Patterns & practices SharePoint guidance is an asset uploaded in codeplex which provide development guidance on SharePoint Intranet applications.

As described:

Project Description

We plan to provide guidance to customers on how to build SharePoint Intranet Applications. This includes guidance on how to Architect, Design, and Develop applications as well as best practices.

Intended Audience

This guidance is intended for software architects and software developers who are building applications on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Familiarity with Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and ASP.NET is useful for evaluating the guidance.

The download page is here.

Do you have any experience with this SharePoint product before? Go ahead and submit your review and help the community determine the usability and value of this SharePoint partner/product/offering.

You can customize your Windows Vista cursor using CursorFX. As described:

CursorFX is a program for Windows XP and Windows Vista that enables users to vastly improve the visual appearance and functionality of the Windows mouse cursor. Once installed, users can choose between hundreds of different mouse cursors with fluid animations, smooth edges, unique sizes, and more system event behaviors. In addition, CursorFX supports features such as smooth motion which the default Windows mouse cursor does not.

Version 2.01 adds additional cursors and more options.

Download the Windows Vista application here.

ShellRunAs is a very good utility authored by Mark Russinovich and Jon Schwartz that allows you to run applications under different user accounts. They describe their work as:

The command-line Runas utility is handy for launching programs under different accounts, but it’s not convenient if you’re a heavy Explorer user. ShellRunas provides functionality similar to that of Runas to launch programs as a different user via a convenient shell context-menu entry.

ShellRunas works on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008.

You can download this utility here.

Microsoft has finally announced their Windows Cloud strategy via the WinHEC PDC 2008 where Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie called it as Windows Azure. Ray noted that Windows Azure is going to be a scaled-out cloud operating system that runs on virtualizes servers in the new massive data centers of Microsoft’s.

Microsoft Azure is going to run Azure Services Platform where developers can develop applications scaling the cloud from beginning to run on Microsoft’s rented on-demand  infrastructure.

Starting January, Microsoft Azure will host a limited version of Office which would come to full scale in the future.

Windows Azure is going to be built from the ground up and it’s long term vision is going to be interoperable and open. In the early stages of the platform, Visual Studio and .NET is going to be the primary development framework and tool to be used; later on, it will add Ruby on Rails and Python and Eclipse development platform. Open source development tools will definitely be supported by Windows Azure such as HTTP, REST, WS-*, and the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub).

Azure Services Platform will also be home to SQL Services, Microsoft’s Live Services and .NET Services that will eventually create federated applications traversing firewalls and communicate across application and services. Both SharePoint Services and Dynamic CRM would be added as well.

Image source from Sys-con.

Hold-off your celebration for a while; Netflix has made their shows and movies available to MAC users, with restrictions.

In an excerpt of Netflix system compatibility information from their website:

“Apple does not license their DRM solution to third parties, which has made this more difficult, but we are working with the studios and content owners to gain approval for other solutions. As soon as a studio-approved DRM for the Mac is available to us, whether from Apple or another source, we will move quickly to provide a movie viewer that enables you to watch movies from Netflix instantly on your Mac.”

The information is because Netflix shows are using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology and would only run on Intel-based MACs. Both Microsoft and Netflix are pushing their products relentlessly which includes running streaming movies to XBox and Samsung Blu-Ray DVD players.

Microsoft is clearly making progress with Silverlight after they have streamed the recent U.S. Olympics and now Netflix. I think it would be a couple more years before they get head-on with Adobe Flash. Two years may be long in a fast paced industry; but not when you take into account Flash dominance in the last decade.

Dublin .NET is a codename given by Microsoft to their .NET extension that would be deployed in their recently announced Windows Azure cloud computing. During the PDC 2008, Jacob Avital and Mauricio Ordonez performed demonstrations of how the cloud-based .NET framework asynchronously capture client generated events, respond and make the necessary actions.

As described by Microsoft: