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10
Mar
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10
Mar
¡Hola a todos!
Sentimos el retraso pero a veces el día a días nos impide publicar las noticias que queremos y creemos más relevantes en nuestro blog y os pedimos disculpas por ello.
Y como bien reza el título de esta nueva entrada efectivamente tenemos ya disponibles desde finales de Febrero-principios de Marzo las nuevas actualizaciones para Office 2007 y Office 2003 en forma de Paquetes Acumulativos (CU).
Como ya os comentamos con anterioridad el Grupo de Producto de Office decidió el uso de esta modalidad para no tener que esperar a la salida de un nuevo Service Pack o de HotFixes que de forma individual deben salir a la luz, para que de una forma periódica podamos evaluar las mejoras que se han realizado con respecto a los productos a fin de que podamos proceder a su instalación en nuestros entornos.
Los enlaces para conocer los detalles de dichos paquetes acumulativos son los siguientes pero ya os avanzamos que la traducción automática no es aún perfecta y existen algunas expresiones que no son muy naturales aún:
Actualización acumulativa para de 2010 de febrero de 2007 Office
Office 2003 actualización acumulativa de febrero de 2010
Por lo que a continuación os facilitamos las versiones originales en inglés si queréis estudiar algún detalle específico:
Office 2007 Cumulative Update for February 2010
Office 2003 Cumulative Update for February 2010
Esperamos que os sean de utilidad.
¡Saludos!
Luis
10
Mar
Many people may have heard of some of the ongoing “buzz” words around SmoothStreaming. SmoothStreaming is a technology born of work in the Silverlight domain. The basic idea is that allows developers to supply audio and video streams that adapt to the users current bandwidth and machine conditions (like cpu retention etc.). Actually the adaptive streaming heuristics are quite detail and work really well.
Whats so important about this technology is not so much the technology itself but the underlying platform that allows for it to work. This is MediaStreamSource a public but little known abstract class available to developers to allow them to extend the basic functionality of the media stack.
Before I get into more detail about how this facilitates smooth streaming I’m going to give a brief introduction of how MediaStreamSource works and some of the ideas it could potentially be used for. This article will be very much a simple background of MediaStreamSource. Part 2 of the series will try to further address how to use MediaStreamSource and go into detail about the API.
MediaStreamSource at heart allows you the developer to directly send “un-containerized” media samples to the Silverlight media stack for processing and display. If we look at most video formats today they consist of 2 main ideas:
MediaStreamSource requires developers to implement 2 above themselves, while still providing the framework to decode and playback the coded sample bit stream from 1 above.
So why would anyone want to implement 2 above themselves, this seems like a lot of work? To give an example lets now discuss the SmoothStreaming case. For SmoothStreaming we need to be able to change the quality of the audio/video being played back midstream depending on a number of different heuristics like network bandwidth, cpu performance etc.
If we consider that a video or audio bit stream is broken into samples as mentioned above, then all we’d need to do would be to change the samples were sending to the Silverlight plugin when we detect a change in conditions effecting our heuristic. In essence this is mostly what SmoothStreaming does. It packages small sets of samples into “chunks” and switches on the fly what quality the “chunks” we are downloading are, and sends it through MediaStreamSource down to the Silverlight plugin.
This scenario could be implemented directly into the stack, but this is just one of the flexible uses that MediaStreamSource provides for us, to make scenarios similar to these available.
MediaStreamSource was made initially available in Silverlight 2. It was in Silverlight 3 that the scope of MediaStreamSource expanded significantly when the ability to playback raw audio and video frames became available in Silverlight. Before this Silverlight was capable of playing back a predetermined set of audio/video codec’s including VC-1, wma, and mp3. With raw audio and video support this means the user could provide their own container and decoder and playback any format in Silverlight that they wish with their decoder platform, making use of the rest of the Silverlight RIA stack and media playback framework.
