Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Everybody who’s subscribed to the MSDN Belux Flash newsletter probably has noticed that Gerd De Bruycker has found himself a new job at Microsoft: EMEA Event Manager. First of all: congratulations Gerd, I wish you all the best and good luck with organizing TechEd, IT-Forum and so on. But I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Gerd; he has done an incredible job at Microsoft Belux supporting the local community; giving people the chance to get some exposure, to share their knowledge. Thanks a lot!

Just released on the MSDN Dowload site (get it here); a nice set of tools to help you with IBF development!

Very nice, a help file that contains information that can be used by "normal" users who want to work with Windows SharePoint Services sites, lists, document libraries, ... Download here.

When you’re developing BizTalk Server 2004 stuff, you probably know the different steps of the deployment process of a BizTalk assembly by heart: unenlist the orchestration, undeploy the assembly, deploy the new assembly, bind the orchestration, start the orchestration. You can leave out the bind step if you choose to define your bindings at design time, but still it’s a tedious process. Luckily that BizTalk community has done some efforts to simplify this process! I’m only highlighting two of them, if you use another tool/technique/trick let me know!

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 1 provides the latest updates to Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

Last Friday Patrick showed me the Google Desktop search software (check his blog for his thought’s, David has a nice vision too). Of course they need to fix the privacy issue, and I’m pretty sure they will. The usability of this application is pretty huge, but I’m still hesitating to use it. First of all, it’s running in a web browser. Why would the Google Desktop application or any other desktop application run inside a web browser? I want the rich user experience of a smart client! I want integration with the OS, with other applications; maybe I even want to use it from within a task pane (that would be cool!). My second concern is the privacy issue. Just imagine that the Google Desktop web server contains a security hole… all your sensitive information could be exposed on the internet. Scary isn’t it?

For everyone who's living inside a Virtual PC (like me): start your downloads (get the readme here)!