Latest News from .NET Developer's Journal

Windows XP Installation Issues on ACPI Enabled System

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:52:00 EST

ACPI or Advanced Configuration and Power Interface is an industry power management specification. It enables an operating system to control the amount of power required to be given to each device that is connected to the computer system. Thus, it eliminates device management responsibilities for firmware interfaces. However, when ACPI is enabled, your system BIOS might create issues. These problems are typically observed when you try to install Windows XP on your computer. You might be compelled to perform clean installation of Windows XP in such cases to solve the problem. Since the process deletes all the data that is stored on the hard disk, you will need to restore it from the recent data backup available. At times, backup might prove incompetent to restore the required files and folders. To cope up with such problems, you need to use an efficient data recovery tool that could extract the data thus lost

Reality Check at the Cloud Expo

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST

The talk at the Cloud Computing Expo this week in Santa Clara was all about enterprise cloud adoption. Is it real? Is it already happening? If so, who’s doing it, which applications are they running and which clouds are being tested? To a large extent, cloud computing is a victim of its own somewhat out-of-control hype cycle. Since so much has been written and discussed about the cloud in 2009, there is now a growing impatience for actual results. The fact that 2000 people showed up at the Cloud Expo in Santa Clara this week (double the number from last year’s show) suggests that at the very least, interest in enterprise cloud computing remains very real, and the need for practical solutions and use cases is growing more urgent.

New Value in the Computing System Industry

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

Cisco's foray into the server market, the merger between Oracle and Sun Microsystem, the acquisition of Fujitsu Siemens Computers by Fujitsu, and the acquisition of Silicon Graphics International by Rackable Systems have stirred the equilibrium in the worldwide computer system industry in 2009. The industry is expected to see more companies engage in horizontal and vertical cooperation. Looking ahead to 2010, as the effects of the global financial crisis continue to be felt, the industry is expected to face changes within the next two to five years resulting from Moore's Law, virtualization, and cloud computing. The computing centralization effect stemming from cloud computing will intensify the competition in the green data center segment. Virtualization, energy-saving, and cloud computing are to lead to more acquisitions and mergers in future.

Combining Twitter With Site Monitoring

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:15:00 EST

When Google's Gmail is down, thousands complain on Twitter. If Amazon has problems with its cloud services, you hear about it on Twitter. If a web hosting company has issues, you hear about it on Twitter. Twitter has given consumers a voice, and companies are listening. In other words, Twitter has become a discovery engine for service issues. But only if people effectively let the world know about those issues in the first place. Pingdom, a service that monitors the reliability of websites and services on the Internet, has now made it possible to automate this process. Pingdom users can choose to automatically send Twitter status messages when their monitored sites have downtime, notifying not just themselves, but the world.

Keep Your Executive Assistant Happy if Moving to the Cloud

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Google held a small event in London late last month, at which senior executives from a wide range of organisations gathered to discuss the impact of the Cloud. Presenters included luminaries such as Marc Benioff, Werner Vogels, Geoffrey Moore and Nick Carr, as well as CIOs at the coalface in adopting various Cloud (mainly SaaS) [...]

Adaptec MaxIQ Accelerates Performance of MySQL

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:01:00 EST

Adaptec, Inc. today released the results of third-party performance testing of its new MaxIQ(TM) SSD Cache Performance Solution in MySQL environments. AppLabs, the world's largest independent testing and quality management company, found that Adaptec MaxIQ (with MaxIQ SSD cache enabled) improved read and write throughput by eight times and increased transactions per second by 6.9 times when compared with a non-cached environment.

Regarding IE 8.0 and jQuery

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

Microsoft has chosen jQuery from among the different javascript libraries and has been giving increasing attention to it in its programming software regardless of this IE 8.0 still does not render all of jQueries selectors.