Don’t get me wrong building a decoder is no simple endeavor, but with the possibility open, and some smart third-party developers out there re-usable libraries for different codec’s are starting to emerge. Beyond this one of my many hobbies includes attempting to provide old console emulation in Silverlight through MediaStreamSource. It seems to be an idea shared by others as well: http://10rem.net/blog/2009/03/18/silverlight-3-%E2%80%93-creating-video-from-raw-bits-using-a-mediastreamsource.
I hope you found this overview of MediaStreamSource useful and can get a basic feel for what it’s about. In the coming articles I will describe the interface in more detail, and how it can be used in applications that you’re looking to build. Hopefully the ideas for use can be extended far beyond what they were imagined for (I know games emulation wasn’t the number 1 scenario!!)
Check out MSDN docs here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.mediastreamsource(VS.95).aspx
10
Mar
One of the coolest features I think we’ve added in Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to add your own tabs into the webtest playback view. Extending the user interface in this way allows you to do data analysis and have it pop up right in front of you in whatever format you want. No more exporting to excel or whatever your favorite analysis tool is, just compile everything you one in one place and voila!
That being said, I have been told that it can be difficult to grok at first glance. So, I wanted to post a sort of ‘how to’ in order to get one of these working. A colleague of mine suggested that I could use this forum to demonstrate how to keep track of something that affects the performance of many users’ websites. Namely, Viewstate. So, below is a step by step instruction on how to create a webtest playback tab which keeps track of the viewstate size for each request.
Step 1: Create the add-in project
Visual Studio Add-ins have their own special type of project, you can find it under “Other project types / Extensibility”. I’ve named mine “ViewstateAddin”.
Step 2: Walk through the create add-in wizard
When the wizard launches, you’ll be add a “welcome” screen. Click next to move to page 1.
Page 1 asks you which language you’d like to program your add-in with. I chose C#, but VB or C++ are supported as well if you prefer.
Page 2 will ask you where your add-in needs to be hosted. Since webtest playback is not available within VS 2010 Macros, you can uncheck that box and simply leave the main VS 2010 product selected.
Page 3 asks you for the name and description of your add-in. These will be visible to your users in the manage add-ins dialog, so don’t skimp here. I’ve added mine as shown.
Pages 4 and 5 will ask you for a general idea of what your add-in will do. For example – when you want the add-in to load into memory and whether you will be popping any modal UI from your code. I suggest leaving all of the boxes unchecked (on both pages) if this is your first time creating an add-in.
Page 6 is just a summary page of everything you’ve selected thus far. If everything looks as you expect, click finish to create your bare bones add-in.
Step 3: Creating the user control and adding required references
The user interface you design will be housed within a single user control. Inside that control you can do as you please, but first you must create the user control container. This is accomplished under the project menu by selecting “Add User Control”
You can name the user control anything you want. I’ve named mine “ViewstateControl.cs”. This will add a blank user control to the project which will be used extensively in the next few steps. For now, you can leave it blank.
Before moving on, you will also want to add 2 references to your project:
First - Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.WebTestFramework.dll (This one can be found on the .NET tab of the add reference dialog.)
Second – Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.LoadTestPackage.dll (This one you will need to use the browse tab in the add reference dialog and look in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies)
Caution: Make sure you’re using Version 10.0 of these assemblies or your add-in will not work.
Step 4: Adding the connection code
The process of getting a playback add-in to work for you is a two step one. First, you need to tell the playback window that your control exists. Then you need to register for event notifications. First, let’s go over telling the playback window that you want to have your user control displayed.
This is done from within the Connect class. If it’s not already open, open the Connect.cs file from solution explorer. Inside the Connect class, you will need 2 things. First, an object containing a list of your user controls. (One add-in can provide support for any number of user controls. Each user control will get its own tab.) Second, you will need a handle to the LoadTestPackage Extensibility object. (Don’t worry, it’s harder to say than it is to use.)
Each of these objects needs to be global to the Connect class and declared as follows:
The next method is one you’ll need to add to the Connect class. It will be called when your add-in is loaded for the first time to attach to any existing playback windows as well as each time a new playback window is created. It is responsible for making sure the playback window is displaying a tab with your control on it. If you’re having trouble getting a tab to display, this is one of two likely places to look for a problem.
