Andrew Connell [MVP MOSS]

SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 is now generally available!

Andrew Connell — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:16:42 GMT

In case you missed it, Microsoft announced the general availability for SharePoint 2010 Beta 2. Now anyone can download, install and test it out!

Remember this is beta software so things will likely break and you’ll also have a few extra things you’ll have to do to get it installed and working. Here are some posts to help you out installing the bits:

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint2010

I’ll be presenting at SPTechCon in San Francisco, CA (February 10-12, 2010)

Andrew Connell — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:09:52 GMT

Another SharePoint Technology Conference will be held next February in San Francisco, CA. Fellow Critical Path Training co-founder Ted Pattison is one oft he two keynote speakers. I will also be presenting two sessions at this show:

What’s New for Web Content Management in SharePoint 2010
In this session, attendees will learn what improvements Microsoft made to SharePoint Server 2010 for hosting content-centric sites, including one-click authoring, leveraging metadata, improvements to the Content Query Web Part and even the new Web Analytics service for monitoring the status, health and activity of those sites.
What’s New in Enterprise Content Management for SharePoint 2010
Microsoft’s first foray into Enterprise Content Management came in Office SharePoint Server 2007. In this session, we’ll dive into the new capabilities Microsoft has added to SharePoint Server 2010 that will get more people in your organization in ECM solutions as well as make it easier for records managers to manage and control these solutions.

Hope to see you there!

» SharePoint Technology Conference

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint2010

SharePoint 2010 Dev TidBit – Small bug in VS2010 Beta 2 SharePoint Tools (that’s fixed in RTM)

Andrew Connell — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:55:47 GMT

I ran into this doing a few code samples for SharePoint 2010 using the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 SharePoint tools. Passing it along as it threw me for a loop when I first saw it.

First, in case you aren’t aware, the SharePoint “things” you add to a project in Visual Studio 2010 are called SharePoint Items (SPI’s). This includes things like Web Parts, Visual Web Parts, Content Types, etc. Basically anything that has a Item Template in Visual Studio 2010 is is a SPI.

So what’s the issue? Well, in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, the SharePoint tools make the assumption that if you don’t have any SPI’s in the project, even if it is a SharePoint project, it will not package anything up. For instance try the following:

Create a new project of type Empty SharePoint Project.
Add a single class to the project.
Right-click the project name and select Package. When you look, there won’t be anything in the WSP!

But wait… even though it may not be common, wouldn’t you want to create an assembly and deploy it to the GAC/BIN of a site, but not include anything else in the package? Maybe so! Unfortunately the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 SharePoint tools won’t allow it. Now you can get around this behavior by building the project and then going into the Package designer to manually add a reference to the assembly. But that’s just annoying.

The good news: this is addressed in the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010… it will include any output by the project template in the WSP package. So if you’re working with beta 2, just giving you a heads up.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint2010,visual studio 2010

SharePoint 2010 Dev TidBit – It finally has an official name!

Andrew Connell — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:46:54 GMT

OK, so technically it isn’t the official name, but we’re finally seeing some semblence of a name. As seasoned SharePoint developers know, you do a lot of work inside this nested location on the file system. In the two most current versions of SharePoint it was:

SharePoint 2007 – c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12
SharePoint 2010 – c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14

We all called it by various names. Some called them the ‘12 Hive’ or ‘14 Hive’ (which I never liked or understood since it had absolutely nothing to do with the registry). Now we’re seeing a real name for it in a few places: the SharePoint Root.

Personally I love this new tag… now we just say we’re referring to the SharePoint 2007 Root and most know exactly what we mean. Nice!

Technorati Tags: sharepoint

FYI – Interesting Little Bug in VS 2010 Beta 2 when working with the SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Client Object Model

Andrew Connell — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:39:47 GMT

I’ve been struggling trying to work with the new SharePoint 2010 Silverlight client object model on a new environment I setup. This has SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2… nothing special, that’s it (along with the dependencies such as SQL Server and everything they require).

To work with the Silverlight client object model you have to add two references to your Silverlight project. These two assemblies (Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll & Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.Runtime.dll). These can be found in the [..]\14\TEMPLATES\LAYOUS\ClientBin folder. However I was having an issue.

After opening Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, I created a Silverlight application that targeted .NET 3.5. When prompted I let the project wizard create an associated ASP.NET Web application to test it. Everything was good… until I tried to add a reference to the two SharePoint Silverlight client object model assemblies. When I added them, they appeared with little warning icons… which you know is not good. So I jump to the code file MainPage.xaml.cs and try to add some using statements… specifically to Microsoft.SharePoint. Uh oh… it won’t resolve!

What gives?

Well get this: when you create a new project and accept the default path, it goes in something like this: c:\users\[username]\documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\[Solution/Project Name]. When I moved the project to a more shallow path such as c:\Demos\[Solution/Project Name] & opened it in Visual Studio 2010 beta 2, it worked just fine!

The skinny: It appears that if you have a deep path, Visual Studio 2010 has trouble referencing some assemblies… for me, that’s the SharePoint 2010 Silverlight client object model. The fix: don’t work with projects nested deep in folders. I’ll file this as a bug and cross my fingers.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint 2010,silverlight,client object model

SharePoint 2010 Developer Videos on Channel9

Andrew Connell — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:23:53 GMT

Check out what Microsoft just posted on Channel9… a whole slew of SharePoint 2010 Developer videos hosted by myself and Ted Pattison!

» Channel9 - SharePoint 2010 Developer

Looking to get comprehensive, hands-on instructor-led SharePoint 2010 developer training? Look no further than Critical Path Training! We’ve been teaching hundreds of Microsoft customers over the last year in the TAP, Metro and Ignite programs.

Ted and I are teaching a few classes in December in Tampa, Boston and online to quench that SharePoint 2010 learning thirst! The hands on class is SPT2010… the online class is WC-SPT2010 (click links to get more details on the course agendas). For more information on our hands on or online classes, check out our site at www.CriticalPathTraining.com.

December 7 – 11, 2009 - Tampa, FL (Ted Pattison)
December 7 – 11, 2009 - online (Andrew Connell)
December 14 – 18, 2009 - Boston, MA (Andrew Connell)

10% off for early birds when you register 30 days in advance!

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint 2010

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.