Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Did you ever wonder what technology you should use to create your Office smart client application? Today we have a lot of technologies and tools to choose from (I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing ;-): InfoPath, Visual Studio.NET, VSTO 2003/2005, IBF, Access Developer Extensions, Smart Documents, Smart Tags, ... Today an article was published on MSDN that tries to give an overview of these technologies and has some guidelines which technology to use, you can read it here.

By the way, Microsoft Belux is organizing two sessions that will cover some of these technologies:

• XML and Custom XML Support In Microsoft Office 2003, Yves Kerwyn, October 6th
• Customizing Collaborative Solutions with InfoPath 2003 SP1 and Windows SharePoint Services, Yves Kerwyn, October 27th

See you there!

There's a fix for a known problem in IBF, get it here.

"In Microsoft Office Information Bridge Framework Server 1.0 there is a bug that prevents the sequential execution of operation instances that call an assembly when the location is specified as a URL in the port such as http://server/assembly.dll. The first operation instance call is successful, but subsequent operation instance calls fail. This does not impact operation instances whose path in the port is specified with a UNC path. This update provides a fix for this bug."

By the way, if you want to know what will be in the next version of IBF (version 1.5), check out Patrick's blog entry. I've seen some 1.5 stuff too, it looks pretty cool! Expect a lot of wizards and templates that will create VS.NET projects for you, based on the meta data. Additionally the IBF task pane will be available in InfoPath and Internet Explorer.

That’s right, tomorrow I’ll start my new job at U2U! I’ll will be working on Information Worker technologies together with the famous Patrick Tisseghem (actually Patrick already blogged about it). I’m very excited and it promises to be a great job! For those of you who don’t know U2U: it’s a “Competence Center for .NET Software Development. Above all, U2U is a Competence Center for Software Developers. But U2U is also an official Microsoft Partner and a Microsoft Certified Technical Education Center. And that’s not the end of the story; there’s more to it. The numerous Microsoft official trainings we offer are only the tip of the iceberg, and fit in with a larger aspiration. As a competence center, we first of all want to be the epicenter of pioneering work in software development. Furthermore, U2U is a meeting place for developers who want to keep track of the latest technologies. At U2U, you’ll find the solutions to your development problems of today,and you’ll prepare for tomorrow.”

I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the people who made this possible. Also I’d like to thank all my colleagues I’ve been working with the past 3 years. It’s a small world so I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing each other quite often!

Tom van de Kerkhof has updated his treeview webpart for SharePoint. It uses the SmartPart webpart, to display a user control in a webpart. It's a nice example how the SmartPart can be used to create SharePoint webparts by using ASP.NET user controls. Nice work Tom!

Get it here!

Some great news for the people of Belgium and The Netherlands: SP2 is available in Dutch! Download here.

If you're updating only one PC, don't download the complete package but follow these instructions: "DO NOT CLICK DOWNLOAD IF YOU ARE UPDATING JUST ONE COMPUTER: A smaller, more appropriate download is now available on Windows Update. The best way to ensure you get Windows XP Service Pack 2 is by turning on the Automatic Updates feature in Windows XP today. You can use our step-by-step instructions or, if you prefer, let us do it for you. "

I didn't know they were comming!

• Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 1
• SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Serivce Pack 1

The KB Articles describing what's in the Service Packs are not yet online, so I'm very curious!

UPDATE: The KB Article for Windows SharePoint Services is published here.