.NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit is available for Download

I found on couple of blog so though to share this information as well....

• ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET AJAX History
• ASP.NET Silverlight controls
• ADO.NET Data Services
• ADO.NET Entity Framework

Download the training kit

SharePoint protocol documentation released...

SharePoint Protocol Documentation Released.......

They are split into two groups Front End and Back End. Front end protocols are all the ones that typically talk to a front end web server and the back end ones are mostly how the front end server talks to other servers such as SQL Server.

Get them here: SharePoint Products and Technologies Protocols

Office SharePoint Server 2007 with SP1

 

Office SharePoint Server 2007 with SP1 (32 bit)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2E6E5A9C-EBF6-4F7F-8467-F4DE6BD6B831&displaylang=en

Office SharePoint Server 2007 with SP1 (64 bit)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3015FDE4-85F6-4CBC-812D-55701FBFB563&displaylang=en

Silverligt Blue Print for SharePoint

Integrate Silverlight with SharePoint? Check out the brand new Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint site: http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/ !

'Office 14' to be more Web-friendly

Here is the link to the Article on this http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/02/11/Office-14-to-be-more-Web-friendly-Gates-says_1.html

Configuring BLOB Caching for SharePoint Web Application

BLOB Caching is a feature that isn't well known in SharePoint but serializes large objects to disk on the Web Front Ends to avoid database round-tripping. BLOB Caching would prove beneficial for those who work with large file sizes as this improves page delivery time as cache stores files on front-end server and reduces database traffic. You need to enable BLOB Caching you need to edit your web.config file and changes will be applied to all site collections within the web application.

BLOB is Binary Large Object. here are the steps......

Open web.config file of your Web Application.

You can locate web.config file's location from IIS Manager.

Enable and configure the disk-based cache(BLOB)

• In the web.config file, find the following line:

<BlobCache location="C:\blobCache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$" maxSize="10" enabled="false"/>

              change enabled parameter, from       "false" to "true"

• To change the size of the cache, type a new number for maxSize

.                   The size is expressed in gigabytes (GB), and 10 GB is the default.

                If the directory that is specified in the location parameter does not have enough space to accommodate the cache size, you can type a new directory

                  for the location. 

• To add new file types to the BLOB cache, type the file type next to the other file types. Separate each file type with a pipe (|) character as shown in the file.

Save the file, and close the file

There is no need to reset the iis after doing this.

Knowledge Management 2.0 With MOSS 2007

Knowledge management is the name of a concept in which an enterprise consciously and comprehensively gathers, organizes, shares, and analyzes its knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skills.

During mid 90's, it was believed that few enterprises actually had a comprehensive knowledge management practice operation. Advances in technology and the way we access and share information have changed that; many enterprises now have some kind of knowledge management framework in place.

Knowledge management involves data mining and some method of operation to push information to users. There are various solutions offering to help an enterprise inventory and access knowledge resources.Basically Knowledge Management solutions have ability to organize and locate relevant content and expertise required to address specific business tasks and projects.  I believe that MOSS 2007 has most of the Knowledge Management abilities. and their are some Scanners available which has capability of one touch scanning to SharePoint. if you look at the four processes of Knowledge Management you will find that MOSS 2007 can become best fit for Knowledge Management.

1. Gathering
2. Organizing
3. Refining 
4. Disseminating

MOSS has great capabilities in Organizing, Refining & Disseminating Content and it has partial Gathering capability which can be completed using One Touch Scanners and some custom coding using C# or VB.net over SharePoint Object Model.

Knowledge Management plan generally involves a survey of corporate goals and a close examination of the tools, both traditional and technical, that are required for addressing the needs of the company. The challenge is to select or build software that fits the context of the overall plan and encourage employees to share information. MOSS 2007 is flexible enough to give such capabilities.

Information Architecture & Taxonomy

Taxonomy defines the structure that underpins Knowledge Management, Document Management, Records Management and more. Considerable effort goes into defining & developing taxonomy, with the goal of creating a common structure that will benefit the whole organization. The challenge, however, is to ensure that taxonomy work well for staff, beyond any organizational benefits that are sought. If not designed well, taxonomy can become 'white elephants', too hard to understand and too complex to use. At their worst, poorly designed taxonomy is the direct causes of project and system failure. Information architecture has much to offer those creating taxonomy, including a range of structured techniques for building and testing their effectiveness.

