PDC2008 in pictures

The conferance was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center down town next to the Staple Center where LA Lakers and LA Kings are playing their home games.

The entrance from inside.

The convention center was huge but finding your way was easy.

At one of the keynote sessions, at this session the Azure Services Platform was revealed.

The Azure Services Platform

Except a lot of sessions you had the opportunity to try out the new stuff as SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Live Service etc. by doing some labs.

Some sessions were popular and not all could get in, luckily there were "Overflow Rooms" where you could see the session via a live feed.

Inside a session, in this case "ASP.NET 4.0 Cache Extensibility" by Stefan Shackow.

At the expo you could talk to represantives and see more of i.e. Windows 7.

Microsoft had arranged a party for us at the Universal Studios, it was fun!

PDC 2008 from a SharePoint view day 2

The keynote today was the highlight so far! Ok, it has been in the air since Google apps came online, but it was still exiting to get the first glimpse of Office 14 with Word and Excel as web applications. I really hope we will see this built in to SharePoint in a near future. This would certainly bring Excel services to a whole new level. Microsoft also showed us more of WPF with a lot of cool demos. It's amazing how good looking applications you can create with just a few lines of code.

After almost 5 hours of keynote I only had enough energy left to attend one session. So I went to see what FAST had to tell about the search engine they recently sold to Microsoft. They showed some really nice demos of how you can customize their web parts using Silverlight and Ajax.

I spent the rest of the day lurking around in the Partner Expo area, checking out new products and doing some hands-on labs.

This evening Microsoft had reserved Universal Studios for the PDC attendants, which meant (more) free beer, food and rides. And with Halloween coming up you can probably guess the theme. It was a bit scary to walk around with people in weird costumes jumping out of every corner to scare the s**t out of you. I can't think of a better way to end another great day at PDC :)

The future of C#

Some cool new futures in C# can be expected in the near future, we had the oppotunity to attend at a session by Anders Hejlsberg about the oncoming C# 4.0. The keyword for the next C# is "Dynamic" and here are some new cool features and improvments that we can expect:

- Dynamic Language Runtime

- IDynamicObject

- Improved COM interoperability

- Optional and named parameters

- Co and Contra variance

SharePoint Online extending your service

Due to Microsofts new platform Azure we were looking forward to the session about the SharePoint Online Service. Shortly the SharePoint Online is a service provided by Microsoft where the servers are maintained by Microsoft at their data centers where the end customer is subscribing to the services. Some benefits among others:

- No SharePoint Server Deployment
- Backups
- Antivirus by ForeFront

Management is done via the Microsoft Online Services Administration Center which makes it very easy to create new sites, manage users etc. There are some major drawbacks though, you are not able to run server side code which means i.e. that you will no be able to deploy custom WebParts. The SharePoint Online is stil in a early stage and some of the nonsupported features may change.

Surface Cravings!

Man har ju sett artiklar om Microsoft Surface tidigare men kanske inte riktigt förstått nyttan/meningen med det. Är det inte bara en stor pekskärm kan man fråga sig?

Jo det är förvisso saant, men det är också en hel del mer än så. T.ex är det en stor pekskärm där många kan interagera med olika objekt samtidigt. Pekskärmen kan också fås att interagera med fysiska objekt (ex.vis kamera, mobiltelefon, visitkort, kreditkort m.m) som man lägger på skärmen genom sk. tags. Via tagsen känner pekskärmen av vilken typ av objekt det är som man lagt på den och man kan därmed knyta specifik logik och användargränsnitt till denna.

Man har ställt ut ett stort antal Surface-bord runt om i mässhallen och man är inte precis ensam om att inte kunna låta bli att testa vad man kan göra med dem.

PC17 - Developing for Microsoft Surface var ett riktigt kul seminarie där man bl.a visade hur man på ett ganska enkelt sätt kan konvertera befintliga WPF applikationer till en Surface applikation.

Synd att prislappen är lite väl hög ($15000), men det kanske blir en sån i julklapp i alla fall...hoppas hon blir glad...

Måndag 27/10 Hello Cloud!

Det var dags för öppningsdagen av PDC. Människor från alla världens hörn strömmade som lämmlar in i LA Convention Center. Efter en snabb frukost bestående av sockrade flingor med ännu mer socker på var det tid för öppningskeynoten med mannen som inte bara har ett coolt namn utan även en respektingivande titel, Ray Ozzie - Microsoft Cheif Architect.

Under den knappt två timmar långa sessionen avslöjades inte bara namnet på nästa Windows OS för molnet - Windows Azure utan även Microsofts vision för det som vi har hört och läst ett tag om nu: Software + Services. Det känns som att pusselbitarna över hur Microsoft kommer att gå till väga för att "ta nästa stora kliv" börjar falla på plats. Plattformen Windows Azure med kompletterande tjänster som Live, .NET, SQL, SharePoint och CRM Services ser mycket lovande ut - framförallt för dem som enklare vill deploya och tillhandahålla globala lösningar och som inte vill behöva bry sig om IT-infrastruktur, datahallar etc.

Om man skall försöka sig på att göra en sammanfattning skulle man kunna säga att: Visionen är mycket stark och man kan börja skönja vilken nytta kunder och vi som tar fram tjänster har av Azure, även om det just i nuläget och på ytan bara kanske ser ut som ett nytt ramverk för att deploya och hosta tillämpningar på.

/Tahoe Solutions

PDC 2008 from a SharePoint view day 1

We arrived at LA Convention Centre on Sunday afternoon for registration, which was a breeze and after a few minutes we had everything we needed for the coming week.

The first keynote started out like any normal rock concert :) Ray Ozzie entered the stage and started talking about the evolution of the PC, and how the internet has changed the way most people work. The amount of connected computers forces large companies like Microsoft to invest a lot of time and money on hardware to deliver their web solutions 24/7. All of this of course led to a disscussion about the cloud and how this can help companies to scale up their solutions easily.

Cloud have been a mystery to me up to this point, so it was very interesting to see the unveiling of Microsofts platform for delivering "the cloud", Windows Azure. And it wasn't less exiting when Bob Muglia and a few others presented the idea of applications and plattforms as cloud services. Watching the demos it looked extremely easy to deploy a solution, and even easier to scale. If you are interested, you'll find a nice introduction to Windows Azure here.

The licensing model starts with 5 clients for the basic model. When it comes to SharePoint services in the cloud, you have to have at least 5000 clients to be able to deploy custom code. At about 4-12 $ per client, the price will be quite high. On the other hand it's not for free to host your own servers. And it is definetly not as easy to scale when you need more juice. Windows Azure and cloud services is really cool and it will be very interesting to see how the final product turns out.

Trying to select which sessions to attend isn't easy, most of them sound really cool. And with lots of new products around the corner it's hard to keep up. I ended upp attending sessions about the future of C#, Visual Studio 2010 and it's support for Agile development. All in all a great day for a geek :)

Sunday 26/10 - Registration

We have finally arrived to the sunny Los Angeles and are ready for the PDC 2008!

The checkin at the amazing Millenium Biltmore Hotel dowtown LA and the registration for the PDC2008 at the Los Angeles Convetion Center went really smooth and we are looking forward to the Mondays sessions and activities.

The schedule for tomorrow is long but here are some of the planned activities:

- Make SharePoint® Apps Shine with Silverlight
- Model-View-ViewModel Pattern in a Nutshell
- FAST: Building Search-Driven Portals with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Silverlight

De nominerade till .NET Awards 2008...

Microsoft har nu utannonserat de nominerade bidragen till detta årets .NET Awards.

Tidigare år så har bidrag som till någon grad baserats på SharePoint knappt räckt till för att fylla Information Worker kategorin. En lite intressant utveckling är att man i år också kan finna bidrag under både kategorierna Dynamics och Web Site som nyttjar SharePoint som en del av en lösning.

Vi säger lycka till! till alla nominerade och hela listan över dem kan ses här:
http://www.microsoft.com/sverige/msdn/netawards2008/nominerade.htm

/Jimmy Wickberg

Event errors 6482 and 6398 in Event Viewer

We had a customer who's development server event logs were filled with the event 6482 (Office Server Shared Services) and 6398 (Timer) errors. Despite installation of SP1 and hotfix KB923028, the issue remained.(http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/923028/en-us)

After some digging we found that the error was caused by lack of access rights to COM services which was identified by the error code 80070005 (Access Denied).

Workaround

1) Start the "Component Services" manager by Start --> Run --> dcomcnfg

2) Expand the Component Services --> Computers --> My Computer and select DCOM Config in the left pane.

3) In the right pane right click on OSearch and select Properties

4) Select the Security tab and click on the Edit… button for the "Launch and Activation Permissions"





5) Add your SharePoint service account or group to the list and give it rights for the "Local Launch" and "Local Activation". Click OK to confirm the changes and return to the security properties.





6) Finally click on the Edit… button for the "Access Permissions", add your SharePoint service account or group to the list and give it "Local Access" rights.





You may also need to do the same procedure for the SPSearch service.