Mirjam's blog

Site Column Definition Schema

Mirjam — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:49:00 GMT

While working on a customer project I had to create a lot of site columns, based on the columns created by a business analyst through the user interface.

As I was creating the site columns through a feature I was trying to find the Site Column Definition Schema on MSDN. And I found it. It can be found here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms459922.aspx. Too bad it 's not a complete overview. That might have something to do with the disclaimer at the top of the page though:

[This topic is pre-release documentation and is subject to change in future releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.]

Maybe there is a full reference somewhere on Technet or MSDN and I just couldn't find it, but this wasn't much help to me.

Luckily I was able to use the great post Brian LaSitis did that has a nice overview of all properties of all column types in it.

[Update]

Wouter van Vught just tipped me that you shouldn't always use StaticName and SourceID. This info is coming from this blog post by Robert Bogue.

He says:

" Version, StaticName, and SourceID aren't attributes that should typically be set. Version isn't supported at all, StaticName is only for the office clients, and SourceId is supposed to be set by the framework to the feature that created the field. SourceId is supposed to help you work back to the feature that created the fields. Well, as it turns out if you set this field to be the same as the sourceId for the fields that you added in via the UI, SharePoint doesn't mangle the document template. (So leave the sourceId in -- for this case only). "

My colleague Maarten gave me a tip to go and look at this page that contains information about the Field Element. Some of this information can be used to help determine how site columns should be described.

[Update2]

Found out that this post by Brian LaSitis doesn't contain all possible options. I'm adding a few extra options that I needed myself here. If you know of more options that aren't mentioned in the Brian's blog let me know by leaving a comment with the option and the field type.

Choice Field

<Field ID="{8e2b16ee-86ce-49c5-b217-91a1eee4e664}"

Name="Project"

StaticName="Project"

DisplayName="Project"

Description=""

Group="My Columns"

Type="Choice"

SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3/fields"

Format="[Dropdown/RadioButtons]"

FillInChoice="FALSE">

<CHOICE>Project A</CHOICE>

<CHOICE>Project B</CHOICE>

</CHOICES>

</Field>

DateTime Field

<Field ID="{b0cda4bf-3588-498b-8f5b-dcd5f860ecf0}"

Name="DueDate"

StaticName="DueDate"

DisplayName="Due Date"

Description=""

Group="My Columns"

Type="DateTime"

Format="[DateTime/DateOnly]"

SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3/fields"/>

Note Field

<Field ID="{c8da1af1-5a97-4ea9-8055-bfd9ea4e89e1}"

Name="Comments"

StaticName="Comments"

DisplayName="Comments"

Description=""

Group="My Columns"

Type="Note"

NumLines="6"

AppendOnly="TRUE"

SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3/fields"/>

My Experience as a Woman in Technology

Mirjam — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:55:00 GMT

This post is basically a reaction to http://www.mosslover.com/archive/2009/06/17/my-experience-as-a-woman-in-the-community.aspx. I completely agree with the statements made in this post, but the comment got so long that I decided to write a post about it myself.

Ok, so I guess the SharePoint community is a very lively thing where people feel the need to separate themselves into sub groups and very actively promote these groups. I don't really want to get involved in discussions like that. I just like my job a lot and I love interacting in the community and organizing community stuff. I don't care about any label, I just want to be able to do what I love. Unfortunately though mother nature kind of put me in a difficult position in the latest uproar.

I'm a woman from the Netherlands and I became very active in the Dutch SharePoint community in the last few years. I worked very hard to get where I am today and almost everyone encouraged me to do so. I don't think I've ever felt that I was pushed back by peers. I must admit that as far as speaking and writing articles is concerned it might even make it a tiny bit easier if you are a woman, because you stand out from the crowd. Of course that won't get you anywhere if you don't know what you're talking about, but occasionally it can be a little easier to get noticed.

When visiting customers they sometimes look at me in disbelief when I come in as the "SharePoint Architect", but I always manage to win them over by staying calm and showing them that I know what I'm talking about.

One of the community things I do in the community is organizing the IW/SharePoint track for SDN. The last magazine we did was a "Women in Technology" edition. But it wasn't about women. It was about the content. That just happened to be written by women. I'm very proud of the end result, the quality of the articles in there is very high.

Guess what I'm trying to say is that I like to interact with other "Women in Technology", whether that would be in a pub, at a conference, online or in a magazine. But I don't see the need to separate ourselves from the men in the business. The large majority of the men I've met professionally have been respectful and kind and I like hanging out with men just as much as I like hanging out with women. Let's just all give each other some room to live and breath and do our jobs to the best of our abilities and I think there is room enough for all of us.

User Profiles and User Information List Synchronization

Mirjam — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:44:00 GMT

Lately I have been getting a lot of questions about where user data is stored and how it is synchronized within SharePoint 2007. This inspired me to write this blog post about User Profiles and the User Information List or UserInfo table. I will also do a future post on what happens when a user profile is deleted from MOSS 2007.

