Wictor Wilen

Welcome back to another post in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (full series index available here). Now it is time to introduce the TextBox control, which can be used to allow users to enter text information in your Ribbon customzations. What is the TextBox control? If you’re familiar with .NET development (WinForms or ASP.NET) then you already know what a TextBox is. It allows your users to enter and change text.

The first control in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (full series index available here) will be about the Label control. What is the Label control? The Label control is a simple control that allows you to add a Label to any of your Ribbon groups. Labels are most often used in combination with other controls such as text boxes and drop downs. You can using a label target another control so that if you click on the label then the other control gets focus. A Label can be a text, an icon or both.

This first real post in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (full series index available here) will be about some of the common properties that most or all of the Ribbon controls shares. I assume that you have some basic knowledge of SharePoint 2010 Ribbon customization, if not check out one of my previous posts. What is a Ribbon control? A SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Control is the interactive parts of the Ribbon. Controls exits within a Group (B) within a Tab (A). The controls can be labels, buttons, drop downs, menus, galleries and more. You can add, remove or change default Ribbon controls or add completely new Tabs and Groups.

Welcome to 2011, this will for sure be an exciting year! I thought I start this year off with a series of blog posts about the different controls that can be used in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon. Hopefully a bit better than the current MSDN documentation. The series will discuss each control that are available for usage in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon and show you through examples and code how to use them. I will even throw in one or more tips and tricks along the road.

The time has come for me to do my summary post of 2010. This is my fifth summary post (2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009). This year has been truly amazing. Working in the SharePoint world has been so interesting and challenging with the brand new Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 products. I have been knee-deep in SharePoint 2010 work both for my employer (Connecta) and for personal reasons (pure fun, book, learning…). A huge thanks to my wife and daughters that can put up with my constant chatter about this obscure thingie…

Recent discussions I’ve been involved with and blog posts have highlighted some of the SharePoint 2010 Sandbox limitations (either as bugs or as a feature). I have also talked about this during SEF 2010 and SPCSEA 2010. While writing my book SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action I had the opportunity to discover these limitations early on and have learned to live with it. If you read my book you will find a lot of references to “this does not work in the Sandbox” (you’ve already ordered it huh? Otherwise it’s just one click away).

Finally back in the blogging saddle, keep stacking ideas and post embryos but never time to finish them. This post is about how you create custom Health Rules for SharePoint 2010 and this health rule is of particular interest since it checks for debug build assemblies in all installed farm solutions. Health Rules Health Rules in SharePoint 2010 is a great way to make administrators aware of possible problems and issues with your farm; such as running out of disk space, living up to best practices etc. SharePoint 2010 comes with a bunch of out-of-the-box rules (of which some are good and some not that good). The best thing about the Health Rules is that you can write your own to fully satisfy your needs and live up to your governance standards.

Yesterday the SharePoint Team posted on their blog about a major issue with the latest Cumulative Update for SharePoint 2010 and recommending not to install it. If you have installed it you might experience major problems with User Profile services - contact Microsoft Support as soon as possible for help. So what about these Cumulative Updates? Everyone that has been in the business for some time working with products such as SharePoint and other products such as SQL Server knows that the CU’s are coming every each month or quarter. These updates contains the latest hotfixes assembled into a one package to make it easier for you to patch your server product. One problem with these CU’s (not the actual CU’s though) is that a lot of people download them and install them as soon as they are released - Fail! This is not the intended purpose of Cumulative Updates, let me explain why:

I just came home from a great trip to Singapore and the Southeast Asia SharePoint conference. It has been a great adventure travelling that far and meet so many SharePoint fans, Southeast Asia is really hot. The conference has been perfectly arranged by Debbie, Randy and Steve at a great location. Thank you! A new conference in the area was announced during the closing session, and if I’m allowed I’ll gladly come back! Hopefully I can spend a few more days here in Singapore then. One thing that really stood out in this conference part from the actual SharePoint content, the speakers and the great people here was the great local food for dinner and tea breaks - love it! As always great to see the real person behind the tweets and the twitter images.