Wictor Wilen

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.