Even if you are not visiting Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference currently running, make sure you watch the keynotes LIVE/Recorded to get glimpse of all the products coming in next one year.
Here are few of them :
Both IE8 and SharePoint/MOSS 2007 are OpenSearch compliant. This enables SharePoint admins to publish a custom search provider for IE users so that users can search the site content from browser search bar.
Here are the steps:
http://<portal>/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k={searchTerms} . This returns results in RSS format.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:ms-ose="http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/">
<ShortName>My Portal</ShortName>
<Description>Realtime My Portal Search</Description>
<Url type="application/rss+xml" template="http://<portal>/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k={searchTerms}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>
<link title="My Portal Search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" rel="search" href="<path to file uploaded>" />
With Windows 7, Search is integrated with Operating System. Apart from ability to index any kind of local content like files, mails , others, Windows 7 also supports federated search.
With federated search users can even search content outside local desktop.
Windows 7 support search federation to remote data stores using OpenSearch technologies that enable users to access and interact with their remote data from within Microsoft Windows Explorer. Additional search connectors can be created and deployed to external OpenSearch engines.
SharePoint 2007 search engine is OpenSearch compliant and so you can create a connector to search SharePoint site using Windows Explorer search bar.
Start with creating an OpenSearch Description (.osdx) file that describes how to connect to the Search Web service.
The simplest form of query URL for SharePoint / MOSS 2007 server which returns results in RSS format is following :
http://<my_portal>/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k={searchTerms}.
Create a file with .osdx extension and following contents:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:ms-ose="http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/">
<ShortName>My Portal</ShortName>
<Description>Realtime My Portal Search</Description>
<Url type="application/rss+xml" template="http://<my_portal>/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k={searchTerms}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>
Replace <my_portal> with your portal server name. Double click the .osdx file created. You will be shown following confirmation box.
Click ‘Add’. The new connector will be added to Windows favorites.
In Windows 7, when you perform search using Windows Explorer, there is no direct way of exporting the results to a text file.
Here is a small trick to copy them to a text file.
1 - Open Windows Explorer and search for what you want
2 - When the search results populate, select all (Ctrl + A)
3 - Hold the Shift key and Right Click on the search results
4 - Select "Copy as Path" (this option only shows up when you hold shift before the right click)
5 - Paste into a notepad window, Excel spreadsheet, etc...
The results will be formatted as:
"\path\to\first\item"
"\path\to\second\item"
...
Thanks Tarek Ayna.
Developers and IT Pros can expect the following benefits from Windows Server AppFabric:
Faster Web Apps Made Easy
Windows Server AppFabric helps developers improve the speed and availability of web applications through distributed in-memory caching and replication technology that works with current ASP.NET applications.
Simplified Composite Apps
Developers can simplify the development of composite applications with the pre-built application services in Windows Server AppFabric, used in conjunction with Visual Studio tools and .NET Framework capabilities (ASP.NET, WCF and WF). IT Pros can also simplify the deployment, monitoring, and management of composite applications with configuration and monitoring capabilities that are integrated with familiar tools (PowerShell, IIS Manager, and System Center).
Enterprise Performance and Availability
An enterprise’s most important and demanding applications can achieve elastic scale, performance, availability, and reliability (benefits often associated with the cloud) with the help of Windows Server AppFabric. These and countless other benefits from an unparalleled partner ecosystem utilize familiar skills from the .NET Framework and Windows Server.
Additional Resources:
Microsoft News Center feature story on Windows Server & Windows Azure platform AppFabric:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/nov09/11-17pdcappfabric.mspx
Beta2 Blog Post on Windows Server Blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/
Additional information on Windows Server AppFabric:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/app-main.aspx
Information (including download link) for Windows Azure AppFabric:
In general, if your PC can run Windows Vista, it can run Windows 7.
Just download, install, and run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta. You'll get a report telling you if your PC can run Windows 7 and if there are any known compatibility issues. If an issue can be resolved, you'll get suggestions for next steps.
Before you run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta, be sure to plug in any USB devices or other devices such as printers, external hard drives, or scanners that are regularly used with the PC you're evaluating.
The public beta of Windows 7 is out and everyone seems to be excited about it.
It not only improves upon the Vista but also adds lots of cool UI enhancements.
It also introduces lot of new platforms like Direct3D10, Direct2D, Windows Scenic and Sensor & Location Platform.
Catch all of it here .. New in Windows 7
Windows 7 is the next release of client operating system after Windows Vista. Its out for preview with beta 1 available for download.
The Windows 7 homepage is LIVE with lots of information for everyone.
