Wictor Wilen

Back in the saddle from another TechDays event here in Sweden. This year it was all about the cloud! It was as always a great show and an awesome party. Thank you Microsoft, all presenters, all attendees and sponsors. I did two sessions - or actually one session divided into two segments about Office 365 and Windows Azure. I tried to squeeze in as much cloud technology as I could in a one big demo. For those who attended - I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to go back to the slides or take a look at the demo code you can find them below. The sessions were also recorded so you can enjoy them in full glory (keep an eye on the TechDays site for more information).

In less than a week Sweden’s largest Microsoft conference will take place in Örebro - TechDays 2011, same place as last year. The conference is already fully booked with 1.700 participants, but there’s a waiting list! The theme of the conference is “The Cloud Story”. This year I will do two sessions, or rather one long sessions split into two parts on Office 365 + Windows Azure. This will be over two hours full of great demoes and information. I’ve built one big demo that will combine the powers of Office 365 (SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Lync Online) and Windows Azure (web and worker roles, SQL Azure, AppFabric). We’ll also touch on technologies such as Silverlight, WPF, Open XML and WIF. So if you think this is interesting, if you’re considering moving your stuff into the cloud or just want to have fun - then these are the sessions to attend.

Today an article was published on the SharePoint Developer Team Blog called Calling a WCF Service using jQuery. The content and purpose of the article is good and interesting but the way it is implemented can not be considered best practice and is definitely not the way we (I) teach SharePoint 2010 development. For instance this article manually registers assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache! Something that we never should do! It tells you to copy files to the virtual directory bin folder and into the Layouts folder! Ouch! Also, the article contains some plain ol’ errors.

The other day I was setting up another SharePoint 2010 farm and got the usual question to participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). As always I bailed out of this. Why? Sending information to a third party about my SharePoint farm doesn’t appeal me, even if it’s Microsoft. You know, they might check how I configure my farm, how I use it etc., and then sit back and laugh at me. Not really, but I think most of us prefer not to send that information to Microsoft. But, this is not my normal standing to the CEIP. I use to participate in it, like when I install new software and they have that little checkbox asking me to send info about my installation. Why not give Microsoft some help about any kind of troubles during the installation. But when it comes to SharePoint - nope.

The SharePoint 2010 user interface relies heavily on JavaScripts, just take a look at the Ribbon which is completely generated by a bunch of JavaScripts. Often customizations of SharePoint also involve JavaScripts. You need it to open modal dialogs, add notifications, create Ribbon Page Components etc. etc.. JavaScript is just one of the programming languages you must know as a SharePoint developer - and you can do amazing stuff with it (just take a look at SPServices by Marc D Anderson).

Back again (sorry about the delay) with a new part in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (all parts available here). This time I’m going to show you an interesting control - the Spinner control. What is a Spinner control? The spinner is an up/down (increase/decrease) control with some smart abilities to handle different units. For instance it is used when setting image and table sizes in the default ribbon. The Spinner control has a value (number) and a unit (pixel, percent, points etc.) and three ways to modify the value; manual or using the up and down buttons.

I’ve just published a page, which I plan to update regularly, containing links to web sites, tools, products, solutions, articles, posts, books etc. which I recommend and talk about during my SharePoint 2010 classes. You can find the page here: Class Links If I did promise you during my classes to add a link to it and have forgotten - drop me an e-mail and remind me.

Back with another SharePoint 2010 Server Ribbon Controls post, this time a shorter one, compared to previous posts. We’ll take a look at the ToggleButton control. I know I said I’m going to talk about the DropDown in this post, but I’d reconsidered and take the easy ones first - since the DropDown control will be divided into several posts. What is a ToggleButton control? The ToggleButton control is very similar in behavior to the Button control with the difference that you can toggle the state of the button; it can either be on or off.

Welcome back to part 6 of my SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (full series index can be found here). This time we’ll take a look at the CheckBox control. What is the CheckBox control? If you’ve not been hiding under a rock you should now what a CheckBox is - it’s a box you can check. It can have two states - checked or not checked. Sample CheckBox control A CheckBox can look like this when implemented in the Ribbon: