SharePoint Conference 09, Bangkok and Sketchflow

This is my first blog post since February which is rubbish but I’ve been so busy with work and stuff in my personal life like getting married I just haven’t had the time.

I’ve been working on a pretty big Web Content Management system for a large company which I can’t say much about at the moment as it’s under wraps but I’ve been learning a lot of useful stuff developing this solution and increased my skills around SharePoint especially in the WCM area so will hopefully be blogging some more SharePoint stuff soon.

I registered to attend the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 09 in Vegas so looking forward to that and I’m off to Bangkok next week to do some work I’ve just come back from Barbados for our honeymoon so I’m doing a lot of travelling this year which is all good to me.

I attended the London DotNet User group meeting last week at which the infamous Scott Guthrie did a talk on Silverlight and showed us some new features of Silverlight 3. He also showed us a new product which looks like it’s coming with the next version of the Expression Suite called Sketch Flow. Sketch Flow basically allows you to quickly mock up UI’s and allows you to obtain feedback from clients and customers then allows you to turn this mock up into a real Silverlight application. It looks quite useful and I look forward to trying it out myself.

Anyway hope to be blogging some new technical articles in the near future and you can always follow my tweets at twitter.com/leejdale

Web.config Transformations with Visual Studio 2010

When deploying a web application across your organizations hosting environments you need to make sure you make the correct modifications to your web.config on each environment. Currently with Visual Studio 2008 this means hand modifying each web.config to make connection strings point to the right database servers, changing the debug compilation attribute to false etc. Doing this for each deployment can be a major pain and can allow bugs to slip into your environments, for instance you may forget to modify your connection string and have your production application pointing to your staging server or have your application underperform because you have left debug compilation on.

Thankfully the Visual Studio team has come up with a great feature to be included in the next release of the IDE that allows you to keep a copy of transformations for each web.config. Your transformations will get applied to your main web.config when the application is deployed to each environment. This should greatly improve the deployment experience and help keep deployment errors down to a minimum.

Channel9 have a video all about it so head over to there and check it out.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/10-4-Episode-10-Making-Web-Deployment-Easier/

New website: www.moggymart.com

A while back I decided to build a website for allowing people to post free classified advertisements for pets and animals; I decided to use ASP.Net 2.0 with AJAX Extensions and SQL Server 2005. User registration and authentication was done using the ASP.Net Forms Based Authentication with SQL Server Membership Providers.

As normally happens with side projects I gave up on it because I was too busy with my day to day projects and never touch it for a long while. Lately I picked it up again and decided to at least finish what I started so the first release looks like this www.moggymart.com

I plan to add more features when I get time and would be grateful for any feedback on the site.

Creating an Enhanced Rich Text Field in your SharePoint Content Types

When creating custom content types inside your features or site definitions you need to specify field definitions to define your custom fields. I was trying to create a Enhanced Rich Text field within my Content Type but was struggling to find the right XML.

Eventually I found out you need to include the RichText=”TRUE” and RichTextMode=”FullHtml” attributes within your field definition as shown below:

<Field

    ID=”{8A2EA652-DDCB-4bf7-84EE-129E7B7A5403}”
    Name=”ArticleBody”
    Group=”Reuters columns”
    DisplayName=”Article Body”
    Type=”Note”
    Sealed=”FALSE”
    ReadOnly=”FALSE”
    Hidden=”FALSE”
    RichText=”TRUE”
    RichTextMode=”FullHtml”
    DisplaceOnUpgrade=”TRUE” />

I can’t understand why this information isn’t more readily available and well documented on MSDN.

Back on Twitter

After giving up on twitter a while back I’ve decided to give it another go so I have signed up for a new account (I couldn’t get my old one back). If you want to follow me my username is leejdale.

I am using the Twitterific client application for OS X which seems to be doing the trick right now.

Best Intranets of 2009 show dramatic increase in the use of SharePoint.

I read an article today over at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html which details the 10 best intranets of 2009 (or should that be 2008?).

The article had an interesting excerpt which outlines the growing use of SharePoint in the top intranet sites and especially the growth in the use of MOSS 2007.

In total, the 10 winners were built on 26 different products — substantially fewer than the 41 used in 2008 or the 49 used in 2007. Most impressively, fully half of the winning intranets used SharePoint, especially the recent MOSS platform (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007). As the following chart shows, SharePoint use has grown dramatically in recent years. This is particularly impressive given that, from 2003–2006, the winning intranets didn’t use earlier versions of SharePoint at all.

Here is a graph from the article which shows the growth in the use of SharePoint within the winning group of intranet sites.

As you can see up until 2007 none of the winning sites were using any form of SharePoint at all.

Go check out the article it’s a good read and shows that MOSS development and SharePoint knowledge in general is a good skill to have in today’s market.

New Gadget: Sony eBook Reader PRS-505S

Often I need to carry around large reference books for work which means lugging around 600 pages of SharePoint information in my backpack every day. I’ve been wanting to try out an eBook reader for a while so started to look around the web for the best one.

I came across the Sony PRS-505S and read some good reviews on it, so decided to take the plunge and order one. I eventually ordered from the Waterstones online store which had the best price at £194.

The device turned up two days later and I must say first impressions were good, it was stylish, lightweight and felt solid. I installed the Sony Library application which incidentally is a Windows only application and there is no support for Mac as far as I know. Not a problem I just installed it on my Vista VM and headed over to www.ebooks.com.

