Andrew Connell [MVP MOSS]

Conferences and the Twitter Phenomenon #SPCONN09

Andrew Connell — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:04:30 GMT

At the SharePoint Conference a few weeks ago in Las Vegas I found Twitter to be a very cool tool during the show. I really like it from two perspectives: the presenter & the attendee.

From the attendee’s perspective…

When you’re attending a session you post messages in Twitter and include a hashtag that includes the session number. This message can be an open question, feedback on what is going on in the session or letting others know how things are going in the session. This is great for attendees that are attending the session as you can have a complete dialog during the session without interrupting the presenter or being rude to people sitting around you. What’s also cool though is the presenter can have someone else in the room answering questions as they come up. Another cool benefit is that other conference attendees in other sessions can see how other sessions are going and make a decision to switch sessions.

To most effectively do this, include the hashtag for the conference as well as the session number. That way people can search just on the conference hashtag or the specific session.

From the presenter’s perspective…

Unfortunately when we present, we can’t monitor the discussion during the session, but what’s really cool is being able to come back after the session and search for all the tweets that include the hashtag of the session. This way we can see what people were talking about and even follow up to some questions after the session is over. It’s also great because it gives us a chance to clarify something that didn’t get presented just right, elaborate on something in a demo, or even address a question that someone didn’t get to ask because we ran out of time or they had to run to another session.

Try it out! Next week at SharePoint Connections in Las Vegas, make sure you use the hashtag #spconn09 and one for the session you’re in using the session code. For instance, if you’re sitting in one of mine your tweet would look something like “In @AndrewConnell’s session #hdv301 on ECM at #spconn09 waiting for it to start.”

Looking forward to the dialog!!

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,twitter

SharePoint 2010 Changes in Rendering

Andrew Connell — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:09:39 GMT

In SharePoint 2007 many customers provided lots of feedback to Microsoft… ok, they complained… that the markup generated by SharePoint 2007 (which also meant WSS 3.0 & ASP.NET 2.0) was not clean, concise or friendly to accessibility requirements.

What’s new in the SharePoint 2010 generated markup story…

Microsoft heard this loud and clear and committed to have SharePoint 2010 generate WCAG 2.0 AA complaint markup. However you may seen or heard in various places, even from a Microsoft person, in a blog or in some news report, that SharePoint is also generating XHTML 2.0 Strict markup… that is not true. The product team has not committed to that and in my opinion people seem to be getting a bit too carried away. This is usually the result of folks who seem to be inferring what WCAG 2.0 AA is (frankly… as we’ve all seen, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what an accessible site really is). There are and will be a few extra attributes that Microsoft added to the markup which would not conform to the strict rules. Regardless, the most important thing here is WCAG 2.0 AA support which covers a very big spectrum of accessibility guidelines and requirements.

One of the most common complaints I saw was the the OOTB controls, like the ASP.NET menu control, generated HTML TABLE based markup. What people really wanted was a more CSS friendly rendering (as tables are supposed to used only when presenting data in a tabular form, not in controlling the presentation). One way around this was to use control adapters, something Randy Drisgill talked a good bit about. This was also the approach of the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint which basically swapped out the default rendering with CSS friendly renderings.

Let’s see the difference…

Thankfully Microsoft has changed the rendering of the controls in SharePoint 2010 right out-of-the-box (OOTB) so we don’t have extra work to do! Check out this sample rendering… I took an OOTB Publishing site from SharePoint 2007 and saved the rendered page as raw HTML. Then, I backed up the site, restored it in SharePoint 2010 and upgraded the visuals to the new 2010 UI. Then I saved the rendered results as a raw HTML file. One big thing to take note of: I didn’t do anything to the markup, I just upgraded the site and then told SharePoint to use the new 2010 rendering instead of the 2007 rendering. Taking these two HTML files, one with a 2007 rendering and one with a 2010 rendering, I looked for the global navigation. Check out what I found…

Here’s what the global navigation looks like in SharePoint 2007:

That’s clearly table based rendering… the CSS & accessibility purists are saying “yuk… I’ve worked so hard in 2007 to mitigate that rendering, why show it again?!”

