Office 2007 Delayed

Microsoft announced today that office 2007 will be delayed for the purpose of shipping a better product. Different versions of Office 2007 will shipping at different times in 2007.

The 2 business editions are:
Office Professional Plus 2007
Office Enterprise 2007

The 6 consumer versions are:
Office Home 2007
Office Student 2007
Office Professional 2007
Office Small Business 2007
Office Standard 2007
Office Ultimate 2007 edition.

The business editions are now expected to ship by the end of 2006, a few months later than the previously announced October date. Consumer editions are expected to ship in "early 2007", instead of the January 2007.

To try Office 2007 Beta2 online, please go to http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/testdrive.mspx

Web Part Resources

As a follow-up to this month's meeting, listed below are a few SharePoint 2003 Web Part resources.

• Web Part Template for Visual Studio
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=CAC3E0D2-BEC1-494C-A74E-75936B88E3B5&displaylang=en
  
• Son of Smart Part
  http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=6cfaabc8-db4d-41c3-8a88-3f974a7d0abe
  
• “The Rational Guide to Building SharePoint Web Parts”
  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0972688862/qid=1151515832/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-1550737-3506543?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
  
• “Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit”
  http://www.bookpool.com/ss?qs=sharepoint+resource+kit&x=0&y=0
  

This list has been incorporated into the PowerPoint presentation. The presentation is titled SharePoint 2003 Web Parts and is listed under the Previous Presentations section of the SIG web site.

Retrieving Identity Values

Q: How do you retrieve the Identity value of a row that was last inserted in a SQL Server DB?

A: SCOPE_IDENTITY, IDENT_CURRENT, and @@IDENTITY can all be used to return values inserted into IDENTITY columns. However, each one has its own scope limitations. Scope refers to a specific module (i.e. a stored procedure, trigger, function, batch).

• SCOPE_IDENTITY will return last identity values generated in any table in the current session, but within the current scope.
  
• IDENT_CURRENT returns the value generated for a specific table in any session and any scope. It is not limited by scope and session, but it is limited to a specified table.
  
• @@IDENTITY will return the last IDENTITY column value inserted across any scope in the current session, but it is not limited to a specific scope.

For more information, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/tsqlref/ts_sa-ses_6n8p.asp

Microsoft ForeFront

Microsoft recently announced a new line of products designed for security at all levels, called ForeFront. The Forefront product line currently consists of the following products:

- Forefront Client Security (formerly called Microsoft Client Protection)
- Forefront Security for Exchange Server (currently called Microsoft Antigen for Exchange)
- Forefront Security for SharePoint (currently called Antigen for SharePoint)
- Antigen for Instant Messaging
- Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006 Release Candidate

Athough some of these products (i.e. ISA) are not new to the market, they have been incorporated into the new package now known as "ForeFront". For more information visit ForeFront homepage. Also, be sure to see the FAQ section and video demo.

SharePoint 2003 SDK 3.0

Microsoft recently released SharePoint Software Development Kit v3.0. To download the SDK, go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=05E0DD12-8394-402B-8936-A07FE8AFAFFD&displaylang=en

Microsoft Technical Preview in Cleveland

Microsoft Technical Preview

Featuring Vista, Office and Exchange

Microsoft® is making a special appearance in Cleveland, OH on Wendesday, June 21, 2006, to give a presentation to Greater Cleveland PC User Group members (and guests) about technical details of the upcoming releases of Vista, Exchange and Office. Microsoft experts will be giving in-depth technical presentations and demos and there will be Q&A time. In addition, they will be providing refreshments and raffle prizes. As with all GCPCUG meetings, this is free and open to the public. GCPCUG requests that each attendee be included in an RSVP email to me@RLCoppedge.com to insure that there is enough seating and food. Please include the number of people attending in the RSVP.

Event Information

Wendesday, June 21, 2006, 5:00 to 9:30 PM
Cleveland Renaissance Hotel
Ballroom B

24 Public Square
Cleveland, OH 44113
(216) 696-5600

Free and open to the public

Subject Content

Microsoft Vista - This presentation will serve as a deep dive into an IT Pro’s workflow centering on the day to day activities that are typical in desktop management. We will illustrate the deployment tools, management interfaces, GPO, and additional features. Our goal it to represent a real “day in the life” approach for IT Pros, highlighting how Windows Vista will make your day more productive with topics such as Booting and Resuming Windows, Recovering from System Errors, New Event Viewer, Forwarding Events & Subscriptions, Scheduling Tasks and Diagnosing Performance Issues.Microsoft Office has evolved from a suite of personal productivity products to a more comprehensive and integrated system. This session, will provide a look into the new components around enterprise content management, collaboration, and business intelligence, and how the new, but familiar results-orientated user interface will help you and your organization produce better results faster.Exchange Server 2007, the next major version of Exchange, will be a leap forward in enhancing the information worker's access to larger mailboxes while giving the email administrator a more manageable and secure email infrastructure. This session will provide an overview of the product direction and provide a sneak peak at some of the new features that will be included in the product.

