SharePoint Brain Freeze

SharePoint Saturday Raleigh and Speaking at Sandhills SharePoint User Group November 19th.

Joshua D. Carlisle — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:09:00 GMT

I wanted to thank everyone who spoke, volunteered, and attended the first SharePoint Saturday Raleigh event. Talking to folks after the event and listening to some feedback from twitter everything seems pretty positive so far which I’m glad to hear. We’re already looking forward to another event next year and we’ll work hard to improve on our success. Look for future announcements through the Triangle SharePoint User Group.

I really apologize to the folks at my session, projector issues cut my time in half and then VM slowness and beta stability problems killed the rest of the session. The really embarrassing part came afterwards when I noticed in my rush to move rooms after the projector failed I never plugged in my laptop. No Power = Power Saving = CPU Suckage = VM Useless. Hopefully if you attended my session you got some useful information from our discussion. As promised I’ve already started to work on my webcast with the full demo\slide deck so I should have that available for download\streaming this week for folks.

On another note i will be presenting this same session (hopefully with better luck!) to the Sandhills SharePoint User Group in Fayetteville on Thursday November 19th. So if you missed my presentation or want to give it another go you may want to check out that meeting, its a smaller group so there will be lots of opportunity for questions and discussion.

Here are some pictures for the speaker social, as you can see everyone was having a pretty good time.

SharePoint Saturday Goodness

Joshua D. Carlisle — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:46:37 GMT

First off if your in the Raleigh area and you haven’t registered for SharePoint Saturday Raleigh, What are you waiting for! Go register, I promise it will be a great time!

I’m particular excited about the Raleigh event not only because its the first home town SharePoint Saturday for me and the great new SharePoint 2010 content but also because its going to kick off a couple months of speaking at other SharePoint Saturday events. The new addition to my family, Ava now 5 months old, has kept me pretty busy the last few months but I’m looking forward to getting back out in the community again. And what a great time to! I’m looking forward to sharing some of the great new developer experience available in SharePoint 2010. If anyone has ever heard me rant about the state of SharePoint 2007 developer tools (whether you agree or disagreed with me lol) then you can understand just how excited I am about the developer experience in SharePoint 2010 (and Visual Studio 2010).

On the developer experience I plan to split my sessions across a couple of developer topics:

SharePoint 2010 Developer Goodness (SharePoint Saturday Raleigh, Virginia Beach, Richmond)

Although few argue the business success of SharePoint you’ll find far fewer developers singing the praises of SharePoint. For developers the lack-luster integration with Visual Studio was often a pain point. For developers and designers alike SharePoint Designer, with all of its portability and applications lifecycle consequences were also a source of frustration. For all the heavy development environment requirements could often be a show stopper. With all that and more in mind SharePoint 2010 represents a significant step forward fore SharePoint as a development platform. SharePoint is now a first class citizen in Visual Studio 2010. SharePoint Designer can now fully participate in application development lifecycle. Windows Vista and Windows 7 are now viable development platforms for SharePoint. In this session we will be introducing the new features of Visual Studio 2010’s integration with SharePoint. We will be providing on overview of SharePoint Designer 2010 new ability to produce WSP packages. Lastly we’ll be touching on some of the new built in tools for developers including the Developer Dashboard.

SharePoint 2010 Developer Workflows – Joint Sessions with Michael Lotter (SharePoint Saturday Kansas City)

SharePoint 2007 introduced the SharePoint platform to Windows Workflow. Along with it came some first generation design tools and a very disconnected experience between developers, designers, and business and between the toolset they work with including Visual Studio, SharePoint Designer, and Visio. Did you ever wish that the Visual Studio experience wasn’t as painful, or that you could make your SharePoint Designer workflows more portable, or that you could take your workflow designs developed by your business and port them into SharePoint? Well the wait is over with SharePoint 2010. In this joint back to back session we will be showing off the new features of SharePoint 2010 that allows you to develop workflows using Visio, import them into SharePoint Designer, make modifications in SharePoint Designer, extract to Visio for further modifications and finally extracting into Visual Studio for some hardcore workflow modifications.

November 7, 2009

November 21, 2009

December 12th, 2009

January 10th, 2010

Look forward to seeing everyone there!

So You Want To Become A SharePoint Professional?

Joshua D. Carlisle — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:30:08 GMT

Since I started speaking to groups on the subject of SharePoint at the early days of SharePoint 2007, no matter the topic of my discussion at the time, I almost inevitably got the question from the audience, “I don’t know anything about SharePoint but i want to get into SharePoint, where should I get started?”. It’s a pretty common question out there and you’re likely reading this post because you have the same question, I’ve pointed this blog post to you, or you’ve already figured out a way to answer that question and you’re curious how I suggest to approach the task.

The answer isn’t the easiest. You see SharePoint is a HUGE BEAST of an application and it can be overwhelming trying to figure out where to get started. Early on I approached this from the perspective of a web developer, specifically ASP.NET developers, in my SharePoint for ASP.NET Developers presentations last year. For me it wasn’t the most exciting or sexy of presentations to give but to date it’s still been one of my most popular. Probably for one of the most obvious reasons - there are a lot more asp.net developers then there are SharePoint developers and SharePoint is one of Microsoft’s best selling products in company history. You put the two together and you have folks wanting (or being told to) learn SharePoint.

In my presentation last week at the Hampton Roads SharePoint User Group I was once again presented with the same question. I typically have quite a few stock answers and it inevitably comes down to requests for specific resources. Instead of trying to keep my suggestions and resource links on every presentation slide deck i decided to bite the bullet and get a blog post up to reference.

First off start with the basics:
- Start with Windows SharePoint Services. WSS provides the foundation for it's big brother Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Understanding WSS will prepare you for the added complexity\functionary when\if it becomes time to move up to MOSS and will give you an excellent foundation.
- Learn what SharePoint can do out of the box. As a developer its very easy to start thinking about custom solutions when a customer presents you with a challenge. One of the biggest value in a truly good SharePoint professional is knowing the capabilities of the application and helping your customer avoid the complexities and cost of custom development on top of an already expensive investment. In areas where SharePoint doesn’t exactly shine, such as some of its Web 2.0 features, it may mean making suggestions for alternative ways to achieve their goals. For example the out of the box Wiki is fairly primitive to current standards (heck it was designed and coded pushing 5 years ago) but they may be able to save 100% of the custom costs by accepting 80% of the functionality they need. You’ll find as you gain experience with SharePoint its all about compromises and working with the tool not against it.
Make use of free online resources:
- Official SharePoint Forums – The official SharePoint forums are a great place to get started and ask questions. Not only are there Microsoft technical specialists who monitor and answer questions there is a very healthy community that answer questions. Its a great place to bounce ideas off of, ask about the basics, or get some help with something that is stumping you.
- SharePoint MSDN Site – This is a great aggregate of online resources, links, and articles, and videos. In the early days it’s content was fairly light but they’ve really improved it in the last year. Just this morning i noticed a great article on different tools and techniques for developing in SharePoint.
- Download a Pre-Configured SharePoint Virtual Machine – Microsoft created a time bombed virtual machine that comes preconfigured with MOSS, Search, Reporting,etc. Its a great way to play around without having to worth through the overhead of installing and configuring a new environment. If you mess up the environment all you have to do is restart and you’re back up and running. Just make sure you get your playing done in 30 days, after that you’re on your own :( .
- End User SharePoint – End User SharePoint is new in the last year to the SharePoint community. At last year’s SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach I remember Mark Miller talking up his new community site and since then its has really grown, lots of great articles from community contributors from around the country.
- SharePoint Blogs – The SharePoint blogging community is one of the most active technical blogging communities I’ve ever seen. There are too many blog posts to mention but I’d start with the MS SharePoint Team blogs and checkout some MVP blogs. I guarantee within a few days you’ll have a couple dozen RSS feeds added to your favorite reader.
Buy some books. With all the great online resources its easy to overlook the tried and true reference guides, before heading out and dropping the $$ on some books though make sure you checkout the free online resources.

Some of my favorites include:
Attend SharePoint User Groups and Community Events:
- SharePoint User Groups – Most folks are within driving distance of a SharePoint User Group or Office Geeks user group. The ISPA site has a pretty good listing of existing user groups out there so check it out to find one in your area. SPUG’s are one of the best resources that nobody knows about. You get presentations from folks in the industry, not travelling presenters, the insight that these folks have can truly be remarkable. It’s also an invaluable resource for networking with other SharePoint professionals. If you’re in the Raleigh area check out the Triangle SharePoint User Group, we meet the 1st Tuesday of each month.
- SharePoint Saturday – SharePoint Saturday is a free, educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics. Most SharePoint Saturday events have developer, administration, end user, and power user tracks just to name a few so there is typically something for everyone. SharePoint Saturday’s are spreading like wildfire and you’re seeing them popup all over the country (and world!).
Setting up your own Virtual Machines – Once you get to a certain point you’re going to want to start playing around with SharePoint on your own without having to talk your IT folks into setting up an environment for you. Because SharePoint currently has an Server OS requirement for installation (Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008) the best way to go about it is to setup a local virtual machine using a tool such as VMWare Workstation, Virtual PC, or Virtual Box. Alternatively you can install Windows Server 2003\2008 on a physical machine if you have one sitting around. The final alternative is to use an unsupported tool from Bamboo to allow SharePoint to install on a workstation. I’ve never used this tool and its completely unsupported by MS but it’s out there to try if you can’t swing the hardware requirements of a virtual machine.

On the hardware topic I do have a couple suggestions if you plan to go the virtual machine route:
1. Have your Virtual Machines on a second drive dedicated drive to improve performance. This may mean a secondary internal drive (some laptops 17’ or greater like my HP have two drives) or pickup an external usb drive
2. The faster the drive the better. I usually don’t get less then 7200RPM for my VM disks. Even better if you can afford it go for a new SSD drive.
3. 4GB or grater RAM. The virtual machine uses the same recommended memory as the base OS so you want to try to give your VM at least 2GB of RAM if you can manage it. Anything below that and you’ll start to have performance issues. 8GB RAM, even on laptops, have come down in prices so if you can swing it go with 8GB.

This is by no means an definitive list but hopefully get you on your way to becoming a SharePoint Pro!. Have something you think should be on the list? Drop me a line in my comments.

SharePoint 2010: One caveat - things are going to start changing this week with SharePoint 2010 being formally introduced at the SharePoint conference, and more importantly for me, the lifting of the NDA that keeps me from talking about some of the new content and how it impacts the ramp up time, especially for developers. I’ll keep this updated with some of the latest content as it becomes available.

Speaking at Hampton Roads SPUG & DOD SPUG (Virginia) Tomorrow 10/15/2009

Joshua D. Carlisle — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:35:51 GMT

Tomorrow I will be heading up to Virginia to speak at the Hampton Roads SQL\SharePoint User Group and the Department of Defense SharePoint User Group for a day of SharePoint Build environment topics. The Hampton Roads group meets at the Virginia Beach City Public Schools at their Advanced Technology Center, Room 131. More details on the group and the location can be found at their website http://www.hrssug.org/default.aspx. If you’re in the military\contractor the DOD presentation will also be available on a web conference via the DCO, if you need connection information please drop me a line in my comments and I can put you in touch with the right folks.

I was originally planning to speak on some of the new integration between Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Although SP2010 is still under NDA (so I can’t speak much on the subject - at least until the SharePoint conference next week) I thought there was enough juicy tidbits in the content already announced by Microsoft (fair game to talk about) that I could get away with a high level topic. There have actually been a couple articles and videos released by Microsoft in the last few months, especially most recently on Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint so I felt it would be safe to present on this content in a limited fashion. As I was prepping for the talk I felt I was skirting the boundaries of the NDA a little too closely so I chose to err on the side of caution and hold off on that topic. So if you’re interested in seeing that discussion you’ll have to come to my session at the Raleigh SharePoint Saturday event.

I will however be presenting on a topic that applies to both the current and next version of SharePoint which is setting up a SharePoint Build Environment. If you’ve already seen this presentation in one of my other road trips this year I have a different spin on this presentation that will be new for tomorrow.

Easing Your Deployment Burdens With A SharePoint Build Environment

Every project can benefit from the practice of implementing a build server. From daily builds to continuous integration, the benefits have never been in dispute, but many have felt that SharePoint has too many complexities to be supported in a build environment. In this updated session we’ll be covering the use and creation of custom msbuild tasks to automate many aspects of SharePoint deployment to make the process of not only compiling but solution package creation, deployment, and feature\site creation from within the build process straight forward.

Thanks again to Susan Lennon for the invitation to speak with these groups and I look forward to seeing everyone!

Developing SharePoint Workflows for WSS – Don’t Forget To Remove Your MOSS Dependencies

Joshua D. Carlisle — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:26:58 GMT

I was working on a short workflow project for a client a couple weeks ago that was targeting WSS. Just a simple workflow to provide some enhanced blog posting features - nothing crazy. I typically spin up a new virtual machine for each project from my base developer virtual machine so I have a clean slate but I was being lazy and this was a quick module so I decided to just ride on the virtual machine that I already had spun up for another project. However this virtual machine had MOSS installed but I was already aware of some of the caveats with developing workflows targeting WSS.

I don’t use Microsoft’s SharePoint\Workflow project templates because they don’t support 32bit (boooo!) so I’m not sure if this is an issue with that project type but there are a couple things to consider especially if you're using wspbuilder’s workflow template like me. This is fairly common knowledge with a few searches so I won’t get into great detail but you will need to make some adjustments to the out of the box workflow project template to allow it to successfully deploy\run in a WSS environment as it contains some MOSS dependencies by default:

1) Remove any reference to moss\office assemblies in the project:

2) In your generated elements file remove the references to the forms (AssociationUrl, InstantiationUrl,ModificationUrl, StatusUrl). These are references to pages only available in MOSS.

You may be asking why these pages become an issue. In short these are Infopath Forms Server forms. Unfortunately WSS does not have access to forms server so these are unavailable.

On a side note I was chatting with my co-worker Michael Lotter the other day who did confirm from a MS resource that you can use InfoPath Forms Server forms in workflows for MOSS Standard but only within the context of workflow forms, anything beyond that and you’ll need MOSS enterprise.

3) Remove the default TaskListContentTypeId (unless you are implementing a custom one).

Without these steps you’ll run into problems installing the workflow. Now in my haste I neglected to remove the TaskListContentTypeId. Unfortunately for me the workflow feature successfully activated, I was able to add a workflow reference to my targeted list, but from there things got strange. It would have been easier if I just got an ugly incomprehensible error but SharePoint wanted to keep me on my toes this day.

So if you’re like me and you forget to remove the TaskListConetntTypeId you may be left scratching your head for a while with the strange behavior. The workflow feature will install, activate, and you can associate the workflow with a list but you’ll notice right away that executing the workflow does nothing,the workflow status column shows no status, and no workflow history exists. You will not receive any exceptions, no event or ULS logs, things will simply not work. As with any development error the worst kinds are the ones that don’t throw any exceptions.

So moral of the story, if you’re targeting WSS and developing in MOSS make sure catch all your moss dependencies that may be injected in by your project template of choice or you may get a few surprises when you deploy to your staging\production environment.

