Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Just like Patrick and Joris, I’ve upload my TechEd photos to my Flickr account, you can find them in this set. Btw, I’m really a big Flickr fan (I’ve got a Pro account) and the recently added geotagging features very cool. The thing that makes Flickr my preferred choice above SmugMug and others is that fact that they have an API. There’s even a .NET wrapper which I recently used to create a mash-up with Flickr and Microsoft Virtual Earth (more on that later if I can find some time to finish this pet project). Anyway, here are some of my favorites:

Thursday, November 16, 2006. Remember this day as the day that SharePoint 2007 was released! You can download Windows SharePoint Service 3.0 (WSSv3) from the Microsoft Download site (for free of course).

[Update] Required reading: the official announcement on the SharePoint Team blog. Joel posts the required product keys for the trial and links to several upgrade/installation guides.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Windows SharePoint Services is a versatile technology that organizations and business units of all sizes can use to increase the efficiency of business processes and improve team productivity. With tools for collaboration that help people stay connected across organizational and geographic boundaries, Windows SharePoint Services gives people access to information they need.

Built on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Windows SharePoint Services also provides a foundation platform for building Web-based business applications that can flex and scale easily to meet the changing and growing needs of your business. Robust administrative controls for managing storage and Web infrastructure give IT departments a cost-effective way to implement and manage a high-performance collaboration environment. With a familiar, Web-based interface and close integration with everyday tools including the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Windows SharePoint Server is easy to use and can be deployed rapidly.

[Update] more SharePoint related downloads:

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Pack
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 x64
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Pack x64
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Trial Version

I just got back from an extended week in Barcelona, so I don’t know how long this thing is already available but you can download the Office 2007 Client Applications from the MSDN Subscribers Downloads!

Welcome to Microsoft® Office Professional 2007, the suite of Microsoft Office system products designed with business professionals in mind. Office Professional 2007 helps business professionals save time and stay organized with powerful and easy-to-use tools for managing customer information and marketing activities, analyzing and reporting business information, and producing professional-quality communications.

• Office Professional 2007 includes the following Microsoft Office system programs:
• Microsoft Office Access 2007
• Microsoft Office Excel® 2007
• Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007
• Microsoft Office Publisher 2007
• Microsoft Office Word 2007

Let’s wait for the server components!

I just got back from a really cool Tech Ed session: OFF205 Office Developer 101: How to get started building Office 2007 solutions. Although the name doesn’t give it away, it also covered some SharePoint stuff. The first part of the session discussed some basic Office client development topics (Hello World ribbon buttons and custom Task Panes) but the interesting stuff was in the second part: Alexander Malek talked about the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services v3. It was released earlier today, see Alexanders post, and Joris’ (aka Jopx) post (he was sitting next to me in this session and told me it works for B2TR). (download link).

What was so cool about VS 2005 Extensions for WSS v3? Just a couple of things that made me very happy:

• There is a web part project template for Visual Studio 2005 that allows you to deploy and debug by pressing F5 (or the play button).
• There is a empty SharePoint project template which allows you to insert web parts, custom fields, list definitions, content types etc (and also allows you to deploy from within Visual Studio 2005).
• There is the SharePoint Solution Generator tool, which is my favorite! This tool allows you to generate Site Definitions for existing, customized SharePoint sites. So the scenario could go like this: create a site in SharePoint (through the web UI), add some stuff (lists, content types, web parts, …) and customize further in SharePoint Designer (even CSS). When you are happy with your site and you would like to deploy it in a more professional way than create a Site Template (STP). You can now fire up the SharePoint Solution Generator that allows you to select your site and it generates a complete Visual Studio project for you, that includes your custom Site Definition! It is really a Visual Studio project that uses the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for WSS v3 so you can add custom fields, lists, web parts etc. This is very, very cool!

I hope I can show the web part template in my session later on this week (DEV353 Building Web Parts the Smart Way ,Thu Nov 9 17:30 - 18:45) because it will be quite important in the web part world.

Perfect in line with the start of Tech Ed: Developers in Barcelona Spain: 2007 Microsoft Office System Is Golden. So the long awaited RTM versions should hit the MS Download site really soon now… :-)

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 6, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the completion of the 2007 Microsoft® Office system code and confirmed its release to manufacturing (RTM). This gold code milestone concludes the largest Microsoft Office beta program to date, with more than 3.5 million people downloading Beta 2. The unprecedented quantity of feedback from beta testers and customers helped the Office development team effectively validate product quality and optimize performance. Microsoft Office RTM also marks a critical step toward worldwide business availability of the 2007 Office system, Windows Vista™ operating system and Exchange Server 2007 on Nov. 30, 2006. To underscore the significance of this new day for business, Microsoft executives will participate in events around the globe, including an event with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in New York. General availability of the products will follow in early 2007.

