KB 927362 for which version 1.1 is dated the 30th of October is interesting for the following reason.

It's a KB article for what to do as part of an upgrade from a Beta2 TR version to a RTM version.

(and there was I thinking they only went RTM in November ...)

The key information included in the article by the way is that you need to amend a registry key from DSN to DSN2 before removing WSSv3 Beta2TR because that removal of WSSv3 Beta2TR will remove the DSN key and without DSN2 being there, the install routine for WSSv3 RTM will think it's doing a new installation.

Be careful out there !

For those of you who rushed off to check out the v3 KB articles, I regret that I have since discovered another batch of 9 MOSS, 1 WSS and 6 "Forms Server" (seem to be InfoPath 2007 mostly) KB articles.

I'm afraid I was less than diligent in checking through a file containing new KB articles in the middle of October and only checked the usual "culprits" - i.e. the ones for the v2 products. The KB articles for the v3 products had appeared but had been given a new "product name".

I only discovered this when I *was* diligent in checking a file containing last week's items and after adding all those I realised a bit later that there might have been some even earlier with these new product names and so I checked those old files again (and found the above 16).

I think that's all of them now, but Microsoft have a habit of occasionally putting (say) Word first in the Applies To section for a WSS article so that kind of thing occasionally means I miss a couple.

I'm going to go through the back files for the past few weeks again looking for Excel 2007; Word 2007 etc. articles to see if any of them are actually MOSS2007 or WSSv3 ones.

But for now enjoy the ones you have. Microsoft have updated almost all of them already so there are a mass of articles that in the WSS FAQ sites are dated 3rd November 2006 (for as always the latest version I know about).

Oh, and to newcomers here's the URL of a View of links to all v3 KB articles in Description order.

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/KB%20Articles/V3%20Sorted%20By%20Description.aspx

 

Nero has of course a well-deserved reputation for quality burning but I imagine that if their offer to upgrade my existing Nero copy hadn't come just when I'd bought a new portable and the cost by comparison to the cost of the portable was peanuts I probably wouldn't have bothered.

After all what do I need all the new media stuff for, I already have (several copies of) PowerDVD and WinDVD ?

But anyway I did and now I can report that to my amazement I was yesterday able to say that I wanted to convert a copy of a Mike Fitzmaurice SharePoint web cast (in .wmv format) so that it would run on my (Video) IPod.

Even more amazing was the the resulting file was readable (at least for the power points - the IPod screen *is* a bit small for those demos) *and* in sync.

Instead of spending hours looking for a free or virtually free (25 dollars) shareware solution, I should have gone directly to a quality product. The upgrade (using the download option of course) probably didn't run to more than 50 dollars anyway and I also got a few more goodies with it. (Even a better burner, I suspect).

Mind you I did wonder when that new upgrade I did a few days ago led to me having a nero search box on my bottom menu line. (For those curious it seems to either search the portable or the net) What are nero doing spending time on such a thing?

P.S. Mind you I shouldn't have been so greedy. When that single file worked I set a batch of 10 .wmv files going for conversion. The first ca 6 were OK but there were problems with the next and the conversion failed and I ended up with *none* of them on the IPod. (The conversion phase for all the files in the batch is first and only when that is complete does it save them all, it seems) So tonight I'll just have to convert one at a time.

I've just added a mass (30+?) of MOSS 2007 and WSSv3 KB articles to the KB articles section of the WSS FAQ sites.

For now all of them have been added as category "Other".

I now need to read them all in detail and see if I can find better categories for them. But I wanted to add them to the site as soon as possible so they are available for searches.

I bought this IPod so that I could copy music to it; shove it into the Apple "HiFi" speaker and play the music.

Nothing else. The fact that it had the ability to play back Video was irrelevant.

But I'm a gadget lover like I suspect most computer people and so after a month or so of using ITunes on the machine upstairs (bigger hard disk than the portable) to copy most of my non-classical non-jazz CDs to it and with still most of the 80GB unused, I decided to copy a few films to it just to see if I could.

