In the next few posts called "SharePoint 2010 User Experience" I will take you through a journey of the new user features that make SharePoint the great platform it is today and will be going forward. In this post we will look at the new concept of document sets. So firstly let's look at how this works. Open up your SharePoint 2010 Site and navigate to the "site collection features" link.

Look down the list of features and find the one called "Document Sets". Simply activate this.

Once activated we need to change the document library to accept content types. Follow the steps below:

Once done we need to associate the "Document Set" content type to the library.

So now we have this added, simply click the "Documents" link on the ribbon bar.

This should take us back to the default library view. If we then press the "New Document" button we are presented with our "Document Set" content type.

Selecting this enables us to create a document set, first it asks for a name and then a description.

Then we are presented with what is called a welcome page for the document set. From here we can "View" or "Edit" the document set properties, or use the ribbon bar and upload files directly into the set.

From the ribbon bar select the "Upload Document", then "Upload Multiple Documents" option.

We are then able to use the new uploading method.

Notice how we can drag and drop files directly on the screen, or we can use the "Select files from a folder" option.

Once the files have been selected, they will then upload and you should be presented with a screen similar to this:

Once you click to confirm the upload they should then upload and the screen should return to the welcome page with the documents listed below:

If we come out of the document set now and back into the default library view we can see that the document set is classed as single object that has its own menu items just as with a normal document.

Yes, there are few more menu items than SharePoint 2007!! For example if we select the "Download a Copy" it zips the file(s) up and presents it as a single zipped download.

If we try to use any of the menu items it treats the document set as a single object. You are still able to use all the standard options within the document set as you would with any normal document.

So as you can see there are some great features that are coming in SharePoint 2010, not only document sets but also the ability to zip files as part of a download. These are just a couple of the new features that will be available. Hopefully as I go through them you will see what great things are in store and why should upgrade!!

As you are all aware the SharePoint 2010 NDA was lifted last week at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009. So from now on there should be lots of posts about what 2010 can do and how it can be used. In this post I will walk you through the basic install, setting all the services and end up creating a base internet portal. As a note to start I am using the Tech Preview version of SharePoint 2010 which will look slightly different when it hits the public beta.

Firstly I am using a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM, running on VMware 7, it has 100GB Disk, 4GB Ram and 4 CPUs. I have already provisioned my server as Domain Controller, and installed IIS and SQL Server 2008 and .NET framework 4.0. So let's begin. Pop in the DVD or launch from the executable you have:

Select the "Install software prerequisites" option.

It should then load the following screen, it will then set the correct windows features and roles, download the items needed and install them.

Once completed (you may need to reboot) select the "Install Office SharePoint Server" option.

Leave the server to install as you would expect from SharePoint 2007. Once completed you get a very familiar interface. Select the "Create a new server farm" option.

Follow the wizard as shown below:

Notice the next screen is a new one; it is something called the Farm Passphrase. This is an extra layer of security; I won't discuss this here though.

Once done it should finish as you would expect with SharePoint 2007. Now you may notice that you keep getting multiple login prompts. To resolve these you can perform the following steps:

1. Use "DisableLoopbackCheck" option
2. Add the URLs to the Intranet Zone

If this does not work then you can do the following. Open the registry to the following location:

Add a new "Multi-String Value"

Add the URLs you wish to use, you can use a wildcard option if needed.

Once done this should not cause you anymore problems. To continue on, the new Central Administration should load as shown below:

Firstly let's start all the services that we need on the farm.

You will notice from above that there are a lot more services that can be used within SharePoint 2010. When you click on any of them to Start you should see the nice new processing window load.

When you have started all of the services it should look like this.

So now let's create new web application so we can create our internet facing site. Select the "Manage Web Applications" option.

When it loads select the "Web Applications" option from the ribbon bar.

And here is one of those Tech Preview delights, notice no proper icon, just a place holder for it. Anyway select the "New" option.

You will see the usual screen that we used in SharePoint 2007 but notice it is presented within a light box effect.

Complete the fields as needed. Notice however you now have an option to set a failover database server when creating the web application.

You should also see that we can associate the service applications that we wish to use with the web application. We can use the default options which would be everything that is enabled or select the custom option and select our own.

For now we will select the "Default" option. This will create the web application as expected, so now let's select the "Create Site Collections" option.

You will see the same screen load that we used in SharePoint 2007, but notice there are more templates this time.

For our purpose here we will select the "Publishing Portal" from the "Publishing" tab. The site should then be created as we would expect. When we access the site it should look like the below:

So now you have the site running, you may want to know where you configure the search etc. As you may have noticed there is no Shared Service provider now. So to access the search pages go back to "Central Administration" and access "Manage Service Applications".

Select the "Search Service Application" and then select the "Manage" option from the ribbon bar.

You should then get a familiar screen; you can now select any of the options as you would of in SharePoint 2007.

So there you have a fully function SharePoint 2010 installation. In the next few posts I will look at some of the features sets that are available.

I am sitting here at the SharePoint Conference in Vegas on day two. It is only 9:30 am here and already we have the famous picture on Twitter!!

Great to see how Twitter can be ground to a halt simply by everyone tweeting the conference sessions!! And this time it wasn't me!! J

With the advent of SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010, new Visual Studio Tools are now available to help you the developer to build solutions using SharePoint 2010 easily. In this post we will look at one of the simplest yet long awaited features to come to the developers. The new feature is having the ability to create a Visual Web Part.

So to begin I am using Windows Foundation Services 2010 (Or what was known as WSS 4) and Visual Studio 2010 with the SharePoint Tools installed.

