How to Configure Sharepoint Server Search Service

There is an excellent document available at Technet on configuring Sharepoint Server Search Service
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/601874ea-86c9-4611-bdaf-abe17bbb68161033.mspx?mfr=true

Installing Office SharePoint Server 2007(MOSS 2007)

Check out this link for step by step instruction of installing MOSS2007 on a standalone computer.
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/bd99c3a9-0333-4c1c-9793-a145769e48e61033.mspx?mfr=true

C# Generics

A must read three part interesting blog on C# Generics by Charlie Calvert's Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 and a great video on Generics from Anders Hejlsberg(he and his team developed C#)

Comparison of Visual Studio 2005 and Dreamweaver 8

I am an avid fan of DreamWeaver and I have being using it from the very first version. It is a great tool with Intuitive IDE and rich feature sets. Follow the link to compare both products features http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/products/compare/vs05_dw/

Xtreme Programming - C# Test Driven Devlopement using Visual Studio Team Suite

Most Developers often thinks that their job is develop code and deliver it to the testing team for testing. The problem with this approach is more bugs and cost of quality is very high.

XP strongly advocates for Test Driven Devlopment, Practicing TTD (Test Driven Development) helps team to deliver high quality and mostly bug free product to the customer. In short it helps us to reduce rework and produce well documented test cases. Even team members can test the code without breaking it. The developers can refactor the code without affecting the core functionality later .

So how to Test
Basic steps are

• Write a test to fail
• Write a test to pass
• Start over again.

Let us look at it how to TDD using Visual Studio Team Suite

More on this future

Other Testing Tools of Interest:

NUnit is open source unit testing framework devloped in C# based on JUnit/xUnits testing frameworks for .Net Languages. Nunit is Attribute based testing framework. which can be downloaded from http://www.nunit.org

AJAX, Much Hyped Technology in Recent Times

We were in a discussion with our client, who wanted us to implement AJAX in their project. We had a brainstorming session with our team members to find out what features can be implemented. Sadly enough we found most of the members are carried away by the term AJAX and talking too much about AJAX as a whole new technoloy. They are all ignorant about the fact that AJAX is a new NAME given to the decade old technology by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptivepath.

AJAX is nothing but acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It basically groups the following technologies :
JavaScript
XML
CSS
XHTML (HTML)
XMLHttpRequest

The main part of this technology is XMLHttpRequest used for manipulating or to consume xml data from the webserver using HTTP protocal.This was developed by Microsoft and supported in IE and also adopted by Safari and mozilla webbrowsers. The XMLHttpRequest(W3C site) object is being standardized by W3C.

AJAX was popularized by Google.com in a big way. Check out thier applications like Google Maps, Google Suggestion etc.,

XQuery in .net 2.0

Microsoft decided not to ship Client Side XQuery in .Net 2.0 to know about the current status . check this URL http://msdn.microsoft.com/XML/XQueryStatus/default.aspx

ASP.NET ATLAS (AJAX)

Atlas is a new technology from Microsoft which integrates Client Scripts with ASP.NET 2.0 Server Based Development Framework. You can take advantange of AJAX techniques on the web and create awesome rich client side behaviours. AJAX details can be found on the following link

http://atlas.asp.net/

Webservices without IIS / Run ASMX without IIS

During one of our project development, our client wanted to run webservices with out IIS. There is an excellent article published by Aaron in MSDN which details how to run webservices with out IIS.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/12/ServiceStation/

Microsoft People Ready Event Photos

I am sharing some of the photos taken on the People Ready Event.

Deploying VSTO applications

while creating a VSTO deployment solution, there are lots of issues you might over come and there is a excellent two part msdn aritical about creating deployment. Its an indepth coverage of deployment technics and solutions

Check the following link to find out more
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/odc_vsto2005_ta/html/OfficeVSTOWindowsInstallerOverview.asp

Press coverage about the Microsoft People Ready Event

If you want to know about the event follow the links

http://www.cxotoday.com/cxo/jsp/article.jsp?article_id=72607&cat_id=911

http://www.efytimes.com/fullnews.asp?edid=11365

http://www.channeltimes.com/channeltimes/jsp/article.jsp?article_id=72605&cat_id=819

http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/apr/18ms.htm

Microsoft People Ready Program

I was at HYAT Residency , New Delhi,last week (17th april-18th april) to give a demo of our product "Office for Retail" developed for Microsoft on Office 2003 platform. It was a great experience to talk to other techie's and giving presentation to people. Needlessly to say that this was an successfull event for me.

(to know more about People Ready Program follow the link
http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/default.mspx
)

Mr.Jeff Raikas, President , microsoft Business Division unvieled Microsofts future plan for india and office 2007 (code named 012)

more about O12 (office 2007) in my future blogs.

During this Event 18 ISV's Showcased their products. we developed retail application for the unorganized retail sector. The highlight of the product is easy interface, using the features of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, XML and Webservices.

I shall share some of the problems we faced while developing the application in future blogs.