The impulse for this came from me reading somewhere that Nero 7 Premium Edition already included the ability to create Ipod-style films from .avi s and non-copyright protected DVDs (etc.) and so having failed to find this in the version of Nero 7 Premium that I had, it was time to upgrade that (for nothing) to the latest version of all the components and try.

The first snag was that I had to install ITunes on this machine (I was working on the portable) and connect the IPod to the machine and then when ITunes was installed that wanted to remove all the files on the Ipod that had been synced to the other machine - it seems one Ipod can only "belong" to a single machine. Well I wasn't having any of that so I decided to learn how to say "Cancel" every time it asked me (yes, it would be easier to do this on the upstairs machine but this film creation stuff takes hours and that machine is often used by my wife (enough said?).

Then I started up Nero and finally thanks to one of their PDF FAQs found instructions on how to do this and started - only to be interupted by messages that I needed to specify that it would be using the IPod as a hard disk (plus something else) and setting that didn't seem to have any effect until I re-started Nero.

OK. So finally this worked and the first couple of test .avi films went fairly quickly to the IPod. Then I tried a DVD that had been recorded from the TV. That worked too but needed almost two hours ...

At the end of all this the IPod supposedly had all three films on it but it was still flashing "do not disconnect" like a maniac and waiting for another half an hour had no effect; nor did removing it via "Safely Remove Hardware" so the only choice was to shut down the machine (which didn't shut down until I pulled the IPod from the USB slot ...).

It then continued flashing "do not disconnect" and it was time to spend over an hour looking for what the h*** to do now.

The Apple site told me that if your IPod is set to "use as a disk" you can't just pull out the USB cable to disconnect as this can cause it to freeze - now they tell me!! - instead you have to dismount it from within ITunes.

Next time I'll know but for now that info isn't helping me.

So I found a "you'll have to reset" with the ominous words *try* this.

This said press the Music and Select buttons for 6-10 seconds. Great but my IPod doesn't have a button with the Select text on and the Apple site is no use in telling me what *I' should do with my Ipod version without a Select button.

(Yes, some of you will now be ahead of me)

But then I discovered there were public newsgroups and my first search led right to a message that even I could understand - "to reset press simultaneously the Music button and the button in the middle for 10 seconds".

This worked. (Note: the button in the middle is obviously what Apple mean by the Select button but it is labelless - how's a poor guy to know?)

All this (because of various other attempts involving many reboots and reloads of ITunes and re-adding and taking away to different USB ports) took well over an hour ....

So there you are - reset your IPod by pressing Music + 'the button in the middle'.

In my case this happened without me losing a thing.

Oh yes, and the video quality from that thing recorded on DVD from the TV was surprisingly good. So maybe I'll use it for that as well and put the new Archos (with a bigger screen) on hold until Archos includes WiFi with it.

P.S. It's cheating I know to have SharePoint clicked for this blog, but my next attempt will be to see if the Nero will accept a (SharePoint) .wmv presentation as the input film. I doubt if it will which means that I am still looking for something that will convert Microsoft web casts to avi or mpeg. There's plenty that can convert films in .wmv format but they all still seem to have major problems with Microsoft web casts.

This is a review of roughly the first half of this web cast. That was the point when I "walked out" and if it had been a presentation at TechEd I would have gone after less than ten minutes.

So no prizes for guessing whether I thought this was a good presentation.

For a presentation describing itself as an "In-depth" look at anything this was a joke. As was the level 200 billing. This was closer to 100 - much closer.

So what was the problem?

The guy hadn't bothered to create many slides and most of the ones he used in those 20 or so minutes I survived were stock Microsoft ones over which he talked and talked.

So there were a few general slides and a lot of general words. An awful lot of general words. None of which even started being an in-depth look.

You'll have noted the title - WSS 3.0 *and* MOSS 2007 - and you won't I suppose be surprised that in all that flow of words I noticed absolutely no mention of the fact that most of the things he was talking about weren't in the free WSS product. In fact he didn't (again as far as I heard - I'll admit my mind wandered several times) even mention that there were two products.

