Of course, SharePoint 2007 isn’t really called that - really, it’s called (ahem) ‘Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007′. SharePoint ‘07 it is then…

There is also a new Windows SharePoint Services Developers Center. Shame about the spelling.

When was the last time I looked up something like that about Windows and go an answer that quick? Um, never…

This was a pain - it’s just not as pretty as having the file open as a presentation.

It turns out the culprit for this was IIS - it didn’t have a mime-type defined for ‘.pps’. I fixed this using the advice from Microsoft’s support pages - PowerPoint Show (*.pps) file copies as a PowerPoint (.ppt) file from an IIS Web server.

What the article doesn’t mention, though, is that for MCMS, this change needs applied not to the website, but to the ‘NR/rdonlyres’ directory within the MCMS site.

It turns out you need to add the following to your web.config file, to change the maximum file size that ASP accepts:
<httpRuntime
executionTimeout="3600"
maxRequestLength="10240"
useFullyQualifiedRedirectUrl="false"
minFreeThreads="8"
minLocalRequestFreeThreads="4"
appRequestQueueLimit="100">
</httpRuntime>
I’m not sure what all the settings do - but the executionTimeout is in seconds, and the maxRequestLength is in Kb.

Previously when I’ve had a look at linux distros, I’ve had some problems. My home PC is a fairly antique laptop, with AMD powersaving built in, and an even older PCMCIA wireless network card. What that meant in the past was 1)No wireless network, and 2) a blisteringly hot CPU as it didn’t throttle back when there was nothing going on. That made Mandrake Linux, for me, interesting but not usable.

Ubuntu - well, it picked up the wireless quite happily. I’m writing this on it. And the CPU is running cool - it is truly excellent. I downloaded the ‘live’ CD (bootable CD that loads Ubuntu), and it was painless.

Very Impressed. I shall be making my machine dual boot - there are some applications I don’t want to do without - but this is a VERY usable system. And who’d have thought that a faintly brown colour could look so good - why is Windows so grey?

Anyway, it gives me pause for thought - Sharepoint and all those things I’m being trained up in aside, what does Windows give me that Ubuntu doesn’t? Open office gives me a word processor. I can browse the web. I have email. Yup, it’s a no brainer - as a home user, I’m a convert. I’ll keep using Windows for now - like I say, I have a number of applications I just don’t want to leave yet - but long term, I think I’ll move away. ‘Course I’m stuck with it for work - that’s their problem.

Anyway, Ubuntu - good enough for a

Comments from my old blog:

You know you’re really making me think about it too - I have an old laptop at home that *might* work too.

By Jonathan at 16:48:32 Thursday 11th May 2006

Microsoft Content Management Server 2000 - Addison Wesley

This book covers a lot, and so is quite fat. I found the chapters a bit variable - some, especially those on planning your site, were excellent. Other missed steps when describing how to do things, which made it very confusing. I felt that some of the code examples lacked context too - the functions might have worked okay, but where in the project were they? Also, the chapter order confused me - I’d much rather have had intro, install, configure, develop, etc.. Instead, this seemed to have a bit here, a bit there. For example, I would have moved chapter 3 (CMS Architecture) before chapter 2 (Installation), and followed that up with the entire of section 4 (security). All in all, not bad, but not as good as…

Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server - Packt

This book seems to me to have a much clearer layout. Introduction, Installation, Configuration - that’s what I like. Although a slimmer book, somehow this does seem to cover more ground. The text is distinctly techy, and it lacks some of the ‘planning’ chapters mentioned above, but it really gets in under the hood, and tells you how to do the sorts of things you’re bound to want to know. For example, I’d been annoyed by how the previous book hadn’t really described channel rendering scripts.

All in all, I was impressed by this and would recommend it, although…

Advanced Microsoft Content Management Server Development - Packt

…this is also a pretty good book. Aimed as an ‘advanced’ book, it tackles more advanced subjects (like SharePoint integration, Infopath, search, etc.). It also seems to be aimed at ‘making your life easier’ - I like books with title like ‘Useful Placeholder Controls’. It sort of falls into the ‘things you’ll probably want to know’

So, in summary, I’d recommend the last two books - they share some of the same authors. And if you haven’t had a question answered by Stefan Gossner, you haven’t worked with MCMS yet. It’s just a bit of a shame that these books will be redundant come Office 12

So, who will win? Well, Microsoft clearly have an advantage as they’ll be shipping IE7 with their next OS - whenever that is. To be honest, though, the thing that interests me most is if this stimulates better standards across browsers. I just had a fight with aligning an image with a line of text - and I had to hack it to fix it - so here’s to hoping.

