This Monday an announcement was published at the Microsoft Sharepoint Team Blog announcing the CTP of Visual Studio Excensions for Sharepoint (v1.3) which is greatly anticipated. This is said to be a interim until Visual Studio 2010 is released. Among the best features of this CTP is the ability to use it on x64 systems also! Finally! Download the CTP from here or read more on the Sharepoint Team Blog.

I will deliver some really good (if I may say so) seminars about Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, at Informator Utbildning in Stockholm and Gothenburg. Read more, and book you free attendance, on their website about the Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 seminar.

Back from christmas – no computers at all for 18 days. Almost the worst panic situation ever for me. =) However, on my way to the MCT Summit in Prague now and meet fellow MCTs from all of EMEA. If you are there then please send me a mail and lets meet for a beer or something. Will blogg if anything interesting pops up (I know there will be but some I think is under NDA). Otherwise see you in a week when I publish my first screencast. Live long and prosper.

When developing workflows with WSS and you need input, config or whatever. You are directed to making ASP.NET pages. In MOSS you will also have the InfoPath possibility. In WSS however it can take forever just to do a simple form. As a new alternative a cool codeplex project have been developed. Read more at Codeplex. [via: Andrew Connell]

The Sharepoint team yesterday announced the WSRP toolkit., a toolkit with resourses on how to  integrate WebSphere and other (WSRP-compliant) systems with Sharepoint. The toolkit consists of some demo code projects in visual studio, screencasts and a whitepaper on the techniques used.  Read more here, or download directly from MSDN.

I’m not dead or gone, just had a lot of work to do. Have started to record a lot of screen casts about sharepoint and powershell – which of the first will be available here soon.

Important patch have been released by Microsoft for Sharepoint Server 2007 and Search Server 2008. This patch have been distributed before in the October cumulative update. Read more.

Also; register today for the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference in London between 6-8 April. There isn’t that much decided in the area about session but the line-up of speakers seems really impressive and promising. Read more.

Recently discovered a post about LinQ to SQL will be depreciated(?) in .NET4.0. Some people think this is good, and some think it’s really bad. I haven’t decided yet; I just have started to use LinQ to connect data to my applications… Read more and a clarification here.

Microsoft is also developing a concept called OSLO which has a lot of exciting stuff. Something I especially like as a “Curly Braces”-programmer is the M modeling language. However I don’t use it as intended but rather to quickly generate really good sql… =) A video can be found here

Then to a topic which isn’t really IT but rather general topic. Today I went to my local store and got news from a cashier there that three of the five cashiers just got sacked. This because the pay points have been automated and the customers now scan their goods them-selfs. Three of the five lines were closed. This is optimization of flow; they will handle a increased number of customers, they will be able have less staff. More economically liable in other words. I can see some similarity to my own optimizations in document handling and it-structures and automating tasks which today employ people – tomorrow by machines. Of-cause the greater good is served – but when Christmas is coming and you see people loosing their jobs over “optimizations” you get a bit sad. Just a short philosophical note from a techie =).

The SP2 for Office Systems 2007 was announced not long ago. Today I got positive confirmation that some MVP, and other select users, already is beta testing the upcomming SP. The official word is that it will be availiable sometime between Febuary and April. However given the circumstances that selected users already have been given a beta I would be very supprised if it wouldn’t be a more generally availiable SP this side of new year. But just guessing here.. =)

 Some of the better improvements is:

• Better support for XPS, and PDF
• Performance and manageability improvements to variations in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) including STSADM commands for repairing links between source and target pages
• Improvements around processing status approvals from Office Project Web Access into Office Project Professional 2007
• Improvements to read-only content databases and index rebuild timer jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Also; the team will also release a Upgrade Advisor which will help you to make sure that your system is ready for SP2 and list all additional task needed to be perfomed. No more guessing (or reading a lot) as with SP1. =) Will update blog as soon as I have more information.

