It leverages the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) based canvas allowing users to visually design processes. K2 wizards generate WPF schedules and activities, which can be customized in the Visual Studio environment.

Processes can incorporate both .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 code into the same process definition, providing application longevity and leveraging the latest Microsoft platform technologies.

SourceCode, K2, K2 blackpearl, K2 blackpearl 4.5, Microsoft, Visual Studio 2010, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

After some searching, I found this post outlining how an install of Office 2010 on a 64-bit environment was the problem and corrupted the Visual Studio Web Authoring Component. The fix is pretty straight forward:

1.  If an automatic upgrade was performed from Office 2007 (32-bit) to Office 2010 (32-bit) on a 64-bit OS:

• In Add/Remove Programs, locate "Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component"
• Right-click and select "Change"
• When a dialog opens, choose "Repair" option

2.  If you manually uninstalled Office 2007 on a 64-bit OS:

• In Add/Remove Programs, uninstall "Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component"
• If you are using Visual Studio 2008:
  • From the Visual Studio 2008 media, navigate into the WCU\WebDesignerCore folder and install WebDesignerCore.exe
  • If you were upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you must reinstall Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008.
• If you are using Visual Web Developer Express:
  • Uninstall and reinstall Visual Web Developer 2008 Express

Links
Rosscify Article
Microsoft KB Article

Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft Office 2010

With the announcement regarding the release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 on April 12th, I started thinking about some conversations that I’ve had with clients over the last couple of months. Many have expressed interest in getting to use the new development environment and were eagerly waiting for its release. In two cases these clients didn’t have source control systems. I would never have believed it, however I’ve seen it (or the lack of it). To make it worse, one of these is an enterprise level organization with scores of development teams, developing everything from their corporate web site to large scale EAI initiatives. Their reason for not using source control – Team Foundation Server is too complex to install and manage. And they do daily backups. Well, okay then!

Back to Visual Studio. Visual Studio is much more than just a development environment these days, in conjunction with Team Foundation Server, it’s an application lifecycle management system. It’s features include version control, build automation and work item tracking to name but a few. As far as I’m concerned, having these capabilities is essential to organisations that do a lot of in-house development. One option that I often recommend is to use a hosted solution. Let the experts take care of it! Over the past year I’ve made use Praktik Hosting for work with some of my clients, especially the small to midsize and remote clients. They have a great monthly subscription plan and have never been down. So, get Visual Studio 2010, and leave Team Foundation Server to the experts.

Microsoft, Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation Server, Praktik Hosting

Microsoft, BizTalk, BizTalk Server 2010, ESB, ESB Toolkit 2.1

Session 1: Designing Architecture
John Bristowe & Damir Bersinic

The initial part of this session was an introduction to the main theme of the day – the different challenges facing developers and IT Pros in the development and deployment of enterprise applications. The main point being that developers are eager to use new technological advances to improve productivity and meet difficult deadlines while IT Pros are more conservative. Their concern is having more uptime, requiring testing and controlled releases on new technological products.

There was a demo on using the System Definition Model (SDM) within Visual Studio for Architects where the application dependencies were compared to the environment’s logical design and differences were brought to the front, e.g. the application being dependent on a service pack which was not present on the environment.

Session 2: Building, Deploying and Maintaining the ApplicationDesigning Architecture
John Bristowe & Ruth Morton

This session focused on the deployment and monitoring of applications.

• Documentation – developers hate writing it and IT Pros expect it, especially when an application is developed with multiple dependencies.
• System Access – developers require it in data-centric applications and IT Pros hate giving access. The rule of thumb is to code with least privileged accounts to get the required access.
• Monitoring Tools – developers are always keen to code new tools to monitor their applications, IT Pros prefer using existing tools thereby not requiring new applications being installed and supported. While I could agree with the first two points, I find this one a little hard to believe – who wants to code a new application that monitors your latest application? It sounds a little like rework to me.

Session 3: Developing Web Applications on the Microsoft Application Platform
John Bristowe

The main topic in this session was IIS 7.0. It was my first look at IIS 7.0 and I was pretty impressed. My favourite enhancement shown was the ability to view the web.config from IIS in the form of a console. There are icon for all web.config tags, e.g. Application Settings, Connection Strings, Sessions State, SMTP Email, etc. When changing the settings in IIS the underlying web.config is updated and should you alter the web.config the console updates.

IIS 7.0 has two modes for ASP.Net integration. The first mode, Classic, is the same as the current version of IIS. The second mode, Integrated, removes the calls to the ISAPI filter and IIS controls the entire process.

Another new feature of IIS 7.0 was the support for PHP 5 through Fast CGI for IIS. Fast CGI increases performance by reusing existing Common Gateway Interface (CGI) processes. PHP 5 can be supported on older versions of IIS (5.x and 6) by downloading the latest Technical Preview. For more information see Fast CGI for IIS.

Session 4: Building a Strong Data Foundation to Your Application
John Bristowe

The two main points of value from this session for me were:

• Visual Studio 2005 for Database Professionals – this is a great tool for database development in any application. The demo showed some of it’s useful features including
• Integration with Team Foundation Server
• Rename Refactoring – previewing changes prior to execution
• Schema and Data comparison tools
• Leverage of the Test Project Infrastructure
• Data generation functionality
• Language INtegrated Query (LINQ)
• The ability to query and transform relational and XML objects
• Provides SQL and XQuery like functionality in C# and VB.Net
• Supports type checking, IntelliSense and query refactoring
• It has an extensible model for languages and APIs

The LINQ functionality for SQL and XML will form part of C# 3.0 and VB 9.0 and will be released in .Net 3.5. Why version 3.5? I have no idea…

All in all the day was informative, although my overall memory will be about the multiple rants I heard regarding the pricing structure of Visual Studio Team Suite and its versions. Nice tools although most of the people I spoke to would not be able to use any of the features shown in the demos as they had Visual Studio 2005 Professional and their employers could not afford the full blown version.

Links:
Unify 2007 Tour for Developers
Unify 2007 Tour for IT Pros
IIS
The LINQ Project

Microsoft, Unify 2007 Tour, IIS 7.0, LINQ, Visual Studio 2005

C:Windows\assembly\GAC\Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word11.0.0.0__71e9bce111e9429c\Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll

Visual Studio 2005, Global Assembly Cache, GAC