I read on the internet about other IE 8 problems vis-a-vis jQuery. The following figures show how different IE 8.0 renders the same content (I threw in a lot of selectors) when compared to other browsers. It appears that IE 8 can render the ID tag selector well but none of the others. I tried it out in the latest issue of Microsoft Blend Super Preview but it appears that rendering (interpretation) has remained the same from IE 6.0 to IE 8.0.

This is in IE 8.0

This one in Firefox

This one in Opera

This one in the latest issue of Super Preview. The left one is IE 6.0 and the right one is IE 8. I am not sure if the Super View is supposed to render css styles.

HiT Software and Solid Quality Mentors Team Up

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:32:00 EST

HiT Software, Inc., today announced a new partnership with Solid Quality Mentors, a trusted global provider of education and solutions for Microsoft Data Management and Development platforms. The partnership allows SQL Server users to tap Solid Quality Mentors for expert training and support on their data integration projects that use HiT Software’s DBMoto™ data replication and change data capture product.

Attunity Extends its Partnership with Microsoft to Enable Heterogeneous Change Data Capture

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:00:00 EST

Attunity Ltd. (OTC BB: ATTUF.OB), a leading provider of real-time data integration and event capture software, announced today a strategic partnership to market solutions that enable real-time business intelligence and efficient data integration based on the companies' data integration products. The solution, based on Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and Attunity's low-impact change data capture (CDC) technology, enables efficient and real-time integration of heterogeneous data with significant cost savings.

Using Network-Side Scripting to Convert Microsoft Smart Quotes to HTML Entities

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:03:00 EST

Dealing with Microsoft smart quotes is a fact of life for developers. Almost every developer out there has a server-side script/function they use to strip them out of user-generated content and replace them with web-friendly HTML entities instead. But handling smart quotes in application code isn’t always possible or as high a priority as other tasks. If you were looking for a way to address smart quotes once and for all, across multiple applications with one, centralized simple method then a network-side scripting solution may be the answer.

Presently Brings SharePoint Integration to Business Collaboration Tool

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:00:00 EST

Presently, the enterprise microblogging platform developed by Intridea, Inc., announced today the general availability of the Presently SharePoint Web Part, a free and open-source component for Microsoft's SharePoint Enterprise Collaboration Platform. The Presently SharePoint Web Part allows businesses to view and post updates to their company's microblogging network directly from within the SharePoint portal. When combined with Presently's proven behind-the-firewall enterprise installation options, companies can now securely and easily integrate microblogging into existing business processes.

Turning on the Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2010

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

The developer dashboard is a great new feature that developers can use to aid them in tuning performance on a page. This new functionality adds information to the bottom of any page in SharePoint that displays performance information and what SQL queries were executed to display the page. To my knowledge, there is currently no way in the UI to turn this on, so you can do this with a quick x64 console application. This is soon to become a quite popular code snippet I am sure.

DevCentral Top 5 for November 30, 2009

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:36:00 EDT

Released into the wild, the DevCentral team is back from our week of being sequestered in a conference room discussing the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Well…everything as it pertains to DC, at least. We even rolled successfully to save against being mauled by zombies or turned into newts (hey…it's almost Halloween, gimme a break…). As such there is plenty of content to pour through this week, including a very cool talk with a newbie to the F5 family. As always I'll give you my picks and hope they serve you well. Here is the Top5 for this week:

SPC 2009 Wrap-Up

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:15:00 EDT

The last day of the SPC had some tech-laden sessions hosted by Andrew Connell. The first was about migrating from 2007 to 2010, and how you can add the nice 2010 development features (like the ribbon and the developer dashboard) back into your 2007 master pages when you migrate them. The theme seems to be that you invested in branding and customizing 2007, and Microsoft is making it straightforward to move that content to 2010. The idea is to not have to stop doing work in your 2007 instance waiting for 2010 to release. All in all, it looks like going from 2007 to 2010 should be much easier than 2003 to 2007.

Installing Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Was a Breeze

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

VS2010 comes in three flavors with increasing capabilities, Professional, Premium and Ultimate. Ultimate can do everything the others can and much more.

With the gathering of stuff in the clouds VS 2010 is built-in with capabilities to master the clouds by supporting Windows Azure.

It's only a short hop from now to launch time (March 2010) but it is worth trying it out.

Although it was a marathon installation experience (some 4 hours are so with two or three boots), it went on well on my Windows XP with Sp3 without a hitch except for the fact that Silverlight 3(one of the many programs in the installation package) failed to install. Yes, there was one more thing. The last message screen had a button which would take me to some documentation that failed as well. Anyway this time around the experience may be even termed pleasurable.

Here is a screen shot of the latest of the Visual Studio products.

Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional here.

Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium Beta 2 – Web Bootstrapper here

Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 Web Bootstrapper here

Is Your Vocabulary Costing You Money?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:45:00 EDT

By Tom Hopkins When we give a presentation to a future client not only do our appearance, visual aids, and body language relay a message, but the words we use create pictures in their minds. When we hear a word, we often picture a symbol of what that word represents. We may even attach emotions to some of these words. For example, let’s consider the words, SPRING, SUMMER, AUTUMN, WINTER. Depending on your particular experience, each of those words can generate positive or negative emotions in [...]

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Install Fails In Boot Camp

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:15:00 EDT

I ran into an interesting bug this past week when trying to install the beta 2 build of Visual Studio 2010. I tried both the web bootstrap install and the full ISO download. I also tried the Ultimate version as well as Professional. Nothing seemed to be working. It turns out that my machine configuration was [...]

Citrix Regroups on XenDesktop Licensing

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:15:00 EDT

Citrix got push-back on its newfangled two-week-old VDI+XenApp kit, XenDesktop 4 – which it meant to license only by named users not concurrent users – so Tuesday it materialized a new device-based licensing option, a new VDI Edition for both user/device and CCU licensing and a new campus-wide licensing program for schools.

Mezeo Partners with Tier 3 to Deliver Enterprise Cloud Storage Services

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:30:00 EDT

The Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform is a software-only, deployable solution with RESTful Web Services APIs for programmatic access to storage. It provides service providers such as Tier 3 with the opportunity to provide their own hosted and branded cloud storage offerings to their customers. Files stored in a Mezeo-based cloud can be securely accessed via pre-built, brandable access clients including the Web, smartphones (BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile) and desktop, using the Mezeo Native client for Windows and WebDAV based connectivity for Linux and Mac.

Tasktop Collaborates with Microsoft to Enhance Eclipse for Windows 7

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:03:00 EDT

Tasktop Technologies, creators of Eclipse Mylyn and the leading provider of task management for application lifecycle management (ALM), today announced it is developing updates to the Eclipse IDE that will incorporate new features available in Windows 7 into the leading open source development environment. In collaboration with Microsoft, Tasktop will ensure that the improved productivity and user experience of Windows 7 will be available to developers using the Eclipse IDE, as well as to desktop applications built on the Eclipse platform, such as the Tasktop Pro rich client for agile task management.

Authentic Personal Branding Concept

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EDT

"The Secret" was launched by Rhonda Byrne in 2006 and says that thoughts have an energy that attracts like energy and you attract into your life whatever you think about. This tool refers to what Buddha said: "What you have become is the result of what you have thought". It suggests the following: "your dominant thoughts will find a way to manifest. ... Whatever you focus on the most is what will be most attracted to your life. ..Once you are aware of this law and how it works, you can start to use it to deliberately attract what you want into your life... Like attracts like...You get what you think about, whether wanted or unwanted...You are a living magnet...You get what you put your energy and focus on...Energy attracts like energy...it has it roots in Quantum Physics.

Microsoft "Opens" Outlook Personal Folders Format (.pst)

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:03:00 EDT

Big news from Microsoft today. In a blog post to the interoperability @ Microsoft blog, Paul Lorimer, Group Manager, Microsoft Office Interoperability announced they will be "opening" the Outlook Personal Folders format also called a .pst file.

Lorimer said that "In order to facilitate interoperability and enable customers and vendors to access the data in .pst files on a variety of platforms, we will be releasing documentation for the .pst file format. This will allow developers to read, create, and interoperate with the data in .pst files in server and client scenarios using the programming language and platform of their choice. The technical documentation will detail how the data is stored, along with guidance for accessing that data from other software applications. It also will highlight the structure of the .pst file, provide details like how to navigate the folder hierarchy, and explain how to access the individual data objects and properties"

He also admitted that that the documentation is still in its early stages and work is ongoing. Going on to say "We are engaging directly with industry experts and interested customers to gather feedback on the quality of the technical documentation to ensure that it is clear and useful. When it is complete, it will be released under our Open Specification Promise, which will allow anyone to implement the .pst file format on any platform and in any tool, without concerns about patents, and without the need to contact Microsoft in any way."

This initiative is part of Microsoft's Interoperability Principles, which they announced in early 2008. As part of this initiative Microsoft has committed product features, documented formats, and implementation of standards that allow interoperability. The move to open up the portability of data in .pst files is another step in putting these principles in action.

Lorimer also said that "Over the past year, Microsoft Office has taken several steps toward increasing openness and documenting interoperability guidelines, offering customers a choice of file formats and embracing a comprehensive approach that includes transparency into our engineering methods, collaboration with industry stakeholders, and shared stewardship of industry standards"

This is a great move by Microsoft!

IT Myths and Legends

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:09:00 EDT

There is a common myth that the reason legacy code continues to run in businesses around the world is that no one understands it; that IT and businesses are afraid to replace it because they don’t know what it does.

Once again, living in the mainframe capital of the world (the insurance industry heavy midwest), I get to talk to IT folks who deal with legacy software and hardware all the time. Do not doubt that they know exactly what that legacy software does and how it works, and perhaps frightening to proponents of change and the benefits of emerging technology those IT organizations are still developing software for those legacy platforms.

THE TIGHT-COUPLING OF SOFTWARE AND THE BUSINESS

I’m sure there are plenty of organizations out there with some legacy software running that no one understands and for which the organization has no one with the skill set to migrate to a more modern system. But I’m of the opinion that there are far more organizations out there with legacy software running that has simply become too expensive and laden with risk to migrate. Software that is core to the business, that essentially has become the business over time carries with it an exceedingly high risk – if it fails, the business fails, and in a way that’s very real and very costly. There is a high level of not only software but business integration that happens over time with critical systems and it is that integration and dependence on specific legacy systems that deters organizations from even considering a migration to a more modern system.

These IT organizations know what the legacy software does; in fact they continue to develop new functionality and systems that integrate with and depend on those systems, and they invest in human capital by specifically training new developers and architects on those systems and legacy platforms. The original developers have long since moved on and up – to project and program managers who are more than willing to evaluate new platforms and systems but who also understand the risks to the operational effectiveness of both IT and the business should something go wrong.

Legacy systems developed in the early 1970s are still being maintained because the risks outweigh the potential benefits. These decades old systems are so integral to the continued operation of IT and the business that the risk inherent in migration is simply too high to justify such an undertaking. With so much time and money invested in these systems they are as close to perfection as software gets, and any migration to new platforms runs the risk of introducing errors and new flaws that would need to be worked out over time. Too, every integrated system would need to be updated, which incurs the risk that those systems would have errors and issues. It's actually mind-boggling to consider the effort that would be required to accomplish such a Herculean task.

IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT

That’s not to say these organizations have not invested in new architectures, solutions, and platforms over time. Indeed, they have, and there are plenty of heterogeneous environments out there with a good mix of both legacy and modern software not only in production, but integrated and orchestrated together in what is a big melting pot of application development environments. Modern systems are used to interface to users and customers, but the core software upon which these businesses rely is ancient, legacy software that may never be replaced. As long as the supplier of both the hardware and the software development environments continues to support it there’s no reason for these organizations to change.

With many organizations wholly reliant on legacy software it is more likely the case that comfort levels drive continued reliance on these systems than ignorance. It is exactly because they understand and trust the systems in place that they continue to build on them, to integrate them, and rely upon them to power their businesses day in and day out.

It is hard to justify why an organization should migrate its entire business to a new platform and new software that might be error-prone and requires millions of man-hours to migrate when a comfortable system that just works already exists. The costs to train new developers and architects is by and large less of an investment than attempting to re-architect an entire ecosystem of applications while that ecosystem is evolving. Because of the time it would take to migrate such systems – and prove their correctness – there is no way to “go dark” until it’s done; it would have to be accomplished while new systems are being integrated and put into place. You’d almost need two IT organizations to get it done – one to work on and maintain the old architecture and one to work on and migrate the new one. That’s not counting the costs to invest in a completely new architecture requiring new platforms, new hardware, new software, and new developers.

SOA ENABLED CONTINUED RELIANCE

What’s ironic is that SOA was purported to provide the means by which migrations could occur but instead enabled the continued reliance on legacy systems. Organizations implemented web services interfaces to legacy systems, but never took the next step; they did not use the inherent decoupling of interface from implementation provided by SOA and its standards to replace the implementation. Instead, web services became exactly what some feared: little more than a method of integration; a bridge between two worlds. And thus it has remained, with service-enabled interfaces it is easy enough for organizations to update presentation layer and user-interface technology, to take advantage of emerging web application models without giving up the comfort and trust they have in their core systems.

Even if these organizations started a migration today it would still be years if not decades before every legacy software system was replaced with something more “modern”. That’s why it’s important amidst the hype of cloud computing and social networking and web 2.0/3.0/4.0 that we not lose sight of the fact that not every organization is simply going to rip and replace their entire architecture in favor of the latest and “greatest” new data center model. We need to continue to support internal hybrid models of application architecture as well as hybrid data center architectures. In the application delivery space this is a lot easier than it might be for some: applications are applications, protocols are protocols, and network traffic is network traffic. Application delivery platforms, at least, are capable of supporting both legacy software and modern implementations at the same time, on the same solution, without equal alacrity. Whether that enables organizations to move from legacy to modern, or offers a means by which more modern technology can be applied to legacy systems without requiring modification to those applications is up to the organization.

Legacy software isn’t going away, and whether we like it or not the number of legacy systems is growing each year because organizations can’t afford the risk to their business and can’t justify the investment to change. So even as we continue to look forward to how emerging data center and application architectural models can provide benefits and solve problems we need to continue to evaluate how to support aging technologies and provide them, as well, with the tools necessary to keep their applications secure and available.

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,legacy,software,hardware,cloud computing,infrastructure,application delivery,cobol,integration,web,internet,blog

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Are You Getting Excited About the Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara?

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:45:00 EDT

Whether you are searching for a Cloud Computing solution for your enterprise or you want to learn about the latest and greatest Cloud Computing technology, The Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara, California running from November 2 until November 4 is for you. http://cloudcomputingexpo.com/general/keynotes1109.htm Keynote speakers include Richard Marcello, President, Systems & Technology, Unisys, Shelton Shugar SVP [...]

Microsoft Falls Off Cliff, Keeps on Ticking

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:30:00 EDT

Wall Street declared Microsoft the winner over the economy Friday morning when the results of its September quarter weren’t as bad as everybody thought they were going to be. As a reward, its stock price was pushed up to the highest point since June of last year. Still the economy put up quite a cat fight. It gouged 18% out of Microsoft’s earnings and 14% out of its revenues.

