Microsoft.Net Technology Blog - Vikas Goyal

* Windows Azure Platform Timelines

2009-11-01T18:36:00.001+05:30

October 2008 PDC - Community Technology Preview (CTP) for the Windows Azure platform (Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services).

November 17th 2009 PDC 2009 - new features in Windows Azure will be made available for the first time.

January, 2010 - New customers will have to sign up for an offer to access services on the Windows Azure platform. Existing CTP users will receive first bill with a $0 balance and can track exact usage while still enjoying free service. Preview Billing.

February 1, 2010 – All customers start getting charged for using Windows Azure Platform

* SharePoint Foundation 2010 : Software Platform Requirements

2009-10-27T06:10:00.001+05:30

Following are the minimum requirements :

Windows Server 2008 64-bit operating system with SP2 or later, OR Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 64-bit with SP2, SQL Server 2005 Express 64-bit, SQL Server 2008 64-bit or SQL Server 2008 Express 64-bit
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 with SP1 installed

Level 1 Internet browser options for Windows:

Windows Internet Explorer 7 32-bit
Windows Internet Explorer 8 32-bit
Firefox 3.x 32-bit

Level 2 Internet browser options:

Windows Internet Explorer 7 64-bit
Windows Internet Explorer 8 64-bit
Firefox 3.x on non-Windows operating system
Safari 3.x

What’s New in SharePoint Foundation 2010

* SharePoint Foundation 2010 What’s New Overview

2009-10-23T21:55:00.001+05:30

Windows SharePoint Services is now Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 is the next version of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 which is the foundation infrastructure for any SharePoint product like MOSS or SharePoint 2010.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 will be available as a free download in November 2009. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 relies on the SharePoint Foundation 2010 technology to provide a consistent, familiar framework for lists and libraries, site administration, and site customization. Any features that are available in SharePoint Foundation 2010 are also available in SharePoint Server 2010.

What's New in SharePoint Foundation 2010

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) the next version of BDC in MOSS 2007 is now included in SharePoint Foundation.
Streamlined Central Administration with Ribbon interface
Claims based Authentication : to support any corporate identity system like Active Directory, Domain Services, LDAP-based directories, application-specific databases, and user-centric identity models.
SharePoint Maintenance Manager : enables SharePoint Foundation to automatically check for potential configuration, performance, and usage problems.
Ability to send SMS alerts to mobile phones
Client APIs : There programming models supported : Managed APIs (for ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript), .NET managed client & Silverlight client), Web Services & Web Part Page Services Component (WPSC)
Microsoft Sync Framework as part of SharePoint Foundation : allows other Microsoft and third-party applications to synch more easily with SharePoint Foundation 2010 deployments.
Mobile : Mobile Web Part adapters, Mobile SMS and many new controls.
LINQ to SharePoint Provider on server side.
Ribbon Interface
Sandboxed Solutions : allows site collection users to upload their own custom code solutions. stored in a solution gallery.
Shared Services Provider (SSP) has been replaced by Service Application Framework : supports WCF, Round Robin Load Balancing, Claims based identity.
Silverlight Web Part for simple and quick hosting of Silverlight controls.
Stsadm.exe administration tool has been replaced by Windows PowerShell.

SharePoint Server 2010 builds on SharePoint Foundation 2010 and so whatever is new in SharePoint Foundation is new in SharePoint Server also apart from lot of other new features available in SharePoint Server.

* Beta 2 of .NET 4.0 and VS 2010 released

2009-10-20T18:46:00.001+05:30

Read all the details here.

* All new MSDN launched

2009-10-20T08:35:00.001+05:30

New Design
Free e-learning courses in English to all MSDN and BizSpark subscribers
Priority support in MSDN forums to subscribers
Windows Azure Platform free computing hours
Usability enhancements.

MSDN Global Network

* Can my PC run Windows 7 ?

2009-10-12T22:57:00.001+05:30

In general, if your PC can run Windows Vista, it can run Windows 7.

