These are a selection of list of links that I acquired on a recent SharePoint developer course with Patrick Tisseghem of U2U.  This is part 3 of a 4 part series:

• Part 1 – Articles & Blogs
• Part 2 – Utilities
• Part 3 – Workflow, Search & Silverlight
• Part 4 – Handy Hints & Books

Workflow

Windows Workflow Foundation
http://netfx3.com/content/WFHome.aspx
An introduction and kick-off point for developers wanting to get started with Workflow Foundation.

Custom Workflow Activities
http://codeplex.com/SPDActivities
A set of handy SharePoint workflow activities for people that don’t want to get their hands dirty creating their own custom workflow activities.

Search

Microsoft search services
http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/products.aspx
Information on the Microsoft Search Server family of products.  Aimed more at decision makers than developers.

MOSS Faceted Search AddOn
http://www.codeplex.com/FacetedSearch
A most excellent add-on for the MOSS search system.  Allows for quick and easy refining of search criteria.

Silverlight

Silverlight for Sharepoint BluePrints
http://www.codeplex.com/sl4sp
Demonstrations of how Silverlight can be used with SharePoint.

Vertigo – FamilyShow
http://www.vertigo.com/familyshow.aspx
Example of using Silverlight in SharePoint

Deep Zoom Composer
http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/tags/Deep+Zoom+Composer/default.aspx
Nothing to do with SharePoint but a very cool application.  Useful if you want to embed a Deep-Zoom show in SharePoint

These are a selection of list of links that I acquired on a recent SharePoint developer course with Patrick Tisseghem of U2U.  This is part 2 of a 4 part series:

• Part 1 – Articles & Blogs
• Part 2 – Utilities
• Part 3 – Workflow, Search & Silverlight
• Part 4 – Handy Hints & Books

Utilities

STSAdm extensions
stsadm.blogspot.com
A set of extensions to STSAdm.exe that make just about any SharePoint administration task a piece of cake.  The extensions are packaged as a SharePoint solution package (.wsp) and are installed with the STSAdm.exe utility itself.

Sharepoint Project Utility
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/ACs-VS-SharePoint-Project-Utility-Tool-Window-for-SharePoint-Developers.aspx
A utility for VS developers for creating the standard directory structures and default files for various SharePoint development scenarios.  Requires the installation of the DX Core VS addin.

VS2008 Sharepoint Extensions
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/06/04/announcing-the-vsewss-version-1-2.aspx
A set of projects and project items for VS2008 for SharePoint development.  My initial investigation suggests that these may be geared more towards MOSS2007 than WSSv3.

Event Receiver Management - El Blanco
http://chrissyblanco.blogspot.com/2007/08/event-receiver-management.html
Allows management of event handlers to specific lists, libraries, etc.

Application Pool Manager
http://www.harbar.net/articles/APM.aspx
System tray access to IIS Application Pool tasks.  Runs on the machine that SharePoint is installed on.

Fiddler - HTTP Debugging
http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/
Useful tool for finding FrontPage rpc calls for uploading and downloading documents.

Expresso Regular Expressions
http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm
Wonderful utility for developing and debugging .Net regular expressions.  Once you’ve created and tested your regular expression, Expresso can generate stub .Net code to get the regular expression into your project.

Caml Query Builder
http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/karine/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=28
I’ve not had any experience with CAML yet but I’m sure I’ll be using this tool when the time arises.

Word Content Control Toolkit
http://www.codeplex.com/dbe
Assists with binding xml embedded in a Word 2007 docx file to controls in the Word document.  Useful for generating Word documents containing data from SharePoint.

SmartPart for SharePoint
http://www.codeplex.com/smartpart
The SharePoint web part which can host any ASP.NET web user control. Create your web parts without writing code!

These are a selection of list of links that I acquired on a recent SharePoint developer course with Patrick Tisseghem of U2U.  This is part 1 of a 4 part series:

• Part 1 – Articles & Blogs
• Part 2 – Utilities
• Part 3 – Workflow, Search & Silverlight
• Part 4 – Handy Hints & Books

Articles & Blogs

SharePoint Developer Site
http://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/

John Holiday
http://www.johnholliday.net/

Ted Pattison Group Downloads
http://www.tedpattison.net/downloads.aspx
A host of utilities, demos and articles.  Also, check out the rest of the site.

Ideas & Solutions, Etc.
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnlee/archive/2007/06/24/tips-tricks-from-moss-2007-development-training.aspx
A host of handy hints & tips.

