A while back I was helping a client upgrade SharePoint 2007 code to SharePoint 2010 and I came across this interesting problem. I was working web parts that were created in Visual Studio 2008 using WSPBuilder extensions. The first order of business was to convert them to Visual Studio 2010 templates instead of using WSPBuilder 2010 extensions. Why Use Visual Studio 2010 templates? There are two main reasons I highly recommend using Visual Studio 2010 templates instead of using WSPBuilder 2010 templates....
So, to step back up on my soapbox for a quick moment. The buzz and the noise around jQuery and Client Side development in general is growing and at a fairly rapid pace. This of course is good and bad. It’s good because our applications are becoming more and more user friendly and the visual appeal is increasing exponentially a well. Plus, as developers, we get to develop some pretty awesome functionality that before we would have had to crack open Visual Studio to get the same results. It’s definitely...
Upgrading a SharePoint farm can reveal hidden issues that may not be causing any visible consequences in your current environment. This was especially the case in a recent customer visit to assist with an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. During the upgrade we encountered the error “Failed to create field: Field type <field name> is not installed properly” while attempting to upgrade hundreds of SharePoint lists and document libraries. The issue my customer faced related to a...
As an individual who does not use Internet Explorer as their primary browser, there is a great feature that you may never notice that allows you to easily copy files to and from a document library: the Open in Windows Explorer link. In browsers such as Chrome or Firefox this link may not appear. I know this isn’t a major groundbreaking feature, but it’s really easy to overlook and it’s worth knowing about, especially when you need to create a local copy of a full document library. In this quick blog...
Over the past few years I’ve written a number of blog posts on performing various actions against a site collection or web application (display site collection admins, find all SPShell admins with database, find closed web parts). Invariably with every post I get some comments along the lines of “this is great, how can I run this against every site in the farm”. Well today you get your wish (sort of). Below you will find a template script that traverses all sites within your local farm. Isn’t that...
I have been trying to put a staging environment together to upgrade from SharePoint 2007 SP1 to SharePoint 2007 SP2. Then we will run the preupgradecheck command to varify that the database wil upgrade properly. We ran into the infamous error: Issue : Content database with modified database schemas User modifications to the SharePoint content database, including but not limited to table schemas, index, stored procedures, are not supported and will cause upgrade to future versions of SharePoint to...
Our SharePoint team at work noticed that our SharePoint 2010 farm wasn’t returning search results based on the contents of OneNote files that were saved in document libraries. I did a little research and found a solution, by putting together steps from different posts. First, some details: we’re running SharePoint 2010 SP1 (with the June 2011 CU) on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. However, this issue was seen before we applied the service packs and cumulative updates, so I’m not sure what effect, if...
Part 2 of a Dummies Guide blog posts deals with setting SharePoint’s form fields using jQuery. If you haven’t read part 1 and are a dummy like me, then go do that first because I’m going to assume you’ve read it and not go back over those pieces: A Dummies Guide to SharePoint and jQuery–Getting Started So, I have touched on this topic before in a couple of other blogs, but wanted to make it part of this series so that it was more related. One of the most common things you’ll do with jQuery in SharePoint...
I have several conferences coming up where I’ll be talking about jQuery and best practices around deployment, maintenance, and performance tuning in SharePoint and I find that I never have enough time to talk about everything I’d like. So I thought I’d write a few blogs about the subject from a complete beginners standpoint. After all, we were all beginners once and nothing frustrates me more than finding a solution to a problem, but then having no idea how to implement it. Also, in subsequent blogs...
This is a recent question I ran into on the MSDN TFS Forums. Made me think why I use it and how to make it effective. Here is what my response to this was … “My #1 justification is the fact that when you are looking at TFS source control is not all it does. TFS has the benefit of enabling a solutions team with different roles the right level of visibility. Not everyone will use Visual Studio, for example project managers. In many cases Visual Studio can intimidate the individual. When deployed with...