SharePoint Saturday Charlotte Session Follow-up

Joshua D. Carlisle — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:43:51 GMT

Well SharePoint Saturday Charlotte is now behind us. I had a really great time. Thanks again to Dan Lewis and company for putting together a great event. It was great to catch up with everyone and especially meeting some new folks like Laura Rogers, Heather Waterman, and Shadeed Eleazer. I’m hoping to make it to some more SharePoint Saturday’s soon.

A couple follow-ups on my session on using a SharePoint Build Environment. In case you missed the SharePoint Saturday Charlotte site you can also download my presentations and the demo build script project.

I also wanted to share a solution on a issue I reported in my session related to WSPBuilder. In my experience WSPBuilder at times exhibited a very long build time for solution packages, sometimes as much as 5-10 minutes. A recent community post on codeplex provides a solution to the issue. It would appear that wspbuilder historically made use of reflection to gleam information about references, in a recent release they moved over to a a mono related project called Cecil that is causing the performance impact. Checkout http://wspbuilder.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=56751 for more details and the fix.

SharePoint Saturday Charlotte – Speakers

Charlotte SharePoint Saturday This Weekend – See Everyone There!

Joshua D. Carlisle — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:07:12 GMT

Wow what a busy week. Lots of activity on the community front this week for me. Had a great meeting last night with the rest of the Triangle SharePoint User Group Leadership , we’ve got some really great plans and announcements coming up for the SharePoint community in Raleigh. The new TRISPUG site is coming along nicely and we’ve just opened up registration. I’m ending the week with a trip out to Charlotte for SharePoint Saturday event with some of the rest of the B&R crew (Michael Lotter, Nas Ali, and Becky Isserman) and also my family in tow (we’re spending Sunday at the Great Wolf Lodge – fun fun fun). I’m really looking forward to the event. I’ve been doing a good bit of work behind the scenes with SharePoint Saturday but I’ve only made it to the first event. It’s been great to see the success that Michael has had with the SharePoint Saturday concept. I’m looking forward to catching up with folks that I really wish I could see more often (new and old acquaintances).

I’ve been doing my Back to Basic – Feature Development session for my last few speaking engagements and I thought a new presentation would be a good change. I recently finished an engagement with a client helping them setup a build environment for SharePoint and it was such a good experience (both challenges and fun stuff), with lots of questions from the client, that I thought the community might get some value from it as well.

Ease Your Deployment Burdens by Setting up a SharePoint Automated Build Server

Every project can benefit from the practice of implementing a build server. From daily builds to continuous integration, the benefits have never been in dispute, but many have felt that SharePoint has too many complexities to be supported in a build environment. In this session we’ll see how with the use of msbuild and some custom build tasks we can make the process of compiling, solution packaging, testing, and deployment very straightforward.

Not registered yet? Checkout http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/charlotte/default.aspx . Look forward to seeing everyone there!

The Scourge of Corporate User Group Ownership

Joshua D. Carlisle — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:30:18 GMT

The catalyst for this post was a comment by Chad Grieves to my previous post on the Introduction to the Triangle SharePoint UserGroup. I don’t know Chad and he doesn’t identify himself beyond his name or his company but he implies that he’s part of the leadership of the original Raleigh SharePoint User Group. It would appear that he is upset that we started a new SharePoint usergroup in Raleigh (TRISPUG). Based on searches he is or was associated with ThoughtBridge as an Account Executive (e.g. Sales) for the Carolinas and ThoughtBridge is\was the “sponsor” of that group.

Chad’s Comment:

“Josh, reading through your information I see several false statements. We started 2 1/2 years ago, the Raleigh SharePoint Users group, along with Microsoft as the "go-to" managed partner in the Carolinas. We are far from fledgling with over 50 companies in attendance. We do it every 2 months at the request of the participants. I believe you are associatted with tek Systems- are you a Managed Partner in the SOutheast for Microsoft? I know of a handful in the Carolinas and you were not one of them... it is my understanding you are a staffing firm wanting to get into the MOSS project business..please make sure you update your blog to include factual information-“

With the original groups’ last reported meeting being last year I believe, the group’s site (www.sharepointusersgroup.com/RSug) being down, no communications I’ve heard of to the community in almost a year, all of my emails going unanswered, past members saying the group fizzled, truly how can anyone assume otherwise? Is the original group still providing any type of service to the community?