Just download, install, and run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta. You'll get a report telling you if your PC can run Windows 7 and if there are any known compatibility issues. If an issue can be resolved, you'll get suggestions for next steps.

Before you run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta, be sure to plug in any USB devices or other devices such as printers, external hard drives, or scanners that are regularly used with the PC you're evaluating.

Click here to see complete details

* SharePoint : Install on Windows Server 2008

2009-09-27T00:35:00.001+05:30

With service pack 1 of MOSS 2007, apart from Windows 2003, Windows Server 2008 is also supported platform. If you do not have a installable media of MOSS 2007 with SP1, you can create slipstreamed installation source by adding SP1 to actual media of SharePoint 2007 without SP1.

This installation source must include files from both Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 SP1.

Click here for detailed steps of created such installation source.

* SharePoint : Why there are two search services ?

2009-09-25T20:31:00.001+05:30

You have installed MOSS farm and now setting up the services on the farm. What you see is that there are two search services .. why ?

Office SharePoint Server Search : This is main Search service responsible for indexing the MOSS content.

Windows SharePoint Services Search : The name is slightly misleading but this service is used for indexing the help system content that gets installed as part of MOSS installation. So if you do not want your users to use Search of Help System… you do not need to start this service.

* SharePoint : Server Type options disabled during installation

2009-09-25T19:47:00.001+05:30

If you are installing MOSS 2007 and find that the top two options are disabled i.e. Complete and Web Front End.

This means you have WSS 3.0 – Windows SharePoint Services already installed on your machine. Uninstall it and try again.

* Open XML sdk and code snippets

2009-09-19T11:18:00.001+05:30

Microsoft recently announced the August 2009 CTP of Open XML SDK 2.0. The improvements have been made in mainly following areas :

Add semantic level validation support

Add markup compatibility/extensibility support

General improvements based on your feedback

You can read more about it here. Download it from here.

Recently Open XML code snippets have also been released. This package of code snippets provides over fifty reusable code samples, in both C# and VB.NET, which accomplish many common tasks involving Excel, PowerPoint, or Word documents.

Read more about snippets and download them.

* MOSS 2007 vs SharePoint 2010

2009-09-18T13:46:00.001+05:30

MOSS 2007

SharePoint 2010

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

SharePoint 2010

Helps organizations gain better control and insight over their content, streamline their business processes, and access and share information.

Business Collaboration platform for enterprise and web

Mostly on-premise

Deployed on-premise or as hosted service

Portal : Share content based on user’s profile

Collaboration : Allows Teams to work together

Content : Create and manage documents, records, and Web content

Search : Quickly and easily find people, expertise, and content in business applications

Business Intelligence : Make informed business decisions

Business Process & Forms: Design business forms that are accessible directly in a Web browser and integrate them with databases or other business applications.

Sites : Share information seamlessly with employees, partners & customers

Communities : Empower people to work together

Content : Manage content lifecycle from creation to disposition

Search : Find Information and People anywhere

Insights : Make informed business decisions

Composites : Rapidly create dynamic business solutions

Supports 32 and 64 bit platform

Supports only 64 bit platform for SharePoint and SQL Server

Office Clients provided some out-of-box integration

Smart client – SharePoint workspace with all features

No client APIs for integration with LOB apps

Client APIs will be available

Single browser support

Multi browser support – IE, Firefox, Safari.

Excel Services

Excel & Visio Services

While MOSS 2007 provided great open platform in technology space for enterprises, SharePoint 2010 will take the Enterprise 2.0 strategy to web/internet and thus to customers and partners.

* Exchange 2010 : Integration with Line of Business applications

2009-09-18T10:35:00.001+05:30

All the communication and collaboration products from Microsoft like Exchange, Office Communications Server and SharePoint MOSS provide excellent clients to harness the server capabilities in most effective manner. Like Exchange comes with Outlook, OCS comes with communicator and SharePoint comes with Outlook & Groove integration & SharePoint workspace from SharePoint 2010.