If you’re having trouble getting all of the above objects to resolve, make sure you have the following using statements in the file:
As you can see above, there is no constructor for ViewStateControl that takes a WebTestResultDetails argument. Don’t worry about that just yet. It’s expected since we haven’t written any code for the control.
Now that you’ve created the method which will be called when your control needs to load, you need to make sure it gets called. There are 2 times when your control will need to load.
For the first case, we just need to call the WindowCreated method from the OnConnection method. You do this by first creating a handle to the Loadtest package extensibility object and then calling WindowCreated for each open window. For the second case, you need to subscribe to the WindowCreated event from the extensibility object and call WindowCreated from within the event handler.
Your OnConnection method and event handler should now look like this:
That’s all that is required to get your new tab to display within webtest playback. If you were to fix up the call to the nonexistent constructor above, you could compile and give it a shot. Sadly though, you’d see nothing but a blank tab. So let’s keep going and finish the add-in.
Step 5: Registering for events
Now that the add-in will display, you can get to the meat of the add-in, registering for and handling events. The following events are available for your add-in to hook.
You have already seen how to subscribe to the WindowCreated event in Step 4 above. The other events are subscribed to similarly and in the same place. In fact, for this demo you will need to subscribe to each of them. Here’s what the OnConnection method should look like after you’ve subscribed to the events.
For now, you’ll need to create stubs of each of these event handlers so that the code will compile. We’ll get back to writing these handlers in step 7.
Step 6: Writing the UI
Now that you’ve created the add-in, it’s time to add the meat of what you want to see. I am by no means a UI expert, but I’ll give you enough to get started here. I dropped a listview and a label onto my user control. The listview I gave 3 columns – row number, viewstate size, and the URL. The label will contain the viewstate size of the currently selected request in the UI. It looks like this:
For the code behind the UI, I created 3 main methods. The first is a utility method to pull out the viewstate from the response body of a request.
Next, a method to iterate through the list of requests and update the listview…
And finally, a method which will update the label with the viewstate size of the currently selected request.
Step 7: Putting it all together
At this point, all of the code is written except the event handlers. We just need to add calls from the event handlers to the UI update handlers and clean up memory.
The TestCompleted event is a good event to use when getting summary data. I’ve used it to call the UpdateSummaryDetails method as shown below.
For changing data when different requests are selected in playback, you’ll want to use the SelectionChanged event. I have used this event to call the UpdateSelectionDetails method written in step 6.
And lastly – there is a WindowClosed event which will allow you to remove your tab from playback and release any resources you may have tied up.
Step 8: Turning it on
At this point, you’ve finished creating the add-in and it’s ready to go. Just compile it and launch a new instance of Visual Studio. Once you’ve launched the new instance, you can look under the tools menu for “Add-in manager”. you should see your add-in listed and be able to turn it on. If you want your add-in always loaded, make sure to choose the enable on startup option.
Next, just run a webtest and see the results!
10
Mar
I was spending some time responding to Connect bugs the other day when I ran across this suggestion:
“It would be nice to have a clip board history window that could be next to the control toolbox as a nice utility window. (Often in presentations I see Microsoft presenters using a custom clipboard tool for such a purpose).
Many times I wish I could go back to something I copied & pasted just a few minutes ago, then to have to go and copy the same text all over again.”
Turns out that Visual Studio already has this “hidden” feature. It’s called the Clipboard Ring. If you copy a number of items to the clipboard, pressing [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[V] will paste the last text that was copied, but it will also highlight the pasted phrase. Continue holding down [Ctrl]+[Shift] and press [V] again. This will cause that highlighted section to cycle through the other items on the clipboard. This is extremely useful when you have to copy multiple lines of separate text to a new document.
Now, you might be saying, “Great, but what if I want to save a piece of code that I use frequently in multiple places? I don’t want to have to cycle through the clipboard ring every time.” Well, there’s also a feature for that! If you highlight a section of code (or text) and drag it to the Toolbox, VS will create a "snippet” (not to be confused with code snippets) that can be dragged into the VS editor.
This feature is extremely useful for code demos where you don’t want to type out each line of code.
