Portals & Integration blog

ODF-support in Office 2007 SP2: conformance <> interoperability

Robert te Kaat — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:04:00 GMT

Since the release of Office 2007 SP2, Office has native support for Open Document Format (ODF). This means that we can get rid of all the plug-ins we've been using so far...

However, first tests with SP2's ODF Save-As functionality shows that it's far from perfect: ODF-documents created from MS-Office look (very) different in OpenOffice and vice versa or can't be opened at all, sometimes even causing hangups. Reason for this seems to be that Microsoft has primarily focussed on conformance to the ODF 1.1-standard it paying less attention to interoperability with format of ODF-files as created by currently most-used ODF-editors. You can read more of those tests here: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090503215045379.

For MS-Office users it seems smart to keep those plug-ins at hand, since they show that just conformance is not always the way to go if you need interoperability.

Links:
- Office 2007 SP2
- SUN ODF Plugin
- Clever Age

Office 2010 release schedule

Robert te Kaat — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:17:00 GMT

Last week Erika Erhli released some information on the name (Office 2010) and release dates.

You can read more here!.

AddInSpy: diagnostics tool for developing an Office add-in

Robert te Kaat — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 06:35:00 GMT

"AddInSpy and AS are two variants of the same tool: a diagnostic tool for use both while developing an Office add-in, and also to troubleshoot issues with deployed add-ins. Note that the tool is unsupported. The tool discovers and reports a lot more information than is available through the Office UI natively."

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/AddInSpy/

Solving problems with the WF-designer

Robert te Kaat — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:15:00 GMT

Everybody doing serious workflow development using Windows Workflow Foundation has probably experienced first hand that the workflow designer hosted by Visual Studio is not the most stable application ever. Every now and then you get unexplainable errors, while you didn't do anything you'd expect to be remotely responsible for trashing the WF-designer. It not just annoying, it can be very irritating and - believe me - even ruin your day!

Solving those issues it probably even harder than causing them, although after a while you do get more creative. I've worked with the WF-designer for over 2 years now and have come up with a solution that in my case solves most of those problems:

Close all instances of Visual Studio (including products like SQL Server Management Studio)
Remove all temp-files created by Visual Studio (using the cmd-file attached to this article)
Remove the <solution>.suo (same folder as the solution-file itself)

Although the WF-designer gets better every release of Visual Studio or its service packs, it's still far from perfect. Since we're probably stuck with it for some time, I hope this post will help a few people to save their day! ;)

NB: The attached cmd-file contains a version-number of Visual Studio. Check to see if it matches with the version of Visual Studio you're using (eg: 8.0=VS 2005)

Do Less. Get More. Develop on SharePoint.

Bart Gunneman — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:06:00 GMT

This is a great site for SharePoint developers content! Make sure you installed Silverlight BTW :)

click

Visual Studio 2008 extensions for WSS released

Bart Gunneman — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:30:00 GMT

Just a quicky... The WSS 3.0 tools for Visual Studio have been updated. Version 1.2 hasn't got any new features (as far as I can tell after examining it for 5 minutes) other then support for Visual Studio 2008!

So download it here: click and uninstall VS 2005 ;-)

Disable the toolbar header on a listviewwebpart from code

Bart Gunneman — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 08:14:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I helped out on a project creating some featureeventreceivers to dynamically add webparts to pages. Because of time-restrictions I didn't have the time to look into a weird problem we encountered..

We experienced a problem when adding a listviewwebpart from code in which we don't want to display the toolbar. (aka toolbar = none from the Edit Shared Webpart menu).

Now, my fellow team-system-guru Marcel :-) decided to turn over to the wonderful world of SharePoint and came up with a solution!

On his blog he posted the code-snippet to effectively remove the toolbar from a listviewwebpart. The solution looks like a hack..but apparently this is the only way to achieve this..

Read it here: click

Great work Marcel!

Several new SharePoint links this week.

Bart Gunneman — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:05:00 GMT

This week the SharePoint conference is being held in Seattle, and surprise surprise all kind of new goodies are made available to the community.

Check out these links:

Silverlight and MOSS blueprint -> http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/

CKS Enhanced Blog Edition Version 2.0 -> http://www.codeplex.com/cks

Office Live workspace -> http://workspace.officelive.com/

Have fun!

VSTO Powertools sneaky announcement

Bart Gunneman — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:01:00 GMT

Wow,

I was browsing the MSDN blogs and came across this soapbox video: http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto/archive/2008/01/17/sharepoint-workflow-tools-video-interview-with-john-durant.aspx.

John Durant speaks about creating SharePoint workflows with Visual Studio 2008, but he also mentions there is going to be a powertools package.

One of the tools which will be in there is a tool to upgrade a Sharepoint Designer Workflow to a Visual Studio Workflow!

That's great news! That way you'll be able to add custom code to a IW generated workflow...or redistribute it using the feature and solution framework!

(I must see more of these videos ;-) )

Workaround to resolve upgrade issues WSS 3.0 SP1

Bart Gunneman — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 11:10:00 GMT

This article gives a brief description of the workaround when encountering issues during the installation/upgrade of WSS3.0 Service Pack 1.

Scenario

During the installation of the WSS 3.0 Service Pack 1, the SharePoint Products and technologies wizard is started:

After continuing the wizard, accepting the restart of services, and acknowledging that every other server in the farm was updated with new binaries (and is waiting on the same message) step 8 of the upgrade process may fail (only if the particular server has the Windows SharePoint Services Help Search service running).

The wizard states that a error has occurred with the following description:

Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products and Technologies. Further information regarding this failure can be found at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS\Upgrade.log.

An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PostSetupConfigurationTaskException was thrown. Additional exception information: Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PostSetupConfigurationTaskException: Exception of type 'Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PostSetupConfigurationTaskException' was thrown.

at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.UpgradeTask.Run()

at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.TaskThread.ExecuteTask()

Check the error log

To verify that the error that has occurred is the same as described in this document, please review the Upgrade.log file that was described in the error message normally located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS\.

Scroll down to the bottom of the file and locate the following error message:

Invalid column name 'ItemHighPriority'.

Invalid column name 'CrawlScope'.

This indicates that the described workaround is valid for your upgrade error. Any other errors do not apply to this workaround.

How to work around this issue

After you have verified that the error you received is the same as described here, follow these steps to work around the issue:

1. Disable the Windows SharePoint Services Help Search service for all servers

a. Navigate to the central administration of the environment

b. Open the Operations tab and click on the Servers in Farm.

c. Click on the link/name of the server which is running the Windows SharePoint Services Help Search service and click on the name of the service.

d. Write down the name of the database and stop the service.

e. Do this for every server in the farm that is running this service.

2. Remove the databases from the SQL server.

a. Use the enterprise manager console on the SQL server to detach the Search databases, use the database names retrieved in step 1d.

b. Move the mdf and ldf database files from their current location to a backup location.

3. Re-enable the Windows SharePoint Services Help Search service for all servers that where running the service in step 1.

a. Use the same database names for each server as previously used.

b. You do not have to fill in the usernames/passwords, these where saved in the configuration database even though they appear blank.

4. Re-execute the SharePoint Products and Technologies configuration wizard on every SharePoint server in the farm (the sequence does not matter) and complete the upgrade process.

Effects the workaround has on the server farm

Because all the search databases where re-created, all search data is lost. This can be recovered by initiating a Full Crawl over all content sources.

Also, the backup of the SQL server needs to be checked to see if these re-created databases need to be added in the backup-script.

If the upgrade finalizes successful, the old files of the search databases can be removed.

What caused this?

We don't know for sure, but we suspect this behaviour occurs on farms wich are installed with MOSS Beta 2 and upgraded ever since. (so B2 -> B2TR -> RTM)

Hope this helps you!

Microsoft SharePoint Developer Team Blog

Bart Gunneman — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:06:00 GMT

Through the standard SharePoint team blog I found this link to a new Team Blog.

The WSS and MOSS development team is blogging on a variety of topics!

click

One to add to your RSS list!

Got something to say? Drop me a line!

Bart Gunneman — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:51:00 GMT

In the news section on the right side of this blog you will find a messenger online indicator.

(like this: )

If you got any questions, remarks, etc. etc. and you see I'm online feel free to click on the indicator and drop me a line.

You do not need to have messenger installed or even have a live account!

Microsoft Search Server 2008 RC available

Bart Gunneman — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:00:00 GMT

Is that something...I'm at TechEd Barcelona right now and will be attending a session named "Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007 for Search Code Name 'S2' - what is it and What's New" at 17:00 today. Now I'm checking my email through CommNet here and I just received the announcement that Microsoft released a new product called 'Microsoft Search Server Express'

So far, it looks to me like this is basically Sharepoint for Search. However...there will be an EXPRESS edition FOR FREE available!

Download the RC here: click

Pretty cool...I'm wondering what the session will be about.. ;-)

UPDATE (16:11)

More info on the Enterprise Search blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/enterprisesearch/

Are you visiting TechEd Barcelona?

Bart Gunneman — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 14:44:00 GMT

Hi!

Just wondering: November 5th, TechEd starts in Barcelona.

I'll be there, some of my colleagues will be there and ofcourse Wouter is doing some sessions on OOXML!

Will you be there? If so...drop me a comment, maybe we can go and grab a 'cerveza' or two :-)

Cheers,

Bart