SharePoint

I’m excited to be returning to Las Vegas in May of 2019 to speak at the SharePoint Conference 2019 in May 21st to 21rd, at the MGM Grand. This event is one of the two major events, second one being Microsoft Ignite, that the SharePoint, OneDrive and Yammer product groups are announcing their greatest and latest features and also where you will meet some of the finest speakers and community members of our great SharePoint family.

If you are an ISV or SI with multiple clients and are interested in building SharePoint Framework (SPFx) solutions that you would like to re-use you will face a huge issue when it comes to reference SharePoint JavaScript files and reference your SharePoint Framework bundles. All these URL’s are hardcoded into your solution configuration files and requires you to update these files and rebuild for each and every client environment. And not only that even in your own development team this will cause issues if you don’t have a shared development environment.

Let me start with congratulating the SharePoint Framework team on an amazing job and an amazing journey reaching this GA milestone. A Big Thanks from the team here in Redmond to everyone who helped us to get to GA! #SPFx #SharePoint #SharePointFramework pic.twitter.com/czo2Duon7z — Chakkaradeep (@chakkaradeep) February 24, 2017 The SharePoint Framework plays a significant part of the SharePoint future, yes - this is only the first version with a lot of new features on the way, and it is a part of the new SharePoint wave. I’ve haven’t seen this interest in SharePoint for many years and I’m glad I’m still in this business. Delivering top notch collaboration solutions for our clients at Avanade. The SharePoint Framework will make it easier for us to customize SharePoint and it will also bring a lot more value for our clients in the end allowing them to stay evergreen and not being tied into “workarounds” and pesky SharePoint Designer hacks or arbitrary JavaScript snippets.

I guess that almost every application or solution you ever built has contained some portions of a logging mechanism. And how many of you have written your own - yup, all of you! But what about the SharePoint Framework - yes, it has built-in logging! How to log in the SharePoint Framework Logging is a very convenient and easy way to keep track of events happening, instead of having breakpoints, or in JavaScript even worse - alerts. The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) has as all decent frameworks a built-in logging mechanism, albeit very simple, but still yet valuable. It’s contained in the @microsoft/sp-client-base module and the class is called Log. To use it in your SharePoint Framework solutions you need to import it as follows:

Do you write code that potentially can throw an error or an exception? Oh, you don’t - but sure you use a web service or external service or something that can throw an error. Well, it is you responsibility to handle the error and make sure to inform the user in a good way that something bad happened. With that I mean, do not show just a Guid. With the SharePoint Framework being all client side I think it is important to have control of your client side Web Parts and make sure that you properly handle and display error messages in a consistent way. In this short post I will not go in to the JavaScript error handling details, but rather show you another nugget in the SharePoint Framework that helps you render error messages in a standardized and consistent way.

SharePoint Framework is all about rendering stuff on the client side, avoiding the long overdue ASP.NET Web Forms technology that SharePoint (Online) is still fundamentally based on. When rendering things client side everything is done asynchronously, to avoid locking down the UI threads and having a user experience that is fluent. In order to give the user good feedback that things are happening in the background, you need to have some kind of visual cue that tells the user - hey I’m doing stuff now, gimme a minute. There are thousands of different ways to do this and everyone does it differently; ranging from animated gifs to “loading” texts. And everyone using different methods does not always help with the user experience - so why don’t we have a common way to do this?

At the Future of SharePoint event in San Francisco on May the 4th Microsoft announced the new and improved customization option and/or development model called the SharePoint Framework. This is a development model that solely focused on client-side development. There’s been some confusion going on on Twitter and other social medias and podcasts and I thought I should put together an Q&A post for this.

Today is the day many of us have been waiting for since the big SharePoint event at May the 4th. The highly anticipated SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is here and announced in at the SharePointFest, in this blog post, as well as in the new Github repo for SharePoint. Personally I’ve been waiting for this even longer after being involved by the product team to give early feedback and also attending the first top secret DevKitchen “hackathons” where we could try out very early bits.

Today at The Future of SharePoint event Microsoft have announced the next iteration in SharePoint development - the SharePoint Framework. As one of the old ones who started with the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit, to the COM+ event handlers in SharePoint 2001, over to custom built DDFs, to WSP’s to Apps and Add-ins - this new framework is a very welcome change. For years SharePoint Developers have been forced to walk in shame in the outer rims of the developer guild. It’s been so hard to get over the threshold and once you were over it, there was very few who actually returned to a normal life. I’ve been struggling for years to get ASP.NET or web developers to get on over to SharePoint development with no luck. The Add-in model did not help in any sense here and just introduced new pitfalls and confusions.

About a year ago I wrote a blog article called SharePoint Team sites are dead. An article that stirred up many feelings in the community and started an interesting (and somewhat harsh) discussion - which was kind of the point. Fast forward to May 2016 and this is a totally different ball game! SharePoint Team Sites are back! Modern team sites Jeff Teper, CVP at Microsoft, writes in the just now published The Future of SharePoint blog post: “Team sites has always been at the heart of collaboration with SharePoint”, a statement I absolutely agree with. Team Sites is what made SharePoint such a successful product. The post I wrote about how Team Sites are supposed to be dead are still true though - Team Sites are not what they used to be, they have transformed and merged with Office 365 Groups into something more powerful - the new Modern Team sites.

SharePoint Team Sites are dead, there you have it! The era when SharePoint Team Sites was the king of SharePoint and web based collaboration are over. SharePoint Team Sites are dead, I said it again. Ok, you might think this is a link bait, a scam or something else - it’s not. This is how I foresee the future of online collaboration in SharePoint Online/Office 365. Team Sites are based on a decade old construct in SharePoint. They allow a great flexibility and extensibility for the end users, but… …it requires a lot of training …it drives a lot of support …it drives a lot of consultancy hours (yes, I am/was one of those) …historically upgrades are extremely expensive …[fill in your own here] …do the end-users really need that much power?

Here’s a little nugget that I’ve planned to blog about for some time, that I needed today for a small task. I needed to do a background job to SharePoint Online that at a scheduled interval downloads list data, process them and optionally updates some data in my site. This can of course be done by creating an executable storing username and password combos, and with the help of the TokenHelper.cs class from the App for SharePoint Web Toolkit NuGet package and some stored username and password combos we can make the Auth pieces quite easy. I don’t like that approach. There’s two big drawbacks with that approach. The first one is storing the username and password – we can solve that with an AppOnly policy, which I blogged about in the SharePoint 2013: Using the App Only policy and App Principals instead of username and password combos post. The second issue is that I very much prefer to script these kind of tasks, it makes it more flexible. Problem with that approach is that we need to manually do the Auth pieces. But from now on you just copy and paste from this post.

It’s been way to long since we had a Sweden SharePoint User Group meeting in Stockholm, but the wait is now over. On the 26th of February we are all invited to the local Microsoft offices to learn more about SharePoint. Specifically this evening we will be able to hear from Erwin van Hunen, who will talk about the Office 365 Patterns and Practices project. We will also be able to hear from Microsoft about their Hybrid OneDrive for Business experiences. If this doesn’t get you fired up, then what would!

The time has come for me to do, as I’ve done now for eight years (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006), my annual post to sum up the year. It is always fun to look back to what happened the past 12 months. This past year has been a somewhat “in-betweeners” year. We (me, my clients, colleagues etc.) are standing on the edge of something big and the bridge over to the other side is really, really long. Some hesitate to pass the bridge, thinks it is to steep down, some people are running across it in fear, some take it just easy and some pass it half-ways and then stalls there not knowing which direction to go. Microsoft has already passed the bridge to the other side, they ran as fast as they could. But, they dropped so many things on the way over, things that I and others need to pick up and fix and very often even remind Microsoft that they dropped it at all!

You should mark the 29th of October at 1pm EST (18:00 CET) in your calendar. The MVP Chats are back! A couple of years back we regularly held MVP chats where anyone could ask SharePoint MVPs anything (almost at least). These chats was really successful and we received really good feedback. Unfortunately the tool we used for the chats was abandoned and we have been looking for a new way to do this. We think we’ve found a really interesting format for this by using the AMA format at Reddit (/r/sharepoint).

I’m so excited to be once again going to Singapore and speak at the Share-The-Point Southeast Asia 2014, held November 25-26 2014. It is one of my favorite conferences and this will be my third time in the awesome country and city of Singapore! Everything is just great about this; the people, the speakers, the attendees, the city, the food – you name it! This year I will have two sessions:

April 1st 2014, for many a day full of jokes, but for 966 individuals this is the day they either is being awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award or being renewed as MVPs. I’m fortunate to be one of those this time, and now for my fifth year! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Server technical communities during the past year.

When I first heard about SharePoint Online at the PDC 2008 I was a bit disappointed that you could not use custom code but had to rely on the built-in functionality and the things you could do with SharePoint Designer (which is quite powerful anyway, especially with jQuery). To read more about SharePoint online, head over to Tobias Zimmergrens blog. But with some clever techniques you can take advantage of the Windows Azure Hosted Services and create your custom code. I will show you how to create some custom code, which normally is done by SharePoint event receivers or timer jobs, using a Worker Role in Windows Azure.

