SharePoint 2010

Introduction SharePoint 2013 introduces a new model on how Site Collections are upgraded using the new Deferred Site Collection Upgrade. To keep it simple it means that SharePoint 2013 can run a Site Collection in either 2010 mode or 2013 mode, and SharePoint 2013 contains a lot of the SharePoint 2010 artifacts (JS files, Features, Site Definitions) to handle this. When you’re doing a content database attach to upgrade from 2010 to 2013, only the database schema is upgraded and not the actual sites (by default). The actual Site Collection upgrade is done by the Site Collection administrator when they feel that they are ready to do that and have verified the functionality of SharePoint 2013 (or you force them to upgrade anyways). But, the Site Collection admin might have to upgrade sooner than expected for some sites.

A year and a half ago I posted the Visual guide to Windows Live ID authentication with SharePoint 2010 series, a post that got a tremendously amount of hits (and still gets) and tons of comments (and new ones still coming in). It showed quite a cumbersome way to Live ID enable your SharePoint 2010 Web Applications using the Microsoft Service Manager, MSM, (which works some times and some times not). Although it did/do work it is not the best way to enable Live ID authentication to your SharePoint 2010 web site. The MSM required you to first test in their INT environment and get approval before putting it into production, and you had to follow a set of guidelines on how to use Live ID logos etc etc, not mentioning all the manual configuration.

While fiddling, developing and configuring SharePoint 2010 I use the Service Application management a lot. This requires that you go to Central Administration, click on Manage service applications and then click on the service application that you need to configure or manage. I believe that managing the service applications are one of the most common tasks for people like me (I know some of you readers gets more fired up about the monitoring and upgrade parts of CA though).

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!

Introduction SharePoint 2010 introduced the Service Application concept and that architecture model also includes the possibility to publish and consume service applications between farms. For instance you could have the Managed Metadata service application in one of your farms and use it in another farm. There are several interesting and valid scenarios for this and some of them include having dedicated Shared Services farms, that is a farm that’s only hosting service applications and not any content applications. If you have one of these farms, or farms that publishes or consumes service applications you are facing an interesting upgrade scenario when looking at SharePoint 2013. In this Visual Guide I’ll try to go through all the required steps for a successful upgrade to SharePoint 2013

I’ve seen it asked numerous times on forums and I’ve been asked over and over how to interpret the encoded claims - so here it is: a post which will show you all the secrets behind how claims are encoded in SharePoint 2010. Updates: - 2012-03-09 Added Forms Authentication info. - 2012-03-11 Updated with information about how the claim type character is generated for non-defined claims Background If you have been using previous versions of SharePoint 2007, been working with .NET or just Windows you should be familiar with that (NETBIOS) user names are formatted DOMAIN\user (or provider:username for FBA in SharePoint). When SharePoint 2010 introduced the claims based authentication model (CBA) these formats was not sufficient for all the different options needed. Therefore a new string format was invented to handle the different claims. The format might at first glance look a bit weird…

A couple of months back, when the weather was grey and it was cold (well, it still is here in Sweden, glad I did a tour to the Riviera last week), I wrote a post about how Claims encoding works in SharePoint 2010, simply called “How Claims encoding works in SharePoint 2010”. In that post I discussed how SharePoint encoded Claims from relatively long descriptive claims, containing URN’s, to a smarter and shorter format - smaller to store, faster to compare format etc. While there are tons of defined claim types only a selected few are “pre-encoded” in SharePoint. Here are a few examples:

Building the metadata structure in the Term Store Manager in SharePoint 2010 is not the most convenient way. I prefer working with the metadata structure and terms in an Excel document so that I can discuss the structure with colleagues and clients before implementing it. The Term Store Manager allows you to import a comma separated text file containing a Term Set. By default the Excel 2010 Save as CSV does not save in the correct format and for that I have made a Excel 2010 macro enabled template which produces the correct format.

The Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2010 can be configured using STSADM commands, PowerShell or some coding. To easy turn the Developer Dashboard on and off I have created a Farm scoped feature that allows you to configure the Developer Dashboard from Central Administration > General Application Settings > Development Settings. The Developer Dashboard contains more configuration options than just to turn it on or off. With this feature you can configure all of the options available for the dashboard:

In this article I would like to give you some information about a very important timer job in SharePoint 2010 - the Application Addresses Refresh Job. If you do not understand what it is used for you might see some strange (to you) error messages when configuring SharePoint. Even if you’re familiar with it it might be a good idea to continue reading. Purpose of the Application Addresses Refresh Job The Application Addresses Refresh Job has one specific job to do - keep track of all available and online instances of all service application end-points. This means that whenever a proxy requests an endpoint for a service application it will ask the Topology Service (the Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service) for an endpoint. The Topology Service keeps a list of the endpoints that has been discovered by the Application Addresses Refresh Job and passes on one of these endpoints to the proxy, using the load balancing algorithm, which uses that endpoint to talk to the service application. So far so good…

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!