It is of course typical for most Microsoft people to always only tell you what's in MOSS 2007 and never bother to tell you that most of what they are saying isn't in WSSv3 (honourable MS exception, Mike Fitzmaurice, who is very clear and upfront about this), but I think we have a right to expect this in a presentation where both WSS and MOSS are listed in the title.

Mike, too, being close to the development team, has a right to say "We" when he's talking about features in a SharePoint product. This guy used "we" as well but his blurb says that he is "a TechNet presenter on the Microsoft Seminar Sales Team" which doesn't to my mind put him even close to the developer team and in a position to say "we" all the time when saying what the developers had added.

 

But that's a minor niggle. The big niggle is that this "in-depth" look wasn't. Not even close.

 

Note: All of the addresses of the KB / Articles - 2007 Products / MS / Non-MS Articles below were valid at the time I added them to the WSS FAQ site and to this file. I can't guarantee that they still are.

(This is also posted to the WSS newsgroup at microsoft.public.sharepoint.windowsservices - web access via http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/newsgroups/server/sharepoint.mspx)

(Items are added to the WSS FAQ throughout the week so you will find new items more quickly by checking at wss.collutions.com or www.wssfaq.com daily.)

From 30th October - 5th November 2006 

I. KB Articles

New

None

 

Modified

None

 

II. Articles - 2007 Products

New

A. Office 2007 Server Products

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/helloitsliam/archive/2006/11/03/15740.aspx

MOSS2007 – Rebuild Corporate Website (Part 4) (Blog - Liam Cleary)

3rd November 2006

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/joostschermers/archive/2006/11/03/15717.aspx

Publishing Web Content (Blog - Joost Schermers)

3rd November 2006

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7bab2321-71e6-4cf2-8bcd-0880e0d1cda3&displaylang=en

Deploying Windows Rights Management Services with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Step-By-Step Guide

3rd November 2006

(Note too

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=114f4f9c-b398-4f95-b10c-74ea32dc562d&displaylang=en

Installing Windows Rights Management Services with Service Pack 2 Step-by-Step Guide

3rd November 2006)

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/ssa/archive/2006/11/04/15719.aspx

Creating a Survey in MOSS 2007 Programmatically (Blog - S.S.Ahmed)

3rd November 2006

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/ssa/archive/2006/11/01/15602.aspx

Creating a Survey in MOSS 2007 (Blog - S.S.Ahmed)

1st November 2006

http://blogs.msdn.com/ecm/archive/2006/10/30/building-tylerbutler-com-part-1-planning-and-basic-branding.aspx

Building tylerbutler.com, Part 1: Planning and Basic Branding (MS Blog - Tyler Butler)

30th October 2006

http://blogs.msdn.com/cjohnson/archive/2006/11/01/feature-stapling-in-wss-v3.aspx

30th October 2006

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/joeldhall/archive/2006/10/30/15504.aspx

MOSS 2007 Search: Hiding part of a page from indexing & crawling - Part One (Blog - Joel D Hall)

30th October 2006

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/joeldhall/archive/2006/10/30/15512.aspx

MOSS 2007 Search: Hiding part of a page from indexing & crawling - Part Two (Blog - Joel D Hall)

30th October 2006

http://msd2d.com/newsletter_tip.aspx?id=a14f3443-c394-4950-a048-8394bcce749b&section=Sharepoint

More About SharePoint 2007 Content Types (MSD2D - Bob Mixon) *may need registration*

30th October 2006

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/tonstegeman/archive/2006/10/29/15374.aspx

Custom Edit forms in Office SharePoint Server and WSS lists (Blog - Ton Stegeman)

29th October 2006

http://sharepointsolutions.blogspot.com/2006/10/automation-in-visual-studio-2005-for.html

Automation in Visual Studio 2005 for WSS v3 Feature Development (Blog - Tony Bierman)

28th October 2006

https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastRegistrationConfirmation.aspx?culture=en-US&RegistrationID=1286567344

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Office Excel Services Technical Overview (Level 200) (Matt Hester)

27th October 2006

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/32908/1954?pf=true

Share Your Spreadsheets with Excel Services in SharePoint 2007 (Devx - Laurence Moroney)

