SharePoint Blog by Jeremy Thake in Perth, Australia

Joel Oleson visits Perth

Jeremy Thake — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:26:00 GMT

It was great to finally meet @JoelOleson again and I really appreciate he making the effort to fly to Perth to present at the SharePoint User Group.

It was really surreal actually, much like meeting the Brisbane crew a few weeks ago. You speak to these guys on Twitter, read their blogs, add them as a friend on Facebook and yet you still are not sure what to expect when you meet them in person! It’s another joy of being part of such a great community and I look forward to meeting more of the community in coming years!

After the event, myself @PaulCulmsee and @MoSSums took Joel to Fremantle to sample the food at Little Creatures and then onto the Fremantle markets (below).

Then, on the way back to the city we took him to Cottesloe beach. Not the warmest place to be in our winter here in Western Australia, but it didn’t seem to matter to Joel in his SharePoint Best Practices polo shirt whilst the rest of us Aussies froze to death wrapped up in our winter gear! Something to do with coming from Idaho apparently ;-) Not quite sure what he found down there…but he seemed pretty excited by it all and dipping his hands in the freezing cold Indian Ocean!

I didn’t have the time to write an IBIS map to get round this “Wicked Problem” of @PaulCulmsee’s radically untidy car, but figured I’d post the photo anyway just for laughs ;-)

I will be presenting at #AUTechEd

Jeremy Thake — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:41:32 GMT

With the announcement yesterday, I can finally openly jump up in the air and celebrate being asked to speak at TechEd Australia! The session got published yesterday on the TechEd web site that I am co-presenting with Andrew Coates (@coatsy) from Microsoft!

It is a real honour for me to be able to present at TechEd, but also to be presenting alongside someone I have so much respect for also! One of my blogs most popular posts was triggered from discussions had with Andrew at a Perth SharePoint User Group where he was pitching VSTO to us – have a read here.

I’m really looking forward to co-presenting with Andrew on this one. It’s going to be interesting balancing the decision on building solutions in SharePoint and VSTO and demonstrating the tools available, no doubt to: SharePoint newbies, VSTO newbies and the gray area in the middle ;-)

The abstract is below:

DEV340 Building Solutions with SharePoint and Visual Tools for Office

"The Microsoft Office system evolved from a suite of personal productivity products into a comprehensive, multifaceted, and integrated system. Building on a solid foundation of familiar tools, the Microsoft Office system today includes applications, servers, services, and technologies designed to work together to solve a wide array of business problems. Jeremy Thake and Andrew Coates will present the SharePoint server and Office client tools available. This session will walk you through the journey of discovery on how to best leverage the client/server platform to build your solutions. Discussions around the new client side VSTO tools and the server side VSeWSS tools will focus on the creation of solutions from initial development to deployment. Come along to this demo-filled session to learn how to take advantage of the millions of programming hours that have gone into the Office platform and the .NET Framework and truly Stand on the Shoulders of Giants!"

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (07Jul)

Jeremy Thake — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:45:27 GMT

[completely biased] How ASP.NET Developers can leverage SharePoint webcast
@jthake (me) presents on the findings from the collaborative efforts on the SharePointDevWiki.com page…a huge thanks to the community on this!
SPTDD: SharePoint and Test Driven Development, Part Two - Eric Shupps
@eshupps continues the discussions around TDD referencing big guns like Sahil Malik and Andrew Woody! More TDD here
JOPX on SharePoint 2007 (MOSS and WSS V3 ): The ten commandments for SharePoint development
@jopxtwits Great great great post! You must all abide by them!
Introducing the Content Monster Web Part by Todd Baginski & Andrew Connell
@andrewConnel and @toddbaginski show off their latest creation!
Re-using SharePoint controls - Robin | zevenseas | SharePoint Blog
@robinmeure just keeps pumping out quality posts! Some great code + screenshots of useful controls available to you in SharePoint
SharePoint Automation: Setting List Properties using STSADM
@glapointe has been quiet, but this stsadm command is a corker and you can look at the code to see how he’s leveraged the API…great resource!
Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : How We Did It: BDC Meta Man Web Edition
@nickswan & @brettlonsdale have shown that rich interfaces are possibly in SharePoint moving the BDC MetaMan directly in! Great job guys and awesome lessons learnt!
SharePoint Automation: Deploying SharePoint Files Not Handled by the WSP Solution Schema
@glapointe provides a great way to deploy files to the SharePoint farm web application directories that are not supported by WSPs schema!
Everything Microsoft. : 5 things you should know about SharePoint 2007 Records Center
Records Management is really the poor untalked of citizen in SharePoint, this area is going to rise to surface in next version as ECM is pushed harder and taken more seriously in “v2.0” for SharePoint of Records Management
SharePoint Search-as-You-Type with jQuery - Jan Tielens' Bloggings
@jantielens ”Mr SharePoint jQuery” (well one of them) keeps showing off how “sexy” you can make SharePoint ;-) More on jQuery here
JOPX on SharePoint 2007 (MOSS and WSS V3 ): SharePoint - It's all about making the right choices and decisions - When to use custom site definitions.
@jopxtwits more debate on custom site definitions, which has been collaborated on here too. More on Site Definitions here.
The ordering of your CAML query matters… « The Art of SharePoint Evolution
Great little trap to watch out for in CAML!
SharePoint PowerShell PowerPack v1 Feb 2009 – SharePointforAll
More PowerShell goodness provided by Quest for PowerShellGUI. More on PowerShell here.
AvePoint Introduces Free Tool for Item-Level SharePoint Restores from SQL Server and DPM Backups
Another AvePoint getting on the “free” bandwagon…keep them coming ISV’s! Very valuable
SharePoint Governance
Some huge SharePoint MVPs have gotten together to produce this site along with some big commercial companies too…be interested to see where this goes…
Office Sustained Engineering : Office hotfixes to be delivered on a defined schedule in the form of Cumulative Updates
Yes SP2 has just come and now Cumulative updates are here to keep your Admins busy, be aware of the changes!

