From the outside in

Have a look...

http://thumbtack.livelabs.com/

I've been using PowerShell a bit recently and I like this alot, very cool...

http://andrewpeters.net/powershell-gadget/

What do you think the following post from ADO.NET team blogs says?

http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/10/29/update-on-linq-to-sql-and-linq-to-entities-roadmap.aspx

Back in April this year I gave a talk on SQL Server 2008 and one of the aspects I covered was the Entity Framework. It was hard to say at that point what the impact of the Entity Framework was going to be. It just seemed to be important.

Many thanks to Andy Westgarth for organising a very interesting talk on OpenXML, given by Craig Murphy yesterday. Craig gave an excellent introduction to Open XML file formats in general and specifically the Open XML Format SDK 2.0.

I've been working recently on a project migrating SharePoint 2001 Portals to MOSS. The project has had some tight deadlines, hence the absence of posts. I've used PowerShell to deploy and customise the sites. I'll try and post about my experiences using PowerShell with SharePoint.

I've recently written an ASP.NET web application to programmatically execute SQL Server 2000 DTS packages and jobs and report on the outcome. I should really have the link below bookmarked given the amount of times I've used it.

Feature Pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2005, February 2007

I'm heading over to Newcastle for the SharePoint User Group tonight.

It's a whiteboard session on MOSS Architecture.

Newcastle SharePoint User Group

Hope to see you there if you are going.

 UPDATE....

Big thank you to John Timney (Cap Gemini), Brian English (Cap Gemini) and Phil Hunter (BT) for an excellent user group meeting. There was a mix of people from different industries, lots of round table discussion and good information shared.

I'm currently implementing an intranet/extranet MOSS architecture for 4500 users and found the whiteboard session invaluable.

Once again, many thanks.

Working with SharePoint, sometimes you just have to install assemblies to the GAC. An example of this I have had to deal with recently was writing a webpart to access methods in the UserProfileManager class.

Debugging GAC installed assemblies can be a bit frustrating, hopefully the following steps will make it alot easier and obvious....

1. Install the assembly into the GAC

2. Map a drive using SUBST to %SYSTEMROOT%\assembly

SUBST maps a drive to a path - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/msdos/07_refer.mspx?mfr=true 

A mapped drive does not use the Assembly Cache Viewer and will show you the true folder structure.

3. Locate and open the GAC_MSIL folder in the mapped drive

4. Locate and open the folder containing your assembly. The name of the folder is the same as the assembly name.

5. Copy the pdb (program database) file from your project build folder to your assembly folder in the GAC. Because you have mapped a drive to %SYSTEMROOT%\assembly you should be able to do this easily with Windows Explorer.

6. Do an iisreset /noforce (this is not really required but usually helps - general rule of thumb for working with SharePoint).

7. Go to Visual Studio and attach the debugger to the w3wp.exe (remember there may be more than one depending on how many app pools you have).

You should now be able to hit the breakpoints you have set.

I'm presenting tonight on SQL Server 2008, along with Rik who is presenting on Windows Server 2008 and Richard who is presenting on Visual Studio 2008.

VBUG Newcastle: VS2008, SQL Server 2008 and Win 2008 Launch Event

Hope to see you there.

I'm going, are you?

This is a community event, by the community for the community.

Get yourself there, registration is now open.

As Ferris Bueller said "Life moves pretty fast".

Silverlight 1.0 was released last September, the first public beta of Silverlight 2.0 ain't that far away...check out Scott Guthrie's blog post here.