Registered for Microsoft PDC 09

Registered to attend the Microsoft Professional Developers conference in Los Angeles in November. Hoping to learn a lot about programming for Windows 7 and Server R2 and also want to get a lot more knowledge on Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0.

Looking forward to this along with the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas in October and this is my first time to the big developer’s conferences in the U.S; it should be a good experience.

You can more info at the PDC site.

Localizing a SharePoint UI using ASP.Net Resource Files

I have a requirement for a project I’m working on to make all strings in the UI of a SharePoint 2007 site localized. The problem was that the rest of the site collection needed to stay in English, this meant all the system and admin pages needed to stay in English while all the user interface needed to be localized. The requirement also stated that an admin of the site collection could change this is the admin pages.

I immediately turned to ASP.Net resource files as this would achieve exactly what I wanted, I wanted to use the Regional Settings -> Locale setting in the site collection to determine the locale to show. The problem with this was that changing the sites Regional Settings Locale had no effect on the CurrentUICulture that the current ASP.Net thread was running under, this meant that ASP.Net would load the resource file for the user’s browser not the resource file for the locale of the site collection.

I used the following blog post from Mikhail Dikov which is a good example of how to use ASP.Net resource files in a SharePoint site. The blog post fails to mention however that for the culture to change within a SharePoint site you need the language packs installed and this would affect the whole site collection, admin pages and all.

So the following is an outline of how I achieved my goal:

• First I created a default resource file which contained all the English strings and then resource files for each locale I wanted to support.
• Next I deployed these resource files into my SharePoint web applications App_GlobalResources folder (see Mikhail’s blog post on how to deploy your resource files using a SharePoint feature).

• I then added the following code to my page layout which changed the current ASP.Net threads UI culture to the same culture of the SharePoint site collection:

<script runat=”server”>
protected override void InitializeCulture()
{
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContext.Current.Web.Locale;
base.InitializeCulture();
}
</script>

This made sure that each time the page loads the ASP.Net culture was set to the correct site collection culture.

• Now that the correct ASP.Net culture is selected in the page we can go ahead and localize our strings in the page layout like this:

  <asp:Literal runat=”server” Text=”<%$Resources:MyResourceFile,MyLocalizedStringKey %>“ />

  Note that we can also just use “<%$Resources:MyResourceFile,MyLocalizedStringKey%>” in any ASP.Net web controls property if you don’t want to use a Literal control.

And that’s all there is to it, I think it’s a clean and simple way to localize the SharePoint UI without using language packs and localizing the whole site collection including admin and system pages.

SharePoint 2010 overview videos

Microsoft have released a site for SharePoint 2010 that has some videos with overviews of the new stuff coming in the next version of SharePoint.

The videos cover both features for I.T. Pros and Developers so head over to the site and check them out asap!

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

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.

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.

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

Visual Studio 2010 will vastly improve Sharepoint development

Microsoft is really improving the tooling support for Sharepoint developers in the next release of Visual Studio including being able to “F5″ debug from inside Visual Studio and VS handling all the package deployment, process attaching, app pool recycling etc which will be really helpful.

Also they will be providing lots of VS templates which give us some nice designers for things like WebParts and Features so we don’t have to worry about GUID matching and hand writing our XML files which should save bundles of time when setting up and new solution.

Channel9 have a cool video screen cast which gives a brief overview of what’s coming in VS 2010 for Sharepoint devs.

Migrated blog using Sharepoint Community Kit Enhanced Blog Edition 2.0

I have just migrated alot of this sites content across to my Sharepoint site hosted on a server in my office you can view the new blog here http://portal.athousandthreads.net/sites/leedaleblog/ .

I’m using CKS EBE 2.0 to power the site and created my own custom theme which is very easy to do if your used to creating MOSS master pages.

You can check out CKS EBE 2.0 over on codeplex here http://www.codeplex.com/CKS .

I will still be posting articles to this blog and just replicating them across there.