Web Developer Resources

Venezuela with its seashore is always mistaken for some paradisaical Caribbean island. The fun part o this country is that it has disco pubs in Caracas that goes vibrant with rocking rhythms. However, even during this fun time, you can access your mails easily.
Hosted Microsoft Exchange server gives you this facility!

By configuring your wireless with hosted Microsoft Exchange, you can surf through your mails quickly that too on free Exchange hosting. However, prior to synchronization with Exchange email hosting, verify with your own country’s local providers regarding their support functionality with Exchange web hosting.

Venezuela has a population of over 26 million of which most of the populace speak Spanish. And since Hosted Exchange 2010 is available in multi-lingo pack which includes Spanish as well, the inhabitants of Venezuela can use the Exchange Hosted features in their own home tongue.

Thus, be a native or non-native of Venezuela, using Microsoft Exchange Hosting on your mobile device is the best for your mail access!

Being a freelance web developer is great, but it has its downsides. Even though the money may seem really good in the beginning, soon you’ll be taking on various small-sized projects that will be eating into your time and preventing you from getting any actual work done. To remedy this, as well as other factors that can influence your productivity, you should take some simple steps to ensure you’re making the most out of your time.

First, concerning those small tasks mentioned above – get rid of them. Or at least, get rid of as many as you can without harming your income too much. Free up some space for the big and really important projects, to ensure that you’re filling up your time with tasks that are actually worth it.

Also, don’t rediscover fire. That is to say, if you can base your design on a freely available element or template – do it. Of course, this has its limitations – don’t rip off other people’s works; only use them as a very simple base on which to work. As a general rule, if the original work can still be recognized in your finished product, you probably didn’t do that good of a job.

Find some way to manage your clients as well – all those conversations can pile up, so make sure you do your best to schedule those whenever you can, so that they don’t take up as much of your time and you can concentrate on working.

What is Word Automation Services in SharePoint Server 2010?
Ever tried to transfer .docx files into PDF? Most of us try to perform server side conversions of Open XML files (.docx) into fixed formats (PDF and XPS) using the Word desktop application. Now this conversion can be done hassle-free with Word Automation Services.

As an element of SharePoint Server 2010, Word Automation Services allows you to perform file operations on the server that previously required automating desktop Word:
* Converting between documents formats (e.g. DOC to DOCX)
* Converting to fixed formats (e.g. PDF or XPS)
* Updating fields
* Importing “alternate format chunks”
Features of Word Automation Services

Features of Word Automation Services include the following:
o Reliability – Word Automation Service was built from the ground up to work in a server environment, which means that you no longer have to worry about issues like dialog boxes that bring the process to a halt, expecting a user to provide input; creating interactive user accounts under which to run the application to avoid running into permissions issues, etc.
o Speed – The service is optimized to perform server-side file operations, and in doing so provides performance significantly better than existing solutions.
o Scalability – The service can take advantage of the processing power available on typical server hardware (multiple processors, additional memory). For example, although a single instance of WINWORD.EXE can only utilize a single core of processing power, with Word Automation Services, you can specify the number of simultaneous conversions (and the # of processing cores) to use based on the available hardware.

What Word Automation Service doesn’t do in the SharePoint Server?
One of the most important things to understand about Word Automation service is what it doesn’t do. Word Automation Service is not intended to be a 1:1 replacement for the existing desktop object model. Instead, the server is one half of a replacement for the existing object model – the other half being the Open XML SDK.
o The SDK is designed to handle tasks that don’t require application logic, such as inserting or deleting content (paragraphs, tables, pictures), inserting data from other data sources, sanitizing content (removing content, accepting tracked changes), etc.
o The service is designed to handle those few tasks that do need application logic: reading the entire document formats that Word supports, converting to the entire output format that Word supports, recalculating dynamic fields, etc.

Word Automation Service is not featured in SharePoint Foundation 2010. Nevertheless, there is still life left in SharePoint family of products including Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 and WSS 3.0 that has free SharePoint templates for business use.

I’ve been continuously saying that SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation has been launched with some really great features and when saying that I cannot afford to forget its yet another cool feature Developer Dashboard. The Developer Dashboard allows you to monitor page load performance on SharePoint. Simply put, you can see how each element on the page loads! Now isn’t that really cool?

The Developer Dashboard in SharePoint Server displays diagnostic information gathered during the loading and rendering of the SharePoint content. The dashboard, in conjunction with FireBug or the IE Developer Toolbar, helps developers and designers identify issues in their custom projects. This can be set to always display or to only display on demand. The Developer Dashboard has three different states—On, OnDemand, or Off. When the Dashboard is set to On, it will always be shown on every page. Read the rest of this entry »