Read the full press release over here.

I’m sitting here in room 119 were Patrick and Ted are doing the first part of their WSS Pre Conference session. So far Ted has been doing the speaking and Patrick has played the demo monkey (he’s really good at it!). Here are some pictures and a small movie of their performance.

Keep an eye on my Flickr stream (RSS) for more TechEd pictures. Here's the movie (thanks to MSN Soapbox):

TechEd: Developers 2006

What a coincidence: last week a student asked a question that I couldn’t answer straight away and probably at the same time somebody posted a blog post solving the question! The question was how to customize the edit form that you get when you create or edit a list item in a SharePoint 2007 list (EditForm.aspx). In SharePoint 2003 you could do this trick by editing the page in FrontPage 2003, when your right clicked on the control on the page you could actually break the control into different controls. Optimistically I tried to do the same thing in the SharePoint Designer, although the right click menu didn’t show to option that I was looking for (there went my street credibility for that course :-) ). Kristian Kalsing explains it on this blog post how this works in the 2007 world:

1. Open your site in SharePoint Designer.
2. Browse to your list and open the 'NewForm.aspx' web form.
3. Go File > Save As... and give the form a new name such as 'NewForm2.aspx'.
4. Delete the default List Form Web Part from the page.
5. Go Insert > SharePoint Controls > Custom List Form.
6. In the List or Document Library Form dialog, select the appropriate list, content type and type of form.
7. Click OK and a new Data Form Web Part is added with controls representing all the fields from the list (in my environment all the controls show "Error Rendering Control" but this does not affect the final result).
8. In the newly added Data Form Web Part, delete the rows containing fields not to be shown to the user (ensure that fields being removed are not required fields without default values as this would prevent the user from submitting the form).
9. At this point, you can do other customisation such as rearranging the fields if you wish.
10. Save the site.

Last week I did a Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 Course at the Microsoft Portugal Campus in Lisbon. The training room was pretty crowded: more than 30 enthusiastic students! Even though it was a public holiday on Wednesday in Portugal (and in Belgium) everybody showed up, thanks everybody! Anyway there were some avid readers (even some fans!) of my blog that asked to post some pictures of the course. So here they are! Kudos go to everybody that was involved: it was a great week!

Yesterday evening I arrived with my pal Patrick in the beautiful city of Barcelona for Microsoft Tech Ed: Developers. The complete U2U team will be present and we will have a boot as well. Make sure to drop by to say hi, and maybe get one of the beloved U2U goodies (say that Jan sent you).

On Thursday I’ll have a session together with Patrick about web parts:
DEV353 Building Web Parts the Smart Way (Thu Nov 9 17:30 - 18:45)
In this session, Web developers will get a wide but deep overview of Web Part development. You will first see how WSS v2 style Web Parts can be upgraded and deployed to a WSS v3 environment. Next, you'll learn about the Smart Part and the Son of the Smart Part providing an alternative but very productive way of creating Web Parts. You will see more than the usual Smart Part demos with a lot of tips and tricks to benefit the most from the Smart Part. ASP.NET 2.0 introduces its own Web Part infrastructure and you will get a quick overview of the essential steps of building ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts. Guess what? WSS v3 utilizes the same Web Part infrastructure so all of your work can be re-used in WSS v3. But there are some pitfalls that will be discussed and you will see some demonstrations of scenarios where you are forced to choose for building Web Parts the WSS v2 style. Next, you will learn about what the combination WSS Features and Web Parts can do for you and the session concludes with the announcement and demonstration of the latest version of the Smart Part, appropriately called by Mike Fitzmaurice as the 'Return of the Smart Part'.

I’m sure it will be lots of fun to be on stage again with Profke! Make sure to check out his other sessions as well (and of course the rest of the Office 2007 content). This morning we already met Joris (aka Jopx), there seem to be a lot of Belgian developers so the Belgian/French country drink will be exciting too I guess!

See you at Tech Ed: Developers in Barcelona, Spain!

Could it be that the first (to my knowledge) download has been made available for the 2007 Microsoft Office System? The download page doesn’t talk about beta so this could be the real thing!

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System

An important note can be found at the bottom of the page (for those of you who were looking for the document level customizations in VSTO 2005 SE): Note that if you install on top of Visual Studio 2005 Professional, no document-level customizations or other functionality that is part of the full version of Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office (VSTO 2005) is installed. VSTO 2005 SE adds only the application-level features listed in the feature highlights section above. If you install on top of one of the Visual Studio Team editions or Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office, you will have VSTO 2005 project types available side by side with VSTO 2005 SE projects.

The documentation can be found here (still talks about the beta stuff right now), the redistributable here.