Random Rants & Raves

It’s been ages since I’ve updated this blog. So let’s start the year with some install tips for one of the most exciting products coming out this year from Microsoft – SharePoint 2010.

If’ you haven’t got it yet, head over and download the SharePoint 2010 beta. If you are planning to install it for testing on a Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 machine here are some small install tips for you that’ll take some small irritations away from installing the beta.

1. Download the Pre-Requisites for SharePoint 2010 beforehand and install them yourself. You can get a list of direct downloads for these at http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/10/25/sharepoint-2010-pre-requisites-download-links.aspx
2. Make sure you’ve promoted the machine to a Domain Controller
3. Once the install phase of the SharePoint setup is complete, do NOT start the SharePoint 2010 Product Configuration Wizard automatically. Instead, install the very important hotfix for .NET Framework 3.5SP1. Reboot after the install.
• In case you did start the config wizard, you’d most probably have gotten an error on Step 5 while installing services. Quit the wizard and install the hotfix above.
• Reboot the machine and open up RegEdit and search and delete all of the following (whichever you can find)
• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\WSS\Services\Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchWebServiceManagerService
• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\WSS\ServiceProxies\Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchWebServiceManagerServiceProxy
• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\WSS\Services\Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchService
• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\WSS\Services\Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Administration.SPSearchService
4. Complete the install using the configuration wizard and you should be up and running with SharePoint 2010 easily enough.

Recently I had to write some code as a sample to be able to display Word and Acrobat files on a Web page in a 2-page view. We couldn’t simply use a plugin or application on the user’s machine to do so. The solution was to export each page out to an image and then display the pages in any way we needed. We therefore needed to do some document export code from our application.

Word to Images

Converting Word files (.DOC & .DOCX) to images was fairly simple, although I do think I probably took a longer approach. The problem is that the older DOC format and the newer DOCX format have different APIs to work with. So instead of doing this, I simply exported them both to XPS and then used the XPS API to retrieve images for each page. This last part was not obvious to me till I found the one line of code required to do this on a forum – I apologize for not linking to this as I can’t find that link anymore. The credit for that part is wholly the original author’s.

PDF to Images

Converting PDF to images was a major issue. There is no direct way of doing this. There are many 3rd party components that are available to do this, but most of them cost a bomb. Some free ones like PDFSharp are able to iterate pages but there is no way to export a complete page to an image without walking through the entire structure of the page and redrawing everything.

This is where I found the GFLAX library. This requires GhostScript for Windows to be installed on the machine as well. You can register the DLL and then reference it in your .NET code.

Code Sample

I’m attaching the entire code sample to this post as a download. The code is released with the open source BSD license. All external components (Word and Office interop assemblies, GFL, etc.) have the copyright of their owners and must be adhered to.

Usage

Once you download the attachment and extract it, open it in Visual Studio 2008. Make sure you’ve installed GhostScript from the link above and run a “regsvr32 GFLAX.dll” for the GFLAX Library. Add reference to Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word on your machine (and remove the marked lines from Web.config) from the .NET tab and to GFLAX from the COM tab.

Run the application and upload .doc, .docx and .pdf files and you can then view them in the browser directly.

 
Two page display of an uploaded Word file. Works with PDF files too.

We normally use what are called TrueType fonts on Windows machines for everything – whether in applications or when typing a document in Word. However, Windows Vista and above have had a new type of font system called OpenType.

OpenType is a scalable font format, built to be compatible with TrueType, but having many advanced typographic features like:

• Ligatures
• Numeric styling
• Fraction Styling
• Glyphs
• Style “sets”
• Contextual Alternates

You can read about the full specification of features here. However, the strange part has been that you couldn’t use the OpenType features in your Word documents… That is, till now. Word 2010 does have the ability to use the OpenType features in any document.

To do this, you will need to use an OpenType font. Some of these are Calibri, Cambria and the other “C”-fonts. But to really see the power of OpenType you need to use Gabriola. This is a script like font that has a number of cool features to it. Open Word 2010, change the font to Gabriola and add some text to the document. At first glance, the text looks pretty normal.

