For those people that want to evaluate and try Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, Microsoft released last week the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration Virtual Machine.

It seems to be ready for Hyper-V and it encompasses in fact two virtual machines :

1.- A domain controller server with SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2010 and the Office Suite 2010

2.- A joined Windows Server 2008

As everything has a price, the download weight 13.5GB :-)

Google is working on a new language named "Go" and they call it a "systems programming language". It is not the intent to make a review or to compare it with other existing language, far from that, but it worth having a look at that new language.
First, the syntax is similar to the languages that most of the people are used to. It is more or less the same as C or Java. A bit closer to C anyway for some reason described further in this post. One notable difference is that the type is defined after a variable name, for example.
One of the goal of the language is to simplify the code or to make it less verbose. But, as a tradeoff, it makes the code reading more difficult, or maybe it is just a matter of getting used to the syntax. For example, there is only one keyword for the loops : for
A thing I find nice is the possibility for a function to return more than one value and therefore they introduced multiple return functions.
The other features of the language are summarized here :
Anonymous functions
Slices; a part of an 0-based array
Maps; other word for dictionary
Object orientation using structures; which makes it closer to C than Java and in my opinion not the best thing the language could have
Interfaces
No inheritance; Instead of supporting object inheritance, the creators of the language prefer to use composition of structs
Real-Time flavour; My ADA background reveals to the surface when I see the constructs of Go to support multitasking. What I liked a lot in ADA was the possibility to write methods that were callable from other tasks and how easy it was to create a multi-task program. With Go, it seems that simple. You define a method and rather than calling it normally, you prefix it with the keyword "go" :

go MyParallelTask;

Communication in a multi-task program can also be a challenge, being just to exchange information or data or just to synchronize two tasks. With Go, you need to instantiate a channel and use arrows (channelname <- value and variablename := <- channelname) to send to or received data from the channel. That channel can be synchronous or in other words blocking enabling the synchronization between two tasks or can by asynchronous (under certain limits given by the buffer size of the channel).

On the side of what is not in Go, we have :
Generics or templates
Exceptions

For those two points, the Go team has not yet decided if they would add these features for the reasons that can be read here : http://golang.org/doc/go_lang_faq.html#generics

In conclusion, it is too early to say if this language will succeed and gain many market shares in the programming world. It will mainly depend on the built-in libraries and the platform that will support it. Less important for such system languages is the interoperability features and how a Go program will be able to communicate with the external world. Another success factor is the developer community. Today, Go is only available for Linux or Mac OS X and probably some tools or IDEs would be needed in the future, but not sure because as it is mentioned a number of times, the aim of the language is system programming language and therefore not playing in the same field as C# and other high-level languages.

Title : Essential SharePoint 2007 - Delivering High-Impact Collaboration

Authors : Scott Jamison, Mauro Cardarelli, Susan Hanley

Summary :
Deploying SharePoint and leaving it to the users and not monitoring it is the best way for failure. This is known and true also for non-SharePoint projects. But what really lacks with SharePoint is how to demonstrate the management what could bring SharePoint in an organization and how to improve the SharePoint infrastructure during its life. In other words, when deploying SharePoint, governance is one of the important keys to success.
This books not only describes the SharePoint functionalities but also gives some guidance to better know your organization and how to solve its collaboration problems and is the first SharePoint book I read that is talking about "information architecture". It describes the different 2003 to 2007 migration options, what are the possible backup, restore and disaster recovery scenarios. Then it goes through Records Management, workflows, Search and finally Business Intelligence, providing plenty of step-by-step examples and screenshots

Onthe other side, I had the chance to attend the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas session of Scott and Susan that was very interesting and a source of inspiration to make a SharePoint deployment a success not only from a provider point of view, but also a success for the users.

Review :
This book is not for developer or technical people, but more for people that need to sell SharePoint as a collaboration platform. For me, it is not for end-users as well. We can feel that the book is not relying only on the functional expertise of SharePoint but also on the way information workers are working with IT and their habits. Excellent examples can be taken to put in front the business value or the benefits of the platform. Finally, I think this book is a good starter for talking about SharePoint governance.

Title : Foundations of BizTalk Server 2006

Author : Daniel Woolston

Summary :
BizTalk Server 2006 was until last year, the latest version of the middleware product from Microsoft. Since, the new version, BizTalk Server 2009, has been released. Despite BizTalk Server 2006 is not the first or second version of the product, it really needs documentation on how to use and develop on this platform as it is absolutely difficult or impossible to start on such product like this.
The book is structured around the different component or pieces of BizTalk : Messaging, Schemas, Maps, Ports, Orchestrations. It covers all the aspects of the product even tackling the application deployment.
It is full of useful screenshots and the explanations are clear enough even if you don't have the software at hand.

Review :
Working with BizTalk since couple of years, I found the book quite basic. Ok, the title contains "Foundations", so don't expect advanced explanation but rather take it as a first look at BizTalk. A good example is to read it before an intermediate or advanced training. At the end, it gives an excellent overview of what can be done and how can specific problems can be solved with BizTalk Server 2006. Another good point is that it is not a big pad to read and can be absorbed in a week-end :-)

Title : SharePoint 2007 User's Guide: Learning Microsoft's Collaboration and Productivity Platform

Author : Seth Bates, Tony Smith

Summary :
This book described the different functionality of SharePoint 2007 from a users and power users point of view. Therefore, this book is not technical and is not showing any code.
First, the notion of sites, lists and document libraries are described with a lot of screenshots. Then, the book is going through workflows, policies and the different way of page personalization, finishing by two case studies or solutions solving document management and project collaboration in few steps.

Review :
Definitely, this book is not for techies or advanced users. Nevertheless, as the book is really user oriented, you can learn some functionalities that are less exposed or used but nevertheless very useful. It means that if people know already SharePoint or working with the product on a daily basis, it can be read quickly.
The two solutions presented at the end of the book are very good examples of how to address typical collaboration problems quickly and providing a high value without going into an expensive development project.

The next meeting of the Swiss SharePoint Club will take place in Basel. The topics will be around workflows and projects management.

For more information and registration, it is here : http://clubsps.wordpress.com/