Digital Signature Support in InfoPath 2010

Here is the improvement in InfoPath on Digital Signature from Gergely Kota.

http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2010/02/18/digital-signature-support-in-infopath-2010.aspx

Building a SharePoint 2010 tag cloud search refiner

Nice blog from El Otro

http://httpcode.com/blogs/PermaLink,guid,8b267ee2-e214-4187-8e8d-e3c4f092fc66.aspx

myspace for outlook

What is MySpace for Outlook?
It's a newly available add-in that puts MySpace inside of Outlook:

Uses Microsoft's Social Connector to add the "People Pane," which shows a profile picture and other MySpace info for each contact who's also a friend
Creates a special MySpace Contact List
Shows your friends' status updates and other Stream activities
Provides one-click access to your friends' profiles
Enables you to easily email your friends

http://www.myspace.com/msoutlook

TWITTER ADD-IN FOR MICROSOFT OUTLOOK

TwInbox seamlessly integrates Twitter into Outlook. It is a perfect Twitter client for any Outlook user, from a Twitter newbie to a business professional.

http://www.techhit.com/TwInbox/twitter_plugin_outlook.html

New Ajax Control SeaDragon

The Seadragon control can be used for interactively viewing images. Use your mouse to pan and zoom around the image.

http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/Samples/Seadragon/Seadragon.aspx

ASP.NET ComboBox - Master / Detail with Unlimited Detail Levels

The ComboBox provides a built-in master / detail feature, which allows you to organize data from multiple data sources in the same ComboBox. To set up a detail ComboBox, add a new ComboBox control inside the Details section of the master ComboBox.

http://www.obout.com/combobox/aspnet_master_detail_unlimited.aspx

Powershell articles from Ted

http://blog.tedpattison.net/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=3

SQL Reporting Services data from SharePoint lists

Nice post to create reports with SharePoint data in SharePoint 2007
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/reporting-services/ReportFromSharePoint.aspx

Using the SharePoint Business Data Connectivity Designer in VS 2010

Nice web cast. Thanks to Boris and Beth.

Boris shows off the new Business Data Connectivity designer in Visual Studio 2010 and how it allows you to describe data coming from multiple data sources and how to work with them in SharePoint. He builds a master/detail association across entities coming from separate data sources (a database and a service) and demonstrates how the entities can be displayed and edited.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/funkyonex/Using-the-SharePoint-Business-Data-Connectivity-Designer-in-VS-2010/

Visual Web Part in SharePoint 2010

Visual Web Part in SharePoint 2010

Before I explain what it is, I will remind what we were doing to have visual control in SharePoint 2007. We were creating our ascx controls in TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES folder. To be able to use the control in our webpart, we were loading it in CreateChildControls method with this.Page.LoadControl(_ascxPath); . _ascxPath is path for our control. You can see the following complete syntax.

protected override void CreateChildControls()
{
Control control = this.Page.LoadControl(_ascxPath);
Controls.Add(control);
base.CreateChildControls();
}

So what is new now. To be honest nothing has changed in strategy. But Visual studio made a great job including this future into Visual Studio. We do not need to think about deployment hassle and all other painfull operations. Now we can just simply add and change this future quickly.

Here is the sample about How to create Visual Web Part in Visual Studio 2010.
http://www.helloitsliam.com/archive/2009/10/20/sharepoint-2010-%E2%80%93-create-a-visual-web-part.aspx

Asp.Net 4.0 - Session State Compression

Using sessions sometimes may cause performance problems. To prevent these we usually split the IIS and State machine server. Additionally we would store session in SQL server. One of the new future in ASP.net 4 will definetly be our pain killer on this subject. It is very simple configuraation. When we configure the sessionstate in web.config, we will simply set compressionEnabled as true. Then ASP.NET will compress (and decompress) serialized session state by using the .NET Framework System.IO.Compression.GZipStream class. You can simply give it a go and see the difference via configuring SQL DB as a sessionstate server and checking the size of SessionItemLong field in ASPStatesTempSessions table. On text values we can see incredible difference, but if it is an image file the difference will not be that incredible.

mode="SqlServer"
sqlConnectionString="data source=dbserver;Initial Catalog=aspnetstate"
allowCustomSqlDatabase="true"
compressionEnabled="true"
/>

Getting started with LINQ to SharePoint in SharePoint 2010

Nice blog from Tobias Zimmergren, it clearly explains how to use LINQ to SharePoint in SharePoint 2010. I am now planing to integrate this into SharePoint Explorer in VS 2010.
http://www.zimmergren.net/archive/2010/02/19/sp-2010-getting-started-with-linq-to-sharepoint-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Nice posts from MS CS Forum

Post1: Displaying advertisement depending on basket content

Requirement:
1. User has 1 of product 12345 in their basket
2. They navigate to the cart page
3. See advertisement which says to "buy 1 more to get free shipping" or "buy 1 more to get 10% off" (just examples). There would be discounts defined for these.

Elegant solution of Ravi
1. Create a user profile to store basket line items information.
2. Whenever an item is added to the basket, we will update this user object.
3. whenever a basket is converted into purhase order we will remove items from this profile,.
4. Using marketing manager, set basketitems as target profile. Check my blog which explains how to set target profile.
http://microsoftblog.co.in/commerceserver/targeting-on-other-profile-objects/
5. Create advertisements or discounts based on that target expression.