If you are looking for self-study help with SharePoint then there is not shortage of books. Currently I am reading Inside WSS 3.0 which is a great book. However there are many titles available and a lot of them have good ratings on Amazon. Here is a list of SharePoint/MOSS books I know about.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices by Ben Curry, Bill English Read more about this book…

Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Pro Developer) (Pro Developer) by Ted Pattison, Daniel Larson Read more about this book…

Professional SharePoint 2007 Development (Programmer to Programmer) by John Holliday, John Alexander, Jeff Julian, Eli Robillard, Brendon Schwartz, Matt Ranlett, J. Dan Attis, Adam Buenz, Tom Rizzo Read more about this book…

Beginning SharePoint 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007 (Programmer to Programmer) by Amanda Murphy, Shane Perran Read more about this book…

SharePoint 2007 User’s Guide: Learning Microsoft’s Collaboration and Productivity Platform by Seth Bates, Tony Smith Read more about this book…

Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) by Andrew Connell Read more about this book…

Real World SharePoint 2007: Indispensable Experiences From 16 MOSS and WSS MVPs (Programmer to Programmer) by Robert Bogue, Adam Buenz, Andrew Connell, Stacy Draper, Luis Du Solier Grinda, Todd Klindt, Jason Medero, Dustin Miller, Shane Perran, Joris Poelmans, Heather Solomon, Nick Swan, Jan Tielens, Mike Walsh, Shane Young Read more about this book…

Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 by P. Tisseghem Read more about this book…

Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 Inside Out by Errin O’Connor Read more about this book…

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Inside Out by Jim Buyens Read more about this book…

Technorati Tags: SharePoint

Few weeks ago I blogged about AppReadiness which is a site  to  find if your application will work with Windows Vista or not. Lately Microsoft has been preparing for a similar site but at a bigger scale which will cover hardware and software.  I’ve been keeping an eye on this one for last few days and sometime today Microsoft launched Vista Compatibility Center. This will one place to find out if your software or hardware will work with Windows Vista. I remember from he promo page they had earlier before the site went live that Compatibility Center will list 9000 products to start with.

I have always had my doubts on Alexa. I somehow was never convinced about its ranking system. Today I found what could be the mother of all malfunctions. I went to Alex to look at my rankings and I saw this:

So I am ranked 3,354,223 out of whatever gizillion sites out there. I then checked on one of my favourite blogs called Computer Zen written by Scott Hanselman.

So Scott’s blog ranks at 19,703,654 as compared to my 3,354,223. You’ve gotto be kidding me. He has twenty eight thousand subscribers to his feed and my feed subscription is too embarrassing to be mentioned in front of Scott’s. Clearly Alexa is not doing what it is suppose to do.

BTW: I am not loosing sleep over this. Next few days I’ll be telling everyone that my blog ranks better than Computer Zen.

Placing a web browser in your windows forms application could not be easier. All you need to do is place the WebBrowser control on your Form in designer and then use the Navigate method on WebBrowser control to visit a web address. Here is a simple form I have created and handled the click event of button to navigate to a Url.

private void buttonGo_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  webBrowser.Navigate(textBoxAddress.Text);
}

It does not take more than few seconds to get this going. IMO one of the easiest controls to work with.

It should be no surprise that Microsoft is getting into cloud computing. Other than ordering servers in thousands Microsoft is giving more hints about their presence in cloud computing space. While browsing sessions list for PDC 2008 I came across sessions which will targeted towards cloud computing.

There are already players in this arena who provide some awesome computing power to anyone for a small fee. With Microsoft stepping in I am sure they will take the concept to another level and will channel it better than anyone through their well established developer community. Maybe next year will be all about cloud.

Definitely something to be proud of. Mozilla has confirmed their entry into Guinness Book Of World Records for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours. According to their site Firefox3 was downloaded 8,002,530 times on 18th June, 2008.

Joseph Albahari who co-authored C# 3.0 in a Nutshell has written a fantastic tool for writing LINQ queries called LINQPad. Lately I have been working extensively with LINQ and I often feel the need to write some code quickly to test my query. I usually end up writing a simple console application or a test. In such instances where you want to quickly verify the results of your query, LINQPad really shines. The tool itself is very simple and does not require an installer. Just download the exe and you are good to go.

This is what it looks like:

Technorati Tags: LINQ, LINQPad

Visual Studio 2008 Extensions For Windows SharePoint Services are now available for download here. Few things to keep in mind are that these extensions can only be installed on Windows 2003 or Windows 2008 Server. There is also a small note on the download page which says that "Microsoft does not offer technical support for these extensions". I say what’s going on? C’mon guys why can’t these extensions be installed on Vista or XP? Further if these extensions are not supported then where is the supported dev environment for SharePoint? Visual Studio 2005 is not an acceptable answer.

Found an awesome Technical discussion guide titled: Addressing Sarbanes-Oxley Challanges Using the Microsoft Office System. A good read for SharePoint enthusiasts.

In January 2007 Microsoft acquired a company called Stratature with a motive of stepping into the lucrative MDM (Master Data Management) market currently dominated by IBM camp. Microsoft’s MDM effort is code-named Bulldog and will be part of the overall SharePoint universe in some form when it is released. An announcement has been made about a CTP which will be available in third quarter of 2008. At present a Technology Preview is available by requesting one. You can find more details here.

If you are interested in MDM you might be interested in visiting these links:

Kirk Haselden

Roger Wolter

MDM Page At Microsoft