User Profiles

The user profile store in MOSS 2007 contains information about users. User profiles can be created by importing users from a user account directory, or they can be created manually. In most environments Active Directory will be used as the source for creating user profiles. In the MOSS 2007 Shared Service Provider an LDAP import query can be configured that will create user profiles for accounts that are returned from Active Directory by the LDAP query. The user profile imports can be scheduled to run on a regular basis and they can be either incremental or full.

Once a user profile is created additional information about the user can be added to the user profile properties by the user itself, an administrator, a Business Data Catalog data source or an LDAP directory.

By default data from user profiles is shown in the People Search results, on the My Site and in the User Information list of MOSS and WSS sites.

User Information List

All MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 sites have a user information list. The information in the user information list is stored in the UserInfo table in the content database of the site. A user gets added to the user information list when he or she has accesses the site for the first time. In the user information list a user's email address, login name and name are stored. MOSS will make sure that user profile property information for those fields for users that are added to the user information list is sent to the user

information list. The image below shows an overview of the user profile architecture in MOSS 2007.

Synchronizing user profile data to the user information list

Keeping the information in the user information lists up to data is a task that is handled by the Profile Synchronization and the Quick Profile Synchronization timer jobs. By default the first job runs once every hour, the second one runs every couple of minutes and is incremental. The first time user data is replicated from the user profile to the user information list of a site a full update is needed. So the Profile Synchronization job needs to run in order to get the data replicated to the site and this may take up to an hour. If information about a user is already stored in the user information list and the information changes in the user profile it will be synchronized with the data in the site collection by the Quick Profile Synchronization job.

You can also kick off the profile synchronization jobs by running the stsadm sync command.

stsadm -o sync

If you believe that information is not synced between the user profiles and the user information lists in one or more sites you can request a list of content databases that have not been synchronized for x number of days by using the following stsadm sync command.

stsadm -o sync -listolddatabases <x number of days>

If one or more content databases show up in this list you can clean up the sync list so they can be added to the list again.

stsadm -o sync -deleteolddatabases <x number of days>

You can also use the sync command to change the schedule for the synchronization job.

For more information on the stsadm sync command have a look here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263196.aspx.

Nintex outgoing email settings on IIS 7.0

Mirjam — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:42:00 GMT

As you've probably noticed by now I'm working with Nintex at the moment.

Yesterday I was trying to create a workflow that had to send a notification to a user. I added my smtp server and a from address to the Nintex outgoing email settings. Be aware that you have to set the Nintex outgoing email settings separately from the outgoing email settings for the rest of your farm. This is because Nintex uses System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient.Send where as SharePoint itself uses SPUtility.SendEmail (thanks Gerard!). So Nintex doesn't take over the farm settings for outgoing email and theoratically you could use a different smtp server or from address for Nintex workflow. Now that I write it down I realise that this last fact might be the reason why they use different settings. To give you the opportunity to define a specific from address for emails send from workflows.

Anyway, even after I added my smtp server and from address to both my SharePoint farm and Nintex settings page I still received errors that emails could not be send as no from address was specified. I didn't understand why that would happen so I opened up Bing (I really like Bing, and I love the background pictures) to try and find other people with the same problem and preferably a solution too. I didn't find anyone with the same problem, nor did I find a clear solution, but I did find someone that was having problems with other Nintex related settings that he traced down to being caused by using IIS 7.0 (and Windows Server 2008) as opposed to using IIS 6.0. As it happens I'm using Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7.0 as well. So I decided to have a closer look at IIS 7.0 and also fill in my smtp server in the IIS 7.0 settings.

This did the trick. My emails are being send without a problem now. I didn't investigate any further as to what is causing this somewhat weird behaviour. It might have something to do with the firewall. I might do a bit more investigating later on, but as others may have the same problem I decided to at least post the solution I found now…

Hope this can help others.

Nintex context menu problem solved

Mirjam — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:57:00 GMT

On our development environment at one of our customers we had a very weird problem with Nintex.

For one of my colleagues Nintex worked perfectly
If I logged on to the server with my own account I could create or manage a workflow, but if I added a new Workflow Action the context menu of that action wouldn't work. I couldn't configure or move the action.
If I tried changing a Workflow Action that was added to a workflow by my colleague the context menu worked fine.
If I logged onto the SharePoint environment using my colleagues account the context menu on new actions still didn't work.
If I logged onto the server using my colleagues account configuring actions worked without a problem.

Knowing all this I knew it had to be something on the server itself and not something in the SharePoint environment.

So I checked all permissions on the server, Internet Options in Internet Explorer, compatibility view settings (it's IE8), whether the site was in the Intranet Zone for both accounts..

After checking all that I still had the same problem.

Today we added another development server to the same environment, connected to the same SharePoint environment. I browsed to the site on the new server and when adding a Nintex action I got the IE security popup asking me whether I wanted to add about:blank to my trusted sites. I did that and everything worked perfectly.