Content Deployment
http://blogs.msdn.com/ecm/archive/2008/06/11/announcing-end-to-end-content-deployment-walkthrough.aspx
A guide to website content management and deployment using SharePoint.

OpenXML Developer
http://www.openxmldeveloper.org
Not really SharePoint specific but a developer site for working with the office documents OpenXML standard.  Useful for developers wanting to tie SharePoint data into Word documents (see Word Content Control Toolkit in Part 2 - Utilities).

I’ve just been playing with Google Maps for Guernsey again and I’ve noticed a few discrepancies.  Firstly, Google doesn’t seem to have any information regarding one-way roads in Guernsey.  This means that although the driving directions will give you the shortest route, the route may take you the wrong way down a one way road.  This is quite significant around St Peter Port where the roads are narrow and twisting and, if you’re not familiar with it, not being able to follow directions can get you hopelessly lost.

Another, possibly more significant error, is that there is at least one missing road, possibly more:

View Larger Map

Strangely, Yahoo Maps has got both the missing road and the one-way information. Yahoo it seems is using Navteq sourced data whereas Google is using data from Tele Atlas. I’ve just submitted the information to Tele Atlas about the missing road, but I’m damned if I’m going to submit all the missing roads corrections.
 

Microsoft has been trying to make itself F/OSS friendly recently.  From agreeing not to sue open source projects to working to provide a bridge between it’s proprietary source management system (TFS) and the much loved open source alternative SubVersion.  Microsoft seems to be trying its best but still appears to be keeping open source at arms length.

The question is: is Microsoft ready to get into bed with open source itself.  Enter Zend.  Zend is an Israeli company that has grown up around the open source scripting engine PHP.   Previously Microsoft announced that it would be working with Zend to provide better support for PHP under Windows Server.

In the last day or so it has become apparent that Zend is laying some of it’s staff. Erick Schonfeld has speculated that this may be to make Zend more attractive to a prospective purchaser.  With Microsoft on the verge of finally to a deal to buy (some if not all) Yahoo, it may Zend may also look attractive if Microsoft is to continue supporting the applications that Yahoo has running on PHP.

There is also the long awaited dynamic language support for .Net.  Maybe PHP could be leveraged to bring more hobbyist developers over to the .Net platform.  Obviously there is the question of getting the .Net framework ported over to alternative operating systems, however Silverlight has demonstrated that they might not be adverse to that idea.

Of course, Oracle has also previously shown an interest in PHP and it would sit nicely alongside MySQL, which that previously purchased.  And then there is IBM, who also seem to be embracing open source as their extensive use, distribution and support of Java show.

Following on from my presentation last night on TeamCity, I’ve been trying to configure our installation at work so that it can be accessed by our developers in the UK.

The first problem is punching a hole in the firewall.  This was done easily enough by our network admin, however it had to be done a different port than normal as the default port was already being used.  Next, this port had to be configured in the Tomcat server.xml file.  One of the clear things I discovered whilst changing the port setting is that it is possible to have both HTTP and HTTPS access to TeamCity at the same time on different ports.  This meant we could keep the old internal HTTP port for local developers and set up the external port as HTTPS for our developers in the UK.

Setting up HTTPS meant creating a certificate for Tomcat.  It was easy enough to create a self signed certificate using the TeamCity documentation and the Tomcat documentation.  The Tomcat documentation also includes information about importing a third party signed certificate.

One thing to note about the self-signed certificate is that you can only import the certificate in Internet Explorer for future visits to the site if the value given to keytool for “What is your first and last name?” is the domain name used to access the site.  This one had me confused for a while.

Could it possibly be that Cable & Wireless are almost ready to roll out the long awaited and delayed broadband upgrade in Guernsey?

Last week I heard from an insider at Cable & Wireless that they are due to be finished internal testing some time this week.  Today I have just received an email from a friend sent to him by C&W saying:

There will be a short break in service for all High Speed Internet Pro users from 5am on the 6th May 2008. The outage is expected to last less than one hour.

If this is the case we can look forward to a blindingly [not very] fast broadband service.  I must say that I’m not overly confident that either this will be the upgrade or, if it is, that the downtime will be limited to one hour.

I have heard from an inside source that the equipment that they have bought in to  facilitate the upgrade isn’t all it was meant to be and that maybe they are regretting buying it.  If this is the case I’m guessing (from the way the person spoke about it) that we can expect the reliability of broadband in the island to go down hill once the upgrade has been rolled out.

Following on from my previous blog post, about the continuing delays with the broadband upgrade in Guernsey, I have just received an email from C&W in which they give a bit of context about the upgrade, why they have made some of the choices they have and a bit of background of the commitment from C&W to the telecoms infrastructure of the island.

With regard to your technical questions, you are correct that the new faster services will be based on the ADSL standard.  Rather than being an out of date technology, in our experience standard ADSL is far less susceptible to noise and interference than either ADSL 2 or ADSL 2+ at speeds of up to 8Mb/s.  Both ADSL2 and ADSL 2+ are also extremely prone to problems arising from variations in wiring quality, and for these reasons we have opted to use standard ADSL as it offers a more stable service.  However the equipment that we have now installed is capable of supporting both ADSL2 and ADSL2+ in future.

It’s good to know that at some undetermined point in the future we might possibly get ADSL2 or ADSL2+.  However, my personal opinion is that I would rather have 12Mb/s or 24Mb/s that is occasionally dropped to a lower speed because of quality.   Is your average home user really going to know that they’re not getting full speed.  As a result of contention ratios you’re not always going to be getting 8Mb/s on ADSL anyway, so does it really matter?

The current project is a proactive £2.5 million investment by Cable & Wireless, as part of our ongoing plan to provide faster broadband services in the Bailiwick. That level of investment hopefully provides you with some idea of the scale of cost involved in providing broadband services in a market of just 24,000 households.  Comparisons with the UK, where the market is a 1,000 times larger, are often misleading. 

I’m not going to argue that these numbers sound impressive but I wonder how they stack up against the C&W annual profits?  And what is the annual investment per-capita in Guernsey compared with the UK?  I’ve no doubt that there are economies of scale coming into play but it would be interesting to find out.

The entry level price for broadband in Guernsey is just £14.99, and when you also consider that many UK broadband services require a standard BT line, which is around 50% more expensive than the local exchange line rental (£7.99 per month compared to £12.50 per month), then hopefully you can begin to see the overall cost this into context. 

These numbers are a little miss-leading.  For entry level broadband from BT is £15.99 (not including any current offers) but if you bring the C&W entry level plan up to the same level as the BT one it shifts the Guernsey one up to £19.49.  Also, the line rental from BT is £10.50 and not £12.50.   With these numbers I make it £26.49 for 8Mb/s from BT and £26.99 for 1Mb/s from C&W - I know which I would prefer!

Since 2001 Cable & Wireless has invested more than £35 million into capital projects in Guernsey as part of our commitment to improving the Bailiwick’s telecommunications infrastructure.  

Would C&W care to share with us what this money has been spent on?  Also, what real effects of this can the average end customer see?  Because to be quite honest all I can see is that I’ve still just got a basic landline, a plain old 2.5G mobile phone and I’m still stuck in the dark ages with 1Mb/s broadband.  I fail to see where the £35 million has been of benefit to me.

Yesterday C&W release a notice on their website saying that they are entering the final phase of testing the broadband upgrade in the island and that this should be complete within four weeks.

This upgrade will bring the whole island up the the old-school ADSL (8Mbit up / 1Mb down) standard.  None of this fancy-pants ADSL2 or ADSL2+ wizardry.

I emailed C&W several days asking about what was happening at C&W regarding the upgrade but he has so far declined to respond.  I think that may be due to the fact that I questioned why the upgraded speeds would be so low and why we wouldn’t be getting ADSL2 or ADSL2+ speeds, and wondering if maybe C&W was abusing it’s monopoly position to make sure that they can get the maximum profit from a minimum investment.

After minimal research (and a lot of guessing and estimation) I figure

the pricing of broadband will look something like this:

• 2Mb - £24.99/Month
• 2Mb Premium - £49.99/Month
• 4Mb Premium - £79.99/Month
• 8Mb Premium - £99.99/Month

Oh well, here’s me hoping I’ll get included in the upgraded speed trial.

This morning when I tried adding a new note to Evernote I was surprised to get a warning message saying that Evernote could not synchronise with my online account.   However, due to good application design this didn’t stop me from creating new notes, it simply meant I’d have to wait until later to get text recognition on images.

On checking the Evernote website it appears that some changes to the web application are being rolled out as visitors are greeted with the following message:

Ssshhh. The elephant fell asleep.

Actually, we’re performing some maintenance.

We’ll be back up and running very soon.

Please be patient and check back in a bit. This page will auto-refresh every 60 seconds.

Also the design is a little different.  Does this mean a mobile java version of Evernote is just about to be released?  Who knows but I’ll be watching and waiting with anticipation.