Wictor Wilen

How to get Remote Debugging work properly

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.

SharePoint

SharePoint, Vista and Office 2007 security problems solved

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.

Office Open XML

Office Open Xml Links - 5 December 2007

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:

.NET

Architecture Journal Reader - a great WPF demo

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.

.NET

Downloading Visual Studio 2008 RTM

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…

Microsoft

Future Windows suggestions

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:

Microsoft

TechNet Edge

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

Microsoft Search Server 2008

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.

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer released!

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!

Microsoft

What is the Digital Locker?

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.