To RSVP, send an email, with the all attendees included, to Bob Coppedge.

For other Microsoft-related events in June, see the blog entry from June 6th.

Web Part Debugging Tip

Here's a little tip on SharePoint that I wanted to share with everyone. When debugging a web part on a SharePooint site and there are problems bringing up the page, try the following. Manually enter the URL of the page in question and add "?contents=1" to the end of the URL. Once you press enter, the page returned is the "Manage Web Part Page".

This will list all web parts on that page, including their title, type, display on page, and personalized properties. This will help identify if other web parts on the page are causing problems with opening the page.

File Access in VB.Net

Listed below is an example of file access in VB.Net, utilizing many of the I/O functions. First the routine creates a file, then deletes it. This routine is used only for demonstration purposes.

Sub FilePurge()

Static dtLastPurgeTime As DateTime
Dim dtNow As DateTime
Dim intCounter As Integer
Dim Files() As String
Dim strGUID As String, strTXTName As String

While True
strGUID = System.Guid.NewGuid.ToString
strTXTName = "C:\Temp\STB_" & strGUID & ".TXT"

'Create a uniquely named .TXT file
Dim swTXT As StreamWriter
swTXT = File.AppendText(strTXTName)
swTXT.WriteLine(strGUID)
swTXT.Close()

'Wait 2 seconds before proceeding
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(2000)

dtNow = Now
Dim lTimeDiff As Long = DateDiff(DateInterval.Hour, dtLastPurgeTime, dtNow)

If lTimeDiff > 24 And Now.Hour = 22 Then 'Check if last purge was more then 24 hours ago and current hour is 10PM

'Purge *.TXT files
Files = Directory.GetFiles("C:\Temp", "STB_*.TXT")
For intCounter = Files.GetLowerBound(0) To Files.GetUpperBound(0)
If DateDiff(DateInterval.Minute, File.GetCreationTime(Files(intCounter)), dtNow) > 30 Then 'Purge only if file is older than 30 minutes
File.Delete(Files(intCounter))
End If
Next intCounter

'Update Purge Time
dtLastPurgeTime = Now()

End If

End While

Error_Handler:
Resume Next 'If an error occured while deleting a file, skip it this iteration and move to the next file

End Sub

Upcoming .Net related events

Listed below are upcoming events in the Cleveland area pertaining to .Net development:

• June 8th: ONSQL SIG Meeting
• June 10th: GCPCUG General Meeting
• June 22nd: MSDN Event
• June 27th: C#/VB.Net SIG

If you have any questions about these events, please e-mail me at sam@clevelanddotnet.info.

The LINQ Project & SQL Prompt

Microsoft has begun work on the next version of .Net. One of the key features is integrated SQL commands. T-SQL keywords and commands will now be part of intellisense, elimating spelling errors. In addition, table and field names will also be incorporated in intellisense. This project is named LINQ (Language Integrated Query). To read more about LINQ, please visit The LINQ Project.

For those that can't wait for the next release of .Net to use this feature, Red Gate Software has introduced SQL Prompt. This product provides SQL Intellisense in Microsoft Query Analyzer, SQL Server 2005 Management Studio, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio .NET 2003, SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Manager, and UltraEdit32. To read more about this product or to download a free version, please visit the SQL Prompt web site.

Detecting a user's group in SharePoint 2003

Listed below is a C# example of programmatically querying the group(s) a user belongs to on a SharePoint 2003 site:

using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;

private boolean IsContributor()
{
boolean bContributor = false;
SPWeb currentWeb = SPControl.GetContextWeb(this.Context);
SPRoleCollection currentRoles = currentWeb.CurrentUser.Roles;

foreach(SPRole myRole in currentRoles)
{
strRoles = myRole.Name.ToString();

if (strRoles == "Contributor")
{
bContributor = true;
break;
}
}

return bContributor;

}

"File or assembly name Microsoft.VisualBasic.Compatibility, or one of its dependencies, was not found."

I had an windows application that was converted from Visual Basic 6.0 to VB.Net 2003. After it ran fine in development, I moved to production where I received the following error "File or assembly name Microsoft.VisualBasic.Compatibility, or one of its dependencies, was not found."

Since the application was converted from an older version of VB and uses some legacy functions, it requires "Microsoft.VisualBasic.Compatibility.dll". This library was originally found on the development machine in C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322, but was not found on the production server.

The easiest way to resolve this is simply to copy the .DLL into the working directory of the application. The .DLL can also be packaged with the project installation to avoid the same issue from repeating with future installs.

Preventing Timeout while debugging XML Web Services

When debugging XML Web Services, an exception appears indicating the operation has timed out. To resolve this problem, set the TimeOut property on the XML web service object to -1. This will set it to infinite timeout.

This tip was found in "Debugging Applications For Microsoft .Net and Microsoft Windows"