Select the text and press <Ctrl>-D to enter the font properties dialog. Click on the Advanced tab to reach the OpenType settings. The easiest way to see the changes is to change the “Stylistic sets” value. Change it to say “5” for now and see what happens:

You can now see that there are some nice effects starting to show up. Crank up the value to say 7.

The text effects become even more pronounced. You can also experiment with the other settings to see other features of the font. For instance, the Number forms for “Lining” and “OldStyle” change how numbers are shown like this:

The Contextual Alternates allow you to let characters change according to their relative position to other characters around them. Take a look at the “D” in the word “different” being typed below:

As you can see, the way that the character “d” is drawn changes each time surrounding characters change. You can turn this off or on if you want.

There are a ton of other features available in OpenType fonts as well and combinations of the settings can help you create extremely rich looking typography.

Do try out the OpenType features and with different fonts to see the effect of all the different settings you can do on them. You can add a ton of richness to your documents this way.

Here’s a small tip: If you’re using Outlook 2010, you can use these features when creating a new mail as well!

One of the cool new features of PowerPoint 2010 is the ability for you to broadcast your presentation over the Internet for remote or networked viewers. This allows you to show presentations even if there is no projector available.

More...

PCQuest has just published 3 of my articles in their current issue. It was actually supposed to be 4, but the one on ASP.NET 4 got lost in the mail and a resend was received too late for this issue. You can read these articles here:

• MS Office 2010 Preview
• Silverlight 3 LoB Apps Part I (new series)
• Windows 7 Development Part I (new series)

I’m also going to try and compile a list of articles I’ve written in PCQuest over the last few years and link to them here.

Watch out Google Apps, Office “14” is coming to the Web – and unlike the Google version, it works with the offline rich client as well as mobile devices to give a whole new set of features.

Some salient points:

• Office 14 is going to be available in the normal rich client version
• The Web version will be included into the applications
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote are the apps that will be available in the “cloud” :)
• Seamless syncing of content between the desktop, Web and mobile will be possible
• Multiple people can work on the same document in different media at the same time and see changes in real-time
• The Web version works on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari
• If you have the Silverlight 2 plugin installed (in any of the above browsers) you get an even richer experience than the Ajax based one which mimics the rich desktop client almost exactly
• The rendering engines in each application is the same as the one in the desktop version and hence the document you view in your desktop will be exactly the same as the one the Web!
• You get all the rich features – charts, tables, WordArt, SmartArt etc. on both the Desktop and Web version – YAY!

Check out the video over at Channel9 for a quick cool demo.

If you've ever used the Google "office" applications - Google Spreadsheet, Google Docs, etc., you'd have known that saving and using files over the Internet has it's advantages. However, the Google office has some stuff that you can't really do - and that is work with your documents offline and having richer edit capabilities. Imagine being stuck in a long flight without having the documents you need with you on your notebook or a time when you need to create a richer document - with maybe a fancy table of contents, cover page etc.

This is where MS Office really shines. You get extremely rich editing capabilities within it. To those who call Office "Bloatware" and say that 90% of the users use only 10% of the features that Word, Excel and PowerPoint have, all I have to say to them is this: if you ever reach that time when you want more than that standard 10% you use, you'll be extremely glad to find that Office already has it and can ease your burden of doing it considerably.

You can now get the best of both worlds by signing up into the Office Live Workspace for free. It allows you to store, view and edit documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) as well as share and collaborate with others. You can also create lists like Tasks, Contacts, and Events here and store them in specific workspaces. If you've never used SharePoint earlier, this is a good first step to seeing the stuff you can do.

The best part is that the site can get fully integrated with your Office product by simply installing the Office Live Add-in available on the site. (Note: If you're on Vista, you also need to install this update and reboot before using the add-in). Once ready, you can save and open files directly from the Live workspace from within the Office applications. This also gives you offline capability to allow you to work with the documents when not connected to the Internet and then syncing them back to the workspace when you are connected.

There are only two small downsides to this stuff:

1. If you've already worked with SharePoint (WSS or MOSS), you'll find that a lot of features are missing from this hosted version. This is however a good thing so as not to confuse or frighten most people who've never worked on SharePoint before.
2. There is no in-place editing of documents inside the Web browser like in the Google apps. I however prefer editing with all the rich capabilities of Office, but it might be a small deterrent to some.