Sharepoint server 2010 RTM was lauched 2 days before.

Here is my setup experience (presented through a small number of snapshots) of this new product in a VirtualBox environment.

To download VirtualBox : VirtualBox

The Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 Technet documentation : Technet Doc

The list of prerequisites is as follow :

Because I'm not in a domain and want just evaluate the product, I choose the Standalone mode.

Let the wizard configures your products.

Everything is fine, let's create your first site! 

Imagine this scenario :

• You've built a Silverlight application with the out-of-browser feature.
• This application is installed on multiple computers.
• You may work with your Silverlight app without being connected.
• You want to avoid complex sync programming and you don't want to use server-side data service(s).

In this scenario, you need to work with a local repository to persist your data. Keep it simple and let's consider an XML file to serialize your data (for more complex scenario, this article may be a source of inspiration).

But… Implementing a data sync pattern may lead to headache.

How to avoid writing a server sync service, a (proprietary?) client agent (with a nice data changes detection), and how to remain the less system-dependant as possible?

Others have done it for you with Dropbox!

Simply said, Dropbox "is software that syncs your files online and across your computers".

Dropbox is stable, secure and very seamless. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

For more information about it and if you want to register, go here (and, at your turn, invite your friends to earn more space).

So, come back to our Silverlight OOB application. Here is then my architecture suggestion:

You can try it with this application : DropboxSLOOB

To use it :

• Install the application on your computer (out-of-browser with elevated privileges) clicking the button

  

• Your Dropbox folder MUST be installed in your "My Documents" folder.
• Create a small XML file in your Dropbox folder, copy this :

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

  <Items>

  <Item data="This is an item data" />

  <Item data="This is another item data" />

  <Item data="efefe" />

  </Items>

Now you can get your items and create new ones. And if you try to use another computer with the same application, you'll see that your data is synced! 

To download this test application and the test XML file (it's inside the Visual Studio project), go here.

This application is made under VS 2010 RC with SL 4.0 RC.

Element to element binding was new with Silverlight 3.0.

To know more about it, I invite you to read this post from Jeff Prosise.

Some improvements are made in Blend 4 Beta and Visual Studio 2010 RC to improve your everyday work on this point.

The old way (Blend 3.0/Visual Studio 2008)

Suppose that you want to bind the value of a Slider to a TextBlock text :

In Blend 3.0, you must select the TextBlock, go into the common properties, select the Text property and the Data Binding in the contextual menu :

Once this is made, you must select the Element Property, browse the three to find the element and the property to bind to.

In Visual Studio 2008, there was nothing to help you to generate this simple XAML piece:

<TextBlock Height="32" Margin="8,0,12,8" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Text="{Binding Value, ElementName=slider, Mode=OneWay}" TextWrapping="Wrap"/>

The new way (Blend 4.0 beta/VS 2010 RC)

In Blend 4.0, you still have the same option. But you also have a more friendly option with the new "Element Property Binding" option.

Choosing that item, you only have to select the element you want to bind to with your mouse :

A new dialog then opens to ask you which property you want to bind to :

In Visual Studio 2010 RC, you also now have now the option to work with the properties window to do the same thing.

Go to the Text property in the Properties window. Click on the small Value Source icon :

Select "Apply Data Binding"

In the dialog that appears, select an ElementName source, choose the slider :

Then in the Path, choose the property you want to bind to :

After having installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP and the Blend Add-in Preview/SDK for Windows Phone above my Visual Studio 2010 RC and Blend 4 Beta, I decided to port my Home Loan Application to Windows Phone.

This was quite easy to do.

This is currently a really raw application and the final result looks like that:

You can download this sample here

I don't know why but I had troubles with the out of the box PhoneSlider style :

It looks nice but it was impossible for me to work with it inside the emulator.

So I took the default style :

And I just skinned the button to change the square into a plain circle :

This last looked better to me!

Once you've installed Office Web App on your Sharepoint 2010 Beta 2 (on a single server farm in my case), you may encounter the message "an error has occurred" when you try to open an office document in Office Web App.

Don't forget to activate the Office Web App feature on your site collections if you want to avoid that :

• Go into the "Site Actions" of your site collection

• In the "Site Collection Administration", select the "Site collection features"

• Activate the "Office Web Apps" Feature :

And have fun with this very nice feature!