcher - but each and every user needs to manually pin it to their App Launcher #fail Deferred Updates: Only allow monthly security updates and defer feature upgrades ExpressRoute for Office 365: Improve the SLA of your network connection to Office 365 by having a dedicated route for your traffic Improved sync slider and lean storage footprint on small devices in Outlook 2016: Sync slider, just the name of it sounds cool. Keyboard access for Pivot Tables and Slicers in Excel: You can now use the keyboard with pivot tables and slicers in Excel! Keyword & People search suggestions in Outlook 2016: Better search in Outlook 2016. Mark emails as Clutter in Outlook 2016: Directly tag e-mails as Clutter from Outlook 2016, if your inbox has Clutter enabled. Modern Attachments in Outlook 2016: Best productivity feature in the Office 2016 suite New and Modern Charts: Modern charts, such as Waterfall… New Office 365 Admin Center Preview: Interesting. This preview is said to be launched - that is ON ALL TENANTS - but I have yet not seen it on any of mine. Mayhaps one of the US only things. Office 365 Help Pane: I really like the “What’s new” thing. Keeps you and your users up to date with changes. Office 365 Notification Pane: Notifications everywhere in Office 365 - now if only we had an API for this. OLAP Connection Support in Power View: OLAP and PowerView - a wet dream for the BI people Organization support card: Get your helpdesk details into the Office 365 Help pane. Really great feature. PivotTable Field Search: Can’t get enough of these PivotTable and BI stuff… Producer controls for Skype Meeting Broadcast: A surprise to me. Is this really launched? Purchase & Subscriptions Experience Refresh: I’ve said it before, the refresh is not as fresh as you want, specifically it is not very user friendly Real-time Co-authoring in Skype for Business: co-author like a champ! Search Refiners in Outlook Web App: Not only better search in the Outlook 2016 client but also in Outlook on the web. Skype for Business for iOS: I’ve seen people cheer in joy for this! Smart Rename in Power Pivot: Rename stuff smart… Subscription Management Experience refresh: A good and intuitive UI Support for small screen portrait layouts in Outlook 2016: Great update for all you Windows 10 7" screen users Top teacher-requested features added to OneNote Class Notebooks: I have not tried the OneNote class things, but I’m sure this is really awesome! Video Based Screen Sharing: P2P sharing of video content Rolling out Advanced administrative controls for archiving: Support for SEC 17a-4 record retention (new) Android: Android for Work compliance with multi profile support: support for Android for Work (don’t know what this is, but I bet it’s useful) (new) Android: Android M Enterprise compliance: More Android stuff (new) Android: Easy Sign-in, Sign-up: Never a bad idea to make things easy, especially when it comes to the Android platform (new) Android: Presenter view: Present your deck from your Droid (new) Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in SharePoint Online: This has been in the works for a long time, now finally rolling out. DLP in SharePoint - Policy Management: Public preview targeted for September 2015 Optimized file picker in Outlook on the web: A smarter file picker that allows you to automate steps when saving attachments Task Notifications in Project Online: Project Online gets task notifications and daily digests Unique Project IDs in Project Online: Auto generated unique and readable Project IDs (new) In Development Android: Deeper Integration with Outlook: quick edit of e-mail attachments (new)

And is Yammer dead? It is now three and a half years since Microsoft acquired Yammer and I think this is the end of Yammer, as a product/service. Let me explain myself, to avoid the flame war and hate mails that happened when I shared that my thoughts in the Team Sites are dead post. I think Yammer as a brand will stay for a while, it’s a strong brand and it’s worked into so many PowerPoint decks from Microsoft that it would be hard to wash that away. But as a product or service Yammer is no longer of interest. I claim this due to a number of facts and observations over the last few years. People who follow me on social media cannot have avoided how I’ve been pretty aggressive in my comments about this product and I’m by no means alone.

Hey, look at that - a surprise update of the Office Roadmap! This time around we just have a couple of minor updates AND a couple of features that actually is removed from the Roadmap - all related to FastTrack. My guess someone was to trigger happy earlier this month when releasing this… Changes 2015-09-28 These features are no longer listed on the roadmap! FastTrack | Yammer Onboarding Expansion FastTrack | Project Online onboarding FastTrack | Azure Rights Management Onboarding FastTrack | Adoption planning services FastTrack | Skype for Business Onboarding Expansion FastTrack | Data migration to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business All that is left of the FastTrack items are

The second update of the Office Roadmap this months is now live. This time a huge set of features that are rolling out, most of them has to do with the updated Office ProPlus client (2016). There are some hidden gems in this such as the “Likes” in OWA, huge Sway licensing changes and (the not so hidden) announcement of Office 365 Planner. Changes 2015-09-25 Now Launched Cortana & Office 365 Productivity Scenarios: The Cortana and Office 365 feature should now be launched (from rolling out). I’ve yet to seen what it actually does. Office 365 Groups: mobile app: Love it! We have the Office 365 Groups mobile app, called Outlook Groups available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone (on some platforms only available on select markets). Office 365 Service Trust Portal: A new portal with even more information about trust, compliance, certifications etc. Important for Company admins can log in to the portal, Service Trust Portal, to give other users access to the portal. It is implemented as an Azure AD app and it actually requires some interesting permissions on your Azure AD to be able to use it. Brand new on the roadmap. Office 365 Setup Enhancements: the new migration options are now fully launched Office 365 Setup Wizard: the more streamlined getting-started and setup guide is live. Office 365 Video: most likely the service that has taken the longest time to fully roll out. Video! It’s here… Office 365 Video - Embed: The video embed features should be available for everyone Office 365 Video Update: Everyone should also have the updated Video experience in their tenants by now. Yammer for Apple Watch: Yawn! If you are the one user using this, please contact me so I can find out why… Rolling out Automatic Relationship Detection: PivotTable stuff, for those who are interested I guess this is a big del. Automatic Time Grouping: Same here, but for PivotCharts… Colorful Office theme: This sounds like a small thing, but it is actually huge. Each Office ProPlus/2016 client application now has it’s own color scheme (Word - blue, PowerPoint - red, Excel - green etc). One of the feedbacks I heard from customers about Office 2013 was the white theme - no one liked it. I really fancy this new colorful theme, with a subtle color on each app which makes it much easy on the eyes. Create and collaborate on Visio diagrams using Office-like experience: Anything with Visio is a good thing Dark theme: Welcome to the dark side. If you liked to old app Darkroom, you’ll like this. Data Loss Protection (DLP) for Office desktop: DLP on the desktops for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Nice addition! Deferred Updates: If you don’t want to be on the latest and greatest you can now defer feature updates for the Office client. Easy Enable for Data Analysis Add-Ins: More Power[View|Pivot|Map] improvements Getting started experience in Visio: Visio for everyone! Higher DPI support for 250% and 300%: Ok, this must be in preparation for Surface Pro 4 (Staffan, I just dropped my Surface 3…) Improved conflict resolution in PowerPoint: Conflict resolution in PowerPoint has been a mess, especially with those Management Consultant slides… Improved sync slider and lean storage footprint on small devices in Outlook 2016: How about that, think about being the PM for the “sync slider”. Information Rights Management (IRM) protection now added for Visio files: RMS and Visio! Gotta keep those drawings secure! Keyboard access for Pivot Tables and Slicers in Excel: The Excel BI team has been on fire Keyboard access for Shape Panel in Visio: Visio is getting closer to be one first class citizen in the Office family Keyword & People search suggestions in Outlook 2016: better integration with the Office 365 backend in Outlook 2016 for search to give you even better and more relevant results Likes Coming to Outlook on the web: This is a new feature on the Roadmap and I think I like it! You can give an e-mail “Thumbs up” and this will be preserved. This is likely to prevent all those “+1” e-mails. Making it easier to share files and collaborate: This is one of the better improvements in Office 2016 - the updated Share pane which combines sharing and co-authoring information Mark emails as Clutter in Outlook 2016: I occasionally see this feature in the new 2016 client. For instance yesterday when doing a demo of that feature, it was not there… Math Input Control: A cool feature for students and scientists Modern Attachments in Outlook 2016: The number one productivity improvement in Outlook 2016. Attach you recent documents in a few clicks without actually sending attachments. More secure translation options: I’m surprised this hasn’t been in there before, but now the information from your documents is sent of SSL to services such as Bing and MS Research. Multi-factor authentication: Makes all users cry but security officers jump in excitement New and Modern Charts: How many different chart types can there really be? New capabilities on Yammer Android app: The Yammer people are still struggling to entice the Android crowd - ever heard of Office 365 Groups and the new Outlook Group app? New Chinese and Japanese Default Fonts: New updated modern fonts New Forecasting Capabilities: Excel again! New Office 365 Admin Center Preview: Another new addition to the roadmap. All Office 365 Admins will soon have the new admin center experience in their tenants. During the transition you will have a link in the old portal to the new one OLAP Connection Support in Power View: More PowerView Optimized file picker in Outlook Web App: A really good file picker in OWA that allows you to more easily add attachments from your OneDrive for instance Pan and zoom while loading large charts/SmartArt: SmartArt improvements PivotTable Field Search: No comments needed, more Excel stuff Quick data linking in Visio: Make it easier to hook up data to your VIsio shapes Quick Shape Formatting: More style presets in Word, Excel and PowerPoint Read-only mode for Excel: Open Excel more faster Real time co-authoring in Word: Microsoft is catching up with other services, this is a neat feature - and it actually works Refreshed stencils and smart shapes in Visio: About time…I’m dead tired of the 3D server shapes Smart Lookup for Office: Contextual research options in Word, Excel and PowerPoint Smart Rename in Power Pivot: PowerPivot… Support for multi-selection of Slicer items using touch: Touch my Excel! Support for small screen portrait layouts in Outlook 2016: Optimizations of Outlook 2016 for small screen devices. Tell Me: It’s like Cortana but for Office, use Tell me to find that function you need instead of clicking like crazy in the myriads of menus in Office In Development eDiscovery Case Management, Hold & Permissions: No update on this one, except removal of a comma in the text New per-user licensing for Sway: New on the roadmap and this is a significant one. “Sway will soon switch to a per-user licensing model, so that organizations no longer have to choose whether to have Sway enabled for the entire organization vs. nobody at all”. A good move and all you Service Managers out there you need to plan for this one. So you don’t get the same confusion as when Microsoft initially launched this product to everyone (that is a dumb move that we will just have to get used with,…) Office 365 Admin app updates October 2015: We will see Groups administration in the next wave of the admin app. Like it! Real-time Co-authoring in Skype for Business: First of all - whoever wrote this description need to read it again - worse English than mine. Ok, this is a new thing on the Roadmap and my interpretation of the lousy description is that it could be something really cool Reassign Sways from deleted user: New on the roadmap. With this update you should be able to actually reassign the ownership of Sways to users that is removed from your tenant Video Based Screen Sharing: New on the roadmap: P2P based Video Based Screen Sharing. Work Management in Office 365: The Office 365 Planner announcement,. I can’t stress how excited I am about this one. Think of it like Trello in Office 365 Groups. Can’t wait to start using it!!! Read the full Planner announcement here.

Almost a month has gone since Microsoft did an update to the Office Roadmap. But fear no more, it is here stuffed with new and interesting stuff. It’s quite a long list this time around. A lot of them are just Office 2016 features that we’ve known about for some time, but now added to this Roadmap. But also some really interesting FastTrack features, with very sparse descriptions. Changes 2015-09-09 Now Launched About Me Update and New Authoring Tool: The updated About Me, part of Delve, is now fully launched, including the new Stories authoring tool. Unfortunately totally missed out on communicating this new and actually really great way of composing content - kind of like a mix of Sway and a blog tool. (Started rolling out in April) Azure AD Sync for Yammer: Finally Yammer is in some way in sync with Azure AD and disabled/deleted accounts will now be suspended in Yammer (new on the roadmap) Major update to Outlook Web App: Outlook on the web has a new UX (from In development) Office 365 Admin app updates: the regular admin app updates, this time support for logging in to multiple tenants Office 365 Admin App Updates for June: the admin app June updates Outlook for iOS opens IRM protected emails: the iOS version of Outlook now supports reading, managing and creating IRM protected e-mails. (new) Search Suggestions in Outlook Web App: type ahead with recommendations in OWA (from rolling out) UserVoice coming to Outlook on the web: provide user feedback to UserVoice directly in the OWA interface (from in development) Weather Bar in Outlook Web App: now shows the local weather in OWA (from in development) Rolling out Apps for Project Pro for Office 365 write support: write-back support fro Apps for Project Pro for Office 365. Nice enhancement! (from in development) Capacity Management capabilities in Project Online: heatmaps and colors in Project Online for better predictions of resource utilization (from in development) FastTrack | Request Service Onboarding: you can now request setup help directly from within the admin center and get on board the Office 365 train fast and for free. (new) Multiple timeline bars in Project Pro for Office 365: more GUI stuff for all them project managers (from in development) Office 365 Setup Enhancements: improvements in the setup wizard for mail migrations (from in development) Resource Engagement Workflow in Project Online: better management for resource management and planning (from in development) Subscription Management Experience refresh; a new card view when working with subscriptions. In my opinion a far worse experience than before, the card view is just annoying. (from in development) In Development Add-in deployment via Click-to-Run: a few add-ins/apps can now be deployed via the C2R method (new) Archiving in Office 365 for 3rd-party data: Office 365 will support archiving of Twitter, Yammer, Facebook, LinkedIn, GoogleTalk, DropBox, Box, SalesForce, Chatter, SMS and more and more. This is huge for compliance and regulatory business! Big thumbs up! (new) Automatic Relationship Detection: PivotTables and data and relationships. Some magic for all BI and Excel lovers. (new) Azure departmental template availability: department specific RMS/IRM templates. (new) Click-to-Run manageability gaps addressed for IT-pros: improvements to make the already stream-lined (pun intended) deployment even more streamlined (new) Colorful Office Theme: Not really new, just new on the roadmap. Office (C2R and 2016) has a new default Colorful Theme. I love this small but significant UX change. (new) Create and collaborate on Visio diagrams using Office-like experience: been here a while, previously it was rolling out, now it’s not… Dark Theme: an improved Dark theme in Office (C2R and 2016) (new) Data Gathering and Shaping Capabilities: Power Query, previously an add-on, is now included in Excel 2016. (new) Data Loss Protection (DLP) for Office desktop: This is really cool, DLP is not just a cloud feature, it will be on our desktops as well. (new) Deferred Updates: Office 365 commercial customers can defer Office patches to allow more time for testing (new) Easy Enable for Data Analysis Add-Ins: BI, BI, Power this and Power that. All BI features will be enabled by just you thinking about them (new) FastTrack | Data migration to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business: No info yet but probably free migration to SPO (new) FastTrack | Skype for Business Onboarding Expansion: more free stuff (new) FastTrack | Adoption planning services: being just a migration and onboarding consultant is probably not the smartest move at the moment… (new) FastTrack | Azure Rights Management Onboarding: no info (new) FastTrack | Project Online Onboarding: no info (new) FastTrack | Providing the customer success service: no info (new) FastTrack | Yammer Onboarding Expansion: no info (new) Getting Started experience in Visio: no longer rolling out :-( Higher DPI support for 250% and 300%: Makes Office work better on high DPI screens (new) Improved conflict resolution in PowerPoint: making co-authoring even better, and for PowerPoint the conflict resolution has been really bad… Improved sync slider and lean storage footprint on small devices in Outlook 2016: who doesn’t like improved sliders!!! (new) Information Rights Management (IRM) protection now added for Visio files: also rolled back from rolling out Keyboard access for Pivot Tables and Slicers in Excel: more Excel BI improvements (new) Keyboard access for Shape Panel in Visio: new key to start use in Visio - F6 (new) Keyword & People search suggestions in Outlook 2016: simpler and more effective search in Outlook 2016 (new) Making it easier to share files and collaborate: one of my fav features in Office 2016 - sharing is easy!! (new) Mark emails as Clutter in Outlook 2016: get rid of those annoying e-mails that you don’t care about (new) Math Input Control: for all you math geeks (new) Modern Attachments in Outlook 2016: if sharing is my fav feature this is way better - avoid attachments and sharing at the same time (new) More secure translation options: document translation, research pane and others now use SSL for transport security - about time!!! (new) Multi-factor Authentication: support for MFA in Office client (new) New and Modern Charts: new charts in Excel (new) New Chinese and Japanese Default fonts: Wingdings? (new) New forecasting capabilities: improved Excel 2016 forecasting (new) New timeline view in Project: improved timeline view in Project 2016 (new) Office 365 content pack for Power BI: combine Office 365 usage and user information and get some insights (new) Office 365 detailed usage reports: more and better reports (new) Office 365 Groups: Support compliance requirements: support for Office 365 Groups in the compliance center with retention and holds (new) Office 365 Reporting Dashboard: new aggregated dashboard in the admin center (new) OLAP Connection Support in Power View: OLAP support in PowerView (new) Outlook for the web inline OneDrive attachment preview: better preview options in OWA (new) Pan and zoom while loading large charts/SmartArt:: no explanation needed (new) PivotTable Field Search: search and you will find (new) Quick data linking in Visio; one step connectivity for real time data (new) Quick Shape Formatting: more presets in Office 2016 (new) Read-only mode for Excel: open up an Excel document in SharePoint in read-only mode - what’s new with that!?? (new) Real time co-authoring in Word: it’s been said before but this is now real time co-authoring for real (new) Refresh stencils and smart shapes in Visio: another Visio thing that was in the rolling out section earlier Set Automatic Replies in Outlook for iOS & Android: get your OOOF’s rolling on the fruitphones and droids (new) Smart Lookup for Office: contextual lookups (new) Smart Rename in Power Pivot: rename stuff in PowerPivot, probably really good feature, I don’t know (new) Support for multi-selection of Slicer items using touch: Slicers, BI and touch - sounds like a wet dream to many (new) Support for small screen portrait layouts in Outlook 2016: looking forward to testing this on my 7" Windows 10 tablet (new) TellMe: Kindof Cortana but limited to the Office Ribbon :-) (new) Moved off to the Previously Released list NDR backscatter protection Office 365 ProPlus user activation management Public Folder calendar and contact access in OWA SharePoint Online storage usage model Skype for Business - Windows Phone Skype for Business Preview - Cloud PBX with PSTN Calling (US Only) Skype for Business Preview - PSTN Conferencing (US Only) Skype for Business Preview - Skype Meeting Broadcast Workload-specific admin roles That’s it. Twas a long post this time…

Updates to the roadmap, again! This time around it is all about Yammer. This major update of Yammer features that’s already rolled out or in development just shows how disconnected the Yammer and Office 365 teams are. Changes 2015-08-13 These are the changes since yesterday. Now Launched New Capabilities for Yammer iOS app: better photo and file sharing, better search, better this and better that. Directly to launched Real-time Yammer group activity indicators: a feature that’s been rolling out for a while, but still new on the roadmap. Tiny profile pics when people post stuff in groups. Directly to launched Yammer Next Group Notifications: another thing that’s been out there for a while, but new on the roadmap. Directly to launched Rolling Out Yammer for Apple Watch: if I had a Apple Watch this is one of the things I would never install on it. Most likely for all the cool kids (new) In Development Group Updates feed for Yammer mobile apps: Mobile Apps = Android or iOS, not win phone. This update allows for better possibilities to catch up on conversations Groups in Office 365 for Yammer: the long rumored Yammer integration with Office 365 Groups. One really interesting new thing that I for sure will keep an eye on! New capabilities on Yammer Android app: “…new capabilities that boost team collaboration”. If they say so,.., (new) Office Online multi-user coauthoring in Yammer: sigh - thou shalt not store and edit documents in yammer. (new) Yammer Discovery Feed: smells like Facebooks (annoying) algorithm to surface relevant conversations. (new) Yammer External Groups: allows you to invite external users to a group. Nice improvement, way better than external networks or the flexternals. (new) Yammer Group UI Redesign: “cleaner look to focus attention on high impact activity..:”, overall a good thing (new)

We have updates, and quite a few of them, to the Office Roadmap. Some clean up, some awesome Visio features rolling out and a set of new features in the In Development segment. Also noticeable quite a few of the “refresh” features and one cancelled item. Changes 2015-08-12 Now Launched NDR backscatter protection: has been rolling out for a while Office 365 Admin Center June Updates: the June stuff is launched Office 365 Store: launched. Verdict from customers - why does it have to be there, can’t we remove it? Office Online Edit in Yammer: Really dump feature that allows users to edit documents in Yammer - documents should never ever be stored in Yammer to start with! Public Folders: adding and removing favorites in OWA: Public folders? Didn’t someone say they were to be removed :) Rolling out Adding IRM protection to Visio file: sweet feature that now is rolling out and allows to protect your most important files. Coming from In Development Create and collaboration on Visio diagrams using Office like experience: more of them Visio goodies rolling out DKIM Outbound for Exchange Online Protection: better protection in ExO by digitally signed message headers Getting started experience in Visio: Visio, nuff said Office 365 Domain Purchase Experience: from in development Office 365 Settings pane: the third “pane” to be rolled out (Help, Notification and Settings). I just wonder when we are allowed to hook into these? Office 365 User Purchases: just buy it yourself if your IT department says no. From in development. Office 365 Video Embed: I don’t know about you but I’m getting confused. Rolling out, Launched, Rolling out… Purchase & Subscriptions Experience Refresh: a new user experience for the purchase and subscriptions pages are rolling out. Personally I had hard to find what I needed… Rapid data connectivity in Visio: Now, if only everyone had access to Visio Refreshed stencils and smart shapes in Visio: Metro? From In Development. Search Refiners in Outlook Web App: make it easier to find your stuff using refiners in OWA Search Suggestions in Outlook Web App: more OWA search goodness In Development Auto-Expanding Archives: new item on the roadmap that allows archives to automatically expand as needed. No mention of any specific service but I guess it is an Exchange Online thing :) Major update to Outlook Web App: Outlook Web App, or should I say Outlook on the web, will have major UX update coming (new) Mobile PDF annotation support for iOS: offline access and PDF editing support on iOS - those fruit fone users get all the fun… (new) Office 365 Admin app updates: focus this month is on… GROUPS! I’ve said it before - Groups is the future folks! (new) Office 365 app launcher refresh: New on the list! App launcher will be more like the Windows 10 Start menu with different sized tiles. Save to OneDrive for Business in Outlook for iOS and Android: new on the roadmap, wonder if these things get added to the Modern Mail client in Windows 10 (phone)? Subscription Management Experience refresh: even more modern design I presume… (new) Supervisory Review for financial and regulatory compliance: Wow, really cool and scary. This feature will allow auditors to look into a subset of users communications. (new) Uservoice coming to Outlook on the web: a link directly in OWA, sorry Outlook on the web, so users can give feedback to the OWA, sorry Outlook on the web, team. Cancelled Evolving the Outlook Web App options page: added in April, but no info on why this is cancelled Moved off the list into the Previously released Azure AD Reports Disable OneDrive for Business sync for unmanaged PCs Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection MDM for OneDrive for Business Mobile device management Office 365 Groups: Dynamic CRM integration Office 365 Groups: files improvement Office 365 Groups: improving visibility and management Office 365 Groups: adding Like to Conversations Office 365 services hosted in Microsoft Australia datacenters Office Online Preview in Yammer Quarantine Message Body Preview Skype for Business Online Unified OneDrive API

It has been a while since Office 365 introduced the suite wide themes. These themes are applied on all services within the Office 365 suite, or at least the ones using the Suite Bar navigation. Up until the very last few weeks the suite wide theme has been something you can set but your SharePoint site owners and all end-users has been able to override them. Finally these things has been resolved and fixed (no info about this on the Office Roadmap, hence this blog post)!

In this post, in the Office 365 Groups for Admins series, I will leverage what we learned in the previous posts, combine it with some PowerShell magic and create some basic reports. You can use these reports as a base for your Office 365 Groups reporting in your organization. Note: all these reports require that you have connected to your Exchange Online tenant with appropriate permissions, see this post about more details.

As you might have noticed I’m a big fan of Office 365 Groups, aka Unified Groups. I do think they will play a major role in the future of Office 365 Collaboration. Office 365 Groups consists of many moving parts, some that are half baked, some that are not working at all and some that is a bit difficult to understand. In this series of posts, will be published over the next few weeks and after that when needed, I will describe how you as an Office 365 Admin can and should work with Office 365 Groups.

In the last post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I showed you how to manage the Unified Groups using PowerShell. Let’s continue on that journey and take a look at how you can manage the Group memberships using PowerShell. All membership management are done using the *-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlets, you can access them using PowerShell and connecting to Exchange Online as shown in the previous post. The cmdlets is at the moment that well documented. If that changes I’ll make sure to update this post (and please remind me).

One of the loudest complaints I hear from people when we talk about Groups is the lack of management features, so in this post in the Office 365 Groups for Admins series we will take a look at how you can manage your Unified Groups using PowerShell. In the previous post I actually already showed you how to use PowerShell to create Groups, but let’s take a step back. Connecting PowerShell to Exchange Online To start working with the Unified Groups in PowerShell we need to connect to Exchange Online and we do that by establishing a PowerShell session to a specific Uri, see code sample below, and then import that session to our local session. This means we do not have to install any PowerShell module or similar. This is how it should look like:

In this post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series we will take a look at how you as an admin and your end-user can create Office 365 Groups. The option to allow end-users to create Unified Groups or not are determined by the Mailbox Policy, as described in a previous post. End-user creation of Office 365 Groups End-users have two ways of creating new Groups; either use the Office 365 web interface or using Outlook 2016 (works on the PC edition, not sure about Office on Macintosh). This is option is by default available for ANYONE within your organization, there is no granularity at all, there is no approval or anything.

In this post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I will talk about the small but important policies we can apply to Group creation. At the moment there is very little control of the actual Office 365 Group creation in Office 365. And this tends to be one really important aspect of the Unified Groups discussion - can we allow them or not? I do hope that I over the time can update this post with new and improved governance features.

This is the third post in my Office 365 Groups for Admins series and it will focus on one of the primary tasks an Office 365 Admin has to do once their tenant is up and running; should we allow our users to create Office 365 Groups or not? I’m not going to give you an answer to this. It is something you need to evaluate properly within your organization, but I do recommend that you initially always turn off Groups, so that you can get some governance into the game before promoting it to everyone.

In this first post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I will show you where you have the different entry points for the Unified Groups. It’s important to understand this as it is important in the posts to follow. Office 365 Mail (end users) The first and perhaps the most obvious point of Office 365 Groups is in the Office 365 Mail application (Outlook Web App, OWA). On the left hand side you will see the Groups heading. Under that heading 10 of the Groups you are member of are shown, with your Favorites on top.

Some “small” updates this week on the Office Roadmap Changes 2015-07-22 Now Launched Office 365 Groups: Power BI Integration: A new and easier way for teams/groups to collaborate in Power BI. Directly to launched. In Development Office 365 User Purchases: An interesting new option for the Store. Individuals can with this feature in place “purchase and individually own a subscription to additional software”. Looks like if your manager doesn’t approve of your Visio request, you can buy it on your own :)

A week has gone since last update to the Office Roadmap and it looks like the Office 365 team is on a good pace. Changes 2015-07-16 These are the changes I’ve noticed on the Roadmap, including my personal comments/take on some of them. One big shocker here and it’s in the Cancelled section, check it out! Now Launched Multi-Tier Cloud Standard for Singapore: something brand new that is just for Singapore that is launched? No description at all on the Roadmap - I’ll get back with details. Quarantine Message Body Preview: last week rolling out and now fully rolled out. Exchange admins can now really easy preview stuff in quarantine. SharePoint Online storage usage model: “Auto” quotas are now fully rolled out Workload-specific admin roles: Also the new admin roles are fully rolled out Rolling Out Office 2013 Windows client modern authentication preview: new ADAL based AuthN is rolling out In Development Office Online Edit in Yammer: Allows you to edit documents directly in Yammer. New on the roadmap PSTN Calling in Skype for Business: US Only, more countries coming up, PSTN Call in feature. More awesome S4B features! Public Folders: adding and removing favorites in OWA: Who said Public Folders was dead! Cancelled Document Conversations for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online: CANCELLED! No surprise to me. Another Yammer feature that is going in to the bin. If Microsoft can do a big write-down on Surface, they sure should do it on Yammer as soon as possible. From Rolling Out. Moved off into Previously Released (Added since original post)

JavaScript is the new black and each and everyone has re-discovered JavaScript and it’s inevitable not to have JavaScript as one of your tools. Especially if you’re working with SharePoint, Office or Office 365 Apps or Add-Ins. In this short post I’m just documenting and sharing a small and nifty JavaScript hack that is very handy when you’re doing for instance JavaScript injection, one of the most popular customization patterns for Office 365 and SharePoint Online at the moment. I often find myself in the situation that I need to deploy and inject a JavaScript file and an accompanying CSS file. More than often both the JS file and the CSS file is very small and I’ve found it very handy to combine the JS and CSS file into one JS file.

Hello everyone and hope you’re not reading this, it’s summer time and great weather, except in Sweden of course. We have some updates to the Office Roadmap today, the first set of updates in FY16 for Microsoft. Last week I complained about Microsoft changing URL’s to the roadmap site - they are now fixed ;-) Changes 2015-07-09 This are the changes I’ve noticed since the 26th of June including my take on the additions and changes. A lot of Skype for Business stuff has been launched this time!

Some interesting summer news on the Office Roadmap this week. But first of all something that is not very cool at all; the Office roadmap URL has changed. I’ve used and linked to http://success.office.com/roadmap/, http://office.com/roadmap and http://success.office.com/roadmap/en-us but the only one that is working right now is http://success.office.com/en-us/roadmap/. Booh! Thou shalt not change URL’s without redirects… Changes 2015-06-26 This is the detected changes in the Roadmap. If you use the newly released feature on the Roadmap that shows the Recently Updated Features, you will see that it states about 50 changed features, since we don’t know their “algorithm” behind the feature, just ignore it and keep reading…

No updates to the Office Roadmap today! But - a new huge feature to the actual Roadmap page that might make these posts obsolete A new button has been added to the Roadmap page, called “Show only recently updated features”: Once you toggle the button it will show you only what has been updated since sometime (this is not specifically clear at the moment). Currently it only shows the last update from last week.

Updates to the Office Roadmap today as well. Changes 2015-06-11 Since yesterday, only one item has change, or rather been added to the Roadmap. In Development Office 365 Settings pane: the unification of all Office 365 services continue (time to forget SharePoint, Exchange etc). A new Settings Pane is in the works that contextually adjusts the settings depending on where you are in Office 365.

More updates to the Office Roadmap! This time around we have a few interesting new additions to the roadmap. Changes 2015-06-10 This is what has been added to roadmap since the last couple of days. Notice that all of these are new things on the Roadmap. Now Launched DMARC Support in EOP: DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, http://dmarc.org/) in EOP. Directly to launched! Rolling out OAuth and MFA for Outlook for iOS & Android: just as it sounds, the new ADAL based authentication is rolling out for iOS and Android In Development Advanced administrative controls for archiving: Enables SEC 17a-4 record retention. Allows you to make sure that policies as such are not turned off or removed Skype for Business conversations in the web experience: This was shown in a video the other day. Nice additions to the web UX. Office 365 Domain Purchase Experience: a better experience to get your hands on and purchase new domains without any 3rd party services Office 365 Video - Embed: Allows videos to be embedded outside the video portal, for instance in a team site. But the big news here is that this allows Kiosk users rights to view videos. Office 365 Store: This update will make it easier for users to buy third party applications directly from within Office 365. Users will see a new “store icon” in the Waffle. Finally some updates to the pretty lame and boring Office store. Moved off into the previously released Skype Developer platform

Summer is almost here, and I’m currently in the air over Hungary after a short but great weekend in Budapest. And the Office team in Redmond and all around the world keeps on pumping out updates. This is the summary of what has changed since the last update in May. If you’re into compliance or a Vision fans, there’s a great amount of new stuff added to the In Development category.

SharePoint Team Sites are dead, there you have it! The era when SharePoint Team Sites was the king of SharePoint and web based collaboration are over. SharePoint Team Sites are dead, I said it again. Ok, you might think this is a link bait, a scam or something else - it’s not. This is how I foresee the future of online collaboration in SharePoint Online/Office 365. Team Sites are based on a decade old construct in SharePoint. They allow a great flexibility and extensibility for the end users, but… …it requires a lot of training …it drives a lot of support …it drives a lot of consultancy hours (yes, I am/was one of those) …historically upgrades are extremely expensive …[fill in your own here] …do the end-users really need that much power?

Both Build and Ignite has passed and we finally have the first update on the Office Roadmap in a month. It’s quite a few new interesting things in the pipe this time and but no new Yammer features :) Changes 2015-05-15 Since the 15th of April the following items has changed on the Office Roadmap. Now Launched Change copy/paste behavior in the Outlook Web App: brand new updates directly to production. Changing how mixed content (images and text) are pasted in OWA. DLP in Office 365 to protect Externally classified content: from rolling out Edit Office 365 profile details page update: now fully launched Enhanced NDRs: from In Development Increase Message Size limit to 150 MB: from In Development Lync Web App support for Mac and Windows Chrome users: from Rolling Out MDM for OneDrive for Business: From Rolling Out Office 2013 client update to support passive authentication using SAML: from Rolling Out Office 365 Groups : Dynamics CRM integration: A brand new feature to Office 365 Groups! And it’s a good one. This new feature in CRM allows you to create Office 365 Groups to collaborate with team members that don’t have access to CRM. Read more here. Office 365 Groups: adding Like to Conversations: from In Development Partner Admin Center New Customer List Filters: from Rolling Out Recommend OneDrive for Business for Large Attachments: from In Development Rolling Out First Release Select people: directly to production. One of the best new enhancements, announced at Ignite, that allows you to have First Release per user instead of per tenant. Office 365 Groups : files improvements: new on the roadmap. Necessary improvements to Office 365 Groups, now if only content types were available in groups… Office 365 Notification Pane: did they do this properly this time? Office 365 Video Update: HTML5… we listened to your feedback… SharePoint Online storage usage model: from in development, allows you to have “Auto” quotas SharePoint Online uses Exchange Web Services to send mail: new kid on the block, will improve how the shared items e-mails are sent and perhaps not being classified as spam SharePoint Online will start to transition to using TLS to send email securely in our datacenters: perhaps not the most exciting new feature, but a good one. Also a feature that will be available on-premises in SharePoint 2016 Skype for Business Online: from in development - just ye ole re-branding of Lync. Save to OneDrive for Business: from in development. Save to OD4B directly from OWA (Outlook Web App, not Office Web Apps). (Updated since the original post) In Development Custom Tiles: a new and highly requested feature. Once this one is rolling out you will be able to add links to the App Launcher Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection: Something new that will make all your Exchange admins excited. Read more. Inline Service Health for Support Request Creation: new feature that supposedly should help you not submitting requests to Microsoft. Office 365 Groups: mobile app: The roadmap doesn’t have much to say on this feature, but I guess the title says it all. Oh, did I hear someone say that Team Sites are dead? Update since the original post: “We’ll be delivering a mobile app that surfaces Outlook Group conversations and files across iOS, Android and Windows Phone by the end of 2015. “ Organization support card: new feature that allows you to add you own contact support details in the help pane of Office 365 Proactive notification of Outlook version: admins will now know if you are lazy and don’t update Outlook… Moved off to the list into Previously released Clutter control and admin capabilities Compliance Center for Office 365 DKIM Outbound for Exchange Online Protection Exchange Transport Rule: Recipient Notification Action Improved Yammer thread visuals with Card View for iOS/Android Lync Online Active User Activities Report MAPI over HTTP for Outlook 2013 and Exchange Online New preview features for Power BI Office 365 Admin App Update Office 365 Groups Notebook OneDrive for Business Sync for Mac Outlook Web App options update Removing Deleted Items Retention Period RMS support for document libraries Sign-In Page Branding and Self Service Password Reset Skype for Business desktop application update Touch Design Enhancements for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business Yammer groups prioritization Yammer support for Android Wear devices

It was a couple of weeks since last, but this time we got some major updates on the Office Roadmap, following the recent announcement on the Office blogs. Changes 2015-04-15 Since the 26th of March, these are the changes. Quite a few of them… Now Launched Bulk Updates in Project Online: Directly to launched status Improvements to Demand Management in Project Online: Another Project thingie, directly to launched Changing support for LinkedIn in Outlook: LinkedIn connections in Outlook no longer supported, another that went directly to launched Clutter Control and admin capabilities: from rolling out Document deletion policies for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online: A really interesting and important feature, now live Lync Online Active User Activities Report: previously rolling out MAPI over HTTP for Outlook 2013 and Exchange Online: one of the oldest things on the roadmap now rolling out More control over Sent Items for Shared Mailboxes: from in development New preview features for Power BI: from rolling out Option for Passwords to Never Expire: new on the list the last time, but now launched Removing Deleted Items Retention Period: from in development. This one is a huge one! Now Rolling out About Me Update and New Authoring Tool: Big news yesterday on the Office Blogs. From In development. Lync Web App support for Mac and Windows Chrome users: from in development. Everyone is now invited to the party! MDM for OneDrive for Business: Another great OneDrive feature now rolling out Mobile Device Management: Changed name from “Mobile Device Management for Office 365” to “Mobile Device Management”. From In Development. NDR backscatter protection: more Exchange goodies, new on the list Office 365 Groups: improving visibility and management: new on the list. Finally some improvements in this feature for enterprises. We might not need to turn it off at every client anymore. Public Folder calendar and contact access in OWA: from in development Skype for Business desktop application update: New Skype for Business is now rolling out since yesterday. In Development Evolving the Outlook Web App options page: OWA is evolving. New on the list Improved image attachment viewing in Outlook Web App: OWA team is on fire. New on the list Optimize File Picker in Outlook Web App: Keep it coming OWA team! New on the list Recommend OneDrive for Business for Large Attachments: Go OWA! New on the list. Save to OneDrive for Business: Speechless! New on the list Storage and file upload improvements for Sites and OneDrive for Business: Yay! Let’s upload those big video files… New on the list Office 365 Groups: adding Like to Conversations: Ooops. This was just rolling out the other week - back to the drawing board? Office 365 Help pane: A new and better way to introduce features for the end-user. I like it. New on the list Office 365 Notification pane: Another Ooopps. This was also previously Rolling out, with mixed feelings in the community. Better make it work and look good before launching… Task Notifications in Project Online: Another new Project thingie Moved off the list into Previously released eDiscovery Center Scale Increase My apps for Office 365 app launcher Office 365 Admin Center for Business Office 365 ISO 27018 Privacy Compliance OneNote Staff Notebook for Education Outlook for iOS & Android Partner admin mobile app PIN lock and other updates for Outlook for iOS & Android Quarantine Bulk Release RMS Departmental Templates No longer at the list at all Forms on SharePoint Lists - bye bye, for good? Phew! Good Job Microsoft!

It’s just less than three weeks until the SharePoint Evolution Conference 2015 has kicked off - and I’ll be there speaking. The Evolution Conference is by far the most important and interesting conference when it comes to SharePoint - online and on-premises. The lineup of speakers are incredible - no other conference will ever get this assembly of crew from all around the world. And in this case this really is “no marketing, no bullshit” (thanks AC & CJ). The sessions and their content is out of this world, ranging for hard-core developer stuff, to nitty gritty infrastructure details to well-polished shoes and ties type of stuff. If you’re in this business - you should be there! Go register, there is till a couple of more slots available.

Aprils fools day and for the sixth time I have been awarded with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) recognition for SharePoint Server. Dear Wictor Wilen, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2015 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Server technical communities during the past year.

Here we go, another round of updates of the Office Roadmap. Don’t we love them! And sometimes they roll out even before the roadmap is updated ;-) Changes 2015-03-26 These are the change since yesterday. Now Launched Office 365 Admin App Update: Directly to launched status Features now rolling out Office 365 Groups: adding Like to Conversations: New stuff on the roadmap. Seems like the Office 365 (Exchange) team is building a whole new Yammer… Office 365 Notification Pane: (from development) This feature seems to cause some disturbance in the force. It’s rolling out, but it seems like it is just half finished… It does not (at the time of writing this) work and the user experience is…confusing. Worth mentioning here is that it is rolling out for Groups to start with (something that was changed today as well from yesterday ;-) Option for Passwords to Never Expire: (new on the list) Allows admin to use the UI to configure this rather than only PowerShell Tighter Yammer Integration with Delve: (new on the list) More Yammer in Delve. Why not more Groups in Delve? Features now In Development Office 365 Setup Wizard: (new on the list) The replacement for the basic and advanced setup options. The wizard will include migration from on-premises, Google Apps and more! Really neat!

Another day with some changes in the Office Roadmap, and some really interesting ones actually! Changes 2015-03-25 These are the changes since last time. Now launched Compliance Center for Office 365: From rolling out. Now no one can be less compliant than anyone else, or… Office 365 Groups Notebooks: Coming from nowhere direct to launched. Each Office 365 Group now has a OneNote Notebook. Features now rolling out Edit Office 365 profile details page update: Another newcomer on the list, only this one didn’t make it directly to production :). By clicking on the Gears in the upper-right corner, choosing Office 365 Settings, then choosing Me you will (if your tenant has this feature rolled out) find the new responsive page (https://portal.office.com/profile)

One very common requirement in SharePoint, and other portal solutions for that matter, is to have the possibility to target content to a dynamic audience of users and even secure information based on dynamic rules. Traditionally this has been done with Audiences in SharePoint. Audience is a dynamic set of users that is compiled, usually once a day, and at compile time the rules of the Audience is evaluated. A SharePoint Audience is used to target information, but cannot be used to protect content - ie as a security group.

