July 14, 2009

Workaround for “Package does not support server operating systems” with Orca MSI editor

I recently tried to add the Windows Media Player 11 FireFox plugin (wmpfirefoxplugin.exe) to my Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition machine and was disappointed to see the below dialog warning me of the fact it wouldn’t install on a server operating system.

Not one to cede easily I opened Sysinternal’s PROCEXP.EXE, found the MSI handle, made a copy, and used Microsoft Orca to edit he MSI and remove the requirement. The package installed and works great.

If you use Windows Server 2008 as your workstation you might want to consider these same steps for any installation that fails around O/S verification. The warning, of course, is that the software might truly not work as expected. However, most of the times it seems to run just fine for me.

July 13, 2009

SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek !!!

Today Microsoft released some great videos highlighting the potential of the next release of SharePoint. There is some excellent material here include a full walk through showing live products in action.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/

Overview

Tom Rizzo, speaker
Robust cross browser support
AJAX calls for faster page loads
SharePoint Designer 2010 – Streamline interface, robust BDC features. No more Lightning Tool BDC Metaman?
SharePoint Workspace 2010 – Take lists and documents offline with a better than ever Groove client
BCS is the new BDC
Rich integration with Office 2010 – Sample BCS populated memo to regional sales representative.

IT Pro

Richard Riley, speaker
Professional productivity, Scalable platform, Flexible deployment
Release timeline
Central Admin cleaned interface. Similar to Control Panel in XP from Windows 2000.
Robust Logging. New dedicated database, runs BPA (Best Practice Analyzer) to give suggestions, granular detail never seen before. “Slowest Pages” insight.
Visual Upgrade. Allows site owners and users to preview before decided to switch browser interfaces.

Developer

Developer productivity, Platform services, Flexible deployment
Developer dashboard. Site feature provides browser output with detail rendering stack.
Visual Studio 2010 – MUCH improved developer experience. Detailed build options and project types.
Visual web part designer.
LINQ for SharePoint API
Client Object Model (OM) available in Silverlight and JavaScript.
Write quality solutions in less time.

July 7, 2009

Drag and drop .XML files to Excel 2007

Working with SharePoint daily I see a great deal of XML data. System configuration, user data, feature definition, list schema, usage, etc. SharePoint is a product that lives and breathes in XML format for nearly everything.

I personally find Excel 2007 very handy here.

If you didn’t know it is possible to drag a plain XML file onto a blank workbook and follow the Excel 2007 defaults to view in a grid layout (sample below). From there it’s …