Templated Helpers in ASP.NET MVC 2 (VS2010 Beta 2 Version)

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Templated Helpers are one of the new features in ASP.NET MVC 2. The other day, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 came out and some of you may have noticed that it comes pre-equipped with a beta release of ASP.NET MVC 2. In short a templated helper is a way of using various combinations of implicit and explicit rules to automatically place partial controls wherever particular data types need to appear, either in edit mode or display mode. So let's say you have a DateTime property on your model called MeetingDate. Rather than make every single view write its own (potentially contrasting!) code to render dates in view mode and in edit mode, you can now do something like this:

Citizen Developers Will Build New Business Apps

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:33:00 EDT

By 2014, citizen developers will build at least 25 percent of new business applications, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner said that this advance should both enable end users and free up IT resources. However, analysts warned that IT organizations that fail to capitalize on the opportunities that citizen development presents will find themselves unable to respond to rapidly changing market forces and customer preferences. Gartner defines a citizen developer as a user operating outside of the scope of enterprise IT and its governance who creates new business applications for consumption by others either from scratch or by composition.

Deleting Your Hard Drives

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:23:00 EDT

For those of us old-timers who muscled 9-track tapes on 10 ft tall Burroughs B-3500 mainframe computer tape drives, with a total storage capacity of about 5 kilobytes, the idea of sticking a 64 gigabyte SD memory chip into my laptop computer is pretty cosmic. Now we see systems where "a single server can scale linearly, which provides up to 6GB/sec of read bandwidth and more than 500,000 read IOPS."

Infrastructure-as-a-Service Will Mature in 2010: Microsoft's David Chou

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:00:00 EDT

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New CTP for SQL Azure

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:04:00 EDT

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Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint Named by InfoWorld

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:34:00 EDT

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New Fotolia Add-in for Microsoft Office 2007 Applications

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:50:00 EDT

Hovering over search results lets users preview the image. A simple double click inserts a free comp of the image into the document, allowing customers to try before they buy. Once members see a photograph, vector or illustration they are interested in, they can purchase it while still in their document by selecting download and the appropriate size and license. “Connecting Fotolia’s online image library directly to Word and PowerPoint is a great productivity win for our customers,” said Rob Ashby, Group Manager for Office.com. “The add-in’s use of the ribbon makes finding and using the right images fast and easy, without customers having to leave their work.”

HERMES SoftLab Announces New Data Management Technology for MS SharePoint

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:00:00 EDT

HERMES SoftLab has announced the availability of its MS SharePoint data management technology. The software building block, called the HERMES SoftLab SharePoint Filter, will help storage vendors provide advanced SharePoint data migration for storage applications, such as data protection and active archiving.

The EC & Microsoft Contemplate Beating Their Swords into Plowshares

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EDT

After 10 years of trench warfare and a body count of close to $1.8 billion in fines, the European Commission is getting ready to pass Microsoft the roach of concord and close the book on the case. The EC said Wednesday that a final settlement of the browser issue, Europe’s updated version of the old Netscape case that saw Microsoft branded a monopoly in the first place, could be all of a month or two away.

Disk Controller Failure Is Evident and Cause Data Loss

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:36:00 EDT

When the disk controller gets damaged or it fails, hard drive become inaccessible, undetectable in BIOS and renders the system unbootable. Same problem may also occur if your hard drive is malfunction due to either logical or physical problems. It might result into serious data loss and you need to opt for Hard Drive Recovery to get your mission critical data back.

Resolving “Data Error Reading Drive C” in Microsoft Windows

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:36:00 EDT

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Deploying a Data Connections Library using a Feature

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:54:00 EDT

If you’re like me at all, you like to see compete examples of how to do things. Yes, I can usually read something and apply what I already know, but sometimes, it is nice to see a fully working example of something, before you try something on your own. Today’s example is how to deploy a data connections library using a feature. I already posted how to deploy a .UDCX file to a data connection library so I thought this post would go well with it. Our example starts with a standard feature.xml file.