25th October 2006

http://www.heathersolomon.com/blog/articles/servermstpageforsitecollect_feature.aspx

Create a Feature: Master Pages for Site Collections (Blog - Heather Solomon)

19th October 2006

http://www.15seconds.com/issue/060824.htm

Building Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (internet.com - Gayan Peiris)

24th August 2006

 

B. Other Office 2007 products

https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastRegistrationConfirmation.aspx?culture=en-US&RegistrationID=1286567307

Microsoft Office System Webcast: Advanced Tips and Tricks for Incredible PowerPoint 2007 Presentations in No Time (Level 300) (Stephanie Krieger, Arouet.net)

26th October 2006

C. Other New 2006/2007 Products

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c1a8cc18-dc9e-4c50-b598-86e640a79910&DisplayLang=en

Commerce Server 2007 Starter Site

31st October 2006

http://www.microsoftvirtuallabs.com/express/registration.aspx?LabId=e423099b-b71b-44f6-bd63-b11170f1e0cf

MSDN Virtual Labs: Microsoft Virtual Lab Express: What's New in BizTalk Server 2006

31st October 2006 (date added)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=f05fc67a-1a2d-45c3-8a9b-6d4123f560ea&displaylang=en

Commerce Server 2007 Starter Site Installation Guide

27th October 2006

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032296904&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Virtual Labs: BizTalk 2006 - New Features for Deploying and Managing a BizTalk Application

3rd April 2006

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032296905&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Virtual Lab: BizTalk 2006 - New Features for Working with Flat Files

3rd April 2006

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032296902&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Virtual Lab: BizTalk 2006 - Integrating Business Rules

3rd April 2006

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032296906&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Virtual Lab: BizTalk 2006 - Working with Maps
 
3rd April 2006

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032296903&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Virtual Lab: BizTalk 2006 - Working with Schemas

3rd April 2006

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032303235&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Virtual Lab: Getting Started with Windows Workflow Foundation Server

31st October 2005

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032306527&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Virtual Lab: Architecting Connected Systems: Windows Workflow Foundation (Ed. using Visual Studio 2005)

31st October 2005

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032312601&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Virtual Labs: Commerce Server 2007: Profile Integration and Extension Virtual Lab

24th October 2005

Modified

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=771aeb45-9d27-4d1f-acd1-9b950637d64e&displaylang=en

2007 Office System Document: Developer Posters (ver 1006)

27th October 2006

Deleted

None

 

III. MS Articles

New

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3d11925e-1ed6-43b0-bb94-fe69170ccf82&DisplayLang=en

Business Intelligence Portal Sample Application for Microsoft Office 2003

30th October 2006

Modified

None

IV Non-MS Articles

New

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/uday/archive/2006/11/02/15620.aspx

Backup & Restore Site in SharePoint 2003 (Uday)

4th November 2006 (date added)

Modified

None

V. WSS FAQ additions

None

VI WSS FAQ Modified

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSS%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=193

III.59 How can I make the link between Web Part Connections a dropdown list rather than the standard radio buttons?

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSS%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=462

VII.05.48 WSS Products - SP Manager v2 for SharePoint 2003 (SPS and WSS) [Backup - NSE Inc.] *** Now "EMC Backup Manager for SharePoint" (EMC) ***

VII WSS v3 FAQ additions

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=884

I.29.07 What are the differences between SPS 2003 and MOSS 2007?

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=883

III.73 What are the differences between a Blank Site created in the browser and one created with stsadm ?

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=885

III.74 Can you change tree view navigation so that it only shows sites and not pages?

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=887

III.75 How do you change the number of levels of menus from the top navigation bar?

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=888

V.22 Beginning SharePoint 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007 (Wiley - Amanda Murphy, Shane Perran)

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=889

V.23 Sharepoint 2007: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly - Robert Tidrow)

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=892

VI.16 SharePoint Manager 2007 (Carsten Keutmann)

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=890

VIII.07 Designing Forms with Microsoft Office InfoPath and Forms Services 2007 (Microsoft .NET Development Series) (Addison-Wesley - Scott Roberts, Hagen Green) 

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=891

VIII.08 Pro InfoPath 2007 (apress - Philo Janus)

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=881

IX.06 SharePoint Experts (US) (Dustin Miller)

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=882

IX.07 Dolmen (Belgium) (Joris Poelmans+)

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=886

IX.08 Informator (Sweden) (SP trainer usually Göran Husman)

VIII WSS v3 FAQ Modified

http://www.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=637

III.02.01 Limits: Is there still a 10MB limit for templates?

VIII WSS v3 FAQ Deleted

None

At work I have an old (and I mean by that about 6 years old) portable that is running Windows Server 2003 and WSSv2. It's very useful to have that around when I want to quickly lookup something in a WSS Server without having to stop what I'm doing on my main work machine to load up a VM.

So I have been idly thinking that with portable prices coming down it might be a good idea to have the same kind of setup at home. I wouldn't need the good graphics card I otherwise insist on in a portable as this would be only serving as a server and most even cheap machines these days have 1GB of memory which is enough for even MOSS's needs.

So when I saw an Acer for less than 800 Euros but with a 64-bit AMD processor; 1GB of memory and even an unnecessarily large (for my needs for this notebook) 120GB hard disk, I thought the time had come to seriously consider this. The graphics card was as expetcted terrible but who cares, it's a server.

Luckily I decided to think about this overnight and with the morning came the realisation that the graphics card used *shared memory* and thus apart from being just useless (which .... doesn't matter on a server ... ) it would also mean that I wouldn't actually have 1GB available to install MOSS in, so MOSS wouldn't install.

An abrupt end to that idea. Adding extra memory would cost a couple of hundred more and be anyway stupid on this price of machine, so I'll just have to wait until prices come down far enough for portables with nonshared memory to be at that price point.

[By which time of course I can replace my 1.5 GB Acer Ferrari (was 1 GB - 1 GB memory chip replaced 0.5 of that) with a model that has 2GB from the start and then that 1.5GB notebook will be available for Server usage ... A much better idea than buying a second machine just to be a second machine, don't you agree?]

I was reading something over the weekend (I can't remember whether this was a book or an article or what) about designing web sites and the one clear message I got out of it was "put the stuff that your users need in the correct place in the page" (or they will go elsewhere).

So far the (mirror) WSS FAQ site at www.wssfaq.com (or indeed www.wssv3faq.com - try it!) has been so standard that I've left the typical menu line (Home to Help) alone and apart from the Google ads (that hardly anyone bothers with these days - I guess they, like me, have seen them all before; hopefully the release of v3 will bring some new companies) and that nice row of links to the main sections that is underneath the standard header section, there is nothing particularly different between that site and the site as it came out of the box. Heck, I haven't even bothered to change the default colour/color - nor am I likely to.

But "inspired" (if that's the word) by my reading, I decided to make that standard menu line more useful and so I got rid of all the standard links except Home. (Before I did that I made sure that I put "Documents and Lists" and "Site Settings" behind a couple of icons so that I could still access them.)

I then thought a bit about which inside pages were people most likely to want to go directly to (and which I could have snappy names for).

The first one was obvious - Books - and while I was at it I added an additional text to the v3 Books page to avoid people accessing the links only to find that the books haven't been released yet. [Aside: I think it's good information to put there what is coming out so you can if you want hold back on buying something because you know that your favourite author is coming out with a book a month or so later. Hopefully the addition of "*released*" in a Title column will satisfy both kinds of users of the site. Note, though, that Amazon allow you to pre-order most books they list (and one person has taken advantage of that to pre-order books though my links on that page for which my thanks(!))]

The other decision was to always link to the v3 version of the particular kind of information. In the case of Books this was fine because there was a link there already to the v2 books page (and back from that to the v3 books page), but in the case of the other links I was adding there was no such cross-linking and this had to be added. Finally, I had to create new Views in the v2 section in order for there to be an equivalent page to go to from the already existing v3 page.

