The release version of the Open XML SDK is now out. The download page mentions April CTP under the Description, however, this is the June 08 version. The download details will show that it was published on 6/10/2008. So go ahead and start playing with it, if you have not done so in the past. Will see if I can write a few articles on using this soon.

Some companies may need to change some rules to match their coding standards. For people who don't have a particularly though out coding standard in place, and are using something from the ASP / VB / C days, it may be worth changing over the standard based on the Source Analysis rules, as it has been in use for quite a while at some parts of Microsoft, and from an overall look, it does look quite a decent one.

//-----------------------------------------------------------------------
// <copyright file="Program.cs" company="Your Company Name">
// Copyright (c) Your Company Name. All rights reserved.
// </copyright>
// <author>Your Name</author>
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------

// <auto-generated />

For more details about headers, you can check out the rules documentation on the Source Analysis Blog.

Lastly, now, you are sort of morally forced to document every method. I know it's a bit of an effort for all lazy developers like me. So GhostDoc come here to rescue us from our plight. For those of you, who don't know about Ghost Doc, shame on you. Just kidding ;) It is a cool VS Add-In by Roland Weigelt, which auto generates method descriptions by guessing it from the description. It is not perfect, but definitely a big leap from the Visual Studio way. Download it and I can assure you that you will seriously get addicted to it. Combine together Ghost Doc and Source Analysis, make coding much clearer, better documented and developer friendly.

Some of my old readers would have noticed that I've stopped blogging for quite a while now. Thing in my personal life, kept me busy and off blogging.

However, I am very much here, and dying to start blogging again. While I was in hibernation, the world has moved ahead leaps and bounds. MOSS is getting more and more popularity, and I am seeing people get excited about SharePoint more than I have ever seen before. I have been working with MOSS for a little while now, and it is HUGE. So while I begin another journey to learn, hack and understand the nitty gritty's of MOSS, I will try my best to keep discussing my findings with you. Had been busy with an architecture project in MOSS and currently working with a MOSS OpenXML based project. Have learnt a lot of things, but MOSS does amaze me daily.

For this so called first post, I will just list out some interesting pieces from fellow bloggers which I have been reading lately.

Andrew Connell posted a nice article on getting Silverlight working in SharePoint.

Spencer Harbar has posted a nice article on Internet Sites Licensing with SharePoint.

The Microsoft SharePoint Team has a nice article discussing the architecture for Building a News Workbench.

Paul Andrew has a short and effective task list on getting started with SharePoint development. Very practical advice here.

Doug Mahugh has some fantastic resources for those interested in getting started with Open XML. One of the best compilations I have seen.

And last but not least, Todd Baginski has a nice article on programmatically customising Site Navigation in WSS and MOSS.

As Windows 2008 is now officially released ( and people suspect that the release of Vista SP1 is similar to the codebase of Windows Server 2008 ), it would be nice recap the top new features which are making its way to us. I found this nice article which introduces to some of the fantastic changes coming with Windows Server 2008. I am really looking forward to a GUI less set of servers running on a dual core machine and providing multiple services. Oh, and the self healing NTFS sounds cool. Check out all the other features and I am sure you would be dying to get your hands on the new system.

Now I am off to find out more about Server Core. It is a really fantastic concept if it lives up to it's promise. It will definitely ease the burden on existing servers, boost performance, and decrease power consumption and cooling needs. One Quad - Eight core servers, lots of ram and server core to replace 2-3 existing servers, would be fantastic. From a developers point of view, if I can get AD, SQL Server, DNS and Mail working from a GUI Less Server Core VM installation, using under 512 MB of Ram, that would be just fantastic. All I need is to connect via a admin GUI to the Server Core machine and configure the services. Would be even fantastic if all servers ( SharePoint, Office Servers, Biztalk etc ), are enabled to run via a GUI less server in the future. This would make it phenomenal. It would take away the pain of developing on a laptop.

SearchEngineLand has a nice write up about this proposed acquisition. It discusses the event in detail and portrays a nice picture of what is going on and why. Definitely worth a read.

There are also live blogged notes from the Microsoft conference call for the Yahoo! bid at 8:30.

Steve Ballmer's letter to the board of Yahoo! is available for us to read at the Microsoft Presspass site. Definitely worth a read. I skipped the financial figures, and tried to find out what is Microsoft looking after with this acquisition. Search dominance, online advertising market share, or just an increase in long term profits by bringing Yahoo! financial figures in it's Balance Sheet.

We keep hearing things about Microsoft and Yahoo acquiring various firms related to Search, Advertising and Social Networking fields. Had never gussed that Microsoft will make a bid to get one competitor completely out of the way by acquiring it.

Definitely one of the biggest news I have seen in my career. Microsoft today proposed to acquire Yahoo! for $31 per share. That puts the value of Yahoo! at approximately $44.6 billion.

Financials apart, this will have a BIG effect on the search and online advertising landscape. Combined together, it will become a bigger and meaner rival to Google, and we can definitely see exciting things happening in the search and online advertising space. One thing is for sure. Exciting things ahead in the online advertising front. I guess it is time I try out some ad's myself and see for myself if they are worth $44.6 billion.