<Feature xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"

Id="{EF18A3A1-8D0D-40a9-8BEF-B23ADE36889D}"

Scope="Site"

Hidden="False"

Title="My Data Connection Library"

Description="This deploys a data connection library">

<ElementManifests>

<ElementManifest Location="Elements.xml" />

</ElementManifests>

</Feature>

Now we need to build our elements.xml file. There are two things we need to know to deploy a SharePoint list in this case. The list template id and the feature that the deployed the list template. The first thing we need to know is the List Template Type for the data connections library. We can figure that out by looking at the type attribute in the List element of the SDK. Looking at that, we determine the List Template Type is 130.

We now need to figure out the feature id. There is a number of ways to do this (and maybe it is even documented somewhere), but I went with a more brute force approach. I knew that the Records Center site template provisioned a data connection library, so I went to the SiteTemplates folder in the 12 hive and found the SPSREPORTCENTER folder. Looking at the onet.xml file inside, I found the line I needed.

<List Title="$Resources:spscore,ReportCenterOnet_DataConnectionsListInstanceName" FeatureId="00BFEA71-DBD7-4F72-B8CB-DA7AC0440130" Description="$Resources:spscore,ReportCenterOnet_DataConnectionsListInstanceDescription" Url="Data Connections" Type="130" />

There is the FeatureId and the Type again. Note the FeatureId of 00BFEA71-DBD7-4F72-B8CB-DA7AC0440130. For some reason, they never use brackets with the GUID on the Id here. Not sure if that is required or not. We can pretty much use this line in our elements file, but we do need to make some changes, since elements.xml needs a ListInstance element instead of a List element. Here is what our ListInstance element looks like.

<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

<ListInstance FeatureId="00BFEA71-DBD7-4F72-B8CB-DA7AC0440130" Id="{7C6924D1-5704-4a6f-9C6C-04902A312252}" TemplateType="130" DocumentTemplate="130" Title="Data Connections" Url="DataConnections" OnQuickLaunch="FALSE" Description="My Data Connection Library." />

</Elements>

As you can see it’s pretty similar. Be sure and give it a unique Id. You can customize the Url to your liking. One thing I will point out is that you should not set RootWebOnly to true on this list. If you do, you will get an Object Reference not found error and the list will not deploy. Copy your feature files out to your 12 hive. Then install and activate your feature. You should have a data connections library at the URL you specify. I will point out that the library won’t show up in the Lists on your site, nor will there be any navigation to it, but it will be there. I hope this quick tip today helps you.

Life at a Law Firm’s IT Department

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EDT

Though we may have finally hit the bottom of the economic slide (and the jury is still out on that one), we in the IT profession have faced more challenges over the last 12 months than most of us have had to deal with in our entire careers prior to that. The interesting thing is that for most folks in the IT industry in general - and in the legal community specifically - this type of budget pressure on the IT department is nothing new.

Wave on Ulitzer: Confessions of a Google Wave Fanboy

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 12:15:00 EDT

Like many who were given early Google wave sandbox accounts, I didn't see the purpose at first. The rather buggy javascript laden interface was actually kind of slow and at times cumbersome and worst of all crashed my browser all the time. This was for the most practical of reasons, I didn't know anyone else using the platform and it was an alpha that was changing on practically an hourly basis.

Judge Saves Microsoft $388m

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EDT

A Rhode Island district court judge Tuesday struck down a jury verdict ordering Microsoft to pay an obscure Australian developer by the name of Ric Richardson $388 million, reportedly the fifth-largest patent infringement award in history. In a relatively rare and painstaking post-trial judgment as a matter of law (JMOL), Judge William Smith found Microsoft’s patented Production Activation (PA) system, its scheme for defeating illegal copying of Windows and Office, did not infringe on a patent held by Richardson’s companies Uniloc Singapore Private Ltd and California-based Uniloc USA Inc.

Microsoft Browser Solution Under Fire

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EDT

The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), the group of Microsoft foes that has been hounding the company for years with complaints to the European Commission, and Opera, one of its members, are griping that the proposed ballot screen solution to the EC’s charge that Microsoft’s bundling of its IE browser in Windows violates antitrust law, a claim based on a complaint that Opera initiated, is too complicated for the poor dumb user to master.

