My group has been working with http://www.nationalrail.co.uk and one of the first deliverables is this beauty , an add-in which integrates Microsoft Outlook 2007 and 2003 with the UK’s National Rail timetable web service to deliver Software + Service in action! Interestingly, the add-in is built using...

A LOT of UK ISVs are excited about projecting their solutions into Sharepoint which is great. But there is a small niggle when developing for Sharepoint - you need a server (even if it is just a VM). Interestingly a Microsoft partner has created a "workaround" which allows WSSv3 to be installed...

David in my team has been busy being creative and has come up with a nifty little competition for UK partners - with 10 Xbox 360 consoles as prizes. Nice one Dave. You can find more details at http://isvfasttrack.co.uk/openxml.aspx or you can contact me direct to find out some more. Enjoy!

A small point but useful to know. Starting with RC1 and going forward, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 will have to be downloaded separately. More information can be found on the Windows Server Division blog.

My colleague and mate David Gristwood owns the Office and Unified Communications track at Tech Ed and is buzzing about how it is looking and the opportunity Office 2007 presents to developers of business applications. He also let slip that there are a few spaces left for the Developer Conference (IT...

These are exciting times - lots of new technologies which will be useful to UK ISVs. The following is a list of just how broad our remit is right now - and in case you were wondering. We are a team of.... 8 :-) Visual Studio 2008 – great new development environment which can build .NET Framework 2.0...

I was reminded this week that a lot of folks are still struggling to understand if their hardware is capable of running our latest product releases - which must only mean they have not heard of the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment tool. WVHA is an agent-less network inventory tool designed to quickly...

Every so often I come across a single slide that does a great job of explaining an important technology. This is a good example (especially if you see it with the build). Something I have always wanted (but alas never created) is a collection of such slides across all our interesting technologies. It...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/20/desktop_office_suites/ caught our teams eye. It is a survey of desktop software of over 4800 folks and draws a few interesting conclusions. Firstly on SaaS: "The other big news from this chart is that online alternatives to desktop office suites delivered via the...

As a team we have had lots of discussions around OpenXML of late. But I think Dave summarised the importance of OpenXML perfectly today: "OpenXML was the primary success of the POC I did with <ISV NAME REMOVED> last year. Every other piece of the puzzle could have been achieved with some other...

Your are a developer? You are in the UK? Then get yourself over to http://www.Microsoft.com/UK/launch2007/dev/default.mspx and check out what the team has pulled together for UK developers to launch Windows Vista and Office 2007. I am gutted that my Achilles Tendon injury has kept me away from all this...

Great news and a big "Well done!" to all the teams who have been working so hard on these great products. .NET Framework 3.0 is now complete and available for download - enjoy! http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=10CC340B-F857-4A14-83F5-25634C3BF043&displaylang=en Windows...

This week we were running a 3 day Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server lab for our UK early adopters. I went along to "make the tea" as my MOSS knowledge is pretty low - leaving the real work to colleague. In trying to not look completely stupid I used the following two resources. I would recommend them...

As I keep getting asked this by my ISVs :-) There is a sample out there that would be well worth a look (Thanks to http://mentas.spaces.msn.com/ ) http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=7858dbb6-6f4a-4a9d-b1b4-03c73aa16d15

This little tool missed me - hence I am guessing it missed others. If you are running Beta 2 and would like to send us feedback then we have a small tool which adds two icons to the notifications area of the taskbar over by the clock: a happy face to click when you want to give us positive feedback and...

We have made available a CTP of the next version of Visual Studio Tools for Office. VSTO "v3" is designed to help developers take better advantage of those new capabilities in Office 2007, as well as to provide additional infrastructure to ensure .NET solutions in Office run more reliably, efficiently...