Wow, 2013 was an interesting year and the time has come for my annual blog post to sum up the year that soon has passed us and looking a bit into the crystal ball for the next one. This is my seventh summary post and it is always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006). For me the year has been really intensive on all levels; I don’t think I´ve ever experienced such a huge demand for my professional services as of now, there is so much new stuff to learn and it´s harder and harder to keep up, I have a hard time resisting doing tons of community stuff and at the same time we had a huge construction work at our house, and of course having two soon-to-be teenager girls takes its toll!

Finally we’re getting SharePoint Saturday to Stockholm! Next year in January, or to be more precise the 25th of January 2014, the global SharePoint Saturday event will come to central Stockholm and World Trade Center. What is a SharePoint Saturday? SharePoint Saturdays are a free events that happens in cities around the world, unfortunately most of them are on the other side of the pond. But once in a while we see these great events pop up in Europe. It’s free in that meaning that it is organized by volunteers, the speakers do it because they have nothing better to do on Saturdays and there is no entrance fee and if you’re lucky you can get some swag as well! But, the events are sponsored, but just to get a good venue and of course the accompanying SharePint after a full day of sessions.

Two weeks ago the ship returned to Stockholm from a 48 hour cruise on the Baltic Sea hosting the 10th edition of SharePoint and Exchange Forum. As usual the conference was a great show arranged by MVP Göran Husman and his Humandata crew. Thank You! We enjoyed a lot of great sessions from well-known speakers around the world and we spent the nights in the bars (and on the tables) during the nights. I had a lot of fun even though it was a bit weird having my first session just as the ship left the harbor and turned sharply – as far as I could see no one got sick, at least not from the sea.

This is a sad and dark day for the Microsoft community, especially for us who love products such as SQL Server, Exchange, Lync and SharePoint. Microsoft Learning (MSL) has decided till kill their advanced certifications; Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) formerly known as Microsoft Certified Master (MCM). This is also a post I hoped not to write, as the matter of fact I started drafting a post a couple of weeks back that should recommend these certifications to the community out there, that post will never see the light now.

Yesterday I got the really cool news that I completed all recertification requirements for the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master: SharePoint certification. Couldn’t be a happier SharePoint professional right now! What is the MCSM and what about MCM? The Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) program has during the latest year transitioned into the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) program. It is not only a change in name but also a change made to adapt to the new world order. The program is not longer focusing on one specific version of the product but instead focus on what’s in the market at the current moment and specifically it covers both on-premise and cloud solutions. This is good in many senses – this allows the program to always be current, always use the latest techniques and technologies etc. The MCM was a certification without expiration date (well eventually the product cease to exist, but you still have the cert) whereas the MCSM has a three year life span and you must recertify to stay on top.

I just received the confirmation that I am renewed as SharePoint MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) for my fourth consecutive year. It’s an honor being chosen among all the professionals around the world, especially now when SharePoint is getting more and more widespread and is being adopted by more and more companies worldwide. I’d like to take the opportunity to say thanks all my colleagues at Connecta, that put up with me, and all my friends around the world that I’ve learnt to know throughout these years. I’ll continue to write obscure blog posts and show up at conferences, and I will continue to organize the Swedish SharePoint User Group meetings.

Only one day and a few hours left of the year of 2012 and the time has come for me to make my (now traditional) summary post. I’ve done it now for six years (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006) and it’s always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months. This year has been an interesting year to me and contained some really interesting milestones, happenings and events.

When testing SharePoint or any other software that uses Active Directory or any kind of data storage it is important to test with lot of data, data with variations and real life data. One area that is often forgotten is Active Directory, ok you create 10 or 20 test users, perhaps 50 or 100 users called Mr. Test Testson32 or similar, but that is not enough. I like to use some real world data for my Active Directories both for testing and for sure it looks more fancy when doing a demo with SharePoint (especially with these new social features in SharePoint 2013). So I’m going to show you some of my scripts I use for this.

Here we go again! The conferences are piling up one after another now when we have our new and shiny toy (=SharePoint 2013). For me personally this is an exciting time and gives me the opportunity to travel, meet old and new friends, to network and first and foremost learn more about SharePoint. A lot of us are currently experimenting with the beta bits, actively running some projects on it and just wondering how it will work when Microsoft finally will make the golden master. The conferences gives you the opportunity to hear about the latest news, learn about some features that you haven’t got a chance to explore yet, learn from those who has been working with this new product for months and even years and also hear a different perspective of others experiences compared to yours.

It’s been some time since we had some Sweden SharePoint User Group (SSUG) meetings. But now we’re back and more excited than ever. We’ll start with the first meeting in Stockholm the 24th of September and have another one coming the week after, the 4th of October, in Malmö. Stockholm, 24/9-21012 This time our host is Steria AB. We will have two sessions, one delivered by Steria with a yet not announced session and another one by me which will be an introduction to SharePoint 2013.

For some reason I get a lot of questions in my inbox about different SharePoint problems people have. I don’t mind, as long as they are polite. If I have time I do try to help out, but sometimes time is not enough. I’m sorry if I don’t answer all of them. But in order to help more people I have compiled a set of rules for SharePoint Troubleshooting. First rule of of SharePoint troubleshooting: You should always check the ULS logs The Trace Logs, often called ULS Logs, is where you find your answer to most of your problems. Always use ULS Viewer - if you do not have that tool in your kit, then you’re out on thin ice, period! Check the correlation id, search for exceptions and warnings. Things I almost always find the answer to here is “file not founds” (404) and “Access Denied”s (401). If you cannot find it immediately in the logs and you can re-create the problem, turn up the logging level to Verbose.

I thought it was about time to bust one quite common myth in the SharePoint world (and there are lot of them!). This one in particular is interesting because it can cause you some interesting troubles, or at least some embarrassment. This is about that you can determine the current SharePoint [2010] version by checking the HTTP Response Header called MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices. So let’s bust that myth, or at least try!

It’s been almost a week since the International SharePoint Conference ended, the first of its kind – and what a conference it was! I was honored to be part of the developer track, together with top-notch speakers and developers such as Andrew Connell, Ben Robb, Eric Schupps, Matthew McDermott, Mirjam van Olst, Paul Schaeflein, Todd Carter and Waldek Mastykarz. We’ve been working together on this “project” for a couple of months having weekly calls trying to build a solution that we would use for the developer track. I really think that we did a good job and that we covered a lot of the important pieces in a SharePoint project – that normally isn’t covered on conferences. And I do hope that you who attended it, enjoyed the track and what we tried to show you.

It’s Aprils fools day and together with a lot of other MVP’s around the world we’re checking our junk mail folder for the e-mail that says that we have been renewed. I just got mine (actually not in the junk for the first time). This was my second renewal and I have now been awarded MVP for three consecutive years (2010, 2011). Thanks to everyone, colleagues, friends and Connecta, who have supported me the last year. Looking forward to another 12 months of really exciting SharePoint work and happenings.

In less than a month the greatest SharePoint conference on this side of the pond will take place in London - the International SharePoint Conference (ISC). The ISC is the new name for the conference held in London and previously called Best Practices Conference and Evolutions Conference. This will actually be my first year at the conference, but I always wanted to go there - and now I’m one of the speakers in the fantastic line up!

I bet you will! The Advanced Certification Team at Microsoft Learning will start a new Live Meeting series where you can learn more about the Microsoft Certified Master and Microsoft Certified Architect programs. It will be regularly held meetings where they will go into details about the programs. The program managers will make you understand the program mission and vision, how to prepare for a certification, how to apply for participation and the value of the programs. If you’re interested in one or more of these programs I recommend you to attend one of the live meetings or watch the recordings. Of course attending the live meetings will allow you to directly ask questions to the program managers!

I’ve now been home for about 48 hours since visiting Anaheim, California, for this years edition of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference. It has been a great week in California with colleagues, friends, clients and new acquaintances. This year, eight people from my company, Connecta, travelled over for the conference. We all had a blast with some spare time before and after the conference, which included a visit to Six Flags - Magic Mountain and a drive along the Pacific coast. We also met up with a few old friends and colleagues and had a good time with our clients, who also attended the conference.

Earlier today Jeff Teper, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, wrote about the 10th birthday of SharePoint. This post made me lean back and close my eyes for a while and think back of what has happened during the last decade - and it is a lot of stuff! And I’ve playing with SharePoint more or less since then! The SharePoint story for me started back in 2000. I was running my own company, iBizkit, and we built a “SharePoint like” Intranet portal product. The product was modular based and very configurable. We hade something we called Modules based on COM+ components and XML output, that had a common interface and a single rendering engine which could translate the XML output to HTML, WML or whatever depending on the device and the users settings. I was, and am, still very proud of that architecture. Initially we looked at the Digital Dashboard, but came to the conclusion that it didn’t fit our needs, so we built our own from scratch. It was built on top of Site Server (and then later on AD), IIS, ASP and COM+. We got a request from a customer that they would like a document management system for their Intranet. And what could be better than building it yourself - use a third party tool. And at that time I’ve been checking out the Tahoe project from Microsoft, that later became SharePoint Portal Server 2001. What we did was build a more dynamic interface (way before AJAX was known as AJAX, and this is where Robert Nyman started his brilliant JavaScript career). than SPS 2001 had and incorporated that into a module in our portal solution. I dug up on old screenshot:

The 1st of April is one of those days when a fourth of all MVPs just waits for the renewal e-mail from Microsoft. Luckily I got mine this year, just before heading home from work this afternoon. This means that I will do my second term as a SharePoint MVP and I’m already looking forward to the paintball in a cold a rainy Seattle! Congrats to all other renewed and new MVPs all around this globe.

