3Sharp

Tech-Talk: Making Backups Cool with DPM

Devin L. Ganger — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:55:50 GMT

While I was at the Tech-Ed NA IT Pro conference last week, Jason Buffington and I took the chance to invade the Tech-Ed Online fishbowl studio and record a quick Tech-Talk on using DPM. You can now view it online on the Tech-Ed IT Pro page and the Library page, or stream it directly. Now that Tech-Ed's over, maybe we'll both find the time to be on Xbox Live at the same time so we can continue our discussion in Call of Duty 4...

Welcome, Mike Rand!

Devin L. Ganger — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:46:23 GMT

Just a quick shout-out to fellow 3Sharpie Mike Rand, who just posted his first post to the 3Sharp blog site last week. Mike's a super-smart developer here with mad SharePoint skills; I can't imagine why he hasn't blogged sooner than this, but I hope to see him posting more frequently! He's also pretty good at foosball.

A .NET add-on for working with Exchange Web Services

Devin L. Ganger — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:10:20 GMT

I just got word that Independentsoft has come out with a beta version of an EWS client API for the .NET Framework and .NET Compact Framework. I've not looked at it yet, but I'm particularly hopeful about having a good way to work with EWS from Windows Mobile devices.

Exchange Web Services (EWS), introduced in Exchange 2007 and enhanced in Exchange 2007 SP1, is Microsoft preferred interface for all future programmatic reach into the Exchange store. While EWS is a Web service, it can be pretty complicated to work with. Luckily, we've done some work with EWS here at 3Sharp; Paul's been presenting some developer training sessions on EWS in partnership with Microsoft. We've found that Inside Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Web Services has been a valuable reference on EWS.

One of the challenges for EWS development is that the schema and object model is pretty complex when compared with the typical Web service, enough so that you need to use special Visual Studio proxy classes when you use .NET to work with EWS. This, by the way, is very likely the cause of the compatibility issue I found between EWS and SharePoint Designer -- Designer's proxy classes aren't the EWS-aware ones.

3Sharp, Podcasting, and You

Devin L. Ganger — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:25:11 GMT

The talented people at 3Sharp are one of the best reasons to work here. Our Platforms Group is just one piece of the pie here; we've got some top-tier development talent who can make SharePoint stand up and dance. Those guys down the hall have been working hard on a little surprise they like to call the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint, which Microsoft has just released on Codeplex as indicated in their press release. 3Sharpies John Peltonen, David Gerhardt, and Paul Robichaux are also blogging about it, so if you’re interested, check them out.

I've been hearing bits and pieces, but last week I got to sit down and take a good look at what they're doing. Wow. This is some cool stuff that is going to make sharing podcasts, video talks, and other knowledge sharing content a lot easier. I can't wait until I can start using it; I've already lined up some content that I can put up and I'm already thinking of some more I can do.