Personally, though, I’ll stick with Firefox for now.

For years now I’ve been interested in typography. It seems to me that it’s one of those overlooked things - that web page looks okay, until someone who knows about type works on it, and then it looks great.

I agree with the article, I don’t like Arial - the weight of the top of the ‘a’ seems wrong. Not sure what to use instead - at the moment I use Tahoma and Trebuchet a lot, but I’m not entirely happy with either. And yes, I’m sticking with the free fonts - I’m not a specialist, I ain’t paying for fonts (blimey but some of them cost…)

Microsoft contend that customers don’t want a media player free version of Windows. They’ve not sold a copy. This isn’t, perhaps, surprising. I’d have bought one, except none were actually available to consumers. Also, given the choice between the two versions, just with or without Media player, for the same price, well, people will choose with. Even if they don’t want it.

It’s like, given the choice of a burger with a gherkin, or searching all over the place for a burger without a gherkin, most people will accept the easy to find burger, and TAKE OUT THE GHERKIN. Much the same has happened here - except that people can’t take the gherkin out as Microsoft have tied it to the OS. Again. Internet Explorer - ring any bell? And that worked, didn’t it?

I digress. Instead, what most people have to do is just put up with having Windows Media Player, and use another if they want to. And people are, and Microsoft point to this as being a sign of how it hasn’t monopolised the market.

Well, they’re right, they haven’t taken the market - their product isn’t good enough. Windows Media player has a rubbish user interface, and the only thing I’ve been able to reliably view with it are Microsoft Webcasts. Everything else, I seem to have problems with codecs, and so on.

So it isn’t good enough - yet. And that’s the thing, that’s what the court case should be about. When it is a good enough media player, that’ll be it for the competition. Just like Internet Explorer.

I’ve not found a media player I’m entirely happy with - but Winamp is (surprisingly) pretty okay. I guess if it does follow the history of IE, I’ll have to wait for a bunch of enthusiastic, disgruntled techies to write something better.

Well, the server dutifully set off to index the Internet. Yeah, not a few blogs but the whole enchillada. Unsurprisingly, when I went to the machine, it was reporting ‘Low Disk Space’. A brief search showed up some ma-hooo-sive (i.e. large) index files.

“Right”, I thought as I looked at a report saying ‘0 bytes free’, “I’ll clear the indexes”

Wrong. I went to the search administration pages, and tried to reset the indexes. I got no response - no error, nothing. My browser just showed the ‘page loading’ bar. No page ever loaded.

So I set the blogs path to be excluded, and tried to run a full index - again, no result.

In the end, the only answer I found was (get this), deleting the index file by hand. Then you can do exciting things like, I dunno, reset the indexes or run a full reindex. It appears that having the disc full prevented Sharepoint from being able to do anything with the indexes. Which was fun, as they were filling the disc.

It sort of goes against the grain to talk about Microsoft stuff, but some of the things I’ve been working with lately - Sharepoint, Biztalk, Content Management Server - are actually pretty good. Okay, so they tie you to MS SQL-Server, IIS, IE, Visual Studio (uck), Windows, Office, and the kitchen sink, but in terms of what they give users, they’re neat products actually. Sharepoint - well, it’s not a master of anything, but it’s pretty good at many things. CMS, well, it did what it said on the tin. Biztalk - silly name, but a good idea.

If they could just unbundle the browser, web server, database and IDE, that’d be great.

Why is CSS unable to style obvious things like this? I mean, radio buttons? Checkboxes? Grrr…

Comments from my old blog:

Workaround = ditch the standard bullet, create an image, place it left top, use some left padding.

By Rew at 02:18:37 Thursday 4th May 2006

Hey Rew,

Yeah, considered that, but it was too complicated - I was driving this through Microsoft Content Management Server - the users have access to ‘unordered lists’, but asking them to just use images would have been a bit too much.

Plus, it would make site-wide changes impossible.

By Andy at 13:43:27 Friday 5th May 2006