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:

Today Microsoft released a bunch of external Search connectors for their search products such as SharePoint Server, FAST and Search Server or for clients such as Windows 7. The external search connectors are based on the OpenSearch specification, so it’s quite easy to integrate with whatever product you like. Downloads These are the new released connectors: Bing Image Search Local Search News Search Business Week Encyclopedia Britannica Flickr Google Blog Search Google News

Next Wednesday I will sit in the SharePoint MVP Experts panel for a Q&A session where you can ask your questions about SharePoint. The SharePoint MVP Experts Q&A chat is your opportunity to chat and get instant answers about any SharePoint related questions, including topics such as development, design, configuration and setup. There will be several SharePoint MVP’s ready to answer your questions… When? The chat will take place the 29th of September at 9AM PDT. Sign up here and add it to your calendar. Also sign up here at the Facebook event page.

A little more than a year ago I wrote a post after finishing all four SharePoint 2007 exams called “70-640 passed! Do you really call this a certification!”. I thouht the exams were to easy and did not say much about your SharePoint skills at all and I had hopes for the new SharePoint 2010 exams. I did hope that they would stop focusing on IntelliSense and API knowledge and more focus on best practices, design decisions and problem solving. Unfortunately I can’t say that my hopes became reality.

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.

This Wednesday the SharePoint User Group Sweden (#SSUG) had an awesome meeting sponsored by Sogeti at Hotel Anglais in Stockholm. The event was sold out when announced in a few hours and we had to change conference room a few times at the hotel to fit everyone. More than 80 people showed up - our new record that we have to beat the next time. On the agenda for the day was first Christoffer von Sabsay (Sogeti) presenting about the Handelshögskolan SharePoint 2007 WCM case. A great presentation with a good deal of tips and tricks. MVP Göran Husman (Humandata) was up next presenting about the offline capabilities in SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010, also an interesting session with good insight how to combine Office, SharePoint Workspace and SharePoint for optimal flexibility. Last, but not least, I (Wictor Wilén, Connecta) did a session about SharePoint 2010 licensing and the related products. For me it was a good exercise to dig in to the gazillion options of SharePoint licensing.

It’s Friday and thought that I should share some small tips on how to make your SharePoint demonstration experience better. I assume that you have a quite powerful laptop with virtual machines running SharePoint. I used to do my demos directly in the virtual machine, in full screen mode. This requires that I have all the necessary client components installed such as Office, SharePoint Designer, the Windows Server Desktop Experience feature enabled etc. All this of course take resources such as memory and CPU from the virtual machine. Also Internet Explorer consumes CPU cycles and if you’re using Firefox in the demo you get another memory hog in your virtual machine.

While commuting home this beautiful afternoon I received an e-mail from Microsoft containing the following: Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Server technical communities during the past year. I am very, very proud of receiving this award and it gives me a real boost to continue exploring the SharePoint world…

It is 2010 now and SharePoint 2007 have been out forever, it feels like it anyways. The last two years has been about best practices in SharePoint both for developers and IT-pros and especially the Disposing of SharePoint objects has been discussed in absurdum. So I guess we should have to talk about it - but guess what - we certainly do! The reason I bring this up today is that I was about to join a new WFE to a farm and it failed once it started to provision the web applications. Using the logs I found the source of the failure, it was some kind of component that threw an unhandled exception when it was created. See logs below (I have cropped it a bit)

The year of 2009 is about to close and it’s time for me to summarize this year, as I’ve done for the last few years (2006, 2007 and 2008). This year has been one of the most inspiring and exciting years for me in a very long time. I have been doing so much fun stuff this year. The most significant change has been starting to work for my new employer Connecta (after nine years at basically the same employer). I needed some new challenges and I now work with some really talented people from whom I learn and share so much. As you readers know, it’s all about SharePoint for me and I have done some awesome projects this year that I’m proud of and really looking forward to some SharePoint 2010 gigs. I also finally got my MCT certification and already scheduled a number of courses for next year, looking forward to meet some aspiring SharePoint students!

Yesterday we had a Swedish SharePoint User Group meeting, hosted by Connecta (yes, my new employer). We had a new record with number of participants, over 60 interested SharePointers of all kinds showed up to listen to MVP Göran Husman, Humandata, talk about the news in SharePoint 2010 and Peter Karpinski, Microsoft Services, talk about how to do Rapid Application Development with SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010, Visio 2010 and InfoPath 2010 and how to script you SharePoint 2010 installs. Thank you for great shows and thanks to everyone who showed up.

Just hours before the SharePoint Conference 2009 starts in Vegas, and all information will flood out from the conference, blogs and twitter, Microsoft released three four posters that should help you in planning and updating your SharePoint 2007 installation to SharePoint 2010. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Upgrade Approaches (added since original posting) Visually describes the different upgrade approaches Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Upgrade Planning Takes you through how to upgrade hardware and software on your servers. Shows the available upgrade paths.

The long awaited service pack for PerformancePoint Server 2007 is now released to the web - Service Pack 3. This is the last service pack for PerformancePoint Server since the PerformancePoint Server bits will from next week be turned into PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010. Service Pack 3 is the last update to the standalone version of PerformancePoint, which was announced in January this year when Microsoft changed their BI strategy. After this update Microsoft will not invest any further into the 2007 version and as you hopefully are aware of - the Planning module will not exist in the upcoming 2010 version. The Planning module is instead offered as source code - now called the Financial Planning Accelerator, so that you can safely still use any investments in the Planning Module.

Delegate Controls in SharePoint is a blessing when you are customizing the features and interface of SharePoint. The Delegate Controls are areas in the out-of-the-box SharePoint pages where you are allowed to inject your own controls. This is heavily used by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which essentially is a set of features on top of Windows SharePoint Services. For example the standard WSS user information page redirects to the MOSS My Site, this redirection is done by inserting a delegate control into a specific delegate control on the userdisp.aspx page. This nifty delegate control can be used in a WSS solution when you want to create a custom profile page, without modifying any of the OOB files and easily reverts to it’s original state when you deactivate the feature.

Inspired by the latest SharePoint PodShow topic; The SharePoint Data View Web Part-Episode 31 and Laura Rogers post on building a permissions dashboard I just had to write this post. In the last paragraph Laura quickly mentions how you can reuse the created Data View Web Part. I think this is really important to know how to export and import this Web Part. What I don’t want people to do is to fire up SharePoint Designer and create these Data View Web Parts in the production environment so that the pages get’s unghosted or customized. Also when you are working with solutions packages and features to deploy your applications in environments it’s necessary to know how to do this.

I’m glad and proud to tell you all about that next month I will start a new job. I will start as a SharePoint Architect at Connecta. This is a fantastic opportunity for me and it will let me work with some of the finest SharePoint minds and developers here in Sweden as well as some really awesome customers. I’ve been working with basically the same company now since 2000, when I and two good friends founded it, iBizkit. We all came from consultancy firms working with WCM, portals and intranet solutions and had a dream of making a really good semi-product for these kind of solutions. And we did! In 2001 we integrated our product with the first version of SharePoint. We continued this integration in the upcoming versions of SharePoint, but have since the release of SharePoint 2007 focused more and more on the SharePoint platform, and I have personally lived in that world for the latest years. About two years ago, we sold the company to Pdb DataSystem, a natural step to expand and evolve the business.

Developing solutions and features for SharePoint is a nightmare for all beginners, and even for the experienced SharePoint developers. If you ever have had the opportunity to create a SharePoint solution you most probably have had to make a lot of hacking in a bunch of XML files, just to build a simple feature. This is the way you have to do it, and the way taught by tutors and Microsoft, when using it with Visual Studio and no add-ins. This is the way it was, and has been, for most of us SharePoint programmers since the beta releases of SharePoint version 3.

Finally I’ve found the time to make the last work on ChartPart 2.0 for SharePoint. I have been working on and off on this release for quite some time – but now it’s here! ChartPart 2.0 for SharePoint is a Web Part that allows you to instantly create charts based on your existing SharePoint lists. You can make columns, bars, pies and even 3D charts. ChartPart version 1.0 was released last year and have had up until now close to 10.000 downloads, which I’m very proud of. I’ve received awesome feedback on the Codeplex site, on Twitter, my blog and when I met people and told them that I was the one who made it.

Last night we had a SharePoint User Group Meeting here in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a great evening with a lot of attendees, thank you all for showing up. It’s always fun to see new and old faces, sorry I didn’t have time to talk so much with you (due to my VM’s crashing just before my demos…). First, a big thanks to KnowIT and Jonas who provided us with a great place to host the meeting and some good food and beer!

The latest version, 4.0, of the great SharePoint Administration Toolkit has been released, read all about it in the post by the SharePoint Team. It contains a lot of interesting and great stuff that you could use for everyday usage. One new part of the Administration Toolkit is a SharePoint solution called Permission Reporting Solution. This is a solution package that hugely improves the permissions management of your Site Collections and Sites in SharePoint.