Now check out what it looks like in SharePoint 2010 after you tell the site collection to use the 2010 rendering (aka: upgrade the visuals):

While there’s a bit more markup, there are no tables… all unordered lists which are much easier to deal with on accessible sites & with custom branded sites! Keep in mind the coolest part about this: I didn’t touch the markup at all in the page layout or master page… I just clicked the magic button that said “use the 2010 rendering & visuals, not the 2007 ones.” I love magic buttons…

One more thing…

In the previous post and in my SharePoint Conference session, I said the following (paraphrased): when you upgrade to 2010 & upgrade the visuals, your site will still just work. That’s not entirely true in all cases. As you can see from these rendering changes above, you could very easily have some rendering nuances as the underlying markup your branding was written to may have changed with this new markup rendering from some controls you were leveraging… so there may be a bit of extra cleanup.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint 2010,publishing site,wcm

Upgrading a SharePoint 2007 Publishing Site Master Page to SharePoint 2010

Andrew Connell — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:09:45 GMT

At the SharePoint Conference in Vegas two weeks ago I co-presented a session with Chris Johnson from Microsoft on how to upgrade a SharePoint 2007 Publishing site to SharePoint Server 2010. We covered some pre-upgrade stuff, things to watch out for, but what I think was likely the most interesting piece of the whole session was when we took a content DB backup of a 2007 site, restored it and added it to SharePoint 2010 (using a similar process I wrote about previously) and then modified created a new master page from the sites custom branded 2007 master page and added the 2010 stuff like the ribbon and developer dashboard.

It was a fairly easy process believe it or not… what I liked about the demo was we intentionally ran into a few errors along the way (yes, those were expected for those who were in attendance) because I wanted to show what a real world process looked like. For those of you who were at the conference, I had also written one of the hands on labs available to attendees (#321) that walked you through the process on the SharePoint Server2010 Beta 1 / tech preview build.

This week I had planned to write a nice detailed blog post on how to do this exact same thing in beta 1 and beta 2, but in the process of poking around the beta SDK on MSDN I blogged about the other day, I noticed there’s a great page already there explaining the same process I was going to write about! Why reinvent the wheel, esp. considering the MSDN page has a lot more detail in it than I planned to add.

» MSDN SharePoint Server 2010 Beta SDK - Upgrading an Existing Master Page to the SharePoint Foundation Master Page

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint 2010,wcm,publishing site

Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig?

Andrew Connell — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:05:58 GMT

Over the last year I’ve been working with SharePoint 2010 in various ways. With the new requirements of x64 hardware in this release, I got a lot of questions at the SharePoint Conference, on Twitter and via my blog on what hardware I use to do my SharePoint 2010 development & demos. Here it goes... hopefully this helps someone else out there.

The setup…

First, let’s get on the same page: SharePoint 2010 *requires* a 64-bit operating system in Windows Server 2008. For the majority of us you’ll want to virtualize it. These virtual machines, at least today in beta 2, really want at least 4GB of RAM allocated to them (that’s what I run most of mine at).

Unfortunately Microsoft doesn’t have a desktop virtualization story that supports 64-bit operating systems. The only Microsoft solution is to run Hyper-V which means you have to be running Windows Server 2008 x64 as the host OS. The other option is VMWare Workstation which can do 64-bit guest OS’. There are other virtualization options, but these are the two most common ones.

The back story…

For the first few months of this year I was still on my MacBook Pro that I loved. However when you’re stuck with virtualization, you don’t want to run your VM off the same HDD spindle as your host OS… the I/O fighting between the host OS & the VM kills performance. That means you always have a 2nd HDD spindle. With my MacBook Pro, that meant an external drive (which I hated doing). The other thing was that at the time the MacBook Pro only supported 4GB of RAM. Ugh… annoying!

