Microsoft Office 2007 for a trial spin by the end of February

Microsoft has made the Enterprise version of Office 2007 for trial up until the end of February. This includes all Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc. At the end of the trial run, Office 2007 Enterprise will downgrade to a crippled edition that bars users from creating, changing, or saving documents and files. Users will still be able to view and print documents, however.

Download the free trial from here (~502.1 MB) (link) or check out the official trial site (link) for more information. You will need a trial licence key, which you can obtain from here.

"What the C or C++ Programmer Needs toKnow About C# and the .NET Framework" book by Charles Petzold

As I am coming from C++ background, long time ago while I was trying to catch up with .NET and C#, I would have died for a book like this:

"What the C or C++ Programmer Needs toKnow About C# and the .NET Framework" by Charles Petzold (link)

First thing you should note is the author - not everyone, but the famous Charles Petzold. Then you should notice that this book is completely free right now, so I really don't know what you are waiting for - just go there and download it :)

Service Unavailable error and IIS 6.0

Today I experienced very strange behavior from my local IIS 6.0. Everythime I accessed some web site previously working sound, I kept on getting this empty page saying "Service Unavailable". When I saw that all of my Web sites part of my current project are showing this same message, I tried to open a stand-alone and completely different Web app, but again the same message. Ok, that's was a clear indication that there was something wrong with the IIS6 installed on my local box. I hit the Internet and found the following KB article on MSDN site (link). This just rang up a bell that the problem can be rooted in the app pools I've been using. And it was a true suggestion - I had to change the identity under which my default ASP.NET 2.0 app pools were using (since the old one was not valid anymore). And now I have one greatly working IIS 6.0 up and running...

Exposing a MEX Endpoint

Today I found out the following. Let's say you have an Indigo service using the basic profile binding (BasicProfile) or any of the WS-* profiles. Then, you need a way to expose the metadata of your service to clients. Normally, you will define a new WS-MetatadataExchange (MEX) endpoint. But here is the trick. If your service is self-hosted, then if you specify a base address while opening the service, then you have this MEX endpoint created for you. Just point to the base address in your Web browser, and you will get the service description file or if you want the WSDL - just type the "?wsd" in the address bar. Here is a sample code that demonstrates this:

Uri baseAddress = new Uri( "http://localhost:8080/MEXAutoMetadataSvc" );

// NOTE: by specifying a base address, the MEX endpoint should be automatically populated especially for HTTP based profiles
myServiceHost = new ServiceHost( typeof( .. MEXAutoMetadataSvc ),
new Uri [] { baseAddress } );

//Open myServiceHost
myServiceHost.Open();

Now with this code running, if you go to http://localhost:8080/MEXAutoMetadataSvc you will see the description for this service.

Windows Vista and Office 2007 webcasts

If you want to ramp up with the cool and fascinating features that Vista and Office 2007 provide to us (developers), you may want to check out this site:

http://www.powertogether.com/

There, you will find a realm of online virtual labs and web casts, bundled up to give you one-stop-and-shop place to speed up with that technology, which IMO is really revolutionary. And don't get me wrong - I don't think of Windows Vista as of the new Microsoft OS with the very sleek UI, but also with all of its major improvements in security, connected systems development (and Microsoft .NET framework 3.0) and totally revamped way of interacting with your PC. I can tell you that having Vista on my desktop, I will never think of moving back to any previous OS.

As far as Microsoft Office 2007 is concerned, I will really recommend you just playing with it for couple of hours. Then send me back your comments. However, back on the link I gave you here, there is a good overview of what's into the developers toolbox for Office 2007 so it's worth to go there and master these.