Sep30

Vista 64 bit and Live Writer update

Categories:

It seems Windows Live Writer Beta 3 cannot be installed from the main official download link on Vista 64 bit due to the whole Windows Live installer package or something. You can download the separate bits and get it to run from the link in this forum post:

http://cid-9e63a4688135fd45.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/LiveSuiteEN

Vista 64 bit update : seems a bit more stable today :) perhaps it likes Sundays. I know I do.

 
Sep29

Windows Live Writer - no 64 bit support?

Categories: General Ramblings
Seems Windows Live Writer does not support Vista 64bit, or at least so it says when you try to install it. Nothing mentioned about that on the requirements page.
 
 
Beginning to regret going 64 bit, and considering sending it back.
 
Sep26

SUGUK Special Interest Group : Education

Categories:

Andrew Woodward is the driving force behind a new special interest group on SUGUK that focuses on using SharePoint in education. If you're involved in this area head over to the forum and get involved in the discussions.

Also great news that the user group passed 2,000 members recently. As of typing this we're at 2050!

October's meetings will be posted soon. Keep an eye on the RSS feed or your inbox.

 
Sep25

No complaint experiment

Categories:

People who I talk to both in person and on messenger will know that I'm always raving about the next great book I've just read. What's most funny about this is that when I was growing up at school I couldn't stand reading. I guess it's because I was being told to do it back then where as now it is actually my choice. Well if there's only one book you read this year that I recommend make sure it's the Four Hour Work Week and subscribe to the blog as well.

The blog post I read today from the 4HWW blog is titled '21 day no complaint experiment'. Anyone who knows me will agree I have the odd tendency to complain and moan a fair bit, but with customer service out there provided by companies such as BT, Three Mobile and a lot of other companies, sometimes it's just hard to stay positive! :) Especially when your new games PC also like to keep showing you a blue screen of death, no doubt my Xbox 360 will start showing the rings of death on Thursday when I buy Halo 3 (see I've started off on one already!)

A lot of people would struggle to go just 21 days without complaining about SharePoint, but I think I'll be able to manage that! (No Liam I do not worship Bill Gates!)

So I've decided to give it a go! 21 days with no complaining, and if I do complain I'm going to swap which wrist my watch is on. That should be annoying within itself! :) What's interesting is that you can go from complaining to giving it a positive spin eg

“Man, I went into the post office and had to stand behind this rude jerk for 30 minutes. What a waste of time.”

to

“Man, I went into the post office and had to stand behind this rude guy for 30 minutes. It was a waste of time. From now on, I’ll go in the mornings before 10am to avoid the crowd.”

The problem is I am going to watch Reading play Liverpool tonight so I might be saying...

"Man, I'm never going to watch Liverpool play again, it was a waste of time! Next time I'll just get drunk at home instead!".

 
Sep25

Vista 64 bit headaches and pains

Categories:

It's been a bit quiet on here over the past week or so while I've been playing around with my new gaming PC I announced I was getting before. It looks awesome, sounds like a hovercraft, and is about as stable as bambi on ice. Initially I was suffering from blue screens of death about every 30 minutes both trying to play games and run VMWare. As well as catastrophic failures the nVidia drivers seem to be having issues as well so games were crashing out shortly after starting. After many many different Vista patches and trying almost every nVidia driver release under the sun it seems to have calmed down a bit. I can play World in Conflict now at max details and resolution which is very very nice. I'm looking forward to doing a decent amount of work on VMWare over the weekend which will really test the stability out.

When it runs it is so fast and using it is great.......just need to stop it crashing so much!

 
Sep11

BDC Meta Man release with DB2 support.

Categories: SharePoint
We've just released version 2.0.0.3 Beta of BDC Meta Man which now includes DB2 ODBC support. Although SQL syntax should be the same for all ODBC connections it invariably isn't, so we're going to go through and implement each ODBC connection as it's requested. Got a request? Leave a comment or send me an email. DB2 support is available for professional customers only, but we are looking for one or two extra beta testers so if you do have a DB2 test environment get in touch.
 
Here's a quick overview of using BDC Meta Man with DB2. First things first ensure you have a ODBC connection setup that you can use (this will of course have to be setup on your MOSS boxes as well)
 
Notice we've highlighted the name of the ODBC connection. Now open BDC Meta Man and choose to connect to a DB2 - ODBC data source. In the connection box you'll simply need to enter the name of your ODBC connection you created above
 
 
Now you can expand BDC Meta Man's datasource tree and see your tables. Notice it also brings back the system tables as well (there's not much we can do here unless we introduce a filter by schema mechanism)
 
 
Now you can drag and drop your tables till your heart is content, creating association relationships between your entities.
 
 
We developed this using DB2 version 9 so if users have any issues with earlier versions please do let us know. You can file bug reports with this link here.
 
Finally the link for the download? Well go here:
 
and you'll see it's the second one in the list. DB2 web part write back should hopefully be released in a day or so...
 
Sep11

Blog now running off CKS:EBE

Categories: SharePoint

I’ve now upgraded this blog to be running off Community Kit for SharePoint : Enhanced Blog Edition. Vincent Rothwell has done a fantastic job with the various features and enhancements over the out of the box SharePoint blog that makes it operate and feel a lot more like the .Text blog I left behind at http://weblog.vb-tech.com/nick. Particularly pleasing to the eye is the themes that are available (I’ve only got the basic ones added here) which you should be able to modify yourself with the Theme drop down box located on this page.

 
Sep10

Business Data Catalog and DB2 users?

Categories: SharePoint
I've got BDC Meta Man working with DB2 version 9 but as usual it's the test version that's similar to SQL Express. If anybody has a test setup of MOSS 2007 and DB2 where they'd be able to test BDC Meta Man and the business data catalog please get in touch:
 
Sep8

Business Data Catalog, Navision, and Tables with lots of columns

Categories:

Navision tables have a habit of having lots of columns in with long column names. If you try to create an association between two tables from Navision (or just have one very large table with lots of columns) you may come across this error message when importing your application definition file:

Application definition import failed. The following error occurred: Parameter '@Value' exceeds the size limit for the sql_variant datatype.

This is because the SQL statement is too long. You can fix this simply by modifying the number of columns being returned by your association method. In BDC Meta Man do this by:

1, creating your association by dragging and dropping between the fields
2, right clicking on the child entity and choosing to edit it
3, go to the Methods tab
4, select your association method
5, remove some of the columns from the Selected Columns listbox and click the arrow pointing to the left.

Once you've reduced the size of your SQL Query by removing some of the columns the application definition file will import fine

 
Sep7

Business Data Catalog White Paper

Categories:

Brett has written a free white paper on the Business Data Catalog for all to download (it requires registration on the site).

http://www.bdcmetaman.com/downloads/BDCWhitePaperPart1.zip

It goes over the ideas behind the BDC, the architecture, and how you can use your LOB data once you've imported your application definition file to MOSS 2007. Perfect for anyone looking at the BDC for the first time.

 
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