Get to the point: The portable hardware…

So in May I switched back to a PC. I got a Lenovo ThinkPad w500. I looked at the HP EliteBook 8720* line as well as the Dell Precision M6400. For me, the Dell was MASSIVE… there is a really good reason why you don’t see the power supply in the pictures… because it’s MASSIVE… the box is big too. Sure the Dell has a quad core CPU, but the form factor is just too big. The HP is nice… that’s the demo machine a lot of Microsoft folks use, but I’m just not a fan of HP laptops. Plus, both of those have that extra numeric keypad. Notice the title of this section: the portable hardware… those those two laptops are huge.

For me the Lenovo w500 is perfect… it’s a super powerful & very well built solid machine. If I didn’t have it and had to get another one, I’d get the exact same machine again.

The only special configuration I ordered it with was the Intel T9600 Core2 CPU (2.8Ghz), 2GB RAM, a 128GB SSD as my primary drive and a extra drive caddy that could be swapped out with my modular DVD drive. To save a bit, I got the least amount of memory from Lenovo and then proceeded to upgrade it to 8GB of RAM (two 4GB modules) from Crucial.com. I also ordered a 7200RPM HDD that I put in the caddy… so this is the hardware I ran with at the SharePoint Conference (leaving out anything not important):

Lenovo ThinkPad w500
Intel Core2 T9600 (2.8Ghz)
8GB RAM
128GB SSD
360GB 7200RPM HDD spindle

For my OS configuration, I have two native installed OS’ on the two drives & have my laptop configured for dual boot:

Drive 1 (128 GB SSD) – one partition with Windows 7
Drive 2 (360 GB 7200RPM) – two partitions… one with Windows Server 2008 R2 + Hyper-V & one with all the VMs on it

This setup ran great… even having the Hyper-V OS on the same spindle where the VM’s VHD files were located.

While at the SharePoint Conference I saw a few sessions where folks were using two SSD’s… one for their VMs. There was this one HP laptop with two SSD’s that the ECM track presenters shared that just screamed… it was blazing fast and you’d never guess it was a laptop… you’d think it was some massive blade server in the back. That changed my mind.

When I got home last week from the show I swapped out the 360GB 7200RPM drive for a Crucial 256GB SSD. This guy has 250MB/s read times & 200MB/s write times! So far I’ve been VERY pleased… it is incredibly fast! My new portable configuration is:

Lenovo ThinkPad w500
Intel Core2 T9600 (2.8Ghz)
8GB RAM
128GB SSD (Windows 7)
256GB SSD (Windows 2008 R2 + Hyper-V w/ all VMs)

I do all my SharePoint work on my laptop from Hyper-V when I’m not in my home office like when I’m teaching, presenting or just away from the home office.

The non-portable hardware…

What about the day-to-day SharePoint development business when I’m in my home-office? For that I never use my laptop to run SharePoint. If you are a long time reader, you’ll know I built a virtualization rig just for this purpose. I still do 100% of my SharePoint work on my virtualization rig when I’m at my home office. The virtualization rig is super powerful, has loads of memory and is absolutely silent with passive cooling.

The only time I boot to my Windows 2008 R2 partition and fire up Hyper-V when I’m home is when I’m copying VM’s over or prepping for a class/presentation I’m about to hit the road for.

Closing thoughts…

So that’s how I do my SharePoint 2010 development. Others will have their own opinion (I know many who are very happy with their HP’s an Dell’s)… no one is right/wrong. For me, this configuration works great for me and is the perfect balance between top performance and portability. Now I just need to find a better backpack as my huge Swiss Army bag feels like it weighs 5lbs when empty!

I do get two questions about this setup: why not 16GB of memory and why the SSD’s?

To the question about 16GB, frankly I think that’s overkill. First, it’s not easy finding a PORTABLE laptop that can support 16GB and second, 16GB is WAY too expensive in my eyes as I can always run a SP2010 VM at 4GB… when presenting/teaching I bump it up to 6GB. If you need multiple VMs running for some reason (personally, something I find I never need to do), I still think 8GB is fine.