Back from Bacelona and TechEd; one part with lots of new inspiration of things to test, do and develope, the other part is just tierd from all the tapas and social life. =) One of the nice things I was playing with the last week was content expiration policies. Offen when I do ECM projects the built-in functionalities isn’t enough and previously I always turned to my developer friends for assistance but now I found a realy simple, yet good, step-by-step howto of how to create your own policies – even something that a non-programmer as myself pulled of. Read more at WinSmarts

In way of certification two new “certifications” became availiable during the TechEd IT-Pro week. Theese are not “in the same legue” as our traditional MCTS on sharepoint. It is the Certified Master for Sharepoint and Certified Architecht for Sharepoint. The following is a quote from the Sharepoint blog: “The Master program is designed to be the top-tier technical certification for SharePoint Products and Technologies for years to come. The goal of the MCM is to provide a means for training, recognizing, and developing the top SharePoint technical experts in the world. Specifically, the MCM is intended for technical professionals whose primary responsibilities include designing, building, configuring, deploying, and supporting large, often complex, MOSS 2007 environments. Building on the MCM, the MCA certification is designed for professionals who possess an additional skill set focused on the larger business strategies and technical architecture as a whole. This skill set includes the ability to communicate with business and technology leaders, to understand the customer’s current and long-term organizational and technical needs, and to design a solution to meet those needs. To receive the MCA for SharePoint, students must first graduate from the MCM for SharePoint program and will then have the option of sitting for a comprehensive Review Board interview conducted by Microsoft experts and MCA’s. ” More information is availiable on the Microsoft Learning site

Lastly a quick note about the Windows Azure plattform and Sharepoint Online. This was announced two weeks ago at PDC, and re-launched again during TechEd. The services are “clould” services. Today Sharepoint Online does not build on Azure. Sharepoint online do not carry nearly as many features as the real Sharepoint (on premise) installations do. I will be back to map the diffrences in a few days. Until then please read the sharepoint blog.

If you read my blog before you probably know that I am on-site at TechEd IT-Professionals EMEA in Barcelona as a MCT-Ambassador. Have had the time to go to lots of exciting seminars and more importantly I’ve met lot of people who I only had contact with trough newsgroups and mail before. Haven’t been bloging yesterday, since I could not find any network cable (panic!) and my wifi seems brooken. Finally found a MediaMarkt and now I’m connected via some kind of hotel-isdn-type of connection.

As a MCT-Ambassador for Microsoft Learning I’m in the Ask-The-Experts area and answering questions about learning, certifications and that kind of stuff. It’s a challange to remember all of the certifications, paths and books. But very fun – over my expectations – I think it is due to all the people I get to meet.

Today I attended a seminar about what I thought to be Sharepoint External webs, optimizing and configuring etc. But the seminar was about something completely different (even if it kind of was external access – just not what I expected): it was about IAG (Intelligent Application Gateway). The IAG is a application layer security software which lives on top of ISA-server. Currently only availiable as a appliance but soon also as a virtual appliance (running in Hyper-V I would presume).

The IAG will inspect the health of a visitors computer, for example looking for anti-virus software and based on that health information restrict access to Sharepoint. Whats exciting (realy sexy actualy) is that it does limit specific functionality and not the whole site. For instance you might be able to browse the extranet while not having a anti-virus program but you cannot upload. Great stuff I think and will deep dive into this as soon as I can find the time.

Also discovered, or rather got reminded of, the large number of protocolls and ports used in Sharepoint for all sorts of communication. Could be a real challange to setup a multi-layered setup with segmentations and firewalls. One thing I learned today is that the search query from the WFE actualy use SMB for the querys (not the index transfers – already knew that).. will look into that tonight I think..

I realy hate myself for not beeing at PDC. Lots of bits and pieces of Office 14 is landing in from collegues and friends “on-scene” at LA. Currently working hard on compilling all the sceenshots, videos and other stuff I got in the mail for this blog. Will be posting a long commentary about this in a day or two when I get time of from teaching classes and realy can deep dive into all the materials. Let’s just say that the things I’ve seen is REALY exciting! =)

Also as a side-note I’m proud to say that I got certified for EBS, took the beta exam sometime in august and just got the news that I passed. Which now means that I’m a charter member for TS: EBS 2008, Configuration. This is besides my sharepoint certifications my most valued certificate.. =)