Catch all the action here .. Windows 7 homepage
Windows XP had IIS 5.1 , Windows 2003 came with IIS 6.0. Vista and Windows 2008 come with IIS 7.0.
IIS 7.0 brings a big architecture shift in http & asp.net requests processing pipeline. While asp.net comes installed with IIS 7.0, you need to specifically enable it to host asp.net website. If you have worked on IIS 6.0, you may not find the familiar UI on IIS 7.0.
To enable ASP.NET on IIS 7.0 on Vista machine, you need to do following:
Control Panel –> Programs –> Turn Windows features on or off ->
Expand the IIS node and check the ‘ASP.NET’ checkbox and you are done. More on IIS 7.0 architecture later.
The latest version of Windows Live product suit has come out of beta and are available for download.
Bill Gates recently launched the DreamSpark initiative which provides free Microsoft software to students in India.
It can be downloaded from Internet or DVD can be collected from partners after verifying the student status.
Following products are available :
Microsoft recently at PDC announced the preview of Azure Services Platform which covers the complete stack for cloud applications.
1. Hosting platform.
2. Building block developer services.
3. Development Tools
4. Hosted Microsoft Products.
Get the overview of it in this article: Azure Services Platform: An Introduction
The CTP of VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 is available for download from here.
Its available as Virtual PC image only and total download size is around 7GB.
As part of the executive mails series, Steve Ballmer recently introduced the next technology platform called Windows Azure.
Windows Azure in simple terms will be a Cloud Operating System running in the data centers of Microsoft. A comprehensive set of storage, computing, and networking infrastructure services.
So in a Software + Services kind of scenario while Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will provide a platform for Software part, the Services hosting platform will be Windows Azure. Microsoft promises a seamless integration between both desktop and cloud platform with next version of Office client introducing the web version of Office applications like Word, Excel, etc.
Also any applications deployed on Windows Azure will be accessible from any device including desktop.
In other terms Windows Azure will be an OS as a Service and will help organizations to launch their software systems with zero deployment on their premises.
Windows Azure will be part of Azure Services Platform which already has few Microsoft Products hosted online like Sharepoint. Windows Azure will provide the capability of hosting custom solutions.
Microsoft has launched an exclusive site to showcase the research projects focused on developers @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/devlabs
Currently its showcasing the following projects. They are ready to be tried and so can be downloaded.
Microsoft Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, games, Web pages, and applications.
Small Basic is a simple and easy programming language with a friendly environment that provides a cool and fun way of learning programming. From making turtles animations to running a slide show on the desktop, Small Basic makes programming natural and effortless.
Pex (Program EXploration) is an intelligent assistant to the programmer. From a parameterized unit test, it automatically produces a traditional unit test suite with high code coverage. In addition, it suggests to the programmer how to fix the bugs.
CHESS is a concurrency testing tool for finding and reproducing concurrency Heisenbugs in your code. CHESS can find assertion violations, deadlocks, livelocks, data-races, and memory-model errors. CHESS works both for managed and for unmanaged code.
This site covers the support lifecycle information for all Microsoft Products.
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/
As part of Parallel Computing Initiative, Microsoft recently launched the CTPs of Parallel Extension to .NET framework.
This allows developers to express parallelism in their code to harness the full power of multi-processor and multi-core systems.
with .NET 4.0 and VS 2010, parallel programming framework will be core part of .NET framework.
Read more about Parallel Programming Framework
Read more about What’s New in .NET 4.0 , What’s new in Visual Studio 2010.
Join the Live Services Jumpstart event in a city nearest to you to explore the full breadth of the consumer components of the Microsoft ‘Software + Services’ Services – Live Services – in several in-depth technical sessions, hands-on code labs and informal Q&A. Microsoft's top engineers and Web development experts will lead you through 2 days of level 300-400 discussions on the latest technologies and upcoming offerings.
None in India :-(
With the introduction of .NET to Windows Application Development, the need for end to end Application Server functionality starting coming out.
Before .NET, COM/COM+ hosting services provided much of the app server functionality for business components and IIS was there for website provisioning.
But COM/COM+ was not opened for hosting managed components and instead IIS was promoted to start acting as App Server also with Windows 2003.
In Windows 2008 it improved further with the introduction of Windows Activation Service (WAS) which together with IIS provided end to end support.
The new Application server codenamed ‘Dublin’ is trying to simplify it further by making deployment, management and scaling the applications easier.
Check out my quick article on the information which has been made public.
What’s new in ‘Dublin’. I will be updating this article as and when information becomes available.