Moral of this story: if you are using Nintex workflows and the IE Enhanced Security Configuration (ESC) settings are turned on you need to add about:blank to your Trusted Sites.

Bob Fox, Spence Harbar and a SharePint at the SDN Event on June 26th

Mirjam — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:45:00 GMT

On June 26th the next SDN Event will be held in Houten in the Netherlands. Now all SDN Events are great, but for the IW track this one will be extra special. We've got two MVPs speaking, Bob Fox and Spencer Harbar and on top of that our own Robin Meure will be presenting as well.

The SDN Event is free for members of SDN and only 95 euros for non-members. Lunch is taken care of by SDN.

Right after the regular SDN Event you can have a drink and some fun with the Bob and Spence and the Dutch SharePoint community at the bar of Hotel Houten. All the more reason to come and join us on the 26th!

These are the IW sessions that you can attend:

SharePoint Mythbusters: Debunking common SharePoint Farm Misconceptions - Spencer Harbar

This interactive session will dive into common SharePoint Farm Myths and discuss common misconceptions around Global Deployments, Farm Topologies, Shared Service Providers, High Availability, Security and more. Alongside best practices for each “myth”, the SharePoint “magic numbers” will be covered and there will be plenty of scope to discuss any particular queries you may have on farm deployment

Best Practices for Virtualization with Hyper V and SharePoint - Bob Fox

In this presentation I am going to give an overview of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper Virtualization Technology with a strong emphasis on how to leverage using SharePoint in a Virtual Environment. Some of the topics covered: - Hyper V What is it - Hyper V what are the benefits - Hyper V What you need to know - Hyper v How to implement (Demo) - Hyper v How do I deploy my SharePoint environments (Demo) - Hyper V Recommendations and take away info

Kerberos part 1: No ticket touting here. Does SharePoint add another head? - Spencer Harbar and Bob Fox

This session will provide an overview of Kerberos and the benefits it offers in a SharePoint 2007 deployment including: Discussion of whether your SharePoint deployment needs Kerberos. A tour of the required pre-requisites and configuration settings. Best Practices for automating configuration in a SharePoint Farm. Best Practices for diagnosing common configuration errors

Kerberos part 2: advanced scenarios and additional considerations - Spencer Harbar and Bob Fox

This second Kerberos session will provide an example, end to end scenario with MOSS, Excel Services and 3rd Party applications, and dive into additional troubleshooting and auditing best practices, known issues and workarounds, including Q&A/Discussion. This session is part two of a two part session. Part two assumes attendees are familiar with the concepts presented in part one.

Waarom SharePoint Application Pages? - Robin Meuré

Wanneer je maatwerk oplossingen bouwt bovenop SharePoint dan heb je vaak behoefte aan een pagina in Central Admin om je oplossing te kunnen configureren. Het liefst zou je dezepagina in de look&feel van SharePoint willen hebben en uiteraard wil je zo veel mogelijk gebruik maken van bestaande SharePoint controls. En als het even kan zou je ook graag je configuratie willen opslaan zoals SharePoint zijn configuratie opslaat.. ;)

For more information and registering for the event go to http://www.sdn.nl/SDN/SDNEvent/SDNEventjuni2009/tabid/124/Default.aspx.

Please contact me if you have any additional questions, or if your company would like a stand at the SDN Event to reach hundreds of attendees with your brand.

Thursday's DIWUG meeting

Mirjam — Sat, 09 May 2009 20:07:00 GMT

Last Thursday we held another DIWUG meeting. This one was a special one! We had an all-time high number of visitors. 99 people registered and in the end 85 actually attended the evening event that was held at our own Macaw office at Schiphol-Rijk. It was just able to hold all 85 attendees. Luckily food and drinks were well taken care of :-).

As usual there were two presentations:

A SharePoint User eXperience by Sandra de Ridder from Sparked (slides)
Functioneel ontwerpen voor MOSS by Maurice de Bakker and Jaap Mollema from TamTam (slides)

There were no hardcore technical topics this time, but really interesting presentations on other aspects of SharePoint. The presentations were well received and caused some interesting discussions that continued after the sessions over a beer.

I would like to thank everyone that helped make this a great evening, Karin and the reception at Macaw, the speakers, the Dutch SharePoint community that showed up in such high numbers and made this evening really enjoyable and a great success. And of course the fellow DIWUG organizers Marianne (@mariannerd) and Dirk (@Zirk77).

I hope to see you all again at the upcoming events!

May 28th and 29th, DevDays 2009 at the World Forum in the Hague
June 26th, Software Development Event (SDE) in Houten with Spencer Harbar (@harbars) and Bob Fox (@bfox11b), well established SharePoint experts that have presented at Tech-Eds, SharePoint Conferences and SharePoint Best Practices Conferences. More information will shortly be made available on the SDN website.
Next DIWUG meeting will have presentations on BI and Excel Services and Forms based computing. As soon as the date for the meeting is set we will of course let you know!