To the question about SSD’s: I fully recognize that two SSD’s in a laptop isn’t the most cost effective option for many. I didn’t need to go this route (no do you)… two 7200RPM spindles would work (and did work) just fine (just make sure they are 7200RPM spindles and not 5400RPM).

Why the SSD’s? I look at it this way: for most small businesses, you don’t have a ton of capital expenses. From my perspective, if I’m going to be on a laptop 8hrs, when developing for SharePoint, demo’ing and teaching SharePoint is my life, I want a good experience and not have to wait around. If you’re an avid cook, do you use crappy knives or so-so pots? No… you’ve got something much better than what’s in my kitchen like Henckel knives or All Clad cookware.

Top session at SharePoint Conference 2009

Andrew Connell — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:03:18 GMT

Two weeks ago I presented two breakout sessions & a full-day post conference workshop at the SharePoint Conference. Before the show Microsoft setup a little contest for the top speakers for Microsoft & non-Microsoft speakers. I’m sure this was to incentivize many speakers to do the best they could do as this was a big coming out party for SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft wanted to put on a great show (that they did). While creating a session for a conference is a lot of work, presenting to a big group of people who are interested in learning something new is a lot of fun for me.

In all three of my sessions I had a blast… hopefully lots of great technical info, a little bit of unplanned humor (gotta love that blank error dialog when SharePoint Designer 2010 said “click here for more details”) and hopefully everyone learned something.

There were over 250 breakout sessions at the show. Last night I saw this little nugget cross through the Twitterverse. One of my breakout sessions, SPC406 – Creating a Custom Service Application, was rated as the top non-Microsoft breakout session of the show by the attendee evaluations. Got to love that last time slot & the 400 level session (which really could have been a 700 level). All I did was build the most scalable calculator in the world using the new service architecture that added two numbers together! :)

For those of you who attended and submitted an eval, I wish I could thank each of you individually. I’m glad you enjoyed the show and I hope you learned something in the process.

SharePoint 2010 Developer Documentation / Resources

Andrew Connell — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:10:39 GMT

If you didn’t notice, MSDN went live with a special SharePoint 2010 Beta Developer Center last week. There’s a ton of great information here… all public before the first public beta is even available for download (note: Beta 2 will be publically available in November).

Those legacy folk all heard the complaints about the quality & quantity of the developer documentation for the last release of SharePoint (WSS v3.0 & MOSS 2007). The documentation team took the feedback to heart. While the criticism was justified early on, they worked very hard and engaged many people outside of Microsoft to help with the documentation. People like me were asked to write articles & screencasts on things we thought were missing (here’s a list of my contributions).

This time around they doubled down. Early on, going back to 2008, I recall talking to some of the guys on the MSDN side responsible for SharePoint like Randall Isenhour & AJ May who were adamant about having a much better story when the first public beta for SharePoint 2010 was available. Man… I never expected THIS much stuff! Check out what’s on the developer center already!

SharePoint 2010 Deprecated Types & Methods
What’s new in SharePoint Foundation 2010 (formerly known as WSS)
What’s new in SharePoint Server 2010
SharePoint 2010 SDK (MSF2010 & SPS2010)
SharePoint 2010 Developer Eval Guide Walkthrough

Check out what Andrew May put on his blog recently too! He’s asking if you want to have your code samples integrated into the SDK! How’s that for being open!

In my opinion, the SharePoint MSDN guys get two thumbs up for their work thus far… and we can only expect to get even more great stuff!

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint 2010,msdn

SharePoint Connections Fall 2009 – Las Vegas again!

Andrew Connell — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:20:15 GMT

The SharePoint Conference 2009 is now behind us but in just under two weeks SharePoint Connections Fall 2009 show will kick off in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay the week of November 9-13, 2009. Are you going to be there? I will along with Critical Path Training!

