Please take a look these videos to know more about business connectivity services

http://blogs.msdn.com/bcs/archive/2009/11/06/bcs-overview-demo-video.aspx

Here are the awesome features which you can see from this demo video.
• Full read/write capability of BCS
• Create an external content type which connects to a SQL backend
• Bring external data into SharePoint through an external list
• See how the external list provides the same functionality of a normal SharePoint list
• Take the external data into Outlook and SharePoint Workspace
• Auto-generated forms and customized InfoPath forms for external lists
• External Data Columns and using Word templates to fill in information using external data

Microsoft releases a document which describes common ways to build and scale farm topologies, including planning which servers to start services on.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=fd686cbb-8401-4f25-b65e-3ce7aa7dbeab

It is an exciting news that Sysinternal has released the trouble shooting utilities. This suite contains following:

The Suite is a bundling of the following selected Sysinternals Utilities:

As most of you aware, Microsoft is conducting a contest to re-design their Conference Site. I wanted to participate on this contest and have designed the following Look&Feel Template. Please feel free to provide comments re.below. Would be appreciate your input.

Last week, I have been working with fixing the search issue. Actually,  the crawler was failed to crawl the large team site which has heavy weight document libraries with lot of folder structures – Some other people were try to fix this issue by deleting the large document libary, but no luck. So these guys were planning to restore them back, but unfortunately they could not find that huge document library in both site collection & site Recycle Bin(sounds weird)- Please take a look at Chris Blog, he mentioned this same problem in his blog http://www.sharepointblogs.com/cwogle/archive/2009/06/18/large-items-in-sharepoint-recycle-bin-fixed-er-worked-around.aspx. It was very important libray though, so we were planning to restore it from Tape Backup using Symantec Backup Exec. As you may aware, Backup Exec is used to resore the specified file or document library. Using this tool, they were trying to restore the document library(which has 9720 items, and total size would 29GB) from Tape Backup to SharePoint site. But, they could not able to restore it(i.e., 29GB) back using backup exec for various reasons. So, the network administrators have decided to restore it to UNC path. Instead of restoring to C:\, they could restore it to the document library.

Symptom:

Not able to restore huge document libary(i.e., 29GB) to sharepoint site

Resolution:

Create a document library and select action->open with windows explorer(please make sure that webclient services have enabled, if not this option wont work). It will open a document library within the windows explorer. Use this UNC path to restore by using symantech back exec.

As you may aware, CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) uses web services to provide greater interoperability across multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories. Here is a small introduction about CMIS who doesn’t aware of it: CMIS  is a standards proposal consisting of a set of Web services for sharing information among disparate content repositories that seeks to ensure interoperability for people and applications using multiple content repositories. Alfresco, Day Software, Dennis Hamilton, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle and SAP have joined forces to propose CMIS, the first Web services technical specification for exchanging content with and between Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. Here is the conceptual CMIS architecture

and here is the Service Oriented Content Management architecture from Optaros

When you think about Interoperable Content Management(CMIS), first thing you could have ask: Is (CMIS) the perfect solution? Maybe. Maybe not. But the fact that something has been developed that ECMs and other application developers can work with to provide an integrated view of an organization’s content is a step in the direction we need to go. We all know the days of a single, in-house ECM system are pretty much over. SharePoint has already taken care of that. We need something to give us hope that our content is manageable — regardless of where it’s located. CMIS does that. Kyle McNabb has answered the lehman question on his prespectives and here is the DRAFT specification which will be submitted to OASIS – and AIIM has shown an excellent CMIS Demo (i.e., “Federator”)

[Update]:

Attached: CMIS Federated Search Code from AIIM iECM Demo – You can download it from here https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-3771

One of my customer wanted to create a BDC application definition file for Oracle 11g database Entity. Also, they wanted to use an InfoPath to leverage or pre-populate the dropdown list from Oracle database entity. Due to the budget cut, they are not willing to spend money/hours to create a seperate webservice wrapper for an oracle entity to pre-populate the dropdowns(in InfoPath) and they would like to use BDC application definition file as a datasource for an InfoPath(sounds crazy  here? [:)] ). They had raised a valid question to me that “Why don’t to use BDC as a Data Connection for Infopath? – BDC application definition file has connection string and method instance, blah, blah… so why we can not re-use this application definition file as a datasource for InfoPath Developement?”- Pretty good question, isit? [;)] – Conceptual Design diagram attaced. 