So what we ended up with as my choice for what *you* are going to want to access directly is

Books; Labs; SDKs and Web Casts

All, as I said already, go directly to the v3 pages, but there are links from there to the equivalent v2 pages (and back). [Note: except Labs as there are no equivalent links in the "MS Articles" List.]

So what started out - as the subject says - as another minor change to the WSS FAQ site turned out in fact to be a bit more that that.

I hope you find that that effort wasn't wasted.

P.S. Note that when you use Front Page 2003 to amend the Menu Line (Home to Help) in default.aspx the change is done immediately (no saving) and is valid for the entire site. So don't be surprised by that (I was the first time I did this, but not this time). The technique by the way is (in design mode in FP 2003) to select the Menu Line and then right-click and then the choice about halfway down allows you easily to remove/add/modify links.

Note: The first part of my review of this book was at

http://mikewalsh.bilsimser.com/PermaLink,guid,d8eb8269-6e83-44d7-95c8-26e26aa21e4d.aspx

The second part of my review of this book was at

http://mikewalsh.bilsimser.com/PermaLink,guid,f5fda223-1398-452f-bb26-ab707bc94c8a.aspx

The book itself can be found via these links

Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0321336615/heme

This third part of the review is about Chapter 3 which is a long look at List Definitions.

If I were a German I'd love it but as I'm not I'm not so sure.

I'd better perhaps explain.

Before I moved back to Germany the last time, I had an interview and the German prospective boss said that he liked having a mixed team of Englishmen and Germans. I naturally asked him why and he said that the Germans spent far too much time designing a system before implementing it while the English wanted to get on with it and thus spent too little time. The mixed team meant the Germans pushed the English to slow down and do a little bit of planning at least; while the English pushed the Germans not to make such a meal of the design phase.

This difference in attitudes was confirmed a few years later when I had been made responsible for introducing a (mainframe) repository system and after less than three months we had solved the usual stumbling blocks of naming standards and a data structure and were in production (admittedly with the great help of a german consultant who had done this all before -but guess who pushed her to supply information at a faster speed than she wanted to). A few months later I went to a user group for that product at Braun and we were given a talk from someone from that company about their design. It turned out that they had started "implementation"  a good year before us and *still* were in the design phase!

What's that to do with this book ?

Well the book has a very germanic feel to it - especially the third chapter. The chapter goes into great detail about the background of List definitions and even includes a six page table on the possible values of the Field attribute (something you may well think ought to be left to the standard Microsoft SDK for the product), yet the examples of *when* to use these techniques are few and far between.

For instance I've many times over the years seen replies in the newsgroups that say you can use "event handlers" to solve particular problems that can't be solved out-of-the-box. I've never actually learnt how to write event handlers. So when this book started giving an example for when to use event handlers I thought "great", at last I'll find out how to do this. Fat chance: it shows you where to specify that event handlers can be used and that's that. Nothing about how to write an event handler at all (and I checked the index - what I read is all there is).

Similarly there is only one example of adding a field to a definition (one for an expiration date) despite all those pages of detail on the Field attribute. OK. Perhaps most of you would include the example of adding a field for SizeInKB - well it was never explained as far as I could see what use this field was going to be.

Do't get me wrong, there's a lot of useful stuff here - the section on adding Views *in the templates* rather than - as I have done - creating them in a List and then Saving the List as template is again very well written and detailed, and just as before there are the occasional useful tips along the way such as the fact that even a Required field can be outflanked by copying a file to the Explorer View (when the required field is set to null), but the general picture remains for me the same. The book is designed for people who want to know all the details before they start using the product - or to put it another way, it's for Germans.

As for me, I continue to miss the problem-based approach used by "Advanced SharePoint Programming" and I wonder more than a bit if a book that takes such a thorough approach to SharePoint v2, didn't come out just a bit late in the cycle. I spent my time looking at the fundementals when WSSv2 was in late beta and by the time it had been in production for a few months I was looking for the solutions to problems. This book came out in 2006, two and a half years after WSS and SPS 2003 went into production. I can't help feeling that it's solving a problem (complete understanding of the fundementals) that it's too late for most people to solve.