SharePoint Designer available for free

For those of you that are interested, SharePoint Designer is available free of charge from April 2.

Here's the link


http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2009/04/02/download-spd-for-free-today.aspx

Feb CU installation issues...

Not sure if any of you have had issues installing the Feb CU, but I've come across an issue that I thought I should share.

The installation worked fine, however the wizard failed. After hours of investigating why it failed, it turned out that a web.config was set to read only. After changing it, the wizard worked.

If you want to install the WSS and the MOSS Feb CU (I recommend you do, it fixes a lot of content deployment issues), here's the steps:

• Run the WSS CU setup
• Restart the server
• Run the MOSS CU setup
• Run the configuration wizard

If you are only using WSS, you can skip the step of installing the MOSS CU.

Fadi

Internet Explorer 8

IE8 if finally out. I recommend everyone download it. I'm playing around with it now, and I like some of the new functionality like the way the search box works.

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx to download it.

Getting SharePoint to work on Vista

I did some searching and came across this interesting post. It actually shows you how to get SharePoint to work on Vista with SQLExpress as the database.

http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2008/05/21/how-to-install-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-sp1-on-vista-x64-x86.aspx

Fadi

Content Deployment

Many of you have played around with content deployment and gone insane trying to get it to work. After much trial and error, I've found the best way to get it to work is to create a blank site on the destination server. On the source server, set up content deployment and the first time around, do a full deployment. Once the full deployment has finished, change it to incremental deployment.

If you need more details, just email me and I'll be more than happy to help out.

Fadi

WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 SP2

SP2 for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 has been announced. The release date is scheduled between February and April this year (2009).

Some of the improvements include:

• Improved Read-only content databases
• ECM Performance and Manageability
• Improved Index Rebuild Timer Jobs
• Upgrade Checker

I'll let you know closer to the release date if there's anything further included (I'm sure there will be).

Fadi

SPDisposeCheck Released

SPDisposeCheck v1.3.1 has been released (well a couple of weeks ago now). It will help improve your SharePoint assemblies. It inspects you assemblies and checks that you are correctly disposing of certain objects. Go to http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SPDisposeCheck to download it.

Fadi