News Bits

Various bits of news and rumours:

• K2 blackpearl has gone RTM. You can download it from the K2 website after logging in with your user ID. Chris O'Connor is already blogging about the installation...check out his blog postings here and here.
• There is a SharePoint Asset Management Toolkit currently in beta at Microsoft. The intention behind it is to give an organization an overview of all the SharePoint assets floating around on the network: WSS sites, portals, etc. The idea being to get more of a handle on what's being built out there by enthusiastic 'Pointers.
• If you're keen on exploring LINQ, you'll probably be interested in the LINQ to SharePoint community project. Led by Bart De Smet, C# MVP, the project is currently in Alpha 0.2.3 (which is only four light years away), and the aim is to provide some of these following features (taken from Dimitri Clement):  

  • Custom query provider that translates LINQ queries to CAML, the Collaborative Application Markup Language used by SharePoint for querying.

  • Support for LINQ in C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0.
  • Entity creation tool SpMetal to export SharePoint list definitions to entity classes used for querying.
  • Visual Studio 2008 integration for entity creation (a.k.a. SPML).
  • Can connect to a SharePoint site either using the SharePoint object model or via the SharePoint web services.
  • Planned support for updating through entity types.

  You can find the bits at LINQtoSharePoint on CodePlex and the team blog is at http://community.bartdesmet.net/blogs/LINQtoSharePoint/.