Some small but interesting additions on the roadmap today. Changes 2015-03-19 New stuff on the roadmap Yammer support for Android Wear devices: (Directly to Launched) Yammer on your wrist! Ok, where’s the Microsoft Band app? Enhanced NDRs: (In Development) Microsoft will now help you understand the cause and reason of NDRs in a much easier way. ExpressRoute for Office 365: (In Development) You want your own redundant fat pipe to the Office 365 Data Centers - then this is your feature. Will be launched this fall.

It’s not easy to keep up on what is happening in the Office and Office 365 world. Everything is changing so fast. Fortunate for us Microsoft and the Office product group has created the Office Roadmap site (http://office.com/roadmap) with all (almost at least) the details on what is in development and rolling out etc. It became quite famous the other week when the new forms solution went from In Development to Cancelled.

It’s not easy to keep up on what is happening in the Office and Office 365 world. Everything is changing so fast. Fortunate for us Microsoft and the Office product group has created the Office Roadmap site (http://office.com/roadmap) with all (almost at least) the details on what is in development and rolling out etc. It became quite famous the other week when the new forms solution went from In Development to Cancelled.

Here’s a little nugget that I’ve planned to blog about for some time, that I needed today for a small task. I needed to do a background job to SharePoint Online that at a scheduled interval downloads list data, process them and optionally updates some data in my site. This can of course be done by creating an executable storing username and password combos, and with the help of the TokenHelper.cs class from the App for SharePoint Web Toolkit NuGet package and some stored username and password combos we can make the Auth pieces quite easy. I don’t like that approach. There’s two big drawbacks with that approach. The first one is storing the username and password – we can solve that with an AppOnly policy, which I blogged about in the SharePoint 2013: Using the App Only policy and App Principals instead of username and password combos post. The second issue is that I very much prefer to script these kind of tasks, it makes it more flexible. Problem with that approach is that we need to manually do the Auth pieces. But from now on you just copy and paste from this post.

It’s been way to long since we had a Sweden SharePoint User Group meeting in Stockholm, but the wait is now over. On the 26th of February we are all invited to the local Microsoft offices to learn more about SharePoint. Specifically this evening we will be able to hear from Erwin van Hunen, who will talk about the Office 365 Patterns and Practices project. We will also be able to hear from Microsoft about their Hybrid OneDrive for Business experiences. If this doesn’t get you fired up, then what would!

I’m very excited and glad to announce that this is my last day at Connecta/Acando and starting on Monday I will be joining the Avanade forces here in Sweden. I will take the role as the Collaboration lead, continuing my passion for SharePoint and the future of collaboration on the Microsoft stack. Joining Avanade and in this role seems like one of the most exciting things I could do at the moment. We’re standing on the brink of huge changes going on in our collaborative environments. Cloud, devices, services, security and identity – there’s so many things going on right now and there’s so many things to think about, plan for and execute on. Also Avanade, being such a global company but being fairly small here in Sweden, brings a lot of opportunities on the table for me and my future customers. I’m looking forward to expanding and building the Collaboration team here in Sweden in combination with the Nordic and global teams – and build the best Collaboration delivery team on the Microsoft platform! If you want to be a part of this, then just ping me!

The time has come for me to do, as I’ve done now for eight years (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006), my annual post to sum up the year. It is always fun to look back to what happened the past 12 months. This past year has been a somewhat “in-betweeners” year. We (me, my clients, colleagues etc.) are standing on the edge of something big and the bridge over to the other side is really, really long. Some hesitate to pass the bridge, thinks it is to steep down, some people are running across it in fear, some take it just easy and some pass it half-ways and then stalls there not knowing which direction to go. Microsoft has already passed the bridge to the other side, they ran as fast as they could. But, they dropped so many things on the way over, things that I and others need to pick up and fix and very often even remind Microsoft that they dropped it at all!

Here’s a quick tip/solution on how to shut down your VMWare Workstation 10 and 11 Virtual Machines if you’re using the Windows 10 Tech Preview (basically all builds, but only tested on 9879). Currently if you’re using Windows 10 Tech Preview as your host operating system and if you’re trying to shut down a VMWare Workstation Virtual Machine you will crash Windows 10, and potentially corrupt your machine and virtual machines. You’ll see a Blue Screen of Death with a DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION exception.

You should mark the 29th of October at 1pm EST (18:00 CET) in your calendar. The MVP Chats are back! A couple of years back we regularly held MVP chats where anyone could ask SharePoint MVPs anything (almost at least). These chats was really successful and we received really good feedback. Unfortunately the tool we used for the chats was abandoned and we have been looking for a new way to do this. We think we’ve found a really interesting format for this by using the AMA format at Reddit (/r/sharepoint).

Today the Office Updates blog added a new blog post titled “Web Apps Server Removal from Download Center”. The contents of that blog post is short: As of 11-24-2014 Office Web Apps Server will be removed from the Microsoft Download Center. At that time it will only be available for download under Volume Licensing agreements. For more information please visit the site Volume Licensing Service Center. Office Web Apps Server, used by SharePoint, Exchange and Lync to view, preview and edit Office documents is and has been one of the key features/add-ons of these products and allows for browser based editing and collaboration. It has up until now been available as a free download, free from licensing for reading but requiring Office client licensing for editing.

I’m so excited to be once again going to Singapore and speak at the Share-The-Point Southeast Asia 2014, held November 25-26 2014. It is one of my favorite conferences and this will be my third time in the awesome country and city of Singapore! Everything is just great about this; the people, the speakers, the attendees, the city, the food – you name it! This year I will have two sessions:

I’m thrilled to be presenting at TechDays 2014 in Stockholm the 19-20 November. This is the 5th time the TechDays conference is held here in Sweden and I know that this years edition will be even more awesome than the previous times. As usual the best speakers from Sweden will be there and some international really interesting speakers, such as the well-known Mary Jo Foley. I will be presenting a session about the new and interesting Office 365 APIs. We will walk through what these new APIs do, what they can be used for, how to do authentication and why you should invest your time in these APIs. It will be a developer focused session and we will look at code as much as possible – and we will have as much fun as possible.

There’s a lot of stuff happening right now at Microsoft, they innovate, create great software and services, the new CEO accepts and wins almost all challenges and the SharePoint and Office team is listening! This is the Microsoft that I like and this is how I want Microsoft to continue to be. But Microsoft and the SharePoint team can’t just listen in blind – they listens to us out here in the real world, customers, clients etc. and we need to make our voice heard. This can be done in several ways, we can talk to our Microsoft representatives, we can whine on our blogs and on social networks OR we could make ourselves heard at UserVoice.

Introduction One of the blog post I receive the most e-mails about is the How to do active authentication to Office 365 and SharePoint Online. Some of the feedback I get is “thank you” etc. and some of them are people that are modifying it for all kind of things, especially when trying to do “background jobs” or integrations using user credentials. And this is what this post is all about. My standard answer to that question is that you do not want to use the methods in that post for those scenarios, nowadays, since you can actually build an App for that. And even better you can build an App with a so called App Only policy – which means that we do not need to have any user credentials or anything like that. So in order to save me some time in replying that and then another reply on the “how do I do that?” question I can from now on only link to this post :-)

After doing the Microsoft Cloud Show interview with Andrew Connell I thought it might be a good idea to write some of my tips and tricks for running SharePoint 2013 on Azure IAAS. Some of the stuff in this post are discussed in more depth in the interview and some things we just didn’t have time to talk about (or I forgot). I really recommend you to listen to the podcast as well and not just read this post.

A couple of weeks back I was interviewed by Andrew Connell for the Microsoft Cloud Show. The Microsoft Cloud Show is an (almost) weekly podcast where Andrew (AC) and his wingman Chris Johnson (CJ) discusses everything related to Microsoft cloud offerings including benchmarks with other cloud vendors. If you’re not subscribing and listening to the show already then I urge you to do that as soon as possible! Me and AC sat down for almost an hour discussing Microsoft Azure IAAS and specifically when running SharePoint 2013 in that service. We had a great talk, as usual when it comes to AC, and I think we covered a lot of the issues and gotchas and things to think about when building a SharePoint 2013 infrastructure on Azure IAAS.

Introduction The other day I posted about the patching procedure for the SharePoint 2013 Distributed Cache (Microsoft AppFabric 1.1) and on that post I got a great comment from Riccardo: Hi Wictor, is it possible to discover the patch level of the Distributed Cache without looking at control panel? Powershell? That is a great question Riccardo! But the answer is not that simple… Check the version using Installed Updates The easiest way to manually check what version of AppFabric you are using, or rather which CU that is applied to AppFabric 1.1, is to use the Program and Features tool in Windows Server and then click on View installed updates.

Introduction In SharePoint 2013 the Distributed Cache plays a very important role, it is a key component for performance and caching. An incorrectly configured or managed Distributed Cache will cause issues, with your farm. I’ve even seen blogs recommending turning it off, most likely due to that they don’t manage the cache properly and get into a situation where it causes even worse performance problems. One of the good things with the Distributed Cache is that is not a SharePoint service, it is a standalone service called AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server. Initially the guidance from Microsoft was that the Distributed Cache (DC) would be patched together with SharePoint and we should keep our hands off it. But that has over the time changed and allowed us to take advantage of the fixes and improvements that the AppFabric team does to the service. So, it is our responsibility to patch the Distributed Cache. But how do we do it?

Introduction SharePoint 2013 (and earlier versions) allows you to use alternative authentication “sources” than Windows. We can part from the different options with Windows login, use Forms Based Authentication (FBA) or use a federated/trusted identity provider. Forms based authentication is a good approach if you don’t want to manage your users in Active Directory or if you don’t want to use Windows Login. The downside with FBA is that you must manually do some web.config modifications, there isn’t any UI for managing the users (yes, I know you can use LDAP or just download something from the tubez, but you get my point). Using a federated approach is more interesting, that allows you to get the identity management and authentication away from your SharePoint farm (and this is a really good thing, SharePoint admins are generally not identity management people!). A trusted identity provider is a service such as Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), Microsoft Azure Access Control Services (ACS) or any other SAML 1.1 compatible Identity Provider (IdP).

Introduction The other week I posted an article about how to use SharePoint Hosted Apps when using SAML Claims, I did not expect that amount of feedback I had on that blog post, in e-mail, comments, tweets etc. Some of that feedback was how do you do it with Provider Hosted apps. Well you’re about to find out. It took me a while to get it properly done and there are some things that you should be aware of. In this post I will walk you through the simplest scenario and you will notice that there are a couple of moving parts. But, since I am such an influencer I thought I should make it easier for you. I will show you how to do this without the minimal changes to your current provider hosted apps – you only have to add an extension file to your solution, make a small modification to the helper files that Visual Studio gives you and a couple of web.config modifications! All the code you need will be published in a Github repository (https://github.com/wictorwilen/SharePointContextSaml) for you to consume and do all the fancy gitty stuff that you code dweebs out there like.

Introduction By now each and every SharePoint developer out there should spend their time building SharePoint Apps instead of the old trusted friend of ours; Full Trust Code. Ok, Apps doesn’t solve the equivalent of world hunger in SharePoint at the moment, but that’s a discussion for another time. I assume you get my point. We have two types of apps (we used to have three little monkeys jumping in the bed, but one just bumped his head); Provider hosted apps and SharePoint hosted apps. Without going into details, Provider hosted apps are the apps that are hosted outside of SharePoint on a specific location (URL) and SharePoint hosted apps are running on top of SharePoint (using JavaScript) on a “random” location. This location is called the App Web and is a SharePoint SPWeb with a specific randomly generated URL. That URL could look something like this:

For no one out there, in the SharePoint space or any other space, Microsoft Azure has gone unnoticed. Microsoft Azure is a really great service, or rather set of services, that for a (Microsoft or SharePoint) developer or IT-Pro is something that they should use and embrace. Personally I’ve been using Azure since the dawn of the service and I’ve been using it more and more. I use it to host web sites, host SharePoint and Office Apps, Virtual Machines, Access Control and a lots of other things.

April 1st 2014, for many a day full of jokes, but for 966 individuals this is the day they either is being awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award or being renewed as MVPs. I’m fortunate to be one of those this time, and now for my fifth year! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Server technical communities during the past year.

Introduction This is the first “real” posts in the Workflow Manager Disaster Recovery series. In this post I will show you what you need to do to prepare for Disaster Recovery (DR) situations when working with Workflow Manager and Service Bus. The obvious Let’s start with the obvious pieces. You should run your Workflow Manager farm on three (3) servers (for more on this discussion see the SPC356 session). Running on three servers are important not just for high-availability it might save you from going into DR mode. DR should be considered as the last resort. You should also consider one or more SQL Server high-availability options, more on this later.

Introduction Welcome to a new series of blog posts in which we will focus on the Disaster and Recovery (DR) routines for Workflow Manager 1.0 in combination with SharePoint 2013. During SharePoint Conference 2013 me and SharePoint sensei Spencer Harbar presented a session called “Designing, deploying, and managing Workflow Manager farms” (watch the video recording). During that session we discussed different DR options for Workflow Manager and the Service Bus and we got tons of questions on that specific topic. We did not have time to go into details and we did not show any of the necessary scripts/routines you need to do when restoring a Workflow Farm or Workflow Scopes, and there is very little information available on that topic on the interwebs – so that is why this new blog series is being posted.

Introduction When using the Web Platform Installer to download and/or install Workflow Manager you can no longer download and install Workflow Manager 1.0 and Workflow Manager 1.0 CU1. The only option is to download Workflow Manager 1.0 Refresh (which essentially is CU2). So when installing a new Workflow Manager farm for SharePoint or just because you want to rock some workflows you have to use Workflow Manager (WFM) 1.0 Refresh. Unless you’ve been smart and previously downloaded and saved the original Workflow Manager. When using WFM 1.0 Refresh you also need to download Service Bus 1.1.

When I first heard about SharePoint Online at the PDC 2008 I was a bit disappointed that you could not use custom code but had to rely on the built-in functionality and the things you could do with SharePoint Designer (which is quite powerful anyway, especially with jQuery). To read more about SharePoint online, head over to Tobias Zimmergrens blog. But with some clever techniques you can take advantage of the Windows Azure Hosted Services and create your custom code. I will show you how to create some custom code, which normally is done by SharePoint event receivers or timer jobs, using a Worker Role in Windows Azure.

Here’s another post with scripts from my sessions at SharePoint Conference 2014 – this time from the Mastering Office Web Apps 2013 Operations and Deployments session (SPC383). To get a more in-depth explanation of all the details, please watch the recording at Channel 9. Let’s start…but first! OWA = Outlook Web App and WAC = Office Web Apps (Web Application Companion). Preparing the machine before installing Office Web Apps Before you install the Office Web Apps bits on the machine you need to install a set of Windows Features. The following script is the one you should use (not the one on TechNet) and it works for Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

As promised I will hand out all the scripts I used in my SharePoint Conference 2014 sessions. The first set of scripts are from the demo used in the Real-world SharePoint Architecture decisions session (SPC334). This session only contained one demo in which I showed how to set up a Single Content Web Application and using Host Named Site Collections when creating Site Collections. Creating the Web Application and the Root Site Collection The first part of the script was to create the Web Application using SSL, configure the certificate in IIS and then create the Root Site Collection. The Web Application is created using the –Url parameter pointing to a FQDN, instead of using the server name (which is used in the TechNet documentation, and causes a dependency on that specific first server). Secondly the script assumes that the correct certificate is installed on the machine and we grab that certificate using the friendly name (yes, always have a friendly name on your certificates, it will make everything much easier for you). A new binding is then created in IIS using the certificate. Finally the Root Site Collection is created (it is a support requirement) – the Root Site Collection uses the same URL as the Web Application and we should not specify any template or anything. This will be a site collection that no end-user should ever use.

Wow, that was an awesome conference! SharePoint Conference 2014 is over and I’m very glad I attended the conference – both as a speaker and attendee. Finally Microsoft and the SharePoint Product Group told us about their future and vision for SharePoint and SharePoint Online. If you knew how long we have waited for this… I’m glad they start to sort out the service (ie Office 365) and now can add new capabilities into the platform. I’m glad Jeff Teper officially said that there will be at least one more version of SharePoint on-premises. I’m glad that the product group is listening to our and our customers feedback. I’m glad that we have such a strong community I’m excited about the future of SharePoint (to be honest, it’s been some time since I had that feeling).

I’m really proud to announce that I will be speaking at the long anticipated SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vegas, March 3-6 2014. The SharePoint Conference hosted by Microsoft is returning to Las Vegas, but this time located at the Venetian, bigger and perhaps more interesting than in a long time. If you are in the SharePoint business as a developer, IT-Pro, architect, business analyst, power user or executive, then this is the conference where you would like to be next year.

Introduction We all know that one of the most important parts of SharePoint 2013 (and 2003, 2007 and 2010) are SQL Server. Bad SQL Server performance will lead to bad SharePoint performance! That’s just how it is! There are tons of ways of doing this by having enough cores, adding more RAM, using fast disks, using multiple instances and even servers. You should all already be familiar with this. Search is one of the components in SharePoint that requires A LOT of resources, especially when crawling and doing analytics. For both SQL Server and SharePoint Search there are plenty of documentation on how to optimize both the hardware and configuration of these components. In this post I will explain and show you how to use the SQL Server Resource Governor to optimize the usage of SQL Server, especially for Search.

Introduction We all know that one of the most important parts of SharePoint 2013 (and 2003, 2007 and 2010) are SQL Server. Bad SQL Server performance will lead to bad SharePoint performance! That’s just how it is! There are tons of ways of doing this by having enough cores, adding more RAM, using fast disks, using multiple instances and even servers. You should all already be familiar with this. Search is one of the components in SharePoint that requires A LOT of resources, especially when crawling and doing analytics. For both SQL Server and SharePoint Search there are plenty of documentation on how to optimize both the hardware and configuration of these components. In this post I will explain and show you how to use the SQL Server Resource Governor to optimize the usage of SQL Server, especially for Search.

Introduction This is a story from the trenches where Excel Web App in Office Web Apps 2013 refuses to render Excel documents, while other Apps such as Word and PowerPoint works just fine. The end-users are met with the generic error message: “We’re sorry. We ran into a problem completing your request.” The problem is easy to solve but can be somewhat difficult to locate and in this post I will show you how to find the issue and fix it.

If you have been working with SharePoint you should know by now how to get the build version of an installation using PowerShell. Knowing the version of the installation is crucial for troubleshooting and knowing what features or limitations the current installation has, given the new release cadence. If you don’t know how to do it then Bing for it and then return here. But how do you do the same for Office Web Apps Server 2013?

Introduction SharePoint 2013 (and previous versions) uses a client side “token” to validate posts back to SharePoint to prevent attacks where the user might be tricked into posting data back to the server. This token is known by many names; form digest or message digest or request digest. The token is unique to a user and a site and is only valid for a (configurable) limited time. When building Apps or customizations on top of SharePoint, especially using patterns such as Single Page Applications (SPA) or using frameworks such as knockout.js it is very common that you see errors due to that the token is invalidated, which is due to that you have not reloaded the page and the token has timed out. The purpose of this article is to show you how you can refresh this form digest using JavaScript.

This year has barely started but the conference season is already running at full speed. The first conference for me of this year will be the TechX Office 365, here in Stockholm, Sweden. This is a conference organized by Microsoft with sole focus on Office 365. There will be national and international speakers of top class. I will do two presentations, one about Building Apps for SharePoint [Online] 2013 and one about Building Apps for Office 2013.

Introduction A couple of weeks back I blogged about the March Update for Office Web Apps 2013 and also how you could use that update to show PDF previews in a SharePoint 2013 Search Center. Since then I’ve received a lot of requests on how to enable PDF Previews in a Document Library, which isn’t there by default. Of course it is not a WAC thing, it’s a SharePoint 2013 thing – but the SharePoint 2013 updates (up until now at least) does not provide this capability either.

Wow, 2013 was an interesting year and the time has come for my annual blog post to sum up the year that soon has passed us and looking a bit into the crystal ball for the next one. This is my seventh summary post and it is always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006). For me the year has been really intensive on all levels; I don’t think I´ve ever experienced such a huge demand for my professional services as of now, there is so much new stuff to learn and it´s harder and harder to keep up, I have a hard time resisting doing tons of community stuff and at the same time we had a huge construction work at our house, and of course having two soon-to-be teenager girls takes its toll!

Happy Holidays everyone! At the upcoming SharePoint Conference, next year in Las Vegas, I will be presenting a session called Real World SharePoint 2013 Architecture decisions. The session will discuss and give examples of real world decisions and trade-offs you might be faced with as a SharePoint Architect. In order to make the session even more interesting I would like you all to help out with some statistics. Therefore have I created a small survey with a few questions. Filling it out should not take you more than an a few minutes, so there is no excuse not to do it.

I remember a person who clearly stated “I will never ever write a book again”. Yup, twas me. I managed to hold that promise for a year and a half. But when an interesting opportunity appears, I’m usually all-in again. And so it was. Early this year I got the request from some dear friends to help with writing another book, fortunately this time not as the single responsible author but instead together with a really experienced bunch of SharePoint people, whose knowledge and resume are really impressive. I was asked to participate to write two chapters in the Inside Microsoft SharePoint 2013 book, published by Microsoft Press.

Introduction In this post I will show you how to fix the “Could not find Stored Procedure ‘Search_GetRepositoryTimePerCrawl’” exception in SharePoint 2013. This is an exception that you can get when looking at crawl log details for a Search Service Application. The error might go unnoticed since it will not affect indexing or querying. Symptoms In SharePoint 2013 when you are trying to inspect crawl logs and statistics for indexing and querying you might see exceptions that say “Could not find stored procedure ‘Search_????’”. You will also see critical errors in the ULS Trace Logs like this:

Finally we’re getting SharePoint Saturday to Stockholm! Next year in January, or to be more precise the 25th of January 2014, the global SharePoint Saturday event will come to central Stockholm and World Trade Center. What is a SharePoint Saturday? SharePoint Saturdays are a free events that happens in cities around the world, unfortunately most of them are on the other side of the pond. But once in a while we see these great events pop up in Europe. It’s free in that meaning that it is organized by volunteers, the speakers do it because they have nothing better to do on Saturdays and there is no entrance fee and if you’re lucky you can get some swag as well! But, the events are sponsored, but just to get a good venue and of course the accompanying SharePint after a full day of sessions.

Introduction JavaScript is the future of SharePoint development (and please don’t quote me on that :-). JavaScript is everywhere in SharePoint 2013 and upcoming incarnations, and you will see a couple of posts on this topic from me in the future. The JavaScript language is easy (well, sort of), but the many different implementations and API’s built using JavaScript might cause confusion. One of the things in SharePoint 2013 that makes JavaScript development quite problematic is the Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) in SharePoint 2013. In this post I will show you what to think of when building JavaScript features on top of SharePoint and make them aware of MDS and make them work with MDS.

Introduction I’ve been reading and seeing a lot of blog posts, articles, videos etc over the last few months discussion Host Named site collections vs Path Based site collections in SharePoint 2013, and 2010 for that matter. What I find interesting is that a lot of those articles are either misinterpreting the official guidance and documentation on TechNet or are just plain wrong. In this post I will try to clear up some of the confusion, and hopefully I’m not that wrong in this post. And yes, I can agree that Microsoft could have been more clear on this topic, but what’s there is actually pretty decent.

It’s been over a week since I got home from an amazing trip to the other side of the globe (literally). It was a long way getting to New Zealand but definitely worth it. It was my first ever TechEd, both as attendee and presenter and first trip to New Zealand. I had a great couple of days meeting the SharePoint community and other Microsoft junkies, and also had the opportunity to have a quick breakfast with Scott Guthrie.

Two weeks ago the ship returned to Stockholm from a 48 hour cruise on the Baltic Sea hosting the 10th edition of SharePoint and Exchange Forum. As usual the conference was a great show arranged by MVP Göran Husman and his Humandata crew. Thank You! We enjoyed a lot of great sessions from well-known speakers around the world and we spent the nights in the bars (and on the tables) during the nights. I had a lot of fun even though it was a bit weird having my first session just as the ship left the harbor and turned sharply – as far as I could see no one got sick, at least not from the sea.

This is a sad and dark day for the Microsoft community, especially for us who love products such as SQL Server, Exchange, Lync and SharePoint. Microsoft Learning (MSL) has decided till kill their advanced certifications; Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) formerly known as Microsoft Certified Master (MCM). This is also a post I hoped not to write, as the matter of fact I started drafting a post a couple of weeks back that should recommend these certifications to the community out there, that post will never see the light now.

Overview and background This post is intended to show and explain why you see the intermittent (and annoying) “To start seeing previews, please log on by opening the document.” message when using previews from Office Web Apps Server 2013 (WAC) with SharePoint 2013. Unfortunately I do not have the magic bullet (yet) on how to solve it completely, this post is more on why you get it and how you can avoid seeing it too often.

For the fifth (if I recall correctly) year in a row I’m proud to present that I will speak at the annual SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2013 conference, September 30th to October 2nd. This year Office 365 MVP Göran Husman not only managed to bring some of the top-notch speakers around SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Office 365 to the conference, he also convinced them all to dress up in sailor suits and have the conference on a cruise ship between Stockholm, Sweden and Helsinki, Finland.

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at TechEd in New Zealand the 10-13th of September. This is really cool and my first trip down to Kiwi land. TechEd is a conference for all Microsoft technologies, not only SharePoint, but the lineup of SharePoint speakers and sessions at this conference just looks awesome; Dr. Search aka Neil Hodgkinson, MCA Wayne Ewington, MVP Mark Rhodes, MVP Debbie Ireland amongst others. If you live in the southern hemisphere and are just remotely interested in SharePoint you need to get your ticket ASAP!

Introduction I frequently see one specific question asked on distribution lists, Twitter, Yammer and other social networks: “How do I install Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC) on the same machine as SharePoint 2013”, very frequently also followed by “any hacks accepted”. Those who have tried have noticed that there is a hard block – SharePoint cannot be installed on an Office Web Apps machine and Office Web Apps cannot be installed on a SharePoint machine. This is purely by design and I will in this post show you why and why you shouldn’t try to hack it.

Here goes a post in the middle of the summer, directly taken from yet another e-mail conversation with information that I thought was well known. It has been blogged before, but perhaps you readers (thanks mum and the other one) don’t follow those blogs, so here we go. Introduction Who doesn’t like Excel? Most people love it so much that they can’t get enough of it and uploads the Excel files to SharePoint and view and edit them using Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC). The web view and editing can be very beneficial on slow networks, on machines and devices without any decent Office edition or just as nice widgets on your dashboards.

Introduction This is a follow-up post on the SharePoint 2013, Office Web Apps 2013 and Excel files with Data Connections post that I previously wrote. That post talked about how you needed to do, so called, WOPI Suppressions if you had Excel files with Data Connections and had those data connections configured to use the authenticated users account. The WOPI Suppression made sure that the rendering of the Excel book was done by Excel Services in SharePoint 2013 rather than with Office Web Apps 2013.

As you might have noticed I have somewhat fallen in love with Office Web Apps 2013, or WAC as we say now that we’ve gotten this close to each other. It’s an amazingly well written server product with the good side benefit that it is also very usable for the end-users. Even though me and WAC has been hanging around for a while and by now know each other pretty well, WAC has constantly been reporting that it is Unhealthy. And from what I’ve seen, heard and experienced in the field I am not alone…

Over the last few months I’ve been asked numerous times and I’ve seen quite a few e-mail conversations on how to work with new Host Named Site Collections (HNSC) and Content Databases. In this post I will show you how I have solved the problem using the native API hooks in SharePoint. Background Host Named Site Collections are not a new thing in SharePoint, it has been with us for quite some time, but not been extensively used due to previous limitations (and there still are some). With SharePoint 2013 one strong recommendation is to consider using HNSC, in contrast to the traditional path based site collections. It gives you a couple of benefits in management, performance and is required for Apps to work properly. On the other hand it also has a couple of downsides such as not being able to create new Site Collections in the UI.

In SharePoint 2013 JavaScript is the new default language and all our (at least mine) solutions and projects are using JavaScript more and more, even though everything is not built as SharePoint Apps. Farm or Full-trust solutions built using JavaScript will in many situations create a better user interface and an improved perceived performance. The more we build user interfaces using JavaScript we cannot just forget about some of the basic UX rules, such as using localization. End-users really hate when they see mixed content in different languages. We’ve known for quite some time how to do localization server-side, but how do we do it in a smart way in JavaScript?

Yesterday I got the really cool news that I completed all recertification requirements for the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master: SharePoint certification. Couldn’t be a happier SharePoint professional right now! What is the MCSM and what about MCM? The Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) program has during the latest year transitioned into the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) program. It is not only a change in name but also a change made to adapt to the new world order. The program is not longer focusing on one specific version of the product but instead focus on what’s in the market at the current moment and specifically it covers both on-premise and cloud solutions. This is good in many senses – this allows the program to always be current, always use the latest techniques and technologies etc. The MCM was a certification without expiration date (well eventually the product cease to exist, but you still have the cert) whereas the MCSM has a three year life span and you must recertify to stay on top.

Today at the SharePoint Evolutions 2013 Conference I announced my latest pet project called Open WOPI. Open WOPI is an open WOPI client that allows you to extend SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013 and Lync 2013 with file previews and editors for any type of file formats. The project is now (at least very, very soon) available to download from openwopi.codeplex.com and is published under the Ms-PL license. This is currently an early beta (or what you would like to call it) but will be improved over time.

Just discovered a really interesting and just awesome nugget in SharePoint 2013 that solves a problem that have been annoying me for a long time. The problem manifests itself when you’re having multiple URL’s for your SharePoint farm or when using SAML or Forms based login (like in Office 365 and SharePoint Online) and you’re using the profile pictures on sites not residing on the My Site Host Web Application (or host named site collection). Then the user profile picture is not shown, you get the default image not found image or you’re prompted to authenticate with the My Site Host.

If you still haven’t picked up on my book about SharePoint Web Parts – SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action, then this is the chance for you. Today (5th of April) the book is featured as the Manning Deal of the Day. All you have to do is browse to http://www.manning.com/wilen/ and then use the dotd0405au promotion code. This will give you 50% percent discount, for you non-math-geniuses that’s half off the full price! And since you now saved a couple of bucks, there’s another Manning book with the same deal and promotion code today and that’s PowerShell in Action 2nd edition.

In less than two weeks I’m speaking at the SharePoint Evolutions Conference 2013 in London. It is as exciting for me as it is for all attendees. The conferences held by Combined Knowledge has proven over the last years to be the highlight of SharePoint conferences around the world – everything from the venue, to the people, to the sessions and to the parties are surgically planned and executed – no one leaves without a smile on their face and pumped with knowledge!

I just received the confirmation that I am renewed as SharePoint MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) for my fourth consecutive year. It’s an honor being chosen among all the professionals around the world, especially now when SharePoint is getting more and more widespread and is being adopted by more and more companies worldwide. I’d like to take the opportunity to say thanks all my colleagues at Connecta, that put up with me, and all my friends around the world that I’ve learnt to know throughout these years. I’ll continue to write obscure blog posts and show up at conferences, and I will continue to organize the Swedish SharePoint User Group meetings.

Introduction SharePoint 2013 introduces a new model on how Site Collections are upgraded using the new Deferred Site Collection Upgrade. To keep it simple it means that SharePoint 2013 can run a Site Collection in either 2010 mode or 2013 mode, and SharePoint 2013 contains a lot of the SharePoint 2010 artifacts (JS files, Features, Site Definitions) to handle this. When you’re doing a content database attach to upgrade from 2010 to 2013, only the database schema is upgraded and not the actual sites (by default). The actual Site Collection upgrade is done by the Site Collection administrator when they feel that they are ready to do that and have verified the functionality of SharePoint 2013 (or you force them to upgrade anyways). But, the Site Collection admin might have to upgrade sooner than expected for some sites.

I’m really glad to see some patches being rolled out for Office 2013, SharePoint 2013 and Office Web Apps 2013. There’s some really important fixes and some very interesting fixes that I’ve been waiting for. In this post we’ll take a look at the first Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC) update – specifically we’re looking at how to patch your WAC farm to minimize the downtime. If you follow my instructions you will have zero downtime (except for a brief moment where Excel stuff will not be accessible).

In my last post (still smoking fresh) I showed you how to update your Office Web Apps 2013 farm to the March 2013 update, connect it to SharePoint 2013 and being able to view PDF documents in the browser. What I didn’t explain or show in that post was how to enable the PDF Previews in Search – but I’ll do it now. Pre-requisites Before you start fiddling with this, you need to make sure that you have the March 2013 update of Office Web Apps Server 2013 (WAC) installed and connected to your farm – if you don’t know for sure, ask your admins – sometimes they know…if they don’t give them the link to my previous blog post.

Introduction The search engine and search experience in SharePoint 2013 has been totally re-written, since its predecessors. In SharePoint 2010 we had something called Best Bets or Visual Best Bets if you worked with FAST for SharePoint. A best bet was a promoted result that was triggered by one or more keywords, used by the search admins to promote certain links or banners for specific search queries. In SharePoint 2013 this is now called a Promoted Results and the procedure of creating them is different and so much better – there’s more ways to trigger on, more ways to render the results etc, but the actual shown result isn’t that smart, until now…

Here’s a short post with a tip that I find very useful. In many scenarios you have several SharePoint 2013 installations to handle – it might be different farms, production environments, testing, staging, development etc. Do you know which Central Administration you’re working in at the moment? They all look the same, SharePoint Blue, the regular Status Bar warning that you’re running out of disk space etc. Unless countermeasures are taken you don’t know what environment you’re in unless you take a look at the URL – which in many cases is just another server name and port. It’s very easy to make a mistake and make a change in the production environment instead of in the test or dev environments.

In SharePoint 2013 the way Personal Sites (aka My Sites) are created have been totally rebuilt to support the new way of utilizing the Personal Sites. In this post I will go through how Personal Sites are provisioned, asynchronously, and bust a couple of myths about how interactive Personal Site instantiations should be “prioritized” and increase throughput. Background Personal Sites or My Sites were previously created “on-demand”. When a user went to his or hers non-existing My Site the provisioning started while the user waited for the site to be created, painfully watching the spinning animated gif. This worked fine in SharePoint 2010, and earlier, but now with SharePoint 2013 so much more are depending on the user having a Personal Site – everything from the social stuff in SharePoint 2013 (yes, not all SharePoint customers have yet wandered down the Yammer road) to the really great Office 2013 interaction (SkyDrive whatever). Requiring users to “manually” creating their Personal Sites is no longer a good option…

Last week the Forefront team finally released Service Pack 3 for Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) 2010. This is a long awaited release for us working with SharePoint 2013 and for those using non-legacy operating systems and browsers. In this post I will show you how to publish SharePoint 2013 Host Named Site Collections through UAG 2010 SP3 and consume the published site using Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8. What’s new in UAG 2010 Service Pack 3 Before diving into the interesting pieces let’s take a look at some of the new features of Service Pack 3. First of all, to be able to install SP3 you need to have your UAG at SP2 level – SP3 is NOT cumulative.

The SharePoint Health Score was introduced in SharePoint 2010 and plays an even more important role in SharePoint 2013. The Health Score determines the health of a SharePoint server/web application on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is the most healthy state. SharePoint automatically starts throttling request once the Health Score is to high. The Health Score is can be calculated using many parameters, such as memory usage, concurrent requests etc. In this post I will give you some details on how the Health Score works, how you can troubleshoot it and how you can use it and how you can configure it.

With this new wave of SharePoint, the Office Web Apps Server (WAC – I don’t like the OWA acronym, that’s something else in my opinion) is its own server product, implementing the WOPI client protocol, which allows a client to retrieve documents from SharePoint on the behalf of the user. Documents will flow from the WOPI servers (SharePoint, Lync, Exchange etc.) to the Office Web Apps Server – this means that potentially confidential information will be transferred from the SharePoint environment and stored/cached on another server. This could result in unnecessary information leakage and compromise the enterprise security.

SharePoint 2013 introduces a whole set of new and improved features. One of the things that is both new and vastly improved is the Workflow platform. Workflow is no longer a part of the SharePoint core infrastructure, but instead a separate server product. Even though ye olde Workflow platform, 2010 style, is still in the product for backwards compatibility. SharePoint 2013 leverages the Azure service called Workflow Manager 1.0. (Not the cloud version but a local on-premises installation).

Only one day and a few hours left of the year of 2012 and the time has come for me to make my (now traditional) summary post. I’ve done it now for six years (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006) and it’s always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months. This year has been an interesting year to me and contained some really interesting milestones, happenings and events.

This blog has been powered by my own custom implementation of the Metaweblog API , because I wanted to test Windows Live Writer. As I posted before the current implementation of the Metaweblog API by WLW is not correct in the beta. According to the WLW newsgroup, on this issue, the team are taking a second look at the Metaweblog specifications. Funny thing is that WLW does not even follow the specifications found at MSDN.

George Trifonov has written a nice tutorial on how to implement your own MetaWeblog based blog engine on his site and published the article on Codeprojectt. He also provides the full implementation in C# as a download. With the sample George enables you to use Windows Live Writer, for example, when writing blog posts.

You all know that you need to install the SharePoint 2013 pre-requisites before installing SharePoint 2013 – this is done either online or offline using the pre-req installer. All the requirements are listed in the Hardware and Software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Technet article. Once in a while you need to do the installation on a disconnected machine, that is a machine that is not connected to the interwebz. Then you typically Bing for a fancy script that downloads all the pre-reqs for you and you run the pre-reqs installer in unattended mode. That is where you pass in the local path to all the downloads either through a file or through the command line (I’m not going to cover that – it’s all over the web and even in the TechNet article mentioned before).

Well, I thought I should write another episode of my Building your own WOPI Client series, here’s the links to the previous episodes part 1, part 2 and part 3. This time around we’ll dig into another of the different actions that a WOPI Client can surface – the interactivepreview mode. Background As you’ve seen in the previous posts we can build a viewer and an editor for C# files, to be used in document libraries for instance. What if we would like to lift up and enhance our custom file formats in search, just like Office Web Apps Server does with the Office files. We’ll you can do that very easy, and you should! In this post I’ll show you how to surface the preview mode in a Search flyout. This also means that we’re going to take a look at the new SharePoint 2013 Search Engine, the Design Manager and some funky HTML syntax.

This is part three (and counting) of my Building your own WOPI Client series. In part 1 I discussed the WOPI Protocol and especially how to implement the Discovery process of a WOPI Client. In part 2 we built a viewer application as a WOPI Client and connected it to SharePoint. In this part we’re modifying our WOPI Client to support basic editing of the files. Modyfing the WOPI Client Discovery data The first thing that we need to do is to modify our Discovery method, in our case the static XML file, to tell the WOPI Server that we support editing of the files. It’s a simple procedure and we just add another line of XML like this to the app element:

Welcome back to another part in my Building a WOPI Client series. In the previous and first post I walked you through the basics of the WOPI protocol, how the WOPI Discovery mechanism worked and how to implement it and finally how to register a WOPI Client with SharePoint 2013 as WOPI Server. In this post we’ll continue to build on our C# Viewer and now actually add the viewer – we ended the last post quite dull with just showing a simple Hello WOPI web page which we now are going to turn into a real C# viewer.

Hi friends, finally time for some posts with some real code samples, and not some silly scripts. In this post, and a couple of follow up posts, I will walk you through the basics behind the WOPI protocol and WOPI Apps and WOPI Hosts. In the end you will see how we can create our own viewers and editors for files just like the WAC Server 2013 can view and edit Microsoft Office files in SharePoint 2013.

When testing SharePoint or any other software that uses Active Directory or any kind of data storage it is important to test with lot of data, data with variations and real life data. One area that is often forgotten is Active Directory, ok you create 10 or 20 test users, perhaps 50 or 100 users called Mr. Test Testson32 or similar, but that is not enough. I like to use some real world data for my Active Directories both for testing and for sure it looks more fancy when doing a demo with SharePoint (especially with these new social features in SharePoint 2013). So I’m going to show you some of my scripts I use for this.

Here we go again! The conferences are piling up one after another now when we have our new and shiny toy (=SharePoint 2013). For me personally this is an exciting time and gives me the opportunity to travel, meet old and new friends, to network and first and foremost learn more about SharePoint. A lot of us are currently experimenting with the beta bits, actively running some projects on it and just wondering how it will work when Microsoft finally will make the golden master. The conferences gives you the opportunity to hear about the latest news, learn about some features that you haven’t got a chance to explore yet, learn from those who has been working with this new product for months and even years and also hear a different perspective of others experiences compared to yours.

It’s been some time since we had some Sweden SharePoint User Group (SSUG) meetings. But now we’re back and more excited than ever. We’ll start with the first meeting in Stockholm the 24th of September and have another one coming the week after, the 4th of October, in Malmö. Stockholm, 24/9-21012 This time our host is Steria AB. We will have two sessions, one delivered by Steria with a yet not announced session and another one by me which will be an introduction to SharePoint 2013.

In todays episode of discovering awesome features in SharePoint 2013 we’re going to take a look at something really interesting, a feature that has been requested for years, a better management of end-user licensing in SharePoint. Even though this article contains a lot about SharePoint 2013 licensing I must make it very clear that nothing has yet been communicated from Microsoft regarding licensing on SharePoint 2013, and I am no expert on licensing and this is a Preview and this article must be considered as-is, things will and might change over the course of time. Remind me to go back to this article once SharePoint 2013 has gone gold. Microsoft has not made any statements about this and it might be so that you can forget about this article after RTM.

A year and a half ago I posted the Visual guide to Windows Live ID authentication with SharePoint 2010 series, a post that got a tremendously amount of hits (and still gets) and tons of comments (and new ones still coming in). It showed quite a cumbersome way to Live ID enable your SharePoint 2010 Web Applications using the Microsoft Service Manager, MSM, (which works some times and some times not). Although it did/do work it is not the best way to enable Live ID authentication to your SharePoint 2010 web site. The MSM required you to first test in their INT environment and get approval before putting it into production, and you had to follow a set of guidelines on how to use Live ID logos etc etc, not mentioning all the manual configuration.

Introduction SharePoint is based on a very rich web interface containing lots of moving parts and lots of customizable areas. As you know the Interwebz is based on a request-response approach where you request a page and get a response back. The approach is the same whether you update the whole page or portions of it. The last decade we’ve seen smart approaches working around this “problem” using DHTML, JavaScript, AJAX, UpdatePanels, you name it. Facebook, which also contains a very rich and dynamic interface, has been excellent in making a dynamic web interface minimizing the amount of data downloaded for each user interaction and in this way also increasing the perceived performance.

For some reason I get a lot of questions in my inbox about different SharePoint problems people have. I don’t mind, as long as they are polite. If I have time I do try to help out, but sometimes time is not enough. I’m sorry if I don’t answer all of them. But in order to help more people I have compiled a set of rules for SharePoint Troubleshooting. First rule of of SharePoint troubleshooting: You should always check the ULS logs The Trace Logs, often called ULS Logs, is where you find your answer to most of your problems. Always use ULS Viewer - if you do not have that tool in your kit, then you’re out on thin ice, period! Check the correlation id, search for exceptions and warnings. Things I almost always find the answer to here is “file not founds” (404) and “Access Denied”s (401). If you cannot find it immediately in the logs and you can re-create the problem, turn up the logging level to Verbose.

While fiddling, developing and configuring SharePoint 2010 I use the Service Application management a lot. This requires that you go to Central Administration, click on Manage service applications and then click on the service application that you need to configure or manage. I believe that managing the service applications are one of the most common tasks for people like me (I know some of you readers gets more fired up about the monitoring and upgrade parts of CA though).

I thought it was about time to bust one quite common myth in the SharePoint world (and there are lot of them!). This one in particular is interesting because it can cause you some interesting troubles, or at least some embarrassment. This is about that you can determine the current SharePoint [2010] version by checking the HTTP Response Header called MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices. So let’s bust that myth, or at least try!

Introduction In this small post I’m going to show you a really nice new feature to SharePoint 2013. It’s the Access Request and Invitations feature that allows you to easier manage access requests to your sites. Access Requests has been in the product for quite some time but required that your admins checked their e-mails once in a while. Using the new Share feature in SharePoint 2010 this process is so much easier. This has somewhat been blogged by the SharePoint team, but I would like to share my view of it.

Introduction SharePoint 2010 introduced the Service Application concept and that architecture model also includes the possibility to publish and consume service applications between farms. For instance you could have the Managed Metadata service application in one of your farms and use it in another farm. There are several interesting and valid scenarios for this and some of them include having dedicated Shared Services farms, that is a farm that’s only hosting service applications and not any content applications. If you have one of these farms, or farms that publishes or consumes service applications you are facing an interesting upgrade scenario when looking at SharePoint 2013. In this Visual Guide I’ll try to go through all the required steps for a successful upgrade to SharePoint 2013

One of the best things introduced for developers in SharePoint 2010 was the SPMonitoredScope, which can be used to trace your application, and to pin down potential bottlenecks. I wrote a post on how to use it way back in 2009 – Improve you SharePoint 2010 applications with monitoring using SPMonitoredScope. It’s still worth a read and still true for SharePoint 2013. But the SharePoint team has continued to evolve the SPMonitoredScope in SharePoint 2013, with two small but interesting changes.

I hope you all had the pleasure to try out the new and improved Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2013 Preview. It’s a fantastic improvement to its predecessor and contains a huge number of improvements. One of the most notable ones is that it’s no longer a control on your page which only shows you information about the current request. It’s now a separate window which shows you all requests since you started the developer dashboard session. It can actually compete somewhat with ULSViewer!

As usual a new version of a product has new requirements of all different kinds; especially when it comes to resource usage. With SharePoint 2013 there is no difference. The Hardware and Software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Preview is published and I thought I should walk through the new and updated requirements and compare them with SharePoint 2010. And also talk about some other key changes that you need to be aware of when planning your SharePoint 2013 installations.

Well, by know everybody living in the SharePoint world are sitting with their best tin foil hats on and installing, configuring and fiddling with SharePoint 2013 Preview, which was announced today by mister Steve. I’ve been fortunate to be a part of the (debated) closed beta for some time and have been trying out the new version of our favorite product. You probably will be overwhelmed with blog posts over the next couple of months, up until the SharePoint Conference 2012, and continuing after that. And I aim to be a part of the flooding (at least partly)…starting with a topic that I think is profoundly important - Authentication.

I’ve seen it asked numerous times on forums and I’ve been asked over and over how to interpret the encoded claims - so here it is: a post which will show you all the secrets behind how claims are encoded in SharePoint 2010. Updates: - 2012-03-09 Added Forms Authentication info. - 2012-03-11 Updated with information about how the claim type character is generated for non-defined claims Background If you have been using previous versions of SharePoint 2007, been working with .NET or just Windows you should be familiar with that (NETBIOS) user names are formatted DOMAIN\user (or provider:username for FBA in SharePoint). When SharePoint 2010 introduced the claims based authentication model (CBA) these formats was not sufficient for all the different options needed. Therefore a new string format was invented to handle the different claims. The format might at first glance look a bit weird…

A couple of months back, when the weather was grey and it was cold (well, it still is here in Sweden, glad I did a tour to the Riviera last week), I wrote a post about how Claims encoding works in SharePoint 2010, simply called “How Claims encoding works in SharePoint 2010”. In that post I discussed how SharePoint encoded Claims from relatively long descriptive claims, containing URN’s, to a smarter and shorter format - smaller to store, faster to compare format etc. While there are tons of defined claim types only a selected few are “pre-encoded” in SharePoint. Here are a few examples:

Building the metadata structure in the Term Store Manager in SharePoint 2010 is not the most convenient way. I prefer working with the metadata structure and terms in an Excel document so that I can discuss the structure with colleagues and clients before implementing it. The Term Store Manager allows you to import a comma separated text file containing a Term Set. By default the Excel 2010 Save as CSV does not save in the correct format and for that I have made a Excel 2010 macro enabled template which produces the correct format.

A couple of days ago I started the migration of my blog to the new and shiny Windows Azure Web Sites (AWS - I don’t think that acronym is a co-incidence) and the Orchard CMS platform. The whole reason behind doing this migration is that I felt the need for a more modern (and stable) platform than the one I’ve built from scratch, years ago, and of course that I want to fiddle with some new toys. So, here is a short story on how I did the migration.

The Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2010 can be configured using STSADM commands, PowerShell or some coding. To easy turn the Developer Dashboard on and off I have created a Farm scoped feature that allows you to configure the Developer Dashboard from Central Administration > General Application Settings > Development Settings. The Developer Dashboard contains more configuration options than just to turn it on or off. With this feature you can configure all of the options available for the dashboard:

YES! I’m finally alive with a new hosting provider - this time it’s Microsoft (who could have guessed that!). Thanks to the just released Azure Web Sites I have now moved my blog from my old custom blog implementation (that has been a fun project though), to running Orchard on Azure Web Sites using SQL Azure. This finalizes my cloud migrations - last year I moved e-mail and everything but the site to Office 365 and started with a hosted service for this site, but for running this little blog that was a bit to expensive (you’re not clicking the ads enough).

In this article I would like to give you some information about a very important timer job in SharePoint 2010 - the Application Addresses Refresh Job. If you do not understand what it is used for you might see some strange (to you) error messages when configuring SharePoint. Even if you’re familiar with it it might be a good idea to continue reading. Purpose of the Application Addresses Refresh Job The Application Addresses Refresh Job has one specific job to do - keep track of all available and online instances of all service application end-points. This means that whenever a proxy requests an endpoint for a service application it will ask the Topology Service (the Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service) for an endpoint. The Topology Service keeps a list of the endpoints that has been discovered by the Application Addresses Refresh Job and passes on one of these endpoints to the proxy, using the load balancing algorithm, which uses that endpoint to talk to the service application. So far so good…

It’s been almost a week since the International SharePoint Conference ended, the first of its kind – and what a conference it was! I was honored to be part of the developer track, together with top-notch speakers and developers such as Andrew Connell, Ben Robb, Eric Schupps, Matthew McDermott, Mirjam van Olst, Paul Schaeflein, Todd Carter and Waldek Mastykarz. We’ve been working together on this “project” for a couple of months having weekly calls trying to build a solution that we would use for the developer track. I really think that we did a good job and that we covered a lot of the important pieces in a SharePoint project – that normally isn’t covered on conferences. And I do hope that you who attended it, enjoyed the track and what we tried to show you.

It’s Aprils fools day and together with a lot of other MVP’s around the world we’re checking our junk mail folder for the e-mail that says that we have been renewed. I just got mine (actually not in the junk for the first time). This was my second renewal and I have now been awarded MVP for three consecutive years (2010, 2011). Thanks to everyone, colleagues, friends and Connecta, who have supported me the last year. Looking forward to another 12 months of really exciting SharePoint work and happenings.

In less than a month the greatest SharePoint conference on this side of the pond will take place in London - the International SharePoint Conference (ISC). The ISC is the new name for the conference held in London and previously called Best Practices Conference and Evolutions Conference. This will actually be my first year at the conference, but I always wanted to go there - and now I’m one of the speakers in the fantastic line up!

Last Friday I got the fantastic message that I had successfully passed the Microsoft Certified Architect - SharePoint 2010 (MCA) certification, something I’m really proud of - but something most of the community never ever heard of. During this weekend I’ve been pinged and messaged by a lots of people asking the question “What is a Microsoft Certified Architect?”. In this post I intend to answer it as thorough as possible, including my own personal aspects of it.

The best free SharePoint magazine published online, the DIWUG SharePoint e-Magazine, did yesterday release their sixth edition. As usual this is a great edition with a mix of articles for every aspects of the SharePoint universe. The articles are written by SharePoint community members and the magazine is compiled and managed by Mirjam van Olst and Marianne van Wanrooij. This edition contains articles ranging from hard core Service Application federation, to SharePoint Online and Azure development to articles on how to engage your users and project teams in SharePoint. As usual - something you just must read!

Another post you think! Does this guy have a life? Well, actually I do. But once you get me started , I’m hard to stop… This sixth post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010 is going to show you how to leverage some of the features that Azure ACS provides you with when using Facebook as Identity Provider. I’m going to show you how to use the Facebook Graph API and retrieve information about the user (and possible his/hers friends) - this is of interest if you’re going to build a community or something similar on top of SharePoint 2010. For instance we can use the information from Facebook and push into the SharePoint 2010 User Profile service once the user has signed up..

This is the fifth post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010 and this time it is time to augment some claims using the Azure ACS. We’ll do this to prepare for the next exciting part. For this post I assume you have configured at least one Web Application to use Facebook login using Azure ACS - make sure that you’ve followed post 1 and post 3 and optionally post 4 thoroughly.

This post serves as an index for all the articles in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. This series is a set [not yet determined amount] of articles where I show you how to leverage the Azure Access Controls Services (ACS) in combination with SharePoint 2010 to make it easier for you to use identity providers such as Google ID, Windows Live ID, Facebook AuthN etc.

Back with another promised post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. This time I’m going to show you how to work with multiple web applications. We’re going to use the stuff we configured in part 1 (basic setup) and part 3 (Facebook setup), and hopefully we’re avoiding the problems discussed in part 2 (common problems). Scenario In this article I would like to show you how to use Azure ACS and SharePoint 2010 when we have multiple Web Applications in SharePoint. The sample will assume the same web application as used in the previous posts, but now with a dedicated My Site Host Web Application (called http://my). If we just enable the same Trusted Identity Provider to the “My” Web Application, the user will be redirected to the Azure ACS log in page, but when he/she is redirected back it will redirect back to the other web application (called http://sp2010 in the previous posts), because that’s the web application we configured in the Return URL in Azure ACS.

Welcome back to a third post in the Visual Guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. In the first part I showed you how to do the basic configuration of Azure ACS and SharePoint 2010 and log in using a Google Id. The second part discussed the most common problems I’ve seen so far. In this post we’ll continue extending the ACS Relying Party to support another Identity Provider - namely Facebook! Depending on what type of site/community you’re trying to build with your SharePoint 2010 site it might be of interest to use Facebook login (they have like a gazillion of users or something). The Facebook AuthN parts are a bit different than the others OOB IP’s in Azure ACS - but not complicated at all, so let’s get started…

This is a the second part of the Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. I hope you’ve read part 1 which showed you how to configure SharePoint 2010 to use Windows Azure Access Control Services, ACS, as the federated Identity Provider, IP. In this post I’ll go through the most common errors that you might stumble upon (most likely due to the fact that you didn’t follow part 1 thoroughly). These errors are also applicable to other providers such as ADFS.

The SharePoint Enterprise Search Migration Tool (SMT), created by Microsoft, is a great little tool for moving/migrating search settings from one SharePoint Search Service Application to another, and even from a SharePoint 2007 SSP to a SharePoint 2010 SSA or FAST for SharePoint. The tool is available for download from the MSDN Archive - both as a binary and its source code. It is a console application that creates an XML when exporting the settings and uses the same XML when importing the settings, and it works great in a scripting environment. The SMT that’s available from MSDN Archive allows you to migrate Best Bets, Search Scopes and Site Collection Search settings.

I bet you will! The Advanced Certification Team at Microsoft Learning will start a new Live Meeting series where you can learn more about the Microsoft Certified Master and Microsoft Certified Architect programs. It will be regularly held meetings where they will go into details about the programs. The program managers will make you understand the program mission and vision, how to prepare for a certification, how to apply for participation and the value of the programs. If you’re interested in one or more of these programs I recommend you to attend one of the live meetings or watch the recordings. Of course attending the live meetings will allow you to directly ask questions to the program managers!

For a couple of weeks (ahem, months) I’ve been struggling with a strange Search Service Application issue. Some time back I went to check out on some Crawled Properties when making a tool to help copying settings between SSA’s (more on this tool in another post). Then I noticed that there were tons of Crawled Properties with just garbled binary data(!) as the property name.

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is now available for download für alles and it does not only include the Windows 8 stuff like the previous preview did - this one contains the thing we all want - the SharePoint Developer tools. Overall the performance of Visual Studio 11 is blazingly fast! I regret I tested it - since I will go back to 2010 tomorrow (or even tonight). They team has done a great job and included a lot of the PowerTools natively; such as the new Solution Explorer, the improved search feature etc.

It is always fun to get back on site after a couple of days off work. SharePoint 2010 is like an annoying little critter, if you’re not there to cuddle with it it will do the most strange things. I currently have a support case open regarding some issues with crawled properties (I hope that will be another story to tell another day) and went into the Search Service Application admin pages in Central Admin to check some things. When poking around I noticed that the incremental crawl hasn’t been run for a few days - actually it stopped working on the 31st of December last year (sounds like ages ago now :-). In this farm we have three Search Service Applications and only this one hadn’t been incrementally crawled - the other two worked just fine. I fired up an incremental crawl manually and that worked, waited for the next incremental crawl to start - and it didn’t. Also tried a full crawl manually - which worked fine, but the scheduled crawls never started.

It’s that time of the year, when you’re thinking about what you’ve done and accomplished the last twelve months. I’ve been writing a summary for the last five years (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010) and I always think it’s fun to look back at the year gone and do some predictions for the upcoming one. This year has been totally crazy - I’ve been enjoying my work and clients/projects at Connecta and I totally love that we have such a strong team and offering. I can really feel the momentum we have in our team and projects, and nothing is stopping us now…

The last week I stumbled upon a really interesting new and shiny User Profile Synchronization issue - one of these things that just make your day! We had to manually initialize a full synchronization, after doing some updates to one of the user profile properties, and the user profile synchronization would not just start… Everything looked fine (on the surface) and we tried the incremental sync, which also looked like it was starting but nothing happened. The sync service was up and running and the FIM services was started, the MIISClient showed no activity. We took a look at the timer jobs, which are responsible for kicking of the synchronizations and saw that they all failed with the error message Access Denied.

It was some time since I did a real blog post and I have been fiddling with a specific topic, which I’m going to write about, for quite some time now. I’ve been working an Office 365 Intranet and been doing two conferences lately where I’ve demonstrated Office 365 and Windows Azure integration. One of the challenges (and boy, there are many) of Office 365 and SharePoint Online are access to External Data or services. In a few blog posts I will describe how you can work around these issues using some very simple techniques. All that is to it is that you have to “think outside the box” and not always go down the traditional SharePoint way of doing things.

Back home after a few days in Berlin for the European SharePoint Conference 2011. It was a great conference with good speakers and really nice attendees. It was three days full of sessions, expert panels, shoot-outs and SharePoint fun! Thanks to everyone who was there (especially those who came to my sessions :-) and the team behind the conference! And as always it great to meet up with the SharePoint MVP’s, MCM’s and now even MCA’s!

I’ve now been home for about 48 hours since visiting Anaheim, California, for this years edition of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference. It has been a great week in California with colleagues, friends, clients and new acquaintances. This year, eight people from my company, Connecta, travelled over for the conference. We all had a blast with some spare time before and after the conference, which included a visit to Six Flags - Magic Mountain and a drive along the Pacific coast. We also met up with a few old friends and colleagues and had a good time with our clients, who also attended the conference.

A couple of days ago the SharePoint 2010 Cumulative Update for August 2011 was released. Always a good time to see some things fixed and some things break. Installing a Cumulative Update is always a risky business, and you should only install them if you any experience problems that the CU resolves and only when you thoroughly tested it. One CU to rule them all! Without going into details about the content and fixes in the August 2011 CU there is one other thing that is of real interest - and that is how MIcrosoft has changed the packaging process for the Cumulative Updates. Since the release of SharePoint 2010 there has been talk and discussions about über-packages. That is Server Cumulative Packages that contains both the Server hotfixes as well as the Foundation hotfixes, which makes the update process a bit easier and faster - you only need to install one package. Up until now there has been mixed messages on the über-packages and caused some confusion. The recommendation has been that you need to install both SPF and SPS CU’s on a SPS installation and all three if you’re using Project Server.

This fall is going to be pretty busy in terms of conferences and presentations and I’ll have my fair share. Here’s what I’ve planned for this fall, so far. Webinar: No Farm Solution in sight! On Tuesday the 6th of September I will do a webinar discussing SharePoint Online and Office 365 and how you can build solutions using SharePoint Online, Silverlight, Windows Azure and more without creating any farm solutions:

If you’ve been in the SharePoint business for a while (at least a couple of days) you should be aware of the SharePoint objects that needs to be properly disposed; SPSite and SPWeb in particular. Objects that need disposal inherits from the IDisposable interface and requires that you call the Dispose() method when you’re done with the object - this is to ensure that the object frees up resources that the .NET managed garbage collector cannot free up automatically. This includes objects such as non-managed SQL connections, resource handles, file handles etc. Disposing objects is nothing unique for SharePoint - all (real) .NET developers know how to dispose of a SQL connection. You can read more about the best practices around disposing SharePoint objects in the MSDN Disposing Objects article. Not doing this properly will eventually lead to application crashes, high memory usage and/or bad performance.

The 65th SharePoint Pod Show is out featuring…tada…me :-) The SharePoint Pod Show is THE podcast about SharePoint and is done by Rob Foster, Nick Swan and Brett Lonsdale and has featured a lot of great SharePointers from all around the world throughout the years. If you haven’t already listened to the podcasts, then you got 65 episodes to catch up on! There are some epic ones, such as my favorite one #50 - which is about performance tuning. And make sure that you subscribe - you don’t want to miss their SPC11 Road-trip…

Besides SharePoint my very dear topics is performance optimizations and new technologies, so here’s a post mixing all these together. Background Caching is one way to improve the performance of any application, there are several ways to do it in-memory, disk etc etc. SharePoint 2010 has a set of caching capabilities, most of them are in-memory caches and some involve disk or even SQL based. One problem with (especially) in-memory caching is that if you have a farm different servers may display different results, which is due to the fact that the different servers cached information at different times. Another problem with in-memory caching is that it’s per process, that is that you have different caches for different web applications and application pools.

This is a short story about how you can get and resolve stale Managed Metadata Service (MMS) databases in SharePoint 2010. I’ve been working with Managed Metadata quite much and done some backup/restore juggling from production to test and to dev environments. Which by the way works really smooth. I’ve also recreated the MMS databases a couple of times. After applying Service Pack and the re-released June 2011 CU I went into Central Administration to take a look at the databases and their upgrade status. This is what I found: four MMS databases, of which two didn’t upgrade, and I only have two MMS service applications in this particular environment.

Here goes another post using the WebPartAdderExtension Element. I previously wrote an introduction to custom Web Part Gallery sources and a second one on how to enhance the end-user experience when adding new Web Parts. Now I’m going to show you another trick that this technique can be used for. Introduction Deploying Web Parts are normally done by using the Module element in the Elements manifest and using that element uploading/deploying Web Part Controls Description files (.webpart or .dwp files) into the Web Part catalog. These Element manifests for Web Parts must be scoped to the Site Collection level, since it is there where the Web Part catalog lives (~/site/_catalogs/wp). So if you want do deploy a solution containing a set of Web Parts you need to activate that Feature on each and every Site Collection. You can do it in a number of ways such as Feature Stapling, code, scripting etc. Could be quite tedious work if you have a large farm with many site collections and web applications. Also when retracting solutions with Features that uses Modules we manually have to clean up the files provisioned.

This is a follow-up post on yesterdays introduction to the WebPartAdder (which lately has been one of my favorite features of SharePoint 2010). In that post I mentioned that you could invoke a JavaScript function when a Web Part is added using a custom Web Part Gallery source. The Silverlight Web Part If you have been working with SharePoint as an end-user you’ve probably seen the nice modal dialog that pops up when you’re adding a Silverlight Web Part to a page, see the image to the right. It allows you to very easily configure the Web Part with the appropriate XAP file without editing the Web Part properties. If more Web Parts were like this it would be a whole lot easier working with Web Parts.

Writing this post has been on my agenda for some time, initially I intended to put it into my SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action book, but there was not enough time, you know how it is! This is an excellent new feature to SharePoint 2010 which allows you to dynamically populate the Web Part Gallery with Categories and Web Parts. So here we go. Introduction to the Web Part Adder and the Web Part Gallery Think of the List and Libraries category in the Web Part Gallery - it is dynamically populated with the lists and libraries available in the current web. This is all done using the WebPartAdder class which loads all the Web Parts available in the gallery from a number of different sources, see figure below. These source include the List and Libraries category, the local Web Part catalog, files in the wpcatalog, closed and uploaded Web Parts etc.

I guess by now we all seen or read about the new SharePoint 2010 guidance on scaling limits announced by the product group today. To sum it up it this is the new guidance on content database sizing: up to 200GB - still the recommendation 200GB to 4TB - yes, it’s been done and can be done (with the help of a skilled professional architect :-) 4TB or more - only for near read-only “record centers” with very sparse writing This looks good right, and it can be in some cases. But now on to the fine prints, which actually are written in the updated Software Boundaries and Limits article. If you read the announcement and the boundaries article you see that to be supported you need to follow a number of hard rules (such as IOPS per GB) and you must have governance rules (such as backup and restore plans) in place. Ok, if I got the IOPS needed, the best disaster recovery plans ever made and a skilled professional - should I go for the 4TB limit then? I think not, unless you really need the scale and have the hardware requirements.

About a year has passed since SharePoint 2010 RTM:ed and now the first Service Pack is released, Service Pack 1. A Service Pack is always a big deal for SharePoint. Service Packs contains all the previous cumulative updates and in most cases some new features. SP1 for SharePoint 2010 is all that. Before diving into some of the new stuff I want to raise a finger of warning. Plan and test your SP1 upgrade thoroughly! Even though Service Packs are tested more than CU’s they are not tested in your environment and with your customizations. Read more on this topic.

SharePoint 2010 allows you to configure your Service Application in Application Proxy Groups. By default all Service Applications ends up in the Default Proxy Group, named default. This Proxy Group is used by all Web Applications unless otherwise specified. Sometimes there is need to create specific Proxy Groups for different Web Applications, the reasons may vary but often it is a result of having different service offerings. For instance you would like to have different Managed Metadata Service Applications for different Web Applications.

Post is updated, see comments at the end of the post. We’re really getting close to the go live of Office 365 and I am, and I guess a lot of you are as well, preparing to launch a couple of Intranets and sites. As you know by now there are some major differences between SharePoint 2010 on-premise and SharePoint Online in Office 365. And there are also some more subtle ones that jumps up right in your face.

Now with the Microsoft Certified Master course two and a half weeks behind me and the great news that I accomplished all the exams, and might call myself a Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2010, only a few days old I thought I should write something about the program, experience and value of it. Recent blog posts about the Microsoft certification programs also put some extra fuel onto the urge of writing about it.

This is a post detailing how you perform active authentication to SharePoint Online in Office 365. Active authentication is required when you need to authenticate in code to programmatically access SharePoint objects, using for instance Client Object Model, web services or WebDAV from outside of Office 365. When you are “in” SharePoint Online or using the web browser this is not needed since you are either already authenticated and the web browser handles the authentication using active authentication.

I’m proud to announce that I have been selected to speak at the European SharePoint Conference, held in Berlin 17-20 October 2011. This is the largest SharePoint conference in Europe this year and there are plenty of good speakers and sessions, so get your seat while they still are available. I will have two sessions: Integrating Office 365 and Windows Azure - Tuesday, 18th at 11:15 This session focuses on how to extend Office 365 using Windows Azure. Playing in the Sandbox - Wednesday, 29th at 11:15 One of my favorite topics; understand the SharePoint 2010 Sandbox and overcome its limitations. I will be bringing a few copies of my book, so make sure that you attend my sessions and have a chance to win one.

The by far best utility for SharePoint 2010 developers is the CKSDev extension (Community Kit for SharePoint - Developer extensions). It’s an extension to Visual Studio 2010, available through the built-in Extension Manager. To install it, just hit Tools > Extension Manager and then search for “CKSDEV” in the Online Gallery. Version 2.0 of CKSDev was released yesterday, and if you already have it installed you should have been notified about the update.

Once in a while even a SharePoint addict does something else but SharePoint and so has I. I’ve been fiddling a bit with a Windows Phone 7 application. Actually the application has been available in the Windows Phone marketplace for two months now (thanks to those who downloaded it or even purchased it). But now it’s up to version 2.0 where all my initial wanted features are in place, thanks to a huge delay when flying into Seattle this weekend.

For quite some time I’ve been pretty annoyed (and that’s an understatement) of the strange span-tags generated by the output of pages in SharePoint 2010. Not only are they annoying they also make the markup invalid, since the span tags are omitted after the closing html tag (duh!). So in order to get to the bottom of this I decided to face my fears and entered debugging mode. It only took me a few minutes to find out what was going wrong, and I didn’t even have to step (almost) through any SharePoint code to find it out. Here’s what I found and how I found it…

Earlier today Jeff Teper, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, wrote about the 10th birthday of SharePoint. This post made me lean back and close my eyes for a while and think back of what has happened during the last decade - and it is a lot of stuff! And I’ve playing with SharePoint more or less since then! The SharePoint story for me started back in 2000. I was running my own company, iBizkit, and we built a “SharePoint like” Intranet portal product. The product was modular based and very configurable. We hade something we called Modules based on COM+ components and XML output, that had a common interface and a single rendering engine which could translate the XML output to HTML, WML or whatever depending on the device and the users settings. I was, and am, still very proud of that architecture. Initially we looked at the Digital Dashboard, but came to the conclusion that it didn’t fit our needs, so we built our own from scratch. It was built on top of Site Server (and then later on AD), IIS, ASP and COM+. We got a request from a customer that they would like a document management system for their Intranet. And what could be better than building it yourself - use a third party tool. And at that time I’ve been checking out the Tahoe project from Microsoft, that later became SharePoint Portal Server 2001. What we did was build a more dynamic interface (way before AJAX was known as AJAX, and this is where Robert Nyman started his brilliant JavaScript career). than SPS 2001 had and incorporated that into a module in our portal solution. I dug up on old screenshot:

The Web Analytics feature in SharePoint 2010 is a great new addition and allows you to get some insights on how your users behave whether it’s an Intranet, Extranet or a public facing web site. One of the reports is called Top Browsers and shows which web browser that the users are using to access the site. For a public facing web site this report might make sense but for an Intranet the results may cause you a headache if you do not understand how to interpret the data.

The 1st of April is one of those days when a fourth of all MVPs just waits for the renewal e-mail from Microsoft. Luckily I got mine this year, just before heading home from work this afternoon. This means that I will do my second term as a SharePoint MVP and I’m already looking forward to the paintball in a cold a rainy Seattle! Congrats to all other renewed and new MVPs all around this globe.

Back in the saddle from another TechDays event here in Sweden. This year it was all about the cloud! It was as always a great show and an awesome party. Thank you Microsoft, all presenters, all attendees and sponsors. I did two sessions - or actually one session divided into two segments about Office 365 and Windows Azure. I tried to squeeze in as much cloud technology as I could in a one big demo. For those who attended - I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to go back to the slides or take a look at the demo code you can find them below. The sessions were also recorded so you can enjoy them in full glory (keep an eye on the TechDays site for more information).

In less than a week Sweden’s largest Microsoft conference will take place in Örebro - TechDays 2011, same place as last year. The conference is already fully booked with 1.700 participants, but there’s a waiting list! The theme of the conference is “The Cloud Story”. This year I will do two sessions, or rather one long sessions split into two parts on Office 365 + Windows Azure. This will be over two hours full of great demoes and information. I’ve built one big demo that will combine the powers of Office 365 (SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Lync Online) and Windows Azure (web and worker roles, SQL Azure, AppFabric). We’ll also touch on technologies such as Silverlight, WPF, Open XML and WIF. So if you think this is interesting, if you’re considering moving your stuff into the cloud or just want to have fun - then these are the sessions to attend.

Today an article was published on the SharePoint Developer Team Blog called Calling a WCF Service using jQuery. The content and purpose of the article is good and interesting but the way it is implemented can not be considered best practice and is definitely not the way we (I) teach SharePoint 2010 development. For instance this article manually registers assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache! Something that we never should do! It tells you to copy files to the virtual directory bin folder and into the Layouts folder! Ouch! Also, the article contains some plain ol’ errors.

The other day I was setting up another SharePoint 2010 farm and got the usual question to participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). As always I bailed out of this. Why? Sending information to a third party about my SharePoint farm doesn’t appeal me, even if it’s Microsoft. You know, they might check how I configure my farm, how I use it etc., and then sit back and laugh at me. Not really, but I think most of us prefer not to send that information to Microsoft. But, this is not my normal standing to the CEIP. I use to participate in it, like when I install new software and they have that little checkbox asking me to send info about my installation. Why not give Microsoft some help about any kind of troubles during the installation. But when it comes to SharePoint - nope.

The SharePoint 2010 user interface relies heavily on JavaScripts, just take a look at the Ribbon which is completely generated by a bunch of JavaScripts. Often customizations of SharePoint also involve JavaScripts. You need it to open modal dialogs, add notifications, create Ribbon Page Components etc. etc.. JavaScript is just one of the programming languages you must know as a SharePoint developer - and you can do amazing stuff with it (just take a look at SPServices by Marc D Anderson).

Back again (sorry about the delay) with a new part in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (all parts available here). This time I’m going to show you an interesting control - the Spinner control. What is a Spinner control? The spinner is an up/down (increase/decrease) control with some smart abilities to handle different units. For instance it is used when setting image and table sizes in the default ribbon. The Spinner control has a value (number) and a unit (pixel, percent, points etc.) and three ways to modify the value; manual or using the up and down buttons.

I’ve just published a page, which I plan to update regularly, containing links to web sites, tools, products, solutions, articles, posts, books etc. which I recommend and talk about during my SharePoint 2010 classes. You can find the page here: Class Links If I did promise you during my classes to add a link to it and have forgotten - drop me an e-mail and remind me.

Back with another SharePoint 2010 Server Ribbon Controls post, this time a shorter one, compared to previous posts. We’ll take a look at the ToggleButton control. I know I said I’m going to talk about the DropDown in this post, but I’d reconsidered and take the easy ones first - since the DropDown control will be divided into several posts. What is a ToggleButton control? The ToggleButton control is very similar in behavior to the Button control with the difference that you can toggle the state of the button; it can either be on or off.

Welcome back to part 6 of my SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (full series index can be found here). This time we’ll take a look at the CheckBox control. What is the CheckBox control? If you’ve not been hiding under a rock you should now what a CheckBox is - it’s a box you can check. It can have two states - checked or not checked. Sample CheckBox control A CheckBox can look like this when implemented in the Ribbon:

Now it’s time for the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Button Control in the Ribbon Control series (full series index can be found here), What is the Button control? The Button control needs no further description - it’s a button on which the users can click to execute commands. Buttons can exist alone or in menus (which will be covered later in the series). Sample Button control A Button control could be implemented as follows:

Welcome back to another post in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (full series index available here). Now it is time to introduce the TextBox control, which can be used to allow users to enter text information in your Ribbon customzations. What is the TextBox control? If you’re familiar with .NET development (WinForms or ASP.NET) then you already know what a TextBox is. It allows your users to enter and change text.

The first control in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (full series index available here) will be about the Label control. What is the Label control? The Label control is a simple control that allows you to add a Label to any of your Ribbon groups. Labels are most often used in combination with other controls such as text boxes and drop downs. You can using a label target another control so that if you click on the label then the other control gets focus. A Label can be a text, an icon or both.

This first real post in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (full series index available here) will be about some of the common properties that most or all of the Ribbon controls shares. I assume that you have some basic knowledge of SharePoint 2010 Ribbon customization, if not check out one of my previous posts. What is a Ribbon control? A SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Control is the interactive parts of the Ribbon. Controls exits within a Group (B) within a Tab (A). The controls can be labels, buttons, drop downs, menus, galleries and more. You can add, remove or change default Ribbon controls or add completely new Tabs and Groups.

Welcome to 2011, this will for sure be an exciting year! I thought I start this year off with a series of blog posts about the different controls that can be used in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon. Hopefully a bit better than the current MSDN documentation. The series will discuss each control that are available for usage in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon and show you through examples and code how to use them. I will even throw in one or more tips and tricks along the road.

The time has come for me to do my summary post of 2010. This is my fifth summary post (2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009). This year has been truly amazing. Working in the SharePoint world has been so interesting and challenging with the brand new Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 products. I have been knee-deep in SharePoint 2010 work both for my employer (Connecta) and for personal reasons (pure fun, book, learning…). A huge thanks to my wife and daughters that can put up with my constant chatter about this obscure thingie…

Recent discussions I’ve been involved with and blog posts have highlighted some of the SharePoint 2010 Sandbox limitations (either as bugs or as a feature). I have also talked about this during SEF 2010 and SPCSEA 2010. While writing my book SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action I had the opportunity to discover these limitations early on and have learned to live with it. If you read my book you will find a lot of references to “this does not work in the Sandbox” (you’ve already ordered it huh? Otherwise it’s just one click away).

Finally back in the blogging saddle, keep stacking ideas and post embryos but never time to finish them. This post is about how you create custom Health Rules for SharePoint 2010 and this health rule is of particular interest since it checks for debug build assemblies in all installed farm solutions. Health Rules Health Rules in SharePoint 2010 is a great way to make administrators aware of possible problems and issues with your farm; such as running out of disk space, living up to best practices etc. SharePoint 2010 comes with a bunch of out-of-the-box rules (of which some are good and some not that good). The best thing about the Health Rules is that you can write your own to fully satisfy your needs and live up to your governance standards.

Yesterday the SharePoint Team posted on their blog about a major issue with the latest Cumulative Update for SharePoint 2010 and recommending not to install it. If you have installed it you might experience major problems with User Profile services - contact Microsoft Support as soon as possible for help. So what about these Cumulative Updates? Everyone that has been in the business for some time working with products such as SharePoint and other products such as SQL Server knows that the CU’s are coming every each month or quarter. These updates contains the latest hotfixes assembled into a one package to make it easier for you to patch your server product. One problem with these CU’s (not the actual CU’s though) is that a lot of people download them and install them as soon as they are released - Fail! This is not the intended purpose of Cumulative Updates, let me explain why:

I just came home from a great trip to Singapore and the Southeast Asia SharePoint conference. It has been a great adventure travelling that far and meet so many SharePoint fans, Southeast Asia is really hot. The conference has been perfectly arranged by Debbie, Randy and Steve at a great location. Thank you! A new conference in the area was announced during the closing session, and if I’m allowed I’ll gladly come back! Hopefully I can spend a few more days here in Singapore then. One thing that really stood out in this conference part from the actual SharePoint content, the speakers and the great people here was the great local food for dinner and tea breaks - love it! As always great to see the real person behind the tweets and the twitter images.

Today Microsoft released a bunch of external Search connectors for their search products such as SharePoint Server, FAST and Search Server or for clients such as Windows 7. The external search connectors are based on the OpenSearch specification, so it’s quite easy to integrate with whatever product you like. Downloads These are the new released connectors: Bing Image Search Local Search News Search Business Week Encyclopedia Britannica Flickr Google Blog Search Google News

This years SharePoint and Exchange Conference, the seventh in order, took place this week. For the second year I was there as a speaker and had just as great time as last year. It is currently the largest conference in Scandinavia focusing on SharePoint and Exchange technologies and its growing for each year. Göran Husman (MVP) and Beatrice from Humandata has done an excellent job in putting this conference together and finding such good speakers; both national and international. Thank you!

Here is the third part of my Visual guide to Windows Live ID authentication in SharePoint 2010. This part takes off just where we ended the last part. If you haven’t read part 1 and part 2 then make sure to read them through before continuing. Submitting site for compliance In order to get your INT site into the PROD/production environment you need to make sure that your site follows the compliance rules. If you do not follow the rules then you will not be able to run your site using the “normal” Live ID accounts. The compliance criteria and verification cases can be found at the MSM site as Word or PDF format. Note that this document is dated way back in 2006 so some things are quite outdated. Here is a short but not complete summary of the compliance criteria:

Recently came across a really interesting bug in SharePoint 2010. It’s when you are trying to upload multiple files using the ActiveX control, where you can drag and drop files or select multiple files. I started receiving “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” exceptions from the STSUpld control. The usual Google, ahem, Bing check revealed nothing. Just that I was not alone having this problem (hence this post).

An intense Twitter conversation initiated by Fabian about how Managed Metadata is updated in SharePoint 2010 gave me the idea to note down a few interesting bits about the Taxonomy Fields and how they work within a Site Collection. I hope/guess that Fabian will write a good post (as usual) about his findings as well. Introduction The possibility to tag documents in SharePoint is one of my favorite features and one of the reasons that I think you should move to SharePoint 2010 as soon as possible. As every new function added to the huge SharePoint spectrum I have an urge to dive deep into these new additions to really know how to use them fully. I’ve spent some time with the Managed Metadata Service Application and the taxonomy fields used with it. I can’t say it has been a smooth ride all the way - but digging into the actual bits and understanding how it all works made it a whole lot easier. And you know what - why keep everything a secret!

Welcome back to the SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 Better together series for this third part. In part 2 I showed you how to use Visio 2010 to convert your business requirements into workflows that later could be used in SharePoint 2010, using SharePoint Designer 2010 as the man in the middle. This time I’ll show you how Visio comes into play even after you have deployed your workflows and running them in your organization.

UPDATE 2012-02-01: A new and better approach to this is detailed in a new Visual Guide - Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. I’m back with the second part of the Visual guide to Windows Live ID authentication with SharePoint 2010 series. Part 1 was a huge success and has received a lot of feedback and hits - I hope many of you out there successfully configured your web sites and extranets. I’m currently working on getting the new Swedish SharePoint User Group website up using Live ID…

Introduction After a long and well deserved vacation we’re now back with new strength! It’s time for our first SSUG meeting for the fall! Please do remember; This is a FREE event – we never have and never will charge anyone for loving SharePoint and sharing the awesomeness :-) Meeting details Let’s meet up at Microsoft HQ for our first SSUG meeting this fall! You will have the possibility to mingle around with SharePoint MVPs, folks from Microsoft and of course all our splendidly cool members!

The other day I had an interesting and great workshop with a customer about the BI features in SharePoint 2010. SharePoint Insights is one thing that really gets me going - so much great stuff can be unleashed using Excel, Visio and PerformancePoint Services. One thing that annoys me with the default settings in SharePoint 2010 is the BI Center. A BI Center does not support the “BI for everyone” mantra - that center only turns numbers and KPI fans on. What you should do is enable BI features on all of your sites; your Intranet home page, your department sites or even on project sites etc. But it isn’t as easy as you could imagine. So here’s some tips for you all to BI-enable all your sites. Oh wait, don’t say to your end-users that you BI-enabled their site - tell them that you have Insight enabled their site instead so you don’t scare them off.

