SharePoint, BizTalk, SQL Server, Azure and the Cloud in General

About a month ago, Microsoft announced the release of Lync for Mac.  If you have access to TechNet or MSDN you likely have access to download this tool. Among the benefits of the tool, being able to connect to Office 365.  Exciting news, yet for some odd reason it was a battle if you had upgraded to Lion (have not heard of anyone having issues that is running on Snow Leopard).  Microsoft then released an update for Lync for Mac.
Now, after the update, it was still no dice for me.  Upon further research there were two additional items needed.  One was removing an “unknown” certificate that made its way to the Keychain.  The other was to manually declare the Internal and External servers for it.
Here is a summary then of the “fixes”
1) Get the update for Lync for Mac, if AutoUpdate has not gotten it, run it manually by going to Help (on any of the Microsoft Office for Mac Apps), from there Check for Updates.

2) Check Keychain Access for an “unknown” certificate, and delete it.  To get access to this, you need to go to Applications > Utilities > Keychain Access

3) Modify the Connection Settings for Internal and External Servers to point to: sipdir.online.lync.com:443 (some have reported to not need this, in my case it was needed)

Hope this helps if you are having issues connecting to Office 365 and taking on a really great tool across the Mac and Windows platforms.

Recently I have been doing quite a bit of testing on different means to deploy the Azure SDKs and such. After a very successful couple of systems, I started running into issues last night.
Here is the problem, if I go to the Windows Azure Website, and go to Develop, then click on the SDK and Tools, then Get Tools & SDK, it launches the Web Platform Installer.  All seems well at that point, except it will go through the initial process, will find the SDK files for 1.4, but since the tools for Visual Studio are still 1.3, the location throws back a 404, which causes the Installer to fail. 
NOTE:If you already had SDK 1.3 and the tools in place, it will go through.
The fix is to go directly to the Microsoft Download Center location and download the files.  Here is the link … http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=7a1089b6-4050-4307-86c4-9dadaa5ed018

Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools Update
If you installed the Productivity Power Tools as soon as they came out about a month ago, when you open VS 2010 the next time, it will notify you that there have been some updates to some extensions.
Now, to update the extensions, you will go to the Get Started section of the Start screen, and make sure you have selected the Welcome Link, then you will expand the Extending Visual Studio area by clicking on it.

Once you have expanded the Extending Visual Studio link, next you will click on the Launch Extension Manager link.

You will see there are updates available, expand the Updates tab

You will see the options listed, and click update.  Once you click update, it will proceed to confirm you want to update and install.

After it completes the installation it will redirect you to the Productivity Power Tools description page.  You can also download the update from that page.
The artist formerly known as TFS Scrum v1.0 – Beta is now known as Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0
It is now released under its new name, Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0.  You can download from the tool’s description page.
And get more information on the release http://blogs.msdn.com/b/aaronbjork/archive/2010/07/19/announcing-microsoft-visual-studio-scrum-1-0.aspx
And check out the information available on MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff731587.aspx

With the release of the “September – 2010” TFS 2010 Power Tools, came an addition to the Team Foundation Server Administration Console.  This addition is the Team Foundation Backups Tree item. 

The tool is used to create backup plans and to work with it you run through a wizard, just like you would in configuring TFS or any of the extensions it has.

The areas covered through the tool include:
Backup to a Network Backup Path, retention configuration. Under Advanced Options, the extension to be used for the Full and Transactional backups.

The capability to include external databases, meaning, include the reporting databases and SharePoint databases as part of the plan. 
[UPDATE: Note the documentation on Brian Harry’s Blog on this.  There is a bug that will render your SharePoint in an unsupported state if using the tool.  In the meantime refer to my other post on SharePoint and Windows Server backup]

There are further options as you can see, that includes being able to define a task scheduler account, be able to set alerts for notifications on execution of the plans, and last the option to configure the schedule for the plan execution.  All in all a very good tool and great way to safeguard the investment you’ve made.

A while back I decided to get back to speaking engagements and such. For the most part I had kept that to some local User Groups and some conferences like TechEd. I decided to sign up for the INETA Speaker program. Well my first gig came through. I will be speaking at the SharePoint Users of Ft. Wayne, Indiana meeting on July 14th.
The topic is on Building Solutions for SharePoint using Visual Studio LightSwitch.