Wictor Wilen

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.