Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Fresh new goodies on the Microsoft Download site:

• Windows SharePoint Services V3 Starter Kit: Workflow Developer Starter Kit for Windows SharePoint Services V3
  The Workflow Developer Starter Kit for Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services V3 (Beta 2) contains Microsoft® Visual Studio® project templates for workflow in Windows SharePoint Services V3 (Beta 2) and a sample custom workflow.
• Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Update: InfoPath 2007 Beta Support
  With this update to the Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio 2005 as included in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 for the Microsoft Office System, you can develop InfoPath 2007 forms inside Visual Studio.
• Outlook 2007 Add-Ins: RulesAddin, TravelAgencyAddin, and PrepareMeAddin
  The three sample add-ins provided in this download are available in both C# and Visual Basic .NET versions. They demonstrate many of the new and enhanced features of the Outlook object model.

Sure the 2007 Microsoft Office System looks very sexy, but I know lots of people who are quite hesitant to install it on the machine that they use during their everyday life (and they are probably right). So you’d like to try out the beta bits without messing up your main operating system and without the hassle to install and configure the server components, this is for you:

2007 Microsoft Office System Beta 2 Test Drive

Take the 2007 Microsoft Office release out for a test drive!

You are just a few clicks away from a free online test drive of the latest version of Microsoft Office programs. Take them out for a spin in this quick, easy-to-use, browser-based trial experience.

The real-time test drive does not require product installation or download—it's the fastest way to try out 2007 Microsoft Office system programs. In just minutes you can start exploring Microsoft Office through your Web browser on your own, or follow the step-by-step tutorials to experience all of its useful features.

Experience how the 2007 Microsoft Office system can help you better manage documents, organize your workload, and collaborate with coworkers—not just from your desk, but from almost anywhere. With the test drive you can try out the latest improvements to familiar Microsoft Office applications and use sample data that you can edit, send by e-mail, and post to Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies sites in real time.

One of the more common things to customize in SharePoint 2003 (both WSS and SPS) are the pages that display lists or document libraries. Users end up on those pages when they click on the list/document library in the Quick Launch, or on the web part title that’s displaying the list/document library data. Those pages can be customized but you need to build your own site definition or you need to use FrontPage.

The good news is that in SharePoint 2007 (both MOSS and WSSv3) those pages are editable from within the web user interface. Just navigate to the page and click Edit Page in the Site Actions menu.

Once you are in edit mode you can customize the page by adding web parts to it. Or you can choose to edit the web part that is displaying the list/document library data!

I’ve been running Beta 2 of the 2007 Microsoft Office System on my main laptop for a couple of weeks. At first I was a little bit hesitant to install the Beta of my main machine since I actually need to get some real work done as well (sometimes I feel like a real Information Worker!). But so far I only experienced some minor glitches, so I can uninstall the old, trustworthy Office 2003 bits from my machine (I went for the side-by-side installation of Office 2007). Some of my colleagues are running Vista Beta2 as their main operating system but I didn’t dare to do that yet. But those guys have the really slick looking black/gray UI in Office 2007, old-fashioned people (like me) have the blue UI.

Last week I discovered that you enable the Vista look in Office 2007 even if you are running on Windows XP! You can go to the Word options window (or Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, … doesn’t matter since it’s a global setting) and in the Personalize section select the Windows Vista (gray) color scheme.

Tadaa, the complete Office suite will now run with the Vista color scheme! The screen shot below is Word 2007 but all the other client applications will use the color scheme. You won’t get of course the nifty transparency effects, but the gray UI looks great also on the WinXP Silver color scheme.

Update: for the people that can't find the options in Word: Mike posted the solution in the comments:
For those like me who couldn't find it, Word Options is ...
- Click on the icon at the top-left of the screen (left of the diskette icon - the pop-up says "File") 
- Word Options is at the bottom !

This week we had the pleasure to organize a first Train-the-Trainers (TTT) course on the 2007 Microsoft Office System at U2U in Brussels. It was a very international group; 18 passionate trainers coming from all over the world: Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Chechia, Russia, Litva, Marocco. Of course we took the opportunity to show them the touristic side of Brussels as well and let them enjoy some Belgian beers. You can see some pictures over here (scroll down to "Office Development and SharePoint 2007 Train-The-Trainer at U2U"). It was great teaching you guys, and I want to wish you all the luck for your trainings!

Sometimes a very small feature in SharePoint 2007 can mean a big relief for SharePoint users. Do you know the “pain” to add a user to a SharePoint site for example: you need to know the exact account name or the email address. One small typing mistakes will result in an unrecognized user. In the next version of SharePoint this scenario is drastically improved, and resembles a lot the experience that you get in Outlook.

First of all SharePoint will actually tell you if you have entered a correct user name. When the name is recognized it will get underlined just like in Outlook. You can trigger this recognition process by clicking the Check Names icon (left one) or you can use the Outlook shortcut CTRL+K.

That’s already nice, but what happens when you enter only a part of a user name can’t be recognized because more than one user names matches? You’re text will be underlined with a red line.

That’s not everything, if you click on the red line you will get a context menu that will allow you to select a user account from the list that’s recognized.

And if that’s not enough, you can also use the Browse icon to get a full blown people and group dialog box. This functionally is available for all the fields in SharePoint in which you need to enter a user name. Besides that you can also use this in your own lists and document libraries when you create a new column and use the column type Person or Group.