Also two of the biggest email platforms Hotmail and Yahoo Mail will be combining if this acquisition goes ahead. Flickr will also fall into Microsoft's lap. I am sure there are going to be lots of rampifications to this. More than I can think of. Do let us know if you can think of any significant change this will bring to the industry.

Shawn Burke has a nice article which explains how to enable Visual Studio to download the symbol files and enable debugging for the .NET Source Code in your project. This is definitely a big help, as we no longer have to treat internal .NET assemblies as a black box, but gives us a the power to find out why an error happened and what kind of data the runtime expects?

Have a look at this excellent article and start configuring your development environment to support it.

One of the biggest new announcements I have heard in a while. Newsgator which is the leader for RSS Clients, has recently announced that it is making it's clients FREE. Yes, you heard it. They are free to download and use. Yipeeeee. This includes FeedDemon, NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Go ( most exciting ), and also allows free sync with NewsGator online. NewsGator Go and my Windows mobile is the perfect combination. Head over to NewsGator and download the Free Clients today.

Wishing all my readers a very Happy New Year. May this year bring lots of joys and happiness into your lives, cause after all, those are the things which matter most. I am not a person who religiously makes resolutions and tried to keep them, but this year, I will definitely keep one promise. That is to all of you. I will write more often and write stuff of better quality. As you all know, my blog migration story is over. This blog is up and running. Spent most part of the last year in getting all my things in order. Still have some organising to do ( I organise everything a lot ), before I can focus on newer things. Have set a target to organise and put in order most of my things ( pending projects, active projects, clothes, books, various mailers, photos, files etc... you get the picture ) and get ready for new tasks by 15th Jan. Hope to see you all more often in this new year.

I have finally managed to port my blog from Wordpress to Community Server 2007. It was not at all a pleasant affair, but a very rough one. However, I am quite pleased with the result. I lost quite a bit of links as it was difficult to retain old links, and hence will loose my google rating, but don't care. It will rebuilt again in course of time as I write more content. The one thing I managed to get it right was to retain all comments. Hence, as far as I am concerned, this migration is a success. Over the coming few weeks, I will work on the design and a few tweaks here and there, but will now concentrate on writing more.

Don't expect the Wordpress to Community Server migration to be a simple one. I have to manually edit and correct every single one of my posts. Still have to figure out a way to set redirects from my old post URL's to this new one. I don't want to use Community Server functionality to create redirect URL's as I want to create a permanent redirects hence, allowing blog aggregators and search engines to update the URL's.

Hello,

I have been thinking about shifting to Community Server for quite a while, but due to lack of migration tools decided to hold back. Finally I have taken the dip and decided to migrate to Community Server. It has been quite a painful process and am currently migrating my posts over to this system. I hope to have all the old posts migrated very soon to this new system.

Just a quick update. Found this cool poster of .net 1.0 - 3.5 namespaces. Definitely a must to hang around any developer's cubicle ;) Download it straight from Microsoft.

As promised I am back. My development laptop has arrived. It is more like beauty and the beast put together. ( A real beauty to look at and work on while performing like a beast ). Many people have asked me more details about the laptop and I will try to review it later on sometime.

I finally decided to buy a Rock Xtreme 770 from Rock Direct. The configuration I went for is as follows :

• Intel Core 2 Duo T7500
• New Nvidia GeForce 8700M GT 512MB (DX10) Graphics Card
• Hi-res 17" WUXGA+ Display
• 2GB DDR2 667MHz (single module)
• 100GB 7200rpm SATA HDD
• HD DVD
• Windows Vista Home Premium

I chose to go for a single module 2GB ram as I want to add another 2GB stick later on and migrate to Vista 64 as soon as all decent drivers are available. I do like gaming, and so far 8700 has been an absolute beauty. Running almost all games ( BioShock, Quake Wars, Lotro ) on high settings at full native resolution ( 1920 x 1280 ).

I will be setting this up next and I have decided to write a few posts on how I setup my laptop. May be helpful to people who want to get the most from their machine.

I know I have been unable to keep my promise to start writing to this blog again. There are several reasons for that. After so long on not updating my blog, I was thinking that I will hardly have any readers left but all your comments proved me wrong. Logged in after ages to see a lot of encouraging comments which did in fact motivate me to start writing again. One of the factors for not writing much about MOSS 2007 was unavailability of a decent machine at home to run MOSS. I am happy to said that I have finally managed to order the latest ROCK laptop ( Xtreme 770 - T7500 ) and am patiently waiting for delivery. Will be configuring it to start testing SharePoint 2007 code and will post my progress and any lessons I learn along the way.

One thing I was interested in doing was to give something back to the SharePoint community. I want to find out what annoyances people face the most with 2007. If I can figure out something which can help the majority of users, I may sit down and write some tool for it.

Anyways, bye for now. My new laptop will be arriving in 2 weeks time, and hence will be getting busy playing with WSS at home. Still have to figure out a way to get a SPS 2007 development license for my home PC. Will definitely plan to start updating this blog regularly in a couple of weeks from now.