Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Renaud Comte posts:

GuiSmigrate.exe
This is a little graphical interface for the sMigrate.exe tools.It will help you in the process of back up/ restore , Package / deploy and STS migration more easily.This little tools allow you to process any operation with the sMigrate woth not a command line to write. There is some options too : you can export

• a .bat file
• a log file

You just have to modify the .config file with the Url of your Smigrate.exe. Download here

Nice work!

There will be a TechNet Evening session organized by Microsoft, on the 3rd of March in the NH Hotel (Diegem, Belgium) about SharePoint Customization & Development. Patrick, Yves and myself will show some really cool stuff you can do with SharePoint, so if you're interested in SharePoint, please join us (register here)!

Speakers:

• Yves Kerwyn, Technology & Solutions Advisor from Microsoft Belgium
• Jan Tielens, Software Architect from Ordina Euregio
• Patrick Tisseghem, managing partner from U2U

During this TechNet Evening 3 speakers will cover 3 topics in 2 hours. The first topic is about customizing SharePoint solutions with Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003, which will be delivered by Yves Kerwyn, Senior Technology & Solutions Advisor at Microsoft Belgium. After this part Jan Tielens, Software Architect at Ordina Euregio, will talk about building professional web parts covering the SharePoint Object Model. To conclude this TechNet Evening session, Patrick Tisseghem (managing partner at U2U) will discuss developing workflow applications with custom approval routes & InfoPath forms processing.

UPDATE: http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2004/03/11/88118.aspx

Since releasing my previous “essential” webparts (Navigation, MyAlerts & Breadcrumbs) I'm really into extending SharePoint. I've always wanted to create a webpart that would display the contents of an RSS feed and this weekend I finally found some time! So here it is: the Leadit RSSReader webpart. I know Tim Heuer has already created such a webpart, but as a developer it's always cooler to be able to use your own bits.

I've tried to make this webpart as flexible as possible, you can change following properties:

• Feed URL: of course :-)
• Number of posts to show
• Cache duration
• Show post contents
• Post title in bold (useful when showing the post contents)
• Show post date
• Post icon URL (if no URL is set, no icon will be displayed)
• Show feed title
• Show copyright (if one is available in the feed it's shown below the posts, if the feed has a link to an image, that image is shown too)

The easiest way to use this webpart is to put the Leadit.SharePoint.RSSReader.dll in the GAC (it needs some privileges to read the feed) and the DWP file in the \wpcatalog directory. To mark the assemnbly as safe put the following line in the SafeControls section of the Web.Config: <SafeControl Assembly="Leadit.SharePoint.RSSReader, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=86680f0f768d39e0" Namespace="Leadit.SharePoint" TypeName="*" Safe="True" />.

Downloads:

• Leadit.SharePoint.RSSReader_1_0_0_0.zip
• Leadit.SharePoint.RSSReader_1_0_0_0_Src.zip

As always: please test this webpart first before you use it in a production site, I'm not responsible for bad things that could happen... :-) Btw, for all the Belgian people intrested in customizing SharePoint: keep the 3th of March free in your agenda (evening), I'll post more details as soon as they become available.

Patrick was right: InfoPath 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP-1) Preview can now be downloaded.

Normally I don't re-post messages especially if another Belgian blogger has posted it already. But his time I've got to make an exception: Patrick has a scoop: there is an update coming for InfoPath!

On February 23rd, Microsoft Corp. will unveil a special preview of updates that will be added to Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003, as part of the Office Service pack scheduled for relase in June. Some of the most important enhancements are :

• Increased support for digital signatures 
• Enhanced document recovery 
• Additional handwriting support for tablet users 
• Multiple enhancements to the programming environment (Visual Studio .NET toolkit) YES!
• Technical updates: Thanks to the error-reporting customer-feedback technology, some fixes are included

Keep an eye on Patrick's blog to stay up-to-date.

Update: updated list here.

Probably this trick is known already by most of the BizTalk users, but I had to search some time to figure it out (blush). Probably every demo of BizTalk 2004 you'll see uses a Send File Port that sends messages to a directory and most of the time these files will have a GUID as a filename, so each message sent will have a different name. No big deal you'd think, but I was actually looking for how to give these files such a name! The solution is to use “macros” in the URI property of the Sender Port, kinda strange name I think but it works. :-) So the URI property could look like “c:\temp\out\%MessageID%.xml“. Everything between the percentage signs (including themselves) will be replaced by the GUID which is of course unique.

