SharePoint provides a cost-effective, easy-to-implement solution for organizations interested in enhancing team collaboration, document management, and search functionality and in providing a portal to access corporate resources and intranet/extranet environments. The SharePoint 2007 family (consisting of Windows SharePoint Service 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) build upon these features and toolsets and introduce a staggering array of new tools and capabilities that undeniably make SharePoint 2007 an enterprise-class solution.

This new edition walks IT professionals, website designers, SharePoint administrators, and SharePoint power users through the design, implementation, and customization process. Exciting new capabilities such as workflow, records management, web content management, business processes, and business intelligence features are covered in depth. Best practices are provided for planning the architecture, scaling to meet the organization’s needs, migrating from SharePoint 2003, and managing the farm or multi-farm environment.

(more…)

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is a set of tools based on the Visual Basic language. The great thing about using it to enhance Office applications is that it's easier to learn than Visual Basic. After reading this book, the reader will be proficient in the VBA language and will have extensive knowledge of the Office 2007 Object Model. This book will cover all features of the VBA editor and show how to program some of the more useful new features in the Office 2007 applications. This book assumes no prior programming experience, so even programming novices can get up to speed quickly on the basics of the VBA language. It is very practical and offers the reader tested programs and projects that he or she can implement right away. This book reinforces the reader's learning by presenting useful, end-of-chapter pedagogical resources, including question-and-answer sessions and quizzes, as well as practical exercises that cement and extend the reader's knowledge. It explorers not only the object models of Word and Excel, but also other members of the 2007 Microsoft Office System, including PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook.

(more…)

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) replaces Microsoft's diverse presentation technologies with a unified, state-of-the-art platform for building rich applications. WPF combines the best of Windows and the Web; fully integrates user interfaces, documents, and media; and leverages the full power of XML-based declarative programming.

In Essential Windows Presentation Foundation, former WPF lead architect Chris Anderson systematically introduces this breakthrough platform, focusing on the concepts and techniques working developers need in order to build robust applications for real users. Drawing on his unique experience as team leader, Anderson thoroughly illuminates the crucial new concepts underlying WPF and reveals how its APIs work together to offer developers unprecedented value.

(more…)

Welcome to the sixth volume of the Game Programming Gems series. With team sizes constantly expanding, developers are finding themselves pushed to become increasingly specialized. This makes it important to have cutting-edge, ready-to-use material in your specialization, as well as resources that you can call upon if you need to work outside your area of expertise. Volume 6 has been explicitly designed with your current challenges in mind. With the new generation of machines, players expect higher-fidelity models and animations, fancier physics and graphics effects, and more intelligent AI. All of these capabilities require robust teams and longer schedules, so to help ensure that your games are still delivered on time and on budget, you?ll find 50 all new articles written by experts in game technology from many different backgrounds and over twenty countries. This volume also includes a brand new section dedicated to Scripting and Data-Driven Systems, which is focused entirely on the growing trend of removing the programmer from the data-tweaking loop. So, whether you?re a new game programmer starting out on this exciting path, a grizzled, industry veteran, or a most welcome visitor, we hope that you will find inspiration, insight, and at least one or two true gems to use in your world!

(more…)

Expert ASP.NET 2.0 Advanced Application Design will help you derive maximum performance and reliability from the distributed applications you create with ASP.NET 2.0.

The book first looks at some of the non-functional requirements that impact the design of a distributed application. It then relates them to the servers and services available in the .NET 2.0 Framework. ASP.NET 2.0 is the central process for use in distributed .NET applications, and the book closely examines the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework and its hosting environment, Internet Information Server (IIS). The book looks at how ASP.NET 2.0 is used by different packages within .NET (like Web Services), and explores how it can be extended to meet your own custom requirements.

(more…)