Macaw Solutions Factory blog posts series

Mirjam — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:55:00 GMT

Our two Macaw Solutions Factory Architects, Vincent Hoogendoorn and Serge van den Oever have started blogging about the Macaw Solutions Factory. Some of it is about the Factory itself, some of it is about the thoughts and ideas behind it.

All projects that have custom development in them in the Information Worker Solutions department at Macaw that I work for use the Macaw Solutions Factory to support the development process. It makes starting a new project easier and because it defines the base of the structure of your soluton and projects it makes it easier for developers to work on projects that other people started without needing a lot of time to get up to speed. The Macaw Solutions Factory also speeds up the development process for SharePoint projects with the help of post build scripts and it has build in support for generating SharePoint solution packages (.wsp files) for your solution.

So far, most posts are written by Vincent. You can find them here:

Factory Vision, Part 1: Introducing the Macaw Solutions Factory

Factory Overview, Part 1: A Bird’s Eye View of the Macaw Solutions Factory

Macaw Vision on SharePoint Release Management

If you are interested in the subject stay tuned, there's more to come!

SharePoint Site Definition Provisioning Order

Mirjam — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:14:00 GMT

When you use site definitions to create sites it's often pretty unclear what the order is in which the sites are provisioned. Knowing the order can be important if you want to make several changes to your site that are dependent on each other. In that case you need to know how to make sure that the changes are executed in the right order.

Site Definition Provisioning Order

Url for the site is created
Global onet.xml is provisioned
Site collection (SPSite) scoped features defined in onet.xml are activated in the order in which they are listed in the onet.xml
Site collection scoped stapled features are activated in random order
Site(SPWeb) scoped features defined in onet.xml are activated in the order in which they are listed in the onet.xml
Site (SPWeb) scoped stapled features in activated in random order
Listinstances defined in onet.xml are created
Modules defined in onet.xml are processed (and thus this is the moment at which the default. aspx file and other aspx files defined in the modules are added to the site)

This list tells you that if the order in which features are activated is important and you want to use feature stapling you should create dependent features.
This also tells you that the default.aspx page is the last thing that is added to the site. If you want to make changes to this file like moving around web parts on the page, or adding web parts to the page you there are a couple of ways you can go about this:

You can create a feature that provisions the default.aspx page and associate another feature with that one that will contain a featurereceiver that makes changes to the default.aspx page. – This is the recommended way to go about this
You can create a web control on the master page that will be executed only once – This is recommended for adjusting the MySites. Steve Peschka wrote a great blog post about this http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/22/customizing-moss-2007-my-sites-within-the-enterprise.aspx
You can use the ExecuteUrl element in the onet.xml. You can add a hyperlink to a custom aspx page to the ExecuteUrl. This page will be opened after the site is created. You can have the custom page make the changes you want to.
You can create a custom provisioning provider, which adds the capability to hook custom code to be executed after the site has been created.

My Microsoft Certified Master experience

Mirjam — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:43:00 GMT

Since a lot of people are interested in the Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) experience I'm going to try and write a blog about it. Note that this will just be a post on how I experienced the program. I can't elaborate on the actual content of the training, although I will blog on specific topics later on.

It was great, very intense, so usefull, terrific, brutal, fantastic, fascinating, informative, overwhelming…

Ok, so it's very difficult to describe. I will give it a try.

The group of students consisted of 16 SharePoint experts. All people that have a lot of experience in doing SharePoint implementations. Lots of them are also trainers and speakers. It's amazing to spend 3 weeks in a room with a group like that. We've had a lot of great and very valuable discussions, since people do different types of projects and have come up with different best practices. We were all there to learn and everybody was more than willing to share their knowledge and experience. I really want to thank everybody for the great three weeks!

Working with the instructors was also very special. All of them are the best in the field on the area that they covered. They are not just trainers, but people that actually work with the product and have an amazing depth on the subject that they covered. It was a priviledge to be able to learn from their experience and to be able to bounce thoughts and ideas off of them.

The training was conducted on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. For me it was the first time that I was on campus and that really brought something extra to the experience. Being there also meant that it was possible for product team members to drop in when we were discussing a certain subject to elaborate even more, sometimes on the current version and sometimes on how things will change in vNext. Very valuable!

As I said before I can't say much about the actual content of the training, but I can say that it's very broad and very deep. It reaches from information architecture, capacity planning, infrastructure, SQL, a lot of SharePoint services (like Search, BDC etc), development and troubleshooting. All this material was covered in three weeks of training. That's a lot to cover in three weeks, which means that it's long days of instruction supplemented with hands on labs in the evening. It means that you eat, drink and breath SharePoint for three weeks. This is a stretch, but it's a great way to hugely expand your knowledge in a relatively short amount of time.

Of course your knowledge will also be tested. There are three written exams and one hands on qualification lab. These exams also take place during the three weeks. This means that the master program is not for the lazy and not for the faint hearted.

At the moment I know that I passed the three written exams. The results for the qualification lab are not in yet. Personally I'm sceptical about me passing that one. But it really doesn't matter. I'm very proud that I was part of the R2 (beta) MCM SharePoint group. And I'm very proud to have passed at least three of the exams. If I haven't passed the qualification lab I will be able to retake it in a Microsoft office around here, so I don't need to travel to Redmond for that.

Even though this was a beta the program was very well organized. Off course there were a couple of small glitches along the way, but the whole experience is already pretty well polished. I personally think that we've got the acting program manager to thank for that. He did an amazing job in managing content and logistics and watching out over all the candidates. He was terrific. Thank you.

All in all the experience was great, I'm still exhausted, but I wouldn't have want to miss it for anything in the world!

Some links to MCM related content:

Microsoft Certified Master: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Blogpost by Russ Houberg, MCM R2 attendee

Blogpost by Spence Harbar, MCM R2 attendee (posted pre-R2)

Blogpost by Andrew Connel, MCM instructor

Blogpost by Todd Baginski, MCM instructor

Displaying your InfoPath Forms in a Web Part

Mirjam — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:18:00 GMT

So here I am again with another "did you know". This one is also inspired by Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Did you know that you can display browser enabled InfoPath forms in a web part?

If you create a form that is published to the SharePoint Form Services in the Central Administration and you have selected that users can open the form in their browsers, you can display the form in a web part. This means that the form page will get a SharePoint look and feel, instead of an InfoPath look and feel.

It is easy to configure and you don't need a single line of code.

The web part that is able to show the form is already created for you by Microsoft and is part of the Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.dll assembly. This assembly is stored in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Bin folder.

The first step you have to take to enable the web part to show you InfoPath page is to add a SafeControl entry to the web.config of the web application where you want to use the web part.
The SafeControl entry should look like this:
<SafeControl Assembly="Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" Namespace="Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.Controls" Typename="XmlFormView" Safe="True" />

Now go to your browser and open the Web Part Gallery from the Site Settings page of your SharePoint environment. Click on the New button and you will get a list of available web parts. Look for the entry Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.Controls.XmlFormView and check the checkbox in front of it. Next click the Populate Gallery button at the top of the page. The web part should now be available for use in the site collection.

You can check this by going to a web part page within your site collection and click Edit Page from the site actions menu. In the page click on the Add a Web Part link of a web part section. Now choose the XmlFormView web part that can be found under the Miscellaneous section. An error is generated because you still need to set some properties for the web part. You can simply close the error and go to the properties of the web part to set them.

Go to the Features section at the bottom of the properties list. Expand the section and decide whether you want to display the header and the footer of the form. Since the form is displayed in the middle of the page you probably don't! If you want users to be able to fill in the form in the web part you want to set the EditingStatus to Editing. In the DataBinding section you find the XsnLocation, the XmlLocation and the possible path to the container where you want to save the form to.

If you are displaying a blank form you want to have the XsnLocation pointing to the location where the .xsn file of you form is published to.
If you are displaying an existing form you can have the XmlLocation point to the location of that form.

If you have filled in these properties correctly your web part should now be displaying you form!

Use Stemming for MOSS 2007 Search

Mirjam — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:14:00 GMT

While I was reading Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a to prepare for the Master Program, I came across something interesting again.

In the Search Core Results Web Part you can enable stemming. If you are a non-English reader you probably wonder what stemming is, as I did when I read about it. Stemming is a method of mapping a linguistic stem to all matching words to increase the number of relevant results. This means that if searching for buy, you will also find results that contain bought, buying and buys. For Dutch readers: het betekent dus dat je ook vervoegingen vindt van woorden waar je op zoekt.

Very handy!

Stemming is disabled by default, but can be enabled in the properties of the Search Core Results Web Part.

You can also use stemming if you are using the Query class from the Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.dll assembly. The query class has a property EnableStemming that you can use to turn stemming on or off. Note that the query class also has a property Culture that is very relevant when using Stemming, so the query engine knows in what language it has to look for stem matches of the search term.

SharePoint Custom Application Pages and Custom Action Features: did you know this?

Mirjam — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:56:00 GMT

At the moment I am reading Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to prepare for the Microsoft Certified Master SharePoint program. I consider myself an experienced SharePoint developer, but I came across a couple of basic facts that I didn't know or wasn't fully aware of.

The first tip: when you are creating custom Application Pages for SharePoint 2007 (WSS and MOSS alike) your page should inherit from Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.LayoutsPageBase. I never realized that there was a separate class an application page should inherit from. Mine always just inherit from System.Web.UI.Page. While looking up the LayoutsPageBase on MSDN I came across some more information. When creating a custom application page that is intended for use by authorized users you should use LayoutsPageBase. If your application page will be used by anonymous users you should use UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase.
The second tip: when creating a custom action feature you can use ~site and ~sitecollection to create site or site collection relative urls. If you are creating a custom action that adds a link to the ECB menu of a list or library item you can also use {ItemId}, {ItemUrl} and {ListId} to get the itemid and listid of the currect item. If you read the "How to: Add Actions to the User Interface" page on MSDN you notice that you can also use {SiteUrl}.