If you have large files in a content source that is being indexed by Sharepoint you might run into the following error message: “The file reached the maximum download limit. Check that the full text of the document can be meaningfully crawled.” This is usually caused because SharePoint’s MaxDownloadSize setting is set lower than the size of the file you are attempting to index. You can increase this value, restart the service then kick off a full crawl in order to fix this issue, but SharePoint 2007...
I’ve written a couple of posts about SharePoint 2010 Administrator training/learning, so I thought I should follow up with some tips for developer training as well…. Microsoft has two exams for SharePoint 2010 developers. The first is Exam 70-573, Application Development. The second is Exam 70-576, Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications. Those links cover the topics for each exam as well as some Microsoft preparation materials. One of the best sites, and one that I relied...
When you have Microsoft Office Communicator or Lync installed, and you visit a SharePoint site, you will get these presence indicators next to peoples’ names These indicators (or jelly beans as they are affectionately called) show whether the person is available, in a meeting, out of the office, on a call, etc. When you hover over them, they provide details about the person In SharePoint 2007 (or any other web page), whenever I needed to display a presence icon in custom code, I just use the following...
<Updated 2011-5-1: slides and code from SPSSTL linked below (or click here) and sessions for SPSMI added> <Updated 2011-5-15: slides and code from SPSMI linked below (or click here)> April 30th, 2011 I’ll be presenting at SharePoint Saturday St. Louis. My presentation is “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” which covers many of the new tools and functionality available to developers. This session is fairly demo heavy but stays more on the “overview” side rather than deep...
Only a truly geeky developer can understand the concept that I’ve been working and writing so much code lately they I need to take a break by… well.. writing more code… Anyway! My brain needed a break from my current assignments so I decided to tackle a question I saw posted about populating address fields in SharePoint with a click on a location from a map plugin. It seemed like a nice challenge and something I KNEW could be tackled as long as the proper map API existed… This turned out to be super...
April 30th, 2011 I’ll be presenting at SharePoint Saturday St. Louis. My presentation is “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” which covers many of the new tools and functionality available to developers. This session is fairly demo heavy but stays more on the “overview” side rather than deep dive. I’m excited to visit St. Louis again as I have a number of friends who live there and I’ve heard the SharePoint community is in full swing. Click here for registration information. May...
Hi All, just wanted to point out a teensy weensy but maybe very useful tip. It might be outdated information if you are using SharePoint 2010, but if you are using SharePoint 2007 then you might find this useful. I am sure all of you working with SharePoint has come across Heather Solomon through her blog, it being a really wonderful resource for skinning SharePoint. Heather also has provided a ton of help to the SharePoint community by sharing the minimal masterpages for WSS and MOSS. What I wanted...
I am in the proccess of putting together a demo machine. i arleady have a Windows 7 VM with the essentials for SharePoint Deveopment. But I spent some part of the weekend putting together a demo machine and after some thinking I decided to share some points that you might want to consider when putting together a Development or Demo machine as a SharePoint Developer\Consultant. I also welcome any comments and opinions or rebuttles to any of these points. I spent some time and put together a WIndows...
I recently did some training for a client and one of the topics that came up was upgrading existing 2007 code to SharePoint 2010 Projects. I just wanted to share some of the issues that came up and the discussion that might be usefull to others. If you developed customizations for SharePoint 2007 you either Visual Studio 2005/2008 VSeWSS 1.1/1.2/1.3 or you used WSPBuilder. A lot of fellow SharePoint MVP's and experienced SharePoint Developers used WSPBuilder. I personally prefered it over the VSeWSS...
In this post I present a script that will display all of the site collection administrators for a given web application. This script will work for SharePoint 2007 or 2010 as it uses the object model rather than the new SharePoint 2010 commandlets. Special thanks to Tasha Scott (Twitter) for posting a request for this script. It took less than 15 minutes to come up with and formalize. Solution The solution is fairly straight forward. First you grab a reference to a site collection. Get the web application...
