Zlatan's Blog [MVP SharePoint]

Top 100 SharePoint Blogs

Joel Oleson (http://www.sharepointjoel.com/) is probably by far one of the most prominent experts in this madness that is SharePoint, which some of you, that are active in this space, most likely already know and have outmost respect for him much like I do............ and to be found on his Top 100 list of SharePoint blogs is a great honour!!

Check his blog post here: Top 100 SharePoint Blogs Spring 2008 with Technorati, Bloglines, and Google Reader (http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=31).

Yes I know, my blog is the very last one on the list, but consider the fact that this is the only South African blog there (unless I overlooked someone, but I doubt it). So yeah, there you go, and the only way from here is up J. I'm also anxious to see who's next from our SA community to join me on this list?!

Also check his post on:  

Worlds Largest SharePoint Alphabetical Blog Directory (300+ blogs) (http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=32)

Revolutionising The User Interface (Introducing MenuKiller for WPF)

I don't fancy myself a frontend guy, getting controls and tables and other things to align is usually not my idea of fun, but way back in the days I was a Flash developer (Flash 3, 4 and even 5 for a bit) because Flash and possibilities that could be achieved with vector graphics animation (together with media like music and videos) fascinated me. It opened up my mind to alternative ways of designing User Interface and just like that I was hooked, well not for too long.

Then WPF came out and slowly but surely I started playing with it within the concepts of OBAs and Office System by enriching already boring office interface with cool embedded WPF controls, I talked about a nice example of it from MS in this blog post (http://dotnet.org.za/zlatan/archive/2008/02/07/building-obas-with-wpf-wcf-and-linq.aspx).

Microsoft has been progressively working on reviewing the UI for most of their product, mostly Operating Systems but they haven't yet changed the fundamental way in which the UI is being used, as that would require quite a bit of "Change Control", mostly they've just modernised the UI that hasn't fundamentally changed since Windows 95. Mac has on the other hand spent quite a bit of time and effort on justifying the stupidity of using only one mouse button in favour of ever more popular "right click" button, which has resulted in different thinking when approaching the UI enigma, but not enough to fundamentally change the approach.

There has been some bold challenges in this retrospect, some of you might remember my post "Imagine the User Interface that requires no clicks?!?" (http://dotnet.org.za/zlatan/archive/2008/02/18/imagine-the-user-interface-that-requires-no-clicks.aspx). This has served as an inspiration to many WPF Gurus, like our very own Rudi Grobler (http://dotnet.org.za/rudi/) who has also pushed the boundaries with introducing his own way of navigating through WPF with Nintendo Wii (Having a Wii bit of fun... - http://dotnet.org.za/rudi/archive/2008/02/13/having-a-wii-bit-of-fun.aspx).

Well my friend Schalk pointed out an excellent article titled A MenuKiller Control - Draft (http://www.emphess.net/2008/05/04/a-menukiller-control-draft/), which introduces another excellent concept, and personally, I can't wait to see how this plays out.

Here's the quote of the intro:

"In an effort to take user experience to the next level, designers have come up with ideas on how to solve old problems in a new way. In the last few months, the term "Differentiated User Experience" or simply "Differentiated UX" has come up to describe these efforts.

One of the beforementioned UI designers is Dax Pandhi, who published an article "Rethinking the Button" on his blog which introduced a new control he calls MenuKiller. This control is certainly more than a replacement for the Menu and ContextMenu, as it can be used in ways that are quite different. However, it turns out that changing the way things are typically done is indeed not so easy.

This article gives an overview of my implementation of the MenuKiller and presents a small sample application. It's written in C# using .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. What is presented here is not a full-fledged control, since there are quite a number of open todos. Yet, I hope that this motivates the use of different controls and serves as a good starting point for other WPF control development."

You can download the source code there as well.

Create compact and powerful conditions in your workflows using SharePoint Designer

Ok although some people might know that I personally try never to use SharePoint Designer for designing, developing and deploying workflows, there are some of you that accept its limitations and use it in the most imaginative ways to create very powerful workflows that nicely complement your MOSS solutions. I sincerely applaud those efforts and in that spirit please check out the latest post from the Microsoft SharePoint Designer team titled Create compact and powerful conditions in your workflows (http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2008/05/14/create-compact-and-powerful-conditions-in-your-workflows.aspx).

Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 will provide native support for ODF and PDF document format standards

Yet another round goes to Microsoft on the office interop field...... well done guys, you continue to make us (who support you in this) proud.

