The SharePoint 2010 Beta virtual machine (Hyper-V) only though is now available for download if you are looking at a quick evaluation of the platform and not wanting to install it yourself.  There are two virtual machines that you would have to download.  These virtual machines contain more than just SharePoint 2010.

Click hereto go the download page.

I will be presenting at the Information Worker Community Day 2010 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This event is jointly organized by the Malaysia SharePoint User Group and Microsoft Innovation Center (Malaysia).

In many organizations, business data is stored across different systems, legacy systems or custom applications.  Traditionally accessing these data and making it viewable in a web pages, making it searchable requires an enormous amount of custom code.

I will be speaking on the new functionality inside SharePoint Server 2010’s Business Connectivity Services (BCS), evolved from the 2007’s Business Data Catalog, that makes it extremely easy to display, edit these information and searchable within SharePoint 2010.

Event Details:

Event Details

Date:   10^th December 2009, Thursday

Time:   9.00am – 5.00pm

Venue:

Monash University
Jalan Lagoon Selatan, Bandar Sunway,
46150, Selangor Darul Ehsan
Location Map >>

For more information on the event, please visit http://spugmalaysia.org/iwcommunityday.aspx

Applies to:  SharePoint Server 2010 Beta (Nov 2009), Office Web Apps Beta (Nov 2009)

If you are like me, when you have installed SharePoint Server 2010, you would want to check out the new Office Web Applications and see how it works with SharePoint Server 2010. 

Word Document

PowerPoint Slides within SharePoint site

For PowerPoint Slides Pop Up

The Office Web Applications consists 3 service applications which will be available after installation.  And once deployed, 3 additional site collection features will be added to the web application, if these service applications are associated with the web application.

The much awaited SharePoint 2010 Public Beta is now available now.  You can download the trial here:

http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx

And I am sure you are eager to install it right away :)  Well, this is only beta, so the installation will not be as straight forward as the released version.

Do check out the preliminary system requirements before you start the installation here

And also check out the following useful resources which will help you in your installation and the journey, and these articles have helped me a lot.

Useful Resources:

Installation Notice for SharePoint 2010 Public Beta (Jie Li)

Grant “Replicating Directory Changes” (KB303972)

User Profile Sync Setup in SharePoint Server 2010 Beta (Jie Li)

Path to User Profile Synchronization success in SharePoint 2010 Beta (SharePoint Team Blog)

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available for MSDN subscribers to download.  No worries if you are not a MSDN subscriber, the beta will be generally available on October 22 2009.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx

And if you are looking specifically for SharePoint development, there are quite a number of resources available:

Walkthroughs

• Add Feature Event Receivers
• Create a Custom Field, Content Type, List Definition, and List Instance
• Create a Site Definition Project
• Import a SharePoint Designer Reusable Workflow into Visual Studio 2010
• Import Items from an Existing SharePoint Site
• Creating a Web Part for SharePoint
• Creating a Web Part for SharePoint by Using a Designer
• Create a Custom Site Workflow Activity
• Creating a Workflow with Association and Initiation Forms
• Creating and Debugging a SharePoint Workflow Solution
• Add an Application Page to a Workflow
• Creating an Application Page
• Creating an External List in SharePoint List by Using Business Data
• Deploying a Project Task List Definition

How To...

• Add and Remove Features to a Package by Using the Package Designer
• Add or Remove SharePoint Connections
• Create a BDC Model
• Create an Event Receiver
• Customize a SharePoint Feature

Apparently, only SQL 2008 with SP1 is supported on Windows 2008 R2.  You will be prompted to install SP1 of SQL 2008 before you run SQL 2008:

At first, I thought all I need to install the service pack once I have installed the SQL 2008.  However, you will notice that only the SQL Reporting Services, Sync Framework and Books Online are installed, the rest of the SQL services installation will fail.  The issue is that the setup support files that come with SQL 2008.

There is KB article, KB 955392, which provides steps on how update or slipstream the SQL 2008 installation with SP1.  I personally prefer the slipstreaming method.

Steps:

1. Install the prerequisites of SQL 2008:
   • MS.NET Framework 3.5 SP1
   • Windows Installer 4.5
2. Extract the service pack to a folder on the server using the following command:
   • SQLServer2008SP1-KB968369-x64-ENU.exe /x:C:\SP1
3. Run the service pack to install the Setup files
   • C:\SP1\x64\setup\1033\sqlsupport.msi
4. Run the Setup.exe file from the SQL 2008 source media by specifying the /PCUSource parameter:
   • Setup.exe /PCUSource=C:\SP1

Recently, I have just setup my new company laptop to run Windows 2008 as a desktop and reinstalling SharePoint in Hyper-V.  Upon completion of the installation and while accessing the Shared Services Provider, I was prompted continuously with authentication prompt, even I have entered the correct user and password.  Subsequently, I am just presented with a blank page.

There is a KB article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 that describes the same scenario.

This is more of a note to myself to remember to set the DisableLoopbackCheck in the registry:

Steps:

1. Open your registry editor by going to Start –> Run and enter regedit and click OK.
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa in the registry editor.
3. Right-click Lsa, click on New and select DWORD value.
4. Enter DisableLoopbackCheck and press Enter.
5. Right-click DisableloopbackCheck and select Modify.
6. In the Value data box, enter 1 and click OK.
7. Restart your server.

I would recommend that you do this on at least the Central Administration server, if not all WFE servers.

When you install the Visual Studio Extensions for WSS, you are prompted to select a web site or create a new web site, and select an application pool to be used for the new site.  This site will be used for deploying your SharePoint artifacts into SharePoint.

However, if you are doing this on a Windows 2008 server, which is running IIS 7, there is an additional features that will need to be activated.  Otherwise, you will an encounter the following error:

Go to your Features in the Server Manager, click on “Add Features”

Expand the .NET 3.0 Framework  Features and under the “WCF Activation”, select the “HTTP Activation” and click “Next” to install the feature.

So if you are trying to install the 10 SharePoint free themes, you will need to enable the WCF Activation in order to deploy them.

Cheers

PinPoint is a SharePoint Administration tool which you can download for free.

Example of features:

<Quote>

• Locate most active sites
• Identify documents and pages that have most activity
• Find largest sites and largest items in SharePoint

</Quote>

You can download here

** Do note that I am not advocating or promoting the product, nor in anyway I am affiliated to Axceler.

Quite often we will be writing custom XSL to customize the display of a Content Query Web Part (CQWP) and at times we would want to get the current page URL where the CQWP web part lives.  For example, providing a link to a custom page to display your item as shown below, where the “Details” link is pointing to a custom page.

However, you would like to be able to get back to the origin page where the link is clicked.  You could achieve this by doing the following in your custom XSL:

Step 1:  Add the following namespace to your custom XSL:

xmlns:ddwrt=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime

Step 2:  Add a parameter name “PageUrl” right after XSL Stylesheet declaration:

<xsl:param name=”PageUrl” />

Step 3:  Add a query string to the link:

Step 4:  Add a link or button on your custom page and the following OnClick event: