FarPoint Forums

Spread for ASP.NET in Dynamic Data

scotts — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:50:05 GMT

A few months ago at the Triangle .NET Users Group meeting, Brad Abrams of Microsoft presented some new features releasing with the 3.5 .NET framework SP1. One that caught my eye was Dynamic Data. Brad was able to create a complete CRUD web application in just a few minutes with no writing of code. When I saw this, I was thinking how great it would be if we at FarPoint could configure our Spread control to work with this new technology. I passed this along to the product manager and development team for Spread for ASP.NET and they worked on researching what was needed in our product to enable this functionality.

After a few weeks, we had something they were ready to show me, and it looked great. I have now created a video showing how to replace the standard GridView control with our Spread control in a Dynamic Data website. Take a look and tell us what you think. If you have any comments or questions about this, feel free to email me.

Scott Shorter

Technorati Tags: FarPoint Technologies,Spread for ASP.NET,Dynamic Data,CRUD web application

FarPoint Spread 8 (COM) Beta Posted!

donald — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:06:00 GMT

While nearly all of the other component vendors have fully abandoned their COM product line we are happy to announce that the beta for the latest COM version of Spread is now ready for download.

WHAT’S NEW

-------------------------

New Features

- New Formula Functions

- Ability to create a custom cell

- A 64-bit DLL control

- Shape and color settings for cell notes

- New OCX methods for saving and loading to/from a buffer

- New event for circular references

Enhancements

- Enhanced appearance

- Enhanced appearance for headers and sheet corners

- Enhanced appearance for scroll bars

- Enhanced appearance for sheet tabs

- Enhanced selection highlighting

- Additional export options when exporting to HTML

- Users can apply a secondary sort using control-click

We’re still looking for beta testers to run this through their existing projects and verify that with all the changes we’ve implemented, we didn’t break anything. If you would like to be part of the testing, please send an email to beta@fpoint.com.

- Donald

Spread for ASP.NET RC Posted!

donald — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:44:00 GMT

Yesterday we posted what should be the final testing build of one of our flagship products, Spread for ASP.NET. If you haven’t heard about it yet, we’ve added a lot of new features in this release with one of the primary focuses being on major performance enhancements. Other enhancements include support for Excel 2007 XML, PDF, and ODF; ASP.NET AJAX extender controls added as cell types; row template, row edit template, group footer; and a whole lot more.

Watch for it to be releasing soon!

Debatching Spread for BizTalk Messages in BizTalk Server 2006

robby — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:49:00 GMT

From time to time our pre-sales and tech support teams receive questions on how to take XML messages created by the Spread for BizTalk disassembler and break the single message into individual record item messages - a task that in BizTalk Server lingo is refered to as "debatching."

The Spread for BizTalk disassembler parses incoming spreadsheet data (xls, xlsx, csv, txt) into XML-data as a single BizTalk Message. The first approach I considered was to add an XML disassembler following the Spread for BizTalk disassembler in a single receive pipeline. Good concept, but the logic does not hold water because the XML produced by Spread for BizTalk is typed to a particular schema that is not an envelope schema, and to use the XML disassembler as part of a debatching solution, an envelope schema must be used.

So the next iteration was to create an envelope schema and map the Spread for BizTalk XML to that schema. Using the XML disassembler to crack the envelope was still the approach I wanted to use, so I created another receive pipeline that contains the XML disassembler, and created an orchestration to first map the XML data (message) then invoke the receive pipeline that contains the XML disassembler. Following this, the orchestration simply loops through the output messages.

As in life, and in development, there are many pathways to get from A to B. This is not the only way to solve the this debatch task in BizTalk Server nor is it necessarily the best way, but it does work well, and is easy to follow and maintain.

A big thanks to blog postings from Stephen Thomas http://geekswithblogs.net/sthomas/archive/2005/06/16/44023.aspx Gaurang Desai http://www.codeproject.com/KB/biztalk/BizEnvelop.aspx.

The source code for this sample is attached below as "debatch.zip".

-Robby

Spread for SharePoint - Out the Door!

robby — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:34:00 GMT

It is a great feeling when you manage a product from concept, through design, development, testing, and the last difficult stages of release!

FarPoint Spread for SharePoint officially released a couple days ago and we are receiving calls from excited customers who are telling us it is exactly what they have been looking for. I couldn't be happier about that!

Let me give you a low-down on the features that Spread for SharePoint provides:

Bind to SharePoint Lists for full data binding (read/write) experience.
Integration with SharePoint List View Customizations: column visible, sort, group by, totals, …
Rich formatting options such as: background color, foreground color, font, border, data alignment, …
User Dynamic data analysis through the use of conditional formatting and multiple-level filtering.
Export SharePoint List views to PDF, Excel 97-2003 (XLS), and Excel 2007 XML (XLSX) documents.
Subscribe web services, external to SharePoint, to SharePoint List Events through the Event Subscription Editor in the Tool Pane. This feature allows SharePoint Lists Events Notifications to be exposed to the outside world for participation in pub-sub scenarios such as ESBs or ISBs. (This is available in the Enterprise Edition only.)
Extend the Spread for SharePoint web part to create a custom web part to address the needs of a specialized need by taking advantage of the unsealed base class in Spread for SharePoint. (This available in the Enterprise Edition only.)

As you can see from the (*) in the feature list, Spread for SharePoint has been released as two editions: Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. The Standard Edition is the Spreadsheet web part that binds to SharePoint Lists, and the Enterprise Edition is all of that plus an unsealed base class - for extensibility, and the ability to subscribe web services to SharePoint List events.

I think the functionality of this product is exceptional, but I suppose it is my job to think like that. The spreadsheet capabilities and dynamic data analysis features provide for a very useful SharePoint page component.

However, in my opinion the Event Subscription functionality is the coolest feature offered by this web part. Check out Spread for SharePoint and see what you think!

-Robby

Customer #1-Dan Mathson

petew — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:50:00 GMT

Hello! Following up to my post on June 17th regarding our desire to have happy customers presenting our components at their User Groups, I wanted to take a minute to shout out a BIG thanks to Dan Mathson. Dan is a pleased FarPoint Spread for ASP.NET user who will presenting at his ASP.NET User Group on July 15th. Here is some information:

Meeting Information
When:	3rd Tues. of mo., 6:00pm - 9pm (regular meetings)
Where:	Microsoft SoCal Office 9255 Towne Centre Drive, 4th Floor, San Diego, CA 92121 Map to Microsoft Office Parking Instructions
All meetings are free. Everyone is welcome. Next meeting July 15th, 2008. Click here to view details. Dan will be raffling off a couple of copies of our ASP.NET software as a special bonus to his presentation. Thanks Dan and my only question to all of you is....Who wants to be next?

Interested? Contact me! petew@fpoint.com

Pete Willis

FarPoint Technologies Announces Spread for SharePoint

bill — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:09:00 GMT

FarPoint Technologies Announces Spread for SharePoint

Component Vendor Releases Spreadsheet Web Part with Event Subscription

MORRISVILLE, NC — July 10, 2008 – FarPoint Technologies has announced the release
of Spread for SharePoint. Spread for SharePoint is a Microsoft® Windows SharePoint® Server v3 (WSS3.0) integrated spreadsheet Web Part. Through Spread for SharePoint, SharePoint site owners can bind to SharePoint lists to provide users with a feature-rich, customizable spreadsheet experience. Addressing the needs of the SharePoint users, administrators, developers and system integrators, Spread for SharePoint offers a range of capability from a company specializing in enterprise spreadsheet solutions.

Spread for SharePoint presents SharePoint list data in a dynamic and flexible spreadsheet that is integrated with SharePoint List View customizations including column visible, column order, sort, filter, group by and totals. Users have a complete data-binding experience where changes to the data are immediately reflected back to the SharePoint list and changes to the SharePoint list data made outside of Spread for SharePoint are automatically reflected in the spreadsheet. Users can personalize their view of SharePoint lists by setting column format elements: background color, text color, font, borders, and alignment through the use of a built-in tool bar. Dynamic data analysis can be performed on the data through the use of conditional formatting and multiple-level filtering. Through Spread for SharePoint, users can also save the current view of the list to PDF, Excel 97-2003(XLS), or Excel 2007(XLSX) documents.

“We recognize that SharePoint professionals need rich tools to effectively manage list data,” said FarPoint CEO Rick Williamson, “so we have leveraged our expertise in spreadsheet technologies to produce a spreadsheet component for SharePoint to address these needs.”

SharePoint developers can create custom SharePoint Spreadsheet Web Parts by extending the unsealed base class of Spread for SharePoint. The unsealed base class is part of the Enterprise Edition of the product. System integrators can codelessly incorporate SharePoint lists into event-driven, pub-sub scenarios by subscribing web services, external to SharePoint, to SharePoint list events through the Event Subscription and Routing functionality provided in the Tool Pane of Spread for SharePoint. This functionality is available in the Enterprise Edition of the product. This is yet another innovation from a company that has received the SD-Times Top 100 innovators award.

Availability
FarPoint Spread for SharePoint is available directly from FarPoint Technologies at (800) 645-5913 or (919) 460-4551. The Standard Edition has a suggested retail price of $995 (and is available at an introductory price of $695) and the Enterprise Edition has a suggested retail price of $1495.

# # #

FarPoint Idol Winner!

bill — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:49:00 GMT

Susan Schneider is the winner of our FarPoint Idol contest that we ran at DevConnections this past June. (If you haven't seen the videos yet, you can still listen to them.) We had over 50 contestants and the winner was chosen from 9,232 votes!

Congratulations, Susan!

Susan won with 3,810 votes - a clear victory! The runners up were:

2nd place - Robert Butler making Billy Joel proud with New York State of Mind - he got 2,098 votes!
3rd place - Sylvia Patton singing Heard It Through the Grapevine - she got 1,120 votes!
4th place - Bill Moman with The Gambler
5th place - Layne Baker with Killing Me Softly

Thanks to ALL the contestants. We had a blast with this and hope you did too.

Here's the email exchange between Donald and Susan:

From: Donald Williamson
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 2:22 PM
To: Susan Schneider
Subject: DevConnections Orlando and FarPoint Karaoke

Hi Susan,

Well it looks like your singing talent paid off when you sang ‘Unchain My Heart’ at our (FarPoint’s) booth at the DevConnections show – you’ve won the $500.00!!! You had a total of 3810 votes…congratulations!

We will be sending you a check.
Looks like your menu for the 4th holiday just got a bit better.

Let me know you received this as soon as you can. Congratulations again from all of us at FarPoint!

- Donald
Donald Williamson
donw@fpoint.com

From: Susan Schneider
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 3:29 PM
To: 'Donald Williamson'
Subject: RE: DevConnections Orlando and FarPoint Karaoke

Hello Donald,
You’ve made my 4th of July definitely sweeter…..looks like steak and Champaign!

Thank you for the money but, more importantly, the experience; it was grand!
Thank you again.
Susan Schneider

Maybe Susan should submit that video to the American Idol contest now! Go for it, Susan, but don't quit your developer job.

Sander Schutten and FarPoint Spread for BizTalk

bill — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:14:00 GMT

Thanks to Sander Schutten, the certified Microsoft BizTalk Server technology specialist of Avanade, for mentioning our Spread for BizTalk product. We're glad to see that word is getting out about our Spread for BizTalk solution. As he says:

"If you’ve ever wanted or needed to parse Excel files using BizTalk, you can now."

And he's got lots of other great BizTalk information at his blog, http://www.afanaat.nl, including posters and videos. Great blog, Sanders!

FarPoint Input for ASP.NET beta

bill — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:51:00 GMT

FarPoint is now offering a set of user interface controls for ASP.NET development -- a set of eight input controls, as well as two help controls and five validation controls that can be assigned to those input controls. The product is FarPoint Input for ASP.NET and the beta is available for interested developers. Simply drop us an email at beta@fpoint.com to request a copy. The input controls have more features than the ones that come with Visual Studio so your Web pages can offer more functionality for data entry; the validation controls and user assistance controls provide for better data entry and a richer user experience. The eight input controls include:

Calculator
Calendar
Combo Box
Date
Edit
List Box
Mask
Number

The two user assistance controls are:

Balloon Tip
Message Box

The five validation controls check for:

Character types
Date range
Date comparison
Forbidden and allowed characters
Text length

Day One: FarPoint Training Underway

bill — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:14:00 GMT

Jim Duffy of TakeNote is doing a fine job of leading the first ever ("inaugural" he says) class on FarPoint Spread. We're having some fun talking about the real power behind Spread ("this is way more than a grid") and getting into some of the many features available, whether it's the Spread Designer (who would want to start from scratch from code?), the Spread skins (maybe we should have an area on the forums for posting and sharing skins), or the sorting, grouping, conditional formatting, filtering and more.

These two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) are training on Spread for Windows Forms. Then comes Spread for ASP.NET. So today, Day One, had the overview, the appearance settings, and some of the cool interaction that is available with Spread. Tomorrow we cover the cell types and more. Way to go, Jim! Keep up the great work!

Spread 8 (COM) Update

donald — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:46:00 GMT

First let me say a big thank you to all you loyal Spread customers for giving us your input on the new Spread 8 product. A lot of great suggestions have been submitted via our email survey and forum postings and every request was reviewed.

The biggest request we received was to provide you with an updated, more modern look. The second largest request was to provide a way for you to add your own custom celltypes. We’re happy to announce that both have been added!

The look has been updated to closely match Spread for Windows Forms and Excel. We have also added the ability for you to include your own controls in a Spread cell via callbacks.

Following is the new feature list we have scheduled for Spread 8:

* New Formula Functions (close to 100 new formulas)

* Ability to create a custom cell

* A 64-bit DLL control

* Shape and color settings for cell notes

* SaveBlockToBuffer and LoadBlockFromBuffer

* Enhanced appearance

* Enhanced appearance for headers and sheet corners

* Enhanced appearance for scroll bars

* Enhanced appearance for sheet tabs

* Enhanced selection highlighting

* Additional export options when exporting to HTML

* Users can apply a secondary sort using control-click

To get these features rolled out to you as quickly as possible, some requests will not make it in the initial release. We decided not to hold up the release but rather provide you with these new features now.

Look for a beta around the end of July. Please email me at beta@fpoint.com if you are interested in joining the beta team. Thanks!

- Donald

FarPoint Selling in the Far East with GrapeCity

bill — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:40:00 GMT

Well, we've made a splash in the Japanese market with our major reseller there, GrapeCity, Japan.
They've sent a nice recognition award that we have on our shelf with other awards. We think it looks pretty cool. Here's what it looks like:

The high-quality of our products is something we work very hard to acheive and we are glad that this translates into more business for both GrapeCity and FarPoint. Thanks for thanking us, GrapeCity. Keep up the good work.

FarPoint, INETA and An Offer to Happy Customers

petew — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:24:00 GMT

I am excited to report that we had a great Tech Ed 2008! One of the highlights was co-sponsoring the “INETA Mini-Summit” the day prior to the official start of the show. For those of you not familiar with INETA here is their website: http://www.ineta.org/default.aspx.

Essentially, INETA is responsible for working with .NET user groups all over the world. They spend time and money making sure that the user group members get the most out of their community through innovative speakers and events. I highly recommend that if you are not a member of your local user group you look into attending a meeting. FarPoint has compiled a list of user groups here:

http://www.clubfarpoint.com/FarPointSupportSite/Modules/Resources/usergroups.aspx

The Mini-Summit brought together user group leaders from around the United States (about 50 total) and centered around large and small group discussions regarding how to make the .NET community better. During one of our large group discussions the fearless leader Rob Zelt posed a question to me regarding how a vendor looks to get involved with a user group. Never one to shy away from giving my opinion or the limelight, I shared with the group that our number one priority is NOT to just write a check. We want to be involved in supporting the .NET community through innovative ways. The question I posed back was how do we do that?

Although all the feedback was positive the best idea to come from this discussion was that FarPoint needs to work with our happy customers and see if they would be willing to present one of our products at their local user group meeting. As one user group president put it, “I would much rather have a representative of MY community present your product than have a person from your company come and give me a pitch”. Wow! What an idea!

Ironically within 5 minutes of this discussion, loyal customer Dan Mathson from the San Diego ASP.NET User Group sent an email to me and said he was going to be presenting his application made with our Spread for ASP.NET at his July meeting. Way to go Dan! I also heard from David Hockenberry, President of the Western New York .NET User Group, who said he may have a member willing to present as well. That would rock Dave! The question in this…..Are you so happy with the application you built that you would like to be a presenter at your user group? Would you like to be the next to step up? If so, please email me (petew@fpoint.com) and I will work with you to attempt to make this happen and share with you some of the FarPoint perks you get for doing this! More to come!