But unfortunately, InfoPath data connection wizard doesn’t support BDC application definition file as a Datas ource and it does supports the following options.

We can not use BDC application definition file as an XML form or anyother options. So, I suggested to them to create a simple webmethod(i.e, 4 hours effort) to pre-populate the lookup values from LOB Instances, and make use of this webservice as a datasource in infopath form. So that you can re-use the same application definition file for both BDC application & InfoPath form.

They were really happy to use this technology to satisfy their technical issue as well as save cost [:)] – Using this approach we can able to use Business Data Catalog as a DataConnection for an InfoPath development.

Hope this helps!

Recently, an announcement is published on WebDevTools blog @ msdn that there is a new hotfix available for Visual Studio 2008 (and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express) that fixes some performance and editor issues that have arisen in Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express. Fixes are related to HTML Source view performance, Design view performance, HTML editing, JavaScript editing and Web Site build performance. The download is available on connect.microsoft.com and is related to KB article KB946581. It is approximately 2,5MB large and in order to download it one must login to connect using Live ID. Here is address on connect, and here is official announcement . Installation is easy, quick and straightforward and on my dev machine it doesn’t ask for install DVD.

Last night, I’d the chance to look at John Resig’s talk on the Best Practices in Javascript Library Design.

                This talk explores all the techniques used to build a robust, reusable, cross-platform JavaScript Library. We’ll look at how to write a solid JavaScript API, show you how to use functional programming to create contained, concise, code, and delve deep into common cross browser issues that you’ll have to solve in order to have a successful library. John Resig is a JavaScript Evangelist, working for the Mozilla Corporation, and the author of the book ‘Pro Javascript Techniques.’ He’s also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library and the co-designer of the FUEL JavaScript library (included in Firefox 3).

1. jQuery - that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages.
2. Fuel - Firefox User Extension Library – is a JavaScript Library designed to help developers build extensions using terminology and interfaces that are familiar to them. It will be usable in Firefox 1.5-3.0.

Download jQuery

Download jQuery 1.2.1 (14kb, Minified and Gzipped) Great for production use.

Download jQuery 1.2.1 (77kb, Uncompressed) Great for testing, learning and development.

Download jQuery 1.2.1 (26kb, Packed) For those that can’t Gzip their JavaScript.

Thom has a table of .NET Framework 3.5 features, Daniel also has a good list of the new stuff in .NET Framework 3.51. System.Data.Linq.dll – The implementation for LINQ to SQL.
2. System.Xml.Linq.dll – The implementation for LINQ to XML.
3. System.AddIn.dll, System.AddIn.Contract.dll – New AddIn (plug-in) model.
4. System.Net.dll – Peer to Peer APIs.
5. System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.dll – Wrapper for Active Directory APIs.
6. System.Management.Instrumentation.dll – WMI 2.0 managed provider (combined with System.Management namespace in System.Core.dll).
7. System.WorkflowServices.dll and System.ServiceModel.Web.dll – WF and WCF enhancements (for more on WF + WCF in v3.5 follow links from here).
8. System.Web.Extensions.dll – The implementation for ASP.NET AJAX (for more web enhancements, follow links from here) plus also the implementation of Client Application Services.
9. System.Core.dll – In addition to the LINQ to Objects implementation, this assembly includes the following: HashSet, TimeZoneInfo, Pipes, ReaderWriteLockSlim, System.Security.*, System.Diagnostics.Eventing.* and System.Diagnostics.PerformanceData.