Apart from providing standalone clients they also ship enough programming interfaces so that these server capabilities can also be integrated within Line of Business applications. This helps customers to extract maximum value out of their server investments. Exchange server comes with Web services interface, OCS comes with UCCAPI – unified communications client APIs and now SharePoint 2010 will come with client APIs.

Here are some of the programming interfaces provided by Exchange Server 2010:

Exchange Web Services Managed API 1.0 sdk : The typed .NET sdk which can be used from .NET applications to access Exchange Web Services.
Exchange Web Services (EWS) : Allows custom applications to access Exchange mailboxes over Http/SOAP protocol.
Autodiscover (SOAP) service : Helps in creating custom applications which can autodiscover mailboxes based on client profiles. The communication is over Http/SOAP.
Autodiscover (POX) service : Same as above but over Http/POX protocol. The recommended way is using the Http/SOAP.
Exchange 2010 beta Transports Agents sdk : Helps in creating server side agents which can access e-mail messages and their contents while the messages are being transported to users’ mail boxes. Thus helps in extension of Exchange transport behavior.
Exchange 2010 beta backup & restore sdk : create custom backup, restore and recovery systems.

Exchange Server Developer Center

* SharePoint 2010 : Sneak peek video from WPC

2009-09-13T02:13:00.001+05:30

Building Solutions on SharePoint

* SharePoint Conference 2009 : Not to be missed

2009-09-13T01:57:00.001+05:30

Sessions ..

SharePoint 2010 Overview and What's New
Upgrading to SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 Capacity and Performance Planning
SharePoint 2010 Security and Identity Management: What's New.
SharePoint 2010 Ribbon, ECMAScript and Dialog Framework Development
Upgrading SharePoint Server 2007 Code to SharePoint 2010
Building SharePoint Composite Applications with the Microsoft Application Platform
What’s New in Business Connectivity Services (The Business Data Catalog Evolves!)
FAST Search for SharePoint – Capabilities Deep-Dive
Advanced Dashboard Creation with PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint 2010
Overview of Visio 2010 and Visio Services for SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management Deep-Dive
If You Build It, They Will Come: Driving End User Adoption
Understanding Office 2010 and the Office Web apps
Office Web apps: Deployment and Manageability
Customizing Office 2010 Backstage view and Ribbon
Deep-Dive into SharePoint 2010 My Sites and Social Networking Architecture
SharePoint 2010 Governance: Planning and Implementation
SQL Server Best Practices for SharePoint Deployments
Overview of Access Services in SharePoint 2010
Introduction to SharePoint Applications Using InfoPath and Forms Services 2010
Launching and Supporting Large Global Sites: Lessons Learned from AMD.com (Customer Session presented by AMD)
How SharePoint Helped Employee Communications Do More with Less (Customer Session presented by Dow Jones)
Planning, Deploying and Administrating Excel Services and Project "Gemini" in SharePoint Server 2010
Advanced Web Part Development in Visual Studio 2010
Enterprise Content Management for the Masses: How SharePoint 2010 Delivers on the Promise
The 2010 Lineup: SKUs and Licensing

* SharePoint 2010 : Get ready for ‘only 64-bit’ world

2009-09-10T22:12:00.001+05:30

Here are platform requirements for SharePoint 2010 :

· Windows Server 2008 and above – 64 bit only

· SQL Server 2005 and above – 64 bit only

· Browsers: XHTML 1.0 complaint. IE 7, IE 8 & Firefox 3.x on Windows. Firefox 3.x & Safari 3.x on non-Windows.

Anyone planning to upgrade their existing MOSS 2007 running on 32-bit … start planning now.

Start Planning Now

* SharePoint 2010 : What’s new in SharePoint 2010

2009-09-09T20:38:00.001+05:30

SharePoint 2010 will be the next version of SharePoint 2007 scheduled to be release next year.