Note: Updated 2/12/11 with links to both presentation materials. This past week I presented two sessions at SPTechCon San Francisco 2011. The first session was “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” which . Thanks to all of my attendees for this session. They had so many great questions that we ran out of time before covering all of the planned material. Especially for them I’ve provided the slides and code samples to walk through them on their own. The second session was “Real World...
So I’ve been doing some upgrades just to see if things will work from 2007 to 2010. So far most of the stuff I want works, but obviously there are some things that break. Did you guys know that in 2007 you could add a webpart to the view pages for lists and libraries without losing the toolbar? In 2010 the ribbon disappears every time you add a webpart. So if you are using Scot Hillier’s Codeplex project to hide buttons it will not work the same way, because the ribbon is going to disappear altogether....
From Feb 7th-9th I’ll be presenting two sessions at SPTechCon San Francisco 2011. My first presentation is a new session called “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” which covers many of the new tools and functionality available to SharePoint 2010 developers. My second sessions is called “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” (presented at last SPTech Con Boston) which covers tips, tricks, and advice on deploying SharePoint 2007 solutions. If you hurry you may still...
The last 6 to 8 months have been a blur. They have gone fast! Back in June I took part in a group that was creating content for Microsoft Learning to have it be their Microsoft Official Curriculum lineup for SharePoint 2010. In that process I noticed there was something different about SharePoint 2010 when compared to the wealth and quality of documentation that had been available when SharePoint 2007 was out. There is a lot of it! There is of course the MOC Offerings, and the material I worked on...
So, yesterday I presented a session for the online SharePoint Saturday event SharePoint Saturday EMEA on using SharePoint & jQuery. I created this session as an overview session on using jQuery and SharePoint together detailing best practices on deployment, maintenance, performance, and hopefully pointing some people to some good resources to help them get started. I also spent some time on why jQuery is a valuable tool for the SharePoint developer’s toolkit. If you aren’t just a jQuery hater,...
What is ULS in SharePoint 2010? ULS stands for Unified Logging Service which captures and writes Exceptions/Logs in Log File(A Plain Text File with .log extension). SharePoint logs Each and every exceptions with ULS. SharePoint Administrators should know ULS and it's very useful when anything goes wrong. but when you ask any SharePoint 2007 Administrator to check log file then most of them will Kill you. Because read and understand the log file is not so easy. Imagine open a plain text file of 20...
Document Set is a new feature introduced in SharePoint 2010 as part of content/document management. Document set helps to manage group of documents as a single entity. Actualy Document set is a content type that can be attached to any document library and make use of it's features. Advantages of Document Sets Consider a type "Project", each project has requirements document, project effort estimation spreadsheet, project plan presentation. To standardize the project management process, it's enforced...
Yes, there are still those of us that must bridle our insatiable desires to upgrade to the seemingly supreme and all-encompassing SharePoint 2010 and continue to mend our barely adequate SharePoint 2007 systems. When content types and/or site defined columns are defined at the site collection or subsite level, what are the risks to stop allowing content types based on the defined content type to inherit changes/ settings made to the defined content type? The ultimate goal is to copy items from a...
SharePoint 2010 provides pretty good dialog framework. Throughout SharePoint sites, Dialog framework has been used to avoid page redirections and keep user in same page. In SharePoint 2007 with help of Lightbox/JQuery, dialog framework can be enabled and used. But it has some limitations and time consuming. So how to open a page in Dialog framework? Well, It's pretty simple. Just add Content Editor webpart in the page and add the below code. <script type="text/javascript"> //User Defined Function...
It's a common question very often I've been asked. Well , Microsoft defines "SharePoint is a Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Internet". It's a perfect definition or IT Pros (esp. CXOs), but when it comes to Developers it requires more or different definition. SharePoint first released in the year 2001 as SharePoint Portal 2001. Basically It's a portal which has functionalities for intranet website. The features can be used as it is or can be customized minimum level. SharePoint...