How ASP.NET Developers can leverage SharePoint webcast

Jeremy Thake — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:07:07 GMT

I presented at the Perth dotNet User Group last Thursday, if you didn’t happen to make it I have recorded the presentation.

Click here to download the web cast as a WMV.

More Info

More information is also being collaborated on at the SharePointDevWiki.com so feel free to comment here! I’d just like to say a big thanks to the community for collaborating on this.

Speaker Rate

As mentioned on the web cast, I’d really appreciate your feedback so please visit Speaker Rate to rate this web cast

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (30Jun)

Jeremy Thake — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:07:18 GMT

[Cross posted on SharePointDevWiki.com]

Think this is the biggest week yet! Please support my efforts to compile this by tweeting the link!

Development Environment

Tip: Convering your Virtual PC 2007 disks to Windows Virtual PC (on Windows 7) - Tobias Zimmergren's thoughts on development
Saved a few of my colleagues today playing with the new VPC stuff in Windows 7!
Logging everything that is going on when an assembly loads using CThru - But it works on my PC!
Some nice looking stuff here in terms of being able to trace your application flow
Sanjay Narang's thoughts on SharePoint : Should I Build my application in SharePoint vs. ASP.net
Some great conversation is going on here and also in more depth on this wiki …I encourage people to submit their thoughts on this!
Downloads of my SPTechCon Boston Sessions - The SharePoint Farmer's Almanac
A great take on SharePoint from an Admin perspective…good way to explain this if your a dev talking to an admin

SPElements - SPListConstraints: List Constraints add-on SharePoint
Got shown this by @omarbesiso, haven’t had a chance to look deeply into it…but notable just for what it’s trying to achieve. Much like SLAM.
Sahil Malik on Silverlight in Sharepoint –dnrTV
Sahil has been busy with webcasts and podcasts recently…this one on Silverlight which he seems to be focussing on lately
CoDe Magazine - Article: SharePoint Applied: SharePoint 2007 Ninja Debugging
A register only article *sigh* but some good content in there on debugging. Should also check out the wiki section on this.
SharePoint Check Calendar Availability Custom Column (Beta) – Home
Some awesome clever goings on in this code to check availability before saving calendar entries in SharePoint!
My adventures into SharePoint and PowerShell « Brian Farnhill
Brian has been busy learning PowerShell, good discovery post…should also check out wiki section.
SPCodeSnippets By : Ayman El-Hattab – Home
Some nice snippets for Visual Studio, some are available with VSeWSS, but more comprehensive in this
SharePoint BDC Part 1: Getting Started with the Business Data Catalog - Tobias Zimmergren's thoughts on development
Some more love in the BDC space usually focused on by Lightning Tools folk.

Mobile

PKS Mobile Services Pack and PKS Player for iPhone « The General Theory of RIAtivity
Some awesome stuff going on with PKS recently!

InfoPath

Submit this Form InfoPath - Kathy Hughes, MVP
Good read on InfoPath from Australian MVP

Admin

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Service Pack 2 Update.
Yes, there is a fix for SP2 mishap ;-)
UK SharePoint Team : How to incrementally deploy SharePoint MySites
Some guidance on deploying My Sites
Example Solution Architecture: Twynham School Learning Gateway
Always get asked about architecture of Site Collections etc. This is a great example

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (23Jun)

Jeremy Thake — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 05:09:54 GMT

[Cross Posted on www.SharePointDevWiki.com]

It seems every week more and more great content appears! These could almost become daily Coffee break posts!