From the docs: The files in which the files send handler writes messages can be created dynamically using a predefined set of macros. Before creating a file on file system, the files send handler substitutes all the macros in file name with their individual values. Several different macros can be used in one file name. The file name macros can be used while configuring the file send handler in BizTalk Explorer, or using the Explorer object model.

• %MessageID%
  Unique identifier of the message in BizTalk Server (GUID). The value is taken directly from message context property BTS.MessageID
• %datetime_bts2000%
  UTC date time in format YYYYMMDDhhmmsss, where sss means seconds and milliseconds (e.g. 199707121035234 means 1997/07/12, 10:35:23 and 400 milliseconds)
• %datetime%
  UTC date time in format YYYY-MM-DDThhmmss (e.g. 1997-07-12T103508)
• %datetime.tz%
  Local date time + time zone from GMT in format YYYY-MM-DDThhmmssTZD, (e.g. 1997-07-12T103508+800)
• %time%
  UTC time in format hhmmss
• %time.tz%
  Local time + time zone from GMT in format hhmmssTZD (e.g. 124525+530)

Update (thanks to Mike's comments): %SourceFileName% (it's case sensitive): name of the file that was received by the receive port.

Normally I don't react if some political party evangilises a stupid idea, but this time they've made me angry. It started with the following article on ZDNet.be: Sp.a heeft kritiek op Microsoft-aankoop door dienst Financiën. It turns out the Belgian government will buy 8.000 pc's equipped with Microsoft software. No big deal, but there is a political party that doesn't like this. No problem, everybody has the right to have an opinion (even if I don't like it). But the SP-A (= the political party) uses some arguments in their statement that are completely wrong (I only mention two of them):

• easier software development
  Who says developing for Linux is easier? Come on!
• more opportunities for Belgian ISV's
  What's the difference: you buy Microsoft products or you buy open source products, they both need to be implemented. Right?

On the site of another Belgian party (partner of SP-A), Spirit, you can view the famous video of Bill Gates and “the pie“ while visiting Belgium. Spirt why are you doing this? I think political parties can not promote such behavior! There is also a petition against Microsoft, check out the name of the html page: microsuck.htm. Who created this, some teenagers or some serious adults: I really don't know.

I'm really pissed off, this calls for action. I don't know how, but I do know that I will react. Maybe a petition in favor of the “freedom to innovate”, maybe an open letter, ... ? If you have any ideas drop me a line...

It seems that I'm not the only one thinking about scenarios where you have to upgrade Web Parts that are in use. Ian Morrish points in Tariq's post to a MSDN article that covers this topic:

Upgrading a Web Part Assembly for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies
Summary: Upgrade a Web Part assembly for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, including adding, deleting, renaming, repurposing, or upgrading properties for a Web Part.

By the way, Ian has a great site with a lot of information about SharePoint: WSS Faq. Another great site this time by Stephen Cummins: SPS Faq.

(Day One: click here)

As you I already told: day one ended in a cafe named Pallieter. After a “few beers” we headed for our hotel (in fact it was already day two, that's why I mention it again ;-). The second day of this event started with a keynote by David Chappell: "The Road to Longhorn". David is a very entertaining speaker, check out David Cumps' picture and you'll get the point. I think all presenters of the second day made an arrangement to mention at least 5 times per presentation “use managed code” in some way. In fact that was one of David's main messages: if you want to be able to migrate to Longhorn: use managed code.

Lester Madden is also a funny guy and that day he was one of the happiest persons in Belgium because it was it's last presentation in a long series. His talk about “The Longhorn User Experience” was amusing and intresting: he showed already the worst user interface you can make in XAML: a lot of colors, styles and animation (because of the Happy Hour in the Pallieter, I didn't like that demo: all the moving and rotating stuff...). And I agree with him; the Microsoft Office team probably won't hire him as a UI Designer. But the bottom line was: use managed code and Windows.Forms will still work with Longhorn.

