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?

Hide Skype or other icons from your Windows Start Menu and put it back in your task tray in Windows 7

One of my largest blog hits is how to hide Windows Live Messenger from your Start menu and keep it in your task try in Windows 7 as it did in Windows Vista.

You can see this post here: http://wp.me/piqX8-6

This also works for other icons you don't want to show including Skype.

Windows 8, well that a whole new story since its all about the Metro UI now and App Swapping.  It will be interesting to see apps re-adopt to the new UI.

Windows 8–Developers Preview

and so the era of a new OS begins.  I am very excited to see the changes and new offering from Microsoft.  A big step in the right direction.  Here are some of the initial setup screens for your enjoyment…

And the updated win Explorer,,,

 

More to come…

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?

SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 on Windows 7

And it really does work…

But it sure eats up a lot of memory!  of my 6GB of Ram, I’m up to 70%

Installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 or Vista 64-bit

Great step by step guide on how to install SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 on Windows 7/Vista in the SharePoint 2010 SDK:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx#

 

SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 Standalone begin installed on my Sony CTO Z Vaio…

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.