Are your SharePoint pages loading slowly because you have numerous closed web parts eating up valuable resources? Are you an admin tasked with tracking down those closed web parts? Recently my friend Brian Gough asked me a fairly simple question: “Is it possible to use PowerShell to find all ‘closed’ webparts in a site collection?” In this post I’ll show you a short PowerShell script that will identify all closed web parts on a site and it’s sub-sites. Solution The script below uses an advanced function...
I've spent time the last few month checking out much of the latest in code generation tools. Again one of the most complete and comprehensive is Iron Speed Designer - now in version 7.1. I had the good fortune to talk for about a half hour with Alan Fisher of Iron Speed and I will be adding content here in the next weeks. Hopefully I can also present some examples. Here's the lastest from their press release. For Immediate Release Iron Speed,Inc. Sephorah Green 408.228.3429 sgreen@ironspeed.com http://www.ironspeed.com...
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In this post I will talk about a new script I wrote to save PowerShell ISE files to a versioned SharePoint document library as well as a side project I created on CodePlex to host this code and future releases. Background Recently I began listening to the PowerScripting Podcast and I’m slowly catching up on old podcasts. On episodes 121 and 122 (most recent ones I’ve listened to as of this writing) Hal and Jonathan talked about an idea that piqued my interest immediately: using SharePoint as a script...
We came across a bug in SharePoint 2007 backup/ restore or may SharePoint as a whole. I have been working in a project where we have site migrations and lot of other SharePoint stuffs to migrate and change to fit into the new system. What we do is, take backup, restore and do some stuff after restoration. We were getting an error while restoring a site in a particular list - Exception - Error: Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040E2F at Microsoft.SharePoint.Librar... bstrUrl,...
Here are the steps to upgrade your SharePoint 2007 "Fabulous 40 Templates" to SharePoint 2010 http://blogs.technet.com/b/...
If you’ve configured PDF for Search in SharePoint 2007 then you are certainly almost there in getting it to work with SharePoint 2010. The process is almost identical with some minor changes due to service name change and directory changes. Below are the steps to get iFilter working and configuring pdf files search in a SharePoint 2010 IFilter Install 1. Download PDF iFilter 9.0 for x64 platforms http://www.adobe.com/suppor... 2. Stop the IIS Admin Services by issuing...
(This is a series of posts covering how to include a WinForm app inside a SharePoint 2007 application, which allows users to upload batches of files to a SharePoint document library. For further info, please see Posts One, Two, and Three. All of the code can be downloaded in Post Two.) Just a quick review of our solution, as detailed in the first three posts of this series: a Custom Action adds a menu choice to a document library’s Upload menu, which links to a Windows Form application deployed using...
(This is a series of posts covering how to include a WinForm app inside a SharePoint 2007 application. For further info, please see Posts One, Two, and Four. All of the code can be downloaded in Post Two.) As I promised several months ago, I’ll cover the Custom Action piece of our solution. The custom action is used to allow the users to launch our Windows Forms application using Click Once deployment. Our custom action adds a new link to the Action menu of a document library’s toolbar: Adding a...
This month I had the pleasure of presenting at the BuckeyeSPUG (formerly Central Ohio SPUG) meeting here in Columbus, OH. This is the first time I was the main presenter at our user group, having done small presentations along with other presenters in past meetings. The attendees had some great questions and hopefully learned some new tricks to use on their SharePoint 2007 farms. Thanks to everyone who came out. Below are the slides and demo scripts for those interested. Slides and Scripts: click...
I found it very odd that this was not available when doing some search engine queries. My requirement was to take in an AD user name and query SharePoint 2010 to determine the SharePoint groups in which the account belongs. The code was to run from within a RIA Authentication Service, which is code run on a server and is not likely on the SharePoint server. This code will also work with SharePoint 2007 (WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007). You will need to add a Web Reference to http(s)://<spservername&...