New Blog in Old Skin

bill — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:51:00 GMT

Is it a message board?Is it a forum? Is it a blog? Well, I guess it's all of them now. It seems that all this social networking stuff is converging anyway, so why not have our blogs in the same community space as our forums, and make it that much easier for users of our forums to rate and comment on our blogs.

We just upgraded the forums and added blogs. And we moved our existing blog content to this new blog. Or blogs. Well, for the forums, you shouldn’t notice anything too radically different (if so, please let me know!).
Tag clouds are also now supported which we hope will make it easier to navigate to topics about which you want to read more. We're working on the tag list presentation. Sometimes it's showing up as a bullet list and sometimes as a tag cloud.
I prefer the cloud myself. Let us know what you think of the new blogs, and the new forums too.

Mixon and FarPoint Spread for SharePoint

Gregg — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:40:00 GMT

Thanks to Bob Mixon of Mixon Consulting for mentioning our Spread for SharePoint product -- yes, we too are excited about offering the first integrated spreadsheet Web Part. As he says:

They have taken their Spread product and created a SharePoint enabled Web Part. I did see a demo of it and the UI abilities are very feature rich. If you are looking for a way to display SharePoint List and Library information in a highly customizable way, I recommend taking a look at this product.

Well, enjoy the rest of Tech-Ed and let us know when you've tried out Spread for SharePoint. We think you'll be amazed at the power it affords for working with SharePoint lists.

FarPoint Spread for ASP.NET version 4.0 beta!

Gregg — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:56:46 GMT

Spread for ASP.NET has been an incredible product since it was initially released, but it has not achieved the market prominence that we felt it deserved. So we studied the market more and talked more with our customers; we identified short comings and a list of desired features during the design of our latest version. The number one complaint we were getting about Spread for Web Forms was speed. Well, the beta of version 4.0 should be ample evidence that we have done our homework. We have increased the performance to the point that you may be surprised, and we are adding over two dozen new features as well. Among the latest features we are adding are:

Vastly increased performance – reduced client-server overhead for lightning speed
New browser-based, full-featured Spread Designer
ASP.NET AJAX extender controls added as cell types
Support for document types: Excel 2007 XML, PDF, and ODF
Several new interaction features added: row template (for multiple-line columns), row edit template (for data entry), sheet title and subtitle, group footer, and more

If you are interested in trying the beta of the latest version of Spread for ASP.NET for yourself, contact beta@farpointspread.com and ask for Spread for ASP.NET version 4 beta.

Beta, FarPoint Spread for ASP.NET, design, download, new features, Web Forms

FarPoint Wins SDTimes Top 100 Again

Gregg — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:57:42 GMT

Okay, we've done it again. We received the prestigious Top 100 Award from the SD Times in the category of Components confirming that FarPoint Technologies continues to provide innovative and market-leading component solutions. And this is the second year in a row that we've received it. BZ Media's SD Times is the twice-monthly newspaper of record for the software development industry. (SD Times reaches more than 60,000 subscribers in over 130 countries.) See the current issue for the full scoop on the awards. Thanks, SD Times, for recognizing us!

Awards, SD Times, SDTimes, Top 100 award

At Tech-Ed, we are too busy to blog

Gregg — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:49:26 GMT

The FarPoint guys are at the booth all day today - no breaks - so no time to blog. (Now if we were using Twitter, I guess we'd have time for that.) We are official exhibitors at the Developer part of Tech-Ed 2008, and we are showing off our latest advances in spreadsheet technology. Spread for Windows Forms is our biggy for .NET development. We will be coming out with a new version of Spread for ASP.NET any day now soon in beta and you may get word from the guys at the booth about that. Also, for SharePoint users, be sure to ask Robby what's new with Spread for SharePoint.

exhibitor, Tech-Ed, Tech-Ed 2008

Developer Guidelines

Gregg — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:07:05 GMT

These guidelines have been suggested by our developers. We hope they are helpful to you as well.

.NET Framework Design Guidelines Krzysztof Cwalina's blog (Designing Reusable Frameworks) http://blogs.msdn.com/kcwalina/archive/2008/04/09/FDGDigest.aspx

LINQ Framework Design Guidelines Mircea Trofin's blog http://blogs.msdn.com/mirceat/archive/2008/03/13/linq-framework-design-guidelines.aspx

Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries By Krzysztof Cwalina, Brad Abrams Book on Amazon.com (Part of the Microsoft .NET Development Series series)

Internal Coding Guidelines Brad Abrams's blog (Design Guidelines, Managed Code, and the .NET Framework) http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/articles/361363.aspx

Design Guidelines for Class Library Developers .NET Framework General Reference http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/czefa0ke(vs.71).aspx

If you can think of others, let us know.

