During the last days I've been asked several times for the possibility to convert, as easy as possible, any Word-files into pdfs. Usually one of the following things crossed my mind instantly:

- OpenOffice offers the option to save files as pdfs.

- The Office 2007 plugin "Save as PDF" (naturally requires Office 2007)

- The Acrobat Distiller (Part of the commercial Acrobat from Adobe)

From time to time I made myself some trouble searching for an up-to-date version of some tools, that might could help me, but most of the time I recommended, to the guys that haven't had Office 2007 installed, to download and install OpenOffice.

Since today I would recommend, to the guys without Office 2007, because I like its plugin, to download the "PDF Printer" from Bullzip. The PDF-Printer ist free and requires only the installation of "Ghostscript". Both downloads can be found on the download-page of Bullzip:

After the installation, there's a new printer placed in your system control panel. If you select that device and print your document, a dialog appears, which asks you for the target file location. After you selected the destination, everything will happen automatically.

Today I tried for the first time to create a Silverlight 1.1 (respectively 2.0) project. But even during the first try to compile the project, I got lots and lots of errors, saying that there was a namespace missing. The namespace I read at most was: "System.Windows".

In the silverlight board I found several other guys, which encountered the same problem as I had and couldn't solve it, even if the un- and reinstalled Silverlight and event the whole Visual Studio ... Obviously they made the same fault as I did :-D

If you create a silverlight project it looks as follows:

If you're also having corrupted references for the assemblies "agclr", "system.silverlight" and "system.Xml.core", you probably made a fault during the installation of Silverlight 1.1.

After I downloaded all tools I found on the Silverlight-page, I had to confess to myself, that I've had ignored one download ... It was the "Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh" runtime. I thought that everything I needed was in the SDKs - that's a wrong conclusion!

If you install the VS-tools, you just get the TEMPLATES, which are telling VS how to handle that Silverlight stuff. The assemblies themselfes are in the browser plugin...

The alert I was shown was: "Please close all browser windows first and uninstall Silverlight". For sure I didn't want to uninstall Silverlight - and that was my fault. Obviously you have to uninstall any Silverlight plugins to install the current version.

Meanwhile everything works fine (and great!)

Today it was the time I waited for. Almost as on christmas I was glad that as I entered the page of "Sitecore Xpress", there was no longer the teaser saying "Coming to a server near you...", but a nice looking download page. For sure I logged in instantly and downloaded it. Small 250MB, which needed less than 10 minutes on their way to my desktop ... the license code on the other hand took his time ... I got it at 4pm - But the waiting was worth it. Now I can finally play around with it on VISTA...

The commercial Sitecore (recently called "Sitecore red") had some problems with IIS on Vista ... But I think that will be also fixed on the next version, which I await shortly.

In any way - it's nice to simply ignore the small error message on the beginning (saying the IIS would not run) and just start installing it and - who would have believed - after some minutes - a browser window opened, the page appeared and it simply works. This is how it looks on my screen: 

That cheered my heart.

But what the hell is Sitecore? Sitecore is a highly developed CMS - the best I've ever seen. You almost have the like on your own desktop, if you're welcomed directly after the login with the following screen:

(Yes - that's a screenshot of the current version) ... so just don't wonder if the windows need a little bit longer on the first opening... .Net has to compile the libraries for the first run.

As you can see on the screenshot, the interface looks almost like an Windows-desktop ... and also the "Content Editor" corresponds to the layout of the Windows-Explorer. As a Windows user you shouldn't have any problems to find your way through the system:

So if you would gladly try that CMS, which is normally for commercial use only and which is also used in enterprise solutions: Download Sitecore Xpress in any case! It's free and you won't ever have the same kind of fun with any other CMS ;-).

Links

Sitecore Website

Sitecore Xpress Website (DOWNLOAD)

German Sitecore Solution Partner "netzkern GmbH"