Next Wednesday I will sit in the SharePoint MVP Experts panel for a Q&A session where you can ask your questions about SharePoint. The SharePoint MVP Experts Q&A chat is your opportunity to chat and get instant answers about any SharePoint related questions, including topics such as development, design, configuration and setup. There will be several SharePoint MVP’s ready to answer your questions… When? The chat will take place the 29th of September at 9AM PDT. Sign up here and add it to your calendar. Also sign up here at the Facebook event page.

This is the second post in the SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 - better together series. And it is time to really check out what this great combination have to offer, and the most obvious subject to start with is that we can now use Visio to design the workflows, which then are imported to SharePoint via SharePoint Designer 2010. So let’s get started. If you ever built workflows for previous versions of SharePoint you either used SharePoint Designer 2007 or Visual Studio 2005/2008. SharePoint Designer 2007 had a very limited workflow designer (you can’t actually call it a designer) that took quite some time to get used to and you were very limited in what to do. Visual Studio of course offered you the full set of workflow features. I’m not trying to get to deep into the actual workflow stuff here but it is important to understand how hard it was for the organizations to get their hand-drawn or Visio-drawn workflow into SharePoint. If you used SharePoint Designer to build the workflows then the most problematic situation was when you were supposed to move the workflow from you development environment to production - this was just impossible (yea, there was ways to work around it - but not for mere mortals).

One of the really great features in SharePoint 2010 is the Sandbox, which allows the end-users to upload solutions using the web interface, instead of relying on administrators adding the solutions directly to the farm. One of the things that that can be deployed to the Sandbox is custom workflow activities. These activates can then be used by the end-users building workflows with SharePoint Designer. It is really powerful to add custom sandboxed activities and it is very easy as well! In this post I will show you how to really fast build a custom sandboxed activity that breaks the permission inheritance on the item which the workflow is executed on.

UPDATE 2012-02-01: A new and better approach to this is detailed in a new Visual Guide - Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. Using Windows Live ID as login provider for SharePoint is a really huge thing. It makes the scenario for public facing web sites, extranets etc. much more easier, for instance there is no need to maintain passwords and users in the same degree. For SharePoint 2007 there is no native support for this, so I built a custom Live ID login provider (available at http://spwla.codeplex.com), but SharePoint 2010 has native support for claims based access. And that is what’s on the menu for tonight…

This is the first post in a series about SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 and how the two products integrate with each other. I remember when I first saw Visio many, many years ago. It was before Microsoft acquired it from Visio Corporation. It was my dad using it to make blue prints of our summer house. As most of the gadgets and software he buys he needs a helping hand, not saying he is not technical, but I tend to catch up on such stuff faster than him, so I learnt the basics. I have used Visio since then, during my years in school and university and especially in my job as a developer and architect. (I have also made exact blue prints of our house, including the electrical wiring - call me crazy but I do love that product.) Visio is a great tool for technical diagrams and representations and extremely effective in drawing flowcharts and business processes.

This is a follow-up post to the Understanding folders and namespaces in Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Solutions, Packages and Features (probably my longest blog post title, except this one…). In that post I discussed how folders and namespaces are handled in Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint projects. I will continue to show some details and tips on how you can affect the outcome of your project/packages. Long feature folder names As the previous post showed the features generated by Visual Studio ends up as a subfolder in the {SharePoint Root}\TEMPLATE\FEATURES folder. The feature folder will get the name as the concatenation of the project and the feature - which possibly can be quite long.

UPDATED 2010-10-03: Obviously the KB2276339 is not a Aug CU hotfix KB2352342 is the correct one. The second Cumulative Update (CU) is out for SharePoint 2010. It contains two hotfixes; one for Foundation and one for Server. The Foundation fix contains the really important update that should fix the problem with LINQ to SharePoint and anonymous users. You can get the fixes here: SharePoint Foundation 2010 August 2010 CU hotfix (KB2266423) SharePoint Server 2010 August 2010 CU hotfix (KB2276339) SharePoint Server 2010 August 2010 CU hotfix (KB2352342) - KB article not live yet but you can request the hotfix here. (by looking at the updated components in CA you can see that it patches Access Services, Document Lifecycle components, Shared Components and Word Server) Caution when installing hotfixes (as usual), they are not that thoroughly tested as Service Packs and only install them if you experience the problems mentioned in the KB articles. Nevertheless since this SPF hotfix contains the above mentioned fix for LINQ to SharePoint - this one is pretty important!

Yesterday Todd Bleeker (SharePoint MVP) wrote a post about the SharePoint Project SPI’s where he explains how SPI effectively are folders within a SharePoint solution. I thought that I should continue that discussion a bit and looking at how these folders and other things such as packages and features affects the actual deployed artifacts. Packages A package (#3 in the figure to the right) is the actual WSP file that will be created containing all your objects from your solution that will deployed to the SharePoint application servers. The project can only contain one package.

Visual Studio 2010 LightSwitch is a new kid on the block in the Visual Studio suburbs. Basically it is a rich client application editor for Visual Studio that allows you to develop (or should I say “click-through”) an application very easy without any programming skills at all. You can create a custom database, attach to an external data source or WCF RIA service and last but not least hook it up to SharePoint. And this is what I’m going to give you a quick peek at.

Summer is not yet over (at least not according to the calendar) and this autumn is already being planned and filled with some great stuff. Part from working on a great SharePoint 2010 project, waiting for the book to be ready and some other stuff I also have planned a few speaking events - which I’m really thrilled about. SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2010 Stockholm - 18th-19th October For the second consecutive year I will speak at the largest SharePoint and Exchange event in Scandinavia, arranged by my good friend and SharePoint MVP Göran Husman - the SharePoint Exchange Forum 2010 (#SEF). I will do a session called Playing in the Sandbox where I discuss the SharePoint 2010 Sandbox and how you can use it and how it affect you as a developer. There will be a lot of good speakers and great content - and if you’re around I hope to see you there!

A little more than a year ago I wrote a post after finishing all four SharePoint 2007 exams called “70-640 passed! Do you really call this a certification!”. I thouht the exams were to easy and did not say much about your SharePoint skills at all and I had hopes for the new SharePoint 2010 exams. I did hope that they would stop focusing on IntelliSense and API knowledge and more focus on best practices, design decisions and problem solving. Unfortunately I can’t say that my hopes became reality.

As you know the usage of JavaScript has been more and more used in web applications over the past years for technologies such as AJAX. JavaScript can accomplish really cool stuff on the client side and make the user interface more interactive and responsive. Just take a look at SharePoint 2010 - that’s some heavy JavaScripts there (a bit to heavy IMHO). So lets assume that you are building some new cool stuff, in SharePoint of course, and why not a Page Component for a contextual Web Part. That’s a lot of JavaScript (apart from the server side XML chunks)! So now you are making your web page payload even heavier. This is when minifying comes in. Minifying is a way to minimize the payload of a resource such as removing unnecessary comments and whitespace, shortening function and variable names etc - all to make the payload as small as possible. The only problem with these minified scripts are that they are virtually impossible to debug (and believe me if you are building a Page Component for SharePoint - you need to debug).

If you have been working with SharePoint 2010 development using Visual Studio 2010 you have most certainly stumbled upon the new replaceable parameters that replaces data in your solution files during the packaging process. For instance Visual Studio uses $SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$ in the Web Part control description (.webpart) files and this is replaced with the assembly full name (strong name) during packaging. By default it looks like this when you create a new Web Part:

I have been updating a couple of SharePoint 2010 servers and farms to the latest June 2010 Cumulative Update (CU) as well as installing a slipstreamed package. The slipstreamed install worked flawless using the same technique as with SharePoint 2007. But patching some of my servers seriously failed on both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 with both SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. Here are some of my experiences of the patching.

This post continues in the same neighborhood as yesterdays post about provisioning Managed Metadata columns. This time we take a look at the Ratings in lists (and while we’re at it check out another earlier post about how to customize the look and feel of ratings). The ratings allows anybody to rate items in lists and libraries in SharePoint 2010 Server. This is another highly usable and awesome feature tied to the Managed Metadata Service Application (MMS). To turn on ratings on a list you normally go to Library/List Settings > Rating Settings.

This post will show you how to provision Site Columns that uses Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2010. Managed Metadata is one of the new and exciting features of SharePoint Server 2010. It allows you to centrally manage metadata terms and keywords. Creating Managed Metadata columns using the SharePoint web interface is a simple task but the problem is that it does not allow you to move your Site Columns from one farm to another that easily. The reason is that these Site Columns definitions contains references to the unique IDs of the terms in the current Managed Metadata Service Application (MMS).

The first cumulative update (CU) for SharePoint 2010 is here. The CU was promised in to be ready in June, but have not arrived until a couple of days ago. I’ve been on vacation (last day today actually) so it fits perfect starting out next week with patching some farms. As you probably know by now the Microsoft SharePoint Team has improved the update cycle a bit compared to its predecessor. If you are not aware of the changes or need to get up to speed on the differences head on over to TechNet and read the following articles:

After about six months of writing I have now written a total of 400 pages and 15 chapters about SharePoint 2010 Web Parts for my book called SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action. This is a book focusing on Web Part development in SharePoint 2010 and I think that it covers all that is needed for developers who wants to enhance their SharePoint 2010 and Web Parts development skills. The chapters are:

When you create a Site Definition for SharePoint 2010 you should provide an image that illustrates the Site Definition. It allows the users to separate the Site Definitions from each other, find the correct one faster and it looks quite nice! In SharePoint 2010 Silverlight is used when selecting Site Actions > New Site. This gives you a nice and fast interface to search for the correct Site Definition. The image of the Site Definition is here very prominent. SharePoint 2007 used a different interface but also used images to represent each Site Definition, but in another way and in another size, so might consider updating them if you are updating your farms.

The Tag Profile Page in SharePoint 2010 is used by the Managed Metadata Service (MMS) as a landing page for a term or a keyword. It is used to describe the tag, its location in the taxonomy, synonyms etc. It also contains all the latest tagged items and a note board. The page is quite dull out of the box. Fortunately this page is a Web Part Page and can be customized as you like! You can add Web Parts and rearrange the page. There is not much you can do with the Tag Profile Web Part, but you can edit the Tagged Items Web Part and change how many days it should go back to look for tagged items (default 60 days). The Get Connected Web Part can be slightly configured with what links it will show, see image to the right. And the Noteboard Web Part also has some configuration options such as how many notes to show etc.

I have recently been getting quite a few requests and comments about the status of ChartPart for SharePoint - a charting Web Part that I built about a year ago and shared on Codeplex. This latest version have had more than 6.000 downloads which I think is amazing, version 1 had close to 10.000 downloads. I temporarily put this project on hold a couple of months a go, due to two major reasons; the built-in Chart Web Part in SharePoint 2010 and that I’m currently writing a book (which essentially means that I have no time at all). Now we now that the out-of-the-box charting Web Part is SharePoint 2010 Server Enterprise only and I only have one and half chapters left on the book.

DevSum 2010 is over two days packed with cool sessions. I had the last session of the day and conference but some brave SharePointers showed up and eagerly listened. I hope you enjoyed it and if you need some evening lecture you can download the presentation below, which was about SharePoint 2010 Composites and especially Business Component Services. DevSum 2010 had some great content from local gurus and MVPs and the Microsoft Pattern & Practices group was here and shared some valuable knowledge! Thanks Cornerstone for arranging it!

This Wednesday the SharePoint User Group Sweden (#SSUG) had an awesome meeting sponsored by Sogeti at Hotel Anglais in Stockholm. The event was sold out when announced in a few hours and we had to change conference room a few times at the hotel to fit everyone. More than 80 people showed up - our new record that we have to beat the next time. On the agenda for the day was first Christoffer von Sabsay (Sogeti) presenting about the Handelshögskolan SharePoint 2007 WCM case. A great presentation with a good deal of tips and tricks. MVP Göran Husman (Humandata) was up next presenting about the offline capabilities in SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010, also an interesting session with good insight how to combine Office, SharePoint Workspace and SharePoint for optimal flexibility. Last, but not least, I (Wictor Wilén, Connecta) did a session about SharePoint 2010 licensing and the related products. For me it was a good exercise to dig in to the gazillion options of SharePoint licensing.

The 2nd edition of the Dutch Information Worker User Group SharePoint eMagazine is out! It’s a free SharePoint magazine, focusing on SharePoint 2010. The first edition released a couple of months ago was a fantastic opening issue with awesome content and It looks like this edition is keeping up the high standard. Looking forward to the series continuing… This issue contains some really interesting content ranging from an article about WCM in SharePoint 2010 from Waldek Mastykarz, CKS:DEV from Wes Hackett and feature/solution life-cycle/versioning by Anders Rask. And also an article about SharePoint 2010 Themes by yours truly.

This is just a friendly reminder for you who tries to build a Sandboxed Web Part for SharePoint 2010 and trying to use the FileUpload or HtmlInputFile controls - it will not work. The uploaded files are not transferred to the sandboxed processes and cannot be used in the sandbox. The SharePoint 2010 sandbox runs in a separate process and all requests from the IIS to SharePoint are marshaled over to the User Code process. It is during this process the files that are uploaded during the request are lost - you will always see that HttpContext.Current.Request.Files.Count is equal to 0, or similar properties on the upload controls are set to null.

The Sandbox in SharePoint 2010 allows Site Collection administrators to upload solutions in their Site Collections without access to the physical server. This is a great way to open up for creativity and for each Site Collection owner to expand the functionality of their Site Collection without adventuring the stability of the SharePoint farm. Sandbox Solutions do have some limitations, for instance we cannot add new Application Pages. Application pages are normally pages added to the _layouts folder, which are located in the {SharePoint Root}\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS physical folder on each server.

The Office Web Apps, OWA, in SharePoint 2010 is a great way to enhance the SharePoint experience. It allows users without a decent OS or a locally installed Office client to view and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents. When you install and correctly configures Office Web Apps (yea, can be a bit of a hazzle if you like me avoid the Farm Configuration wizard) and then enable the required Site Collections feature a cache will be created. This cache is used by Word and PowerPoint Web Apps to store the renditions (XAML) of the documents to speed up the process. Office Web Apps will create one cache per Web Application and the cache is stored in one of the Content Databases attached to the Web Application.

I am currently setting up SharePoint 2010 farms back and forth testing out the most optimal ways using least privileges and different configurations. The by far most complex part in the configuration is the User Profile Service Application and the User Profile Sync. Spencer Harbar have fortunately documented how to do it properly in his Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization article. Following that you will likely not fail…

Timer jobs is a great feature of SharePoint to use when you need to perform background execution at regular or specific times or when you need to execute code on all or selected servers in the farm. A timer job is a persistable object deriving from the SPJobDefinition class. SharePoint 2010 has updated this class in many ways, to the better. Not only can the timer jobs be configured and monitored better through Central Administration they can also be invoked on demand.

It’s Friday and thought that I should share some small tips on how to make your SharePoint demonstration experience better. I assume that you have a quite powerful laptop with virtual machines running SharePoint. I used to do my demos directly in the virtual machine, in full screen mode. This requires that I have all the necessary client components installed such as Office, SharePoint Designer, the Windows Server Desktop Experience feature enabled etc. All this of course take resources such as memory and CPU from the virtual machine. Also Internet Explorer consumes CPU cycles and if you’re using Firefox in the demo you get another memory hog in your virtual machine.

Currently setting up a new environment on SharePoint 2010 (which was made available for download yesterday if anyone missed that :-). One of the new features of SharePoint 2010 is to set up a Content Type Hub (which is a part of the Metadata Service Application), which is a hub for all Content Types that other Site Collections can subscribe to. That is you only need to manage your content types in one location.

SharePoint 2010 is just around the corner and Microsoft is starting to release guidance and planning documents for the new and shiny version. Up until now there has been little guidance on hardware and software limits/boundaries/recommendations of SharePoint 2010 and comparisons with SharePoint 2007. But now when the release is imminent is essential to get up to speed on this. Here is a compilation of some of them that I find really interesting and will take for weekend reading.

SharePoint 2010 contains functionality for rating documents and items using a classic five-star rating approach. But those starts looks a little bit like the Google stars, right? Wouldn’t it be cool to brand the rating and use custom icons like this: The solution is quite easy actually. You need to create a set of images and then set a few properties on the SPWeb object of the top-level site in the Site Collection.

The release SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 is imminent and I can already smell them! Microsoft Sweden with André Henriksson will take a tour around our beautiful country and show all the good stuff that is coming for us developers called SharePoint 2010 - The Developer Tour. Me and my awesome MVP mate Tobias Zimmergren will help out during some stops of the tour. It’s a half day full with developer goodies that you can’t miss out on! The tour will stop in Umeå, Göteborg, Sundsvall, Malmö and Stockholm. I will be doing the last stop and that one is after RTM and general availability of SharePoint 2010 so be sure that I will show you the latest and coolest bits of the fantastic SharePoint platform!

I’d like to take the opportunity to tell you about some of my upcoming engagements this spring. SharePoint 2010 - the Developer Tour - May 17th, Stockholm A half day introduction to SharePoint 2010 development arranged by Microsoft in Stockholm. If you are new to SharePoint development or a skilled SharePoint 2007 developer you should not miss this out. Together with Microsoft we will dive into the wonderful world of the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools and SharePoint Designer 2010.

While commuting home this beautiful afternoon I received an e-mail from Microsoft containing the following: Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Server technical communities during the past year. I am very, very proud of receiving this award and it gives me a real boost to continue exploring the SharePoint world…

SharePoint 2010 the logging has been extended with a new Correlation ID which is unique for each request or operation. The Correlation ID makes it very easy to track down any unexpected errors since you can search for the id in the trace logs. This unique ID is also maintained between servers for instance when making a call to a service application. The SharePoint 2010 error page also shows this Correlation ID so that any end-users seeing the message can contact support and give the the Correlation ID. Using the ID the support team can then track down the cause of the error.

In SharePoint 2010 there are more ways to deploy custom code than in its predecessors, the reason is the introduction of the Sandboxed solutions. There are basically now three different ways to deploy custom assemblies: Full trust solutions, aka Farm solutions - The assemblies are registered in the GAC and runs under full trust Partial trust solutions, aka Web Application solutions - The assemblies are deployed to the bin folder of a specific Web Application Sandboxed solutions, aka User code solutions - The assemblies (solutions) are deployed to the Site Collection gallery These are the basic variants of how to deploy custom assemblies. There are actually a few variants of them, but more about them later. So which one should I use and when? Let’s go through them all and look at the pros and cons.

If you have been developing with SharePoint for the last few years you probably are very aware of the SPWeb and SPSite naming is a bit confusing. SPWeb is actually a site and SPSite is a site collection. It’s always fun explaining this to new SharePoint developers… In SharePoint 2010 this naming convention confusion continues and now expands to the administration of SharePoint. Let’s for example take the example when you are activating or deactivating features. In the web interface of SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007 it is called Activate and Deactivate.

As some of you know I’m writing a book on SharePoint 2010 Web Parts development to be published by Manning Publications. I have set up a site dedicated to this book project where you can follow the progress of it. You can find the site at http://www.sharepointwebpartsinaction.com/ I am currently half way through the writing and we are closing in on the Manning MEAP program. So if you are interested in the latest news on the book head on over to the site…

The CssRegistration class (in Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls namespace) is one of the most useful controls in SharePoint 2010. It existed in SharePoint 2007 but was fairly limited then. I thought I should guide you through why it is so useful in SharePoint 2010 and why and when you should use it. I briefly mentioned the CssRegistration control in my previous post on SharePoint 2010 themable CSS files. But first some background. Why the CssRegistration control? There are plenty of times when you need to add custom CSS definitions to your SharePoint projects, for instance in pages and Web Parts. There are several methods of adding CSSes to your projects. You could use inline CSS styles - which results in a lot of markup which may slow your page/site down. Another approach is creating a CSS file and include it in your master page - better but the CSS is always loaded.

SharePoint 2010 has a completely rebuilt theme engine. Instead of having to modify .inf files, create folders and copy and pasting CSS files and images in the SharePoint root we can now create a theme in PowerPoint and upload it to the server. The default SharePoint CSS files are tagged with comments that tells SharePoint to substitute colors and images with the values from the theme. When you switch theme SharePoint generates a new set of CSS files and images with the result of this substation.

I thought I should share my experience on working with SharePoint 2010 development on Windows 7. My previous posts on installing SharePoint 2007 on Vista and Windows 7 are posts that are quite popular. The downside with the “old” SharePoint version is that it was not officially supported to install it on a client machine, but SharePoint 2010 is supported for installation on Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP1 for development purposes. There are many opinions on having SharePoint 2010 installed on your client OS. Some thinks it is despicable, but I think it is great and I’ve used local installations for years now. It’s perfect for rapid development, testing and demos. In seconds you can spin up a site and show some basic stuff for a client. Of course I use virtualization when testing my final bits etc.

While I was testing building some mashups using SharePoint 2010, Web Parts and SharePoint Designer I found an interesting bug. Initial problem Here’s what I did; I set up a Wiki Content Page (the new kind of Web Part Pages) in SharePoint 2010 that was supposed to be called with Query String parameter named ID which should be used by a Web Part. Another page contained items linking to this page using different integer values for the ID query string parameter like this:

The SharePoint 2010 Development Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is great and I really like the way that the project is built using the different artifacts. One thing really annoys me though and that is the way that the code is generated and named when you add items. For example if you create a project and then add a Web Part item to that project then Visual Studio will create a Web Part class with a namespace and class name like this:

SharePoint is an amazing product and there are some fantastic opportunities to make awesome applications. It also has a great API which has had improved further in the upcoming SharePoint 2010 release. But there are several features available in the platform/API that just isn’t available to all of us, unless we sit in Redmond and are building the actual product. There are so many classes or methods that are marked internal or sealed, that I really would like to use. I’m not going to nag about the search Web Parts this time, but instead focus on some classes that I really would like to be changed from internal to public.

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the SharePoint 2010 Ignite training and after a great, but quite hard, interview and discussion I have been approved as a SharePoint 2010 Ignite Developer trainer. I really look forward getting out there and teaching developers about all the awesome features and improvements in SharePoint 2010. If you are interested in training don’t hesitate in contacting me. Together with AddSkills I have planned for a couple of SharePoint 2010 upgrade classes this spring.

It is 2010 now and SharePoint 2007 have been out forever, it feels like it anyways. The last two years has been about best practices in SharePoint both for developers and IT-pros and especially the Disposing of SharePoint objects has been discussed in absurdum. So I guess we should have to talk about it - but guess what - we certainly do! The reason I bring this up today is that I was about to join a new WFE to a farm and it failed once it started to provision the web applications. Using the logs I found the source of the failure, it was some kind of component that threw an unhandled exception when it was created. See logs below (I have cropped it a bit)

This is the second post in my mini series on how to extend the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon. First post can be found here. The goal with this excersice is to extend the Editing Tools Insert tab with a smaller Insert Web Part drop-down, so we don’t have to expand the whole Web Part Gallery to insert a Web Part. In the last post we created a Visual Studio 2010 solution and added the drop-down to the correct tab in the Ribbon using the CustomAction element and some new SharePoint 2010 XML syntax.

SharePoint 2010 contains numerous of improvements in the user interface and it has been built to be able to be extended. I guess that all of you have seen the Ribbon in SharePoint 2010 by now and probably even tried to add a button and fire away a Hello World JavaScript alert (it’s one of the HOLs available also). That’s quite an easy task. But doing some more advanced contextual and dynamic customizations to the Ribbon really makes you sweat!

This is the first post for the year of 2010 and what could be better to start with than announcing that I’m writing a SharePoint 2010 book. More specifically I’m writing a book about SharePoint 2010 Web Parts development with the working title SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action. This is a dream come true to me and I have been thinking about writing a book on and off for quite some time. I want to take my writing/blogging even further, it’s through writing that I educate and evolve myself. It makes me think twice and really make sure that I’m writing the correct stuff (who wants to be haunted down by all the readers and pros out there :-). So a book will be perfect to learn more about the SharePoint 2010 platform and dig down even further in Web Parts development.

The year of 2009 is about to close and it’s time for me to summarize this year, as I’ve done for the last few years (2006, 2007 and 2008). This year has been one of the most inspiring and exciting years for me in a very long time. I have been doing so much fun stuff this year. The most significant change has been starting to work for my new employer Connecta (after nine years at basically the same employer). I needed some new challenges and I now work with some really talented people from whom I learn and share so much. As you readers know, it’s all about SharePoint for me and I have done some awesome projects this year that I’m proud of and really looking forward to some SharePoint 2010 gigs. I also finally got my MCT certification and already scheduled a number of courses for next year, looking forward to meet some aspiring SharePoint students!

SharePoint 2010 comes equipped with a set of new tools to improve the monitoring of your custom applications, there are built-in functionality to check how long your operations take, how many SQL Server calls are done etc. All this is logged and can be visualized in the Developer Dashboard. Another good thing with this is that it’s not something that just automatically is there but you can also hook yourself into the monitoring and the actual Developer Dashboard.

Yesterday we had a Swedish SharePoint User Group meeting, hosted by Connecta (yes, my new employer). We had a new record with number of participants, over 60 interested SharePointers of all kinds showed up to listen to MVP Göran Husman, Humandata, talk about the news in SharePoint 2010 and Peter Karpinski, Microsoft Services, talk about how to do Rapid Application Development with SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010, Visio 2010 and InfoPath 2010 and how to script you SharePoint 2010 installs. Thank you for great shows and thanks to everyone who showed up.

Working with SharePoint 2010 is really a joy, you stumble upon great things all the time. The API has not had any revolutionary changes to be backwards compatible; but small changes here and there, both publically visible and internally, really makes the API better than before. SPListItem.SPContentTypeId To get the Content Type Id of an SPListItem you had to first get the SPContentType from the SPListItem.ContentType and then get the Id of the content type. This method was one marked as internal in version 12, but is now marked 14. It’s those little things. There are actually a lot of previously internal properties and methods that now are public, for example the CanBeDisplayedInEditForm property on the SPField class.

SharePoint 2010 is one greedy beast and you can’t settle with your plain old laptop; first of all you need a x64 bit environment and second of all you need some RAM. Developing for SharePoint 2007 required just a 32-bit machine, less than 4 gigs of RAM and Virtual PC and you could do most of your work without complaining to much. SharePoint 2010 requires some more thought through development environment .

Visual Web Parts are a nice addition for SharePoint 2010 developers. A Visual Web Part is essentially SmartPart revisited and is one of the project types of the new SharePoint extensions for Visual Studio 2010. Sandboxing is one of the most interesting features of SharePoint 2010, especially for large scale implementations and hosting providers. The Sandboxing feature, or User Code Solution, allows you to easily upload a SharePoint feature into your farm into a special controlled environment – called a Sandbox. These Sandboxed features can be controlled by the SharePoint administrators so that they do not consume to much resources and automatically disable them if the exceed their limits. Sandboxed solutions also have severe security restrictions – you cannot access all objects or resources that you would like.

SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2009 (#SEF09) is over and I’m pretty tired but really excited. Two full days, here in Stockholm, Sweden, of SharePoint 2010 information with some awesome speakers and topics. SEF09 was a great conference, about 200 participants – just about the right size to have the time to chat with a lot of people and having a good time. This year the SEF conference also was the official launch of Exchange 2010 and the first larger showing of SharePoint 2010 bits in Sweden. As an extra bonus the SharePoint 2010 beta 2 bits were released during the Monday night party, and during the Tuesday sessions everybody was downloading the bits.

Just hours before the SharePoint Conference 2009 starts in Vegas, and all information will flood out from the conference, blogs and twitter, Microsoft released three four posters that should help you in planning and updating your SharePoint 2007 installation to SharePoint 2010. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Upgrade Approaches (added since original posting) Visually describes the different upgrade approaches Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Upgrade Planning Takes you through how to upgrade hardware and software on your servers. Shows the available upgrade paths.

The long awaited service pack for PerformancePoint Server 2007 is now released to the web - Service Pack 3. This is the last service pack for PerformancePoint Server since the PerformancePoint Server bits will from next week be turned into PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010. Service Pack 3 is the last update to the standalone version of PerformancePoint, which was announced in January this year when Microsoft changed their BI strategy. After this update Microsoft will not invest any further into the 2007 version and as you hopefully are aware of - the Planning module will not exist in the upcoming 2010 version. The Planning module is instead offered as source code - now called the Financial Planning Accelerator, so that you can safely still use any investments in the Planning Module.

Delegate Controls in SharePoint is a blessing when you are customizing the features and interface of SharePoint. The Delegate Controls are areas in the out-of-the-box SharePoint pages where you are allowed to inject your own controls. This is heavily used by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which essentially is a set of features on top of Windows SharePoint Services. For example the standard WSS user information page redirects to the MOSS My Site, this redirection is done by inserting a delegate control into a specific delegate control on the userdisp.aspx page. This nifty delegate control can be used in a WSS solution when you want to create a custom profile page, without modifying any of the OOB files and easily reverts to it’s original state when you deactivate the feature.

Inspired by the latest SharePoint PodShow topic; The SharePoint Data View Web Part-Episode 31 and Laura Rogers post on building a permissions dashboard I just had to write this post. In the last paragraph Laura quickly mentions how you can reuse the created Data View Web Part. I think this is really important to know how to export and import this Web Part. What I don’t want people to do is to fire up SharePoint Designer and create these Data View Web Parts in the production environment so that the pages get’s unghosted or customized. Also when you are working with solutions packages and features to deploy your applications in environments it’s necessary to know how to do this.

I’m glad and proud to tell you all about that next month I will start a new job. I will start as a SharePoint Architect at Connecta. This is a fantastic opportunity for me and it will let me work with some of the finest SharePoint minds and developers here in Sweden as well as some really awesome customers. I’ve been working with basically the same company now since 2000, when I and two good friends founded it, iBizkit. We all came from consultancy firms working with WCM, portals and intranet solutions and had a dream of making a really good semi-product for these kind of solutions. And we did! In 2001 we integrated our product with the first version of SharePoint. We continued this integration in the upcoming versions of SharePoint, but have since the release of SharePoint 2007 focused more and more on the SharePoint platform, and I have personally lived in that world for the latest years. About two years ago, we sold the company to Pdb DataSystem, a natural step to expand and evolve the business.

Developing solutions and features for SharePoint is a nightmare for all beginners, and even for the experienced SharePoint developers. If you ever have had the opportunity to create a SharePoint solution you most probably have had to make a lot of hacking in a bunch of XML files, just to build a simple feature. This is the way you have to do it, and the way taught by tutors and Microsoft, when using it with Visual Studio and no add-ins. This is the way it was, and has been, for most of us SharePoint programmers since the beta releases of SharePoint version 3.

Finally I’ve found the time to make the last work on ChartPart 2.0 for SharePoint. I have been working on and off on this release for quite some time – but now it’s here! ChartPart 2.0 for SharePoint is a Web Part that allows you to instantly create charts based on your existing SharePoint lists. You can make columns, bars, pies and even 3D charts. ChartPart version 1.0 was released last year and have had up until now close to 10.000 downloads, which I’m very proud of. I’ve received awesome feedback on the Codeplex site, on Twitter, my blog and when I met people and told them that I was the one who made it.

Last night we had a SharePoint User Group Meeting here in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a great evening with a lot of attendees, thank you all for showing up. It’s always fun to see new and old faces, sorry I didn’t have time to talk so much with you (due to my VM’s crashing just before my demos…). First, a big thanks to KnowIT and Jonas who provided us with a great place to host the meeting and some good food and beer!

The latest version, 4.0, of the great SharePoint Administration Toolkit has been released, read all about it in the post by the SharePoint Team. It contains a lot of interesting and great stuff that you could use for everyday usage. One new part of the Administration Toolkit is a SharePoint solution called Permission Reporting Solution. This is a solution package that hugely improves the permissions management of your Site Collections and Sites in SharePoint.

Today I stumbled upon Yet Another SharePoint Problem (YASP) with a custom timer job. The custom timer job is supposed to synchronize some user information between site collections (on a WSS 3.0 installation). In some cases the timer job has to add users to site collections. Sounds like a no-brainer, right! The problem is that we are using this installation as an internet facing site and the external users are stored in AD LDS (Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services, formerly known as ADAM) and our own custom authentication provider.

This is the first post in a series on Web Parts Connections. This spring I had a series on Web Part Properties that I think was very successful, they got some good comments and feedback and they get a lot of hits from search engines. Please help me out and evolve this new series of posts with some feedback and questions. What is Web Parts Connections? Web Parts Connections allows you to connect the Web Part server controls so that they can exchange information. Web Parts can either be a consumer and/or a provider. Once you connect a consumer with a provider the consumer starts receiving data from the provider, all this is done on the server side. Web Parts can be constructed in such way that it can have several consumer and provider connection-points, i.e.it can consume or provide information from several different sources. A provider connection-point can have several consumers but a consumer connection-point can have only one provider.

SharePoint Saturday Copenhagen is over after an awesome Saturday in Copenhagen. Thank you all organizers, attendees, speakers and sponsors, I had a blast. I will definitely attend more SharePoint Saturdays when I can. These kind of events really are special; everyone attending are there because they really love working with SharePoint, on a Saturday, when the sun is shining outside, for free… You can find my presentation SharePoint Online and Windows Azure - better together here and the solution that I used for the demo here.

If you have been installing SharePoint you have probably also seen and fixed the DCOM 10016 error. This error occurs in the event log when the SharePoint service accounts doesn’t have the necessary permissions (Local Activation to the IIS WAMREG admin service). Your farm will still function, but your event log will be cluttered. On a Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 machine you would just fire up the dcomcnfg utility (with elevated privileges) and enable Local Activation for your domain account.

SharePoint Saturday is a free informational and educational event that has been held over-there in US several times with a huge success the last year and it is now coming to Europe and Copenhagen, Denmark to be more specific. A SharePoint Saturday is an event for anyone interested in SharePoint and who like to meet similar-minded people and listen to SharePoint professionals and celebrities. I’m going to be there - it will be a blast! I will do a presentation called SharePoint Online and Windows Azure - better together! And I will of course listen to all the other really cool people showing up such as SharePoint MVP’s and gurus.

In most custom SharePoint solution projects you will have to create your own Application Pages, Web Part Pages or other ASP.NET pages to fulfill your requirements. If you are coming from the ASP.NET world you are pretty used to building web forms and similar .aspx pages. Your pages will most of the times then be derived from the System.Web.UI.Page class, but when working with SharePoint you should not use this class as a base.

The new Office 2010 clients have been released as a Technical Preview and I’m fortunate to get my hands on them and free to talk about them. The new clients are awesome! Visio is one of the applications from the Office suite that I use on a daily basis to design, model and draw diagrams, workflows and solutions. Visio 2010 has gotten a really nice facelift and a whole new set of features. The Ribbon has been one of the things I really missed in the 2007 release and the SharePoint integration, that can be seen in the Sneak Peak, looks awesome!

Introduction Microsoft SharePoint contains functionality for Records Management, which essentially is a storage for documents that you would like to store and manage in a separate records center to meet certain legal or other requirements or just to make backups of certain document revisions. To be able to create a Records Center you need to have Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). On the other hand you only need Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) to send documents to the Records Center.

About two months ago I tried to reach out to the SharePoint community with a small survey on how Virtualization is used with SharePoint. The survey was primarily for my own interest to benchmark what others are doing, but I also thought that I should share this with everyone. SharePoint and Virtualization is an interesting piece of discussion; some despise it and some love it. For more information on SharePoint and virtualization read this great article from SharePointMagazine.net.

Just in time for next version of SharePoint to arrive I just completed the final certification exam for SharePoint 2007, the 70-630 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring. As always I did think that it should be some tricky questions or problems to solve in the exam, I even installed a MOSS RTM last night just to walk through the admin interfaces before the infrastructure upgrade. But to my disappointment this certification was by no means any challenge. This was by far the easiest of the four exams.

When developing applications or custom solutions for SharePoint you will on several occasions have to store settings for you application of some kind. When developing database driven or other custom solutions you easily create a database table or make the settings in app/web.config file. You can of course use these approaches when developing for SharePoint, but there are some things to consider when doing this. This post will outline some approaches you can use to store your settings.

I’m really glad that we have managed to get a really nice release of the SharePoint Extensions Lib, SPExLib, out. This brand new release (12.0.0.0) has significantly been improved since the first release a couple of weeks ago. Keith Dahlby has made some really nice Linq extensions for SharePoint which is available in this release. These extensions are also IDisposable safe when using on SPWeb and SPSite collections. By referencing the SPExLib.dll and include the namespaces you can easily write code like this (taken directly from one of my current projects):

Microsoft has updated SharePoint Online with a patch that resolves the bug that prohibited you from getting the service descriptions from the web services, that I previously described. This means that you now can use Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer (or any other tool that you like) to connect to the SharePoint Online web services and code away, instead of going to some local instance to get the descriptions. Does anybody know where the Microsoft Online team posts all updates/changes to the BPOS? I got this information from Troy (from the BPOS team) commenting on my post.

Installing a new service pack onto a server product is not just firing up the installer and hit next->next->finish. You should carefully read through the documentation and test it thoroughly. Service Pack 2 for SharePoint has been long awaited and I’ve seen people the last 24 hours installing it like madness just wanting to get their hands on the new features/updates. I did also install it just minutes after it was released (on my dev machine that is being reinstalled any hour now, when Windows 7 RC is out). 

I’ve had an idea for some time to gather all mine and others nifty extension, utility and helper methods into a shared library so that these can be reused in different projects and I finally got my act together and created a new project on Codeplex called SharePoint Extensions Lib, http://spexlib.codeplex.com/, SPExLib. This is a library filled with extension methods to the SharePoint object model and to the Microsoft.NET 3.5 SP1 classes as well as some helper classes. All you have to do is reference it in your solution and add the using SPExLib.Extensions statement to your code and you are ready to go.

Windows 7 has an upgrade to Virtual PC which allows you to run Windows XP applications virtualized on your Windows 7, without having to run the whole desktop running. I still have to use Visual Studio 2003 to support some old good applications including SharePoint 2003 apps. So I have used a Windows XP virtual machine to run it, but now I can fire up Visual Studio 2003 directly from my Start menu in Windows 7. As most of you know, you can’t install VS2003 on a Vista or Windows 7 machine, and I don’t even want it there either.

I’ve been annoyed for some time at that you cannot prohibit your users from selecting “No Quota” when creating Site Collections. Yes, you can set a default to use but the “No Quota” option is still there. Most probably you have some governance plan or similar that says that you should set quotas when creating Site Collections, but you know that sometimes you forget or somebody doesn’t even care or know what setting No Quota implies.

The day has come when Microsoft officially started to talk about the next version of Office 2010 clients and SharePoint Server 2010 (no longer Office SharePoint Server). We have since some time known that SharePoint 2010 will be supported only on a 64-bit platform, just as Exchange 2007. The new stuff revealed yesterday (as preliminary) are that not only is 64-bit required, it will only be supported on the Windows Server 2008 64-bit platform (including R2) and it will require that you have SQL Server 2008 on a 64-bit platform. There are some other interesting facts that you should check out also in the post (and on about 1.000 other blog posts), but this post is not just about these news.

I just had to try out Community Clips from Microsoft Office Labs and made a short video demonstrating the new version of ChartPart 2.0 for SharePoint . The video shows rendering and customization of the graph, how you connect the graph to a list and some of the 3D features. Community Clips is an awesome and simple video capture utility that from now on definitely will be a preferred tool in my toolbox. Enjoy…and if you like go ahead and download ChartPart 2.0 at http://chartpart.codeplex.com (currently in beta).

After doing some experimental stuff (don’t ask me what!) with my local (Windows 7) SharePoint installation I uninstalled it completely and was going to install it from scratch once again I encountered a strange error. A dialog as below popped up: First I thought that SharePoint did not uninstall correctly and searched the registry as a maniac and found nothing. Then I checked the installation log files, which did not make things much clearer:

Here is a tip for you Codeplex users out there. If you are using the Visual Studio and the Team Foundation source control then you are prompted for username and password every time you open up a project. This dialog does not contain any functionality to store the username and password. If you are often opening projects and/or switching projects entering usernames and passwords can get annoying.

The Office 2007 Service Pack 2 are here and for the server products (WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007) we have a new STSAdm command called; preupgradecheck. This command allows you to check any WSS 3.0 SP2 based installation for potential issues that may prevent an upgrade to Windows SharePoint Services 4 (WSS 4.0) or SharePoint Server 2010. For full reference of the command check out KB960577. The pre-upgrade check command uses a set of rules found in the 12\CONFIG\PreUpgradeCheck\WssPreUpgradeCheck.xml file to check your farm or you can use a custom file.

I’m glad to announce that from now on you can find my project Windows Live ID Authentication for SharePoint on CodePlex. Windows Live ID Authentication for SharePoint is a project that has been developed for some time for the upcoming Swedish SharePoint Community Site, which will be an awesome site with some really cool features of which this is one. I have previously tried some of the available Windows Live ID providers for SharePoint that are out there on the market and the best (previously) one is the provider from the Community Kit for SharePoint, originally developed by Keith Bunge. It has a great basic application design, but had some things that annoyed me and some things I wanted to change, therefore I created my own version, with the CKS version in mind, which I hope that you find useful.

A few days ago I posted a small survey that asks a couple of questions on how you virtualize your SharePoint environments. I will keep the survey open for a couple of more days to get some more results (compared to the number of readers of this blog and number of Twitter followers - the response is really bad…) Click Here to take survey Anyways I thought that I should put up some preliminary results.

Virtualization is a really hot technology right now, and forward and so are SharePoint. I’ve been discussing SharePoint virtualization internally and externally for sometime now and I have my opinions. In order to get a broader view on how SharePoint is virtualized around the globe I put together a small survey that will enlighten this subject. I would like you to fill out the survey and forward it to your colleagues, partners, clients, friends and better halves.

A few weeks back I wrote a post on how to mix Windows Azure and SharePoint Online called Custom code with SharePoint Online and Windows Azure. Since then both Windows Azure and SharePoint online have had some updates. First of all you no longer need to create the bindings in the code to make it fully trusted. Good to know but it does not affect the solution. A Bug in SharePoint Online Web Services More important is the fact that you cannot longer use the Visual Studio Add Service Reference function and add the services from your SharePoint Online site to your solution. You will end up with an error like this:

The SharePoint 12-hive contains by default a number of interesting files that every developer should be aware of. The more you know the better you understand the inside of SharePoint and it allows you to create more efficient and better solutions. Here are my top five favorite files: ctypeswss.xml (in TEMPLATE\FEATURES\ctypes) This is the feature elements file for all the default WSS Content Types. When creating new content types, most often I find it useful to derive them from existing content types. For example if I need to create a content type that derives from the standard content type Task, i can easily get the content type ID, which is used when creating new content type IDs, and what Site Columns that content type has.

SharePoint Designer is now a free tool and available for download. What does this mean really? Anybody can download it and customize their SharePoint installations which is good in some ways, but really bad in others. If the users are not aware of what they are doing they can cause severe damage to your SharePoint, but it can also make really nice enhancements to their installation. There are a lot of nice things you can do with SPD in your sites that you can’t do using the web interface. The web interface on the other side protects you pretty good from doing some mistakes that even the best can do once in a while, like dragging a file or folder to the wrong place. Of course all of this has been possible to do before with SPD, it’s not a new product, but suddenly you can expect a number of new and untrained end-users fire up the SharePoint Designer and customizing in ways you never prepared your installations for.

Today almost everyone have more than one computer; one at work, a few at home, a media center, a PC, a Mac etc, your family members, friends and colleagues have the same. One problem is that a lot of us need access to files on one machine when we are using one of the others. For example I want to access my images when I’m at work sometimes and I do not want to copy all of these images onto my work laptop, when I’m at home I want to have the same favorites and documents that I use at work and so on. Then I have another scenario, let’s say that I do not have any of my computers with me and I want to access one of my files, then I want to have some way to access the files using a standard browser - and why not have editing possibilities.

Have you ever wanted to get rid of the Welcome text before the user name in the SharePoint user menu? At least I have! If you are like me - here is a solution that you can use to customize the text of the Welcome Control (Welcome.ascx). The approach is pretty simple, and can be made in several ways, but I wanted a pretty clean solution that didn’t affect any other behavior of SharePoint and I wanted to write as little code as possible. Eventually I ended up with some more rows than expected, but this was due to the fact that I created this custom Welcome control configurable and deployable.

Microsoft has released a set of ten free Themes for SharePoint for use with the Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services. These ten themes provides a far better experience than the out-of-the-box themes delivered with SharePoint (WSS and MOSS), of which some are really annoyingly ugly! But the new themes needs some tweaking before looking really good, there are several design flaws in some of them, like black text on dark-grey background…

I’m glad to announce that I finally got my stuff together and stitched together the last pieces of the beta of ChartPart for SharePoint 2.0. ChartPart for SharePoint is a SharePoint Web Part that allows you to draw charts from existing SharePoint lists. It’s available at CodePlex, at http://chartpart.codeplex.com/, and is free for use. ChartPart 1.0 have had over 4.000 downloads since it was released and is translated to six different languages. The first version was pretty limited in customization and you could only create some basic charts.

I have been answering questions on the SharePoint forums at MSDN Forums, and while some are really tricky and interesting, some are really basic beginner mistakes. A couple of questions lately have been about Web Part development and how to and where to create your controls. Most of these is easily solved if you understand how the Web Part event model works. First of all you need basic ASP.NET understanding and know how the Page and Control objects work together, how a postback works etc. But I have even seen somewhat experienced ASP.NET developers failing at this point, probably due to the fact that Visual Studio have a slick interface for editing user controls and ASP.NET pages. When it comes to SharePoint you have no visual aids and you are out on thin water, and this knowledge is crucial.

A Web Part, in SharePoint or not, has a Verb that allows the Web Part to be Closed. Closed means that the Web Part is just closed (not rendered) and not deleted, which is a separate Web Part Verb. Closing Web Parts can cause headache for your users and even a really bad performance. Note: To delete a Web Part you have to go in to Edit mode for the page. Close can be done directly from the Web Part menu.

After passing the developer exams of WSS (70-541) and MOSS (70-542) I thought that I should make the deck complete by taking the configuration exams. Today I passed the first one, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Configuration (70-631). I’m mainly a developer so I had some worries about questions on DNS, network configs and load balancing. But this exam was too easy and kept at a very basic level. I missed one question though. All of these exams follow the same pattern - I whish the creators of them had some more imagination and creativity.

Canvas for OneNote is another new and interesting innovation from the Office Labs team. Canvas for OneNote creates a new way for you to manage your OneNote section and pages in a more “inspirational” and “irregular” way. OneNote is traditionally organized into Note books, sections, groups, pages and subpages - just like a classical book shelf filled with note books. It works really nice if you know in which note book you placed your notes (of course you can search to find it…faster than you search your shelf). This feels a little bit old-school to me and I still have a lot of hand notes and documents spread out over my desktop (not the Windows desktop, a real physical one) organized in a very strict chaotic order.

At CeBIT 2009 it today was announced that SharePoint Online is now available worldwide*. SharePoint online is a part of the Business Productivity Online Suite which also contains Exchange Online and Live Meeting. More services will be available at a later date. There is a free 30 days trial option if you would like to try it out, which I really recommend, before you subscribe/buy the solution. You can find more information about the Microsoft Online Services at http://www.microsoft.com/online.

Not that unexpected, but Microsoft chief executive office Steve Ballmer has confirmed that the new Office 14 clients and servers (read SharePoint) will not be released during 2009. The products will be “generally available” during 2010. Generally available may indicate (I’m always positive) that we have a release for volume licensees and partners in late 2009 and in the shelves during 2010 (just like the previous version). Read SharePoint Daily Special Edition for more information.

To end my series of Web Part properties I would like to show how to store more complex values than just strings or integers. What happens if you would like to store a more complex object; an array or a coordinate etc? Editing these properties with the standard generated interface using the WebBrowsable and Personalizable attributes will not work, since it only accepts basic types, shown in part 1. To make these properties editable you have to (almost…continue reading) create an EditorPart, shown in part 2, and control the properties in the SyncChanges and ApplyChanges methods.

Computer Sweden has an article in today’s issue, also published online yesterday, called “Impossible to get rid of the cash cow of Microsoft”. To sum it up briefly it discusses how hard it is to get rid of Microsoft SharePoint once you have it installed in your environment and that the licensing costs flies away. An interviewed CTO states that companies he met don’t have control of their SharePoint installations and that they had to step back and look at the ownership and licenses.

The Sweden SharePoint User Group had the first meeting of this year this evening and it was a great and interesting meeting. I really enjoyed the session by Rickard Löfberg from Credit Suisse when he talked about their globally rolled out collaboration platform, how they handled the massive amounts of data and customized the platform to have a smooth transition to upcoming versions of SharePoint. I did two short sessions; one about Web Part development with 10 tips and a very short introduction to the Geneva Framework. You can find the presentations for download below, currently in Swedish - but if you beg I can finish up the translation to English.

The latest version of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit has been released and it contains a new feature called SPDiag (SharePoint Diagnostics Tool). It’s a new tool for IT-Pros (or admins and developers for that matter) that helps you have a look at all of your SharePoint server (including hardware) configurations in a nice application. You can check everything from log file locations to web.config content to database configurations to… You have two views, one tree view in which you can drill down in your server/farm configuration and read all of the data and one Trends view in which you analyze and examine the usage of your farm and sites using the different logs in SharePoint and Windows. Unfortunately I did not get the graphs to show on my test machine (yes it’s a Windows 7 with WSS :-), see error message on the right.

For the SharePoint Community Sweden community site I have created a master feed containing interesting blog feeds from Swedish SharePoint bloggers, with posts both in Swedish and English. This master feed can be found at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/wictorwilen/spcs_all?_render=rss Add this feed to your subscriptions if you are interested about how we Swedes think and elaborate on SharePoint. It’s built using the amazing Yahoo Pipes.

If you are building a reusable web part that you would like to sell or give away you should look into localizing your web part. The localization support is great with .NET 2.0, using resource files, and there are tons of built-in functionality for this. If you are creating an Editor Part for you web part, then your life is pretty easy, just use the standard techniques. But if you are using the approach by tagging the properties of your web part with the Personalizable attributes, then you are out of luck. Take a look at this property for example:

A recent discussion about how the licenses of Windows, SQL and SharePoint Servers should be handled when we are developing solutions using Virtual Machines made me throw away a mail to Emma Explains Licensing. The concern was that; do we have to pay licenses for every VM or test server? That would have been insane! But I wanted to have this explained how this licensing works - a lot of you perhaps already know but I always have a hard time getting all the different licensing options and rules.

Yesterday SharePoint Community Sweden was launched, initiated by Andreas Kviby. This is a new community site for Swedes and those who speak Swedish about the SharePoint platform. There are a lot of great SharePoint sites and communities out there on the web, but none in Swedish. Having a great community “nearby” will enable the personal interaction to be even better and it will create a lot of interesting spin-offs. I’m glad to be onboard and I will put some effort into this new community and helping out new and old SharePointers as good as I can and I will try to do some blogging about interesting topics in Swedish there - once in a while I will probably double post information here and on the community site (long sentence…).

Part four of my Web Part Properties series. Now it’s time for default values and what you should do when there are values that are incorrect or missing . Last post discussed the .webpart file and I showed you how to do when setting up a Web Part in the Web Part Gallery with default values. Web Parts created using the SharePoint WebPart class can also define default values using the DefaultValue attribute, like this:

The Technet and MSDN sites are great to have when you have to look things up when developing or maintaining solutions for the Microsoft Office Servers, such as SharePoint. But I also like to have this information closer to me and have even faster access to it. Microsoft is providing much of the content as downloadable CHM files, which is a great feature. Here are a list of some of the downloadable help files

Hot from the presses! Today Microsoft announced that Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server will not be a separate product in the future, instead it will be incorporated into the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition. This is some great news for all of us that work with and develop BI solutions. Microsoft is focusing their BI solutions to three products; Excel, SharePoint and SQL Server. This is due to several factors; BI solutions have been very expensive (read PerformancePoint) and have had hard to reach out to the end-users. By incorporating PerformancePoint into SharePoint these factors will be eliminated - BI for everyone.

I thought that it would be time to look up all Swedish SharePoint bloggers, like my former colleague Johan Dewe did about a year ago, he has now left the SharePoint consultant scene, and I thought that it would be time to have a new and updated list. This list is compiled from my own feeds, Johan’s list and some searches on the web. Since blogging nowadays isn’t the “only” way to keep up with what’s happening I’ve also included some Twitter links.

This is the third part of my Web Part Properties series and this post will focus on the .webpart file. Every SharePoint developer have seen it and perhaps edited it, but what is the purpose of the file and when and why should I edit it. Background The .webpart file is an XML file containing metadata about the Web Part. In previous versions of SharePoint this file had an extension of .dwp. Although these files may look similar it’s a crucial difference between those files. The .webpart file uses the http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v3 schema and the .dws file uses http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2. The v2 schema is intended for Web Parts derived from the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart class, which is the base class used for developing Web Parts for previous SharePoint versions. When developing Web Parts using the .NET 2.0 WebPart class (System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart) the v3 schema must be used, see previous article on why you should use the latter.

The more I use/test Windows 7, the more I get confident that this release will get Microsoft back on track. Windows Vista introduced a lot of new and interesting stuff, but was not that polished as one could expect. Service Pack 1 of Vista did take it up one notch, but not far enough. As the statistics nerd I am I like to know exactly what my laptop is doing, how much memory is used, which program accesses disk etc. Vista have a quite good Resource Monitor application and of course the Task Manager (even though I use Process Explorer quite a bit). Windows 7 contains some really good updates to these built-in applications.

This is the second part of the Web Part Properties series. The last post walked through the basics on how to make editable properties on a Web Part. As a sample I used a Web Part that displayed tweets from Twitter - called TweetPart. Using the standard approach, by marking the properties using specific attributes, we made the Web Part editable as we wanted. But the user experience, for editing, was not optimal. First of all the properties we wanted to edit was located in their own category at the bottom, not that easy to find for inexperienced/untrained users. Secondly the properties has dependencies and requires validation.

Windows 7 beta was released into the wild today (or tomorrow if you’re not an MSDN subscriber) and I’m seriously considering running it on my main development machine. But to be able to do this I have one main requirement and that is that I can run SharePoint on it, just as I can on Vista. So after installing the beta bits on a Virtual PC I had to give it a try.

I thought that I should kick off this new year with a series of posts on how to make your SharePoint Web Parts editable and how to enhance that out-of-the-box Web Part property editing combined with some tips and tricks. This first post may be to most of you SharePoint developers somewhat basic, but I have chosen to start from scratch here. Many of this first post topics are repeatedly asked in the MSDN development forums. The documentation in the SharePoint SDK on this topic is really bad; it just says do this and do that, never why you should do it. Often this makes developers unaware of pitfalls or possibilities.

The time has come to make a summary of the past year and have a look into the future – the year of 2009. About a year ago I made a similar post with a summary and some predictions. This year has been a fast year and I have made so much, both personally and at work. For a few months in the spring I was at home taking care of my daughters and tried not to work (which I find really hard). It was a great time and I really need that. At work I think I’ve never felt this pressure from the market, no financial crisis in sight here. It’s mainly been about SharePoint, SharePoint and SharePoint. Our team at Pdb has had some really interesting projects and we have some even more interesting in the pipe.

When working with SharePoint Web Parts and features it is easy to get into trouble if you are changing the version of your Web Part DLL file. The easiest way to get around this is to never change the version of the Web Part, which is a pretty common scenario. But if you are developing a product or feature that you expect to have a longer life cycle and that you will upgrade or enhance over time you should really use the assembly version features. Having a version on your Web Part will make it easier for you to support it for multiple customers and/or installations.

If you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on a new server you will find that your Office 2007 (.docx, .xlsx etc) files is not indexed as they should but the old binary document (.doc, .xls etc) format is indexed. This is due to the fact that the Office 2007 IFilters is not installed by your WSS installation. To resolve this issue you have to download the Microsoft Filter Pack and install it on your server. This will install the actual IFilters which are used for indexing the Office 2007 files.

Today I have spent a few hours tagging photos using the incredible Windows Live Photo Gallery application. It’s quite slow and still has some buggy features, but it’s so good for cleaning and tagging photos. As I tagged along I found some images I took during the PDC 2008 at the LA Convention Center entrance hall. From the Windows Live Photo Gallery I fired up Microsoft Photosynth and made me a Synth. Creating the synth was really easy and done in a few minutes and here it is:

A couple of days ago I made a quick poll on how people preferred to install their SharePoint features. The results are as follows: Using STSADM is the favorite one, probably due to that fact the audience answering to the poll is mostly IT-Pros or developers. Using an MSI based installation is, surprisingly, the first runner up together with scripts. I totally understand why but there are many problems having an MSI based one but the problem is that installation and uninstall is tied to one specific server.

With the recent release of ChartPart for SharePoint I created a simple command file to simplify the installation of the .wsp file. What I did not expect was that so many should download it – about the same amount of people who download the ChartPart. Some really nice people have asked me to release it as an MSI package, which I will do as soon as possible to make it even easier for non developers or IT-pros to install the ChartPart.

After a few weeks of testing and great feedback, ChartPart for SharePoint 1.0 is available for download on CodePlex. CharPart for SharePoint is a free chart web part for SharePoint (WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007) that enables you to easily create charts based on existing lists and views in SharePoint. These are some of the features of ChartPart 1.0 Generate a graph from a SharePoint list in just a few clicks Multiple graph types (bars, columns, splines etc) Legend Title Multiple built-in palettes Custom palettes Size of graph Supports columns such as dates, lookups, calculated, users etc ChartPart is currently translated into English, Swedish and Portuguese and German coming soon. Please contact me if you would like to help out in translating it to other languages.

ChartPart for SharePoint is a new Web Part for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that allows you to create graphs and charts from existing lists in SharePoint in a very easy way. The ChartPart for SharePoint is developed using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and the Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft.NET Framework, which means that there is no need for any third party licenses to create the charts (read Dundas or similar).

Microsoft is currently extremely offensive on their new cloud services targeted to consumers and business users with their Live services. I use a number of them daily with the Live Mesh as the newest addition. A couple of months back I started to move my and my family’s documents to Skydrive, 5Gb free online storage, and I’ve made some efforts to get started with the Office Live Workspace, to have a better place work working with the documents. Then Live Mesh came into the picture, and it lets me automatically sync documents between our PC’s and cell phones – really awesome!

I have just struggled a while with a SharePoint Web Part that constantly threw an error, see below. This Web Part is creating a SharePoint list when it is first loaded by a user and it should create a list with permissions so that only the user has access to it (i.e. a personal list). This is done by breaking the role inheritance of the list using BreakRoleInheritance(false), so that no inherited roles are copied. I’ve used the method for this previously in the solution, but then this was done on a POST request and now it should do almost the same during a GET request, that is when the user navigates to the page.

I made some updates to my Windows Search Index Tool so it also displays all the inclusion and exclusion rules and even functionality for adding and removing rules. So now you can easily exclude folders by creating a rule like this: On the Rules tab, click on the Add button. The button should only be enabled if you are running in elevated privileges on Vista. Enter the pattern, like the image shows and choose if it is an inclusion or exclusion rule and hit Add.

SharePoint 14 is the next version of Microsoft SharePoint and during the PDC 2008 nothing new was revealed about SharePoint 14, but some small parts of the Office 14 clients were seen. SharePoint 14 will, most certainly, be released at the same time as Office 14 which most probably will be released when Windows 7 is released. My guess is that this point in time is in about a year. Windows 7 will pretty soon hit the beta stage, pre-beta bits are already out, and the Office 14 and SharePoint 14 products must enter the beta stage in the near future, to be able to have a release within a year or so. Closed or open beta remains to be determined.

Windows Search is a great for indexing your files and is included in Windows Vista by default (version 3). Version 4 is available for download from the Microsoft site. I recently had some problems when my index suddenly was corrupt and I had to restart indexing all files, which takes a long time if you are using your computer and do not want it to interfere with your work. Somehow it started working again but I have not been able to get it to index up all my files, there are always files left to index.

The buzz about XPS has unfortunately faded away during the last year, probably due to the discussions about the Open Xml formats. XPS is still here and will eventually submitted to ISO and proposed as a standard. Windows 7 has of course support for XPS. When you install Windows 7 (note build 6801) you get the Microsoft XPS Document Writer printer which is used to print anything into an XPS document.

Now sitting here at LAX and reflecting over what we have experienced during the PDC 2008 the last few days. We learned a lot about technical stuff and what’s growing up in Redmond, but I think the most important stuff is what’s happening to the software business in large. With Windows Azure as the first large scale service host and with the number of online services that Microsoft will release in the upcoming years we have a real challenge to adapt to these new business models. Not only Microsoft is running this way, just look at Amazon and others, but Microsoft have such an effect on a large number of users.

I have now done some initial testing and evaluation of the 6801 build of Windows 7, which we got at PDC 2008. First of all I was a bit disappointed that we did not get the updated UI that were shown during the keynote, instead we got a previous build that does not have that much changes in the UI. It boots pretty quick on my Virtual PC, yes I run it there – a little to early to switch out my main OS, and it has a nicer loading screen than Vista.

So the last day of PDC 2008 is over. The brain has been cooked for a few days… This very day did not have any keynote and I kicked off with a session on the Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint. I have note used this add-in since the first releases of it since I didn’t like it that much but had instead relied on manual packaging and deployment as well as STSDev. But after this I might think about moving over and try it out once again. During the session a basic site was built with some lists, event handlers and a Silverlight application using the new Charting controls.

The Fantastic 40, the set of application templates, for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 has been updated with new language support. Among the new supported languages are Swedish, Danish, Portuguese and some more. Some of the DLL’s have also been updated (haven’t checked what). You can download them from here: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Template: Application Template Core Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates: All Templates Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates: All Server Admin Templates

Day three is officially over, I’m pretty tired today after staying up to late yesterday and playing around with the “goods”. I installed Windows 7 and tried it for a while, but to my disappointment I found out that the nice stuff that were shown on the keynote was missing in my release… This morning started with the last keynote of PDC 2008 and it was Microsoft Research that should be in the spotlight. An hour and a half was filled with stuff such as environment and healthcare studies done by MSR, important, but hey – you have an audience of 6.000 programmers/geeks here… The last 20-30 minutes was cool though, they showed up a kids-programming-language called Boku (not only for kids, for me too!) and Second Light an evolution of Surface, where you can project a secondary image onto a surface that is above, yup not in touch with, the surface. Really cool!

Day two is official over. I’m just back from the attendee party at Universal Studios. Keynotes This Tuesday started with a couple of keynotes. I was fortunate and arrived just as they opened the keynote hall and got myself a seat in the front row. After Ray Ozzies intro Steven Sinofsky took over and showed Windows 7 for the first time in public. You can read about the demos on almost every blog, but here are the stuff that caught my attention:

Back at the hotel and watching some Monday Night Football (which I could do that in Sweden!). Here is a summary and some reflections on my day. Woke up early and walked down to LA Convention Center and got me some breakfast (tomorrow I’ll eat at the hotel). I tried to get to the keynote hall as early as possible for some good seating. I ended up in 6th row and had a good overview of the stage and the huge screens. As this is my first PDC and first conference of this magnitude I’m really impressed with the size and organization of it all.

I have arrived at my first PDC and it’s an awesome experience. The conference is huge and I arrived here for the registration and breakfast and met up with some nice guys. I fetched my bags of goods which contained mostly magazines and a bunch of sponsor commercials. We’ll have to wait until Tuesday until the real bits (the hard-drive stuffed with goods) are released and revealed. The keynote on Tuesday morning will really be interesting.

Sitting here in Zürich waiting for the delayed flight to Los Angeles and PDC 2008. This PDC is my first and I really look forward to it. I will suck in as much as I possibly can during the next few days. I have a couple of things on my agenda that I want to accomplish: Go through all of the Office Systems and SharePoint sessions to find out what’s going on Meet with the SharePoint MVPs, Product team and other cool SharePointers Listen and learn from the Experts Understand the Microsoft cloud vision even better, especially how do these services fit in a larger enterprise (I have not understood this yet) And of course be one of the first to try out all this new stuff! I will be staying at the Westin Bonaventure hotel and drop me a line if you would like to meet and have a pint or two.

I gladly received the news that the Office team announced Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007. Not only for the clients but also for the server products (read SharePoint). First of all it’s the support for the different file formats that I long for (ODF for example) and then there is the Outlook performance – both of these are addressed! XPS and PDF will be supported from scratch – no need to install a free plugin (just as it was in the Office 2007 betas).

Yesterday I did a short post on how to make a really simple SharePoint application with a .aspx page inside a document library and some coding with SharePoint Designer. I ended the post with giving a hint that you can also place the code in an assembly. To aid you in your self studies, here comes the solution… Make an assembly First of all we need to make an assembly to host our code behind. Start Visual Studio and create a Class Library project. Add a reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.dll and System.Web. The Microsoft.SharePoint.dll can be found under c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\ISAPI (who came up with the idea to place this stuff here by default?).

Recent discussions in the SharePoint forums led me to write this article on how to create the simplest form of SharePoint applications without using Visual Studio and only SharePoint Designer. Just follow these simple steps to create your own Hello World application in a .aspx hosted in a SharePoint document library. Create the document library First of all we need somewhere to host our applications; create a new Document Library, I called it Applications, and set the default template to either Basic Page or Web Part Page. This sample uses the Basic Page as template.

Emma Healy of Emma Explains Microsoft Licensing in Detail has written a post on how to calculate what Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 license you should use for your public facing/extranet MOSS site. The post has a flow chart to aid you in your decision to choose a MOSS for Internet Sites license (expensive!) or CALS (less expensive). To sum it up you should use the MOSS FIS if you have more than 435 users when using MOSS Standard or more than 242 users when using MOSS Enterprise.

When using Lists with Content Types enabled and you have your custom columns there are some things to remember, such as the custom columns are not part of the list content type items until you configure it so. For example; when you add a custom column to your list you have to option to add your column to all content types.

Everyone, every company, small or large has some kind of file server for storage of documents and other files. The file server are in many cases the heart of the operations. Some have several file servers and some have even more. Almost every file server looks the same; some kind of shared folder with subfolders (in absurdum). Most of these file servers uses file/directory permissions to have control over who are allowed to view or edit the files. Most often this is configured through groups, but far to often permissions are set on user accounts directly.

I noticed some interesting stuff on some “leaked” screenshots from Windows 7 (M3) – there are some changes going on in the lower right corner. I can see a couple of changes that draws my attention. “Hidden icons” icon The icon you can click on to show the hidden icons in the notification area has changed. Is it more than this? By the looks of the icon my guess is that it is more than just showing the hidden ones.

Everybody has something to say about Windows Vista, good and bad. Most often I hear complaints and especially on the User Account Control. Today the Swedish IDG website had an article about the 10 most annoying things with Vista and how to solve them, and of course one of them was about the poor UAC. I must say, and I have been using Vista since before RTM, and only found the UAC annoying during the first few days, when installing the machine. Since then I barely notices it – and if I do, I know why and I can feel more safe using my machine.

Lot of web sites uses a login page so you can identify yourself and so that the application can target information for you. I use a lot of different sites and does a lot of logins and I must say most of these login pages are not user friendly. A login page normally consists of two input fields, for username and password, and a button to make the actual login. In most cases there are a checkbox which you can check to make the application remember your login, by using a permanent cookie. The normal pattern, for us keyboard users are to write in username, hit tab, enter password, hit tab, use space button to check the Remember me checkbox, then enter or tab/space to do the login. This sequence is hardcoded into my brain and I really hate those sites that do not use this pattern.

Once upon a time Microsoft decided to give the users of Windows Vista the opportunity to buy an extra expensive version – called Vista Ultimate. Buyers of this version would eventually get some nice and exclusive content and applications to their sweet new operating system. Microsoft did deliver some nice enhancements such as animated backgrounds and new sound schemes – certainly worth the extra cost. As time went on people waited for the real Ultimate Extra to be delivered…

Microsoft SharePoint is a great development platform but it have some major areas where it could be improved. As of today you can create mediocre applications using the current SDK (which is not so well documented), but to create great applications you really need to understand how the internals of Windows SharePoint Services really works! I would like to show you an example of how bad the documentation and implementation is with a pretty common scenario.

I have a few times failed to install Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft Search Server Express, when I have come to a location where the SQL Server 2005 is already in place with custom configuration. The failures have occurred during the phase when the WSS is trying to create and configure the SQL Server. First time I had some troubles working it out, since I’m not a DBA, so I would like to share my solution since nothing is found on Google on this matter.

In my case I often create SharePoint sites and lists in a development environment or on a demo server, just to set up and verify the architecture and design. From that point I often have to sit down and start writing the actual feature, which involves some heavy Xml coding most of the times – now I have found a shortcut that will save me an awful amount of time. Let’s say that you have created a list in your demo environment, with columns, views and everything. This list is then the target of your feature you are about to develop. Creating the manifests, list templates and instances are pretty easy, but creating the schema can be troublesome and/or time consuming. Today I found a sweet little custom STSADM command called OCDExportList. This custom command exports the list schema from a list in a SharePoint site to an .xml file. Similar functionality can be found in other SharePoint solution generators, but I prefer using STSDEV and for this situation the custom command is great!

I recently received my new HTC Touch Pro smartphone, which is by far the best phone I ever owned so far – it has all that I need to complete my daily tasks. Over the years I had a few phones, of course the latest one has nearly almost been the best for me at that time. I decided to take a look down the memory lane and see what phones I have owned and used for daily usage. There are some in between that I used for shorter periods, but these are the major milestones in my mobile-life.

Today I passed the 70-542 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Application Development), with a score of 1000 (same as 70-541). It was a pretty tough test, but spending the last few days reading through the late Patrick Tisseghems book, Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 made me succeed. I dedicate this result to him – thanks! Technorati tags: SharePoint, MOSS

So everyone by now knows that Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 is available for download, and you all have read positive and/or negative reactions (why do people bother to repeat complaints such as; Firefox already has that feature, Safari is still better, yadda yadda…). Anyhow I have tried it out during the day and have had a really nice experience. Aside from the improved performance (will be back with more on that later on, but Firefox is still way ahead) I have found some really nice improvements.

I have recently seen Wordle images here and there on blogs and sites and I could not resist creating one of my own site, to see what words do I write often here. As you can see it’s lot of stuff about Microsoft (surprise), SharePoint, Visual Studio and .NET. I also seems to like a lot of things. Have you created a nice Wordle?

Microsoft has now released the final bits of Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1, download here. A lot of stuff has been improved such as stability and performance, no need for me to repeat all this since you can find it a gazillion of blogs as well as in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. One improvement I did not read about is that they have fixed/updated the icon of the devenv.exe so you can distinguish VS 2008 and VS 2005 if you are running them simultaneously. The VS 2008 SP1 icon contains a 9 in the lower right corner.

Working and developing with Microsoft products is a great, but when it all comes down to deliver a full solution to your clients you must know how the different products from Microsoft are licensed – and this is a mess (SharePoint?). Hopefully you have some in your organization that has some knowledge of the Microsoft licensing or you have a nice licensing partner that can help you out. But once in a while you end up with a client that wants to know how much it costs – and right now! Therefore I think it is essential if you, as a developer or architect, has (at least) some knowledge of how the different products are licensed.

Finally I have registered for PDC 2008. It will be awesome to head over to Los Angeles and attend to the conference. Since there has not been a PDC for a few years I expect some interesting stuff revealed, like what’s happening with C# 4.0 and the SharePoint team will also have a few sessions (Lawrence Liu has not revealed it’s content though). I will be staying at the Westin Bonaventure hotel, like some other Swedes. If you are attending and would like to hook up for a meeting please contact me.

Ecma International is currently asking ISO members for comments on the XPS standard. XPS is a new XML based standard for a paginated document format, somewhat like PDF. The current working draft 1.2 is now publicly available for anyone and the technical committee (TC46) of Ecma is requesting comments on the XPS draft. They also provide an issue list with all identified problems and an optional status. XPS has gained a lot of support from hardware/printer manufacturers, such as Konica Minolta and Xerox and software companies such NiXPS and SANATech.

It’s summer and time for some vacation, finally. This year has been hard work so far – and I don’t expect it to get lighter this upcoming autumn and winter. I’ve had fun though! Microsoft SharePoint has really been one thing occupying my work – it feels like everyone is not just looking at SharePoint, they want to use it now! We have a couple of cases that is really interesting and I hope that I have convinced them and proposed a nice solution.

So the F-day is here and Mozilla Firefox 3.0 is ready for download. Servers are currently down but you can get it from the FTP site. Mozilla has not even had time to fix their first-run page – it’s still referring to the Release Candidate 3. I guess we will see a record in downloading the next 24 hours. I had some strange experiences while installing it. I installed it over beta 5, therefore the location of Firefox was in the Program Files\Mozilla Firefox Beta 5\ folder and after a few minutes I had the first crash of Fx since beta 3 or something.

Microsoft recently released the Origami Experience 2.0 for Windows Vista, download it here. This is an update to the Microsoft UMPC interface. The Origami Experience is designed for small screens with touch-capabilities, but after just trying it out on my laptop with Vista Ultimate I figured – some of these features would fit into the Media Center interface perfectly. There are a lot to say about the Windows Media Center interface, I think it is quite good – needs some fixes though; why are films divided in three categories – Videos, Recorded TV and DVD’s? The media features in the interface are quite good, but in our family we have a Media Center in our living room and we quite often use it to browse the Internet or run other programs. That’s where I can see a great marriage between the Media Center and Origami interfaces.

Microsoft SharePoint is a great Enterprise Portal framework and contains a lot of collaboration and management features out of the box. SharePoint also has the abilities to find users and their knowledge using a social distance algorithm, but it has lacked some of the social features that applications such as Facebook successfully has implemented and been recognized for. Microsoft even owns a smaller part of the Facebook company. The enterprise equivalent of Web 2.0 – Enterprise 2.0 is steadily increasing and to make it work for the knowledge worker of today you have to include the social features. There are now numerous third party applications you can use to leverage your SharePoint installation to an Enterprise 2.0 portal, I previously blogged about some of them.

Wow, two heavy-weight Windows Mobile phones; Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 and HTC Touch Pro. In a few months I am ready to get me a new phone. I currently use the HTC TyTN, which has been a very pleasant ride (except for the glitching screen right now, to many drops…). When Sony Ericsson announced XPERIA X1 in march I got so excited and decided to get me one as soon as it hits the stores. Today HTC announced that they will continue their Touch series with the HTC Touch Pro, another sweet dream! So which one will be mine?

The Windows Live Writer has once again been updated, it’s still a Technical Preview. The new and updated version contains numerous improvements to the interface and introduces a brand new plugin model. New and improved features The interface has received some updates such as a tabs for switching between views and a nice feature which allows you to edit your post using your blog theme (might have been in previous builds, but this was the first time I’ve seen it).

Yes, you heard it right - now you can install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on Windows Vista! No need for a Windows Server 2003/2008 or virtual machines, remote debugging or any other weird workarounds! Jonas Nilsson of Bamboo Solutions has come up with a way to allow you to install WSS onto a Vista x86/x64 machine using a special installer file. The post contains detailed instructions on how to install WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 on any Windows Vista machine with IIS7.

I have repeatedly had Visual Studio 2008 hang or stop responding when I’m checking in files to Visual SourceSafe, especially when checking in large amount of files. It just stays there and eventually dims out (as non responding application does in Windows Vista). The ultimate solution is to kill the devenv.exe process and start over. But I have discovered that it is not just hanging, it’s just the main application window that stops responding. If you hover the application in the task bar on Windows Vista you see the preview window showing the check-in SourceSafe dialog. So you just have to wait it out.

A couple of weeks ago I bought the Belkin N1 Vision router and was really impressed with the design, usability and performance of it. This was until I tried to connect to my work using a Cisco VPN - it just did not work! The specifications for the router states that it has VPN support; IPSec pass-through and PPTP. On other routers I have seen methods to enable/disable IPSec pass-through in the router configuration, but I could not locate it in the N1 setup utility. After some googling I found out that this is always enabled on the N1 Vision, duh - guess not!

Today I passed another SharePoint exam; the 70-541, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development, with a score of 1000 of 1000. This one was pretty easy, compared to the ones for WSS 2/SharePoint 2003. If you have had chance to do some advanced developing and knows the SharePoint class library and Xml schemas you should give it a shot.

I have several times needed a way to sort XML, retrieved from a file or a web service, inline without invoking XSL transformations, which is the most common way to do it as I have seen. The .NET Framework contains the System.Xml.XPath namespace and is available from the .NET Framework 1.1 and up. This namespace contains a number of classes which can improve the performance of your .NET classes when working with XML. Specifically the System.Xml.XPath.XPathExpression contains a method (System.Xml.XPath.XPathExpression.AddSort) to sort the XPath query results.

The Swedish Standards Institute has as a result of the chaotic OOXML vote in August changed their rules for participating in technical committees and voting in them. Previously you could just before the vote sign the agreement and participate. From now on you must have been a member of the technical committee at least three weeks ahead of the votes you would like to participate in. The new rules also clearly points out that you only have one vote (I’m still wondering who voted twice…).

Author, editor and blogger, Ed Bott is currently publishing a series called Fixing Windows Vista, which contains really nice information and instructions on how to get the most out of your Vista machine. Currently three parts has been published: Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time Ed Bott shows how to install a clean Vista with the latest drivers (which is the most important thing on any Vista system) on a Sony Vaio.

I am really keen on gadgets and devices and have for some time had troubles with my current wireless routers so today I acquired a brand new Belkin N1 Vision wireless router. The reason for choosing this one was many but one of the most important ones was the WAF, Wife Acceptance Factor. Since it is placed central in our home the router must be good looking and that is exactly was Belkin N1 Vision is.

The Microsoft Office Labs team have now launched their own web site/community at www.officelabs.com. This is a site dedicated to “Concept testing”. This means that we can expect to see some nice productivity enhancements to the Office family and get a chance to take them for a test-drive. The aim of the site is for the Office Labs team to gather information from their “tools” and evaluate the usage of them and get a discussion started. So when you download and install the tools from Officelabs.com then make sure to participate in the Usage Metrics.

Two new sound schemes (glass and pearl)…c’mon you could do better than this in a year and a half… And a whole bunch of language packs. This time not announced as an extra but the details still tags them as Vista Ultimate content (but just not extra…)

ISO has published an official FAQ on ISO/IEC 29500 aka Office Open XML. The FAQ contains official answers from ISO to common questions such as: Why two standards? The ICT industry has a long history of developing multiple standards providing similar functionalities. After a period of co-existence, it is basically the market that decides which survives… What about contradictions? …but these can be taken care of during the maintenance of the standard.

During the Virtual Earth that I attended yesterday we were shown a really nice beta in which you easily can create your custom 3D Models for Virtual Earth called 3DVIA. The tool is a browser plugin which will open when you, from the Virtual Earth 3D mode right-click where you want to insert a new model and select Add a 3D Model. Since this is a beta it will take a while until the 3DVIA interface opens up. In my case I had to retry about 10 times due to some unexpected errors. It is also really slow and hogs your CPU.

Today I attended a really interesting event at the Microsoft Stockholm location about the Microsoft Virtual Earth Platform. The event was a result of large amount of questions from partners and customers and the bi-weekly webcasts by the VE team. During the day the team from UK presented the Virtual Earth platform including the Virtual Earth AJAX controls and the MapPoint web services as well as SQL Server 2008, which contains impressive spatial data management. I was there to hear what the Virtual Earth platform could do for my customers and our solutions and during the day I noted down some really interesting ideas and pitches that I will try on them, but…

When .NET 2.0 was introduced, quite a long time ago, the whole System.Xml namespace was re-written, due to the poor performance of the System.Xml implementation. Despite the fact that the CLR 2.0 has been around for a few years there are still implementations using CLR 1.x and especially the XSL transformation bits, since that part is completely re-written and marked as obsolete. But note that they are only being marked as obsolete! You can still compile and run most of the code with just a compiler warning. The old .NET 1.1 classes are still in the CLR 2.0, so you can convert your XSL transformations piece by piece and start using .NET 2.0 or even .NET 3.5 since it is based on .CLR 2.0 (read this post by Scott Hanselman to get a better understanding).

After a lot of turmoil the ECMA Office Open XML document format has been approved as an ISO/IEC standard - IS 29500. The news came out a day earlier than stated, due to a leak which made ISO to go public with the news. The process has not been easy for any part in the process and it has for sure made footprints in the standardization history. A lot of lobbying money as been spent (Politics matter) and a lot of committed people has engaged in verbal and written battles.

Welcome to the new design, I hope you like this one better than the previous. Personally I got tired of the old one and decided to make a change. Please leave a comment if it behaves bad or does not look good on any weird browser (I’ve tried it on FF3b4, Safari and IE8b1). Tomorrow I’ll be back for work after a month and a half of parental leave, which was so nice. I wish it had lasted longer, but I will be home with my daughters Fridays throughout the rest of the spring…

Today is the last day that the national bodies can change/update the votes on the Office Open Xml, DIS 29500, approval as an ISO standard. I really hope that enough NB’s change their votes so we can have OOXML as an ISO standard - I know we will all gain on this. To get a hint in which direction the result is going Andy Updegrove has set up a Vote Tracker, which he will continuously update until we have the final result.

Due to the large amount of users still using Internet Explorer 6 a campaign has started to save developers from having to making specific adaptations to IE6 - SaveTheDevelopers.org. The Save The Developers site contains a script that anyone can place on their web site and it will show a warning to IE6 users and urge them to upgrade to any of the four major browsers; Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari or Opera.

Apple have now released the final version of the Safari browser to Windows, which has not gone unnoticed since they are pushing it as a pre-selected optional update to QuickTime or iTunes. I still refuse to install iTunes on my machines so this approach from Apple is not new to me. As soon as there are any updates to QuickTime Apple recommends me to install iTunes, via Apple Software Update.

A few days ago I compared the JavaScript performance of Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 and Firefox 3 beta 4 and Firefox won that round pretty easy. Previous versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox have a bad history of consuming memory, which annoys me really much. You should not have to close and start your browser several times a day just to free memory, you should be able to start an instance in the morning and have that one running all day without having your memory trash.

Recently my laptop (DELL XPS m1210) has been really sluggish and I have had several BSOD’s when I have been working with it. I try to keep it pretty optimized and up to date so it will behave nice. I think I’ve read most of the optimize Vista articles and posts and I always keep track on which processes and services running and how much memory is used etc etc.

Mozilla Links has an article about the Firefox ultimate feature - Performance, in which they compare the JavaScript performance on different web browsers. Firefox 3 beta 4 as some really impressive JavaScript performance and outruns Internet Explorer 7 with about 700%. But the article did not test Internet Explorer 8 beta, which I think should have been there (at least for reference). Since the IE8 team claims the performance is so much better, and my feeling after a few days of IE8 usage says so I had to do some testing on my own.

ECMA International TC46 has updated the XML Paper Specification documents to working draft version 1.1. The new drafts can be found here as PDF or XPS and the changes can be found here (only as PDF :-) in the issue list. It seems like there are no major changes, mostly minor and editorial changes. I think we can expect some more changes when Office Open Xml has gone through the last steps of the ISO Fast-Track procedure, especially the references to the OPC.

Finally Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 has been released into the wild and of course I had to install it right away and try it out, and these are my first impressions. Installation The installation went smooth and just a reboot on a Windows Vista Ultimate machine. Speed This is by far the best experience so far. It starts really fast, it opens a new tab/windows faster and it renders the pages even faster. What will happen when they start optimizing it! After some testing I find it even faster than the Firefox version I’m using. Thank you!

Microsoft has published the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit site, since IE8 Beta will be available for download very soon. The site contains information on some of the various new and interesting stuff that IE8 will deliver for consumers and developers. Most of the links are currently not working as this post is written… Here are some of the highlights if you ignore all the improvements such as CSS compliance etc.

Breaking news! Good news! Finally! Microsoft and the Internet Explorer team has finally decided to change their previous decision and decided that Internet Explorer 8 will render pages using web standards by default, instead of having some backwards-compatible mode. To catch up and read more head on over to these posts/links. I guess the blogosphere will be flooded with this today… Microsoft Press Release on the subject IEBlog - Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8 Mary Jo Foley - Microsoft caves: ‘Super-standards’ mode to become IE 8 default This is by far the best news in ages from Microsoft (the new open Microsoft?), even better than the news to open up the Windows Server Protocols, since it will affect the end-users more immediate.

The Ballot Resolution Meeting, BRM, on DIS 29500 is currently taking place in Geneva and I’m really curious on what’s going on in down there in Switzerland. There has not leaked anything of interest, just some rumors and photos. I guess we all have to wait until the weekend and then we will be flooded with upset|angry|joyful|content|happy comments from the delegates.

The SDKs for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been updated and are now available at the Microsoft Download site. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Software Development Kit (SDK) (version 1.3) SharePoint Server 2007 SDK: Software Development Kit (version 1.3)This contains several updates and worth to notice is the Search sample protocol handler, Custom Content Source and the BDC editor.

A few days ago Microsoft dropped the news that they are increasing their openness regarding interoperability. This is great news for the world of software, even though everyone has their own opinions in this matter. What now have been made public is more than 30.000 pages of documentation of the various protocols used within Microsoft server products (Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007). You can find the documentation in the MSDN Library or on the Microsoft Download site.

The Microsoft Office Binary File Formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt…) are now available for everyone under the Open Specification Promise, OSP. This is good news for all of you working with the traditional binary format, when for example moving them to the new Office Open Xml, OOXML, file format. The binary file formats have previously been available for download for a long time (under RAND-Z), but now you download them here. This change to put it under OSP, is due to the comments on OOXML by the national bodies and Microsoft has now promised ECMA International to make it easier to get hold of the specifications.

I have several time stumbled upon clients who complain that their hyper linked Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) opens up in the web browser, Internet Explorer, instead of in their respectively Office application. In SharePoint document libraries these problems are solved using a special JavaScript that fires up the correct application, but today I had a client complaining about this problem when having Office documents linked in a Wiki. So I dug up some information from the Microsoft Knowledge Base on this matter and though I should share it (or at least have it written down for future reference).

The Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, also known as the Fab40, is a set of forty different templates that can be used within a SharePoint environment. These templates are good to use as a starter when creating new SharePoint sites or custom solutions and I recommend that you install them into your test or development environment. But the download contains 40 different .wsp and .stp files which has to be installed one at a time; either using STSADM or using the web interface.

You can now subscribe to this feed using Windows Live Alerts, just click the Windows Live Alerts logo and customize how you will receive the alert. This is another great Live service from the Microsoft Live team. You can sign up to create your own alerts here. Thanks to Michael Ganotti for the tip.

If you are about to plan capacity for your Microsoft SharePoint 2007 topology you can get great assistance from the Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007 and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Model. What is Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007? The Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) 2007 is a pre-deployment capacity planning tool for Microsoft Server products when creating distributed application deployments. The SCCP allows you to create a model of your hardware, network and applications/servers using a Model Editor. The model can then be run through a simulator which warns you of eventual bottlenecks and allows you to analyze all kinds of different data.

The Release Notes for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 just appeared on the Microsoft Downloads Site. And just after this Microsoft posted a Media Alert: Microsoft Releases Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2008 to Manufacturing. Finally! Vista Service Pack 1 will be available “to customers in March” and Windows Server 2008 will “be available […] on March 1”. When will it be available on Microsoft Downloads or for MSDN/TechNet Subscribers? Update: The Windows Vista Team Blog has detailed timings for Vista SP1

Will Windows Vista Service Pack 1 be released to the web tonight? Let’s see how the download servers will handle this… Update (later this day): No need for any download servers…we will have to wait a month and a half before it will be available. Sigh…

Finally there is a possible workaround for the missing icons in the Vista Notification Area, see my post from march 2007. The workaround is documented in KB945011 - “System icons may not appear in the notification area on a Windows Vista-based computer until you restart the computer”. It’s the network, power and volume icons in the notification area that suffers from this problem. The KB article pins down the cause due to heavy processing on a Vista based machine during the first startup and that it typically not reoccur after the first reboot. This is because of the “welcome sequence” in Vista that initializes services and applications for the first time.

I found this pretty funny misspelling in the Office Server System Requirements today. Is it a tribute to Linus Torvalds?

A few months ago I wrote about the Architecture Journal Reader, a great demonstration app for a “occasionally-connected” Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF, application. I asked for source code and more samples like this, and sometimes dreams come true. Today Tim Sneath announced the public availability of a News Reader SDK and a Syndicated Client Experiences (SCE) Starter Kit and source code for it. At the same time the team created a MSDN Magazine reader application using the starter kit. The SCE is built upon the Microsoft Sync Framework and .NET 3.0.

Here comes another “it sucks” post about McAfee anti-virus products. I recently was forced into using McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, due to domain policies at my new employer. This was not what I have wanted! For years I have been using Grisoft AVG both at work and at home (they have a great free product for personal use). AVG is great, I have not had a single virus or similar on any of my machines for six or seven years (that has not been intentionally installed - to see what will happen), and I’m sad to not use it on my primary working machine anymore.

Today ECMA International published the final responses to the more than 3.500 technical comments, submitted by the national bodies about four months ago, on Office Open XML (ISO/IEC DIS 29500). This is a milestone in the Office Open XML standardization and it is now up to the participating countries to review the answer on the comments and see if the agree or still disagree. The proposed dispositions are not public (they are only available to the BRM members) but ECMA has a summary of the major changes in their press release.

The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 contains a great new ASP.NET control called ListView. When using the ListView control you have much more control over how the output HTML will look like, which I think still is the main problem with the ASP.NET controls. To learn more about the ListView control, head over to Mustafa Basguns blog and read his excellent articles on the control. The ListView control is great when working with SharePoint (WSS3 and/or MOSS 2007) custom pages, since designing SharePoint pages which adapts into the current administration or takes advantage of all the CSS styles demands you to have pretty good control of your HTML.

Microsoft continues to strengthen their position in the Enterprise Search segment by acquiring the Norwegian Enterprise Search company Fast Search & Transfer (FAST). FAST is, according to Gartner, leader in the enterprise search segment together with Autonomy, where Microsoft was considered Tier 2 players. After releasing the Microsoft Search Server (MSS) and the MSS Express version, I’m glad Microsoft continues to emphasize on this interesting and “hot” area. Forrester stated after the Microsoft Search Server release that:

The year of 2007 is about to come to an end, and it has been a really exciting year. First of all I’ve had a great year with my family; my daughters turned four and one years old during 2007 and it’s so wonderful having them around giving me energy. My wife has been home with them the whole year and next year I will take a few months of parental leave and give them my full attention.

The ECMA Technical Committee 45, continues to comment the comments received during the Office Open XML ISO fast-track procedure and have now reached to two thirds of them. The response to comments are only sent to the national bodies The last set of proposed changes contains one major interesting thing; OOXML, or DIS 29500, is proposed to be a multi-part standard, which some national bodies suggested. The parts are: DIS 29500-1: WordProcessingML, SpreadsheetML, PresentationML and SharedML specifications DIS 29500-2: is the Open Packaging Convention, OPC DIS 29500-3: the extensibility specification This is not a big shocker, I imagined it coming, but anyway I’m glad they made the change(proposition to change). Having the OPC in a separate specification is great! Imagine now how we can use this separate standard for packaging other types of information.

Microsoft is currently in the middle of the process of creating the next generation Microsoft web browser, with the fantastic name - Internet Explorer 8. A few days ago, the IE team reports, the internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 browser test, which is used to ensure proper support for web standards. This is not the case with IE7, take a look at the picture on the right, it should render to a nice smiley…

Not only the Office clients and servers got patched yesterday, Microsoft also released an update to Visual SourceSafe 2005. The update contains a number of hotfixes which includes performance, usability and stability improvements, as well as improvements to compatibility with Windows Vista and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Download it here (KB943847)

Not only the Office 2007 clients got updated to Service Pack 1 today, Service Pack 1 is also out for the Office Server family and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Here are some of the downloads… Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 1 - for new installs Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 - for upgrades Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Packs Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1 - SharePoint Server, Project Server, Forms Server and Groove Server Microsoft Office Server Language Pack 2007 Service Pack 1 Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 Service Pack 1 All are 32-Bit Editions, you can find links to the 64-bits in the instructions.

The Microsoft Office Online now contains links to the Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1. The links are not currently working, but I will keep you updated. Here are the links: Office 2007 Service Pack 1 Visio 2007 Service Pack 1 Project 2007 Service Pack 1 Update: You can find all the updates and changes in this Excel. Let’s hope for a faster Outlook 2007 experience…Update: It feels faster at first glance…

Remote Debugging is a great feature to use, especially when you work with virtual machines. It allows you to develop and debug locally but have the code running on another machine, virtual or physical. Microsoft SharePoint can’t be installed on a Windows Vista or XP workstation, but needs to be installed on Windows Server 2003 or 2008, so the general recommendations has been for developers to have either Windows Server as their main OS or have a virtual machine with Windows Server. None of these work that well; either you have problems debugging your components and you have to rely on traces or message boxes or you have to have a virtual machine with a full development environment, which will not resemble a production machine.

For the last year I have had really annoying security troubles when working with documents in SharePoint (2003 or 2007, WSS or MOSS) on my Windows Vista machine with Office 2007. Every time I have opened up a document for editing the Office applications have asked me to log in to access the document. I have been able to press Cancel three times, but then the document is opened up in read-only mode. The problem has not occurred on any Windows XP installations. I have seen this problem on several computers with Vista. There have been several reported workarounds, of which none has worked for me.

It has been quite calm on the Office Open Xml OOXML scene for a while, but now the BRM on DIS 29500 meeting is approaching in late February of 2008 and the information on the process is increasing. This time I think the ongoing discussion is on a more “nicer” level than right after the ISO vote. Here are some interesting readings that I have read the last few weeks, that I would like to share:

Microsoft has released a new Windows Presentation Foundation demo sample that is a reader application for The Architecture Journal. The Architecture Journal is a quarterly online magazine focused on IT-architecture and contains nice articles and gives you some good reading. It is available online and as PDF (why not XPS?). The Architecture Journal Reader is a WPF sample, very much like the New York Times Reader that was one of the first killer-apps for WPF, that you can use for offline reading of The Architecture Journal.

Visual Studio 2008 is released and MSDN subscribers can download it, which I’m currently doing. .NET Framework 3.5 is also final and available for download. Bye bye Visual Studio 2005…

Neowin.net has posted a picture of suggestions of features for future versions of Windows, gathered from the Windows Early Feedback program. The list contains the top 61 suggestions which is to be presented to the Windows 7 team. I think it’s great that Microsoft tries to listen to the community, but a lot of these suggestions should have been in Windows by now or earlier! Just take a look at these few examples:

On Monday TechNet Edge will open at http://edge.technet.com. The Edge is a (social) network for Microsoft IT Professionals to connect with people at Microsoft “in an informal way”, as Jeff Sandquist says in one of the first forum posts on the site. There are no content so far, but the ReadMe.txt states that the site will contain screen casts, interviews and a discussion forums. It’s basically the same as Channel 9, but this time for IT-professionals. Great!

Microsoft has announced their new enterprise search setup of server products, which include the Microsoft Search Server 2008 together with an Express version, that are free (currently a release candidate). This new server product is an evolution of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search. This is great news since the Search Server (MSS) has great possibilities to integrate to other search engines or data sources (something that you only could do with some heavy BDC programming using MOSS 2007 Enterprise Edition). MSS is based on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and it can extend your WSS installations with better search, even cross-site which has been the major factor to upgrade to MOSS.

The great blogging application Windows Live Writer has left the beta phase and is now released, as a part of the Windows Live Wave 2, with version 12.0.1366.1026. Below is the previous About screen and as you can see there are no Beta remark anymore… I have not yet found any information on what’s new or what’s updated, but I guess we will soon here about it!

When using BitLocker or encrypting your file system with EFS on Windows Vista, you will be using certificates and/or passwords. If these certificates or passwords are lost the chance that you loose the information and data on the disks that are protected is very likely. The certificates can of course be backed up on removable media or similar. But storing these kind of crucial information bits on a remote location is of course the best way and you should do that. You can store it in any kind of web-storage such as SkyDrive, but the best way is to use a service called the Digital Locker by Microsoft.

Apple just released their new version of Max OS X (10.5) called Leopard, which of course has a real neat user interface and really cool experience - the Apple trademark. I have seen a lot of people moving on to the Mac platform the last years, but then we talk about personal and niche users and so far the Apple OS X share is about 4% compared to XP’s 80% and Vistas 8%.

Finally the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras team released the remaining 19 language packs for Windows Vista Ultimate. The language packs allows Vista Ultimate users to easily switch between different languages in the Vista user interface. The language packs are maybe not the most exciting feature for Windows Vista and I believe that this should not just be an exclusive add-on for high-end users (the ones who buy the, as of today, very expensive Ultimate version) of Vista. This feature should be a part of all Vista editions, maybe with an additional minor charge for each language pack.

I’m currently in progress of making the third version of msfeedicon, a free plugin to the Windows RSS platform and Internet Explorer 7 feeds. The new version, 3.0, will include an updated interface as well as some requested features and some major changes that msfeedicon users have asked/begged me about. This is how the notification window currently looks like. I will need a few, 3 or 4 to start with, beta testers to make sure that I have a good release once it’s final, please contact me if you are interested and explain why you should be one of the beta testers. All beta testers will of course get credit in the application!

Yesterday I wrote about Internet Explorer 7 starting to behave like mad when reading feeds with the built-in Feeds functionality. This morning when reading my feeds I specifically studied the usage of GDI Objects in the Task Manager, and these are my findings: GDI Objects Action 1.656 After started IE7 and watched first feed 6.037 After reading about 20 different feeds, in the same IE7 tab 811 Browsed to a non-feed site in the same tab

Internet Explorer 7 has great RSS reader features based on the Windows RSS Platform but I have seen it degrade over the last few months as my number of subscribed feeds and new posts has increased. Every morning when I get to the office I have a few hundred of unread items to go through, see sample statistics from msfeedicon to the right. I have a pretty modern Dell XPS m1210 machine with 2 GB of memory and as I start reading these feeds Windows starts to trash and finally totally goes nuts. Just watch the images below, which I will guide you through.

Today Microsoft announced that it will be extending Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with new enterprise social computing capabilities, by adding features from the partners NewsGator (Press release) and Atlassian. SharePoint Connector for Confluence This connector will integrate the Atlassian product called Confluence which is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge. The connector is allowing you to create more advanced wikis and blogs than the standard features of SharePoint or you can include SharePoint lists into Confluence, it even allows you to search both SharePoint content and documents as well as the Confluence content in one location.

The Microsoft SharePoint blog has a new post called “Known issue: Office 2007 on Windows Vista prompts for user credentials when opening documents in a SharePoint 2007 site”. The article is a result of many reported support cases on this issue and contains a few possible (I repeat possible) workarounds. We have had this problem ourselves and on several customers. In some cases these workarounds really work, but most of the times not. And the problem is not only with SharePoint 2007, we also see it for SharePoint 2003 installations so I think it’s more related to Vista, and its new security features, than SharePoint (the problem does not appear on Windows XP with IE7).

Certificate problems with Windows Mobile and Active Sync seems to be a pretty common cause of not being able to synchronize you mobile phone with Microsoft Exchange, but despite the number of web pages and posts found around the net there are no simple solutions or shortcuts. I previously had some problems installing my certificate on to my Windows Mobile 5 phone, but now it’s upgraded to Windows Mobile 6, which has support for handling certificates. Today I had to update the certificate on our Exchange server since it was not valid anymore and after that my WM6 phone stopped syncing and giving me this error: The security certificate on the server has expired. Check that the date and time on your device are correct and the error code 0x80072f05. The Microsoft KB article 927465 did not help but led me to look for a utility called SslChainSaver which I found on the Windows Mobile Team Blog. The SslChainSaver utility traces all certificates to your server and saves them as files on your machine. It also produces an XML file which you can turn into a CAB file (instructions here) to install them on your Windows Mobile phone.

A few links on XML Paper Specification that I stumbled upon the last few days. View XPS documents using Acrobat 8 The XPS Review Blog has an article that Acrobat 8 (8.1 to be precise) can be used to open XPS documents. I have not tried it, since I don’t own Acrobat 8, but it sounds great. Note: it’s not supported in Acrobat Reader 8.1. A new set of XPS tools from SANAtech SANAtech is has released a set of tools for XPS.

The news that Microsoft will be releasing the .NET 3.5 framework libraries source code for everyone. The code is under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL) which means that the code is available for you to use as a reference or for debugging, not to modify or extend (if you simplify it…a lot), i.e. it’s not open source. What’s in it for us? Scott Guthrie has all the goodies in his post, where he explains how this release of source code integrates into Visual Studio 2008, and how you can debug into (for example) the ASP.NET framework. Whenever you decide to step in to a .NET Core library or ASP.NET method Visual Studio will download the appropriate source code and allow you to dig in to it deeper.

Yes, you heard it right, Sandi Hardmeier (IE MVP) brings us the story that today Microsoft will re-release Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP. The interesting stuff is that the re-release will not have any Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) check during installation. My humble guess is that Microsoft is trying to get all non-legal copies of Windows XP to update to the more secure version of Internet Explorer. I have not seen any official words yet on this and it’s not available on Windows Update, but I’ll update this post as soon as I get more news.

Microsoft has released three more updates for Windows Vista mainly targeting performance, stability and reliability, one thing that Microsoft and Vista currently lacks. Service Pack 1 is in beta, but will not be ready for launch for several months, but to get get back some credibility for Windows Vista and to get the sales back on track I think Microsoft will continuously release these kind of updates. And of course they will get a wider target area for testing them.

Joost is now for everyone, no more invitations to get your hands on it! It’s still a beta but called Joost 1.0 beta and it’s getting better and more importantly it’s getting more channels and content (more than 15.000 shows). So if you have not tried Joost, head on over and download it. The one thing I think is missing, is a seamless Media Center Integration - wouldn’t that be something? Microsoft currently released Internet TV Beta for Media Center (only for the US customers, so us living up north in Sweden are left out as usual…) which I would like to test and compare to Joost - anyone have any interesting comparisons, is it a competitor or can they cooperate?

A few weeks ago I met a friend of a friend at a party who started to work for Accenture as a programmer a few months a go. After some talking we started discussion jobs, and I was wondering what she did at Accenture; what kind of development and projects. As a programmer I was eager to know what she was programming and stuff like that, I know that she had studied C++ at the university and that she had worked with that for a while. At Accenture she had entered the Java world and now she was developing a SOA application - interesting I thought and started to fire some more questions.

Barry Goffe, Director of Windows Vista Ultimate, has now responded to the last days of angry posts on the non-existing upcoming Extras for Windows Vista Ultimate. In his post he announces that Windows DreamScene now is officially released. I really hope that this is not a release that has been forced out from the Redmond buildings, due to the complaints, but instead something that actually works smooth. The language packs are still on delay - let them wait until they are ready, but keep us informed (not only when you are forced to!).

Today the Office 2003 Service Pack 3 popped up in my Windows Update (Vista Ultimate) as an important update. Duh! I have only installed Office 2007, as far as I know!? But after a check in Programs and Features of Vista I found out that I sometime installed the Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components and Office 2003 SP3 applies to the OWC. So the update was not for Office 2007…

The summer is now officially over and there has not been any Windows Vista Ultimate Extras as promised! In July, the Ultimate team the Ultimate Team directory promised us a that the remaining language packs and DreamScene would be released, so far no trace of them! Windows Vista Ultimate with the Ultimate Extras was a smart way to get consumers to pay a whole lot of extra money, about 60% more than the Home Premium version, to get nothing! Yes, there has been some extras released, but that was like 8 months ago! Since then we have seen some language packs removed and a technical preview of DreamScene.

I’m really happy that CNET Download.com has reviewed my application msfeedicon, a free RSS plugin to the Windows RSS platform. The rating is 4 stars of possible 5 and here is the review: If you cant get through the day without checking your RSS feed subscriptions, you’ll be glad to know about Msfeedicon: It perks up and simplifies Internet Explorer’s RSS feature by adding some functionality. There’s one caveat: The tagging feature described by the publisher didn’t work in our tests.

The standardization of the XML Paper Specification (XPS) as an ECMA International standard proceeds. Adrian Ford reports that the initial working draft has been published on the ECMA web site. There are no major changes as of now to the original specification by Microsoft, but rather some editorial changes, read the latest draft here (available as PDF or XPS). Lets hope that the ECMA TC has learned from the recent Office Open XML ISO failure and get rid of all these non-issues that most of the OOXML comments really was about.

The net is crowded with SharePoint blogs, including this one, and I have missed one thing - information for the end-users. I think that there is a great void in knowledge for SharePoint users out there,for example how to use SharePoint as an end-user in the most efficient way, how to do the simple stuff such as creating sites or lists etc. Today I stumbled upon “Get the ‘Point” by Suzanne Ross, which has a focus on the SharePoint end-users. The blog is quite new but features a two-part article series on how to set up a Team Site. It does not sound like rocket science to us developers, but hint you customers and/or users about this blog.

 A new developers community for Windows Live developers - Via Windows Live - has just been launched. The community site contains sections about Silverlight, Live ID, Live Writer, Messenger, Alerts and all the other Live products. As of now the content is quite thin, but it’s up to you/us to fill it with useful information. Just register and then start using it. The site has a Wiki, a Gallery, Articles and more. And you can subscribe to the “aggregated blog of everything Windows Live”.

If so, then you have the chance of winning a grand prize by Microsoft. Microsoft has announced a Windows Media Center - Ultimate Install Contest in which they are looking for the best (finest and most creative) installation of Windows Vista Ultimate Media Center. If it is you, then send in your submission before November 1st, 2007 (for where to send the stuff, look at the link above). The winner will be announced at Electronic House (EH) Expo Fall 2007.

Finally Microsoft has released Silverlight 1.0 - Microsofts new streaming media platform which aims to compete with Adobe Flash. Silverlight is a cross-platform and cross-browser plugin with focus on delivering high performing graphical web interfaces, with support for Windows and Mac OS. Download the final release here. The download page still says Silverlight 1.0 RC , but the RC will automatically update to the final version. For Linux there is a project under the Mono umbrella called Moonlight which will provide a Linux implementation of Silverlight.

ECMA Office Open XML (ISO/IEC DIS 29500) will not get an approval from ISO, as of now. This is what almost everyone expected after the last week of turbulence. Now we can hopefully look forward to some constructive work on all the recieved comments on the specification from ECMA and Microsoft. This will in the end make a better OOXML specification and I hope it will be approved in february of 2008.

Yes, you read it right! Microsoft now offers a royalty-free file format program for the Microsoft Office Binary File Format (the old .doc, .xls and .ppt used in previous versions of Microsoft Office). Microsoft Office 2007 is built-upon the Office Open XML file format which is an ECMA International standard, and an ISO proposal (you have all read about it). But some of us still have application and/or customers that heavily rely on the old binary format. Until now it has been a mess doing something with these documents (for example in the SharePoint event handlers) or producing them without expensive 3rd party applications. We have solved it in some cases by making compressed HTML files (.mht) and renamed them to .doc (it actually works smooth). But if you still have to dig in to the old binary formats you can recieve the binary file formats specifications, which covers the latest versions as well as earlier ones, you can send an e-mail to Microsoft and request an agreement which you have to sign. I have not read up on all the legal issues, but you can read the agreement here.

When I was installing a new Windows SharePoint Services 3 site today I stumpled upon an error I’ve never seen in SharePoint before. It was when I was trying to add new users in the People and Groups administration. It was not a “normal” error page but instead a HTTP 403 Forbidden message was thrown when going to the /_layouts/aclinv.aspx page. This was on a brand new server instance, with everything patched and up to date.

It is now confirmed that Sweden will abstain from voting for the ECMA Open Office XML specification (DIS 29500). After the annullation of the result taken on monday the working group could not agree on having a new meeting before the ISO voting procedure. Some of the members did not like to have a new vote - guess who? So this is the end of the SIS vote for this time. Now, almost everyone have something to say in this matter, except Sweden.

I just recieved new information (in Swedish) that Sweden will not vote Yes for DIS29500 Office Open XML, which I previously reported on. Sweden will instead abstain from voting in the ISO vote on September 2nd. The SIS board had a meeting this afternoon and annulled the previous result due to that one of the commitee members had participated with more than one vote. I do not know which member, but I figure we all soon will know it…

The NiXPS guys has done it again, they have created an XPS viewer for the Mac platform. Read all about it on their blog. The XPS viewer is a part of their upcoming version of the NiXPS platform, which is a cross-platform application for inspecting and manipulating XPS files. It is currently in beta but I think that this new version with the improved XPS previewing abilities will really boost the application.

Today was the meeting when the Swedish standardisation organisation, SIS, was to vote on the Office Open XML standard. I have observed this procedure, but not actively participated in it since the first working group meeting a few months ago. At that time it felt pretty comfortable and the Yes vote was in reach. When this day approached both camps, the pro Office Open XML team and the no-sayers both gathered their forces for the final battle. We all entered the meeting at the last possible minute and we all was signed in to the meeting.

The XPS site at www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps just had an extreme makeover, to fit in to the new Microsoft website. It is basically the same content but easier to read and look on. It seems like not all is done yet, some pages still have the old layout, so I expect some more improvements/additions… The most interesting thing is the new XPS Technology Showcase part which contains references of XPS enabled hardware and software. Go check it out if you are looking for any XPS applications.

Windows Vista contains nice functionality for reporting problems on your machine to Microsoft and to retrieve solutions for your problems using the Problem Reports and Solutions feature. To take advantage of this feature and to report problems or check for solutions you have to either enable the functionality, default behaviour, or do it manually. To access the Problem Reports and Solutions center open up the Control Panel and navigate to System and Maintenance and then click on Problem Reports and Solutions. You will see a list of all your problems that has a solutions or if there are more information on any of your reported problems.

Windows Vista is currently suffering from some major issues with performance and reliability when for example resuming from standby, when you are using graphic intensive applications (read playing games :-) or when you are copying files (especially over a network). As of today Microsoft has two new updates for Windows Vista targets some performance and reliability issues. Update for Windows Vista (KB938194) This one covers some cases when Vista stops responding due to display driver problems as well as some other stuff.

istartedsomething dug up something interesting from the Steve Ballmer presentation at the Microsoft Show and Tell 2007. It’s a roadmap for Microsoft products for the fiscal year of 08 and beyond! Some things caught my attention: Expression Studio V2 - there will be a new version of the Expression series pretty soon Microsoft Tellme - this can be really cool. Windows Server 2008 Update Release and Service Pack 1 - wonder what nice stuff they have in the pipeline for these releases… Microsoft Surface - it will be a real product and is not just a showcase! It’s worth browsing through the whole PowerPoint by Steve Ballmer.

Microsoft Windows Vista has a whole lot of new and exciting stuff and some things that may be disturbing (at least when you’re starting with Vista), like the new structure of the folders; X:\Documents and Settings has been shortened down to X:\Users which is good but then everything you are used to are changed (well almost anyway), My Documents is now called just Documents and this folder does not longer contains for example My Music, which is moved to a new location, one step up, with the new name Music.

Here are some interesting links on the (summer) hot OOXML vs ODF discussion. INCITS issues a ballot of “yes” with comments by Doug Mahugh South Africa votes No with comments on the standardisation of Open XML Brian Jones comments on Setting a New Standard by Jason Brooks Wouter van Vugt announces his pocket-sized Open XML book and tells us about the Dutch ISO/IEC standardisaton of Open XML

The OOXML versus ODF discussions are getting more intense and either side lays out the same arguments why the other one are better than the other. Some arguments are valid - but some are definitley not! Why do the ODF side always use the “it’s to much to read” argument!? Just take a look at Andrew Updegroves open letter to the state of Massachusetts, two of his five points is about this argument!

It has been awfully quiet from the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras team; no new Extras, no new hints on upcoming Extras…no nothing… Yesterday we finally got some good news, nothing exciting really but a sign of life from the Extras team. Their current plan is to ship the remaining lanugage packs and a non-beta release of DreamScene, but not until they all meet the quality requirements. There are nothing said about the upcoming extras, only that they “plan to ship a collection” of extras “over the next couple of years”.

Since the news broke out that XML Paper Specification was submitted to ECMA International bloggers and authors has gone wild, here is a collection of reflections and reactions on it. Most reactions come from the say no to Microsoft team. Andy Updegrove declares “game over” for open standards and in my opinion; his post and thoughts declares game over for innovation! War and PDF: Microsoft submits XPS to standards body - ars technica Microsoft and ECMA: Together again, doing it again by Bob Sutor. He has a point; ECMA should not have the primary focus of getting the ECMA standard to be a copy of the XPS specification. Pretty stupid and non-diplomatic statement by Microsoft and ECMA, this is what the wolves are looking for…

ECMA International has started a technical committee, TC46 - XML Paper Specification (XPS), to “produce a formal standard for an XML-based electronic paper format”. One of the points in the TC46 programme is to consider a submission of the XPS format as an ISO standard. This is really good news to all users of the XPS format and is really vital if XPS is going to be able to compete with the PDF format (which already is an ISO standard, ISO 19005-1:2005/ISO/DIS 32000).

I have recieved five invitations for the alpha of Freebase, the first five comments on this post with a valid e-mail adress will be invited. Freebase is “a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone”. Everyone are allowed to edit and add data and topics, categorized into domains, types and instances. Read more about it on the Freebase FAQ. Freebase is like a more structured Wikipedia. Freebase has a nice API for creating Freebase enabled applications. You can easily query and edit the Freebase for information using JSON.

I found an update to the Microsoft XPS Essentials Pack on Microsoft Download Center today. It does not look like an update but on Vista you will get an Windows Update (.msu) package and when I run it it says that it does not apply to my machine. The download link points to the same link that the Essentials Pack was available on before, but it has a new published date (6/19/2007).

NiXPS v1.0 has been released and is now available as a 30 day trial or for purchase. It’s available for the Windows and Mac OS/X platform. NiXPS is an XML Paper Specification, XPS, tool which can be used for inspection and manipulation XPS documents. The main features are extraction of pages, fonts and images from the document, merging of documents and find and replace. The other major feature is an inspection tool for examining the XPS document structure and XML as well as editing the XML.

Yet another It sucks post! Yesterday I installed the Apple Safari browser on my Windows Vista machine. I thought that it would be nice to use the fastest web browser in the universe to do some application/site compatibility testing without having to have a Mac OS/X system. Yes it is a beta, so I won’t complain about all the bugs and rendering problems (it might of course be the sites I’m testing but in some cases I don’t think so) - I will instead complain on the ugly look and appearance of it.

Windows Home Server, WHS, is a great addition to the Windows Server family, a product that I have wanted to have for a really long time. It will really help me connect my machines at home and provide great features to the connected home and make me share my digital media easier between Media Centers, laptops etc. I have hoped that I could turn my current Media Center, a quite powerful machine, into a Home Server later this year once it is time to build my own new Media Center. I would like to make a clean install of Windows Home Server on that old (2 1/2 years) machine after picking WHS up from my local store.

My favorite Windows Explorer replacement has finally been released in it’s 7th version. Total Commander, which much remainds of the classic old Norton Commander, is a fast and intuitive file and folder manager by Christian Ghisler. It performs much faster than Explorer and has nice built-in features such as packing (ZIP, RAR…), FTP support, multi-renaming, quick-access to common directories… you name it! Version 7 contains a number of new features and fixes, read more about them in my previous post on the subject or on the Total Commander home page.

I previously blogged about the lack of Office 2007 file format support in Windows Mobile 6. Today Jason Langridge revealed that you will not longer need any third party application for this - but instead Microsoft will provide an update to Microsoft Office Mobile 2007 with support for the new Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx). A free update will be available for Windows Mobile 6 and 5 devices and all new shipped devices will have it in the ROM, all starting in Q3 of 2007.

The Windows Media Center Components Database is now live! MCE components is a site which targets Windows Media Center self-builders with help to choose components and to see how the components work together. To help build the database you can add your own system and grade it to help others out. There are currently about 100 systems entered into the database and it will keep growing, as long as you help out. When you are adding your system you will rate it, on a scale 1 to 5, in stability, noise and performance. You can also enter your Windows Experience Index stats, if you are using Vista.

Microsoft has released a CTP for Microsoft SDK for Open XML Formats, which can be downloaded here. The SDK contains a strongly typed library, built on top of System.IO.Packaging namespace, for creating documents based on the Open XML Format. Great, now we don’t have to use the System.Xml.XmlWriter to create Office 2007 documents. Here is a sample on how to write out the number of characters in a Word 2007 document: XmlDocument extendedProperties = new XmlDocument(); using (WordprocessingDocument wordDocument = WordprocessingDocument.Open("document.docx", false)) { ExtendedFilePropertiesPart part = wordDocument.ExtendedFilePropertiesPart; extendedProperties.Load(part.GetStream()); } XmlNodeList characters = extendedProperties.GetElementsByTagName("Characters"); Console.WriteLine(characters.Item(0).InnerText); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; overflow-x:visible;border:0px} .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

You probably already have read all about the new beta of Windows Live Writer. I thought I should write some lines about some of the new really nice features. Linking WLW contains an improved linking interface. You can easily link to your previous posts or to a link in the Link Glossary, using the Link to button_,_ which allows you to write down (remember) a number of links that you often use in your blog posts. When you create a new link you can check the Add to link glossary checkbox and the link will be added to your glossary. The glossary is also accessible from the Tools->Options dialog.

NVIDIA has relaunched it’s driver section and now includes a tool that you can use to scan your machine for the correct NVIDIA graphics driver. To find the correct driver head over to the NVIDIA Driver Downloads section, and either choose to automatically find your driver or make a manual search. The manual search works fine and I find the correct driver directly for my GeForce 6600:

I start every morning on the commuter train checking out the Technology news on Tailrank, using my HTC TyTN (at http://tech.mobile.tailrank.com/) , to see what has happened in the world of technology during the night. Most of the cool stuff happens when it is night in Sweden… But now the technology news has been down for days, it has happened in the past that it has been down for a day or so, but now I have not been able to read the news on Tailrank since monday. No news? Don’t think so!

The MSDN site is currently changing how it looks and works, go check it out. Apart from the actual change of colors and layout the new tabbed interface is the biggest user interface change. Navigation is far much better with this and with the breadcrumbs. The search is the most improved feature, now with auto-complete and more indexed content. The MSDN library tree seems to be much faster, really nice for users (like me) who uses the online help instead of the full DVD install of MSDN library (I always forget to update it when a new DVD arrives). But it is still reloading the whole page and tree for every click in the content on the right!

To this site: www.wictorwilen.se! This site and blog has been up an running for a year now and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I’m really looking forward to the next one! The number of subscribers is constantly climbing and the highlight for me has been the msfeedicon application and the Dissecting XPS series. You, the readers and web searchers, have these top five articles: Add Office 2007 icons to SharePoint 2003 Windows Live Writer 1.0 beta and Metaweblog API McAfee Security Center installation sucks Watch DVDs in VIDEO_TS folders on Vista Media Center Home page of msfeedicon Thanks to Dotnetpark who is hosting this and who have a great support! Only wish the offer .NET 3.0 hosting soon!

Delay has done it - a Silverlight “proof-of-concept” XPS viewer! Head over to his post and try it out, this might be the start of the cross-platform XPS viewer that we all long for…

Chris Lanier, Media Center MVP, just blogged about a new website which collects information on the components of Media Center PC’s, called Media Center Components. The aim of the website is to collect information on which Media Center components that play nice together. Take your time to fill out the form and help building a nice database for Media Center PC’s.

This part of the Dissecting XPS series will focus on some XML Paper Specification tools that are available as of today. The success of XPS, vs PDF and others, are really depending on the number of supported devices, operating systems and tools. Right now the XPS support is limitied in applications outside the Microsoft Windows sphere, but there are plans for other operating systems. (Maybe Silverlight will boost this with the CoreCLR).

DataViz have released a new version of DocumentsToGo for Windows Mobile with support for viewing Office 2007 files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx etc). This is great, I have not used DocumentsToGo since my Sony-Ericsson p910i days but instead relied on the Office Mobile suite embedded in Windows Moblie 5. The current version only supports viewing of Office 2007 documents as of today, but if you purchase the application you will get free upgrades and the coming versions will support creation and editing of Office 2007 documents.

This part of the Dissecting XPS series will introduce the XPS parts of the Microsoft.NET 3.0 framework and where you should look to get started creating XML Paper Specification documents. Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF The XPS classes is a part of the Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF, and is found under the System.Windows.Xps namespace. The Open Packaging Convention classes, used to manipulate the packages is found under the System.IO.Packaging namespace. To get you started with creating XPS documents with the .NET 3.0 Framework you should read the January 2006 article in the MSDN Magazine by Bob Watson which explains it all. It contains everything you need to know from reading to writing to signing XPS documents.

msfeedicon version 2.4 is now available for download. This version does not contain any new functionality only some corrected bugs from version 2.3. Windows XP users are highly recommended to install this new version. Read more and download it at msfeedicon home page.

SoloSEO Review: SoloSEO, is an easy web application containing a set of tools to manage your search engine optimization, SEO. I decided to give it a try to measure how my site is seen by the search engines and how well it performed. When starting with SoloSEO you will get a dashboard containing a checklist with tasks which you should complete to gain full benefit of the service. The tasks helps you getting started with the tools and let’s you get aquainted with the application. The dashboard also contains a summary of your completed tasks, links to the different tools as well as statistics for your site.

I initially had some trouble installing Microsoft Silverlight on Windows Vista. It all installed perfectly without any warnings (not during setup nor in the Windows logs), but I could not get the Silverlight 1.0 beta applications to run. I guess that it had something to do with having installed WPF/E betas installed. To get it to work this is what I did… 1: Start a command prompt using elvated privilegies Click the Start button, enter “command”, right click Command Prompt and select Run as administrator and the click Continue in the User Account Control dialog.

Silverlight (formerly known as WPF/E) is heavily discussed right now, and I really like what I see.. I’m not going to dig in deep here instead I recommend you to read Scott Hanselman’s post on the .NET Ecosystem which I find great. He has put it all into context and thats when I get really excited…

Joost has delivered unlimited invites to all the beta testers and I thought I share a few of them. Since I can’t invite people all day long then the first ten to comment on this post will recieve an invitation. Please supply first- and last name and an e-mail address.

Microsoft Expression Design, version 1.0 is now available for a 60 days trial download, was one product I had big hopes for during the CTP cycle, but now it’s just a simple vector editor. Ok, I’ve said this before and this is not what this post is about… If you now use Design to create images and drawings you have the excellent option of saving or exporting your file in numerous formats other than the Expression Design format; such as GIF, JPEG, PNG, Photoshop format etc. You can even export it to a PDF file, which is great for example when you have a sketch you would like to send to your business partner or friend.

The msfeedicon 2.3 application is now available for downloading. msfeedicon is a free plugin for the Windows RSS platform and Internet Explorer 7 which displays notifications whenever one of the subscribed feeds contains updates. Read more about it here. New in this release is: New icons to enhance usability - due to popular demandNow orange icons is shown when there are unread posts and grey if there are no unread posts. New feature, for Windows Vista only, that disables the notifications when presentation mode is on. For example when a PowerPoint slide is running or when your screen saver is on. Notificatons will be queued up and shown when presentation mode is turned off New feature to clear all queued notifications Numerous fixes Download it here.