Example:

<CustomAction
    Id="UserInterfaceCustomActions.ECBItemToolbar"
    RegistrationType="List"
    RegistrationId="101"
    Location="EditControlBlock"
    Sequence="106"
    Title="MY ECB ITEM">
    <UrlAction Url="~site/_layouts/CustomActionsHello.aspx?ItemId={ItemId}&ItemUrl={ItemUrl}&ListId={ListId}"/>
</CustomAction>

Perhaps you were already aware of these tips, but since I wasn't I thought I should share them.

Slides van DIWUG presentaties van dinsdag 17 februari

Mirjam — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:15:00 GMT

Dinsdagavond (17 februari) was de eerste DIWUG avond van dit jaar. Ondanks de late uitnodiging was de opkomst erg goed, er waren meer dan 50 bezoekers!
De avond werd gehost bij en gesponsord door Sparked.
We hadden weer twee presentaties:

Serge van den Oever van Macaw hield een presentatie over Business Productivity Online Suite. Zijn slides staan hier, en Serge heeft zelf ook een blogpost over de presentatie geschreven met links naar andere interessante resources.
Clemens Reijnen van Sogeti presenteerde over Collaboration in the Cloud. Zijn slides zijn hier te vinden.

Ik wil hiervandaan graag Sparked bedanken voor de goed georganiseerde avond en de sprekers bedanken voor hun inbreng. Daarnaast natuurlijk iedereen die er was bedankt voor de komst!
We hopen op korte termijn uitsluitsel te kunnen geven over de data en de onderwerpen van de volgende DIWUG avond.

Tot die tijd is iedereen natuurlijk van harte welkom bij de SDE van maart op 30 maart in Driebergen. Meer informatie over de komende SDE kun je hier vinden.

Loading UserControls in SharePoint web parts

Mirjam — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:30:00 GMT

If you want to use UserControls in SharePoint web parts you can use SmartPart (http://www.codeplex.com/smartpart). But you can also build a web part that load a UserControl yourself.

If you want to do it yourself you start out by opening Visual Studio (whether you use 2005 or 2008 doesn't matter). Next you create a new project of the type "ASP.NET Web Application".

Then you can add a new class to the project and you make sure that it inherits from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart.

Now create an new folder in the project that you call "Usercontrols" and add a Web User Control to it.

Make sure that you adjust the Inheritance of your .ascx file to a fully qualified name.

Let's go back to the class you created initially and add the user control to it. You add the user control in the CreateChildControls function.

You can see that the function UserControlVirtualPath is called. This function is used to determine where the user control will be located. Reason for this is that the deployment location of the user control changes when you change the location where the assembly is deployed to.

If you deploy the assembly to the GAC the user control will be stored in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\wpresources folder and will have the fully qualified name used to create sub folders. The user control for my project will be stored in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\wpresources\TwitterTimelineWebPart\1.0.0.0__c038812e8af423a0\TwitterPublicTimeline\UserControls if I deploy the assembly to the GAC.

If I were to deploy the assembly to the bin of the web application the user control is deployed to the C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\moss2007dev\wpresources folder.

The UserControlVirtualPath function finds the location of the user control for you.

You can add all the content you like to the user control now. Nothing special about that.

One thing that we need to take care of that is SharePoint specific is the deployment.

I will do it manually, so everyone can copy this.

You start out be creating a .ddf file that will help you create the package. The .ddf file can be stored in the root folder of your project. I will call the file SolutionPackage.ddf. More information about creating the ddf file can be found here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb466225.aspx).

Next you need to create the manifest.xml file that will make sure that all files are deployed correctly. Create a folder "DeploymentFiles" and create a file that you call manifest.xml in it.

In the manifest you will have to create an Assemblies element with a child Assembly element in which you will specify the assembly you want to deploy. The property DeploymentTarget indicates whether the assembly will be deployed to the GAC or to the web application bin. If you want to deploy the assembly to the GAC the DeploymentTarget property needs to be GlobalAssemblyCache. If you would like to deploy to the bin of the web application you would use WebApplication.

The ClassResources element is a child element of the assembly element and will have a child element ClassResource. You will need to fill in the location of the resource file (the .ascx file) in the package in the FileName property. The Location property is used to indicate the folder that the resource file will be deployed to. In this case we will create a sub folder TwitterPublicTimeline with a sub folder

UserControls to store the user control in.

The Assembly element has another child element called SafeControls. The child element SafeControl is used to create the safecontrol entries in the web.config. You will need to add the information about your assembly in the Assembly, Namespace and TypeName properties. The Safe property should be set to True..that was the whole point right?

A great reference that describes the schema of the manifest file is located here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms442108.aspx).

After creating the ddf and the manifest files you start a command prompt and go to the folder where your ddf file is stored. You can then type "makecab /f SolutionPackage.ddf".

This will create the wsp package and include the files mentioned in the ddf file, including the manifest file.

If you want to check whether all files are actually in the package you copy the .wsp file and rename it to a .cab file. Then you extract it and check whether all files are in there.

