Office 365 World

Microsoft has released the Service Pack -1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The main feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 being the addition of RemoteFX. RemoteFX is a feature which enables rich user experience for Remote Desktop users. It enables rich interfaces with the utilization of GPU on the host. This means that remote desktop users can have a full blown Windows desktop experience remotely even from a thin client just as complex as a LCD display.The GPU on the server is shared among all the clients with the RemoteFX technology called VGPU(Virtual Graphical Processing Unit). The remote users can have all the rich experience of Sliverlight or 3D graphics from the client utilizing the VGPU. With the huge adoption of cloud by multiple organizations, Microsoft has yet again made a break through with RemoteFX by enabling the remote users to have rich User Experience which is the foremost requirement for an end user. With this great leap i expect more virtualization and mor...

I ran into a situation where i have to handle the session start of a SharePoint application. I dint find much information about it in the internet, so i decided to post one myself. There are two main steps for this. 1. Enable sessions for your SharePoint application 2. Handle the Session_Start event. To enable Sessions for SharePoint application, make the following changes in your web.config 1. Make enableSessionState= true 2. Replace the <httpModules/> with the below       <httpModules >            <add name="Session" type="System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule" />       </httpModules > 3. Add the Session module for your SharePoint site from the IIS Manager.     Open IIS Manager and expand sites.     Select your site and double click on Modules. Click on Add Managed Module on the right hand side Actions menu Give a name to the module and s...

To create SharePoint projects in Visual Studio, we need to run it as administrator. I find it cumbersome to right click on the icon and click on run as administrator. So i figured out a way to run the Visual Studio 2010 as administrator whenever it is started. For this go to properties on Visual Studio icon. Go to the Compatibility tab and check Run this program as administrator The next time you click on Visual Studio 2010 icon, it will run with the administrator privileges.

This post will explain how resource files can be used while creating visual web parts for SharePoint. For this i will create a project which will have a drop down with two languages English and French. It will also have a text box and label associated to it which asks for a name. When i select a language from the drop down, the text in the label will change according to the language selected. I will start off with creating a visual web part using Visual Studio 2010. The design view is shown below Then i will add two new resource files to this project, English.resx and French.resx Then i will add the key value pairs to the resource files. I will name the key as lblName and the value of it will be Name in the English resource file. In the French resource file, the key will remain the same lblName, but the value will be the french translation for name i. e Nom This is how the English.resx resource file looks like And this is how French.resx looks like I will handle the s...

I just downloaded the IE 9 beta and installed in my laptop. My first impressions -- i love it. It has got a very simple interface which is very appealing. The start up time is just amazing. Microsoft has really worked on this i guess. One thing i hate about IE 8 is the time to start up a new tab. Sometimes it just tested all my patience. But now new tabs really open up with lightning speed. Thumbnails of the mostly used tabs are shown when opening a new tab with colour coding indicating the usage. The interface is really simplified with only the required icons on the top bar. Page load times are really fast- one really necessary feature for a good browser. On a whole i just love the new browser and i am very satisfied with its performance. With the support for HTML 5 and hardware accelaration i am expecting IE 9 to be a great success for Microsoft.

The database approach is followed when the existing server does not meet the hardware and software requirements for SharePoint installation to do an Inplace Upgrade. In such a case SharePoint is installed on a new server and the content from the existing server is attached to the new server. I will be explaining how a MOSS 2007 web application can be upgraded using this method. To do the migration your MOSS installation has to be MOSS SP2 or later. If not upgrade it to SP2 or later. To do a database attach first you have to detach the database from the MOSS installation. This should be done to avoid any inconsistencies in data that may be caused due to updates to the content databases during the upgrade process. To do this Open SQL Server Management Studio Right click on the content database you want to detach, point to Tasks and click on Detach on the pop out.  Then take back up of the content database you have detached. To do this, right click on the database in SQL Ser...

SharePoint 2010 has made available a very useful type of authentication called Claims based Authentication. You can have a custom identity provider and make your web application use that identity provider in the places of default Windows Authentication. You can also make it use multiple authentication providers. Following are the steps to be followed for configuring a SharePoint 2010 web application to use Claims Based Authentication. I will use ADFS 2.0 to authenticate users in my domain instead of Windows Authentication.  Install and Configure ADFS 2.0 Install ADFS 2.0 on the server which can authenticate the users. Run the ADFS configuration wizard. Select create new federation server if you are using this for testing or else select the appropriate option. If you plan to use more than one ADFS select New Federation Server Farm else select Stand Alone Server. Click Next The wizard automatically picks up a certificate. If it show any error. Go to IIS manager and...