I am currently studying for a SharePoint MCTS exam so wanted to download the study guide as an eBook and www.ebooks.com had the book for $49.99. Currently I think eBooks are quite expensive and for these devices to take off they need to come down in price quite a bit I think, when they do I think this is definitely the mainstream future for reading books.

The Sony Reader uses e-ink technology and this makes reading on the device a very pleasurable experience I would go so far as to say even better than reading actual paper. It also takes SD cards and supports SD HC so I stuck in an 8GB card which worked perfectly and give me the potential to store thousands of books.

The device doesn’t have a backlit display so reading in the dark may be a problem but overall I am very pleased and can now leave the big heavy books at home which should help me to avoid back trouble in the future.

Microsoft release CTP of Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint

Microsoft announced a new release for the VS 2008 extensions for SharePoint on Monday and finally amongst the new features is x64 support!

I do all my MOSS 2007 development on an x64 box and couldn’t make use of the handy extensions for Visual Studio which has allows you to quickly and consistently create a number SharePoint solutions.

Now it’s possible so go download and check out the new CTP here.

Here is a list of the new features included:

· Can be installed on x64 Server OS machines running SharePoint x64. Previously only x86 Server OS could be used.

· Separate build commands for package, deploy and retract are added

· Command line build, package and retract commands are included enabling continuous integration and build servers. Previously command line build of SharePoint projects was very difficult

· Refactoring support for renaming of Web Parts. Previously renaming a web part required changes in several files in the project

· WSP View improvements for consistency of deleting feature elements, merging features and adding event receivers to features

· Solution Generator can now generate solutions from publishing sites. Previously only regular sites could be generated

· Allowing partial trust BIN deployments of web parts. CAS configuration must still be provided by the developer.

· New project item template for SharePoint RootFiles items

· Deployment will now optionally remove conflicting existing features on the development server prior to redeployment. Previously any feature name conflicts would result in an error

· Ancillary assemblies such as for business logic can now be added to the SharePoint Solution WSP

· Hidden features related to Site Definition projects are now shown in WSP View. They are no longer hidden

· For advanced users a fast deploy is included to update only the compiled assembly on the SharePoint development installation

· The User Guide is now installed with the extensions instead of being a separate download

Book review: Professional SharePoint 2007 Development

I will be frequently reviewing books on my blog from now on and I would like to start with a good wholesome SharePoint (MOSS 2007) development book entitled Professional SharePoint 2007 Development.

The book is written by some very knowledgeable SharePoint guys who have a vast amount of experience developing on the SharePoint platform. The book provides a good programmer to programmer learning experience from real world professionals who have been developing SharePoint solutions out in the wild for a number of years.

The authors of the book are: John Holiday, John Alexander, Jeff Julian, Eli Robillard, Brendon Schwartz, Matt Ranlett, J. Dan Attis, Adam Buenz and Tom Rizzo.

It’s a fairly large book some 716 pages long packed full of good solid SharePoint development techniques and good examples to guide you along the way.

The table of contents looks like this:

• Chapter 1 – The Microsoft Application Platform and SharePoint
• Chapter 2 – MOSS 2007 Overview for Developers
• Chapter 3 – The SharePoint User Experience
• Chapter 4 – WSS v3 Platform Services
• Chapter 5 – Programming Windows SharePoint Services
• Chapter 6 – A Sample Collaboration Solution
• Chapter 7 – RSS, Blogs, and Wikis
• Chapter 8 – Building Personalized Solutions
• Chapter 9 – Using Enterprise Search
• Chapter 10 – Using the Business Data Catalog
• Chapter 11 – Building Document Management Solutions
• Chapter 12 – Building Records Management Solutions
• Chapter 13 – Building Web Content Management Solutions
• Chapter 14 – Electronic Forms in MOSS 2007
• Chapter 15 – Building Workflow Solutions
• Chapter 16 – Business Intelligence and SharePoint Server 2007
• Appendix A: Using the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Extension for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

The book covers most if not all of the fundamentals to get you started building solutions with WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 and has whole chapters dedicated to building certain types of solutions such as using MOSS as a CMS platform and utilising the web content management features of the product.

I have had this book for a while now and find myself constantly referring back to it especially to lookup some XML I forgot.

As a summary this book covers a wide range of topics and focuses on teaching the right development techniques from an experienced developer’s point of view and is an excellent source to refer back to when you’re stuck. I would definitely recommend getting this if you are planning to do any development on the SharePoint platform.

I’ll be giving a copy of this book away as a prize in the near future but if you want to get your hands on it now then head over to http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470117567.html to purchase it for a mere £31.99.

ISBN: 978-0-470-11756-9

Trying to run the VS 2010 CTP Virtual PC image inside VMWare Fusion on Mac OSX

I wanted to try out the latest CTP of Visual Studio 2010 but the CTP comes in the form of a VPC 2007 image which meant I had to run it inside a virtual machine. Not a problem in most cases but I already run all my Windows applications inside VMWare Fusion and this got me wondering how Virtual PC 2007 would run inside VMWare Fusion if it would run at all.

The answer is sadly no, I got the error message below when trying to boot up the VM. Looks like I’ll have to natively boot Vista to try out the VS 2010 CTP, no big deal but would have been kind of fun to run a VM inside a VM. Oh well.