Jan Tielens' Bloggings

The Oscar for the best web part goes to ...

Who will be the successor of the SmartPart (last year's winner)? Visit Maurice's blog to nominate your favourite web part of 2005:
It's that time of the year... it's time to nominate your favorite Web Part of 2005!!

So who will win the ever prestigious Pawprint Award for Favorite WebPart for the past year? 

Will it be Content Editor Web Part via Todd Bleeker's series of posts on how to change things around using a stock part and javascript? Perhaps it's one of the commercial WebParts that came to market? Will it be the Son of SmartPart?  How about one of the many community-inspired WebParts?  Or Steen Molberg's Blogparts v1.0 - yes, v1.1 was recently released but it can't be eligible for a 2005 award. :)

[Via Mart] Here’s some news for all my Dutch readers (I do have some, right?): there is an equivalent of the BIWUG (Belgian Information Worker User Group) in the Netherlands, the DIWUG (Dutch Information Worker User Group). Nice name guys! :-P Lately I’m spending quite some time in the Netherlands (I’m leaving tomorrow for Amsterdam), so maybe I can join you guys during a meeting!

Welcome to the Dutch Information Worker User Group (DIWUG) website. DIWUG is a platform for people that are interested in Information Worker solutions. Several times a year, DIWUG organizes an event where members can meet, share knowledge and see interesting presentations in an informal setting. If you would like to join us or receive more information about our activities, please subscribe for the next event, or contact us by email . (www.diwug.nl)

Another intresting download: Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System (VSTO 2005) Redistributable Package (x86)

VSTO 2005 is the technology that brings the power and productivity of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework to business solutions built on Microsoft Word 2003, Microsoft Outlook 2003, Microsoft Excel 2003 or Microsoft InfoPath 2003. Download here

There's a new version of the Windows SharePoint Services Administrator's Guide available for download (since 1/20/2006). Download here.

Version 1.8
This version of the Administrator's Guide includes updates about using Windows SharePoint Services with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft Windows Server R2. The following topics are new:

• Installing and Configuring ASP.NET
• Migrating from WMSDE to SQL Server 2005ces

Ladies and gentlemen (living in or near Belgium and the Netherlands): mark your agendas!

• Developer & IT-Pro Days (Brussels, Belgium): 7 & 8 March 2006
  Improve your technical skills on Microsoft's current products and technologies.Prepare for the next generation of applications and systems.
  Receive a technical drill-down on building, deploying, securing and managing solutions that can solve your real-world problems. Join "The Connected Generation" today and experience tomorrow before it arrives. Find out all there is to know at Microsoft’s Developer & IT Pro Days 2006.
• Developer Days (Amsterdam, The Netherlands): 7 & 8 March 2006
  Op 7 en 8 maart 2006 organiseert Microsoft de jaarlijkse Microsoft DevDays. De Microsoft DevDays zijn het grootste evenement voor ontwikkelaars, softwarearchitecten, software-engineers, webontwikkelaars en decision makers op het gebied van softwareontwikkeling en -architectuur. Vooraanstaande sprekers introduceren nieuwe Microsoft-producten en praten u bij over de richting die het Microsoft-ontwikkelplatform inslaat.

I’ll be speaking at both events about Windows SharePoint Service “v3”. Details about the content of my sessions will follow soon. It will be so cool to show off all of the new stuff in public. See you all there!

Hey, I just noticed that the SharePoint team now has a blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint. Subscribed. Let’s hope the public beta of Office “12” will be coming really soon so normal earthlings can blog about the latest and greatest as well!

By the way, I'm wondering why they didn't used the blog template in WSS v3 to host the blog... :-)

For all the Office "12" Beta testers out there who want to build a nice demo VPC image to show off all the new features: Martin has written a nice step-by-step guide.

Installing Office Server “12” Beta 1 on a single machine (either physical or virtual) is not entirely straight forward and having done it many times, there is a specific process that I go through which always works. In this article, I’ll share what works for me – hopefully it will work for you too!

Please bear in mind that this is just an unofficial guide to getting Office Server installed quickly and easily in a demo / test environment. This guide will not necessarily observe best practices with regard to security etc. For production setups, you should seek guidance from the official Microsoft documentation (on Betaplace). (full post)

If you are interested to test drive the new Windows Live Messenger (aka MSN Messenger 8.0, lots of info on the team blog), drop your email address in the comments of this post. The first three comments with an email address in it will receive an invite. The only thing that I'm really excited about is the fact that you can make phone calls to normal telephone lines (VOIP). My first tests are quite positive, the sounds quality is comparable to Skype (maybe even better). It's not that I don't like Skype, but I want to keep my task bar clean. :-) The only reason that I'm not uninstalling Skype already is that fact that Skype runs perfectly behind almost any firewall (a must-have-feature if you want to phone home from a hotel room). Next week I'll be in Porto for a VS 2005 Touchdown Training, so it will be a nice test!

EDIT: At this point there were more than 200 requests, so they are all sold out!

If you have some spare time I recommend to watch the keynote of Bill Gates at the CES 2006; quite entertaining if you are interested to know how our digital life will evolve in the digital decade. The most humoristic part was were Bill Gates knocked out Steve Ballmer in a boxing game! (view that part only over here)

During the keynote a lot of news regarding Windows Media Center Edition has been announced. Check out Charlie Owen’s post for a wrap-up. My Media Center totally changed the way I watch TV: I hardly watch live TV nowadays. I mark all the shows and movies that I may want to watch, and when I have time I select the ones that I want to watch at that very moment. Media Center also allows me to take a bunch of recorded movies with me when I’m on the road.

Charlie has even another very interesting post about how developers can write applications that integrate with Media Center. Three application types will be available: add-ins, hosted HTML applications and WinFX XAML Browser applications. The last one is in my opinion a much needed replacement for the hosted HTML applications that are already available on WinXP MCE 2005. During my Christmas holidays I’ve created a Flickr add-in for this platform, and I experienced that writing hosted HTML applications is not that great (lots of scripts and CSS to deal with). By the way, I’m totally into Flickr as well. It’s a great way to store your digital pictures (mine are over here). A pro account ($ 24.95/year) allows you to upload 2GB each month, there are no limits for space. And the best thing is that Flickr has an API, there’s even a .NET wrapper  (I’m using it in my MCE add-in). Robert Scoble was right, Microsoft should have bought Flickr, but Yahoo did. Maybe that’s why there are rumours that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo? :-)

2006 will be an exciting year!