WSP

Carsten Keutmann: Beginning SharePoint Development (Bonus part #3 WSPBuilder overview)
Hot off the press! Carsten has released a fix for an installation issue with WSPBuilder! This man is the shining light of all things SharePoint Dev Tools!
Planning SharePoint Solution Packages (WSPs) - Eli Robillard's World of Blog
Eli has done a great job of articulating the most generic way of breaking up WSPs…which is a question commonly asked of me.
UK SharePoint Team : Modifying out-of-the-box SharePoint files
Yes guys, don’t modify out of the box 12 files…but if you do…read below…
SharePoint 2007 – 12 Hive System-File Changes: One Feature to rule them all! - Sharad Kumar
This is a really nice concept…creating a backup on replacing a 12 hive file. I tend to just have backups of 12 Hive files for each major release SP1, Infra Updates, SP2 etc and use file diff…but another nice approach.
John W Powell : Automate SharePoint Solution Builds with Visual Studio Extensions For Windows SharePoint Services (VSEWSS) 1.3
Some TFS goodness with VSeWSS
Use TFS to automate even better WSP builds with WSPBuilder « Brian Farnhill
And some more TFS goodness with WSPBuilder :-)

Environment

How to effectively manage your SharePoint Environments, deployments and customsations with solid governance, solution packages and source control by Phil Whicklund
Very good presentation on Configuration Management
Zac Smith's SharePoint Blog - Installation accounts for a dev/test server
Completely agree with this…have a read…catch things as early as possible…security is always last thing to remember…before Reports that is ;-)
Connecting to SharePoint 2007 Web Services using a Service Reference in Visual Studio 2008 - Windows Live
Nice little reminders on SharePoint Web Services with WCF from April
A new approach to solve SharePoint’s painfully slow spin-up / start-up time for first request | Muhimbi's SharePoint Blog
Application Pool taking AGES to start up…check this post out! AWESOME!
Securing Application Pages in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Updated advice on MSDN on securing application pages
SharePoint Code Snippets
Great set of code snippets for VS2005/8

API

Performance of various methods to retrieve one list item - Waldek Mastykarz
Waldek does it again with a thorough post on different methods of retrieving a list item
Steve Fox : Retrieve SharePoint List Data with XLINQ using VS 2010 Beta 1
Some cool future stuff with XLING in VS2010

Agile Development

Measuring velocity is not enough | Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP
Andrew is sharing his experiences with TDD…really looking forward to this book once it’s published!
Doing Agile in a Team of One – Day 2 and the End of Sprint 1 | Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP
and another one..

WCM

Top Sharepoint Sites | Sharepoint Gallery | Sharepoint Showcase
Great new site…kind of competing against Ian Morrish’s www.wssdemo.com excellent resource, but worth a mention!
Chris O'Brien's blog: My checklist for optimizing SharePoint sites
Probably the post of the week for me! Great stuff by Chris on optimising SharePoint…again always the last thing people think of!
SharePoint RTE breaks in IE8 when in editing mode - Waldek Mastykarz
Waldek raises some issues with Rich Text Editor in IE8 :-(
Building Public Facing SharePoint Site - SharePoint Saturday Chicago Session Recap - George Durzi
George Durzi presents some great stuff around WCM
Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : How We Did It: SharePoint.Microsoft.com
AN interesting case study on the new shiny SharePoint.Microsoft.com site

Cloud

Microsoft Online Services Team Blog : SharePoint Online IPD Guide Published
Some more information on SharePoint for the cloud

Misc

SharePoint Social Computing - Enterprise Social Software
A new site released today focusing on SharePoint and Social Computing…interesting to see where this goes…
Guest Blog by BlueThread's Rob D'Oria - Why is that BLOB in My SharePoint Database? - The Bamboo Team Blog - Bamboo Nation
Good explanations on BLOB architecture in SharePoint…the most used weapon by other Vendors to combat SharePoint ;-)
SharePoint Designer 2007 Governance: Options for selective lockdown? - Sharad Kumar
Lock it down! Uninstall it! It’s growing on me, but the source code it manipulates isn’t ;-)
Tony Testa's World | What are my options for forums in SharePoint?
Some good advice around Forums in SharePoint…because lets face it…the Discussion Board sucks more than the Wiki’s!

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (16Jun)

Jeremy Thake — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:19:12 GMT

[Cross Posted on SharePointDevWiki.com News]

SharePoint Saturday Sydney (8th August)
@BrianFarnhill et al are organising Australia’s first SharePoint Saturday. @DanielBrownSA is also organising one in Adelaide too.
Winsmarts SharePoint WCF Support
@SahilMalik has gotten around to releasing on CodePlex the Solution Package with a feature to activate WCF for SharePoint. Great work! I’m making a grand assumption that SharePoint 2010 will have this as default, so always good to get comfortable with it now.

Providing Application Diagnostics - patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance
Some great guidance on Tracing & Logging in SharePoint via the Microsoft P&P team!
Managing SharePoint Configuration- patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance
Some great guidance on configuration management by the Microsoft P&P team and referrals to some awesome Community solutions for configuration management in SharePoint
Securing SharePoint List/Document Library Views Seems (sort of) Possible with jQuery
@PaulGalvin has presented a solution to get round that sneaky business requirement that always seems to come up around securing views on a SharePoint List using jQuery.
patterns & practices Web Client Software Factory - Release: Guidance to enable Unity in a SharePoint App
I have been playing with IoC recently and found this great post on the P&P site explaining how Unity can be integrated with SharePoint
Ian's SharePoint Blog - Testing SharePoint Kerberos Configuration
@IMorrish published this, not always a development concern, but a great little tool to test Kerberos configuration in an environment.
Guest Blog by HiSoftware's Founder Robert Yonaitis - Customizing the Page Editing Toolbar to Include Content Validation for the Web Content Scenario in MOSS - The Bamboo Team Blog - Bamboo Nation
There has been a few of these types of articles published, but I like this one as it puts some more weight around accessibility in a WCM solution!
SharePoint Solution Deployment Strategies – Dare I say Best Practices?
LOL the dreaded “Best Practices” slogan…but some good guidance within this article on what you should deploy using Solution Packages with some different scenarios depending on the size of the project.
SaurabhKV : SharePoint 2007 Development - Build Processes
Covering off another approach to SharePoint Development Solution Packaging like VSeWSS, WSPBuilder and STSDev.
MOSS How to ...: Create a Report from an Analysis Services 2008 Database and deploy it in SharePoint 2007
A great walk through of how to set up a report in a reporting services environment from start to finish!
I got tired of attaching debugger to w3wp.exe. And you? - Life of a Hungarian SharePoint Geek
Another nice little addition to attaching the debugger whilst doing SharePoint development…everyones favourite past time!
New *FREE* Enhanced Discussion Board View for SharePoint - SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land
@JoelOleson published information on a new Solution Package that makes Discussion Boards useable…as the out of the box ones simply don’t cut the mustard.

Importing a stsadm export package from a MOSS Farm to a WSS Farm

Jeremy Thake — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:53:56 GMT

So I’ve been doing some work in a MOSS Farm Development VM for a release to a WSS Farm. I created a a Site Collection using the Collaboration Team Site Definition thinking it wouldn’t use any of the MOSS Features (as you may know that MOSS is a superset of WSS).

When I did an stsadm –o export from my MOSS Farm and then did an stsadm –o import into my WSS Farm I got the following errors:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa
dm -o import -url http://tfsserver:1010 -filename c:\drops\backup.cab
Start Time: 6/3/2009 7:50:58 PM.
Progress: Initializing Import.
FatalError: Could not find Feature OffWFCommon.
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.ImportRequirementsManager.VerifyFeatureDef
inition(SPRequirementObject reqObj)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.ImportRequirementsManager.Validate(SPRequi
rementObject reqObj)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.ImportRequirementsManager.DeserializeAndVa
lidate()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPImport.VerifyRequirements()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPImport.Run()
Progress: Import Completed.
Finish Time: 6/3/2009 7:51:04 PM.
Completed with 0 warnings.
Completed with 1 errors.
Log file generated:
        c:\drops\backup.cab.import.log
Could not find Feature OffWFCommon.

A little bit of poking around and some recommendations from @pseale via Twitter and I discovered that these files created by the export are in actual fact .cab files.

So I renamed the file to .cab and I extracted the contents into a new folder using the Windows UI.

Then I had to work out where the references were that were causing the error. There were lots of .dat files and then the following:

exportsettings.xml
manifest.xml
requirements.xml
rootobjectmap.xml
systemdata.xml
usergroup.xml
viewformslist.xml

Alarm bells rang at Requirementsxml, so I started searching for the ‘OssWFCommon’ mentioned in the error. Bingo! So I made that change…now how do I wrap this back as a .cab?

To do this I need to create a manifest file…to do this I used makecab.exe but this requires a ddf manifest file. As there was 99 .dat files I didn’t feel like writing one myself…so I used powershell and did a ‘dir | ft Name > list.ddf’ and added the following to the top of it.

.OPTION EXPLICIT
.Set CabinetNameTemplate=backup.bak
.Set DiskDirectoryTemplate=CDROM ; All cabinets go in single directory
.Set CompressionType=MSZIP ; All files compressed in cabinet files
.Set UniqueFiles="ON"
.Set Cabinet=on
.Set DiskDirectory1=Package

Then I simply ran makecab.exe to create the new cab, deployed it to my WSS Farm and tried again. I got some other errors for other features and repeatedly removed them until the errors went away!

The full xml elements removed from requirements.xml were:

<Requirement Type="FeatureDefinition" Id="c9c9515d-e4e2-4001-9050-74f980f93160" Name="OssWFCommon" />
<Requirement Type="FeatureDefinition" Id="fde5d850-671e-4143-950a-87b473922dc7" Name="IssueTrackingWorkflow" />
<Requirement Type="FeatureDefinition" Id="02464c6a-9d07-4f30-ba04-e9035cf54392" Name="ReviewWorkflows" />
<Requirement Type="FeatureDefinition" Id="6c09612b-46af-4b2f-8dfc-59185c962a29" Name="SignaturesWorkflow" />
<Requirement Type="FeatureDefinition" Id="c6561405-ea03-40a9-a57f-f25472942a22" Name="TranslationWorkflow" />
<Requirement Type="FeatureDefinition" Id="c85e5759-f323-4efb-b548-443d2216efb5" Name="ExpirationWorkflow" />
<Requirement Type="FeatureDefinition" Id="29d85c25-170c-4df9-a641-12db0b9d4130" Name="TransMgmtLib" />
<Requirement Type="FeatureDefinition" Id="00bfea71-dbd7-4f72-b8cb-da7ac0440130" Name="DataConnectionLibrary" />

I also had to remove some ContentType references from the manifest.xml too which referenced the Id of the feature. So best thing to do is before you remove the Requirement element, is search for the Id in the other xml files ;-)

I would suggest that this is not the best way to do this as you may delete things you shouldn’t ie. that are dependent on Lists working etc.

Results from the SharePoint Implementation Approach Survey

Jeremy Thake — Tue, 26 May 2009 03:55:25 GMT

A big thank you to the 182 people that responded to the Survey! It has been a real eye opener for me in terms of the amount of approaches that are available out there!

Here’s summary:

So many not on 64bit SharePoint Dev environment yet!
Most are working off laptops with their environments
Most are running their environment in a Virtual Machine

Too many not running VM off a separate physical HDD!
Not enough running Server 2008 and SQL 2008

WSPBuilder rules over VSeWSS and STSDev by a long shot!
SharePoint Manager 2007, U2U Caml Builder, RedGate Reflector, MS Dispose Checker, Firebug, IE Dev Toolbar are in most toolboxes

For more information check out the full details on the SharePointDevWiki.com.

SharePoint Web Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2010 Team Suite beta

Jeremy Thake — Fri, 22 May 2009 20:14:35 GMT

So I’m sitting on the plane on the way back to Perth for the weekend and thought I’d throw together a post on the new improved Web Testing capability within Visual Studio Team System 2010 beta .

I remember first getting Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite and trying the Web Testing capabilities with SharePoint. It failed horribly due to the way in which SharePoint renders it’s XHTML.

Fortunately with 2010, the approach has got a lot better, but will still require some custom coding. The immediate benefit is that it gives you the Visual Studio IDE.

The below scenario does highlight a few issues that we’ll have in the SharePoint World with using Web Tests.

Create Test Project

Selection File | New Project from Visual Studio gives you a much improved New Project window:

You’ll get a load of waffle about tests in a .txt document:

and a project structure:

New Web Test

So I’m interested in creating a new Web Test:

Immediately a Windows Internet Explorer (yes it’s IE only) window pops up with a Web Test side bar:

It’s defaulted to start recording immediately any actions I do within Internet Explorer.

For a typical scenario I wanted to record going into a SharePoint Team Site, creating a new List, adding a custom Site Column, and then creating a new List Item. I then want to replay this test on a new SharePoint Team Site to see whether it’ll replay and create the things the same.

As you can see from above team site, it records your steps as you go along. Clicking stop, closes Internet Explorer and returns you back to Visual Studio.

Dynamic Parameters

It’ll go through and detect dynamic parameters for you:

In this scenario it detected:

Which it found on the newform.aspx as a hidden <input> form variable. Looking in the View Source in IE I found:

<INPUT id="__EVENTTARGET" type="hidden" name="__EVENTTARGET" value="" />

Obviously this was not going to be of any use. After this the test appears in the main panel:

First Hurdle: Error re-running Test

In the Test Results, it actually showed up with this:

basically it tried to run the Test again in the same site...and failed. Clicking on the failure gives you more details:

Not very detailed unfortunately.

Changing URLs

Looking further at the steps…to get this test to re-run in a new environment I need to change the url in the steps:

Parametersing Web Servers

Now I can paramaterise the web server, but that is not going to help as it is a sub site collection off the main Web Application I wish to change and this option will only do the root url:

Generate Code

Clicking the Generate Code button: Creates a C# equivalent Web Test (much like WATIN recorder does):

The beauty of this is I can no do a find and replace, or even parameterise the site url:

You can then open the new “Coded Test” and run this:

Immediately I noticed I get an exception error on a step. Searching in my Coded Test I found:

request10Body.FormPostParameters.Add("AddToAllContentTypes", this.Context["$HIDDEN1.AddToAllContentTypes"].ToString());

For some reason this isn’t in the Context of the page when it is executed in this instance…but I got green lights on all the other steps?!? I then noticed above in that step:

request10.QueryStringParameters.Add("NextUsing", "http%3A%2F%2Fwin%2D0xqbnqw37uf%3A81%2Fsites%2FDevSite%2F%5Flayouts%2FListEdit%2Ea" + 
        "spx%3FList%3D%257BB84E37C2%252D4D8D%252D43B3%252DADCA%252DD8F18789892B%257D", false, false);

So the QueryString is being added to the page and as you can see there is an encoded url that I missed! Looking further there were quite a few encoded urls, so I had to parameterise these too!

This time when I re-run, I could see that it was staying on teh StagingSIte now but I was still getting the same error…you can actually click on each step in the Web Test and see what page was rendered. Clicking through from beginning I got this error:

So the listedit.aspx page was getting an error, immediately I noticed that the listedit.aspx is hanging off the layouts directory and has no context of the list…so figured the ListId is in the form post or something…

request7.QueryStringParameters.Add("List", "%7BB84E37C2%2D4D8D%2D43B3%2DADCA%2DD8F18789892B%7D", false, false);

So I need to pass the Guid of the List through…this is suddenly getting a lot bloody harder than it should be! Poking around in the view source of the page from the step before the listedit.aspx (where I clicked on the List Settings I found this:

<a href="/sites/StagingSite/_layouts/listedit.aspx?List=d1d50bba-78ce-4c36-92b5-84ef88b45a4b">Modify settings and columns</a>

So potentially I could go and Extract this url rather than it explicitly setting it.

Limitations

But really i just want to tell the Web Test to click on the Hyperlink because I know that the hyperlink does the query string correctly rather than me forcing it!

This seems to be a limitation of how the Web Tests work as it seems dependent on server side Form Posts and Query Strings for tests. Obviously this is not going to be very useful for very dynamic AJAX orientated sites where it may be dependent on where the user clicks on the screen as apposed to predetermined form post and query string parameters.

If anyone can prove me wrong about this stuff I’d really appreciate it!

Other Neat Features

Changing Parameters

You’ll also notice further down where the newform.aspx action is handled that there are various FormPostParameters added as this is how the newform.aspx operates…as it’s an ASP.NET at heart ;-)

I can then start doing things like replacing:

request5Body.FormPostParameters.Add("Title", "Test");

with parametised titles:

request5Body.FormPostParameters.Add("Title", newListTitle);

This can be extended further by having a data source, say for instance a SQL Database Table with rows and repeating this test for each row using the test data in the table.

Validation Rules

Also at the bottom of the Web Test are various ‘Validation Rules’ it creates by default:

Other Validation rules can be added to validate a web test:

This could come in handy to check the redirected url is correct, or the response time of the page, or that certain text is on the page etc.

SharePoint Blog by Jeremy Thake in Perth, Australia

Joel Oleson visits Perth

I will be presenting at #AUTechEd

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (07Jul)

How ASP.NET Developers can leverage SharePoint webcast

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (30Jun)

[Cross posted on SharePointDevWiki.com]

Think this is the biggest week yet! Please support my efforts to compile this by tweeting the link!

Development Environment

Tip: Convering your Virtual PC 2007 disks to Windows Virtual PC (on Windows 7) - Tobias Zimmergren's thoughts on development Saved a few of my colleagues today playing with the new VPC stuff in Windows 7!

Logging everything that is going on when an assembly loads using CThru - But it works on my PC! Some nice looking stuff here in terms of being able to trace your application flow

Sanjay Narang's thoughts on SharePoint : Should I Build my application in SharePoint vs. ASP.net Some great conversation is going on here and also in more depth on this wiki …I encourage people to submit their thoughts on this!

Downloads of my SPTechCon Boston Sessions - The SharePoint Farmer's Almanac A great take on SharePoint from an Admin perspective…good way to explain this if your a dev talking to an admin

Sahil Malik on Silverlight in Sharepoint –dnrTV Sahil has been busy with webcasts and podcasts recently…this one on Silverlight which he seems to be focussing on lately

CoDe Magazine - Article: SharePoint Applied: SharePoint 2007 Ninja Debugging A register only article *sigh* but some good content in there on debugging. Should also check out the wiki section on this.

SharePoint Check Calendar Availability Custom Column (Beta) – Home Some awesome clever goings on in this code to check availability before saving calendar entries in SharePoint!

My adventures into SharePoint and PowerShell « Brian Farnhill Brian has been busy learning PowerShell, good discovery post…should also check out wiki section.

SPCodeSnippets By : Ayman El-Hattab – Home Some nice snippets for Visual Studio, some are available with VSeWSS, but more comprehensive in this

SharePoint BDC Part 1: Getting Started with the Business Data Catalog - Tobias Zimmergren's thoughts on development Some more love in the BDC space usually focused on by Lightning Tools folk.

WCM / UI

Testing

Testing SharePoint Workflows using TypeMock Isolator (Part 3) - But it works on my PC! Some nice code on using TypeMock to test Workflow

Small steps for testing, big steps for SharePoint testing | Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP Andrew talking about Testing SharePoint

SharePoint 2010

Erika Ehrli : MSDN Office Developer Center – Pre Office/SharePoint 2010 Update The place to bookmark for 2010 info

What we know or can infer about SharePoint 2010 - as of June 23, 2009 - Blogging about SharePoint The rumour mill kicks off again for vNext ;)

Preparing for Upgrade to 2010 Today - Part 1 Preupgradecheck - SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land Joel talks about prepping your environment for 2010

Agile

Admin

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Service Pack 2 Update. Yes, there is a fix for SP2 mishap ;-)

UK SharePoint Team : How to incrementally deploy SharePoint MySites Some guidance on deploying My Sites

Example Solution Architecture: Twynham School Learning Gateway Always get asked about architecture of Site Collections etc. This is a great example

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (23Jun)

[Cross Posted on www.SharePointDevWiki.com]

It seems every week more and more great content appears! These could almost become daily Coffee break posts!