Caveat: Currently, there’s no (easy) way to export Toolbox snippets. If you move to another computer, you’ll have to recreate them. The easiest way to move these between computers is to enter them in a large text document and drag each one onto the Toolbox.
Hope you find these tips useful!
| Weston Hutchins – Program Manager, Visual Studio Shell Team Short Bio: I started at Microsoft as an intern in 2005 and have been working in Visual Studio ever since. I’m currently a PM on the VS Shell IDE team and work on the core IDE UI and services as well as the Extension Manager and http://visualstudiogallery.com integration. Prior to my current duties, I was the SKU manager for the Visual Studio Express products. |
10
Mar
En numerosas ocasiones escuchamos a muchos clientes y usuarios las pocas posibilidades que a veces se tienen para hacer llegar información sobre comentarios y mejoras sobre nuestras aplicaciones al Grupo de Producto de Office.
Bien pues en esta ocasión os ofrecemos una posibilidad única de poder participar en una muy completa encuesta que hemos elaborado con nuestros compañeros de dicho grupo y el de Office Online.
La presente encuesta ha sido diseñada para recoger aparte de una serie de datos iniciales para conocer el entorno en el cual os movéis, tanto como empresa o usuarios, vuestros usos más frecuentes tanto en aplicaciones como en características específicas, a fin de conocer el tipo de perfil y facilitar las mejoras en los áreas de las tecnologías de edición, corrección, revisión de ortografía, gramática, el uso de diccionarios, tesauros, etc.
Os adelantamos que la primera parte es la de recogida de usuario y su entorno y a partir de la cuestión 10 ya comienza lo que podríamos llamar el grueso de feedback sobre dichas herramientas que se verá implementado en la parte final de Office 2010 y contemplándolo para las futuras actualizaciones del producto y versiones.
Ayudadnos a mejorar nuestras herramientas para que sean cada vez más completas y versátiles a fin de que os puedan ser más útiles a vosotros en el día a día.
¡Muchas gracias por anticipado!
Saludos
Luis
10
Mar
Late last year we started the Visual Studio 2010 Architecture Guidance project … probably the worst time as December is a very inactive month with everyone enjoying a well deserved break and January being a very active month to re-start initiatives, thus having little time and bandwidth for these kind of projects. Nevertheless the team has ensured that the guidance project is picking up momentum and recently released a DRAFT of the core scenarios to the Rangers for comment and are hard at work on a BETA release for the core scenarios and a DRAFT release for the
extensibility and Hands-on-lab (HOL) scenarios.
As soon as the BETA content is available I will start sharing some of the nuggets on this blog, to ensure that “you” can get value and “we” can get “your” feedback
>>>>>> In the meantime we would really appreciate if you could add comments to this post or contact me directly in terms of questions you would like us to answer in the questions & answers document, which will accompany the core scenario and extensibility scenario guidance documents. While the scenario train is steaming on well-defined tracks, we have room to manoeuvre in the questions & answers document and probably in the hands-on-lab (HOL) environments as well. So, sharpen your pencils, dust off your keyboards and send us your comments!
The snapshots of the leads who are driving this project are included below to give this project a face, or rather faces
When we ship, we will obviously expand this gallery to all contributors and reviewers …
The leads from left to right are: Clemens Reijnen (MVP), Clementino de Mendonça, Francisco Xavier Fagas Albarracín (MVP), Larry Guger (MVP), Marcel Vries (MVP), RandyMiller (MSFT) and Willy-Peter Schaub (MSFT).
10
Mar
Delegation is a great new feature in Project Server 2010 that allows one user to allow others to act on their behalf. Very useful when a Project Manager is going to be out of town and doesn’t want to have to re-set the status manager for all her owned tasks just so someone else can action updates – instead she just sets a delegate and they can work as if they were the Project Manager. Works across all features – so can be used for timesheets, or even administrative functions. I’m sure there will be plenty of posts going in to the details but wanted to describe how this works for both new instances of Project Server 2010 as well as upgraded 2007 instances
This is pretty powerful and for new Project Server 2010 instances the default behavior is that Administrators can manage resource delegates – so they can set up delegates for any user on the system. So if they navigate to the Manage Delegates option (under the new Personal Settings on the left navigation – or site map) and click New they will see all the users who can be a delegate if they click the Browse button next to Set Delegate, and they will see ALL users if they click Browse next to the Working on Behalf Of.
