PowerPoint Storyboard template with Visual Studio 2011

A nice little surprise for me this morning when I started to browse what got installed with the Developer Preview of Visual Studio 2011.  Can you see it in the start menu?

 

 
 

Yes, it’s a Storyboarding tool!  A PowerPoint 2010 add-in that gives you the ability to mock up Windows Apps, Web Apps, SharePoint Apps, and Windows Phone Apps!

 
 

 
 

Nice to see that the developer tools continue to expand reach to the supporting teams around core dev.

Anyone here on how Microsoft will be packaging this?  It should be a free download from the MS site, and not part of Visual Studio.

Thoughts?

Infopath 2010 bug after 2007 upgrade

Came across an interesting sharepoint infopath 2010 bug with a customer we upgraded from Sharepoint 2007 to 2010. After the upgrade, we opted to leave the UI to the 2007 look and feel until the customer was ready to train on the new 2010 ribbon. We came across a strange side affect with infopath 2010.

When a user opens a form and edits it in the browser, check boxes do not save. All other fields save. If you edit it in the infopath form in the client form filler, it saves checkbox values as expected.

We the tried to turn on the new visual experience on the site hosting the form library and tried editing the form in the browser and voila, it saved the changed check box values.

We then reverted back to the 2007 UI experience and the problem resurfaced.

Obviously the UI compat for 2007 interferes with the infopath browser client.

Anyone scan the Sharepoint CU’s for a patch to this problem?

Virtual Machines and Sharepoint 2010

Publicly known now, SharePoint 2010 runs only on a 64-bit machine.  First thing came to my mind is what will the developer experience be like?

Running Windows 7 RTM with Virtual PC is really slick and fast.  I have a Windows Server 2003 / Sharepoint 2003 / Visual Studio 2008 machine and works great on a Dell XPS 1330.

Sadly, (PLEASE MICROSOFT FIX THIS), Virtual PC does not support a 64-Bit virtual OS. 

First i tried VM Ware.  Their free version offers a lot of really great feature, but a few things that i didn’t like.  First, it requires a Tomcat server to be installed to interface with the Virtual Machine.  Eck.  on my clean Windows 7, please dont!  Second, i kept getting failures (frozen) on in my Windows 2008 R2 during operations.

Uninstalled VM Ware and tried Virtual Box by Sun Microsystems.

So far, its working really well and quite fast; Windows Server 2008 R2 / SharePoint 2010 / Visual Studio 2010.  It even has some slick features such as “Seamless Mode”.

My issue now is that since Virtual technology grabs hold of your Vt-x/AMD-y processor, only one Virtual software solution can run at any given time.

I really like the native integration Virtual PC has with Windows 7 and don’t want to give it up.

Microsoft, Please support 64-bit virtual machines on a 64-bit host… please!

S.

Excel Web Services and that Currency, Accounting format (bold) issue

I have been working with the Microsoft QA team on the Excel Services issue i blogged about earlier.  It turns out to fix the problem, install any custom fonts used by our excel spreadsheet that will be consumed through Excel Web Services on the server.  After you install the fonts on the server, an IIS Reset is required for it to take.

After doing so, Bold type fonts will render correctly.

Thanks MS QA for your help on this!

S.

Just a Restart made it work… Expression Blend 3.0 RC

OK,…after a simple restart after the crash worked.  The Zune3D and other samples are really cool.

 

Can’t play with it more….

 

S.

Expression Blend RC 3.0 First Try…

 

Well, my first attempt to open Expression Blend 3.0 RC today generated this error message when i tried to open the Sample Project “Zune3D (Silverlight)” example.  Ouch….

Will update you all again after i restart my PC…maybe its just a passing thing….

S.

Excel Web Services format issue “Accounting” format vs “Currency”

Strange, but when you publish an Excel sheet to Sharepoint and view it with Excel Web Services, cells formatted as “Accounting” show as follows:

but when you change the format in Excel to “Currency”, it shows correctly:

Could it be some kind of spacing issue with the rendering of the “$” within the web page?

Fix – Excel Web Services returning “External References” Error

Today, we got a strange error when trying to open a published Excel 2007 Workbook in on Sharepoint with Excel Web Services.  The Excel web part returned an error saying "External References (links to other workbooks)" we in the file and could not be opened.  The 12 Hive log files had the same error and did not help any further with what the issue could be.

Looking at the file’s external links properties in excel showed nothing.

I ended up renaming the xlsx file to a zip, and unzipping the Excel file… scanned the workbook.xml file and found a reference to an “external reference” that did not show up in the Excel interface:

 

Searching for the unique id in the rest of the zip file, i found it lead to a “Named Range’ that pointed to an external file.

Voila, went back into Excel, removed the Named Range….

Republished the Excel file and it worked.

MS should update the sharepoint error message saying a formula, or named range is referencing an external file.  Would have helped.

Cheers

S.

Windows 7: Security Providers

 

As per my last post, Norton Anti-virus that came with my ISP (Rogers) did not make the upgrade to Windows 7 Beta.  When opening the application, it stated that it required to be reactivated.  When running the activation, it complained that it was not a supported OS.  Even worse, i was not able to uninstall it.  However, i did find this link:

Windows 7: Security Providers

Thankfully, Norton provides a FREE trial till March 27, 2009 of their Norton Anti-virus software (Norton 360) for Windows 7 (along with AVG and Kaspersky Lab).  Norton 360 found my broken previous Norton install and removed it for me before installing itself.

The new version is so much cleaner and simpler that what i had before.  Nice work Norton.

.NET finally gets a new logo!

That old logo just had to go!!!