I’ve always liked how the Team System team work hard to provide details on what they’re up to. This is becoming more the norm on Microsoft assets (just check out the great job Beth Massi has been doing on the VSTO site for example), and so I shouldn’t be surprised to see just how serious they see simple things like content management to be. as Jeff Beehler notes, the Team System team have...
From Office Web to Office 14 now, and I found Mary-Jo’s post useful as a quick update on progress. Office 14 is the next version of Office (the desktop based one), and in terms of version numbers I think they skipped 13 due to it being an unlucky number (or some such). The post is a good summary, but also includes a few new items, such as the rumour that SharePoint 14 will include offline...
I’m catching up on my blogs, and one that I’ve missed reading for a while is Sarah Perez on Channel 10. I could probably spend a happy half day simply linking to stories she’s been posting over the last month… so do yourself a favor and subscribe to her if you haven’t already. Back in early November she posted a quick Q & A about the recently announced Office Web (coming next year...
Another brain expanding day! I was so impressed with the event that I checked my impressions with a few other attendees – I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just a case of me being so naive about this stuff, that any new information was a revelation :-) But no, there were many others in the same boat. Day 2 was a little different. Where as yesterday focussed on what is possible now (with all the...
I attended day 1 of the Live Services Jumpstart today. Fortuitously this was also my first day working for nsquared (I’d coincidentally registered for the event separate to organising my start date). I haven’t really been following the Live Services side of Microsoft of late, so today was a real eye opener. Although I was aware of many of the Live Services, it wasn’t until we drilled into...
As the SkyDrive team announced yesterday, the online storage capacity has been increased to 25GB (from 5GB). At least we know there’s some benefit coming out of all those containers :-) As the team mentioned (but Life Hacker did a much better job of explaining), there’s also a bunch of new features, including the ability to download entire folders as Zip files. I’ve had problems accessing...
I’m always intrigued when some development companies claim they can’t afford to pay the software licenses for the tools they use. That is, after agreeing to pay salaries, rent, office fit-outs, hardware and other expenses they somehow can’t stump up the cash for operating system licenses and proper developer tools. The usual recourse is to either ‘bend the rules of licensing’ or pursue...
Microsoft has definitely turned around. PDC was the proof that the company is back on track. Not that it was necessarily off track – since they’ve been working on it for the last 3 years – but the lack of communication certainly wasn’t inspiring anyone. What exactly has caused this transformation? Answer: Ray Ozzie. Less than a year ago (just after the MVP Summit) I was gravely...
It’s easy to be impressed (or horrified) by big numbers, and 1.2 billion is certainly a big number when it comes to dollars. That’s what Microsoft spent on advertising last year. Apple by contrast spent $486M (as Lindsay Blakely reported). But forget the actual dollars, instead focus on percentages. As Todd Bishop helpfully points out in his excellent analysis, Microsoft spend between 2% and...
One of the biggest hurdles with VSTO is deployment. As you probably know, the pre-requisites for running a VSTO app (even of the simplest Hello World variety) include: .NET Framework 3.5 Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) VSTO Runtime (Plus Office of course) Now, packaging these isn’t the issue, since the Visual Studio team have worked hard to make the ClickOnce process a simple and seamless...