It’s coming out with lot of really excitement and asked for features which will help enterprises to extract more value out of their SharePoint installations.

On of the big change is happening on branding side. The very popular branding called ‘MOSS’ associated with SharePoint 2007 will no more be used for SharePoint 2010. The product will be called as ‘Microsoft SharePoint 2010’ instead of ‘Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010’.

Here are some of the major enhancements coming up:

End Users

Office Client Ribbon interface for in-place editing of SharePoint content on web
Silverlight web parts and finer control on site Themes.
Multiple Browser support – Internet Explorer, Firefox & Safari
Business Connectivity Services (BCS) as the evolution of BDC. These services can now be consumed from Office client apps also.
SharePoint Workspace (formerly called Groove): a smart client for SharePoint. Supports online, offline and Synchronization of data.

Technology Users

Streamlined Central Administration with Ribbon interface
SharePoint best practices analyzer: Rule based engine for monitoring and self-healing.
Resource Throttling controls: For large lists, a finer control on how many records can be displayed. This can be controlled per type of users and during particular time span of a day.
Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Tools: Designer for creating Web Parts visually and Business Connectivity Services Entities
Client Object Model(OM): Client side libraries which can be used by custom clients to interact with SharePoint data. These can be called from JavaScript, .NET or Silverlight apps.

SharePoint 2010 Preview website

Office 2010 : What a way to collect feedback

2009-07-22T11:36:00.002+05:30

Yes, I am one of the lucky ones who got invitation to try Technical Preview of Office 2010.

Office 2010 team has continued with a unique way of collecting feedback. Once you install preview , two icons get added to you task bar.

‘Send a Smile’ & ‘Send a Frown’

Whenever while using Office 2010, you want to give feedback good or bad just press one of the them and it takes the screen shot of current Office screen. It also pops up a feedback screen where additional details can be added.

I believe quite easy way for users to provide feedback instead of going to connect site or sending emails.

* What’s new in Office Outlook 2010

2009-07-21T20:57:00.001+05:30

The invitation only Technical Preview of Office 2010 is out and I am using it :-).

Here are few of the new stuff i could figure out in last 2 days of usage.

- All new animated colorful splash screen which even shows what’s going on in background.

- Notification in Taskbar showing Outlook is still closing. Very useful for people working with multiple profiles.

- Backstage View – reduce the pop-ups and provide all options to work on content created at one place. So it replaces File menu.

- Conversation View : This is one of the most important feature introduced. In your inbox now you can see mails grouped by conversation which includes mails from other folders like sent folder to give a unified view. It also indicates the relationship between received and sent mails.

Ribbon : Ribbon gets introduced in Outlook also now which was available earlier with word, excel & PowerPoint 2007.

Quick Steps : Aimed at increasing the productivity of frequently done tasks, it also to create shortcuts for such tasks.

Ignore : Ability to ignore a particular conversation which means any mail with the same subject will directly go to deleted items folder.

Meeting enhancements : Ability to see the preview of calendar in the meeting request received. Real time availability of people while setting up the meeting. Both of them very useful.

There are many more new features left to be explored. I am using Outlook 2010 with Exchange 2007. There must be few more new stuff once I start connecting to Exchange 2010.

* IE 8 adoption increasing

2009-07-21T14:09:00.000+05:30

Below are the stats of my Blog over last 4 months.

IE Legend:

March

April

May

June

* What’s new in Visio 2010 ?

2009-07-18T14:01:00.001+05:30

Office Fluent Interface including Ribbon which was available for Word, Excel & PowerPoint

Live Preview : another feature already available to other Office products

Auto size, align & adjust

Containers

Data graphics legends

Paste copied shapes with greater control

Paste shapes in the same location as the original page
Right-click to paste at the pointer location

Status bar navigation tools

Visio Services: Ability to host Visio diagrams in SharePoint and thus does not require clients to have Visio installed.
Process Management Tools:

Create complex processes and sub processes.
Validate process diagrams against rules
Integrate & host with MOSS workflows & SharePoint designer

New Diagram Types:

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) diagrams
Six Sigma diagrams
Wireframes

* Generating Microsoft Office Documents with the Open XML SDK

2009-07-02T00:15:00.001+05:30

Check out my latest article published on devx.com.