Join Me at the 1st Government IT Conference & Expo 6 Oct

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EDT

I hope to see you at the SYS-CON sponsored GovIT Conference and Expo 6 Oct 2009. I’ll also spend time during the day attending the day thinking through everything I’ve ever written and learned about Cloud Computing and Federal IT and hope to bring that to bear in my interactions with Jeremy Geelan, Terry Woloszyn and Barry X Lynn at the end of conference panel on Cloud Computing and Federal IT. Jeremy will focus this panel on the future and I’m sure this action-oriented panel will help bring clarity to this fast moving subject. Related posts:

Microsoft Goes with Stockholder ‘Say on Pay’

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:45:00 EDT

Microsoft’s board has approved a non-binding – and so purely decorative – shareholder “say-on-pay” mechanism that kicks in at its shareholder meeting on November 19 ahead of any government instructions to do so. The Wall Street Journal thinks the U.S. is possibly headed for legislation mandating a stockholder veto on executive pay, and surely greater disclosure.

Microsoft Adds Parallel Skills

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:45:00 EDT

Microsoft has acquired the technology assets of Interactive Supercomputing (ISC), an MIT HPC spin-out that specializes in parallel computing on the desktop. It says the move will bring together complementary technologies that help simplify the complexity and difficulty of expressing problems that can be parallelized. ISC’s widgetry is supposed to enable faster prototyping, iteration and deployment of large-scale parallel solutions.

Word’s Honor Rests with Three Judges

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EDT

The issue of Word’s patent purity and whether Microsoft will have to pay $290 million to a tiny Canadian company because it allegedly wasn’t so virtuous is now in the lap of three judges at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC. Microsoft had the expedited hearing of its appeal Wednesday and their honors are expected to be months at deciding who’s right, Microsoft or i4i.

ViewState is the Froo-It of the Dev-Il

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:45:00 EDT

The other day I was running Microsoft's malicious software removal tool and, to my shock and horror, it did not remove all of my ASP.NET applications that make use of ViewState. I'm sure it's just an oversight and Microsoft will be releasing a patch for that soon... if there is one application that could be called malicious, it's an app that uses ViewState.

Microsoft, Dave Chappell and Cumulux Azure World Tour

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:52:00 EDT

Cumulux is co-hosting Microsoft’s Azure World Tour events with David Chappel at Chicago, Dallas and Washington DC starting Sept 21st . This tour is aimed at generating discussions around the viability of Cloud Computing, its Total Cost of Ownership , Windows Azure etc.

Mimosa Systems’ Next-Generation Archiving Solution

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:45:00 EDT

After evaluating several archiving solutions including Symantec, Sunbelt and GFI, Provident selected Mimosa NearPointTM because of its next-generation architecture, storage management, and self-service search capabilities. Since deploying NearPoint ten months ago, Provident has reduced storage requirements by 70 percent, boosted Exchange performance, and cut email-related help desk calls by 90 percent – freeing the IT staff to focus on the strategic needs of the business. In addition, the company has transformed its email system without incurring the expense and hassle of upgrading to a larger Exchange Server, or having to add additional hardware.

Windows Azure Service Management API

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:00:00 EDT

Microsoft released a preview of the Windows Azure Service Management API to help you manage your deployments, hosted services and storage accounts. This is a REST-based API which users can code against in their toolset of choice to manage their services. You can find the documentation (along with the rest of the Windows Azure documentation) here. This is [...] Related posts:

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Dell News on Ulitzer: Dell to Acquire Perot Systems for $3.9 Billion

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:15:00 EDT

Dell and Perot Systems have entered a definitive agreement for Dell to acquire Perot Systems in a transaction valued at approximately $3.9 billion. Terms of the agreement were approved yesterday by the boards of directors of both companies. The acquisition will result in a compelling combination of two iconic information-technology brands. The expanded Dell will be even better positioned for immediate and long-term growth and efficiency driven.