.NET, design, developer, framework, guidelines

INETA Mini-Summit before Tech-Ed 2008

Gregg — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:13:19 GMT

We join INETA in inviting you to the INETA Tech-Ed 2008 Community Leadership Summit, Monday June 2nd, 2008 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. prior to the start of Tech-Ed this year. FarPoint Technologies is pleased to be sponsoring the event. The Summit will be an informal gathering (not as structured or formal as last year) of Community Leaders, INETA Volunteers, and INETA Speakers, allowing attendees to meet each other, socialize, and discuss the topics related to the user group community. There will be several panel discussions on various topics of interest. This will be a great opportunity to interface with members of INETA, your peers from the community, as well as to talk with our sponsors on how they can get involved to support your user group. You can email noram.communityactivities at ineta.org for registration and details. The Summit location will be sent to you after registration.

INETA, mini-summit, Tech-Ed, Tech-Ed 2008

FarPoint at BizTalk Brown Bag Webcast

Gregg — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:38:04 GMT

June 13th. Friday the 13th. What could possibly go wrong?! That's when you luckily get to hear our own Robby Powell present how to use Spread for BizTalk Server 2006 in a real-world application to handle Excel data. The title of the talk is Creation of an Order Entry and Fulfillment, and Billing/Invoice Process Using Spread for BizTalk, BizTalk Server 2006, and VS 2005. It's not as complicated as it sounds. This is an hour-long Webcast - part of the Microsoft BizTalk Server Technical Brown Bag Webcast series. When: Friday, June 13, 2008 1:00pm PST, 3:00pm CST, 4:00pm EST, 9:00pm UK For visual: Microsoft Office Live Meeting URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=BTSBAG&role=attend&pw=35DKTQ Meeting ID: BTSBAG Meeting Password: 35DKTQ For audio: 866-500-6738 or +1-203-480-8000, Passcode: 221223# (During the call please use *6 to mute your phone to reduce background noise, and *6 again to unmute and ask questions.) The Webcast is available for replay within 24 hours after the session. The PowerPoint presentation is at: \BTSBAG113_RobbyPowell-FarPoint_FarPoint Spread for BizTalk to Read-Write Excel XLS Spreadsheets.ppt . The talk should go for just over an hour. The presentation will step through the creation of a BizTalk Application to produce an automated Order Entry, Invoice Generation and Order Fulfillment system. Through use of FarPoint Spread for BizTalk, BizTalk Server 2006 R2, and Visual Studio 2005, we will create a system that receives Excel (XLS) documents as orders, and creates invoice and inventory pick-list documents. This presentation will take you through the codeless creation of this solution using development tools that are integrated into the Visual Studio 2005 design-time environment. The Spread for BizTalk pipeline disassembler will parse Excel (XLS) data into XML-data, and the Spread for BizTalk pipeline assembler will create PDF and Excel documents from XML-data in the BizTalk Application. Explanation of the use of the BizTalk Mapper and BizTalk Orchestration is also part of this presentation. Spread for BizTalk Server 2006 provides a complete solution for integrating Microsoft Excel data seamlessly into your BizTalk applications. Spread includes a pipeline disassembler that parses Excel data (XLS, Excel 2007 XML, CSV, TXT) into XML, and a pipeline assembler that creates Excel (XLS, Excel 2007 XML) and PDF documents from XML data in BizTalk Applications. Robby Powell is Product Manager, Spread SOA Components, FarPoint Technologies and is pretty good with giving demos and answering questions, so we highly recommend this one. This is classified as a beginner level talk so don't think it's too complicated if you are new to BizTalk or Spread. We were joking about anything going wrong. Robby has done it before, with the early version of BizTalk - we blogged about in FarPoint Spread for BizTalk - Technical Brown Bag Webcast and BizTalk 2006 Technical Brown Bag Webcasts: Unlock Your Excel XLS Data. Thanks to Microsoft for putting these on. We think it's a great way to see how a product can be used to solve a real-world problem. We'll post the details when they are finalized.