It’s about how to us Open XML sdk to generate Microsoft Office documents without VSTO or automation. Article is accompanied by code.

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/42221

* OCS 2007 R2 Trial : Urgent Fix

2009-06-13T09:41:00.001+05:30

Microsoft has just released the following Knowledge Base articles (KB972041, KB972042) to address the incorrect calculations of license expiration dates for Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2 and Office Communicator (OC) 2007 R2 Evaluation Edition. The current expiration dates were calculated based on build time, causing the OCS 2007 R2 and OC 2007 R2 Evaluation Edition to expire after June 13, 2009. By applying this fix, the expiration date will be correctly based on installation date of the server.
Office Communications Server 2007 R2
Office Communications 2007 R2

What’s new in XNA Game Studio 3.1

2009-06-13T09:38:00.001+05:30

XNA Game Studio 3.1 has been released and is available for download.

Its an incremental release on top of release 3.0. If you have version 3.0 already installed, you need to uninstall it.

XNA is a gaming runtime for Windows, XBOX and Zune platforms. XNA Game studio is a free Visual Studio extension to create games for XNA runtime using managed .net libraries and C#.

New features in XNA Game Studio 3.1 :

Avatars : three-dimensional animated characters which can be used on XBOX dashboard.
Xbox Live Party : Allows gamers to communicate with each other using voice chat even when they are not playing the same game or even if they are doing different things on their Xbox.
Play Videos : ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays.
Audio and content pipeline enhancements
Studio enhancements : v3.1 supports both v3.0 and v3.1 projects. tool to migrate v3.0 projects to v3.1. Support for XACT3.
Get more details on : What’s new in XNA Game Studio 3.1

* bing : reviews out

2009-05-29T21:24:00.001+05:30

Microsoft Bing: Much better than expected

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10251432-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Hands On With Microsoft’s New Search Engine: Bing, But No Boom

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/microsofts-bing-hides-its-best-features

* bing it !

2009-05-29T00:12:00.001+05:30

Microsoft has released the information about its new search engine or decision engine as Microsoft calls it.

It will be available worldwide by June 3 @ www.bing.com

Official Press Release : http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/may09/05-28NewSearchPR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases

Live Search Blog : http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2009/05/28/the-sound-of-found-bing.aspx

Virtual Earth Blog : http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2009/05/28/rebranding-microsoft-virtual-earth-to.aspx

MOSS 2007	SharePoint 2010
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007	SharePoint 2010

Helps organizations gain better control and insight over their content, streamline their business processes, and access and share information.	Business Collaboration platform for enterprise and web
Mostly on-premise	Deployed on-premise or as hosted service
Portal : Share content based on user’s profile Collaboration : Allows Teams to work together Content : Create and manage documents, records, and Web content Search : Quickly and easily find people, expertise, and content in business applications Business Intelligence : Make informed business decisions Business Process & Forms: Design business forms that are accessible directly in a Web browser and integrate them with databases or other business applications.	Sites : Share information seamlessly with employees, partners & customers Communities : Empower people to work together Content : Manage content lifecycle from creation to disposition Search : Find Information and People anywhere Insights : Make informed business decisions Composites : Rapidly create dynamic business solutions
Supports 32 and 64 bit platform	Supports only 64 bit platform for SharePoint and SQL Server
Office Clients provided some out-of-box integration	Smart client – SharePoint workspace with all features
No client APIs for integration with LOB apps	Client APIs will be available
Single browser support	Multi browser support – IE, Firefox, Safari.
Excel Services	Excel & Visio Services