However, we have taken the design decision that this is quite a dramatic new feature for existing 2007 users, so the default if you have upgraded a PWA instance from 2007 is that Administrators CANNOT manage resource delegations. So in this case when clicking Browse next to Working on Behalf Of they would see no one.
So the next question is – how do I change this? It is one of the tricky category permissions that sometimes catch our customers out – as it is set for the category of My Organization within the Administrators group. So if you either want to turn this off in your native 2010 instance, or turn it on in your upgraded 2007 instance, go to Manage Groups and select Administrators, then within the Add or Edit Group page scroll down until you see the Categories.
Now for the tricky bit – click on My Organization and you will then see the set of permissions for My Organization! I have collapsed the Project permissions to fit the interesting bit in – the Manage Resource Delegates option.
In 2007 upgraded instances this will look like this and be unchecked – and will need to be checked if you want administrators to be able to set delegates for everyone – in 2010 native instances it will already be checked – so uncheck if you want to turn this off for administrators. You can of course do this the other way around, and go to Manage Categories and then select Administrators – but the key take-away here is that you need to select the category (or group) to see the applicable permissions – something that isn’t always intuitive.
More 2010 postings to come –many, like this one based on early feedback and experience from our TAP customers and Ignite attendees (thanks Jesse!).
10
Mar
Why are we building applications and Web sites? We have a goal. We want these to be effective.
How do one knows that the application is effective? How one gathers information about how the application is being used and interacted with?
Understanding this require instrumentation (that is often done after the fact) and usually is a cumbersome process.
Well, at MIX you will hear how Silverlight empowers you to do this in a much easier way (It might actually blow you away). My college Michael S. Scherotter is going to introduce and talk about the Silverlight Analytics Framework at MIX.
The Silverlight Analytics Framework is about to release next week (March 17 2010) on CodePlex as free open-source framework. The Framework is available for both in browser and out of browser Silverlight applications, is integrated nicely with the design experience in Blend and is supporting many analytic services it can report into.
The session on the framework will be on Monday 3/15/2010 at 2:00 PM at our Mix Conference in Las Vegas – it will be recorded and put up on the Mix site soon after so if you can’t make it, you can still learn about it.
From my experience, after you try this, you will never want to look back. Michael and team did some amazing work on this.
Barak
10
Mar
El propósito de esta entrada en el Blog es en relación a las numerosas consultas hemos tenido en relación a cómo se comportan las aplicaciones del paquete de Office 2007 con respecto a comunicaciones de tipo de WEBDAV y aclarar las posibilidades que ofrecen tanto el paquete Office como la plataforma Windows.
A grandes rasgos podemos decir que Office 2007 (así como futura versión de Office 2010) ya no tiene un motor propio para realizar dicho tipo de conexiones dado que aprovecha el servicio de WebClient del Sistema Operativo Windows Vista o Windows 7 de tal forma que se rompe la dependencia que existía en la versión anterior de Office 2003 y sus componentes web agrupados con la denominación de RoseBud y que se instalaban conjuntamente desde el origen o punto de instalación administrativo.
Esto tiene su importancia dado que por la gran difusión que existe de los productos de Office 2003 se han establecido para fabricantes de aplicaciones de gestión de contenidos de terceros como un referente en sus diseños de trabajo, de tal forma que cuando se ha introducido las nuevas versiones tanto de Office 2007 como de Windows (Windows Vista o Windows 7) en dichos entornos como nuevas plataformas actualizadas de trabajo, de repente los workflows que hasta entonces eran funcionales dejaban de serlo y la conexiones de tipo WEBDAV no se realizaban de la forma esperada.
