Working with VS 2008 SP1 in VISTA

1. Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is already in a beta and can be downloaded from here
2. if you just want to download .NET 3.5 SP1 beta, it can be downloaded from here
3. Lot of enhancements and bugs fixes have been done. Overview of the same can be seen at here
4. There is a dedicated Microsoft forum for VS 2008 SP1 beta and can be visited at here

If you are one of the Vista users using VS 2008, and want to download the VS 2008 SP1. There are some issues related to installing .NET 3.5 SP1 on Vista RTM so better recommended approach is to install the SP 1 of Vista before installing VS 2008 SP1.

Article on Sharepoint workflow wizard in VS 2008

Last weekend, got some good time to write an article on sharepoint workflow wizard in VS 2008. The article gives a brief detail on
1. Sharepoint workflows in VS 2008
2. Sharepoint workflow wizard in VS 2008 and its Pros/Cons
You can get it available from the below URL of code project site
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WF/sharepointworkflow.aspx

Sharepoint Workflows in Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio 2008 provides lot of workflow templates. if you see the screen , two of those belong to Sharepoint.

1. SharePoint 2007 Sequential Workflow
2. SharePoint 2007 State Machine Workflow
Sequential workflow represents a workflow as a sequence of steps that must be executed in order until the last activity is completed. A state machine workflow represents a set of states, transitions, and actions. One state is denoted as the start state, and then, based on an event, a transition can be made to another state. Below is a typical example of a Sequential workflow.

when you select any of these workflow template, it executes the workflow wizard that allows to do debugging on the workflows on sharepoint that requires special permissions. for e.g this wizard takes care of deploying workflow customization on Global Assembly Cache (GAC). Wizard also takes care of associating the workflow template with a document library or list. It how an instance of your workflow can be started. Without VSTO you need to handle this outside of Visual Studio in separate steps. Really i would say that with lots of inclusion of sharepoint related work in Visual Studio, Microsoft is really making the life ease of the developers.

World wide Telescope

Yesterday after downloading a software, the word that came from my mouth is "WOW" .. well , its NOT VISTA, my dear friends... it is World Wide Telescope from Microsoft Research. Microsoft Research team has came up with the product called World Wide Telescope, built on .NET framework 2.0. Presently it is in beta . You can install it in your machines and make your machine as a telescope. You can navigate to any place, any part, universe, glaciers etc .. Its really really awesome . this is far more superior to Google earth, Virtual earth etc..This product is been based on Web 2.0 Visualization technology ( one of the promising and upcoming technologies ) . WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft® high performance Visual Experience Engine™ and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments. If you have a 3d Graphics card, .NET 2.0 and DirectX, download and get a glimpse of the beautiful world around.http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/ .

SharePoint 2007 Maximum Limitations

The following table lists is the Maximum limitations lists in MOSS

Site collection : 50,000 per Web application
Web site : 250,000 per site collection
Subsite : 2,000 per Web site
Document : 5 million per library
Item : 2,000 per view
Document file size : 50MB (2GB max*)
List : 2,000 per Web site
Field type : 256 per list
Column : 2,000 per document library 4,096 per list
Web Part : 50 per page
Users in groups : 2 million per Web site
User profile : 5 million per farm
Security principal : 2,000 per Web site
Search indexes : One per SSPMaximum of 20 per farm
Indexed documents : 50,000,000 per content index
Content sources : 500 per SSP
Start Addresses : 500 per content source
Alerts : 1,000,000 per SSP
Scopes : 200 per site
Display groups : 25 per site
Crawl rules : 10,000 per SSP
Keywords : 15,000 per site
Crawled properties : 500,000 per SSP
Managed properties : 100,000 per SSP
Authoritative pages : 200 per relevance level
Results removal : 100
Crawl logs : 50,000,000
Shared Services Provider (SSP) : 3 per farm (20 per farm maximum)
Zone : 5 per farm
Web application : 99 per SSP
Internet Information Services (IIS) application pool: 8 per Web server
Site collection : 50,000 per Web application
Content database : 100 per Web application
Site collection : 50,000 per database
Index servers : 1 per SSP*
Application servers running Excel Calculation Services : No limit
Query servers : No limit
Web server/database server ratio : 8 Web servers per database server
Web server/domain controller ratio : 3 Web servers per domain controller

Reference of the same taken from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx