SharePoint Developer Introduction for .NET Developers launched

To help drive adoption of SharePoint by Software Developers, Microsoft has launched a campaign to .NET Developers at http://mssharepointdeveloper.com/ The new material is designed to help .NET Developers to learn the top ten artifacts in SharePoint that are interesting to them. They’ve created a variety of materials with different learning styles to make getting started with these artifacts easy and it’s all based on the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint – planned to release v1.2 for Visual Studio 2008 this week also (watch for their announce).

The Top Ten SharePoint Artifacts of interest to .NET Developers being promoted
· Web Parts
· Data Lists
· Event Handlers
· Workflows
· Silverlight Web Parts
· Page Navigation
· Page Branding
· Web Services
· Content Types
· User Management

At the site (which is hosted on microsoft.com):
· An Introductory Whitepaper
· Benefits of SharePoint for Developers
· A Small Public VPC
· Hosted MSDN Virtual Labs in C# and VB.NET
· Video Interview with SharePoint MVPs
· Screencasts
· Web Casts with SharePoint MVPs (incredible 1705 live attendees in just the first four WebCasts)
· Quickstarts
· Labcasts
· Presentation Download
· Hands on Labs Download
· Additional Resource Links

The site encourages developers who use the content to also take a next step and go on Instructor Led Training, Get Certified, and Download an evaluation copy of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

http://mssharepointdeveloper.com/

BizTalk Server Administration Web Console

In the old days, we had to use Visual Studio for managing our BizTalk Server instances. Installing development tools on production systems seems to be the wrong way of administration, but we had no choice. When Paul Somers developed BizTalk 2004 Administration Tool and put it on GotDotNet (Currently it is moved to Codeplex http://www.codeplex.com/BizTalkAdminTool), we can finally manage BizTalk without installing developer tools.

When BizTalk Server 2006 released, MMC based BizTalk Server Administration tool is included and it's a great tool after using HAT. We can easily see the status thru the Dashboard called BizTalk Group Hub Page. But we still have to do an installation for every console that we want to manage from.

When we look at the new server application, most of them includes both windows and web console. Some of the web consoles include limited functionality, but you can do crucial jobs like monitoring and basic definitions.

For these reasons, I started working on BizTalk web admin console and created BizTalkWebAdmin project on Codeplex (http://www.codeplex.com/biztalkwebadmin). This version includes very limited functionality;

• List applications
• List, add, update and delete send ports
• List, add, update and delete receive ports
• List, add, update, delete and bind receive locations

I started working with ESB Guidance project and used this project's parts like ESB.BizTalkOperations, ESB.BizTalkOperationsService and ESB.Exception.Management and changed some parts. I also used BizTalk.Explorer.OM namespace for managing BizTalk. But this limits my management web services portability. Because of this dll reference, my web services have to run on a BizTalk server machine.

In the future, I will try to port this functions to PowerShell and make my web console independent from BizTalk server machine.

BizTalk Server 2006 R3 is on the way

As of April 22, 2008, some details about BizTalk Server's new release are announced at Steve Martin's blog. Especially integration with the 2008 family of Windows Server, Visual Studio and SQL Server and also with .NET Framework 3.5 will be available for the next release.

New features, which are officially announced are;

• New web service registry capabilities with support for UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) version 3.0
• Enhanced service enablement of applications (through new and enhanced adapters for LOB applications, databases, and legacy/host systems)
• Enhanced service enablement of "edge" devices through BizTalk RFID Mobile
  Enhanced interoperability and connectivity support for B2B protocols (like SWIFT, EDI, etc)
• SOA patterns and best practices guidance to assist our customer's implementations

While we are waiting for announcement of the BizTalk Server's new version, it is announced that BizTalk Server 2006 R3 will be an incremental release. CTP of BizTalk Server 2006 R3 is planned for later this year and RTM is planned at the first half of 2009.

Awarded as MVP for the fourth time

I have been awarded as MVP for my extraordinary efforts in Windows Server System - BizTalk Server technical communities during the past year. This is my third year as BizTalk MVP.

Thanks for everybody who helped my achievement.

Attention: SQL Service Pack 2a is released

There has been an issue in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2. If you installed Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2, that you downloaded before March 05, 2007 and created or updated cleanup tasks in your maintenance plans, then you could encounter different runtimes, because SQL Server interpretes intervals wrong.

If you installed SQL Server Service Pack 2 on your system, then download the critical update and apply it on your SQL Server. After restarting the computer, SP2a is active. You must check your tasks' running intervals again.

If you haven't install SQL Server Service Pack 2 yet, then you could check the service pack 2 page and download the updated service pack 2 for your system.

For detailed info, look at the knowledge base item.

New features in SQL Server SP2

SQL Server Service Pack 2 has been released. You can download it from here. You must also download updated books online from that page.

As I installed and reviewed the features, I have seen interesting new features which could change our database designs. Some of the features were necessary improvements.

Maintenace Plan Features

• SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) is not required for executing maintenance plans. Database services handle execution.
• You can define multiple schedules for the maintenance subplans.
• Maintenance plans for multiple servers can be defined.

Database Engine Features

• A new data type vardecimal has been provided for minimizing the disk space, needed to store existing decimal and numeric data types. By using this new data type, large amount of the disk space can be saved, if decimal or numeric columns with high precision used, but most values in that columns do not require many digits of precision.

Management Studio

• Users can now integrate their own custom management reports into Management Studio.

You can read more information about the new features in the SQL Server 2005 SP2 from here.