Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Live Services, SOAP, REST ?????

As i mentioned in my previous post i attended a in person session on Live Services in Redmond on 15th November.

Here are my notes/ observations about the session

We discussed about what all services are available which is already well documented on dev.live.com
I would be more interested in finding why some services are REST services and some are SOAP based. Does it have something to do with live authentication or it is only because of the fact that REST is a simple light weight protocol.
I have a feeling that it might be because of the authentication. As i understood it all the services which need the user to be signed with live Ids are using REST APIs eg. live contacts while the services which can work without a live id authentication are using SOAP eg. live search.

Now how much of it is true remains to be determined. I would probably work towards finding this out and post my findings in a different post here.

BTW at the end of the event a free XBox was given by a lottery and it was won by the person who picked the lottery from the bowl. (Do i smell something fishy here :) )

~Abhishek

Monday, November 19, 2007

OBAF and Office 2007

Currently i am travelling to Redmond and i got a chance to attend a MSDN in person event about OBAF and live services on 15th November.
It was a power series supposed to talk about OBAF and live services. Here are some interesting point which i got out of the OBAF session which i attended

1) Office developer map :- It helps in identifying the tools which might help in developing various office applications. Its a click once application which can be installed on desktop. (I'll give it a try to validate that i understood the discussion about the map correctly)

2) Microsoft is having a set of tools which can help develop an office application. The tools are BDC/ VSTO/ Sharepoint portal

3) The discussion got deviated towards office in between and i found that office 2007 uses a COM SHIM to actually display the ribbon controls

4) One more discussion which happened out of deviation again was about the file formats of office 2007 files. Now i knew that they are xmls embedded inside a zip file however one thought which came into my mind while attending this session was why does the outlook object model still has to be so complex. Why not represent all the message classes like IPM.Appointment, IPM.Post as simple xmls and store them in psts like that. It was discussed in the forum and Joe (Presenter) believed that it might be because of the pst being already an efficient format to store these message classes. I agree with him however it is not an open standard. I believe even .doc was not a bad format. It was converted to .docx to make it more open and we should do the same for message classes in outlook. I would be interested in finding out why it is actually not changed.

I would make a different post for the session about live services.

~Abhishek

Uninstalling beta version of VS 2008

I installed VS 2008 today on my machine. I had a beta on my machine and in my experience with betas i am never able to uninstall them easily.
To upgrade from VS2005 beta to actual release was a pain and i had to actually struggle for hours before i got it right.
However it was simpler for visual studio 2008.
Just follow the instructions on link http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/archive/2007/11/20/how-to-uninstall-vs-2008-beta-2-before-installing-the-final-version-of-vs-2008.aspx to uninstall the the stuff and you are good to go

~Abhishek