MetaShare Beta 1

MetaShare Beta 1 is now available at http://metashare.sourceforge.net.  This release now includes the TIFL document architecture that allows for construction of various target drivers.  The two target drivers that I’ve written so far are FlexWiki and HTML.  The TIFL format is very close to HTML so adding HTML wasn’t too hard.  There is a new command line switch to choose which output is wanted.

I’d like to consider writing a driver for a couple more targets including SharePoint wiki as well as a product called Perspective wiki.   This is a feature request that I’ll add and we’ll see where it goes.

I had thought about implementing SQL authentication for the suite of tools instead of using integrated authentication, but I’d like to give it a go at using integrated authentication for now.  I like having built in security for the suite so that not just anyone can log on to the website and update/mess up the internal metadata.  Hopefully someone will give some feedback in either a comment here on the blog or a feature/bug request on the SourceForge site.

MetaShare is still a beta product and I’d really like some feedback on how it is working for everyone.  I’d really like to take feedback into account before christening it version 1 and having an “official” release.  Let me know any suggestions or problems.  Hopefully we can make this a value add to the Microsoft BI stack.

MetaShare Progress

I’m getting really close to having the TIFL (Target Indpendant Formating Language) architecture completed in MetaShare.  This slices MetaShare into layers so that the particular target formatting is not intertwined with the generation of metadata collaboration documents.  This should hopefully be completed within the next few weeks.  The next item will be changing MetaShare.Web to run off of sql authentication.

Disappearing Cursors in Virtual PC

I’m using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 for demos and stuff and the cursor disappears whenever it is suposed to be an I-Beam.  This happens over text boxes and combo boxes – anything with an I-Beam.

I emailed someone on the VPC team and he suggested changing the cursor theme.  This didn’t seem to work but I found a workaround.  I changed two settings in the VPC:  I turned off “hide my cursor when I’m typing” and also turned on the cursor trails.  At least that was I could figure out where my cursor is.

Good enough for now.

FlexWiki Permisions

I was setting up FlexWiki and running MetaShare.Generate for the first time on a fresh VPC of Windows XP and noticed that I couldn’t edit the generated documents.  I realized that I needed to give the ASPNET account full access to the files in the MyWiki folder under the WikiBases folder.  This could also be used to manage contributor and reader permission across the entire set of wiki files.

MetaShare Project Website

I have written a very simple project website for MetaShare that details information about the project, steps to run a demo of MetaShare.Generate, and some architecture information on how MetaShare is built.  There is also a link to download MetaShare.

I hope that this will help folks get started on using MetaShare.

Holler with any suggestions.