The ISO for VS2005 CTP August release is mounted and the hard drive is buzzing away under the keyboard of my laptop. The iso is on the Debian file server (yes, I also uses Linux). From the 9GB free on my harddisk alsmost 3GB will be occupied by the full install of the CTP. I didn't bother trying the default because that left me with two days of headdache from the December CTP.
As the setup is progressing I have some time to elaborate on the talk due in a weeks time. For the next project we are going to use Office 2003 as our primary front-end. Getting some hands-on experiencce might be handy in that case.
For the talk I'm going to create a small application for a FaceBook. Many, many, many years ago, in the IT stone-age (about 6 years ago) I created already a FaceBook web-client-application. It was using our companies LiveLink Intranet and a lot of nifty javascript code to create a facebook for a whole department. It was very well used especially by secretaries and even nowadays I get question about it. But as the LiveLink portal is no longer up-2-date, that version of the facebook is obsolete.
This year our company migrated to a brand new Active Directory structure where the data contained in it actually reflects the truth. So it will be the perfect place to query for companies, teams and people.
(VS2005 installed with some errors ???)
InfoPath is a great tool for creating online forms. I will use it as the query form for a webservice. The webservice will then query the Active Directory. Based on the data a url can be determined where the picture of the collegue can be found. Those results are stored.
A simple webpage can then be used to view the results of the search.
Well, that doesn't sounds to complex....
More tomorrow...