Jan Tielens' Bloggings

For all the people that have IM'd or mailed me: I'm ok. Actually I'm teaching a course at Windsor, so far away from the explosions. Over here everything is calm. My thoughts go out to all the people who are affected by this.

This is good news! There is a new version of the BizTalk Adapter for SharePoint released on the GotDotNet Workspace. It seems that the adapter was launched at TechEd USA, you can view the web cast online over here (including a demo of the BizTalk 2006 Adapter). Here is my little summary:

I've wanted to write this post for a long time, the trigger to actually write it was my interview by Chris Kunicki for his Office Zealot podcast last week. During this podcast (which was really fun to do, thanks for having me Chris!) we discussed briefly some security problems web part developers could face. Podcasts are great but they are not suited to communicate code, so here's the accompanying post! When you're developing web parts, security could be one of the biggest problems to deal with. First of all you may face some problems to get your web part deployed and secondly you may have some Code Access Security problems. Let's take a look at both of them!

Here's a small tip for Patrick, since he's going to deliver a TechEd Session on Web Parts in ASP.NET 2.0. :-) An important thing in your web part pages is the functionality to switch to design mode (at run-time), so your users can change properties, location, connections etc. for the web parts. In the pre-Beta2 age, we had the WebPartPageMenu control for that, but in Beta 2 this control has been removed. The QuickStarts seem to be using a custom control that is simulating this behavior, but they don't provide the source for it. Luckily it's quite easy to re-create, you can switch by using WebPartManager1.DisplayMode = WebPartManager.DesignDisplayMode; and WebPartManager1.DisplayMode = WebPartManager.BrowseDisplayMode;. Check out Darren's post for more info!

A few weeks back I decided that it was time to move on to the next era of watching TV: having a Media Center PC. Since we already have a couple PC’s at home, I had to find a budget solution to convince my wife, so I “transformed” an “old” PC into a state-of-the-art Media Center. The configuration of the PC is pretty straight forward: a Pentium IV running on 3Ghz, 1GB of RAM, and a 75 GB hard disk. The only hardware that I had to buy was a TV tuner card and a remote control. I went for the Hauppage WinTV-PVR 500 MCE which has 2 TV tuners, so you can record something and watch something else at the same time (a must have feature in my opinion).

A must have tool for every Information-worker-technology developer, get it from the MS Download Center.

Next week I'll be in State College, PA to deliver a SharePoint course. Any SharePoint fans or just general geeks around who want to meet?