Wictor Wilen

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.