One of the features of XML Paper Specification, XPS, is the light-weight reader approach and the portable format which Adobe have had the major market share for, and still has, with the PDF format. We all like the approach with having some kind of document format that can be sent to anyone without worrying that they don’t have a reader for the document. I like that there now are competition on this market, even though I really think that Microsoft with XPS have a long road ahead until they reach an acceptable level of XPS users, even with an XPS reader built in to Windows Vista.

I have been running Windows Vista for a few months now and I discover new bugs (and features) every other day. Vista does not seem so stable as it should be. It’s no big blue screens or major application crashes but small annoying stuff like not persisting settings and stuff like that. I earlier wrote about changing the start menu power button, this changed setting reverts to it’s original state about every third boot and then goes back to my changed state on the next boot! I have also written about that icons disappear from the notification area once in a while.

Today I recieved an e-mail from the Swedish Standards Institute, SIS, containing the proposal for the Office Open XML as an ISO standard (ISO/IEC DIS 29500). Office Open XML is today an ECMA standard, TC-45, and ECMA has submitted the standard to the ISO fast-track process Office Open XML. The fast-track means that it can be an international standard by this August, read more on the fast-track process in this post by Brian Jones. I’m definitely going to second to the proposal.

If you have an Ahanix computer case (in my case an MCE 302-SA) with a Samsung VFD and have upgraded your HTPC system to Windows Vista you may have found out that the VFD does not work nor does the drivers available from the Ahanix web site. But to your rescue there is FrontView for MCE by Media Center Magic. FrontView is an alternative to the default drivers for numerous LCD and VFD displays (CrystalFontz, Samsung, SilverStone etc) optimized for Media Center experience and with a highly customizable interface.

The sixth part of the Dissecting XPS series is here and this time we will, finally, look at some code for reading XML Paper Specification [1], XPS, files. I will in the following sample not use the Microsoft.NET 3.0 Framework, which has built-in functionality for reading and writing XPS files [2]. Instead I will do it using .NET 2.0 (you can try it in .NET 1.1 if you like) and an excellent ZIP library called #ziplib [3]. This will show you more of what’s really happening and it will show you how to integrate XPS into applications built using other .NET Frameworks than 3.0 or in Mono or in what ever you like. For instance, you can use Java and the Java Zip packages.

Yesterday NVIDIA released a new set of beta drivers for Microsoft Windows Vista, v 158.18. The drivers supports the GeForce 6, 7 and 8 series (not the mobile ones). Apart from a number of bug fixes and improvements (to the NVIDIA Control Panel, improved WMV playback quality and 3D performance) the new interesting feature is the PureVideo HD support. But there are numerous things for NVIDIA to fix, jus read the Release Notes.

Microsoft has released version 1.0 of the XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack. The pack is available for Windows Vista or Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server (both 32 bit and 64 bit versions is available). XPS Essentials Pack contains An XPS viewer called XPS Viewer EP - for reading XPS files An XPS Document writer - for printing to an XPS file Filters for previewing (IPreview) and searching (IFilter) XPS files Windows Shell handlers, for Windows Explorer integration and thumbnails Note: On Windows Vista Internet Explorer will still be the default viewer for XPS files. Just right click any XPS file and choose Open With and then Choose Default Program. In the dialog choose the XPS viewer you want to use as default.

Finally the winter is over here in Sweden, the spring is here! I’m currently sitting in the car and the sun is shining outside and the temperature is close to 20 degrees celsius outside. I really like travelling in the car when the sun shines, and it’s even more fun when you are online on the highway - using bluetooth and my HTC TyTN with 3G connection.

The Start menu has dramatically changed in Windows Vista and one of the changes are how you choose to shut down, log of or put your computer to sleep. By default the two buttons in the start menu can be used to put your computer to sleep and to log you off. If you really want to turn your computer off you can press the right-arrow button and get a menu where you can shut down, restart etc. Windows XP also has two buttons but instead of having a sleep button it has a shut down button.

This is the fith part of the Dissecting XPS series and will focus on the Xml Paper Specification, XPS, document properties. Core Properties The properties used in an XPS document are stored in the Core Properties Part, specified in the Open Packaging Conventions, OPC [1]. The Part is located by reading the [Content_Types].xml file and finding the content type application/vnd.openxmlformats-package.core-properties+xml. A document should have one Core Properties part, so there is no requirement to have one but having serveral indicates an invalid package. But there should be no reason to leave out the part. There are also no requirements on which elements that should be present in the part.

This part in the Dissecting XPS series will take off were we ended part 3, by looking into how the actual content is marked up. The content is contained in the FixedPage element and it is marked up by three different elements the Path element which specified a geometry filled with a brush the Glyphs element which represents text the Canvas element which groups elements together The Path element The Path element is used to specify a geometry shape and optionally fill it using a brush. This XPS markup code creates the triangle shown on the right.

Microsoft has decided to make the Expression Blend and Expression Web products available for all MSDN Premium subscribers. This is great news for all developers, and a great enhancement to the MSDN subscription. The Expression Design application will not be included in the MSDN subscription and neither will Expression Media. I surely can understand why Media is not in but I think that Design should be included. Blend will help developers making nice WPF applications and Web will help out when making nice websites, but there is great need for nice graphics on a website and therefore I think Design should be included in the MSDN subscription.

This is the third part in the Dissecting XPS Series and this episode will focus on the Fixed Document parts of an XPS document. The previous part described how an XPS document is packed into a package and how we could find the actual document within it. FixedDocument and PageContent The FixedDocument element [1] is the part of the XPS document which contains the actual pages, which are represented as PageContent elements. The PageContent elements appears in the exact same order in which they should appear in the document and contains a reference to the FixedPage Part and optionally size (width and height) of the page.

This is the second part of the Dissecting XPS series, last post generally described the XML Paper Specification. This post in the series will describe the XPS file format internals. This will give you an overview of how the XPS files are built from ground and up, instead of reading the XPS Specification which covers 453 pages. The XPS file The XPS file, with the .xps extension, is a ZIP file - called the physical Package, and consists of a number of XML and binary files - called Parts. There are also files describing how the files are organized and connected together - called Relationships. 

I will in a number of posts try to explain the XML Paper Specification document format, XPS format, that has been developed by Microsoft. I think the XPS initiative is nice from a developer and ISV perspective, since creating and reading XPS documents is easy and supported from various environments. This series of XPS articles will start off with an introduction to the XML Paper Specification and then continue with general support and competitors and then of course some nice introduction on how to use XPS in applications.

Numerous times my Windows Vista has been missing icons in the Notification Area (when did Microsoft stop calling it System Tray?). The icons that has been missing is normally Network, Volume and Power. In Windows Vista you can easily enable these three notification icons, as well as the Clock, in the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog, accessible by right-clicking the Start icon and selecting properties. But the problem is that I can’t enable these icons when they disappear after starting Vista - they are disabled.

Just a few days ago Microsoft Epression Blend RC was released and now Expression Design beta 2 is available for download. The first beta of Design was a real disappointment for me, since all pixel editing and all Live Effects was removed. Beta 2 is still only vector editing but the Live Effects are there. The focus seems to be the Design/Blend/XAML/WPF integration to start with, which is fine but the technical previews of Design (then called Interactive Designer) really had it wen you could combine vector and pixel layers.

The really nice visual web search engine Quintura has been updated with a better and improved interface. Quintura allows you to enter a search word and then using a visual user interface in which you can navigate a cloud of related search terms and the include or exclude them from your search to refine you result. Quintura allows you to get an overview of which search terms are releated to your search term and it’s fun to use and browse into new areas.

Windows Update now contains the Windows DreamScene Content Pack for Windows Vista Ultimate users. Windows DreamScene is still only released as a preview version, but the big interest for the Vista Ultimate extension made the Ultimate Extras Team to release the content pack ahead of schedule.

DELL, one of the largest PC computer-hardware companies , has really understood how important it is to communicate and interact with customers. First of all I am a very satisfied DELL user, except for some problems with my Inspiron 9100, and I think that the DELL support has been great. But having good stuff to sell an providing satisfactory support is not everything. To be able to stay on top you have to evolve and get with the trends and listen to your customers/community.

About a week ago the released Windows Vista Ultimate Extras was updated and re-released on Windows Update with no information on the updates. The reason for the updates of BitLocker tools and Texas Hold’em game was bug fixes, localization issues and parental control issues. The information is now available in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, in these articles Windows Vista Secure Online Key Backup release information (932926) The Hold ‘Em game for Windows Vista Ultimate is available from Windows Update (932925)

Visual Studio 2005 has now been updated with full support for Windows Vista. It’s an update to Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 and fixes a number of issues when running VS 2005 on Vista. If you have the beta of the update (KB929470) then uninstall it before installing the final update.

I have recieved a few invitations to the Joost beta program. Contact me with your e-mail, first and last name if you are interested.

NVIDIA is continuing thier path to a great driver for Windows Vista. A week ago they released ForceWare 100.65 which is a WHQL certified driver, it does not contain anything revolutionary but is stable (that’s pretty good enough right now). Yesterday NVIDIA took another step forward with a beta of ForceWare 101.41 which is the driver we all have been waiting for since the launch of Vista, four months ago! Performance is better, flat panel scaling is fixed, reduced flickering when using Aero and lots of more stuff. In a few weeks we should expect a non-beta.

The SDK for Visual Studio 2005 has been released in it’s fourth version, download it here (124 Mb). The Visual Studio 2005 SDK 4.0 contains a number of new features and fixes, read more about them here. One of the interesting new features are the Package Load Analyzer which will help you troubleshoot your package load issues. The DSL tools contains a number of minor bugfixes mostly related to the designer.

Previewing files and attachments in Microsoft Outlook 2007 is one of the new killer features that makes my, and hopefully yours, life easier. When installing Outlook 2007 you will get preview functionality for the standard Microsoft applications and images. Previewing files is also integrated into the Windows Vista Explorer. Tim Heuer (mr double-snake error) has together with Foxit software created a PDF previewer. The PDF Preview Handler is easy to set up and is incredible fast in rendering PDF documents for preview.

Today Windows Update with Windows Ultimate Extras contained new or updated versions of the Hold Em Poker Game and BitLocker and EFS Enhancements. If you check the versions of the files you can see that it’s some kind of update: Hold Em Poker Game New version: 6.0.6000.17034 Previous version: 6.0.6000.17015 But the BitLocker secure key backup utility have the same version, 6.0.6000.16442, but have a different size on the file 1.11 Mb (updated) vs 1.10 Mb (previous).

The last few days I’ve had trouble with the Windows RSS platform and Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista Ultimate. The feeds are updating fine but the notification has been troublesome, for example the feed folders never updated the number of unread items in the folder even though there were unread items in feeds in the folder, look at the image below.

Aaron Brethorst has published part two of his UAC and manifests series, this time he shows us how to embed the manifest into a managed application using Visual Studio 2005.

Here is a list of cheat sheets for the Windows and .NET platform that I frequently use and I think are of great interest. Visual Studio 2005 Keyboard Shortcut References Visual C# 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color Visual C++ 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color Visual Basic 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color SharePoint and Office stuff CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services v3) CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2003 New Office 2007 User Interface - Word | PDF Web and ASP.NET stuff Microsoft AJAX ClientScript Cheat Sheet - ZIP JavaScript Cheat Sheet - PNG | PDF Other stuff

Aaron Brethorst has written a nice tutorial on how to create an UAC aware manifest for you Windows Vista applications by creating a .manifest file. He will follow up this article with information on how to embedd the manifest into a managed executable file.

I previously wrote about that Microsoft is using PDF documents as downloads for product information on microsoft.com, instead of their own XPS format. Yesterday I was happy to see that the Virtual PC site contained a Technical Overview document available for download in XPS format, of course with references to the XPS viewer download and a “What is XPS?” link, and there are no PDF download available. I decided to check back on the some other pages on microsoft.com and found out that there are now not only PDF downloads but also XPS downloads on some. For example the Desktop Optimization Pack page, which previously only had a PDF data sheet download now also have an alternative XPS download.

I have for a while thought about why are there no standard in Microsoft applications on how a MDI interface should look like, why do the document tabs look different in (almost) all applications. Examples Below are some examples taken from recent Microsoft applications. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Nice and clean layout, the cross to the right closes the current open document. The down-arrow displays a drop-down of all open documents.

Finally Virtual PC 2007 is released and available for download. Don’t forget to reinstall the Virtual Machine Additions if you are upgrading from earlier versions or betas. Technical overview can be found here as an XPS document.

The Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA), as I earlier removed from this site, has been updated with some new functionality to make it better for site owners who don’t want their homepages cluttered with previews or users that do not want to see the previews. As a site owner you can now put up an option for your users to turn on or off the SPA: And there is also an option to have the preview to trigger on an icon instead of the whole link:

When you have an SQL Server which has been installed on a different port than the standard 1433 you might have trouble connecting to it if you don’t specify the port in your connection string or connection settings. This is how the syntax is, which was new to me until today. The server name (or IP) is separated using a comma sign instead of the standard colon, which are standard in URL’s and others.

Robert Scoble is writing about that the analog TV will be turned off (Turn off analog TV? It’ll never happen) in two years and that he thinks this is not going to happen. This is exactly what’s happening in Sweden right now, by the next few months the last analog terrestrial broadcast is turned off. I think this is great except for that almost every TV has analog recievers and you therefore have to buy another box, with a new remote etc etc. Thank god I’m using a Media Center computer :-), anyone have any suggestions for a good HD Ready dual digital-TV tuner card compatible with Windows Vista?

 NVIDIA has released a new beta of the ForceWare Graphics Drivers Release 100 (100.64) for Windows Vista (32 bit and 64 bit), which is one step forward in their new official plans for a functional Windows Vista driver. According to the Release Notes there are still a lot of missing features, a lot of known issues and only a few small fixes, since the 97.46 WHQL driver. If you experience any kind of problems please go to the newly established Vista Quality Assurance program by NVIDIA and report any problems with the NVIDIA drivers. Please submit any kind of NVIDIA related problems you have on Windows Vista so we can get working drivers for Windows Vista.

Windows DreamScene is now available from Windows Update. It’s a technical preview of the Ultimate Extra application and at a first glance it looks nice. To enable the animated background Personalize your Desktop Background and in the Location drop-down choose Windows DreamScene Content or any other folder that contains your animated backgrounds, see image below. The Location drop-down even contains, by default, your Videos folders so you can test one of the Sample Videos provided with Windows Vista.

NVIDIA has been struggling with the drivers for Windows Vista and this has not gone unnoticable and they are even facing a possible class action. NVIDIA has now publicly released their plans for the ForceWare drivers for Vista. In short here is what we can expect: February - new WHQL certified drivers, probably not anything fancy or new about this one, big thing is that they will probably work fine March - new drivers with new features. TV output and HDTV support including overscan - finally!!! April - new drivers that targets DirectX 10 SLI support and support for H.264 decoding. May - new drivers again, what will be in them is not announced Let’s hope they can keep this time schedule - they are already late…

Windows Vista contains a performance booster functionality called ReadyBoost which really can improve the performance of your Windows Vista system. In fact, ReadyBoost, is one of the top five Windows Vista features according to Ed Bott. In short ReadyBoost caches programs on a flash drive to speed up your Vista, reports are that a program that previously started in 10 seconds will now start in 2-4 seconds. Almost all articles I have read on this subject says that you should use an USB-stick as your ReadyBoost flash drive, but it will work with any kind of flash drive, like an SD-card.

Microsoft Windows Vista contains new common dialogs, such as the Save As and Open dialogs, which have a new sidebar navigation to the left. The navigation can show the folder tree or your Favorite Links. Windows XP had a similar concept, but not as customizable as in Windows Vista. If you are like me and like to have your files organized and have easy access to them you can customize the Favorite Links really easy. All the links in the Favorite Links sidebar is plain old shortcuts (.lnk files) which are located in the Links folder of the Users directory, to be precise: %USERPROFILE%\Links\, for example c:\Users\wictor\Links\.

Virtual PC and Virtual Server uses Virtual Hard Disk which may be dynamically sized, that is they don’t occupy the whole size of the disk on the host system. But they may take up much more than the guest operating system reports. I will show you how to reduce the size of you dynamically expanding virtual disk, using the tools provided with Virtual PC 2007 beta 2 (it’s the same on VPC 2004).

NVIDIA has released ForceWare Release 100 as a beta for Windows Vista, mainly to support the 8800 graphics cards but it works with all the 6/7/8 series. The Release 100 contains an updated NVIDIA Control Panel which contains new functions for scaling the display so finally I can use 100% of my plasma screen. So far it has been working fine, except for when you once have made your settings do not enter the Control Panel again cause it will the revert to default or faulty settings!

Microsoft just released the first RC of the Microsoft XML Paper Specification (XPS) Essentials Pack. Download it here.

Scott Watermasysk led med to this article by Nick Wilson on why you should not have Snap Preview Anywhere on your blog and I’m now joining the bloggers who remove the preview features. I agree with Nick on that the preview is pretty annoying and that it’s not problem free (more than often you have to click more than once on a link). Byt why did I put it up in the first place? This blog is not just a blog for me I use it as a testing platform for different kind of techniques, hypes etc - and to have fun. I will still try on new interesting stuff and I may also remove old uninteresting stuff.

The day is finally here and Windows Vista is available for the consumer market and the commercials are everywhere. In Sweden we hade the annual Grammis awards, the Swedish music industry price, this evening and it was broadcasted on TV. The awards was sponsored by Microsoft and of course it had the standard sponsored by stuff in every commercial break (I’m glad I watched it on Vista Media Center with 30 minutes delay so I could skip those :-). The Vista marketing team had also managed to sneak in some really cool Vista branding when the nominees for each category was presented.

As you probably already have read by now is that the XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 are now W3C Recommendations. XSLT 2.0 is a really nice step forward in the XML transformation technology, a technique that we base our software on to enable us to produce content for different devices, platforms and targets. XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0, in specific, could help us making these transformations much easier without having to use XSLT Extension Objects for some tasks. 

msfeedicon 2.2 is now available for download! msfeedicon is an Internet Explorer 7 add-on which displays an icon in the system tray with information on your feed subscriptions and notifies you with a notification window when a feed is updated. Version 2.2 contains some interesting new features such as the possibility to use Tags to find the posts that you are interested. It’s especially interesting if you subscribes on a lot of feeds. You can use the Tags so that updated feeds containing your Tags wil be Auto-starred or that notifications should only be displayd for the tagged feeds.

msfeedicon, the Internet Explorer 7 feeds utility, is now at version 2.1, a new release with interesting new features. It was just a few days ago that version 2.0 was released, but I have recieved interesting feedback and I had some good ideas on how to develop it further that I just had to implement. I already have plans for another two or three releases in the near future, contact me if you are interested, so you will most probably see more upgrades soon…

It seems like I was not the only one who thought that there should be some nice system tray application for the feeds in Internet Explorer 7. I created the msfeedicon application which shows unread feed posts and notifies the user of new and unread posts. The application have had a few hundred downloads so far and I have had positive feedback from users. Now the Microsoft RSS Team have released the (unsupported) Feeds Plus plugin to Internet Explorer 7 which basically do the same thing with some differences, read more about them on the RSS Team blog.

msfeedicon is now released at version 2.0 and is a major update to the previous versions. msfeedicon is a plugin to the Windows RSS platform and Internet Explorer 7 Feeds and appears as an icon in the Windows XP/Vista system tray and displays when you have unread posts in your subscribed feeds. Whenever there is new posts in a feed msfeedicon will show an alert window with direct access to unread posts. No more need to have the Feeds Favorites Center visible in Internet Explorer nor Internet Explorer open to see when your feeds are updated.

Finally ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, known as Atlas, is released in a fully supported version. The Download is available at http://ajax.asp.net. Here’s a summary from Scott’s blog: The ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, which is available for free with full Microsoft support, can be extended with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit - a set of more than 30 controls for ASP.NET. Microsoft also releases the client-side ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript library under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) which allows you to modify the library and the server-side code is released under Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL) so your debugging will be easier.

For all you Total Commander fans out there; Christian Ghisler has released a new public beta for Total Commander 7.0. Some of the highlights: When pressing F7 to create a directory and the cursor is placed on a file then Total Commander suggests the filename (minus the extension) as the name for the directory Icons in the menus Even more customization options than before

Thinking about the environment is a high-priority nowadays and I stumbled across an interesting article on how we could save money and possible preserve the environment - Black Google Would Save 3,000 Megawatts a Year. The point in this article is that a CRT monitor uses up to 15 watts less power with a black screen instead of white, and as you know power costs money and affects the environment, mostly, in a negative way.

We have been doing a lot of work, on our product, with dynamic updates of web pages - you know the AJAX stuff. Most of the server side results are returned as XML and are delivered from different Web Services. Since I really like optimizations and like good and nice looking code I have been going back and forth in decision of how to return data to the client; XML or JSON. JSON are in some cases more effective but when the object model it tries to represent gets more complex you neither get nice looking code nor saves that much bytes.

Here comes yet another update to the msfeedicon utility, version 1.4. The msfeedicon utility is a free notification icon for the Windows RSS platform, that comes with Internet Explorer 7. The utility will show whenever one of your feeds have been updated and gives you easy access to view the feed. All this so you do not have to waste space on your screen with the Internet Explorer 7 Feeds task pane or some Windows Vista Sidebar gadget.

LiveSide reports that MSN is trying to get back in the business, taking back whatever they have lost to Windows Live. The first battle looks like it’s going to happen on the mobile arena. In the first corner we have the mobile version of www.live.com - mobile.live.com. And in the other corner the mobile MSN version - beta.mobile.msn.com. At a first glance, for me, the winner is live.com since when logging in you have instant access to the feeds, mail, gadgets and other personalization you have done in the rich live.com. The mobile MSN of course contains the classic MSNBC news, FOX sports and other types of content. So if you are interested in that maybe MSN will be the winner. Content vs. customisation?

The Domain-Specific Languages for Visual Studio 2005 Redistributable Components are now available from Microsoft Downloads. You can now use the DSL designer in Visual Studio 2005 Standard (and above), sorry you can’t use these extensions in the Express versions, without having the complete Visual Studio 2005 SDK installed.

The XML Reference Guide is a great site containing everything you need to know on XML standards, from the Document Object Model to RSS to AJAX. Each topic contains in-depth descriptions and samples wich allows you to easily read up on a technology or just have it as a reference whenever you need to. Bookmark this and save for future use.

I have been trying to setup my HTC TyTN to get the synchronization to work over the air using 3G or Wifi so I’m really connected to work 24/7 :-) After setting up the Exchange 2003 servers using the excellent step-by-step guide on TechNet for this purpose I was ready to test it all. But I ran into trouble directly and the ActiveSync reported an error: 0x80072F0D - invalid certificate. No problem, just install it to the trusted certificate store on the Windows Mobile phone…I thought. But the problem is that it’s not that easy done. After some googling I ran into Ant Drewery’s entry Windows Mobile 5.0 & ActiveSync which discussed this problem. I used his method to install the certificate into the Windows Mobile phone and it worked fine, after some initial trouble. I made the mistake first and tried to install the certificate that you get from the padlock icon, which will not work. You have to get it from the Trusted Root Certificate Store or from your administrator (which should have a backup of the original certificate installed on the OWA IIS).

The IEBlog announced that the IE Developer Toolbar Beta 3 is available now. It contains some nice updates such as new interface with an icon in the command bar for easy access to the DOM Explorer and finally a great HTML source viewer. Time will also tell if the R-character hijack bug is still left, I have not noticed it yet… Note: You have to uninstall previous betas of the IE Developer Toolbar, otherwise you will have some nice crashes of Internet Explorer when trying to access the toolbar.

When trying to install the latest NVIDIA ForceWare (97.46) drivers for Windows Vista RTM I ran into some troubles. First of all I downloaded English version which should be installed on a english Windows Vista Ultimate. This did not work at all. The setup exited and said nothing has changed - do you want to reboot? Then Windows Vista popped up an error dialog stating that I needed to download a fix for Age of Empires - duh!

Finally, NVIDIA WHQL ForceWare Release 95, version 97.46, is available for Windows Vista RTM (build 6000). It’s available for download at the NVIDIA website (x86 and x64). I have not yet tested it but the Release Notes states that support for overscan/underscan is not implemented in this release - not good, this is what I was expecting from this release, there are multiple things in the control panel not yet implemented (as they were in Windows XP). There are some bugs fixed and I hope the flickering when switching from the Desktop to Media Center is gone.

Microsoft has launched a special site for Windows Vista Ultimate, windowsultimate.com. The site will contain the Ultimate Extras (not available until public launch in late january), recommended Vista Ultimate Links and hardware and some Team blogs. Announced extras so far are: DreamScene - animated background in Windows Vista Enhancements to BitLocker and EFS Texas Hold’em poker game

This new year starts great! Virtual PC 2007 is now available as a release candidate on Microsoft Connect. Usage of wireless network cards is now on by default and audio works in Vista.

Happy new year to all of you and thanks to all readers of my blog. The number of readers is increasing and I hope it will continue on the other side of the bell tolls tonight. See you in 2007!

I have now updated msfeedicon to version 1.3 after a few days of running and some feedback. The major issue corrected in this version is that the application looses connection to the Windows RSS platform after a few hours of running, this problem is in all previous versions. You can find the new version here.

Microsoft yesterday released the second beta of the Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack 1.0 (build 5715). The pack contains the following: XML Paper Specification (XPS) Viewer XPS metadata and thumbnail handlers for Windows Explorer XPS rich-preview provider XPS IFilter You need Windows XP SP2 or later and the Microsoft Core XML Services 6.0 to be installed on your system.

I had just finished msfeedicon 1.0 when I decided to make an update, version 1.1, with some functionality I would like to see and some bugfixes. This 1.1 update contains: New feature: Refresh feeds option in the context menu New feature: greenish icons when the RSS platform downloads/refreshes feeds Update: better icons Bug fix: correct number of unread posts when a feed is removed You can download the update here, hope you like it…

For a while I have been annoyed that there is no good notification in Internet Explorer 7 when you have unread posts in your subscribed feeds. You have to have the Favorites Center opened to be notified of any feed updates, which may take up useful space on your screen. Therefore I created a small utility that takes advantage of the Windows RSS platform and shows an icon in the system tray which notifies you of any unread feed posts - called msfeedicon.

A few months back I showed how you could add the new Office 2007 icons to a SharePoint 2003 or Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 site. The Right Stuff has made a complete post on how to add the complete set of icons for the different Office 2007 applications. The post also contains a few different sets of Office 2007 icons so you can choose the one that suits your site best.

Today I start my two weeks vacation and I thought I should summarize this year. The year of 2006 has been characterized, for me, as the year of Betas and Technology Previews. I have been trying to involve myself as much as possible in the all the goodies flowing out of Redmond. Microsoft has released numerous amount of new applications and upgrades. Internet Explorer 7 The new version of Internet Explorer is the application this year that will have most impact in the short run on users. More standardized and a slicker interface with support of for example blogs.

 Here is a small tip to all of you that have DVD movies on your hard drives, like me. I have copied most of our kids DVD’s to the hard drives so there is no need to change DVD every fifth minute and as all of you with kids know - they are not that gentle to the DVD discs nor the cradle of the player.

Rob Mensching blogs that the WiX version 2 is nearly done, just a few more bugs to slay. Two of the remaining bugs, about dropping/overwriting Sql databases, are important to me so when they are done I will be really happy! I have been using it for some time now and it is really easy making installers for Windows and Microsoft.NET based applications. I really look forward to the final release of version 2, and of course the upcoming version 3.

It has gone several weeks since the launch of Windows Vista and I am still waiting for a non-beta release of the NVIDIA ForceWare drivers! What are you guys doing? Are you waiting for the release to the general public in January? On the NVIDIA website only drivers for RC2, from october 17th, are available. These drivers do not contain the functionality to fine tune my plasma TV, nor does the standard drivers in Vista, like it can be done in Windows XP.

Microsoft has now released the first Service Pack for Visual Studio 2005 and the Team Foundation Server. The Service Pack comes in several versions, depending on which version of Visual Studio 2005 you have. Here are the downloads: Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite SP1, this updates Standard, Professional and the Team Editions Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server SP1 Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions SP1 What I look forward is that the Service Pack addresses theses issues:

I have created a free web application that converts an RSS feed into an XPS document at http://www.rss2xps.com/. You are free to use it and test it. The application is in beta and will continously improve over the time. I would appriciate any feedback or feeds that will not just work. Update: if the .com address does not work for, you can use http://www.rss2xps.se/ instead.

The Architecture Journal, an online magazine by Microsoft with focus on software architecture, have posted two articles on Domain-Specific Languages, DSL. Domain-Specific Modeling A five page article on what Domain-Specific Languages and Modeling is about and when to use it. Bare Naked Languages or What Not to Model An seven page article on how DSL fits into the software factories methodology.

I previously suggested a better method for getting attributes for an System.Xml.XmlNode in a response to an post by Marcus. Craig Nicholson highlighted in a comment that the code i provided can be even further optimized. private static string GetAttribute(XmlNode node, string name) { XmlElement elm = node as XmlElement; return (elm == null) ? string.Empty : elm.GetAttribute(name); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

The Panel is a site, by Microsoft, with projects focused on the Windows Vista Presentation Foundation and XAML. The site will feature applications and source code for these techniques to show how you can design and implement nice applications for Windows and Live Gadgets. Currently there are some Live Gadgets available as well as a nice 3D RSS Reader called UniveRSS. Feeds are displayed as rotating boxes in a “galaxy” in which you can move around. The feeds are retrieved from your Internet Explorer 7 feeds. Register and download it to try it out.

Expression Design was released yesterday as the December 2006 CTP . The major change was a brand new user interface and a lot of missing functionality from earlier previews. According to the Expression team at the Microsoft newsgroups it just seems that the missing functionality in Design is simply gone due to lack of time. Currently I have noticed that the Live Effects are not present in this CTP, but they are documented in the help files. Pixel layers seems to be completely gone and no reference in the help file - so I doubt they will be back :-(

Microsoft today announced huge changes to the Microsoft Expression suite. Expression Studio Expression Studio is a new member of the Expression suite and is a suite of tools for building web sites and Windows client programs and rich media content. The Expression Studio consits of the four core Expression products; Web, Blend, Design and Media. Expression Design Expression Design, formerly known as Graphics Designer, has come in yet another CTP. The big news here is a complete new user interface, at first glance it looks much better than the old one.

On Microsoft Connect I discovered that Microsoft Expression Graphics Designer and Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer has recieved new names. Interactive Designer has become Expression Blend and Graphics Designer Expression Design. Anybody know anything about this?

Since Internet Explorer 7 is on Windows Update and installed as a high-priority update a lot of users have Internet Explorer 7 installed or you are using the brand new Windows Vista, but how do you do when you are a web application developer and have to test it on Internet Explorer 6. Yes, Internet Explorer 6 will be with us for a long time. You have three options: Have a secondary machine stand by with Internet Explorer 6. An easy but expensive solution.

My favorite Windows Explorer replacement Total Commander is in beta for version 7.0. Total Commander is a great tool for managing files and folders and totally replaces the Windows Explorer for me since it is so much faster in managing files and folders in just one simple window. Version 7.0 contains mostly a nicer interface but includes some highlights such as: Show the drive names in the tabs Alternating background colors on files and folders Nicer overwrite dialog with thumbnail preview Run as administrator when privileges are insufficient I have been a huge fan of the application since I first discovered it years ago (when it was called Windows Commander). When DOS was the primary interface of the PC I used the ASCII based Norton Commander for DOS.

Yesterday I abandoned my streak of Sony-Ericsson mobile phones which started many years ago. In fact it started when I was studying and working for the summer at one of Ericssons mobile phone assembly lines with the GH-688. Since 1996 I have been using them, except for a short period when my employer forced me to use a Nokia. I was choosing between upgrading my Sony-Ericsson P910i to a Sony-Ericsson P990 or the HTC TyTN. After some consideration I went to the mobile phone store and made a deal with the salesman.

Bredbansbolaget, one of swedens largest broadband provider owned by Telenor, has a remarkable lousy password policy. The password has to be between 5 and 8 characters, and valid characters are a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and _ (underscore). With your username and password you can access your personal information, your e-mail, buy music, videos and lots of stuff and have it all on you internet bill. Having this bad password policy goes against all recommendations nowadays and I think they really should consider changing it. Of course I am aware of that they will have less consumer support of people forgetting their password and things like that, but as a customer - should I feel safe? Guess not!

W3C has announced Proposed Recommendations of XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0 and XML Query 1.0. It has been seven years since XSLT 1.0 was published and I think it is great that XSLT has been updated. Some features that I find interesting in XSLT 2.0 is: xsl:analyze-string This instruction let’s you match a string to a regular expression xsl:output This instruction now has xhtml as a valid output parameter xsl:perform-sort With this you can create sorted sequences

No big deal, but I thought this was funny… The monthly Microsoft partner toolkit arrived today and it included a Partner Demo Readiness Toolkit with Windows Vista RC1 and Office 2007 beta. Okey, RTM has not been available that long, but at least RC2 or some other intermediate build would have been more appropriate :-)

After years and months and weeks of waiting it was time to finally install Windows Vista RTM. I downloaded the ISO image from MSDN and burned it on a DVD, the download was fast but it took me hours of retries to get my hands on the license key, I guess the license servers was overloaded with requests. After making one of my hard drives ready I started the installation. This will take me an hour or so maximum I thought after reading all about the new and fast installation and of my experiences with installing the release candidates on Virtual PC’s. All went pretty fine, except that it felt soooo slow, until Vista started the installation. It took minutes between the different screens.

My previous post was about the search web site Snap and here is another nice and interesting way to search the net: Quintura - see & find. Quintura uses a nice concept in which you start with a search term and the get a cloud in which you can include or exclude matchings to refine your search, all is done visually so you can see how your cloud evolves when you’re refining your search.

Snap is really nice new search tool, that tries to enrich the search experience. A nice intuituve web interface with previews of the search results. Scott Watermasysk made me aware of the new Snap preview function - Snap Anywhere, that you now can see on this site when hovering a link. I really like all these new and upcoming services that makes your life and website easier…

Bink.nu has the story that Windows Vista RTM is now available for download on MSDN Subscriptions as well as on TechNet. Downloading right now with good speed (500 KB/sec) but the request for the product keys seems to have some problems, probably high demand right now.

According to CNET News Google, Yahoo and Microsoft teams up on using the Sitemap protocol. The Sitemap protocol is an XML standard for describing the site content and the update frequency to make it easier for search engines to crawl a site. This is great news for all site developers and owners to have their sites crawled correctly. The only problem so far is that you have to submit the Sitemap to each and every crawler that supports the Sitemap protocol.

Finally the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is available at Microsoft Downloads but still no SharePoint 2007 on MSDN.

When writing blog posts I once in a while link to classes and methods in the MSDN Library. So why not simplify this job a bit by writing yet another Windows Live Writer plugin - MSDN Locator plugin for Windows Live Writer. The plugin allows you to search for a class, namespace, method or property using the full name and then inserts a link tag with a description (title attribute).

This is a question that I have asked myself, collegaues and clients now for a while. Next week Vista will be available on MSDN Subscriptions and TechNet and I guess that everyone will be there to download it - me too! I have been running the different betas and release candidates for a while and have waited long for this RTM. I will not install it on my main work laptop, since I have to use Visual Studio.NET 2003 for a while more, and there are no support for Vista and VS.NET 2003. Vista will instead be installed on a Virtual PC so I can test it there. If I get the time I will do the opposite; XP on a Virtual PC with and Vista as host.

After downloading the latest bits of the Office 2007 RTM ISO’s it was time to install it. There are no changes in the installation as I can see at first sight from the latest beta, everything worked fine and smooth and was without much interaction, just the serial key and some optional customization and then about 10 minutes of waiting and I was up and running. Before installing make sure that you remove all betas and updates to them including any add-ins such as the Save as PDF or XPS , otherwise the setup will exit.

Office 2007 is now available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads and on TechNet, after a weekend of updates on the sites. Vista is not yet ready for download, but Maria Johansson says it will be available by Friday the 17th.

The MSDN Subscriber Downloads site will be unavailable this friday “…from 7:00PM to 9:00PM Pacific time on Friday, November 10, 2006,for planned maintenance and upgrades. Both downloads and product keys will be unavailable…” I guess that they are making an update to handle the heavy download request for all the RTM:ed products this week such as Office System 2007 and Vista.

A few months ago I saw a video from Microsoft Live Labs in which they presented something called Photosynth; an advanced image collection viewer that combined the images into a 3D view in which you could zoom in and out and walk around it. I really loved the application I saw as a demo. Today the team behind Photosynth announced a Technology Preview of the application as an ActiveX control which works really nice!

Aaron Brethorst, Program Manager for the Visual Studio - IDE team informed me about a new article on MSDN that explains the Visual Studio Support on Windows Vista. The FAQ contains good answers to the common questions on why there is no Visual Studio.NET 2003 support and how to run Visual Studio 2005 with elevated privileges. There are several questions and workarounds worth reading. I’m still considering wating for the non-beta version of the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 before migrating to Windows Vista.

“It’s time!”, says it all from Jim Allchin. The long wait is over for Windows Vista.

The Microsoft.NET Framework 3.0, or just .NET 3.0, has been released by Microsoft as well as the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET 3.0 and the .NET 3.0 SDK. The downloads are available for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista where applicable. The .NET 3.0 is .NET 2.0 extended with new technologies such as Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows CardSpace.

Microsoft offers a number of VHD downloads at Microsoft Download Center. You can find ready to go/test virtual hard disk images of: Windows Server 2003 R2 Exchange 2007 and Microsoft Live Communications Server 2007 ISA Server 2006 SQL Server 2005 Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Virtual PC demonstration The Dynamics CRM demo VHD contains a complete server with Windows Server 2003, Active Directory, SQL Server 2005, Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft CRM and Visual Studio 2005.

The new Office document format present in the new Microsoft Office 2007 suite is completely new and open and based on XML. This opens up a lot of possibilites for us developers; there is now an easy way to create your own Word or Excel documents from an application. The file format used is called Ecma Office Open Xml format. Previously it has been very difficult or expensive to provide the customers with nice Word or Excel output from an application. For example when delivering an Excel sheet from a website it has been done by creating a table in html and then sending it to the browser with the correct content type (application/vnd.ms-excel), the same thing for Word. But when it came to embedding images or attachments or creating advanced layouts (headers or footers) it has been troublesome. It can be done; for example I created a web application that had a Word document as output, nicely formatted using the mht format.

I have a lot of problem with comment spam on the blog as well as spamming on the trackbacks and the problem is spread widely over the blogging world. A lot of you turn off comments or have registration or other methods to get rid of the comment spamming. LinkSleeve (SLV - Spam Link Verification) is a link spam solution that checks a text for well-known URL’s in a text and tells if it contains any known spam addresses. This service is provided via an XML-RPC service without any licensing.

I have made some updates to this site, the most noticeable are the new addresses (URL’s) to the posts which now should be more descriptive than just an id-number. The permalinks in the feeds should be the same though. If you notice anything annoying or wrong, please leave a comment.

RSS 2 PDF is a nice web application that turns an RSS into a PDF file, which can be useful when you would like to store a feed. The result is a PDF document with bookmarks to all posts in the feed. Try it out for my feed here.

A few days ago Microsoft officially released a modified Royale theme in black. The Royale theme is the one used in Windows XP Media Center. Now there is an updated variant of that theme called Zune desktop theme, download it here. This theme looks really great and matches the black and silver themes in the new Office 2007 and the default theme for Windows Media Player 11.

When developing applications and/or integrations for Visual Studio 2005 with the Visual Studio 2005 SDK, for example using the DSL Tools, the testing and debugging is done using a Visual Studio Instance that are running with a special registry hive, instead of the normal so you don’t mess up your normal Visual Studio operations. After a while, when you have created a lot of testing applications the Visual Studio interface is bloated with messed up toolbars, menus and templates you will need clear this experimental hive. Fortunatley the VS SDK comes with a utility called VsRegEx.exe which will reset the hive to the original state or to the Last Known Good state.

It’s snow in Sweden to everyones surprise! Yesterday Stockholm in Sweden received a few centimeters of snow and the quicksilver reached a few knots below zero degrees Celsius and the whole town went crazy. Cars in the ditches, cars in the wrong lane, busses burning rubber on the ice, frozen train switches…you name it! The thing that amazes me is that it comes as a surprise every year, we have been having snow and winter here in Sweden for the last 10.000 years!

The comments on this blog should now be working. I had some glitch in my spam detection, which should now be fixed.

Marcus writes in his blog how he often ends up with a method that reads an attribute from an XmlNode object. He has optimized his method so that the exception handling will be minimal, since that is pretty expensive. This is a pretty common scenario for me and I have an even better solution, that does’nt involve exception handling at all. private static string GetAttribute(XmlNode node, string name) { XmlElement elm = node as XmlElement; if (elm == null) { return ""; } return elm.GetAttribute(name); } This method uses the C# as operator which cast the XmlNode to an XmlElement, if it fails it will return null instead of invoking exception handling.

The first CTP of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK 4.0 is released to Visual Studio Industry Partners. The release contains Sandcastle, updated setup and improved Vista/UAC support. Note: the download is only available to the VSIP members.