Let's begin open up Visual Studio 2010 and create a project based on the Visual Web Part Template:

You then need to specify the instance of SharePoint that you are using:

Now let's look at the structure of the project:

You will notice that the project now comes with all the components needed to create this web part.

1. Feature Definition
2. WSP Package Definition
3. Web Part Code
4. User Control Code (Visual Elements)

For this example we will simply create the web part, in another post we will look at the other items. So now open the file called "VisualWebPart1UserControl.ascx" or whatever you called yours. Using the standard ASP.NET controls add a label and then a button to the page in whatever layout you wish to use.

If we now double click the button we should be presented with the following code:

We are going to modify the code slightly to the following. Notice also that the intellisense features work really well for this:

Now we have our web part if we now open up the file "VisualWebPart1.cs" we can see what a Visual Web Part is actually made of and how it is called.

Notice how we are calling a user control that will be stored within the CONTROLTEMPLATE of the server. So let's look at our web part in action. Firstly select the build menu and choose to build the deploy the solution.

This process will deploy the web part to the site collection you specified when the project was created, for me it is http://wss4. So once it has deployed I am going to edit my page and choose to add a web part:

I am going to select my new web part that is now listed within the custom category:

I can choose to add this web part to the page now and it should render like this:

Now if I run the page as normal and press the button my web part should now update.

So if we now check, the solution package that was created has deployed everything my web part needed but more importantly create a feature that is activated as part of the deploy process:

This is a great and powerful feature of Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint Tools and SharePoint 2010.

So we have all been working with the Ribbon Bar for a while now in Office 2007, so now we have it in SharePoint 2010. Let's look at the features of the Ribbon Bar for SharePoint.

If we access the home page of my Windows Foundation Services homepage we get the following:

If we select the "Edit" link we get the following:

If we now select the "Share & Track" link we get this.

This is great but this doesn't really help us so let's look at the contextual changes that take place when we work with SharePoint Content. If I edit the homepage and choose the image:

If I now change to modify the text the ribbon bar yet again changes.

As you can see this is fantastic and works just like Office does. This is true when working within Central Administration, for example when I am trying to modify service applications I get the following Ribbon Bar:

To look at the full structure of how these items are added to the UI you need to look at the file CMDUI.XML in the 14 hive. This contains the out of the box structure of all the ribbon bar items. You also have the ability to add your own items to the ribbon bar. All in this entire ribbon bar in the browser is a winner all round!! J

Had to share this one with you all!! I have just built a new Virtual Machine running Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. All of these have been updated, however when I connect to Windows Update I get the following screen!!

Yes that is 1GB of updates for my new VM!! What can I say, all done now but 1GB of updates, almost as big as the DVD with the original media on. It did make me chuckle!! J

Like most of you, you may have looked at the "UserProfileManager" web services and noticed that there is no way to get all the user profiles. I needed this functionality so I decided to create my own web service. So if you need a starter for ten then here we go. Create your web application project so it looks something like this:

Now we need to add the following code:

To make sure that the web service performed better than normal I added some methods that cache the results for a certain time limit. So the core code is this:

We now add the following:

Notice we have started to create the Xml document above. We can now add the XmlElements as needed. This code loops through all of the UserProfiles that exist in the profileManager object and then starts to add XmlElements and attributes as needed.

While doing the code I found that if the profile field had multiple values it would not render them correctly so I had to write some code that would loop through the multiple values and write them out.

Now we have the core XmlDocument created we can then close the document and return it as part of our method.

So now the code is done, we need to add this somewhere. I simply created a new virtual directory in IIS.

I made sure that the directory was using the same Application Pool Account as the rest of the site.

I was then able to run the web service as shown below:

I selected my Xml method then selected the INVOKE option.

Hey Presto, and XmlDocument of my user profiles on my test server.

If I expand one of the users it now lists all the profile fields in the profile as well as their values.

Fantastic, love using Xml to get the data I need. And with some extra caching methods this web service works really well and allows me to get large amounts of data very quickly. I am re-writing this into a WCF service so will blog about it soon. J

In one of my last posts I looked at created a HttpHandler that would use query string parameters to retrieve the Xml of a list in SharePoint. The basis for this was to replace the use of the "owssvr.dll" method due to its security requirements. In this post we will enhance it slightly and turn the Xml into an RSS feed.

For this one we will use the same base as the last one but add some extra methods for generating the RSS feed. So to begin with let's create a new file, I have called mine "GetListRSS.ashx". I then opened it up in Visual Studio 2008. Firstly we need to add the following declarations.

Then we need to add the following using statements and then declare our class as type "IHttpHandler".

Now we can start adding the code to create the XML and generate the RSS. Firstly we need to setup the query strings as before that we want to use to get the site, list and view ID's.

So for the RSS generation I can't take the credit as this is using some of the work that Sahil did on his RSS code which you can find here. I have taken some of the core code and re-purposed it to match what I needed. All in all it is using the same except for a few tweaks. The modified code is below:

As you can see it does exactly what is says it will do (thanks Sahil). Now to test it I copied this to the _vti_bin directory on my server and tested with the following URL.

http://www.helloitsliam.com/_vti_bin/GetListRSS.ashx?SiteUrl=http://www.helloitsliam.com&ListID={A462AB0D-84CF-4918-9950-D562530A5377}&ViewID={f7c353e2-e2fa-494c-a2a9-7c6dbb3bddd6}

The ending result is the following:

As you can see with a little code inside a HttpHandler you can create a component that will not only output raw Xml but also RSS. Big thanks to Sahil for the main RSS code.

This sample could be modified to include a flag that would allow you to re-purpose the results as raw XML or as an RSS feed. Using SharePoint data in its raw XML is the easiest and best approach well I think to using it inside your custom components.