Today I am trying to outline some of the approaches & try to encourage creators of taxonomy to retain a clear focus on usability throughout the design process.

Building taxonomy

---

Taxonomy is typically drawn from a number of sources, including existing industry-wide classification schemes, business functions and structures already in place within sections of the organization & this is the primary way to do so. Some or all of these are pulled together to create a larger or more complete taxonomy. Testing of this taxonomy usually relies on internal review, discussing the taxonomy with Team & Management, and gaining input on areas of strength and weakness of the proposed Taxonomy. While effective for gaining broad user and stakeholder input, this kind of review is very shallow, and is not sufficient to ensure that the taxonomy can be used in practice. Instead of doing such practice, structured techniques must be used, getting beyond staff and expert opinions to build the Taxonomy. 

Following are three clear purposes of a taxonomy:

• knowing where to file information correctly
• retrieving information easily when needed
• meeting legislative, compliance or business objectives

If any of the above mentioned goals are not achieved then it is more likely that taxonomy will fail & normally if We achieve 100% Success on  third Point We believe that we have got the final Taxonomy and this will never fail. I have believed many times in my carrier and every time I have proven wrong on my thoughts and when Taxonomy becomes White Elephant it becomes difficult to manage as well as very very difficult to repair the Taxonomy and we have to continue with the same. I would advice you all to consider Information Architecture tools before you finalize any thing on Taxonomy. I am not expert on Information Architecture but still trying to write something on Information Architecture below.

Information Architecture

Information Architecture is a discipline that focuses on creating effective structures and navigation for web sites and intranet Web Applications.

Information Architecture has a toolbox of techniques that can be applied equally well to taxonomy creation. I am trying to do brief outlying on couple of these techniques here (On which I have tried to work on my current project and seems to have got some success), with links to more information. I have been looking for more resources on this and may post some more articles on this area in future. but I have seen in many of my projects that We end the project but never ever Taxonomy gets completed.

Card sorting

A very simple technique for building an understanding of how staff think about information, used as an early input when creating a taxonomy. For more on this technique:

www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide

Card-based classification evaluation

Provides a rapid way of testing a taxonomy to ensure that staff can correctly store information and find it again later. For more Details on this technique:

www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_based_classification_evaluation

Usability testing

Designed to test the overall ease of use and effectiveness of not just the taxonomy, but the system used to implement it. Should be used throughout the design and implementation process.

Best-practice approaches

It is no longer sufficient to simply gather staff input to assess the effectiveness of taxonomies. Instead, practical Information Architecture should be used to ensure that a taxonomy works in practice. Also Information Architecture practice can change on project to project basis.

SharePoint Great Platform for .NET Developers

I've heard some developers arguing that SharePoint is a threat to their job security because it allows end-users to do things that previously only they had the "power" to do. Look at how easy it is to provision new sites from a top-level site. WSS handles all of the underlying IIS interaction for you. And when you look at what users can do with the BDC (Business Data Catalog), I can understand why many developers shudder.

Being working as SharePoint Architect as well as .net Architect I never felt so on the contrary I always felt that SharePoint is great tool for developers. New Development opportunities opened by SharePoint is mostly not viewed by most of the Developers. I would say that .net is Development framework and SharePoint is great Platform to Build Enterprise Applications for .net Developer's. SharePoint has various flavors of its own and one need to find which flavor suits him it has some opportunities for Designers to work with SharePoint Designers and have great capabilities for Seasoned .net Developers with .net 2.0 & .net 3.0 SharePoint very well uses windows workflow foundation and supports hosting of complex web forms created using info path. It has its own SDK for Hardcore Developers to really work on SharePoint and add value to enterprise.

My message to developers who feel threatened by MOSS is…use it to your advantage. Let it handle the tedious pieces of your application (managing search Crawling, Creating List's & Managing Events and many other things which are nothing but huge time consuming Development efforts). Get more focused on delivering capabilities that will help drive business, and leverage MOSS's infrastructure as an entry-point into your targeted clientele.

In my future post I shall post couple of more posts on SharePoint & .net Development I would rather say Office 2007 Suite and development and then will talk about .net 3.5 and various features of .net 3.5

I have recently started Blogging so I may be doing some big mistakes so if you guys can suggest me then it will be great for me to improve my future posts...............

Will Year 2008 be the year of Developer?

This Question come to my mind when I was thinking about Year 2008 since January 1st about this and now decided to write blog on some thoughts on this question... Will Year 2008 be the year of Developer? I think this year has something within it for Developer as the year dawns with the impending arrival of significant upgrades to the three major pillars of Microsoft Developer Platform: With Release of Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 (No Longer a Database but a Data Platform) & Windows Server 2008.

We maybe talking more about great technology innovations throughout the year like LINQ to Entities for true object-relational database mapping, the new Sync Framework to keep roaming users in touch & Silverlight 2.0 to bring rich interactive experiences to the browser.

Sun Microsystems is also not far behind they are also coming up with yet another version for JAVA and similar to VS 2008 which is available to MSDN users JAVA 6 is also available to Early Access users. It has certain cool features to work with.

Looking all this it seems that year 2008 will become truly a year of Developers. but with all this coming all together both .net & Java Developers will require to have big tanning Budget this year to remain with current technology.

There are few more questions we will get answers for those within next few months.... The Questions are as follows. I would love hear comments from readers on this questions or would like to have few more questions from the readers.

• Will PHP remain as most popular among Developers?
• Who will win the battle between RIA (Rich Internet Applications) & AJAX?
  • RIA frameworks are AIR ("Flash, the Next Generation"), Silverlight and JavaFX
• What will Developers first choice for 2008 will it be HTML 5.0 or will it still be XHTML?

Software Development Predictions for 2008

 

This is first time I am Blogging in my Carrier and I am starting with some Predictions for Year 2008.

Year 2007 was undoubtedly the year of Social Networking, but what will be there in year 2008? Will '08 be the year of "Unified Communications" or the year when CMS comes to stand for "Community Management System" - or even "Collaboration Management System"? Or will it be the year of a giga-merger, to beat the mere mega-mergers of 2007?

1. Web standards will matter more than ever, as more development shifts to the web: HTML5 will eclipse XHTML. Atom Publishing Protocol will emerge as a key component of the programmable web, as will Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE). Interest in using pure web standards for mobile development will increase, and will become more practical by the end of 2008. WCF & WPF will bring Web to new standards during year 2008.
2. The battle for social networking prominence will be played out in 2008 as MySpace, Facebook, Plaxo, and LinkedIn position themselves for enterprise use.  As the "IM generation" enters the workforce they are going to expect in the corporate environment support for familiar social networking technologies, encouraging corporations to figure out how to incorporate them into business culture, but one or perhaps two winners will emerge from the battle in 2008.  Social Networking will be more common among Large Organizations as part of their Intranet.
3. Knowledge Management will become
4. During Year 2008 we will see several major enterprises start efforts to build UX centric applications that increase worker productivity, reduced transaction costs and increase pull through as the UX meme of the consumer facing world leaks into the enterprise. The days of the battleship gray, forms of data application as the king of the enterprise are numbered because of an imperative towards richer visualization of complex and interconnected data. While there will always be a need for the traditional sort of application, by the end of 2008, it is no longer the only element of the corporate landscape.
5. No longer satisfied with simple reductions in costs for initial development, a growing community demand frameworks and tools that facilitate sustainable and agile practices. 2008 will be the year that frameworks and tools take notice and start to deliver solutions that are testable out of the box. Technologies such as Test Driven Development, MVC/MVP patterns, and frameworks that support moching become mainstream.
6. While RIA and AJAX application categories continue to grow, many consumer facing web applications and enterprise applications developers realize there is a need for desktop exploitive applications as well as reach web applications that work everywhere. What meaningful application wouldn’t benefit from a pairing like that of Outlook and Outlook Web Access? In the past it has been prohibitively expensive to build these applications, but with the circa 2008 technology such as .NET Framework 3.5 and Silverlight, it is finally becoming practical to have a single codebase that fully exploits the desktop and offers a rich web experience.
7. We will see downfall of PHP and huge growth of .net market share. Java will continue to enjoy its own Market share.