It took be a while before I realise that while Office 2003 and Office 2007 can be installed side by side, and that it doesn't really matter which version is installed first, it is an entirely different story when it comes to developing Office solutions using VSTO on a development environment with both version installed. In a nutshell, it is not supported ......

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If you wish to create a custom theme in a WSS installation and wanted to install that theme into your Sharepoint installation, you will realize that there is no quick and easy one click method to do it. Below are the steps to illustrate what has to be done to upload a new theme to the WSS installation After creating your theme, copy the content of the ......

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While installing WSS 3.0, I came across another strange error when I try to start my Search Service in the server farm. For some reason WSS refuses to acknowledge that the machine is the indexer. The setup was on single a 64 bit machine installed as a server farm. After reinstalling and re-confirming that everything is where it should be, I decided ......

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I was trying to set up a development server recently on a 64 bit machine with Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 and came across this. After installing the server farm, while Sharepoint tries to load the Central Administration page, it popped up with this error This can be easily fixed by going to your parent web.config file under C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Fr... ......

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Just a couple of weeks ago, I was tearing my hair out trying to meet a really tight timeline and at the same time trying to solve a technical issue which in my opinion is a total waste of time. If anyone of you had ever tried to make SSIS and Oracle work on a 64 bit machine, I am sure you know what I was referring to. Fortunately we have people like ......

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I recently stumbled upon an excellent shell extension for Windows which allows users to map your regular Gmail account as a virtual online drive on your computer. I thought this is an example of how technology is converging. Simply download the setup files, extract it into a temporary folder and run the setup.exe. Once done, you will see a Gmail drive ......

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SCD (Slow Changing Dimension) has been a very common scenario for data warehouses and there are many established and proven techniques that can be used to solve the problems. This includes the usage of SCD Type II (Insert only) or SCD Type I (Update only) methodology. When we start to look at designing a system that caters for real time information, ......

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While there have many takes and talks about Business Intelligence 2.0, which is really BI working in a SOA environment, the technology behind Business Intelligence hasn't seems to mature to the state where we can really have real time performance without sacrificing some traditional BI systems characteristics. SQL Server 2005 did a great job in getting ......

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Is this even possible? I've been trying to design a BI system on SQL Server 2005 with strict constraints to maintain a 'single version of truth'. One of the hardest things in this system is to provide Real Time data views with historical audit. To make things more exciting, many of the dimensions are slowly changing dimensions. Proactive Caching in ......

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I thought this is worth noting. This is the way to generate 1 million records within 1 second in SQL Server 2005. I'll have the code pasted here so that I can have a reference the next time I need to use it. As Namwar Rizvi said, this code is proposed in SQL Server 2005 TSQL Querying by Microsoft press. --Declare a variable to hold the--count of rows ......

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It has been a while since I last posted. Thanks to all the changes that's happening in my life. New job, new role, new technology and a new laptop. Anyway, so I heard that Word 2007 supports blog publication, which is a really neat feature. I got it set up with the following few steps Select publish to Blog Select 'others' for blog type Select MetaWebLog ......

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Here's a pretty decent comparison done on SQLServer against MySQL. I'm not a big fan of MySQL, but recently I got into a project which requires me to evaluate the possibility of using MySQL on a enterprise level datawarehouse. As horrific as it may sound to me, I need to convince with technical proof, that MySQL is not suitable for enterprise level ......

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It took me a while to come to this blog post from Bart. He wrote a very simple and easy to understand article on how you can invoke a workflow engine from a IIS / Self Hosted WCF service. This is very useful from the layered architecture perspective since most service-oriented systems will not have the presentation layer calling the workflow engine ......

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I was writing a proof of concept which uses WCF, WF and ASP.Net 2.0 and across some problems when I tried to call a WCF service from the web application client. Turned out that I spent an hour wasted trying to debug my application because I did not place the proxy.cs file into the App_Code of the web application. I had it documented down and wrote a ......

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I was pretty excited over Apple's new iPhone after witnessing its slick interface in YouTube, and decided that my dependency on the Pocket PC driven by the Windows Mobile platform will have to go. That is until I see this. Somebody actually made an iPhone replica sitting on the Pocket PC. Very impressive. It's a shame that the video has been taken down ......

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