FarPoint Spread for BizTalk, BizTalk, Brown Bag, Microsoft, Spread for BizTalk, Webcast

FarPoint Real-Time Chat (continued)

Gregg — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:19:03 GMT

Of course we were skeptical at first if anyone would log in and chat with us during the single hour that we were available for an online chat with whomever logged in. That was a year ago when it started to pick up in usage. Now during the course of an hour, three or four people will log in and get answers even more quickly than on our forums, and in an informal chat way that can speed communication. One of our most recent visitors put it this way during a chat session: "thanks a lot for your help.... and this is my first time to the "live" chat.... very impressive and a sure way to hold on to your customers!!!!" We felt pretty good about that one. Scott is usually there as well as a few others from the testing group. It's definitely a chance to pick some serious brains. We're even thinking about having a contest to see who can stump Scott. Give him a question that he can't figure out a good answer for. It's a tough one because he's pretty good an providing answers, and usually more quickly than the rest of us. Be sure to tell us which product and which version you are using; sometimes that can help avoid confusion and allow us to give you an answer quicker. And don't feel inhibited -- ask us anything about our products, anything that helps you find solutions to your application development issues. Whether it's how to do something in particular or how to improve speed. Or if it's a sales question, we can help with that, too. If you have a suggestion for product improvement or a new product, let us know. Or just stop by and say hello. We'll be there. So, if you like to remain somewhat anonymous and you are too impatient for email or forums, you have another alternative: real-time chat. Remember FarPoint Tech Support Chat, Tuesday mornings 10:00 to 11:00am EDT and Thursday afternoons 2:00 to 3:00pm EDT. Brought to you by FarPoint Technologies, makers of Spread. You can find a link to the chat on the left side menu of the ClubFarPoint web page or at the top the forums page. --Bill

chat, FarPoint chat, live chat, real-time chat, Tech Support, tech support chat

FarPoint Spread Training Dates

Gregg — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:23:42 GMT

In April of 2008, TakeNote was selected as an official training partner for FarPoint Technologies. Initially TakeNote is offering hands-on, instructor-led classes for Spread for Windows Forms 4.0 and Spread for Web Forms 3.0 here in the RTP, NC location. Future plans are to offer these classes across the U.S. and on-line. If coming to one of these classes is not an option for your organization, TakeNote can come to you and offer these classes onsite. We have secured June dates for those companies who are looking for training in FarPoint Spread products. FPS101: Implementing FarPoint Spread Windows Forms 4.0 June 24-25, 2008 FPS201: Implementing FarPoint Spread for Web Forms 3.0 June 26-27, 2008 Work with an individualized networked desktop computer and flat panel monitor with high-speed Internet access. We make it easy for you to get started using Spread and to get the most of these products. With the two classes back-to-back, we make it easy for you to attend both if you are an enterprise customer and have both products. This is a great opportunity if you have used our COM product for years and want a refresher course on our .NET product, or if you are new to using Spread and need to come up to speed quickly on the power of spreadsheet components. Thanks to Jim Duffy the masterful trainer at TakeNote who is spearheading the training of our .NET products. The training facility is in the Concourse Building at One Copley Parkway, Morrisville, NC, USA, at Exit 284 just three miles from RDU International Airport. It is within walking distance of ten hotels, an outlet mall, a food court, and several restaurants. Hope to see y'all soon.

FarPoint training, Jim Duffy, Spread training, TakeNote, training

Spread for SharePoint Gaining Traction

Gregg — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:08:00 GMT

Since we last posted in April about Spread for SharePoint, we have developed a Web page with more information. See Spread for SharePoint. "Spread for SharePoint is a Windows SharePoint Server v3 (WSS) integrated spreadsheet Web Part. Delivered as a SharePoint Feature, Spread for SharePoint provides SharePoint users with a feature-rich, customizable and personalizable spreadsheet experience. Spread for SharePoint takes Web Part capabilities to the next level by addressing the needs of the SharePoint Users, SharePoint Administrators, SharePoint Developers and System Integrators. " Feel free to try it out -- it's still in beta. Send an email to FPSales@FarPointSpread.com and put something like "Request to Join the Spread for SharePoint Beta Team" in the subject line. Thanks to Michael Gannotti of Microsoft for blogging about Spread for SharePoint. And thanks to those who are already signed up for the beta! --Bill

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