This coming Saturday Aug 14th I will be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Columbus 2010 and next Thursday Aug 19th I will be speaking at the local Central Ohio SharePoint User Group (COSPUG) monthly meeting. If you’ve been following me lately you may have overheard that I’m the lead event coordinator for SharePoint Saturday Columbus. That alone has consumed almost all of my time for the past 3 months, even more so the last month. It has truly been a wild ride so far but the event is coming together...
With the busy schedule I’ve been keeping lately I realized I hadn’t even posted on here that I will be speaking at SharePoint Saturday New York (SPSNY) 2010 this weekend. I will be presenting my “Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms With PowerShell” session for the second time ever. The last time I presented this talk SharePoint 2010 hadn’t RTMed yet so I’ve updated the slides and demo scripts a little bit since then. Aside from giving this presentation I’m also excited to be sitting in on a number of...
Since installing Option Pack 4 for Windows NT to get IIS running Classic ASP, we have all felt the lack of ease from Microsoft to actually create websites on a developer box. There has always been an expressed need to not need a custom configured machine to install Visual Studio and create web sites right away. Why must we open Windows Configuration and add all these pieces if a solution for our OS could be added to the development product line. My first development job was 10 years ago when I worked...
I’m happy to announce that I’ll be speaking at SPTechCon Boston 2010 this upcoming October 20-22. The presentation I will be giving is titled “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” and below is the session abstract. I’m very excited to be speaking at SPTechCon Boston as I attended and live blogged the recent SPTechCon San Francisco this past Feb (link here to recap of that event) and was impressed with all of the people and content I was exposed to. If you have a chance to attend SPTechCon...
I ran across a blog entry with a consolidated list of links to the SharePoint 2007 planning worksheets. These are good starting points for your discovery, analysis, and design and are provided by Microsoft. I would suggest tweaking them to meet your organizational needs. http://itfootprint.wordpres... TechNet provides a consolidated list of planning worksheets for SharePoint 2010. http://technet.microsoft.co... Technorati...
Webinar: Filling the Gap in SharePoint Records Management Find out how you can solve your challenges with conceptClassifier for SharePoint and leverage SharePoint 2007 and 2010 in this free one hour webinar. This informative webinar will focus on records management in SharePoint and how Concept Searching’s award winning conceptClassifier for SharePoint automatically generates conceptual and descriptor metadata from documents, automatically changes the Content Type, and automatically declares records....
For Immediate Release Iron Speed, Inc. Kelly Fisher +1 (408) 228-3436 kfisher@ironspeed.com http://www.ironspeed.com Iron Speed Version 7.0 Generates SharePoint Applications New! Support for Microsoft SharePoint speeds application generation and deployment San Jose, CA – June 8, 2010. Software development tools-maker Iron Speed, Inc. released Iron Speed Designer Version 7.0, the latest version of its popular Web 2.0 application generator. Iron Speed Designer generates rich, interactive database and...
The title of this post is pretty self explanatory, but I thought it worth mentioning since I had never run across this rule until just recently. A few weeks ago I was testing out a new workflow attached to a SharePoint 2007 document library. I uploaded various file types to ensure all were handled properly. One of the files I happened to test with was an empty .txt file to which I got the following error. As you can see from the error message you aren’t allowed to upload a file that is empty. Fast...
I saw an MSDN Forum post today, so I looked for a ListInstance Hidden property in SharePoint 2007 features. There is none, but interestingly enough there is one in 2010. I wondered what would happen if you did this: <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.micro... <ListInstance FeatureId="00bfea71-de22-43... Title="Hidden List Test" Description="Testing a hidden list." TemplateType="100" Hidden="TRUE" OnQuickLaunch="FALSE" Url="Lists/TestHidden" /> </Elements>...