To view XPS files, if you do not have Windows Vista or Microsoft.NET Framework 3.0, you can download the Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack Version 1.0. The download contains an XPS Reader, very much like the Adobe PDF reader and an XPS Document writer, which allow you to print to XPS files. There are other goodies in this pack such as: an XPS IFilter that will help you index XPS files, with Windows Desktop Search for example Windows shell handlers for thumbnail views in Windows Explorer The pack requires Windows 2000, 2003 or XP with the latest service packs and Microsoft Core XML Services 6.0. It’s still a beta, but worth a shot.

Yesterday I wrote a quick post on Google Co-op and Windows Live Search Macros and i thought that I should provide you with two great samples. Lawrence Liu has set up a custom search on Windows Live Search called SharePoint Community Search. The search focuses on SharePoint related sites and blogs. Gavin Joyce, the man behind DotNetKicks.com, has created a .NET Search Engine using Google Co-op. Gavin invites everyone to contribute with .NET releated sites that should be in the search scope.

Microsoft has released Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW and it’s available for download here (XP x86, other versions are available at Microsoft Download Center). I have been using the beta 2 extensively since the release, and the betas before that. It’s a great desktop search application and integrates incredibly nice with the upcoming Office 2007. Finding e-mails in Outlook 2007, documents on your harddrive or captured images in OneNote 2007 is really easy and fast. Give it a try!

Both Google and Microsoft have released custom searches which allows you to create your own specialized searches. Microsoft call it Windows Live Search Macros and Google Google Co-Op. They are basically the same and allows you to create search engines that are specialized for a certain interests, sites or set of keywords. Microsoft Search Macros is the easiest one to start with and with a few simple clicks and forms you are done. Before saving a macro you have to have a valid Windows Live account and then create a Creator ID, which will identify your search macros. For example I have registered wictorwilen as a creator id and my macros will appear under http://search.live.com/macros/wictorwilen/. You have the ability to share your searches or keep them for yourself.

Demonstrating applications for customers is a haunted task. When doing a demo for a customer at least one thing will fail or result in an unexpected result; a brand new error, a debug dialog box with unwanted text, test content that should not be read by the ones you are demoing for etc. If it’s not the application then you have some other things messing up; no connection between the laptop or projector or no connection to the network.

The Windows Vista blog announces the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, a desktop solution that will help Windows desktop users tune their applications and operating systems. It will include applications and features that will enhance: desktop deployment application comaptibility diagnostics and repair This pack is a result of Microsoft aquiring a handful of nice companies, such as the great Winternals. You can read all about it at the Desktop Optimization Pack site. When I first read through that page something caught my attention:

From now on my feeds are published through FeedBurner to get better statistics, yeah I’m a fan of stats. I’ve been using Google Anlytics for this site and others for some long time now and are very satisfied with it - but the lack of tracking feeds or any other type non-script-enabled stuff annoys me. From what I can understand Urchin (the company Google turned into Google Analytics) had that possibility before when making e-mail campaings, but I can’t get it to work. If you have any idea how to I’d be glad.

Last week I recieved my brand new laptop, an Dell XPS M1210. The time had come to throw my Dell Inspiron 9100 through the window! The 9100 has been a great laptop through the last two and a half years but my machine was a monday sample. I was on my third power adapter, one blew up with the smell of gun powder and the second stopped working. I had to switch battery once, when the old one could last for nine minutes. The last 7-8 months I got a BSOD each time I booted it and several times in a row if the laptop was cold, due to some error in the graphics card. I have reinstalled it numerous times and switched hard drive once, since the earlier one started trashing my files. I have not been able to listen to music for a year, since the speaker output only gives my the left channel (oh, I replaced that part once) and when I was using it as a laptop I got burn marks on my thighs. On the positive side I have walked around with a nuclear powerplant - both in power and in weight!

The Task Manager in Windows Vista (RC2) has improved somewhat since Windows XP. There are some really nice new features that makes the Task Manager more useful. First of all the Processes tab has been split into two: Processes and Services. This will makes it more easier to find the processes in the lists and the lists has also been improved with descriptions of the processes. On the Services tab you will also find a shortcut to the Services Management Console.

Simple List Extensions (SLE) is a set of extensions to RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds created by Microsoft to make it easier to exposing ordered lists through the feeds. Simple List Extension contains a set of tags that tells the feed readers how to sort or filter the items in the feed. It also contains a tag that instructs the reader to interpret the feed as a list. If the feed is marked as a list the reader should treat the feed as the complete ordered list which means that readers must remove any cached items not present in the feed.

Yesterday I sat at home using my XP Media Center and decided to check out the Windows Live Gallery if ther were any new interesting Writer Plugins. I fired up Internet Explorer and browsed to the gallery via the link from one of my earlier posts to my Acronyms Plugin. I ended up in an error page that said that the request could not be handled, pleas try again in five minutes. The page was in swedish and provided a link to the Gallery start page, which also was in swedish and there were no links to the Writer Plugins. To bad for people in sweden! But, it all worked fine on my laptop a few hours ago and my first guess, which was right, was that Internet Explorer was defaulting to the Swedish language (found under Internet Options - Languages), and my laptop used English (United States).

Here is a quick instruction on how to install the Microsoft Excel 2007 and Microsoft Word 2007 default icons to your SharePoint 2003 site. First of all you need these two icons, right-click them and choose Save Picture As. Copy the two .gif files into the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\ folder. Then open the file C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\XML\docicon.xml with your favorite XML editor and add these two lines under the ByExtension element:

Windows Live Writer has been upgraded and I wrote a post on the Metaweblog standard conformance of WLW in a previously. The metaWeblog.getCategories I suggested to use to get it to work with Windows Live Writer will now fail since Writer expects that a description is passed in the response. That is your response has to look like this, watch the lines 18-21 and 32-35. 1 <?xml version="1.0"?> 2 <methodResponse> 3 <params> 4 <param> 5 <value> 6 <array> 7 <data> 8 <value> 9 <struct>10 <member>11 <name>categoryid<name>12 <value>1</value>13 <member>14 <member>15 <name>title< span="">name>16 <value>Category 1< span="">value>17 <member>18 <member>19 <name>description< span="">name>20 <value>Description 1< span="">value>21 <member>22 </struct>23 <struct>24 <member>25 <name>categoryid< span="">name>26 <value>2</value>27 <member>28 <member>29 <name>title< span="">name>30 <value>Category 2< span="">value>31 <member>32 <member>33 <name>description< span="">name>34 <value>Description 2</value>35 </member>36 </struct>37 </value>38 </data>39 </array>40 </value>41 </param>42 </params>43 </methodResponse>

I’ve released a small update, version 1.2, to the Acronyms Plugin for the Windows Live Writer in which some minor bugs have been smashed and the possibility to enter your own acronyms has been fixed. Download it form the Windows Live Gallery or directly from this site.

Windows Vista will be released later this year to partners and volume license customers and in the beginning of 2007 to the masses. A successful release of a software product such as Windows Vista requires that a lot of consultants use it and can recommend it to the companies. The last few days it has come out in the open that Windows Vista will not support Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 until the first service pack is released, during the first half of 2007, and even then it will be compatibility issues. Visual Studio.NET 2002 and 2003 will definitley not be supported on the Windows Vista platform!

Today the Windows Live Gallery was updated with a plugin gallery for Windows Live Writer and my plugin for Windows Live Writer is updated with a new and improved interface and functionality. The Windows Live Writer team has gone through the plugin and given me good feedback, which now are implemented. Implementation as a simple content source Possible to write your own custom description of an acronym Improved user interface If you want to download it do it here or from the Windows Live Gallery.

I ran into some problems, that I thought I would share - with the reason, on one of our Virtual Server 2005 R2 machines, running Windows 2003 R2. We had problems copying files to the machine and recieved Delay Write Failed application popups, and it recorded the following event in the Event Log. Event Type: ErrorEvent Source: DiskEvent Category: NoneEvent ID: 11Date: 9/26/2006Time: 1:30:05 PMUser: N/AComputer: SERVERDescription:The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1.

The Windows Vista team has listened to the community (read my previous post on this) and included the option to mute the startup sound of Windows Vista. And also there are a new build (post RC1) out for Windows Vista available for download for a limited time, but beware the build is not that thorouglhy tested as the RC1.

I have been running Microsoft Outlook 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh now for a while and it’s a great improvement to the Beta 2 but. There have been a lot of changes to the user interface in this release. One thing that annoys me is the location of the Send button in a mail that you are composing. The most natural place should be where the Paste button is placed today.

I recently ran into a problem where I had by mistake checked the Remember password checkbox in Internet Explorer 7 (RC) when visiting a NTLM based website, then I wanted to get back to use my currently logged on user to access this website. There is no way to clear these usernames and passwords using the standard ways in Internet Explorer. First of all I tried to turn off the Automatic logon only in Intranet Zone and entering a new but faulty password for the user and checking the remember password checkbox. This cleared the old password but after resetting the automatic logon Internet Explorer always asked for my password for that site and I didn’t want to enter my current logon information and save the password (this would only ask me for a new password whenever I change it).

I’m so happy, the DSL Tools V1 is shipped as a part of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 SDK V3. I’ve been waiting for such a long time, now we can finish up our designers and make them available to our developers, partners and clients so they will be able to develop more easily. I’m currently downloading it, so I’ll have to see how much has changed since the last beta version, hopefully not that much.

Microsoft just released the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh (download here) to the masses. One of the interesting parts Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats, are also updated as B2TR With this download (available in English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish) you can open, edit, save and create Microsoft Office 2007 files using Microsoft Office 200, Microsoft Office XP or Microsoft Office 2003. The following formats are supported:

Jensen Harris bring us good news, as always… This morning, we announced that starting tomorrow (Thursday, Septemeber 14) you’ll be able to download the Beta 2 Technical Refresh build of Office 2007 (build 4407.1005).

Here goes a post, in which I am really upset! One of our customers has implemented a new VPN solution that requires us to have McAfee or Symantecs anti-virus programs. I have been using Grisoft AVG for a long time and are very satisified with that one, but they don’t accept it so I had to change. If you have not tried AVG out, then do it, it’s free for personal use. Since I live in Sweden I wen’t to the swedish McAfee site, signed up for the software and payed with my credit card, good rebates and everyting was fine. Then I logged in to my McAfee account and clicked on the link to start the installation.

Stuart Kent announces that the documentation for the DSL Tools version 1 are available at MSDN. We’re getting closer to a final release of the DSL Tools. I can’t wait to get my hands on it!

I ran into some troubles with the IPSec Services on my Windows XP SP2 machine today. This service was needed by a VPN application that I installed to connect to one of our customers. But during the last re-install of my machine, I set this service to manual startup, and now when I tried to start it It could not start. I recieved the following error message when trying to start it:

There seems to be some kind of software release frenzy at Redmond right now. Microsoft are spitting out application after application and I don’t mean the two huge ones; MIcrosoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Office (Server) System. Applications, small and big, like Internet Explorer 7, Windows Live Writer, XNA Game Studios, different Microsoft Live applications, Windows Desktop Search and now XML Notepad 2006 are dropping out from the software factory. It’s fun, but it takes me so much time reading and catching up on the releases.

The Acronyms plugin for Windows Live Writer has been updated. The plugin now contains more customization on how to generate the markup when publishing the post. You now have the option to use either the span, acronym or abbr tags. Download it here.

Finally! According to Stuart Kent, program manager at Microsoft, the DSL Tools V1 will be a part of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK Version 3 at the first part of september. I have now a long time waited for this release so we can build our own designers for Visual Studio 2005. Currently my company have a huge demand from our customers that our application should be more easily customized, and the DSL tools will really help us out.

There has been a lot of discussions around the net on the non-customizable and non-removable Windows Vista startup sound. Robert Scoble has a post that explains why the Vista team decided to design it like that. My personal opinion, like Roberts, is that I would like to decide for myself if I wan’t a startup sound when I turn my computer on. For example; at home I have Windows XP Media Center which would benefit from having that sound, it lets me calibrate the volume before I put on a movie and it makes me aware of when the machine is up and running.

To kill some spare time I decided to create a plugin for Windows Live Writer that is named Acronyms Plugin for Windows Live Writer. It’s a small and simple plugin that let you search for the meaning of an acronym and insert into you post. You have to option to insert the acronym with the description inline or as a tooltip. When using the tooltip option the acronym will be inserted with a

Tim Heuer has written a really nice Flickr plugin for Windows Live Writer, flickr4writer. Go check it out and/or contribute with expertise or ideas. I’d like to see an Upload to Flickr feature of flickr4writer in the next release.

I spend a lot of time using mainly two applications; Microsoft Visual Studio (2003 and 2005) and Microsoft Office (2007). Microsoft Office 2007 introduces a new user interface that simplifies the usage a lot. I am a devoted reader to Jensen Harris Office User Interface blog and it has taught me a lot and given me influences on how user interfaces should be built and I try to take his advices in account.

The posts are everywhere that Internet Explorer 7 RC1 is out, and I’m not late to test it out. The download of 15 Mb was fast and the installation was easy; it did uninstall the previous beta of IE7, rebooted and installed the RC1. The first think I noticed was that I think it is still a slow-starter, when you open it as the first application after the first boot (it may be my hogging Dell Inspirion 9100?)

This is just me testing my own implementation of MetaWeblog API made in C# and ASP.NET 2.0. This post is created using the Windows Live Writer (beta) which of course did not work directly. I had to do some special fixes to get the MetaWeblog API to work according to the specifications I read through. I’ll get back about that another day. Now I got to go home to put my daughter to bed.

According to Lawrence Liu Microsoft will release a a demo with Microsoft Office Server System 2007 for Virtual Server as a .VMC and a virtual harddisk for Microsoft Certified Partners as a part of the Techinical demonstration toolkit during the next 4-6 weeks. This is great, I guess that it will contain the latest build, and gives us a good opportunity to test and show the new functionlity of MOSS without having to set up new servers or VM’s.

Finally an update to the beta of Windows Desktop Search 3.0. The user interface is back, looking like the 2.6 version, and it works really nice. Looks like the problems with Outlook 2007 and One Note 2007 Beta 2 is gone and it consumes less memory. This update is required for the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 Techincal Refresh release that will be upon us soon.

The incredible Jensen Harris gives you all the details on how to use Fitt’s Law to improve the user interface of your application in the post Giving You Fitts. The article gives you a good insight on how to create a great interface using a mathematical approach instead of just lettting a art/creative director making the job. It explains why the northwest corner (as Jensen told us it should be named) has changed so dramatically.

This is a follow up post to my last about optimizing the Microsoft Virtual Server hard disks. If you use dynamically expanding disks, don’t forget to once in a while compact them using the built-in tools or schedule a script that does it for you. Check out Microsoft TechNet Script Center and these scripts and the rest is up to you :-) Turn of a virtual machine Compact a virtual hard disk Start a virtual machine John Howard, program manager of Windows Virtualization, have a post on how to reduce the size of a VHD: VHD Size Reduction that is worth checking out.

Microsoft has release Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003. The Service Pack contains a number of hotfixes as well as some improvements, read the release notes for more information. I successfully installed the Service Pack, which is not the case for everyone.

Scott Dart (Program Manager) has a good blog post on Metadata and the Windows Vista Photo Gallery. An interesting article on how Windows Vista Photo Gallery reads and handles the metadata in photos. Since I am a Media Center freak with a lots of digital photos I really hope that Media Center uses the most of this metadata, as I wrote in previous posts; here and here.

Here is a tip and some help for you out there who are using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 for optimizing the hard disk of the virtual machines. First of all make sure that you hard disks are fixed size, that means that they don’t have to expand during runtime. Then take advantage of the Virtual SCSI adapters, when the Virtual Machine Add-Ons are installed on the virtual server you will have a significant performance increase of up to 20 %.

I found this post about Windows Live Writer at MSTechToday. Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service. Read more about it and download it at the Writer Zone. The installation program also installs Windows Live Toolbar. It’s worth checking out…

Google has introduced a new Video Search which can be reached from the menu at the Google web site, read about it in the Google Blog. This is a nice new feature in which you can upload and share your videos but this post is not about that feature it is about that the Video link has replaced the nice Groups search link!! When stumbling upon a problem or whenever I try to find help on something I Google for it, and browse throught the first ten hits - then I just click on the Groups link to make the same search in the news groups, where most of your questions are answered. Now I have to click the more link and then select Groups which gives me one click more.

Yesterday I wrote about our new server which is now up and running nicely hosting a number of Virtual Server, this morning none of them was up and a few sites and applications was down. This was due to that the server had Windows Update set to Automatic which is recommended by the OS - which had led to that the server rebooted. I’ve seen it before so this time I found the resolution quick, but the last time it caused me a headache!

Ok, this may not be new to a lot of you or you have never even thought about it - me neither until a few days ago when I was happily unpacking our brand new Dell PowerEdge 2950. I assemled it fast and inserted the Dell OpenManage Server Assistant CD and followed the instructions to install it, this is usually the fastest method and involves so little interaction, everything went fine and it started configuring the RAID and copying files. But after an hour or so I checked it and it was complete at 42%, and I thought lets eat lunch and give it some more time. When I got back it was still stuck at 42%. I rebooted and took the same procedure - and it stalled at 42 again.

A few days ago I complained about not being able to categorize photos in Vista Media Center using metadata. I was using the 5384 (beta 2) build! But in the most recent builds there are a new pivot called Tags, in which you can watch the photos organized by keywords instead of only by date and folders. The tags can be edited through the Windows Photo Gallery and is persisted in the image.

Microsoft Windows Vista contains Windows Media Center (in Home Premium and Ultimate) which is a great upate from the Windows XP Media Center Edition. Finally the user interface is taking advantage of widescreen and the navigation is faster and smoother. But I think one big thing is still missing in the Media Center interface - editing, sorting and searching pictures using metadata; today you can sort them on date taken! I would find it more useful to search for all images containg images of my family, my vacation in Spain or winter images from our summer house.

Blake Handler has compiled a nice list of 150 free Microsoft Windows applications called Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft. I found some nice ones I have not seen before: Mount ISO Files Virtually Virtual WiFi

The Register reports an interesting Dell computer flaw, in which a Dell desktop can be turned of if a mobile phone close to the computer recieves an SMS message - at least it did not start to burn :-)Dell recommends users not to have their mobile phones to close to the computer.

Winternals Software LP is aquired by Microsoft! Winternal (previously known as NTInternals) is most known by their freeware site Sysinternals a site containing numerous awesome and crucial applications to be used with Windows operating systems such as; RegMon, FileMon, Debug Viewer etc. The aquisition is great for Microsoft as they will get their hands on Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell and their knowledge in how to create small, efficient and safe applications. Microsoft really knows how to get the best people and tools…

My company is partners with Microsoft and I am the one responsible for managing the partnership and now and then have to log in to the Microsoft partner site to manage the partnership (check out the status of references, products and MCP’s). Since I have been using Internet Explorer 7 (beta) for a few months I have not been able to use the site with the browser, unless I fire up my test machine with W2K and IE6.

Microsoft Office 2007 will come with a new set of icons. Although they look nice and modern I will have to see them in smaller versions (16x16) to see if they will do. Justin Prine has some opinions and comments on his Flickr photostream.

Ever wondered what JavaScript closures are? Morris Johns has put togehter a nice introduction to the mysterious closures - JavaScript closures for dummies. Make sure to read it before you do any more JavaScripting. Understanding JavaScript closures will make your JS programming more efficient and you can avoid the dreaded memory leaks in Internet Explorer especially when making home brewed Ajax applications. And of course learning this stuff is fun for us developers…

Microsoft Hardware will later this year release a new keyboard - Ultimate Keyboard. The keyboard is a wireless (bluetooth) and ergonomical keyboard with backlight functionality that senses the light in the room and when you use the keyboard. The keyboard are designed for Windows Vista and the Microsoft Live services (Messenger etc). I really like the design and that it is an ergonomical layout of the keys. I use that kind of keyboard at work but at home or when sitting at my laptop my fingers more thatn often slip. The Ultimate Keyboard seems to be working fine when not sitting at a desk - like when you are sitting in you sofa with Windows XP Media Center or soon Windows Vista Ultimate!

Beta 3 is available for Internet Explorer 7. Some nice improvments have been made since beta 2: Ctrl-q does not longer show the tab-thumbnails when using (for example) Outlook Web Access Tab reordering!!! Refresh all functionality for RSS feeds

Daniel Escapa blogs that the XML Schema reference is available for OneNote 2007 beta 2, the download also contains schema references for Visio 2007 and Outlook 2007.

The Outlook 2007 feature Quick Click is a really nice feature; a Quick Click is a defined action to be done when you are single clicking a column on a mail item. You can define Quick Clicks in the mail item views for the columns Categories and Flag Status. Right click the column and select Set Quick Click… to change the action. For example; you can define the Quick Click in the Flag column to add a flag with a Tomorrow reminder (default is today).

I use the Outlook calendar for everything - the calendar is a central part of my life :-) Outlook 2007 has some great features in the calendar view and my favorite is that you see all your completed and upcoming tasks in the calendar view. I normally flag all the incoming e-mails, when I don’t have time to read them or when I have to take some action with them. This automatically creates a task in Outlook. From the Calendar view you can then easily see all tasks for the current week or day and you can also easy go back in time and see exactly when you did what and perhaps why.

For me this second quarter of 2006 has been so interesting with all these beta and CTP products from Microsoft. The summer will be a long wait for the Release Candidates and the autumn a huge and shaky wait for the gold products. Here is a short summary of what i think so far; **Microsoft Expression Graphics Designer**An interesting product which I have big hopes for, I really like, and have just adjusted, to the vector way of doing my graphics.

Just a friendly reminder to all of you that have the Office 2007 beta installed and still have Office 2003 installed: do not install the Office 2003 updates available through Windows Update. I did - stupid me I had the update service on automatic and when turning off the computer I said ok let’s install the patches. After installing the latest patches, Update for Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter (KB917149) and a few others, I started to receive the following errors in Outlook:

Sitting here in the halftime of the Brazil vs Croatia World Cup Soccer game and enjoying a good game. During this FIFA World Cup tournament a must have application is the Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard. It’s a nice little application with direct results, standings and schedule of all games and teams. You can also use the application to be your football news RSS reader and Microsoft provides us with a number of interesting football feeds.

This is the second part of my dissection of a blog and I will try to explain what a TrackBack is.TrackBack is a way to communicate between blogs; for example when a blogger writes a post with comments/links to another blog the blogger can inform the blog that is being commented with a TrackBack ping. This ping will normally be fetched by the commented blog and appended as a comment.To get this to work, both the commenting blog and commented blog has to support the TrackBack protocol, see below.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 is great and it has really improved on a lot of things for this version. One of the things that have been messing with me is the possibility to send e-mails using Ctrl+Enter. I have accidentaly sent away a number of emails, maybe due to my thick fingers :-) when pressing Ctrl+Enter. Outlook 2007 issues a warning when you press Ctrl+Enter and allows you to enable or disable this function. Isn’t it great - small things does matter!

XPS (XML Paper Specification) is an electronic paper format and is competing with Adobes PDF. Since Microsoft is forced to withdraw the function of publishing to PDF from Office 2007 the XPS will be more widely adopted. Read more about it here; Adobe PDF vs Microsoft XPS. Windows Vista will include a XPS reader, but if you already now get XPS files you can download either the WinFX runtime components or the XPS Essentials Pack (beta).

Bink.nu reports that the public beta of Windows Vista 2 will be available soon. Here are the download links (the links will work shortly): Download here: - (English x86) http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/en/x86/download.htm- (English x64) http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/en/x64/download.htm- (German (x86) http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/de/x86/download.htm- (German (x64) http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/de/x64/download.htm- (Japanese (x86) http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/jp/x86/download.htm- (Japanese (x64) http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/jp/x64/download.htm

I’ve asked the OneNote 2007 team about why the Ribbon is not implemented for OneNote 2007, which I would find very useful, and they answered me that they considered it but it will not get into the 2007 release but they will think about it for the next release (OneNote 2011?). Please help me out here and post a comment if you would like to see the Ribbon in OneNote or not and if you do how would you like it?

Jensen Harris, the Office 2007 User Interface guru, writes about what will happen to Office 2007 beta until the final release which contains a number of interesting gems. One of the first stuff I found out when using Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) was that the system menu was gone from the upper-left corner, sorry Jensen I mean Northwest corner, so I could not double-click to shut the application down, and that I had to use the cross in the Northeast (upper-right) corner, introduced in Windows 95. This feel like a big issue to me, since I am used to it, and my mouse cursor is most often located to the left part of the screen, so I am a Windows 3.1 lover, according to Jensen Harris.Instead of opening the system menu you get the new Office File menu in the new user interface.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 introduces a new view for the contacts called Business Cards. It’s a view, much like the old Adress Cards view, but the business cards view lets you customize how the different contacts look - just like a business card. You can customize the business cards and give each one a unique look. This can make finding contacts easier, if the business cards resembles the real ones.

Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report blogs about What do you think of Office 2007 so far? I’ve been using it, mostly OneNote, Outlook and Word, since the release of the latest beta, and I like the most of it. The Ribbon bar and the User InterfaceThe most significant change is the user interface and I like what I see. I took a while for me to be aquainted with the new shortcuts and the Ribbon bar, I am a keyboard user. But I think it’s working fine. I only wish OneNote 2007 had the Ribbon bar, as I wrote before. Outlook does not have it either, but Jensen Harris explains why.Previewing works really fine and is great.

Yippie, finally a new CTP of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK is available. I’m really looking forward to the upgraded DSL Tools. New features of the DSL Tools include: new file format (.dsl), instead of the old .dsldd and .dsldmd. Now things should be easier to get a grip of and there are more designer support new DSL Designer and more…

As Microsoft OneNote 2007 will be a part of the Office Home and Student 2007 suite OneNote will and can be used by students. And it’s a great tool for that! I remember when I studied for my M.Sc. and all the notebooks and pens I used, making notes was very important for me and helped me remember things better. And it still is, I have used OneNote for a few years and been satisified with that, but the new OneNote is so great.

Just a follow up to my last post on Outlook 2007 Instant Search and Windows Desktop Search problems: My scenario in the post does not always happen and it may work for you. The System Restore I did was not that complicated since I did not install anything while I had the troubles, and I have not had any problems after it either, so don’t worry about it.

I have installed the Office 2007 beta, including Outlook 2007, and I wanted to enable the Instant Search functionality and followed the instructions in the dialog that popped up in Outlook. It said that I had to go and download the Windows Desktop Search Beta 3.0 Engine Preview, read about it in Microsoft Help and Support. I did, but I had a previous version of Windows Desktop Search installed. There was no warning and when I tried to search in Outlook I recieved a message saying that Outlook cannot perform your search. And when I tried to use the Windows Desktop user interface that was still there (the 3.0 beta has no UI yet) the explorer.exe crashed.

During the creation of this site I wanted to know more about how the blog world works behind the scenes. I will make a few articles about my findings in this matter and what I have done to create this blog. The first article will describe on how you inform other sources and parties that your blog is updated. This is done through a Ping. You should ping whenever you have created or updated a post on your feed. Pinging is either done automatically or manually. Manual pinging is done by finding a site with a Ping interface, like http://www.bloglines.com/ping, and then enter the Url to your feed. You can find some more on the Blog Ping List at AYWE

The IQBlog has a post, Microsoft OneNote: Great program, interesting design flaw, in which they disucuss the lack of the Save button. Chris Pratley, Group Manager of the OneNote team, responds to the post in a comment - it’s worth reading. And as a side note, the posting page is reported by Internet Explorer 7 as a potential phising page.

Microsoft has release the first public release of the Windows Live Gadgets SDK, you can find it MicrosoftGadgets.com. You can also find the Gadgets Development Overview for Microsoft Sidebar for Windows Vista Beta 2 on the site. Developing Gadgets for both live.com and Microsoft Sidebar will be really easy and fun. But I see a problem with only having live.com as the only web-based Gadget host (host meaning where the Gadget can execute). I would like to see an implementation in either Microsoft SharePoint Services or as a standalone product, so you can host Gadgets in an Intranet scenario. There are some examples on how to host your own Gadgets; for example Donovan West has an example using an iframe solution. The problem is still that the Gadgets are hosted externally which is not that great if you think about security issues.

I have been using Microsof Internet Explorer 7 beta for a while and I have noticed that some sites are reported as suspicious phising websites. The address bar turns yellow and a big popup informs you about it. A few days ago the popup appeard on one of my blog entries. The popup includes a link to a site in which you may inform Microsoft that you are the owner of the site and the site is not a phising site. I gave it a try and reported the site not to be phising site and that I am the owner. Within 24 ours I recieved a response from Microsoft that they had reviewd my request and a few ours later the warning was gone. Phew! I think it all worked very smoothly and I think it is a great feature of IE7. If you would like more information on the IE anti-phising filter, read about it here.

Ed Bott has put together a nice collection of screenshots and descriptions of functions and the interface of Windows Vista beta 2, in his article Vista Beta 2, up close and personal.. Check it out if you don’t have time to install beta 2…

When starting OneNote 2007 beta you will get a warning that informs you that OneNote 2007 requires Windows Desktop Search to fully support Instant Search and Searchable images and audio. This warning will pop up until you install the Windows Desktop Search 3.0 or until you edit the registry, which then will inform OneNote to use Slow Search. Here is how to modify the registryCreate a new text file called onenoteindex.reg and copy and paste below this text into it. Then double click the file and answer yes to the question.

At this page you can read about all the knwon OneNote 2007 issues as well as all the other Office 2007 issues that are known to Microsoft.

I walked through the OneNote Guide for beta 2 and found even more interesting stuff, here are some of the nice ones: Win+N creates a new sidenote Writing and pressing the Tab key automatically creates a table Read through the guidelines before starting to use OneNote 2007

The new Office OneNote 2007 has a built-in Calculator, really nice stuff! To try it out, just write a mathematic formula in a page and end with an equals sign followed by enter or space, for example:3+2=This will result in a row like this:3+2=5 It is quite powerful, it can handle operations like: +, -, /, * parenthesis so you can do formulas like this (3+3)*3=18 ^, for example 10^3=1 000 sqrt(n) for square root sin(n), asin(n), cos(n), acos(n), tan(n), atan(n) mod for modulus And I’m sure there are more…

I’m a huge fan of Microsoft OneNote since a few years back and I use it to store anything about everything. It all started 10 years ago with a simple Notepad document in which i kept all important notes; such as programming tips, important Urls etc. When OneNote came I felt that I was a few years behind :-) The new Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 (beta 2) is such a nice upgrade to the 2003 version. The most interesting things I found after using it for a day is:

Microsoft announced at WinHEC 2006 that Windows Vista Beta 2 is available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The beta will be more broadly available through the Windows Vista Customer Preview Program in the next few weeks. The timeline is still November 2006 for business and January 2007 for consumers. You can find some more information about the release in this Fact Sheet. Go to the Windows Vista Get Ready site to check if you are ready for Windows Vista. You can find the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor program there to test if your Windows XP supports Vista.

Roland Weigelt has updated the GhostDoc 1.9.3 for Visual Studio 2005. Check it out!

There are a lot of downloads today; the new CTP of Microsoft Expression Graphics Designer was announced today. You can download it here. There are also a new CTP of the Interactive Designer. I did some initial tests by exporting images to Gif and Jpegs - and it seems to work much better now, great!!! Remember to download WinFX Beta 2!

So, Microsoft Office 2007, applications and servers, are finally here for download at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx. Expect some huge downloads; Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is at 75 MB and the SharePoint Server at 1.000 MB. The Office Suite and programs is a tiny download of 2.049 MB. That would be a massive hive of 3.5" disks :-). I think a lot of bandwidth will be used on the backbones tonight, and this is just a faint hint of what will happen in a few weeks when the new public Vista beta will arrive.I still remember when I installed Visual C years ago, that was somwhere around 40 disks, thats about 60 MB!

I have moved this blog to my own domain, http://www.wictorwilen.se/ and I decided to have it hosted at DotNetPark. DotNetPark has an excellent service at great prices. For me it was important to have ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server where I hosted my site and they have all that and more. I can easily publish the site using FTP from Visual Studio and connect to the SQL Server using the Enterprise Manager or Visual Studio. Their interface, called DotNetPanel, provides you with everything you need to host your site.You can also have a number of services installed at your request, for example how about Windows SharePoint Services!

Welcome to my new space and domain at www.wictorwilen.se. This new place will host my blog (previously at http://dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/wicwil/).During the next few days all old posts and comments will be moved to this location. Having my own place will make it more easy for me to create what I want and to present and blog about more stuff. This site will be an experimental playground for me and I will blog about some of the interesting stuff that I stumble upon. So expect some changes to the site and functionality.The site is just a hobby, besides my work and family, which both takes a lot of time, but it is fun to have something to rest your mind on.

Rob Mensching writes in a post that WiX has an online manual for version 2 and that eventually a manual for version 3 will show up.

So, after some installation trouble the Microsoft Expression Web Designer was installed, read more about it in the EWD Discussion group.The Expression Web Designer is for me a new and improved FrontPage more focused on the layout. I made some initial pages/sites and I feel that it works pretty smoothly to work with. The target group for this product is purely front-end/html programmers.The EWD will complement the Visual Studio development but the lack of source control integration is not just irritating - it’s a “application breaker”. I think the usage of EWD when building large and complex projects will not be that high if this is not implmented. I think my company will still be using Visual Studio for editing webpages for a while….I also lack a nice integration with the Expression Graphics Designer, it would be nice to right-click an image and open the EGD editor within EWD! (When is the next CTP/beta/Gold for EGD coming???) But, I think I’ll give it a shot and try to use it some more before I give it my final judgement. Do you agree or disagree?

Finally there is a CTP of Microsoft Expression Web Designer.I have been working with the Microsoft Expression softwares now for a while and I like what I see and use. I really hopes that this version of the Expression suite really fits my needs, since I work a lot with web development. The Expression Graphics Designer, which is the one i have used a lot the last few months is really nice, but I think making (small) pixelbased images which are used for web is not that smooth.Download is complete, time to install it. I will get back with some more Impressions of Expression in a while.Update: The download from the Microsoft download site did not work out correctly, but the download from connect.microsoft.com installed fine!

Scott Guthrie announced that the VS 2005 Web Application Project V1.0 Released . Great! I’ve been waitning for this one, the VS 2003 way of working with web projects worked really nice - and now we can use it with VS 2005!Thanks!!!

Tristank has a nice article 3 Simple Rules to Kerberos Authentication/Delegation SPNs on how Kerberos authentication via HTTP should be configured. It contains well explained steps using the SETSPN utility.

Have you ever experienced the 0xe0434f4d exit code and thought, what the heck is that has a nice blog If broken it is, fix it you should which in a post explains how to interpret the exit code which is very good. 0xe0434f4d means that it is an exception from the CLR, ie any managed exception is referred to with this code. And she also explains what the funny 0xe0434f4d means:0x43 0x4f 0x4d are the ASCII codes for COM!

Wow, thats my opinion of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, beta 2. I have been running the preview of the beta 2 for a while and I am so pleased with the upgrade (ahem - new) browser. I have been faithful to Internet Explorer through the last years and I sure will be one truly loyal user for a few more years - if they will speed up the adaptation to new techniques in the upcoming releases. The tabbed interface works smoothly, rendering feels faster, RSS reader is really good and simple, and it feels pretty compatible with older sites (except my internet bank and the community server version that dotnetjunkies run on :-). I really recommend everyone to take part of the beta and evaluate the beta - which Microsoft even have phone support on (in US and some other contries).

My last post showed how to use VBScript functions as CustomActions. More than often you need to access some of the properties you have defined in your WIX files, for example an installation directory, a connection string etc.To access these properties just use the Session object and it’s a Property property.Here’s an example with two properties used: set adam = GetObject(Session.Property("ADSERVER") & "/" & Session.Property("ADSPATH")) The WIX file should contain two properties: <Property Id="ADSERVER" Admin="yes" >LDAP://server</Property><Property Id="ADSPATH" Admin="yes" ></Property> The Property property is read/write so you can manipulate the properties within your code.

Here are some small tips when using VBScript CustomActions using WIX.Creating a script CustomActionFirst of all you have to create a CustomAction in your WXS file: <CustomAction Id="Id_Of_ScriptAction" BinaryKey="Id_of_binary" VBScriptCall="Script_Name" /> Id_Of_ScriptAction is a unique Id of your CustomActionID_of_binary is the unique Id of the binary that contains the vbs file.Script_Name is the name of the Sub or Function in your vbs file. Creating the VBS fileCreate a .VBS file with a function or sub that should be executed.

Check this out - Stored Procedure Object Interface Layer (SPOIL). It’s a really nice framework to use when working with Stored Procedures. It helps you map stored procedures directly to methods in .NET applications.

I have for a few interesting weeks been using Microsoft Windows Installer Xml, aka WIX, to create an MSI installer for our software solution (finally the number of installation has increased so it was worth it :-).Our software is higly configurable and modularized so I needed to use a tool more advanced that the built-in installers in Visual Studio.Net - and the choice was to use WIX. For you out there who doesn’t know what WIX is then the short story is that; WIX is toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The source code and binaries to WIX can be found on SourceForge.To create an MSI you just tap in some XML code and use the provided compilers and linkers and you are up and running in a few minutes - with a simple installation package.Bur, when making a more complex installer you will probably run into trouble due to the lack of documentation on the subject, even if it contains a nice help file I found out that Google was the best source of documentation.I ran into some troubles when I was creating CustomActions and I thought I would write a more thorough article about that in a near future. I found out that making CustomActions using scripts (VB and JavaScript) was really successfull.Are you interested in reading more about WIX check out the blog of Rob Mensching or this great tutorial by Gábor Deák Jahn. What do you think about WIX?And finally: congratulations to the WIX project which celebrates two year anniversary today.

Windows SharePoint Services To Be Open Source With 2007 Microsoft Office Release - would’nt that be nice! A good april fools joke by Bill Simser, it almost got me at first sight!

I’m a bit concerned about all the new user interfaces and layouts that will appear when application developers starts taking use of the Windows® Presentation Foundation (formerly code named “Avalon”). This “tecnology” is awesome but it has it’s drawbacks. With the WPF you can create applications that are really neat looking and have high usability, just take a look at Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer. I saw a really nice demo, on a Microsoft Partner event, of a medical journal application looking like a “medical journal” - not the old fashioned MDI interface with a File, Edit… menu. And I guess most of you have seen the Microsoft Max application and the new Office 2007 interface. But what will happen to the usability between applications? As of today almost all Windows applications has a user interface with a menu bar with the File, Edit etc menus, a toolbar with icons and either one document (SDI) or multiple documents (MDI) in the window area. This is very good when adapting to new applications, you know where to find the functionality you want, not in all cases but the most vital functions are easily found. You know how to save a document or to paste something in to your application. Windows Presentation Foundation does not prohibit this usage but it allows developers to create really cool looking applications with a nice user interface. But when it comes to recognizing functions and behaviours I think this will cause a lot of trouble. Let’s take an example of a hospital, where I have seen similar troubles, having several applications from several vendors; they have Microsoft Office 2007, some kind of medical journal system, a financial report system, an intranet etc. Most of the employees use more than one application. It will be very problematic if these applications doesn’t share the same user interface guidelines. This is the point of my entry! Where is the guidelines for these new awesome user interfaces? Do you have the same opinion or experience as I do?Where can I find information on how to make these new applications run smoothly togheter using common guidelines?

Today I had to move (make an exact copy of) an ADAM (Active Directory In Application Mode) installation to a new server. It was not that trivial and therefore I thought I would share on how to do it. Add the BUILTIN\Administrators group to the Administrators Role in the Adam instance_This group has a well known SID and therefore can be moved to any server. Se picture below._ Make a backup of the Adam data files folder, using Microsoft Backup_The files can not just be copied because they are locked_ Create the exactly same installation on the new server_Use the same ports, service name, application directory partition etc_ Stop the newly created service_So the files won’t be locked_ Restore from the backup you created in 2)Make sure that you specify to overwrite all files, which is not by default Start the service and test it

Just came back from the training center with a passed 74-132 (Designing a Portal Solution with Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies (including Microsoft Content Management Server) certificate. It was quite easy to take even though I never worked with Content Management Server or Commerce Server. Most of the questions was about MCMS and Commerce Server, more than I expected.

Today, after installing the RTM version of VS.NET 2005, I got some errors due to previous installs of the Betas. One of the was a Package Load Failure for the Class Designer. After a quick search on MSDN Product Feedback Center I found a case (FDBK39168, now closed) with a really nice tool that scans and fixes a number of known issues in Visual Studio.NET. You can download it here: http://astebner.sts.winisp.net/Tools/ttool.zip if you have the same or similar errors.

A really nice feature when using .NET Framework 2.0 (beta) is that you can run ASP.NET 1.1 nad ASP.NET 2.0 side by side on the same IIS. You can configure individual virtual directories in the IIS to use different version. The IIS Management Console has a new tab called ASP.NET, see image below, in which you can select which version you would like to use, whithout doing a lot of script-mappings.

Here is an updated version of the ComPlusWrapper that I previously published, this one contains a Hashtable for caching the ProgId/Types as well as a method for invoking methods.Please post any comments to the code or any improvments to the class. public class ComPlusWrapper : IDisposable { private static volatile Hashtable s_types = new Hashtable();private static volatile Object s_lock = new Object();private object _ComPlusObject; private Type _type;private bool _IsDisposed = false;