Now you are ready to upload you .wsp file to your SharePoint environment. You can use the stsadm addsolution command for that.

After that you can go your Central Administration and deploy the solution to your web application. The Solution Management page can be found on the Operations page under the Global Configuration heading.

Click on the solution name and on the Deploy Solution link. Now select the web application you want to deploy the web part to and the time at which you want the deployment to run.

Your web part is now deployed. You will only need to add it to the web part gallery of your site collection be browsing to the site settings page of your site collection and select Web Parts under Galleries. Click New and select the dll of your web part. Scroll back to the top of the page and click the "Populate Gallery" button.

Congratulations! You can now add your web part to a web part page!

Twitter web part for SharePoint

Mirjam — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:16:00 GMT

I love Twitter. I started using it a couple of weeks ago and I am starting to get hooked on it.
Of course I also love SharePoint, so what would be better then to combine the two by having a Twitter web part that displays the tweets in your public timeline in your SharePoint environment.
Aidan Garnish has build the web part and blogged about it. The blog and the download of the web part can be found here.

I installed the web part and it works like a charm.

Very cool!

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 Announced

Mirjam — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:59:00 GMT

The Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 has been announced!
http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/spc2009.aspx

A whole conference about SharePoint "14" for IT Professionals, IT Decision Makers, Architects and Developers.
And this time we get to go to Las Vegas instead of Bellevue. Let's have some fun! ;-)

http://www.helloitsliam.com/archive/2009/02/03/microsoft-sharepoint-conference-2009-announced.aspx

Now available on Twitter ;-)

Mirjam — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:53:31 GMT

I'm starting to become more and more active on Twitter.
I find that it's easy to Twitter what I'm working on. I only write a blog post if I've actually got some serious information to share.
Right now I'm working on a presentation about integrating SharePoint and Silverlight, with a little bit of LINQ, so that's probably what my next real blog post will be about.

Until then: http://twitter.com/MirjamvanOlst

See you around!

DIWUG meeting Data Form Web Part presentation

Mirjam — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:57:32 GMT

At the DIWUG meeting of november 20th Maarten van den Dungen presented about Data Form Web Parts. We promised to put the presentation online at my blog, so here it is. Unfortunately it's in Dutch, but if you have any questions, post a comment.

All in all it was an interesting evening with two very different and both very interesting presentations. I think a lot of people were inspired by the presentations and the ideas that came up during discussions. At least I know that I was. Discussions afterwards were also very interesting and lively and of course the SharePoint Master came up a couple of times..

The next DIWUG meeting will be next year, but on December 12th there will be another SDN Event in Nieuwegein. For the Information Worker track the following presentations are scheduled:

Best practices developing & configuring SharePoint Solutions - Meijers / Bethlehem
First look at Podcasting Kit for SharePoint - Donald Hessing
Anatomy of a SharePoint Employee Blogging Solution - Daniel McPherson
SharePoint Data Governance - Sander de Koning
InfoPath, SharePoint - OTAP met InfoPath Forms Services - Wouter van Vugt

For more information please check the SDN website.

[Dutch Event] DIWUG meeting over Data Form Web Parts en Silverlight in SharePoint

Mirjam — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:42:00 GMT

Op 20 november organiseert de DIWUG weer een avond sessie. Ook deze keer zullen er weer twee presentaties gegeven worden.

Data Form Web Parts
Het Data Form Web Part (voorheen het Data View Web Part) is misschien wel het meest gebruikte onderdeel van SharePoint Designer. Met behulp van het data form web part is het op eenvoudige wijze mogelijk functionaliteit toe te voegen aan sites zonder te programmeren. De mogelijkheden die aanbod komen in deze sessie zijn: het gebruik van het data form web part, conditioneel formateren van content in weergaves, web part connecties, bewerken van data rechtstreeks op de pagina en tenslotte het maken van web parts.
Spreker: Maarten van den Dungen (Macaw)

First look at silverlight with SharePoint
Met de komst van Silverlight kunnen we ook aan SharePoint websites een nieuwe visuele dimensie geven. Waar Adobe Flash andere technologiekennis vereist, kunnen we met Silverlight gewoon in onze vertrouwde .NET omgeving en tools werken. Doordat Silverlight in de browser leeft, zal er gecommuniceerd moeten worden met SharePoint. In deze sessie zal eerst een Silverlight Webpart gebouwd worden die gebruik maakt van de RSS-Feed van SharePoint. Vervolgens zal stilgestaan worden bij de mogelijkheden en onmogelijkheden van SharePoint webservices. Daarna is het tijd voor demo-mania: Silverlight smoelenboek op basis van SharePoint gebruikers profielen, Office Word previewer, image carrousel, chat, en tot slot de Podcasting Kit voor SharePoint.
Spreker: Donald Hessing (VX Company)

De avond wordt georganiseerd bij Sogeti in Vianen.

Het belooft een interessante avond te worden, en het kost je niks, dus schrijf je nu in via http://www.diwug.nl!