One of the more popular quirk in SharePoint 2003 (remember the YASQ’s?) was the alerting mechanism. The alerts in SharePoint 2003 are OK at first sight: you can create an alert for a complete list or document library, or just for one item. The problem is that you can only create an alert for yourself. This makes sense if you think of alerts as ‘RSS-avant-la-lettre’. But lots of people would like to create alerts for other users as well. Unfortunately this was not available out-of-the-box, although you could customize SharePoint by installing various (free) web parts to overcome this issue.

Recently I discovered that this YASQ has become a YASR (Yet Another SharePoint Relief): in SharePoint 2007 you can create alerts for other users! Just navigate to a list or document library, and from the Actions menu choose the Alert Me item.

On the New Alert page you can specify the details about the alert: title, type and destination. The new (and exciting) thing is here that you can enter multiple user accounts to which the alert should be sent.

Further down on the page there are more innovations. In SharePoint 2007 you can create an alert which is based on a specific view which opens quite some interesting possibilities. Finally you can still choose the interval to sent the alert (immediate, daily and weekly). New here is when you select the daily or weekly summary that you can specify the exact time when the alert should be sent (e.g. a daily summary at 7.00 am in the morning).

So are alerts perfect in the release? I think there’s still some room for improvements: when you create an alert for multiple users actually multiple alerts are created. This is a disadvantage when you would like to delete or update the alert that you’ve created for multiple users at the same time (you can’t push forward those changes). And finally it’s not (yet?) possible to create an alert for all the content of a site. But don’t get me wrong, I still consider this as a major YASR!

Probably you already know that you can write/manage blog posts from within Word 2007, when the feature was announced it was all over the blogosphere. Indeed, it’s quite cool! If your blog host is webhost.asp.net and you’d like to blog from Word 2007, this is what you need to do:

1. Open up Word 2007, start typing some text (e.g. ‘Hello from Word 2007’ would be great).
2. From the File menu, choose Publish, Blog.
3. When prompted to Register a Blog Account (you get this dialog when no accounts are created yet), click Register Now.
4. Choose Community Server as the blog provider. Btw, if you’re running Windows SharePoint Services v3 or SharePoint Server 2007, you can also publish SharePoint sites!
5. Finally you need to enter the server account settings. You can use the username and password you use to log in to your blog at weblogs.asp.net. the Blog Post URL is http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/metablog.ashx. If you have a location to which you can publish pictures (e.g. FTP, SharePoint Document Library) you can enable automatic uploading. I’m using a Windows SharePoint Services v2 Document Library on a public WSS site for that, and it works great! When you are done, click the OK button and you’ll get a message telling you the account registration was succesful.
6. Word will open another window in which you can specify the title of the post, categories etc. Finally you can click the Publish button in the ribbon.

Since a month or so I’m using a Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc as my main laptop (replacing my ‘old’ HP NX9110). At first sight I was quite pleased with the machine: nice big screen with a high resolution, good CPU power and not too heavy. Since this is my first tablet, this ‘coolness’ factor is of course also playing a role! Later on I got to know the not-so-nice features of this machine: battery life is not that great (2h) and sometimes it seems that the machine is going to take off. When the CPU usage bumps (even very short) the fan reacts immediately causing some very loud noise. When you’re in a VPC the noise is almost always there.

After reading some forum posts of people who had the same issues, I discovered a post that mentioned a tool that can lower the voltage of modern CPU’s: RightMark Clock Utility. Apparently many CPU’s can run with a lower voltage than set by default which of course lowers the produced heat and power consumption. Probably this tool is fantastic if you get the hang of it, but I spent an hour or so playing with the (many) settings and I didn’t get any result (probably due to my lack of knowledge in this area). When I was looking for some tutorials I discovered another tool that can do the same thing: Notebook Hardware Control. I installed this tool and I got it working in a couple of minutes, I decreased the CPU voltage a couple of levels, without decreasing the CPU clock frequency or the CPU's performance! The UI is more basic than the other tool (less settings) so even I could configure it. The result: the decrease of the produced noise of the Tecra M4 is quite dramatic, I haven’t heard the fan running on the highest speed ever since. The heat produced is a lot less (going from 80 to 90 degrees Celcius to 40 to 50) and the battery life has increased by 20 to 30 minutes. Thank you very much Notebook Hardware Control! There’s a free version and a commercial license (which allows the tool to run as a service) and it’s written in .NET 2.0, can I get any better?

Some of my colleagues at U2U also tried it on their tablets and now they owe me a beer (or two). Peter tried it on Vista Beta 2 running on a Tecra M4, and it works great on Vista as well. So for all of you who want to cool down and silence their laptops: give it a try.

Mmm, now that everybody is used to the (pretty cool) WinFX name, we have to learn to say the .NET Framework 3.0. One of the reasons for this name change that's mentioned is to avoid confusion... Now I'm confused! Will there be a new .NET CLR as well, or is the CLR of .NET 3.0 the same as .NET 2.0? Read the details at Somasegar's blog:

When speaking to developers about WinFX one question that repeatedly comes up is, “WinFX sounds great, but what happens to .NET?” .NET Framework has becomes the most successful developer platform in the world.  Developers know and love .NET.

The .NET Framework has always been at the core of WinFX, but the WinFX brand didn’t convey this.  The WinFX brand helped us introduce the incredible innovations in terms of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow (WF) and the newly christened Windows CardSpace (WCS) formerly known under the codename “InfoCard.”  The brand also created an unnatural discontinuity between previous versions of our framework and the current version.

With this in mind we have decided to rename WinFX to the .NET Framework 3.0.  .NET Framework 3.0 aptly identifies the technology for exactly what it is – the next version of our developer framework.