Wictor Wilen

If you have been working with SharePoint 2010 development using Visual Studio 2010 you have most certainly stumbled upon the new replaceable parameters that replaces data in your solution files during the packaging process. For instance Visual Studio uses $SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$ in the Web Part control description (.webpart) files and this is replaced with the assembly full name (strong name) during packaging. By default it looks like this when you create a new Web Part:

I have been updating a couple of SharePoint 2010 servers and farms to the latest June 2010 Cumulative Update (CU) as well as installing a slipstreamed package. The slipstreamed install worked flawless using the same technique as with SharePoint 2007. But patching some of my servers seriously failed on both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 with both SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. Here are some of my experiences of the patching.

This post continues in the same neighborhood as yesterdays post about provisioning Managed Metadata columns. This time we take a look at the Ratings in lists (and while we’re at it check out another earlier post about how to customize the look and feel of ratings). The ratings allows anybody to rate items in lists and libraries in SharePoint 2010 Server. This is another highly usable and awesome feature tied to the Managed Metadata Service Application (MMS). To turn on ratings on a list you normally go to Library/List Settings > Rating Settings.

This post will show you how to provision Site Columns that uses Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2010. Managed Metadata is one of the new and exciting features of SharePoint Server 2010. It allows you to centrally manage metadata terms and keywords. Creating Managed Metadata columns using the SharePoint web interface is a simple task but the problem is that it does not allow you to move your Site Columns from one farm to another that easily. The reason is that these Site Columns definitions contains references to the unique IDs of the terms in the current Managed Metadata Service Application (MMS).

The first cumulative update (CU) for SharePoint 2010 is here. The CU was promised in to be ready in June, but have not arrived until a couple of days ago. I’ve been on vacation (last day today actually) so it fits perfect starting out next week with patching some farms. As you probably know by now the Microsoft SharePoint Team has improved the update cycle a bit compared to its predecessor. If you are not aware of the changes or need to get up to speed on the differences head on over to TechNet and read the following articles:

After about six months of writing I have now written a total of 400 pages and 15 chapters about SharePoint 2010 Web Parts for my book called SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action. This is a book focusing on Web Part development in SharePoint 2010 and I think that it covers all that is needed for developers who wants to enhance their SharePoint 2010 and Web Parts development skills. The chapters are:

When you create a Site Definition for SharePoint 2010 you should provide an image that illustrates the Site Definition. It allows the users to separate the Site Definitions from each other, find the correct one faster and it looks quite nice! In SharePoint 2010 Silverlight is used when selecting Site Actions > New Site. This gives you a nice and fast interface to search for the correct Site Definition. The image of the Site Definition is here very prominent. SharePoint 2007 used a different interface but also used images to represent each Site Definition, but in another way and in another size, so might consider updating them if you are updating your farms.

The Tag Profile Page in SharePoint 2010 is used by the Managed Metadata Service (MMS) as a landing page for a term or a keyword. It is used to describe the tag, its location in the taxonomy, synonyms etc. It also contains all the latest tagged items and a note board. The page is quite dull out of the box. Fortunately this page is a Web Part Page and can be customized as you like! You can add Web Parts and rearrange the page. There is not much you can do with the Tag Profile Web Part, but you can edit the Tagged Items Web Part and change how many days it should go back to look for tagged items (default 60 days). The Get Connected Web Part can be slightly configured with what links it will show, see image to the right. And the Noteboard Web Part also has some configuration options such as how many notes to show etc.

I have recently been getting quite a few requests and comments about the status of ChartPart for SharePoint - a charting Web Part that I built about a year ago and shared on Codeplex. This latest version have had more than 6.000 downloads which I think is amazing, version 1 had close to 10.000 downloads. I temporarily put this project on hold a couple of months a go, due to two major reasons; the built-in Chart Web Part in SharePoint 2010 and that I’m currently writing a book (which essentially means that I have no time at all). Now we now that the out-of-the-box charting Web Part is SharePoint 2010 Server Enterprise only and I only have one and half chapters left on the book.