WSP

Use TFS to automate even better WSP builds with WSPBuilder « Brian Farnhill And some more TFS goodness with WSPBuilder :-)

Environment

A new approach to solve SharePoint’s painfully slow spin-up / start-up time for first request | Muhimbi's SharePoint Blog Application Pool taking AGES to start up…check this post out! AWESOME!

API

Steve Fox : Retrieve SharePoint List Data with XLINQ using VS 2010 Beta 1 Some cool future stuff with XLING in VS2010

Agile Development

Measuring velocity is not enough | Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP Andrew is sharing his experiences with TDD…really looking forward to this book once it’s published!

Doing Agile in a Team of One – Day 2 and the End of Sprint 1 | Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP and another one..

WCM

Building Public Facing SharePoint Site - SharePoint Saturday Chicago Session Recap - George Durzi George Durzi presents some great stuff around WCM

Cloud

Misc

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (16Jun)

[Cross Posted on SharePointDevWiki.com News]

SharePoint Saturday Sydney (8th August) @BrianFarnhill et al are organising Australia’s first SharePoint Saturday. @DanielBrownSA is also organising one in Adelaide too.

Winsmarts SharePoint WCF Support @SahilMalik has gotten around to releasing on CodePlex the Solution Package with a feature to activate WCF for SharePoint. Great work! I’m making a grand assumption that SharePoint 2010 will have this as default, so always good to get comfortable with it now.

Providing Application Diagnostics - patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance Some great guidance on Tracing & Logging in SharePoint via the Microsoft P&P team!

Managing SharePoint Configuration- patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance Some great guidance on configuration management by the Microsoft P&P team and referrals to some awesome Community solutions for configuration management in SharePoint

Securing SharePoint List/Document Library Views Seems (sort of) Possible with jQuery @PaulGalvin has presented a solution to get round that sneaky business requirement that always seems to come up around securing views on a SharePoint List using jQuery.

patterns & practices Web Client Software Factory - Release: Guidance to enable Unity in a SharePoint App I have been playing with IoC recently and found this great post on the P&P site explaining how Unity can be integrated with SharePoint

Ian's SharePoint Blog - Testing SharePoint Kerberos Configuration @IMorrish published this, not always a development concern, but a great little tool to test Kerberos configuration in an environment.

SharePoint Solution Deployment Strategies – Dare I say Best Practices? LOL the dreaded “Best Practices” slogan…but some good guidance within this article on what you should deploy using Solution Packages with some different scenarios depending on the size of the project.

SaurabhKV : SharePoint 2007 Development - Build Processes Covering off another approach to SharePoint Development Solution Packaging like VSeWSS, WSPBuilder and STSDev.

MOSS How to ...: Create a Report from an Analysis Services 2008 Database and deploy it in SharePoint 2007 A great walk through of how to set up a report in a reporting services environment from start to finish!

I got tired of attaching debugger to w3wp.exe. And you? - Life of a Hungarian SharePoint Geek Another nice little addition to attaching the debugger whilst doing SharePoint development…everyones favourite past time!

New *FREE* Enhanced Discussion Board View for SharePoint - SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land @JoelOleson published information on a new Solution Package that makes Discussion Boards useable…as the out of the box ones simply don’t cut the mustard.

Importing a stsadm export package from a MOSS Farm to a WSS Farm

Results from the SharePoint Implementation Approach Survey

SharePoint Web Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2010 Team Suite beta

Create Test Project

New Web Test

Dynamic Parameters

First Hurdle: Error re-running Test

Changing URLs

Parametersing Web Servers

Generate Code

Limitations

Other Neat Features

Changing Parameters

Validation Rules

Tip: Convering your Virtual PC 2007 disks to Windows Virtual PC (on Windows 7) - Tobias Zimmergren's thoughts on development
Saved a few of my colleagues today playing with the new VPC stuff in Windows 7!

Logging everything that is going on when an assembly loads using CThru - But it works on my PC!
Some nice looking stuff here in terms of being able to trace your application flow

Sanjay Narang's thoughts on SharePoint : Should I Build my application in SharePoint vs. ASP.net
Some great conversation is going on here and also in more depth on this wiki …I encourage people to submit their thoughts on this!

Downloads of my SPTechCon Boston Sessions - The SharePoint Farmer's Almanac
A great take on SharePoint from an Admin perspective…good way to explain this if your a dev talking to an admin

Sahil Malik on Silverlight in Sharepoint –dnrTV
Sahil has been busy with webcasts and podcasts recently…this one on Silverlight which he seems to be focussing on lately

CoDe Magazine - Article: SharePoint Applied: SharePoint 2007 Ninja Debugging
A register only article sigh but some good content in there on debugging. Should also check out the wiki section on this.

SharePoint Check Calendar Availability Custom Column (Beta) – Home
Some awesome clever goings on in this code to check availability before saving calendar entries in SharePoint!

My adventures into SharePoint and PowerShell « Brian Farnhill
Brian has been busy learning PowerShell, good discovery post…should also check out wiki section.

SPCodeSnippets By : Ayman El-Hattab – Home
Some nice snippets for Visual Studio, some are available with VSeWSS, but more comprehensive in this

SharePoint BDC Part 1: Getting Started with the Business Data Catalog - Tobias Zimmergren's thoughts on development
Some more love in the BDC space usually focused on by Lightning Tools folk.

Testing SharePoint Workflows using TypeMock Isolator (Part 3) - But it works on my PC!
Some nice code on using TypeMock to test Workflow

Small steps for testing, big steps for SharePoint testing | Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP
Andrew talking about Testing SharePoint

Erika Ehrli : MSDN Office Developer Center – Pre Office/SharePoint 2010 Update
The place to bookmark for 2010 info

What we know or can infer about SharePoint 2010 - as of June 23, 2009 - Blogging about SharePoint
The rumour mill kicks off again for vNext ;)

Preparing for Upgrade to 2010 Today - Part 1 Preupgradecheck - SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land
Joel talks about prepping your environment for 2010

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Service Pack 2 Update.
Yes, there is a fix for SP2 mishap ;-)

UK SharePoint Team : How to incrementally deploy SharePoint MySites
Some guidance on deploying My Sites

Example Solution Architecture: Twynham School Learning Gateway
Always get asked about architecture of Site Collections etc. This is a great example

Use TFS to automate even better WSP builds with WSPBuilder « Brian Farnhill
And some more TFS goodness with WSPBuilder :-)

A new approach to solve SharePoint’s painfully slow spin-up / start-up time for first request | Muhimbi's SharePoint Blog
Application Pool taking AGES to start up…check this post out! AWESOME!

Steve Fox : Retrieve SharePoint List Data with XLINQ using VS 2010 Beta 1
Some cool future stuff with XLING in VS2010

Measuring velocity is not enough | Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP
Andrew is sharing his experiences with TDD…really looking forward to this book once it’s published!

Doing Agile in a Team of One – Day 2 and the End of Sprint 1 | Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP
and another one..

Building Public Facing SharePoint Site - SharePoint Saturday Chicago Session Recap - George Durzi
George Durzi presents some great stuff around WCM

SharePoint Saturday Sydney (8th August)
@BrianFarnhill et al are organising Australia’s first SharePoint Saturday. @DanielBrownSA is also organising one in Adelaide too.

Winsmarts SharePoint WCF Support
@SahilMalik has gotten around to releasing on CodePlex the Solution Package with a feature to activate WCF for SharePoint. Great work! I’m making a grand assumption that SharePoint 2010 will have this as default, so always good to get comfortable with it now.

Providing Application Diagnostics - patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance
Some great guidance on Tracing & Logging in SharePoint via the Microsoft P&P team!

Managing SharePoint Configuration- patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance
Some great guidance on configuration management by the Microsoft P&P team and referrals to some awesome Community solutions for configuration management in SharePoint

Securing SharePoint List/Document Library Views Seems (sort of) Possible with jQuery
@PaulGalvin has presented a solution to get round that sneaky business requirement that always seems to come up around securing views on a SharePoint List using jQuery.

patterns & practices Web Client Software Factory - Release: Guidance to enable Unity in a SharePoint App
I have been playing with IoC recently and found this great post on the P&P site explaining how Unity can be integrated with SharePoint

Ian's SharePoint Blog - Testing SharePoint Kerberos Configuration
@IMorrish published this, not always a development concern, but a great little tool to test Kerberos configuration in an environment.

SharePoint Solution Deployment Strategies – Dare I say Best Practices?
LOL the dreaded “Best Practices” slogan…but some good guidance within this article on what you should deploy using Solution Packages with some different scenarios depending on the size of the project.

SaurabhKV : SharePoint 2007 Development - Build Processes
Covering off another approach to SharePoint Development Solution Packaging like VSeWSS, WSPBuilder and STSDev.

MOSS How to ...: Create a Report from an Analysis Services 2008 Database and deploy it in SharePoint 2007
A great walk through of how to set up a report in a reporting services environment from start to finish!

I got tired of attaching debugger to w3wp.exe. And you? - Life of a Hungarian SharePoint Geek
Another nice little addition to attaching the debugger whilst doing SharePoint development…everyones favourite past time!

New FREE Enhanced Discussion Board View for SharePoint - SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land
@JoelOleson published information on a new Solution Package that makes Discussion Boards useable…as the out of the box ones simply don’t cut the mustard.