La percepción a primera vista es que las aplicaciones de Office 2007 corriendo sobre dichos sistemas operativos con gestores de contenidos de terceros han dejado de funcionar y ya no se utiliza dicho protocolo de WEBDAV; pero como hemos mencionado antes no es así.
De hecho si tenemos una plataforma actualizada tanto a nivel de Office como en Windows, lo lógico es que tengamos una solución de gestión de contenido y portal de colaboración basada en Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS2007) y que ya contempla el cambio de diseño que apuntábamos antes, de tal forma que se comunica con las aplicaciones Word y Excel tomando ventaja del uso del servicio de WebClient en el que descansan dichas aplicaciones para establecer una comunicación de datos más fluida que con la versión anterior, es decir se trata de una plataforma optimizada.
Bien y ¿qué hacemos si nos encontramos con un entorno que no posea MOSS 2007 o que sea un entorno mixto donde se convivan con aplicaciones de terceros?
Hablamos entonces de esas aplicaciones que basan su estándar en el antiguo diseño de Office 2003, entonces tendremos que forzar de alguna forma a que tanto las aplicaciones de Office 2007 como el sistema operativo Windows Vista no sean tan eficaces y crear una regresión al estadio anterior.
Para ello tenemos la posibilidad de introducir nuevamente el antiguo cliente Web de RoseBud llamado como WEB FOLDER y por otra parte activaremos el Modo Compatibilidad sobre las aplicaciones Office 2007 corran como si estuvieran sobre Windows XP.
Por tanto los pasos serían los siguientes:
A) Instalación del Instalación del HotFix con referencia KB907306 (Webfldrs-KB907306-ENU.exe) cuyos detalles se indican en el siguiente artículo público:
Descripción de la actualización de software para carpetas Web: 18 de mayo de 2007
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=907306
B) Activación del Modo de Compatibilidad sobre las aplicaciones Office, para ello debemos buscar los ejecutables de cada aplicación y tras ello en sus propiedades podremos activarlo como indicamos a continuación:
Esta acción se puede realizar de forma administrativa desplegando a un parquet de máquinas mediante el uso de las siguientes claves de registro:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\AppCompatFlags\Layers]
“C:\Archivos de programa\Microsoft Office\Office12\WINWORD.EXE”=”WINXPSP2″
“C:\Archivos de programa\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE”=”WINXPSP2″
“C:\Archivos de programa\Microsoft Office\Office12\POWERPNT.EXE”=”WINXPSP2″
C) Adicionalmente en algunos casos específicos es muy posible que incluso sea necesario el desactivar o parar totalmente el servicio de WebClient o de WEBDAV del sistema operativo, para que el conjunto de aplicaciones tanto cliente Office con Sistema Operativo se encuentren completamente sincronizados.
Esto sólo será necesario si tenemos entornos mixtos donde tengamos estos servicios de gestión documental de terceros junto con el portal de colaboración de MOSS 2007, donde es posible que para acceder a algunos servicios o vistas de SharePoint tengamos que parar dicho servicio; pero es una cuestión específica que ha de estudiarse en cada entorno.
Hemos de decir que el hecho de que Word, Excel o cualquier otra aplicación de Office 2007 trabaje en el Modo de Compatibilidad con Windows XP no supone ningún cambio más en la forma de trabajo, ya que todas las características de los programas permanecen (ya que Office 2007 se puede instalar perfectamente sobre Windows XP) excepto aquellas que suponen conexión a datos externos o apertura y comunicación con ficheros, como vemos en las siguientes capturas, arriba el cuadro de diálogo de Modo Compatibilidad e inmediatamente debajo el estándar:
La activación de dicho Modo Compatibilidad hace que las vistas se adecúen y cambien su aspecto en los cuadros de diálogo de apertura de archivos cambien su aspecto, de la misma forma que si navegamos a través de WebFolders el aspecto de los iconos expone otros de baja densidad como vemos a continuación:

Además dichas WebFolders permite añadirnos rutas a carpetas web genéricas utilizando un sencillo asistente que como vemos a continuación, también expone apariencia de cuadro de dialogo de versiones anteriores de Office:
Esperamos que os sea de utilidad .
Saludos!
Luis