Patrick’s Bytes

SharePoint developers always have the pain of going back and forth between Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 because 2 of the most productive tools (one is SharePoint workflow project template in VS2008 and WSS3 tools for VS2005) is available in different versions of Visual Studio.

Well, that is the scenario until today the SharePoint team officially released Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 (VSeWSS) with the version number 1.2.

If the only reason you still having VS2005 in your PC is because of VSeWSS then it’s time to say goodbye and have a pure VS2008 development environment.

Download the bits here.

I am out of KL for this week and will be running some workshops and talks at Penang.

This coming Monday and Tuesday I will conduct a Getting Start with .NET programming workshop at MCSB Training Center at Island Plaza. With the help of my pal Ervin Loh, he updated the content of the workshop to use latest features from .NET Framework 3.5 and hands on labs are using Visual Studio 2008. My colleague Rahimah will also be running similar workshop at Cyberjaya at the same place.

After that on next Thursday I will do a What’s new with Visual Studio 2008 talk at Penang Skills Development Center, expect something cool to be demo.

It has been sometime since there is an issue of MSDN mag that focuses on Office Business Application development. I believe not since before Visual Studio 2008 released. Visual Studio 2008 does comes with a lot of new tools inside VSTO for OBA development and it is worth while to have a look what you can achieve easily here.

Editor’s note on why one should think of Office as a development platform http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507637.aspx

Document Automation using VBA to VSTO
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507643.aspx

Automate Web App Deployment with the SharePoint API
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507633.aspx

Integrate VSTO with SharePoint Content Types
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507632.aspx

Oh finally I am able to get Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta installed. Been trying to do this since 3 days ago. Thanks for Andre Ziegler that my installation problem is caused by the bootstrapper and pointed me to download the full installer which I guess is made available later after complains from users like me.

That full installer is only the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installer (its about 200Mb), for the Visual Studio download, I used the bootstrapper to download everything into my hard drive first (which takes another 500Mb) using the following command.

VS90sp1-KB945140-ENU.exe /createlayout c:\VS90SP1\Layout /passive

Now is to get SQL Server 2008 Feb CTP running in the same VPC. Then hopefully lah I will be able to do some talk on this service pack next month.

I got the below error msg from the log

Exe (C:\Users\ADMINI~1\AppData\Local\Temp\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Beta)\dotnetfx35setup.exe) failed with 0×80070643 - Fatal error during installation. :
[5/14/2008, 13:32:27] (IronSpigot::ExeInstallerBase:: PerformAction) PerformOperation on exe returned exit code 1603 (translates to HRESULT = 0×80070643)
[5/14/2008, 13:32:27] Action complete
[5/14/2008, 13:32:27] (IronSpigot::LogUtils::LogFinalResult) Final Result: Installation failed with error code: (0×80070643), Fatal error during installation.

I am doing this in a VPC environment with the below software installed

• Windows Server 2008 Standard RTM
• Visual Studio 2008
• Office 2007 w/SP1
• Windows SharePoint Services w/SP1
• SQL Server 2008 Feb 08 CTP

Already posted my issue in the forum, will update the blog if I manage to find a solution

Visual Studio 2008 together with .NET 3.5 was released about 1/2 year ago. However there are a host of planned features not able to make it to the release, for example:

• ASP.NET 3.5 Enhancement Features
  • ASP.NET MVC (Model-View-Controller) Frameowrk
  • ADO.NET Data Service
  • Dynamic Data
  • Entity Framework
• SQL Server 2008 CTP support
• and more! Read up Scott Guthrie’s blog post.

.NET Client Profile

Then not long ago I got news that another new .NET features will make it to this SP1 release which is the .NET 3.5 Client Profile. Well, Windows Vista comes with .NET 3.0 but the world out there is mostly running Windows XP which does not have any.NET Framework installed at all! (unless you are  a geek head). The .NET Framework 3.5 Client Profile (BETA) contains a subset of features contained in the full installation of the .NET Framework. The subset of features are the Common Language Runtime, ClickOnce, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation. Hollay!! Consider the fact that full .NET 3.5 requires .NET 2.0 and 3.0 installed then those 2 package already take up >100mb of downloads. You can check out Scott Guthrie’s blog here. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/19/net-3-5-client-product-roadmap.aspx

Web Install Only

The Beta bits is available as a web install but there was ways for you to download everything and save them locally. Check out this knowledge base article. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945140

Update Details

There are a few KB articles out there listing down all the changes

1. VSTO http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949258  | http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto/
2. Visual Studio Team System http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951845
3. C# http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950263
4. Visual Basic http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950264
5. ASP.NET/Visual Web Developer http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950261
6. .NET Framework http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951847

Download here!

You can download the bits here

• VS 2008 SP1 Beta VS90sp1-KB945140-ENU.exe
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta dotNetFx35setup.exe

While a lot focus has been on ASP.NET 3.5 enhancement lately (and Silverlight too), I was wondering what happened to Windows Presentation Foundation, which when Vista was launched Microsoft did a lot of cool prezzo on it (it runs on XP as well).

After some digging around, realize that Scott Guthrie and Mary Jo Foley did blogged about this enhancement. Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet event mentioned that the codename for this enhancement is known as ‘Arrowhead’. Scott’s blog post here exposed more details in the form of a roadmap, which among them are

1. Improve setup experience for end users
2. Performance Improvements
3. New WPF Controls i.e. Datagrid, Datepicker and Ribbon

How is it going to be released is still a mistery as there are even some news out there about a SP1 released but still not official words yet. So got to cross our fingers and see how.

The team went back to school yesterday at Multimedia University, Cyberjaya.  Actually we gave talks to audiences working in Cyberjaya on new Visual Studio 2008 features. Me and Poh Sze tag team and started the 1st session of the day with the topic “Breakthrough with VS2008″.

Here is the slides on the topics we covered (Hosted on Windows Live Folders)

Features we covered include

1. Ease of Smart Client deployment
2. ASP.NET 3.5
3. Windows Communication Foundation as a unified framework for distributed programming
4. Language INtegrated Query (LINQ) (SQL & XML)
5. Visual Studio Tools for Office
6. Windows Mobile 6 development with connection WCF and LINQ

VS2008 and .NET 3.5 although is just incremental updates to .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0 but it comes with such a rick set of features that we can’t cover all in 1 hour and 15 minutes so here are some links for you to find out more

1. Workflow Foundation (http://netfx3.com/content/WFHome.aspx)
2. WPF Composite App Framework (www.codeplex.com/prism)
3. ASP.NET 3.5 Enhancements (http://www.asp.net/downloads/3.5-extensions/)
• Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET MVC Framework
• ADO.NET Entity Framework
4. Client Application Services for Win Form/ WPF (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb384339.aspx)

However if you really keen to go deep like Level 300 stuff as regards to Microsoft’s .NET technologies, then better check out Tech.Ed South East Asia 2008 event at KLCC Convention Centre from 11-14 August 2008

LINQ to SQL greatly enhance our coding productivity but when it comes to serialization of the object (means using LINQ to SQL Object as data contract) for used in WCF as data contracts, its a headache as it does not really support binary or XML serialization out of the box.

The immediate solution is to create your own data contract and copy the data from your LINQ to SQL object to properties in the data contract. This approach is good as a quick fix but it is counter productive of retyping everything. On the mean time I think there us overhead of doing so as well.

So the solution is write a native helper class to take care of the serialization using reflection (I bet you will complain there is overhead using reflection as well!) but it up to you as I found somewhere in Code Project the solution to do this is published.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/linqsqlserialization.aspx

While I am helping Tang to do a S+S Outlook addin, his customer is looking at integration with a back end database and also simple workflow.

Developing such an addin for Outlook 2007 would have easy with the Outlook 2007 S+S blueprint but the customer still running Outlook 2003. Late last night I managed to dig thru MSDN and found an article showing me just how to do it with Outlook 2003 and Visual Studio Tools for Office. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa537181.aspx

As per screenshot above, it shows you how to add a custom command bar into Outlook, and also how to trigger Windows Form from Outlook. But the cool thing here is the sample showing you how to create a custom folder under Inbox showing your own set of data. While not as slick as what you can do in Outlook 2007, it is good enough for most people out there.