Gabriel’s post explained why. I typically don’t install VC++ on my dev boxes and apparently this is a known bug in VS 2010 where the command prompt doesn’t get installed if VC++ is not installed.

What really prompted me to post this is this nice feature new to 2010. I realized that I didn’t have the installation iso but gave it a try by going to Add/Remove programs and going through the Add/Remove features in VS 2010. The dreaded dialog to pick the installation path came up.

I was almost about to give up when I noticed the Download button. And viola the setup actually connects directly to the download servers at Microsoft and get’s only the items that have changed. It also went ahead and noticed updated Silverlight Tools and got them as well.

In the words of @AriBakker. Sweet. Sweet indeed.

Take a look at the Google Mail Checker Plus extension. The preview window itself is awesome and it works for GAFYD as well.

A bit of history
You can be forgiven to think that this is all new. The truth is that a skunkworks team within Microsoft built a version of this (code-name NetDocs) way back in 2000 (even before .NET was launched). It is believed that Steven Sinofsky (now head of Windows 7, previously head of Microsoft Office) managed to get this project killed off. Many years down the line Google snagged a lot of the guys from that original team (including the guy who Ballmer threw a chair at).

Back to the Article
Right. Back to our installation. The key document that you need to follow is this Deploy Office Web Apps guide on TechNet.

Pre-Requisites
- The SharePoint 2010 beta needs to be installed
- The documents must be created with the new Office 2010 beta application in order to be editable (you can view all documents but to edit them in the browser you need to at least open and save the .docx using the latest beta of Word/Excel)

Installation
1. Download Office Web Apps from the download centre (here is the direct link). If you couldn’t figure it out the English version is the one named WcServer_en-us.exe

2. Extract the installation and edit the config.xml in order to allow installing on Windows 7. To do this run the following command from the command prompt.

WcServer_en-us.exe /exctact:C:\WCServer

If you have installed SharePoint 2010 on your Windows 7 you will be familiar with what this does.

Now you need to edit the config.xml in extract location and add the following line to \Files\Setup\config.xml just like you did for the SharePoint 2010 install.

<Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True"/>

That is it. Run setup.exe and follow the rest of the guide in the Deploy Office Web Apps article and you will be able to edit Office documents from within the browser in no time.

NB: I did not have to run any of the PowerShell scripts as the features were all activated. I simply created a new Web Application and uploaded some documents and was able to edit in the browser.

Minimum Requirements:
- Windows 7 64 bit: What this means is that your workstation needs to be 64 bit and you need to have the 64 bit version of Windows 7 installed.

Setup:
The key document that you need to follow for installing on Windows 7 is this article: Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server

Key Notes:
- This was installed on Windows 7 Build 7100
- I had UAC turned off
- I already had Visual Studio 2010 Beta before installing SharePoint
- You need to manually download and install the pre-requisites for SharePoint 2010
- You need to extract the setup (using /extract), change an xml file before being able to run setup on Windows 7.

Minor Deviation:
The only part of the guide that I was forced to skip was #5 of ‘Step 3: Install SharePoint’

The reason was that the install for the SQL Server patch kept asking for the other files in the multi-part zip. (Remember to unzip the file even though it has a .exe extension)

Summary:
Excluding the download times it took about 30 minutes to install SharePoint server on my Dell XPS laptop which has 4GB of RAM.

Although there is no guide published yet I was able to install Office Web Apps on my laptop as well, that guide will follow next.

The Wifi connection would be detected immediate but I would not get an IP from the DHCP server. I always had to fiddle around by disconnecting and connecting a few times.

Well today I got down the source. The problem was to do with the Virtual Machine Network Services that were installed when I added Virtual PC. Once I went into the WiFi Adapter properties and removed the Virtual Machine Network Services I was able to get my PC back to instant connectivity.

IT Teams usually like to lock down the proxy server and are not happy when they need to allow anonymous access for outgoing requests.

Looking around none of the the free ones seem to support this. Not even the cool, free Silverlight one from Bamboo Solutions.

So I added proxy support to the CKS World Clock and Weather WebPart that was released on CodePlex (v1.0.15 to be exact). I looked at the licenses and I don’t think I’m breaking any of them by sharing the source code and the setup over at MSDN Code Gallery.

There were numerous posts on various forums wishing to enable proxy support. So here’s hoping someone might find it useful.

Download CKS: Weather WebPart with Poxy – Setup

I’ve given away most of my invites over Twitter but there are a few remaining though. So if you’d like a wave invite drop me a mail or leave a comment with your email address.

One tip I’ve found useful on my first day is to see public waves using with:public. The list is like a fire hose so I usually add some criteria e.g. ‘sharepoint with:public’ to see all public sharepoint waves.

Here’s one quick way that does not not involve writing any additional code.

Step 1: Start off by creating a class that will represent each checked list item in the list box. Obviously if you already have your data item all you need to ensure is that it has a boolean property to store the Checked/Unchecked flag.

public class CheckedListItem
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public bool IsChecked { get; set; }
}

Step 2: Create the list item that will be bound to the list box. I called my list AvailablePresentationObjects.

public List<CheckedListItem> AvailablePresentationObjects;

Step 3: The last step is to create the actual checked list box. I created a list box and used the HierarchicalDataTemplate to hold the CheckBox. The Name and the IsChecked property are then bound to the checkbox.

<ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding AvailablePresentationObjects}" >
    <ListBox.ItemTemplate>
        <HierarchicalDataTemplate>
            <CheckBox Content="{Binding Name}" IsChecked="{Binding IsChecked}"/>
        </HierarchicalDataTemplate>
    </ListBox.ItemTemplate>
</ListBox>

And walla!

Now the IsChecked property will reflect the value in the UI and vice versa. If you need real-time notification when someone checks/unchecks then you simply need to raise the PropertyChanged event in the CheckedListItem class.

Let’s build a better, peaceful Sri Lanka.