Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 available

Microsoft released the 2nd update for Visual Studio 2012 on April 25, 2013. The download is available here -

http://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=38188

Learn more about the changes and fixes here -

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2013/04/04/visual-studio-2012-update-2-now-available.aspx

What's New in Office 365 - Article on SharePoint Team Blog

A nice article on the new features of SharePoint Online by the SharePoint Team can be found here -

http://blogs.office.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2013/04/02/what-s-new-in-sharepoint-online-top-10.aspx

Hope it helps in understanding the capabilities of the updated SharePoint online.

SharePoint 2013 - March 2013 and April 2013 CU

The latest CUs (Cumulative updates) for SharePoint 2013 have been released. The links are provided in this Technet Article -

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/jj891062.aspx

You can find the April 2013 CU's here -

SPF 2013 April 2013 CU - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2751999
SP 2013 April 2013 CU - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2726992

I am hoping that these CUs address some of the issues I am having with making the User Profile Sync service up and running :-)

IT Professional Reviewer's Guide for SharePoint 2013

If you are looking at getting a very quick & to-the-point document on the new capabilities of SharePoint 2013 then download the "IT Professional Reviewer's Guide" from the following link -

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34023

Setting up Service Applications to run SharePoint 2013 Apps

If you have just installed SharePoint 2013 (and not run the Farm Configuration wizard that instantiates all Service Applications to save memory) and would like to try out some Apps, you will get an error during deployment from Visual Studio 2012.

To enable running of SharePoint 2013 Apps we need to setup the following Service Applications -

1. SharePoint, App Management Service
2. Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Service

The App Management Service can be created from the Central Admin and does not need any special steps. Just create it like any other Service Application.

The Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Service cannot be instantiated using the UI and can only be created using the following using PowerShell script -