Secondly there are no false statements in my post. I’m not implying I started the previous SharePoint group in Raleigh, I’m saying that myself and others are stepping up to fill the absence that currently exists for a SharePoint community in Raleigh. I am NOT associated with Tek-Systems, Tek-Systems is just very nice enough to host the facilities for our meetings and they also support other groups in the area such as the Triangle .Net User Group. A few searches with my name and reading through some of my blog can easily confirm this.

But this is really about a bigger issue beyond a single user group and probably my most important point. There is nothing that bothers me more then a company that uses a user group as an extension to their PR and Sales departments. Chad I think your comment speaks for itself. User Groups are not partners with Microsoft (managed or otherwise), they are partners with the COMMUNITY. This parasitic type of behavior that I see from companies and user groups is never a good thing for the user group in the long run because its the business interests that drive the group not the community interest. Once those business interests change or the companies goes under so does the group. In my opinion this is very self evident in the relationship between ThoughtBridge and the previous Raleigh SharePoint user group (and from what I understand the old group in Atlanta as well). In Chad’s comment he refers to a managed partner status and of course he’s referring to ThoughtBridge and his role as account executive of the Carolinas. So falsely accusing me that I’m part of a staffing firm trying to drum up business is a bit like calling the Pot calling the kettle black heh?

Now let me be very clear I have no issue with ThoughtBridge as a company nor Chad. I really don’t know much about ThoughtBridge other then what bing (you like that plug MS hehe) would tell me. The ThoughtBridge site is down so I’m not even sure if they’re around any more so it may be a mute point. I just don’t like the trend that I see out there of companies creating or taking ownership of a user groups. Consulting, Staffing, Product firms will always play a very important role with User Groups because without their sponsorship (key word sponsorship) usergroups could not exist. It’s also great outlet for company employee’s to network with others in the group and we encourage that. The networking that takes place in usergroups is one of the great benefits beyond the technical presentation but its important that usergroup leadership remain independent and impartial to the community.

As for TRISPUG, as I mentioned in my first post introducing TRISPUG but I will reiterate, we will never be associated with any company outside that of a sponsor relationship. Our group will NEVER be owned by any company. Our leadership will and is made up of members from throughout the community. We owe that much to the community as every other usergroup does.

I would encourage any company who wants to get involved with Usergroups to do so, it can be a great value, just don’t go out and try to start your own please :).

Triangle SharePoint User Group (TRISPUG) Meeting – Tuesday Jun 2nd

Joshua D. Carlisle — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:01:42 GMT

This months meeting will be a little more informal then usual. We had several requests for some general discussion and since we have speakers booked up for the next few months I thought this was a good time. Unfortunately my son’s first T-Ball game is tomorrow night so i won’t be able to attend but I’ll be interested to hear about any spirited discussions that may occur. Look forward to seeing everyone next month.

For more details on the meeting and the Triangle SharePoint User Group please visit http://www.trispug.com.

Introducing Ava

Joshua D. Carlisle — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:55:58 GMT

No this isn’t a new CodePlex project but it is a project of sort. Last Thursday, May 14th, my wife brought a beautiful little girl to the world – Ava Mae Ruth Carlisle. A healthy 7.4 pounds and 21 inches long. It’s been a few years since we’ve had a newborn in the house (our son Evan is 5) but it’s a strange thing how your mind represses the memories of lack of sleep and just keeps the cute baby moments. Well the cute baby moments are definitely here but also are the sleepless nights and changing 5 diapers in a row lol. Needless to say I may be quite for a few weeks. Anyway here’s to cute kids!