Wictor Wilen

Finally the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is available at Microsoft Downloads but still no SharePoint 2007 on MSDN.

When writing blog posts I once in a while link to classes and methods in the MSDN Library. So why not simplify this job a bit by writing yet another Windows Live Writer plugin - MSDN Locator plugin for Windows Live Writer. The plugin allows you to search for a class, namespace, method or property using the full name and then inserts a link tag with a description (title attribute).

This is a question that I have asked myself, collegaues and clients now for a while. Next week Vista will be available on MSDN Subscriptions and TechNet and I guess that everyone will be there to download it - me too! I have been running the different betas and release candidates for a while and have waited long for this RTM. I will not install it on my main work laptop, since I have to use Visual Studio.NET 2003 for a while more, and there are no support for Vista and VS.NET 2003. Vista will instead be installed on a Virtual PC so I can test it there. If I get the time I will do the opposite; XP on a Virtual PC with and Vista as host.

After downloading the latest bits of the Office 2007 RTM ISO’s it was time to install it. There are no changes in the installation as I can see at first sight from the latest beta, everything worked fine and smooth and was without much interaction, just the serial key and some optional customization and then about 10 minutes of waiting and I was up and running. Before installing make sure that you remove all betas and updates to them including any add-ins such as the Save as PDF or XPS , otherwise the setup will exit.

Office 2007 is now available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads and on TechNet, after a weekend of updates on the sites. Vista is not yet ready for download, but Maria Johansson says it will be available by Friday the 17th.

The MSDN Subscriber Downloads site will be unavailable this friday “…from 7:00PM to 9:00PM Pacific time on Friday, November 10, 2006,for planned maintenance and upgrades. Both downloads and product keys will be unavailable…” I guess that they are making an update to handle the heavy download request for all the RTM:ed products this week such as Office System 2007 and Vista.

A few months ago I saw a video from Microsoft Live Labs in which they presented something called Photosynth; an advanced image collection viewer that combined the images into a 3D view in which you could zoom in and out and walk around it. I really loved the application I saw as a demo. Today the team behind Photosynth announced a Technology Preview of the application as an ActiveX control which works really nice!

Aaron Brethorst, Program Manager for the Visual Studio - IDE team informed me about a new article on MSDN that explains the Visual Studio Support on Windows Vista. The FAQ contains good answers to the common questions on why there is no Visual Studio.NET 2003 support and how to run Visual Studio 2005 with elevated privileges. There are several questions and workarounds worth reading. I’m still considering wating for the non-beta version of the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 before migrating to Windows Vista.

“It’s time!”, says it all from Jim Allchin. The long wait is over for Windows Vista.