Dragan Panjkov / SharePoint blog /

 As a followup to previous post /panjkov/archive/2008/11/25/isolator-for-sharepoint-you-can-get-it-for-free.aspx, during last weekend I received my FREE and FULL Isolator license.

Thanks, Typemock!!!

Following all the buzz about SharePoint Guidance http://codeplex.com/spg you might already hear that TypeMock Isolator can be used for mocking stuff when unit testing your SharePoint apps. Now, people from Typemock have made it one step further: they released SharePoint targeted product – Isolator for SharePoint, which you (if you're lucky and fast) can get for FREE. Here are the rules:

Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.

The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.

(from twitter, via LLiu)

Lawrence Liu announced new site MSSharePointDeveloper.com. As he said, it is the "start page" for anyone interested in developing with the SharePoint platform. It's nice, it's fast and it seems thah is powered by SharePoint. Main interface is powered with Silverlight, in  nice dark color, with main menu on the right side with links to main development areas, from web parts to user management. Although some links are not live yet, it's one excellent place to be set as SharePoint development start page, as Lawrence already said on twitter.

I found this interesting video about a developer meeting (thanks Grumpy Wookie) with one of the youngest web developers in the world. He prefers SharePoint… All I can add is that future of SharePoint is so bright…

Rebranding an existing site is always process, especially if site must maintain same page structure and, in case of MOSS WCM site, all web parts and content controls must stay alive and in place, so to speek. If you're changing colors and positioning of elements and layout must stay the same in Firefox, IE 6, IE 7, Opera… (and Safari etc…) there's no need to explain old facts again – they all don't render pages in same way. Problems can arise in a pixel or two, or ten… or more…   and one tool that can save the day is Firebug. I especially like to use its css window, disable some style attributes and to watch its impact on layout of that element. Another feature that I like is Layout tab where you can see complete box model of an element.

More screenshots can be seen on its official page http://www.getfirebug.com/

As most of you already know, in order to achieve certification TS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring, you need to pass the exam 70-630. To prepare for this exam, one can use either Microsoft e-learning collection 5404 or instructor led course 5061A. I yesterday passed this exam, and all that I can say is that exam is not difficult. Because I don't have MCP ID, I didn't received confirmation e-mail yet, and I hope I'll receive it in next couple of days (but I received Score report with score 1000 after I took the exam:) ).

Further steps? Exams 70-631, 70-541, 70-542 …

As Scott Guthrie announced this morning (few minutes ago), ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 is available for download on ASP.NET Website and on MSDN download center, here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=38CC4CF1-773A-47E1-8125-BA3369BF54A3&displaylang=en

There is also new beta for Silverlight tools for VS 2008, on Silverlight downloads page:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/bb187452.aspx

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.

I found brief announcement about this on http://blogs.msdn.com/iainmcdonald/archive/2008/02/04/whoo-windows-server-2008-is-released.aspx.

Today Microsoft officialy announced that Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 are RTM'd. Here are posts on WIndows Server Division weblog http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2008/02/04/windows-server-2008-rtm.aspx and on Windows Vista Team Blog http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/02/04/announcing-the-rtm-of-windows-vista-sp1.aspx. Here is an official MS PressPass document http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/feb08/02-04WS2008.mspx on  Upgrade Options and Ensuring Compatibility.

"And why am I so excited about that?", one might ask.

Well, here are symptoms and the solution:

On my personal site www.panjkov.qsh.eu and blog www.blogpanjkov.qsh.eu, I use statcounter.com for tracking site statistics, for almost year and a half. I presume that this is all familiar to readers, but in brief, you register for a free account, receive a piece of html/javascript code and append it to your html on your site pages. I didn't encounter problems with that until I received new hp notebook and I installed Kaspersky on it, as usual and OS Vista Business. It was some two months ago. Well, on this machine I simply couldn't analyze my stats anymore, nor login inside my statcounter.com account. On my sites, banner with statcounter code was invisible, and on statcounter.com I was redirected to some phantomic "gif" file on every try to login. Not to mention poor UX on statcounter.com. I was sure there is somethin wrong, but not persistent enough to research that in depth. I suspected to browsers, but without results, and I was convinced in that this evening when I finally tried to open my account from Opera, again with same results.

And here is resolution for this problem:

After that, I opened Kaspersky's Settings window, and analyzed various options related to Web anti-virus and Anti-Spy. When I disabled Anti-Spy, I was able to use my Statcounter as usual, so I localized problem inside it. When I disabled Anti-Banner(AntiSpy > Anti-Banner), again, I was able to use statcounter as usual. Furthermore, in Anti-Spy there are settings related to Anti-Banner in which is a list with blocked filetypes, blocked sites, blocked filename masks and so on. And, you can guess, there is a statcounter.com in that list. I simply unchecked it (and just to be sure, added it to Whitelist). I again re-enabled all protection services as normal and now

I can analyze statistics for my sites… again.