SharePoint Services in the Cloud???

Mirjam — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:54:59 GMT

On Monday,after the SharePoint Online session here at PDC we asked some questions afterwards about the SharePoint Services that were announced at the Keynote as the SharePoint version in the cloud. We were curious whether it would be anything like the current SharePoint version, whether it would be build from scratch, or whether it would be build on top of the current SharePoint versions.
The answer was that they have no idea yet. Microsoft didn't even start serious preparations for moving SharePoint to the cloud, so it will be some time before we can visit SharePoint in the cloud.

PDC 2009 announced!

Mirjam — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:46:28 GMT

On the PDC site there is an announcement today about the PDC 2009. It will be November 17–20 2009 in LA. I'm pretty sure that this will be the PDC to announce Office and SharePoint 14. I'm already looking forward to coming back here next year!

http://www.microsoftpdc.com/View.aspx?post=http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/PDCNews/Save-the-Date-PDC09/&tag=

Updating lists, columns and content types in SharePoint

Mirjam — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:43:41 GMT

I just attended the "SharePoint 2007: Creating SharePoint Applications with Visual Studio 2008" session by Chris Johnson, who's a Program Manager on the SharePoint team. The session itself was ok, but not really shocking if you've worked with the Visual Studio Extensions for Visual Studio 2005. The more revealing bit was the Q&A at the end of the session.

When asked questions about updating list en content types features Chris answered that the best practice for updating the lists and the content types is actually to build a new feature with a featurereceiver, where the featurereceiver will contain code to update the list or the content type. This means that the feature itself will have no functionality, we just need it to get the featurereceiver to run the code to perform the updates.

A lot of people already decided that this would probably be the best and most solid way to update lists, libraries and content types, but this was actually the first time that I heard someone from the SharePoint team actually saying that this is indeed the best way to update.

Services in the Cloud & SharePoint Online

Mirjam — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:00:14 GMT

It has been a while since I last posted a blog here, but I hope to make up for some of that this week, as I'm in Los Angeles at the PDC 2008. This morning in the first keynote Ray Ozzie announced that Microsoft will be putting it's money on "Services in the Cloud". The "Cloud" is an environment hosted by Microsoft itself that exposes services to the Internet.

The cloud version of SharePoint will be "SharePoint Online". This is a SharePoint environment hosted by Microsoft in the Cloud, so no SharePoint Server deployment and configuration is needed on your side.
Microsoft offers two scenario's:

Standard

More than one company sharing one architecture
Minimum of 5 seats
1TB maximum data storage
No My Sites
No custom code deployment!
$ 7.25 per month per seat

Enterprise

More than 5000 seats
My Sites
Custom code deployment

SharePoint Online offers Office 2007 client integration, so you can take your documents from SharePoint Online offline with Outlook 2007. Also you can use single sign-on, so your employees don't need to log in separately to the SharePoint Online environment.

The thing that stands out here for us developers is definitely that you can not deploy custom code to SharePoint Online. If you want to make customizations to your SharePoint Online environment you can use SharePoint Designer. So you can alter master pages, create page layouts, use data view web parts or content types for instance, but you can't create your own web parts or features.

If you want to use the data in your SharePoint Online environment in your own custom tools you can create applications that run on your own servers or clients and use the SharePoint Web Services that are exposed by the SharePoint Online environment. Of course you can then also use Silverlight Controls to display the data from the online environment.

I think SharePoint Online offers changes to small business that cannot or will not pay the licensing costs that come with the MOSS platform. If you want a simple no-code SharePoint solution, SharePoint Online might be your friend. However, if you want to use any custom functionality like custom web parts or features you might be better off either paying the licence costs for MOSS, or use WSS and deal with the limited functionality of the free platform.

SharePoint Web Services

Mirjam — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:11:08 GMT

Building custom applications for the SharePoint 2007 platform can be done using the WSS and MOSS object model. However, if you can't or won't deploy your code to the WSS server you can also use the WSS Web Services. I must admit that I hardly ever use them, and that I always thought they were not very well documented, but I found some great information here.

The WSS Web Services are part of the Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer namespace. The web services include methods to accessing and customizing SharePoint site content such as lists, site data, forms, meetings, document workspaces, and permissions. The table below shows the WSS web services, including a description of what they can be used for and the reference.

MOSS 2007 also exposes a series of web services. The MOSS web services allow you to use the Business Data Catalog, document management, Enterprise Search, Excel Services, InfoPath Forms Services, and Web content management (WCM). The table below shows most of the web services, there use and the reference you need to use them.

If you want to use one of the SharePoint web serrvices in your visual studio project you can simply add a Web Reference using the path of the SharePoint site for which you want to use the Web Service and add the web service reference to it. Your reference will then look something like this http://[servername]/[sites]/[sitecollectionname]/[sitename]/[subsitename]/_vti_bin/[webservicereference].asmx.

For more information on WSS Web Service look here.

More information on MOSS Web Services can be found here.