This show has loads of great SharePoint 2007 breakout sessions on topics like document & records management, leveraging JQuery in SharePoint, social networking and SharePoint Designer. In addition, there are five breakout sessions on SharePoint 2010 by myself and Scot Hillier:

HDV301: Exploring improvements to ECM in SharePoint Server 2010
HDV302: Exploring SharePoint as a Service with Improvements in SharePoint Server 2010
HDV303: Improvements to the SharePoint Developer Story with Visual Studio 2010
HDV315: Client-Side Programming in SharePoint Server 2010
HDV317: External Data Access & SharePoint Server 2010

Scot & I also plan to conduct a full-day post conference workshop on Friday, November 13 on a Developer Deep Dive on SharePoint Server 2010 (if you’re interested this is a separate registration from the regular conference registration… contact the reservation desk for more details). Here’s what we plan to cover:

SharePoint 2010 Core Infrastructure Improvements (for developers)
Accessing Data in SharePoint 2010
SharePoint & the Sandbox
Workflow

Critical Path Training

Critical Path Training will also be at Connections with a boot and big give-a-ways! Stop by our booth #423 and find out how you can be one of the lucky winners in the free SharePoint 2010 classes we’re giving away at the show as well as how you can be eligible to win an Amazon Kindle 2!

Don’t forget about SharePint on Monday night!

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint connections,spconn

SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night - SharePoint Connections Fall 2009 Edition

Andrew Connell — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:03:52 GMT

Feeling left out missing the biggest SharePint ever @ the SharePoint Conference last week?

Going to SharePoint Connections 2009 in Las Vegas the week of November 9-13, 2009? No? Well, are you a SharePoint person that’s going to be in the greater Vegas area? We’ll be doing another SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night in Las Vegas: Monday, November 9, 2009 from 7p – whenever. After you register, come join other SharePoint professionals for a good drink and banter at the EyeCandy sound and lounge bar, right in the center of the Mandalay Bay casino!

If you plan on attending, please drop a comment on this post for an idea of how many folks will be around. And don’t forget to follow SharePoint on Twitter @sharepint as well as on Facebook!

I personally don’t land in Vegas until 5p that day so I might be a few minutes late, but I’ll be there!

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint connections,sharepint

Introducing a New Critical Path Training Instructor: Asif Rehmani

Andrew Connell — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:42:42 GMT

I’m thrilled to announce a very popular and well respected professional in the SharePoint space is joining Critical Path Training (CPT)! SharePoint MVP Asif Rehmani has a ton of experience with SharePoint Designer and InfoPath and is a frequent presenter on the conference circuit (including the recent SharePoint Conference & the upcoming SharePoint Connections Fall 2009 show) as well as an experienced author with his recent book on SharePoint Designer 2007: Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

Asif is joining CPT as one of our instructors and one of the subject matter experts for our new Creating No-Code SharePoint Designer Solutions for SharePoint 2010 which covers SharePoint Designer 2010, InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Workspace 2010. We’ll start offering this class in early 2010 in both the instructor-led hands-on format as well as online.

Asif runs the SharePoint eLearning blog as well the SharePoint-videos site. He’s even posted a ton of SharePoint Designer 2010 & InfoPath 2010 free videos here: http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/free-sharepoint-sharepoint-designer-and-infopath-2010-videos/

Welcome to the team Asif!

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint designer,infopath

SharePoint Live Virtual Conference & Expo – November 5, 2009

Andrew Connell — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:10:47 GMT

Did you miss the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas last week? Shame on you! No worries… there are other ops for getting up to speed on SharePoint 2010!

Next Thursday, November 5, 2009 from 11a-5p ET there will be a virtual [online] **FREE** conference: SharePoint Live Virtual Conference & Expo. This show will feature big SharePoint names like Ted Pattison, Scot Hillier, Shane Young, Bob Fox, Wouter van Vugt, Joel Oleson, Mike Watson, Martin Tuip, Mary Leigh Mackie & me! Representing Microsoft will be Arpan Shah, Paul Stubbs and Steve Fox.

Interested? Check out the session list and register today! Make sure you follow them on Twitter as well @SharePointVCX.

SharePoint Live Virtual Conference & Expo

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint 2010