This pretty much sums it up:

Also check out a very useful (about to be slightly adjusted) Comparison of office suites from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites)

Original post from Lawrence (http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/05/21/microsoft-office-2007-sp2-to-provide-native-support-for-odf-and-pdf-document-format-standards.aspx)

SharePoint Developer MSDN Web Cast Series

See some prominent SharePoint MVPs cover SharePoint development fundamentals:

Thanx for the link Eben.

See tthe orginal post here (http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2008/05/12/sharepoint-developer-msdn-web-cast-series.aspx)

Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint – Developer User Guide

Check out the new release of the Developer User Guide for Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint has come. Some of you might remember me blogging about the release of extensions earlier this year (http://dotnet.org.za/zlatan/archive/2008/02/13/final-release-of-vsewss-1-1-visual-studio-extensions-for-windows-sharepoint-services.aspx).

So what is so cool about this documentation? Well, it's a nice reference for developers and for using the extensions, check out the document sections:

1. Starting out in SharePoint Development
   An introductory guide.
2. Walkthrough of the VSeWSS User Interface including the WSP View
   A description of the user interface elements. The WSP view is a new tool panel which helps you put together the deployment package for SharePoint projects.
3. The Team Site Project
   A walkthrough and complete sample.
4. The Blank Site Project
   A walkthrough and complete sample.
5. The List Definition Project
   A walkthrough and complete sample.
6. The Web Part Project
   A walkthrough and complete sample.
7. The Workflow Projects
   A walkthrough and complete sample for each of Sequential and State machine workflows. Although these project templates are not shipped with VSeWSS we added them for completeness. They are included in Visual Studio 2008 and are available for Visual Studio 2005 in the Windows SharePoint Services SDK.
8. Project Item Templates
   A description and usage for each of the project item templates. Essentially the project templates are largely empty templates with default project items contained.
9. Best Practices with VSeWSS
   A collection of suggestions for working with the tool.
10. Changes from 1.0 to 1.1
    A list of what was improved. There were lots of improvements from V1.0 of VSeWSS

Still waiting on the release of version 1.2 extensions which will work with Visual Studio 2008. I think the ETA is June.

You can download the Developer User Guide here (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=A8A4E775-074D-4451-BE39-459921F79787&displaylang=en)

Check out the original post about this here (http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2008/05/12/announcing-visual-studio-extensions-for-sharepoint-developer-user-guide.aspx)

Developing Business Intelligence Solutions with SharePoint 2007 and PerformancePoint 2007 - SADeveloper event - Post Event Info

Ok so it took me some time to write post event info on my last speaking event (better very late than never), namely:

"Developing Business Intelligence Solutions with SharePoint 2007 and PerformancePoint 2007"

(http://dotnet.org.za/zlatan/archive/2008/04/04/developing-business-intelligence-solutions-with-sharepoint-2007-and-performancepoint-2007.aspx)

We've had a smaller crowd this time, mostly due to the session being organised right in the middle of the holidays but our diehard fans and some new faces came together with some people who attended my PPS 2007 technical session earlier ("South African Business Intelligence User Group Meeting - Cape Town 15th of April 2008" http://dotnet.org.za/zlatan/archive/2008/04/08/south-african-business-intelligence-user-group-meeting-cape-town-15th-of-april-2008.aspx) and wanted to learn even more, so this was a different yet still great event. This also made the session a lot more interactive and allowed people to ask a lot of questions this time, it was kind of like "Chalk and Talks" at TechEd.

Session started with an excellent presentation by my good friend and fellow MVP (Exchange) Nicolas Blank on new and upcoming features of Windows Server 2008 and why is Hyper-V so frikkin cool J

This presentation was in fact a "Windows Server 2008 Community Launch feedback- Cape Town" (http://blankmanblog.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D0A1CD5B821F0EF9!254.entry)

So look out for more info and sessions coming on Blankman's blog (http://blankmanblog.spaces.live.com/)

So there is no point in putting up a deck this time as from my feedback from my first Business Intelligence PPS 2007 session I was told that people wanted to see more demos on building complete solutions with PerformancePoint Server 2007 so I just used 2 slides I think and did complete end to end demo of creating PPS 2007 (PerformancePoint Server 2007) solutions and how Information Workers, Business/Financial Analysts and CEO/CIO etc use the solution and form part of the cycle and above all how SharePoint 2007 provides an effective delivery mechanism.

I did however promise to post this application flow diagram on how to design and deploy PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning Application:

You can download the pdf here (http://dotnet.org.za/blogs/zlatan/ApplicationFlowDiagram.zip)

Last but not least once again kudos goes to (for sponsoring the event):

Business Connexion (food) and Microsoft (venue).