Today I stumbled upon Yet Another SharePoint Problem (YASP) with a custom timer job. The custom timer job is supposed to synchronize some user information between site collections (on a WSS 3.0 installation). In some cases the timer job has to add users to site collections. Sounds like a no-brainer, right! The problem is that we are using this installation as an internet facing site and the external users are stored in AD LDS (Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services, formerly known as ADAM) and our own custom authentication provider.

This is the first post in a series on Web Parts Connections. This spring I had a series on Web Part Properties that I think was very successful, they got some good comments and feedback and they get a lot of hits from search engines. Please help me out and evolve this new series of posts with some feedback and questions. What is Web Parts Connections? Web Parts Connections allows you to connect the Web Part server controls so that they can exchange information. Web Parts can either be a consumer and/or a provider. Once you connect a consumer with a provider the consumer starts receiving data from the provider, all this is done on the server side. Web Parts can be constructed in such way that it can have several consumer and provider connection-points, i.e.it can consume or provide information from several different sources. A provider connection-point can have several consumers but a consumer connection-point can have only one provider.

SharePoint Saturday Copenhagen is over after an awesome Saturday in Copenhagen. Thank you all organizers, attendees, speakers and sponsors, I had a blast. I will definitely attend more SharePoint Saturdays when I can. These kind of events really are special; everyone attending are there because they really love working with SharePoint, on a Saturday, when the sun is shining outside, for free… You can find my presentation SharePoint Online and Windows Azure - better together here and the solution that I used for the demo here.

If you have been installing SharePoint you have probably also seen and fixed the DCOM 10016 error. This error occurs in the event log when the SharePoint service accounts doesn’t have the necessary permissions (Local Activation to the IIS WAMREG admin service). Your farm will still function, but your event log will be cluttered. On a Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 machine you would just fire up the dcomcnfg utility (with elevated privileges) and enable Local Activation for your domain account.

SharePoint Saturday is a free informational and educational event that has been held over-there in US several times with a huge success the last year and it is now coming to Europe and Copenhagen, Denmark to be more specific. A SharePoint Saturday is an event for anyone interested in SharePoint and who like to meet similar-minded people and listen to SharePoint professionals and celebrities. I’m going to be there - it will be a blast! I will do a presentation called SharePoint Online and Windows Azure - better together! And I will of course listen to all the other really cool people showing up such as SharePoint MVP’s and gurus.

In most custom SharePoint solution projects you will have to create your own Application Pages, Web Part Pages or other ASP.NET pages to fulfill your requirements. If you are coming from the ASP.NET world you are pretty used to building web forms and similar .aspx pages. Your pages will most of the times then be derived from the System.Web.UI.Page class, but when working with SharePoint you should not use this class as a base.

Introduction Microsoft SharePoint contains functionality for Records Management, which essentially is a storage for documents that you would like to store and manage in a separate records center to meet certain legal or other requirements or just to make backups of certain document revisions. To be able to create a Records Center you need to have Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). On the other hand you only need Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) to send documents to the Records Center.

About two months ago I tried to reach out to the SharePoint community with a small survey on how Virtualization is used with SharePoint. The survey was primarily for my own interest to benchmark what others are doing, but I also thought that I should share this with everyone. SharePoint and Virtualization is an interesting piece of discussion; some despise it and some love it. For more information on SharePoint and virtualization read this great article from SharePointMagazine.net.

Just in time for next version of SharePoint to arrive I just completed the final certification exam for SharePoint 2007, the 70-630 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring. As always I did think that it should be some tricky questions or problems to solve in the exam, I even installed a MOSS RTM last night just to walk through the admin interfaces before the infrastructure upgrade. But to my disappointment this certification was by no means any challenge. This was by far the easiest of the four exams.

When developing applications or custom solutions for SharePoint you will on several occasions have to store settings for you application of some kind. When developing database driven or other custom solutions you easily create a database table or make the settings in app/web.config file. You can of course use these approaches when developing for SharePoint, but there are some things to consider when doing this. This post will outline some approaches you can use to store your settings.

I’m really glad that we have managed to get a really nice release of the SharePoint Extensions Lib, SPExLib, out. This brand new release (12.0.0.0) has significantly been improved since the first release a couple of weeks ago. Keith Dahlby has made some really nice Linq extensions for SharePoint which is available in this release. These extensions are also IDisposable safe when using on SPWeb and SPSite collections. By referencing the SPExLib.dll and include the namespaces you can easily write code like this (taken directly from one of my current projects):

Microsoft has updated SharePoint Online with a patch that resolves the bug that prohibited you from getting the service descriptions from the web services, that I previously described. This means that you now can use Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer (or any other tool that you like) to connect to the SharePoint Online web services and code away, instead of going to some local instance to get the descriptions. Does anybody know where the Microsoft Online team posts all updates/changes to the BPOS? I got this information from Troy (from the BPOS team) commenting on my post.

Installing a new service pack onto a server product is not just firing up the installer and hit next->next->finish. You should carefully read through the documentation and test it thoroughly. Service Pack 2 for SharePoint has been long awaited and I’ve seen people the last 24 hours installing it like madness just wanting to get their hands on the new features/updates. I did also install it just minutes after it was released (on my dev machine that is being reinstalled any hour now, when Windows 7 RC is out). 

I’ve had an idea for some time to gather all mine and others nifty extension, utility and helper methods into a shared library so that these can be reused in different projects and I finally got my act together and created a new project on Codeplex called SharePoint Extensions Lib, http://spexlib.codeplex.com/, SPExLib. This is a library filled with extension methods to the SharePoint object model and to the Microsoft.NET 3.5 SP1 classes as well as some helper classes. All you have to do is reference it in your solution and add the using SPExLib.Extensions statement to your code and you are ready to go.

I’ve been annoyed for some time at that you cannot prohibit your users from selecting “No Quota” when creating Site Collections. Yes, you can set a default to use but the “No Quota” option is still there. Most probably you have some governance plan or similar that says that you should set quotas when creating Site Collections, but you know that sometimes you forget or somebody doesn’t even care or know what setting No Quota implies.

The day has come when Microsoft officially started to talk about the next version of Office 2010 clients and SharePoint Server 2010 (no longer Office SharePoint Server). We have since some time known that SharePoint 2010 will be supported only on a 64-bit platform, just as Exchange 2007. The new stuff revealed yesterday (as preliminary) are that not only is 64-bit required, it will only be supported on the Windows Server 2008 64-bit platform (including R2) and it will require that you have SQL Server 2008 on a 64-bit platform. There are some other interesting facts that you should check out also in the post (and on about 1.000 other blog posts), but this post is not just about these news.

I just had to try out Community Clips from Microsoft Office Labs and made a short video demonstrating the new version of ChartPart 2.0 for SharePoint . The video shows rendering and customization of the graph, how you connect the graph to a list and some of the 3D features. Community Clips is an awesome and simple video capture utility that from now on definitely will be a preferred tool in my toolbox. Enjoy…and if you like go ahead and download ChartPart 2.0 at http://chartpart.codeplex.com (currently in beta).

After doing some experimental stuff (don’t ask me what!) with my local (Windows 7) SharePoint installation I uninstalled it completely and was going to install it from scratch once again I encountered a strange error. A dialog as below popped up: First I thought that SharePoint did not uninstall correctly and searched the registry as a maniac and found nothing. Then I checked the installation log files, which did not make things much clearer:

The Office 2007 Service Pack 2 are here and for the server products (WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007) we have a new STSAdm command called; preupgradecheck. This command allows you to check any WSS 3.0 SP2 based installation for potential issues that may prevent an upgrade to Windows SharePoint Services 4 (WSS 4.0) or SharePoint Server 2010. For full reference of the command check out KB960577. The pre-upgrade check command uses a set of rules found in the 12\CONFIG\PreUpgradeCheck\WssPreUpgradeCheck.xml file to check your farm or you can use a custom file.

I’m glad to announce that from now on you can find my project Windows Live ID Authentication for SharePoint on CodePlex. Windows Live ID Authentication for SharePoint is a project that has been developed for some time for the upcoming Swedish SharePoint Community Site, which will be an awesome site with some really cool features of which this is one. I have previously tried some of the available Windows Live ID providers for SharePoint that are out there on the market and the best (previously) one is the provider from the Community Kit for SharePoint, originally developed by Keith Bunge. It has a great basic application design, but had some things that annoyed me and some things I wanted to change, therefore I created my own version, with the CKS version in mind, which I hope that you find useful.

A few days ago I posted a small survey that asks a couple of questions on how you virtualize your SharePoint environments. I will keep the survey open for a couple of more days to get some more results (compared to the number of readers of this blog and number of Twitter followers - the response is really bad…) Click Here to take survey Anyways I thought that I should put up some preliminary results.

Virtualization is a really hot technology right now, and forward and so are SharePoint. I’ve been discussing SharePoint virtualization internally and externally for sometime now and I have my opinions. In order to get a broader view on how SharePoint is virtualized around the globe I put together a small survey that will enlighten this subject. I would like you to fill out the survey and forward it to your colleagues, partners, clients, friends and better halves.

A few weeks back I wrote a post on how to mix Windows Azure and SharePoint Online called Custom code with SharePoint Online and Windows Azure. Since then both Windows Azure and SharePoint online have had some updates. First of all you no longer need to create the bindings in the code to make it fully trusted. Good to know but it does not affect the solution. A Bug in SharePoint Online Web Services More important is the fact that you cannot longer use the Visual Studio Add Service Reference function and add the services from your SharePoint Online site to your solution. You will end up with an error like this:

The SharePoint 12-hive contains by default a number of interesting files that every developer should be aware of. The more you know the better you understand the inside of SharePoint and it allows you to create more efficient and better solutions. Here are my top five favorite files: ctypeswss.xml (in TEMPLATE\FEATURES\ctypes) This is the feature elements file for all the default WSS Content Types. When creating new content types, most often I find it useful to derive them from existing content types. For example if I need to create a content type that derives from the standard content type Task, i can easily get the content type ID, which is used when creating new content type IDs, and what Site Columns that content type has.

SharePoint Designer is now a free tool and available for download. What does this mean really? Anybody can download it and customize their SharePoint installations which is good in some ways, but really bad in others. If the users are not aware of what they are doing they can cause severe damage to your SharePoint, but it can also make really nice enhancements to their installation. There are a lot of nice things you can do with SPD in your sites that you can’t do using the web interface. The web interface on the other side protects you pretty good from doing some mistakes that even the best can do once in a while, like dragging a file or folder to the wrong place. Of course all of this has been possible to do before with SPD, it’s not a new product, but suddenly you can expect a number of new and untrained end-users fire up the SharePoint Designer and customizing in ways you never prepared your installations for.

Have you ever wanted to get rid of the Welcome text before the user name in the SharePoint user menu? At least I have! If you are like me - here is a solution that you can use to customize the text of the Welcome Control (Welcome.ascx). The approach is pretty simple, and can be made in several ways, but I wanted a pretty clean solution that didn’t affect any other behavior of SharePoint and I wanted to write as little code as possible. Eventually I ended up with some more rows than expected, but this was due to the fact that I created this custom Welcome control configurable and deployable.

Microsoft has released a set of ten free Themes for SharePoint for use with the Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services. These ten themes provides a far better experience than the out-of-the-box themes delivered with SharePoint (WSS and MOSS), of which some are really annoyingly ugly! But the new themes needs some tweaking before looking really good, there are several design flaws in some of them, like black text on dark-grey background…

I’m glad to announce that I finally got my stuff together and stitched together the last pieces of the beta of ChartPart for SharePoint 2.0. ChartPart for SharePoint is a SharePoint Web Part that allows you to draw charts from existing SharePoint lists. It’s available at CodePlex, at http://chartpart.codeplex.com/, and is free for use. ChartPart 1.0 have had over 4.000 downloads since it was released and is translated to six different languages. The first version was pretty limited in customization and you could only create some basic charts.

I have been answering questions on the SharePoint forums at MSDN Forums, and while some are really tricky and interesting, some are really basic beginner mistakes. A couple of questions lately have been about Web Part development and how to and where to create your controls. Most of these is easily solved if you understand how the Web Part event model works. First of all you need basic ASP.NET understanding and know how the Page and Control objects work together, how a postback works etc. But I have even seen somewhat experienced ASP.NET developers failing at this point, probably due to the fact that Visual Studio have a slick interface for editing user controls and ASP.NET pages. When it comes to SharePoint you have no visual aids and you are out on thin water, and this knowledge is crucial.

A Web Part, in SharePoint or not, has a Verb that allows the Web Part to be Closed. Closed means that the Web Part is just closed (not rendered) and not deleted, which is a separate Web Part Verb. Closing Web Parts can cause headache for your users and even a really bad performance. Note: To delete a Web Part you have to go in to Edit mode for the page. Close can be done directly from the Web Part menu.

After passing the developer exams of WSS (70-541) and MOSS (70-542) I thought that I should make the deck complete by taking the configuration exams. Today I passed the first one, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Configuration (70-631). I’m mainly a developer so I had some worries about questions on DNS, network configs and load balancing. But this exam was too easy and kept at a very basic level. I missed one question though. All of these exams follow the same pattern - I whish the creators of them had some more imagination and creativity.

At CeBIT 2009 it today was announced that SharePoint Online is now available worldwide*. SharePoint online is a part of the Business Productivity Online Suite which also contains Exchange Online and Live Meeting. More services will be available at a later date. There is a free 30 days trial option if you would like to try it out, which I really recommend, before you subscribe/buy the solution. You can find more information about the Microsoft Online Services at http://www.microsoft.com/online.

Not that unexpected, but Microsoft chief executive office Steve Ballmer has confirmed that the new Office 14 clients and servers (read SharePoint) will not be released during 2009. The products will be “generally available” during 2010. Generally available may indicate (I’m always positive) that we have a release for volume licensees and partners in late 2009 and in the shelves during 2010 (just like the previous version). Read SharePoint Daily Special Edition for more information.

To end my series of Web Part properties I would like to show how to store more complex values than just strings or integers. What happens if you would like to store a more complex object; an array or a coordinate etc? Editing these properties with the standard generated interface using the WebBrowsable and Personalizable attributes will not work, since it only accepts basic types, shown in part 1. To make these properties editable you have to (almost…continue reading) create an EditorPart, shown in part 2, and control the properties in the SyncChanges and ApplyChanges methods.

Computer Sweden has an article in today’s issue, also published online yesterday, called “Impossible to get rid of the cash cow of Microsoft”. To sum it up briefly it discusses how hard it is to get rid of Microsoft SharePoint once you have it installed in your environment and that the licensing costs flies away. An interviewed CTO states that companies he met don’t have control of their SharePoint installations and that they had to step back and look at the ownership and licenses.

The Sweden SharePoint User Group had the first meeting of this year this evening and it was a great and interesting meeting. I really enjoyed the session by Rickard Löfberg from Credit Suisse when he talked about their globally rolled out collaboration platform, how they handled the massive amounts of data and customized the platform to have a smooth transition to upcoming versions of SharePoint. I did two short sessions; one about Web Part development with 10 tips and a very short introduction to the Geneva Framework. You can find the presentations for download below, currently in Swedish - but if you beg I can finish up the translation to English.

The latest version of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit has been released and it contains a new feature called SPDiag (SharePoint Diagnostics Tool). It’s a new tool for IT-Pros (or admins and developers for that matter) that helps you have a look at all of your SharePoint server (including hardware) configurations in a nice application. You can check everything from log file locations to web.config content to database configurations to… You have two views, one tree view in which you can drill down in your server/farm configuration and read all of the data and one Trends view in which you analyze and examine the usage of your farm and sites using the different logs in SharePoint and Windows. Unfortunately I did not get the graphs to show on my test machine (yes it’s a Windows 7 with WSS :-), see error message on the right.

For the SharePoint Community Sweden community site I have created a master feed containing interesting blog feeds from Swedish SharePoint bloggers, with posts both in Swedish and English. This master feed can be found at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/wictorwilen/spcs_all?_render=rss Add this feed to your subscriptions if you are interested about how we Swedes think and elaborate on SharePoint. It’s built using the amazing Yahoo Pipes.

If you are building a reusable web part that you would like to sell or give away you should look into localizing your web part. The localization support is great with .NET 2.0, using resource files, and there are tons of built-in functionality for this. If you are creating an Editor Part for you web part, then your life is pretty easy, just use the standard techniques. But if you are using the approach by tagging the properties of your web part with the Personalizable attributes, then you are out of luck. Take a look at this property for example:

A recent discussion about how the licenses of Windows, SQL and SharePoint Servers should be handled when we are developing solutions using Virtual Machines made me throw away a mail to Emma Explains Licensing. The concern was that; do we have to pay licenses for every VM or test server? That would have been insane! But I wanted to have this explained how this licensing works - a lot of you perhaps already know but I always have a hard time getting all the different licensing options and rules.

Yesterday SharePoint Community Sweden was launched, initiated by Andreas Kviby. This is a new community site for Swedes and those who speak Swedish about the SharePoint platform. There are a lot of great SharePoint sites and communities out there on the web, but none in Swedish. Having a great community “nearby” will enable the personal interaction to be even better and it will create a lot of interesting spin-offs. I’m glad to be onboard and I will put some effort into this new community and helping out new and old SharePointers as good as I can and I will try to do some blogging about interesting topics in Swedish there - once in a while I will probably double post information here and on the community site (long sentence…).

Part four of my Web Part Properties series. Now it’s time for default values and what you should do when there are values that are incorrect or missing . Last post discussed the .webpart file and I showed you how to do when setting up a Web Part in the Web Part Gallery with default values. Web Parts created using the SharePoint WebPart class can also define default values using the DefaultValue attribute, like this:

The Technet and MSDN sites are great to have when you have to look things up when developing or maintaining solutions for the Microsoft Office Servers, such as SharePoint. But I also like to have this information closer to me and have even faster access to it. Microsoft is providing much of the content as downloadable CHM files, which is a great feature. Here are a list of some of the downloadable help files

Hot from the presses! Today Microsoft announced that Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server will not be a separate product in the future, instead it will be incorporated into the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition. This is some great news for all of us that work with and develop BI solutions. Microsoft is focusing their BI solutions to three products; Excel, SharePoint and SQL Server. This is due to several factors; BI solutions have been very expensive (read PerformancePoint) and have had hard to reach out to the end-users. By incorporating PerformancePoint into SharePoint these factors will be eliminated - BI for everyone.

I thought that it would be time to look up all Swedish SharePoint bloggers, like my former colleague Johan Dewe did about a year ago, he has now left the SharePoint consultant scene, and I thought that it would be time to have a new and updated list. This list is compiled from my own feeds, Johan’s list and some searches on the web. Since blogging nowadays isn’t the “only” way to keep up with what’s happening I’ve also included some Twitter links.

This is the third part of my Web Part Properties series and this post will focus on the .webpart file. Every SharePoint developer have seen it and perhaps edited it, but what is the purpose of the file and when and why should I edit it. Background The .webpart file is an XML file containing metadata about the Web Part. In previous versions of SharePoint this file had an extension of .dwp. Although these files may look similar it’s a crucial difference between those files. The .webpart file uses the http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v3 schema and the .dws file uses http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2. The v2 schema is intended for Web Parts derived from the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart class, which is the base class used for developing Web Parts for previous SharePoint versions. When developing Web Parts using the .NET 2.0 WebPart class (System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart) the v3 schema must be used, see previous article on why you should use the latter.

This is the second part of the Web Part Properties series. The last post walked through the basics on how to make editable properties on a Web Part. As a sample I used a Web Part that displayed tweets from Twitter - called TweetPart. Using the standard approach, by marking the properties using specific attributes, we made the Web Part editable as we wanted. But the user experience, for editing, was not optimal. First of all the properties we wanted to edit was located in their own category at the bottom, not that easy to find for inexperienced/untrained users. Secondly the properties has dependencies and requires validation.

Windows 7 beta was released into the wild today (or tomorrow if you’re not an MSDN subscriber) and I’m seriously considering running it on my main development machine. But to be able to do this I have one main requirement and that is that I can run SharePoint on it, just as I can on Vista. So after installing the beta bits on a Virtual PC I had to give it a try.

I thought that I should kick off this new year with a series of posts on how to make your SharePoint Web Parts editable and how to enhance that out-of-the-box Web Part property editing combined with some tips and tricks. This first post may be to most of you SharePoint developers somewhat basic, but I have chosen to start from scratch here. Many of this first post topics are repeatedly asked in the MSDN development forums. The documentation in the SharePoint SDK on this topic is really bad; it just says do this and do that, never why you should do it. Often this makes developers unaware of pitfalls or possibilities.

The time has come to make a summary of the past year and have a look into the future – the year of 2009. About a year ago I made a similar post with a summary and some predictions. This year has been a fast year and I have made so much, both personally and at work. For a few months in the spring I was at home taking care of my daughters and tried not to work (which I find really hard). It was a great time and I really need that. At work I think I’ve never felt this pressure from the market, no financial crisis in sight here. It’s mainly been about SharePoint, SharePoint and SharePoint. Our team at Pdb has had some really interesting projects and we have some even more interesting in the pipe.

When working with SharePoint Web Parts and features it is easy to get into trouble if you are changing the version of your Web Part DLL file. The easiest way to get around this is to never change the version of the Web Part, which is a pretty common scenario. But if you are developing a product or feature that you expect to have a longer life cycle and that you will upgrade or enhance over time you should really use the assembly version features. Having a version on your Web Part will make it easier for you to support it for multiple customers and/or installations.

If you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on a new server you will find that your Office 2007 (.docx, .xlsx etc) files is not indexed as they should but the old binary document (.doc, .xls etc) format is indexed. This is due to the fact that the Office 2007 IFilters is not installed by your WSS installation. To resolve this issue you have to download the Microsoft Filter Pack and install it on your server. This will install the actual IFilters which are used for indexing the Office 2007 files.

A couple of days ago I made a quick poll on how people preferred to install their SharePoint features. The results are as follows: Using STSADM is the favorite one, probably due to that fact the audience answering to the poll is mostly IT-Pros or developers. Using an MSI based installation is, surprisingly, the first runner up together with scripts. I totally understand why but there are many problems having an MSI based one but the problem is that installation and uninstall is tied to one specific server.

With the recent release of ChartPart for SharePoint I created a simple command file to simplify the installation of the .wsp file. What I did not expect was that so many should download it – about the same amount of people who download the ChartPart. Some really nice people have asked me to release it as an MSI package, which I will do as soon as possible to make it even easier for non developers or IT-pros to install the ChartPart.

After a few weeks of testing and great feedback, ChartPart for SharePoint 1.0 is available for download on CodePlex. CharPart for SharePoint is a free chart web part for SharePoint (WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007) that enables you to easily create charts based on existing lists and views in SharePoint. These are some of the features of ChartPart 1.0 Generate a graph from a SharePoint list in just a few clicks Multiple graph types (bars, columns, splines etc) Legend Title Multiple built-in palettes Custom palettes Size of graph Supports columns such as dates, lookups, calculated, users etc ChartPart is currently translated into English, Swedish and Portuguese and German coming soon. Please contact me if you would like to help out in translating it to other languages.

ChartPart for SharePoint is a new Web Part for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that allows you to create graphs and charts from existing lists in SharePoint in a very easy way. The ChartPart for SharePoint is developed using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and the Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft.NET Framework, which means that there is no need for any third party licenses to create the charts (read Dundas or similar).

I have just struggled a while with a SharePoint Web Part that constantly threw an error, see below. This Web Part is creating a SharePoint list when it is first loaded by a user and it should create a list with permissions so that only the user has access to it (i.e. a personal list). This is done by breaking the role inheritance of the list using BreakRoleInheritance(false), so that no inherited roles are copied. I’ve used the method for this previously in the solution, but then this was done on a POST request and now it should do almost the same during a GET request, that is when the user navigates to the page.

SharePoint 14 is the next version of Microsoft SharePoint and during the PDC 2008 nothing new was revealed about SharePoint 14, but some small parts of the Office 14 clients were seen. SharePoint 14 will, most certainly, be released at the same time as Office 14 which most probably will be released when Windows 7 is released. My guess is that this point in time is in about a year. Windows 7 will pretty soon hit the beta stage, pre-beta bits are already out, and the Office 14 and SharePoint 14 products must enter the beta stage in the near future, to be able to have a release within a year or so. Closed or open beta remains to be determined.

So the last day of PDC 2008 is over. The brain has been cooked for a few days… This very day did not have any keynote and I kicked off with a session on the Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint. I have note used this add-in since the first releases of it since I didn’t like it that much but had instead relied on manual packaging and deployment as well as STSDev. But after this I might think about moving over and try it out once again. During the session a basic site was built with some lists, event handlers and a Silverlight application using the new Charting controls.

The Fantastic 40, the set of application templates, for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 has been updated with new language support. Among the new supported languages are Swedish, Danish, Portuguese and some more. Some of the DLL’s have also been updated (haven’t checked what). You can download them from here: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Template: Application Template Core Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates: All Templates Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates: All Server Admin Templates

Day three is officially over, I’m pretty tired today after staying up to late yesterday and playing around with the “goods”. I installed Windows 7 and tried it for a while, but to my disappointment I found out that the nice stuff that were shown on the keynote was missing in my release… This morning started with the last keynote of PDC 2008 and it was Microsoft Research that should be in the spotlight. An hour and a half was filled with stuff such as environment and healthcare studies done by MSR, important, but hey – you have an audience of 6.000 programmers/geeks here… The last 20-30 minutes was cool though, they showed up a kids-programming-language called Boku (not only for kids, for me too!) and Second Light an evolution of Surface, where you can project a secondary image onto a surface that is above, yup not in touch with, the surface. Really cool!

Back at the hotel and watching some Monday Night Football (which I could do that in Sweden!). Here is a summary and some reflections on my day. Woke up early and walked down to LA Convention Center and got me some breakfast (tomorrow I’ll eat at the hotel). I tried to get to the keynote hall as early as possible for some good seating. I ended up in 6th row and had a good overview of the stage and the huge screens. As this is my first PDC and first conference of this magnitude I’m really impressed with the size and organization of it all.

Sitting here in Zürich waiting for the delayed flight to Los Angeles and PDC 2008. This PDC is my first and I really look forward to it. I will suck in as much as I possibly can during the next few days. I have a couple of things on my agenda that I want to accomplish: Go through all of the Office Systems and SharePoint sessions to find out what’s going on Meet with the SharePoint MVPs, Product team and other cool SharePointers Listen and learn from the Experts Understand the Microsoft cloud vision even better, especially how do these services fit in a larger enterprise (I have not understood this yet) And of course be one of the first to try out all this new stuff! I will be staying at the Westin Bonaventure hotel and drop me a line if you would like to meet and have a pint or two.

I gladly received the news that the Office team announced Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007. Not only for the clients but also for the server products (read SharePoint). First of all it’s the support for the different file formats that I long for (ODF for example) and then there is the Outlook performance – both of these are addressed! XPS and PDF will be supported from scratch – no need to install a free plugin (just as it was in the Office 2007 betas).

Yesterday I did a short post on how to make a really simple SharePoint application with a .aspx page inside a document library and some coding with SharePoint Designer. I ended the post with giving a hint that you can also place the code in an assembly. To aid you in your self studies, here comes the solution… Make an assembly First of all we need to make an assembly to host our code behind. Start Visual Studio and create a Class Library project. Add a reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.dll and System.Web. The Microsoft.SharePoint.dll can be found under c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\ISAPI (who came up with the idea to place this stuff here by default?).

Recent discussions in the SharePoint forums led me to write this article on how to create the simplest form of SharePoint applications without using Visual Studio and only SharePoint Designer. Just follow these simple steps to create your own Hello World application in a .aspx hosted in a SharePoint document library. Create the document library First of all we need somewhere to host our applications; create a new Document Library, I called it Applications, and set the default template to either Basic Page or Web Part Page. This sample uses the Basic Page as template.

Emma Healy of Emma Explains Microsoft Licensing in Detail has written a post on how to calculate what Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 license you should use for your public facing/extranet MOSS site. The post has a flow chart to aid you in your decision to choose a MOSS for Internet Sites license (expensive!) or CALS (less expensive). To sum it up you should use the MOSS FIS if you have more than 435 users when using MOSS Standard or more than 242 users when using MOSS Enterprise.

When using Lists with Content Types enabled and you have your custom columns there are some things to remember, such as the custom columns are not part of the list content type items until you configure it so. For example; when you add a custom column to your list you have to option to add your column to all content types.

Everyone, every company, small or large has some kind of file server for storage of documents and other files. The file server are in many cases the heart of the operations. Some have several file servers and some have even more. Almost every file server looks the same; some kind of shared folder with subfolders (in absurdum). Most of these file servers uses file/directory permissions to have control over who are allowed to view or edit the files. Most often this is configured through groups, but far to often permissions are set on user accounts directly.

Microsoft SharePoint is a great development platform but it have some major areas where it could be improved. As of today you can create mediocre applications using the current SDK (which is not so well documented), but to create great applications you really need to understand how the internals of Windows SharePoint Services really works! I would like to show you an example of how bad the documentation and implementation is with a pretty common scenario.

I have a few times failed to install Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft Search Server Express, when I have come to a location where the SQL Server 2005 is already in place with custom configuration. The failures have occurred during the phase when the WSS is trying to create and configure the SQL Server. First time I had some troubles working it out, since I’m not a DBA, so I would like to share my solution since nothing is found on Google on this matter.

In my case I often create SharePoint sites and lists in a development environment or on a demo server, just to set up and verify the architecture and design. From that point I often have to sit down and start writing the actual feature, which involves some heavy Xml coding most of the times – now I have found a shortcut that will save me an awful amount of time. Let’s say that you have created a list in your demo environment, with columns, views and everything. This list is then the target of your feature you are about to develop. Creating the manifests, list templates and instances are pretty easy, but creating the schema can be troublesome and/or time consuming. Today I found a sweet little custom STSADM command called OCDExportList. This custom command exports the list schema from a list in a SharePoint site to an .xml file. Similar functionality can be found in other SharePoint solution generators, but I prefer using STSDEV and for this situation the custom command is great!

Today I passed the 70-542 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Application Development), with a score of 1000 (same as 70-541). It was a pretty tough test, but spending the last few days reading through the late Patrick Tisseghems book, Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 made me succeed. I dedicate this result to him – thanks! Technorati tags: SharePoint, MOSS

Working and developing with Microsoft products is a great, but when it all comes down to deliver a full solution to your clients you must know how the different products from Microsoft are licensed – and this is a mess (SharePoint?). Hopefully you have some in your organization that has some knowledge of the Microsoft licensing or you have a nice licensing partner that can help you out. But once in a while you end up with a client that wants to know how much it costs – and right now! Therefore I think it is essential if you, as a developer or architect, has (at least) some knowledge of how the different products are licensed.

It’s summer and time for some vacation, finally. This year has been hard work so far – and I don’t expect it to get lighter this upcoming autumn and winter. I’ve had fun though! Microsoft SharePoint has really been one thing occupying my work – it feels like everyone is not just looking at SharePoint, they want to use it now! We have a couple of cases that is really interesting and I hope that I have convinced them and proposed a nice solution.

Microsoft SharePoint is a great Enterprise Portal framework and contains a lot of collaboration and management features out of the box. SharePoint also has the abilities to find users and their knowledge using a social distance algorithm, but it has lacked some of the social features that applications such as Facebook successfully has implemented and been recognized for. Microsoft even owns a smaller part of the Facebook company. The enterprise equivalent of Web 2.0 – Enterprise 2.0 is steadily increasing and to make it work for the knowledge worker of today you have to include the social features. There are now numerous third party applications you can use to leverage your SharePoint installation to an Enterprise 2.0 portal, I previously blogged about some of them.

Yes, you heard it right - now you can install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on Windows Vista! No need for a Windows Server 2003/2008 or virtual machines, remote debugging or any other weird workarounds! Jonas Nilsson of Bamboo Solutions has come up with a way to allow you to install WSS onto a Vista x86/x64 machine using a special installer file. The post contains detailed instructions on how to install WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 on any Windows Vista machine with IIS7.

Today I passed another SharePoint exam; the 70-541, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development, with a score of 1000 of 1000. This one was pretty easy, compared to the ones for WSS 2/SharePoint 2003. If you have had chance to do some advanced developing and knows the SharePoint class library and Xml schemas you should give it a shot.

The SDKs for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been updated and are now available at the Microsoft Download site. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Software Development Kit (SDK) (version 1.3) SharePoint Server 2007 SDK: Software Development Kit (version 1.3)This contains several updates and worth to notice is the Search sample protocol handler, Custom Content Source and the BDC editor.

A few days ago Microsoft dropped the news that they are increasing their openness regarding interoperability. This is great news for the world of software, even though everyone has their own opinions in this matter. What now have been made public is more than 30.000 pages of documentation of the various protocols used within Microsoft server products (Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007). You can find the documentation in the MSDN Library or on the Microsoft Download site.

I have several time stumbled upon clients who complain that their hyper linked Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) opens up in the web browser, Internet Explorer, instead of in their respectively Office application. In SharePoint document libraries these problems are solved using a special JavaScript that fires up the correct application, but today I had a client complaining about this problem when having Office documents linked in a Wiki. So I dug up some information from the Microsoft Knowledge Base on this matter and though I should share it (or at least have it written down for future reference).

The Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, also known as the Fab40, is a set of forty different templates that can be used within a SharePoint environment. These templates are good to use as a starter when creating new SharePoint sites or custom solutions and I recommend that you install them into your test or development environment. But the download contains 40 different .wsp and .stp files which has to be installed one at a time; either using STSADM or using the web interface.

If you are about to plan capacity for your Microsoft SharePoint 2007 topology you can get great assistance from the Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007 and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Model. What is Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007? The Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) 2007 is a pre-deployment capacity planning tool for Microsoft Server products when creating distributed application deployments. The SCCP allows you to create a model of your hardware, network and applications/servers using a Model Editor. The model can then be run through a simulator which warns you of eventual bottlenecks and allows you to analyze all kinds of different data.

The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 contains a great new ASP.NET control called ListView. When using the ListView control you have much more control over how the output HTML will look like, which I think still is the main problem with the ASP.NET controls. To learn more about the ListView control, head over to Mustafa Basguns blog and read his excellent articles on the control. The ListView control is great when working with SharePoint (WSS3 and/or MOSS 2007) custom pages, since designing SharePoint pages which adapts into the current administration or takes advantage of all the CSS styles demands you to have pretty good control of your HTML.

Microsoft continues to strengthen their position in the Enterprise Search segment by acquiring the Norwegian Enterprise Search company Fast Search & Transfer (FAST). FAST is, according to Gartner, leader in the enterprise search segment together with Autonomy, where Microsoft was considered Tier 2 players. After releasing the Microsoft Search Server (MSS) and the MSS Express version, I’m glad Microsoft continues to emphasize on this interesting and “hot” area. Forrester stated after the Microsoft Search Server release that:

The year of 2007 is about to come to an end, and it has been a really exciting year. First of all I’ve had a great year with my family; my daughters turned four and one years old during 2007 and it’s so wonderful having them around giving me energy. My wife has been home with them the whole year and next year I will take a few months of parental leave and give them my full attention.

Not only the Office 2007 clients got updated to Service Pack 1 today, Service Pack 1 is also out for the Office Server family and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Here are some of the downloads… Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 1 - for new installs Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 - for upgrades Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Packs Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1 - SharePoint Server, Project Server, Forms Server and Groove Server Microsoft Office Server Language Pack 2007 Service Pack 1 Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 Service Pack 1 All are 32-Bit Editions, you can find links to the 64-bits in the instructions.

Remote Debugging is a great feature to use, especially when you work with virtual machines. It allows you to develop and debug locally but have the code running on another machine, virtual or physical. Microsoft SharePoint can’t be installed on a Windows Vista or XP workstation, but needs to be installed on Windows Server 2003 or 2008, so the general recommendations has been for developers to have either Windows Server as their main OS or have a virtual machine with Windows Server. None of these work that well; either you have problems debugging your components and you have to rely on traces or message boxes or you have to have a virtual machine with a full development environment, which will not resemble a production machine.