The next person on stage was Clemens Vasters, who talked about “Indigo: The Longhorn Communications Architecture”. I've already heard a lot about Indigo, but during this presentation I finally had the famous Aha-Erlebnis. Thanks Clemens, you did a great job! Afterwards there was a private meeting organized by Gerd with both Clemens and David Chappell about SOA. I followed the entertaining discussion and at some point David mentioned that there's a paper discussing the ROI (2 years) of SOA in an EAI project. Like Patrick V I'm still looking for that document, as soon as I can get a hold of it, I'll post a link.

The last session of this event was “Whidbey: Get Ready For Longhorn” by Nigel Watling. Nigel showed off all the new cool stuff comming in Whidbey. Too bad he had a little problem with his Yukon server...

Conclusion

First of all congratulations to Gerd and his team that organised this event: thanks a lot! Secondly thanks to Alain for the invitation!

I liked the Dev & IT-Pro Days for mainly two reasons:

• Great content: there were a lot of intresting sessions not only about what's comming in the next years, but also about what's hot and new right now.
• Great people: it was both fun and intresting to meet again with the Belgian .NET Community. I'm looking forward to see you again at another event.

I know it's a little bit late, it's already a week ago: Microsoft Developer & IT Pro Days 2004. It seems that everybody has already blogged the cool stuff (thanks Tom for the list), the Belgian .NET world is really starting to blog, I like that:

• David Cumps, it's a pitty I haven't met him, I've only met him “virtually“.
• Tom van de Kerkhof, Tom has a strange picture of me, was it on the DevDays or somewhere else? :-)
• Patrick Verbruggen, I met Patrick at the BENUG booth and he had some good news for his company.
• Tom Mertens, I haven't seen his presentation (sorry Tom), but I was told it was good.
• I've met Bart De Smet, but he hasn't blogged about it (yet).
• As always Patrick Tisseghem was there too to evangelize SharePoint and Office, but he hasn't blogged about this event (yet).

The day started quite early, I had to leave (together with Tom vdK and Raf) around 5:30 am to get in Ghent on time. Luckily there wasn't much traffic so everything went fine. The introduction of Bruno Segers (General Manager, Microsoft Belux) was short but funny, I remember two things: 1) developers are from another planet (that explains a lot!) 2) Microsoft promotes the replacement of waitresses by robots running on the .NET Framework (it was a cool demo, but I don't know if I'm in favor of that).

Then Steve Riley talked about Innovation through Integration and of course security. Steve's a really good and amusing speaker, but I agree with Patrick's remarks: the ActiveX Security Warning is not good enough for “normal” users. It will get better in SP2 for developers and IT-Pro's who know what's going on, but this won't help the Information Worker.

After a short break I attended Ingo Rammer's session about “Building Extensible Applications using Attributes, Reflection and Code Generation”. Although it was a level 300 session, I was a little bit disappointed: nothing really new. During the lunch David Boschmans talked about “Build .NET applications to last” besides Hippo.NET, David also mentioned some cool tools of his own company: Compuware.

Astrid Hackenberg presented a very good session  about “SQL Server Reporting Services Uncovered”. Although it was “only level 200”, Astrid showed some impressive features of the product that's already available for a few weeks. Only one small problem: there are no report viewers yet to include in your Windows.Forms applications. :-( But of course there are some alternatives, make sure to read this one by Bryan Keller.

Then it was again Ingo Rammer who talked about “Web Services Wizardry with Web Services Extensions”. I think Ingo has done a really good job on this one: good content and a good message: Indigo will have a bunch of features that WSE brings you today, but be aware that if you use WSE the migration from web services to Indigo won't go as smooth as using default web services.

The last session of that day was brought by Patrick Tisseghem: “Communication & Collaboration: a developer's overview”. As always Patrick showed a lot of demos, and I actually learned something completly new for me: the Research Library of Office 2003. I always thought it was only something annyoing feature to quickly lookup something in Encarta if you've got it installed. But there's a complete extensibility model behind that feature, so you can easily provide your own information when a user uses Research.

The closing keynote was introduced by Gerd De Bruycker, he showed some videos of Longhorn: impressive and fun. Steve Riley finished off, it was a pitty there was quite some noise in the room. The Geek Fest following the closing keynote was a little bit disappointing: a lot of people left really early, guess there aren't a lot of real geeks in Belgium. Luckily our hotel was quite close to center of Ghent, so we went with a bunch of other guys (and a girl!) to a cafe called Pallieter. For more “information” about this side-event, check out this thread on the MS Belux Forums: it was great!

(Day two coverage click here)