Getting Started with Silverlight‘Getting Started with Silverlight’ is a series of 11 videos and hands-on materials that introduces the concepts, skills, and applications customers need when building their first Silverlight application. [link...]
Great Windows Live Videocasts and Information: Check it out on the Live Services Blog at http://dev.live.com/blogs/devlive/
Want to deep-dive into the Windows Azure Services Platform?I have been involved in a course over the last several weeks and this is a mere fraction of the reading material we have covered. (Believe me, it is just a small fraction too…) At any rate, this is all publically available stuff, and there’s quite a lot of videos / screen casts you could leverage as well, but here’s a abridged reading material syllabus:
ü Read the white paper by David Chappellhttp://download.microsoft.com/download/e/4/3/e43bb484-3b52-4fa8-a9f9-ec60a32954bc/Azure_Services_Platform.pdf
ü Read MSDN Magazine “An Introduction to RESTful Services with WCF” by Jon Flandershttp://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.01.servicestation.aspx
ü Read “Getting Started with the Windows Azure SDK”http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179419.aspx
ü Read the white paper on Azure Table Storagehttp://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=131257
ü Read the white paper on Azure Blob Storagehttp://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=131258
ü Read the white paper on Azure Queue Storage
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/2/D/52D36345-BB08-4518-A024-0AA24D47BD12/Windows%20Azure%20Queue%20-%20Dec%202008.docx
ü Read “Understanding Service Architecture”http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179341.aspx
ü Perform the steps in Jim Nakashima’s walkthrough “Quick Lap Around the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio”http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203059.aspx
ü Read “Introducing Geneva” by David Chappellhttp://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9ca5c685-3172-4d8f-81cb-1a59bdc9f7e3&displaylang=en
ü Read “Introduction to Windows Live ID”http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb288408.aspx
ü Read “Microsoft Federation Gateway”http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287610.aspx
ü Read “Understanding Windows Live Delegated Authentication”http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287613.aspx
ü Read “Introducing Live Mesh” by Amit Mitalhttp://dev.live.com/blogs/devlive/archive/2008/04/22/279.aspx
ü Read the Live Framework White Paperhttp://dev.live.com/liveframework/livefxwhatwhy.pdf
ü Read MSDN Magazine “Building Distributed Applications With .NET Services” by Aaron Skonnardhttp://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd569759.aspx
ü Read “.NET Service Bus Overview”http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd129877.aspx
Attention: Important Information on Service Pack 2We take product quality seriously and make every effort to avoid and resolve issues that adversely impact our customers. Unfortunately, we have recently discovered a bug with Service Pack 2 (SP2) that affects all customers that have deployed it for SharePoint Server 2007! http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx
Check out www.vine.net
Don’t forget to stop by Channel 9
I love the rumor mill. It’s been running rampant on the net. Stuff like how we may buy SAP, devour Yahoo, make Google actually RTM something, and are overthrowing the universe make it somehow more pleasurable for me to work and read the free press daily. IMHO, it’s my own little comedy, soap opera and drama stage. However today I read one that made me think “Duh, that’s obvious!” (well, it’s not only been today…) Microsoft will be making available for download Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 for our customers. Of course we will. (See the beta note below!) Microsoft usually encourages customers and partners to download and evaluate customer previews, which ultimately results in changes and improvements to the final product, which we ultimately will ship and make available for download.
Beta 1 of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 represents a substantial amount of the functionality that will be in the final shipping version of the products. For now, if you haven’t upgraded to Visual Studio 2008, it’s not too late! Microsoft has a number of promotions and offers available to upgrade to our latest development tools as you prepare for the next wave of tools. For more information, visit www.microsoft.com/VisualStudio. If you’d like to start directly with Visual Studio 2010, there is a Visual Studio 2010 Beta now available here.
Also, I'd like to thank Mary Jo for helping us spread the word about the PHP SDK for Windows Azure.
As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Interoperability, this open source project is an effort to help bridge PHP developers over onto Windows Azure.
PHPAzure is an open source project to provide software development kit for Windows Azure and Windows Azure Storage – Blobs, Tables & QueuesIt enables PHP developers to take advantage of the Microsoft Cloud Services Platform – Windows Azure and provides consistent programming model for Windows Azure Storage (Blobs, Tables & Queues)
Enjoy!
The views and opinions stated in this blog are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Microsoft. Each posting on this blog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
What a great week it has been so far, I have to admit, looking back over the past week is inspiring. I have survived two “reductions in force” (Hey, I know I work hard for a living… but anything can happen in these times!) and been witness to one of the first bond offerings in company history. On top of that I resumed several personal projects over the past week. (If you’re really interested head to http://www.azure.net, http://www.soulrevolution.net and http://www.uspsa.org)
I’ve been heads-down busy working on my new MCS engagement, working internally on some upcoming SharePoint guidance materials that hopefully will fill-in the gaps for many customer scenarios and workloads. In fact, we are actively working directly with customers to make certain there are no silos in what we will be shipping out. That’s all I can say at this point on that matter, but the work is really fun and will “hit home” for many SharePoint folks.
I’d like to give a glimpse of one area within our internal SharePoint business. This week, I also became a member of our Information Worker Community Subject Matter Experts for SharePoint. These 50-60 global SMEs work with our Community leadership teams in determining IP focus areas for development. This is our “go-to” group that Information Worker Community leadership uses for driving discussion and thought leadership around broad community topics such as IP, Readiness, Product Group Feedback, and Strategy. Some of the benefits of being active in this community are to have early preview in community opportunities like TAPs, Service Line support, readiness development, Product Group information and event registrations. Ivan Smigoc, one of our smartest and most active SharePoint leads, is the current Director of this group, and he does an amazing job! The members of this group are well-known SharePoint folks, almost all having possessing multiple credentials and far-reaching expertise in SharePoint, including several SharePoint Certified Masters. It is both a privilege and an honor to be able to interact with these folks daily!