For the last year I have had really annoying security troubles when working with documents in SharePoint (2003 or 2007, WSS or MOSS) on my Windows Vista machine with Office 2007. Every time I have opened up a document for editing the Office applications have asked me to log in to access the document. I have been able to press Cancel three times, but then the document is opened up in read-only mode. The problem has not occurred on any Windows XP installations. I have seen this problem on several computers with Vista. There have been several reported workarounds, of which none has worked for me.

Microsoft has announced their new enterprise search setup of server products, which include the Microsoft Search Server 2008 together with an Express version, that are free (currently a release candidate). This new server product is an evolution of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search. This is great news since the Search Server (MSS) has great possibilities to integrate to other search engines or data sources (something that you only could do with some heavy BDC programming using MOSS 2007 Enterprise Edition). MSS is based on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and it can extend your WSS installations with better search, even cross-site which has been the major factor to upgrade to MOSS.

Today Microsoft announced that it will be extending Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with new enterprise social computing capabilities, by adding features from the partners NewsGator (Press release) and Atlassian. SharePoint Connector for Confluence This connector will integrate the Atlassian product called Confluence which is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge. The connector is allowing you to create more advanced wikis and blogs than the standard features of SharePoint or you can include SharePoint lists into Confluence, it even allows you to search both SharePoint content and documents as well as the Confluence content in one location.

The Microsoft SharePoint blog has a new post called “Known issue: Office 2007 on Windows Vista prompts for user credentials when opening documents in a SharePoint 2007 site”. The article is a result of many reported support cases on this issue and contains a few possible (I repeat possible) workarounds. We have had this problem ourselves and on several customers. In some cases these workarounds really work, but most of the times not. And the problem is not only with SharePoint 2007, we also see it for SharePoint 2003 installations so I think it’s more related to Vista, and its new security features, than SharePoint (the problem does not appear on Windows XP with IE7).

The net is crowded with SharePoint blogs, including this one, and I have missed one thing - information for the end-users. I think that there is a great void in knowledge for SharePoint users out there,for example how to use SharePoint as an end-user in the most efficient way, how to do the simple stuff such as creating sites or lists etc. Today I stumbled upon “Get the ‘Point” by Suzanne Ross, which has a focus on the SharePoint end-users. The blog is quite new but features a two-part article series on how to set up a Team Site. It does not sound like rocket science to us developers, but hint you customers and/or users about this blog.

When I was installing a new Windows SharePoint Services 3 site today I stumpled upon an error I’ve never seen in SharePoint before. It was when I was trying to add new users in the People and Groups administration. It was not a “normal” error page but instead a HTTP 403 Forbidden message was thrown when going to the /_layouts/aclinv.aspx page. This was on a brand new server instance, with everything patched and up to date.

Here is a list of cheat sheets for the Windows and .NET platform that I frequently use and I think are of great interest. Visual Studio 2005 Keyboard Shortcut References Visual C# 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color Visual C++ 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color Visual Basic 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color SharePoint and Office stuff CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services v3) CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2003 New Office 2007 User Interface - Word | PDF Web and ASP.NET stuff Microsoft AJAX ClientScript Cheat Sheet - ZIP JavaScript Cheat Sheet - PNG | PDF Other stuff

Microsoft Windows Vista contains new common dialogs, such as the Save As and Open dialogs, which have a new sidebar navigation to the left. The navigation can show the folder tree or your Favorite Links. Windows XP had a similar concept, but not as customizable as in Windows Vista. If you are like me and like to have your files organized and have easy access to them you can customize the Favorite Links really easy. All the links in the Favorite Links sidebar is plain old shortcuts (.lnk files) which are located in the Links folder of the Users directory, to be precise: %USERPROFILE%\Links\, for example c:\Users\wictor\Links\.

A few months back I showed how you could add the new Office 2007 icons to a SharePoint 2003 or Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 site. The Right Stuff has made a complete post on how to add the complete set of icons for the different Office 2007 applications. The post also contains a few different sets of Office 2007 icons so you can choose the one that suits your site best.

Today I start my two weeks vacation and I thought I should summarize this year. The year of 2006 has been characterized, for me, as the year of Betas and Technology Previews. I have been trying to involve myself as much as possible in the all the goodies flowing out of Redmond. Microsoft has released numerous amount of new applications and upgrades. Internet Explorer 7 The new version of Internet Explorer is the application this year that will have most impact in the short run on users. More standardized and a slicker interface with support of for example blogs.

Finally the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is available at Microsoft Downloads but still no SharePoint 2007 on MSDN.

Office 2007 is now available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads and on TechNet, after a weekend of updates on the sites. Vista is not yet ready for download, but Maria Johansson says it will be available by Friday the 17th.

The MSDN Subscriber Downloads site will be unavailable this friday “…from 7:00PM to 9:00PM Pacific time on Friday, November 10, 2006,for planned maintenance and upgrades. Both downloads and product keys will be unavailable…” I guess that they are making an update to handle the heavy download request for all the RTM:ed products this week such as Office System 2007 and Vista.

Microsoft offers a number of VHD downloads at Microsoft Download Center. You can find ready to go/test virtual hard disk images of: Windows Server 2003 R2 Exchange 2007 and Microsoft Live Communications Server 2007 ISA Server 2006 SQL Server 2005 Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Virtual PC demonstration The Dynamics CRM demo VHD contains a complete server with Windows Server 2003, Active Directory, SQL Server 2005, Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft CRM and Visual Studio 2005.

Yesterday I wrote a quick post on Google Co-op and Windows Live Search Macros and i thought that I should provide you with two great samples. Lawrence Liu has set up a custom search on Windows Live Search called SharePoint Community Search. The search focuses on SharePoint related sites and blogs. Gavin Joyce, the man behind DotNetKicks.com, has created a .NET Search Engine using Google Co-op. Gavin invites everyone to contribute with .NET releated sites that should be in the search scope.

Microsoft has released Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW and it’s available for download here (XP x86, other versions are available at Microsoft Download Center). I have been using the beta 2 extensively since the release, and the betas before that. It’s a great desktop search application and integrates incredibly nice with the upcoming Office 2007. Finding e-mails in Outlook 2007, documents on your harddrive or captured images in OneNote 2007 is really easy and fast. Give it a try!

Here is a quick instruction on how to install the Microsoft Excel 2007 and Microsoft Word 2007 default icons to your SharePoint 2003 site. First of all you need these two icons, right-click them and choose Save Picture As. Copy the two .gif files into the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\ folder. Then open the file C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\XML\docicon.xml with your favorite XML editor and add these two lines under the ByExtension element:

According to Lawrence Liu Microsoft will release a a demo with Microsoft Office Server System 2007 for Virtual Server as a .VMC and a virtual harddisk for Microsoft Certified Partners as a part of the Techinical demonstration toolkit during the next 4-6 weeks. This is great, I guess that it will contain the latest build, and gives us a good opportunity to test and show the new functionlity of MOSS without having to set up new servers or VM’s.

For me this second quarter of 2006 has been so interesting with all these beta and CTP products from Microsoft. The summer will be a long wait for the Release Candidates and the autumn a huge and shaky wait for the gold products. Here is a short summary of what i think so far; **Microsoft Expression Graphics Designer**An interesting product which I have big hopes for, I really like, and have just adjusted, to the vector way of doing my graphics.

Microsoft has release the first public release of the Windows Live Gadgets SDK, you can find it MicrosoftGadgets.com. You can also find the Gadgets Development Overview for Microsoft Sidebar for Windows Vista Beta 2 on the site. Developing Gadgets for both live.com and Microsoft Sidebar will be really easy and fun. But I see a problem with only having live.com as the only web-based Gadget host (host meaning where the Gadget can execute). I would like to see an implementation in either Microsoft SharePoint Services or as a standalone product, so you can host Gadgets in an Intranet scenario. There are some examples on how to host your own Gadgets; for example Donovan West has an example using an iframe solution. The problem is still that the Gadgets are hosted externally which is not that great if you think about security issues.

So, Microsoft Office 2007, applications and servers, are finally here for download at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx. Expect some huge downloads; Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is at 75 MB and the SharePoint Server at 1.000 MB. The Office Suite and programs is a tiny download of 2.049 MB. That would be a massive hive of 3.5" disks :-). I think a lot of bandwidth will be used on the backbones tonight, and this is just a faint hint of what will happen in a few weeks when the new public Vista beta will arrive.I still remember when I installed Visual C years ago, that was somwhere around 40 disks, thats about 60 MB!

I have moved this blog to my own domain, http://www.wictorwilen.se/ and I decided to have it hosted at DotNetPark. DotNetPark has an excellent service at great prices. For me it was important to have ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server where I hosted my site and they have all that and more. I can easily publish the site using FTP from Visual Studio and connect to the SQL Server using the Enterprise Manager or Visual Studio. Their interface, called DotNetPanel, provides you with everything you need to host your site.You can also have a number of services installed at your request, for example how about Windows SharePoint Services!

Windows SharePoint Services To Be Open Source With 2007 Microsoft Office Release - would’nt that be nice! A good april fools joke by Bill Simser, it almost got me at first sight!

Just came back from the training center with a passed 74-132 (Designing a Portal Solution with Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies (including Microsoft Content Management Server) certificate. It was quite easy to take even though I never worked with Content Management Server or Commerce Server. Most of the questions was about MCMS and Commerce Server, more than I expected.