OK, well enough about me.. let’s get to the good stuff!
So here are my nuggets for today:
Ø If you haven’t visited Channel 9, you’ve been missing out. In fact, Channel 9 has been on my Visual Studio Start page for many years. I’m a video-learner myself, as many of you folks are as well. Well you can find out more about Jeff Sandquist, our Senior Director of Evangelism at Microsoft, who has been running the Channel 9 developer community for the last five years, over at Vator.tv www.Vator.tv is near-and-dear to my heart, as it is a startup co-founded by Bambi Francisco, who hails from the same Francisco clan as my beloved wife Cynthia, and is well known to any of you CBS MarketWatch folks.
Ø I enjoyed Woody Windy’s recent blog post about Discovering the Setup User Account - A SharePoint "Whodunit?". In fact, I bookmarked it with my SharePoint bookmarks. Two things I always like to have.. SharePoint bookmarks and my “SharePoint Portable Library”, which is really a collection of ebooks/SDKs etc. I always lug around with me for reference.
Ø I regularly am privy to emails like this one:
“customer is saying they are managing 500,000 plus records and experiencing various issues and are now considering removing MOSS as a content management solution and going with a competitor.”
which pretty much tell me that said customer hasn’t completely done their information architecture homework, or has gotten off-course. (You all know it’s true.) These cases are even more painfully shameful when customers don’t come and ask for help, and just migrate off the platform at significant cost. There certainly are lots of causes for such complaints, but generally I have seen it boil down to a lack of understanding of the platform itself and how to correctly apply an information architecture that manages this for you, instead of attempting to manage problems. For those of you who didn’t read the manual (and I know that’s at least half of you using SharePoint), we have some excellent guidance as to limitations (“software boundaries”) of SharePoint here on TechNet’s SharePoint Server TechCenter. This sits within Planning and Architecture guidance about Infrastructure Planning and Performance/Capacity that is often overlooked and/or misunderstood by customers. It is true you should not have to hire a rocket scientist to run SharePoint, and the product is engineered so you don’t have to. However, large complex problems usually require some reading. J
So that’s about it for now… a “triple treat” for the day. Enjoy!
This is a cross-posting from the Sharepoint Team Blog:
We’ve heard loud and clear that you want system requirements information as early as possible to assist in your budgeting and planning, so today we’re happy to announce (and confirm) some preliminary system requirements for SharePoint Server 2010:
In addition to the requirements listed above we also wanted to share with you some preliminary detail about SharePoint Server 2010 browser compatibility.
To ensure the best possible experience across multiple browsers we’re focusing our SharePoint 2010 engineering efforts on targeting standards based browsers (XHTML 1.0 compliant) including Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.x. running on Windows Operating Systems. In addition we’re planning on an increased level of compatibility with Firefox 3.x and Safari 3.x on non-Windows Operating Systems. Due to this focus Internet Explorer 6 will not be a supported browser for SharePoint Server 2010.
So, what can you do today to get into the best shape for SharePoint Server 2010?
Below are a couple of common Q&A’s (which we’ll add to as required)
Q: What about Internet Explorer 6 and SharePoint 2010 publishing sites? A: The Web Content Management features built into SharePoint 2010 will provide a deep level of control over the markup and styling of the reader experience. These features will enable customers to design pages that are compatible with additional browsers for viewing content, including Internet Explorer 6. A standards based browser such as Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox 3.x will be required to author content.
Q: Is Internet Explorer 6 officially supported by Microsoft? A: Official Microsoft Product Support for Internet Explorer 6 will expire in July 2010. You can find additional information on Microsoft’s Support Lifecycle Policy including specific dates, product information and support offerings here: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy.
Q: Why are you only supporting the 64-bit versions of SQL Server 2005 or 2008 for SharePoint Server 2010? A: This decision was based on our current test data for SharePoint Server 2010 and real world experience from customers running SharePoint Server 2007 with 32-bit SQL Server. SharePoint performance and scalability can benefit significantly from 64-bit SQL Server and the throughput increases are significant enough for us to make the difficult decision to only support SharePoint Server 2010 on 64-bit SQL Server 2005 or 2008. It has been our strong recommendation for some time that SharePoint Server 2007 customers take advantage of 64-bit SQL Server due to the inherent performance and scale benefits it can provide.
new CloudApp() is a US-based developer challenge (www.newcloudapp.com) to promote the new opportunities and innovative ideas developers are creating with cloud computing on the Azure Services Platform.
Write an application running on Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform. .NET and PHP category applications will be judged by industry leaders, Om Malik and Michael Cote. Entries will be evaluated based on user experience and user interface, innovation and creativity of the application, applicability to cloud computing, and real-world applicability of the application. The overall Community winner will be decided by public voting.
For more information, visit www.newcloudapp.com, and Steven Martin’s blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar/. You can also find out more real-time on Twitter by searching for the “#newCloudApp” hashtag.
Note: Microsoft employees are not eligible to participate in this contest, so I can’t compete against you. Sucks for me… haha..
Contest Dates
What do Contestants Win?
Winning submissions will:
Contestants can choose to submit one entry into either the .NET or the PHP applications category. Azure applications that have already been built can be submitted for the contest. Valid submissions are limited to residents 18 years and older of the 50 United States and District of Columbia.