Last Friday I got the fantastic message that I had successfully passed the Microsoft Certified Architect - SharePoint 2010 (MCA) certification, something I’m really proud of - but something most of the community never ever heard of. During this weekend I’ve been pinged and messaged by a lots of people asking the question “What is a Microsoft Certified Architect?”. In this post I intend to answer it as thorough as possible, including my own personal aspects of it.

The best free SharePoint magazine published online, the DIWUG SharePoint e-Magazine, did yesterday release their sixth edition. As usual this is a great edition with a mix of articles for every aspects of the SharePoint universe. The articles are written by SharePoint community members and the magazine is compiled and managed by Mirjam van Olst and Marianne van Wanrooij. This edition contains articles ranging from hard core Service Application federation, to SharePoint Online and Azure development to articles on how to engage your users and project teams in SharePoint. As usual - something you just must read!

Another post you think! Does this guy have a life? Well, actually I do. But once you get me started , I’m hard to stop… This sixth post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010 is going to show you how to leverage some of the features that Azure ACS provides you with when using Facebook as Identity Provider. I’m going to show you how to use the Facebook Graph API and retrieve information about the user (and possible his/hers friends) - this is of interest if you’re going to build a community or something similar on top of SharePoint 2010. For instance we can use the information from Facebook and push into the SharePoint 2010 User Profile service once the user has signed up..

This is the fifth post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010 and this time it is time to augment some claims using the Azure ACS. We’ll do this to prepare for the next exciting part. For this post I assume you have configured at least one Web Application to use Facebook login using Azure ACS - make sure that you’ve followed post 1 and post 3 and optionally post 4 thoroughly.

This post serves as an index for all the articles in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. This series is a set [not yet determined amount] of articles where I show you how to leverage the Azure Access Controls Services (ACS) in combination with SharePoint 2010 to make it easier for you to use identity providers such as Google ID, Windows Live ID, Facebook AuthN etc.

Back with another promised post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. This time I’m going to show you how to work with multiple web applications. We’re going to use the stuff we configured in part 1 (basic setup) and part 3 (Facebook setup), and hopefully we’re avoiding the problems discussed in part 2 (common problems). Scenario In this article I would like to show you how to use Azure ACS and SharePoint 2010 when we have multiple Web Applications in SharePoint. The sample will assume the same web application as used in the previous posts, but now with a dedicated My Site Host Web Application (called http://my). If we just enable the same Trusted Identity Provider to the “My” Web Application, the user will be redirected to the Azure ACS log in page, but when he/she is redirected back it will redirect back to the other web application (called http://sp2010 in the previous posts), because that’s the web application we configured in the Return URL in Azure ACS.

Welcome back to a third post in the Visual Guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. In the first part I showed you how to do the basic configuration of Azure ACS and SharePoint 2010 and log in using a Google Id. The second part discussed the most common problems I’ve seen so far. In this post we’ll continue extending the ACS Relying Party to support another Identity Provider - namely Facebook! Depending on what type of site/community you’re trying to build with your SharePoint 2010 site it might be of interest to use Facebook login (they have like a gazillion of users or something). The Facebook AuthN parts are a bit different than the others OOB IP’s in Azure ACS - but not complicated at all, so let’s get started…

This is a the second part of the Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. I hope you’ve read part 1 which showed you how to configure SharePoint 2010 to use Windows Azure Access Control Services, ACS, as the federated Identity Provider, IP. In this post I’ll go through the most common errors that you might stumble upon (most likely due to the fact that you didn’t follow part 1 thoroughly). These errors are also applicable to other providers such as ADFS.

The SharePoint Enterprise Search Migration Tool (SMT), created by Microsoft, is a great little tool for moving/migrating search settings from one SharePoint Search Service Application to another, and even from a SharePoint 2007 SSP to a SharePoint 2010 SSA or FAST for SharePoint. The tool is available for download from the MSDN Archive - both as a binary and its source code. It is a console application that creates an XML when exporting the settings and uses the same XML when importing the settings, and it works great in a scripting environment. The SMT that’s available from MSDN Archive allows you to migrate Best Bets, Search Scopes and Site Collection Search settings.

For a couple of weeks (ahem, months) I’ve been struggling with a strange Search Service Application issue. Some time back I went to check out on some Crawled Properties when making a tool to help copying settings between SSA’s (more on this tool in another post). Then I noticed that there were tons of Crawled Properties with just garbled binary data(!) as the property name.

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is now available for download für alles and it does not only include the Windows 8 stuff like the previous preview did - this one contains the thing we all want - the SharePoint Developer tools. Overall the performance of Visual Studio 11 is blazingly fast! I regret I tested it - since I will go back to 2010 tomorrow (or even tonight). They team has done a great job and included a lot of the PowerTools natively; such as the new Solution Explorer, the improved search feature etc.

It is always fun to get back on site after a couple of days off work. SharePoint 2010 is like an annoying little critter, if you’re not there to cuddle with it it will do the most strange things. I currently have a support case open regarding some issues with crawled properties (I hope that will be another story to tell another day) and went into the Search Service Application admin pages in Central Admin to check some things. When poking around I noticed that the incremental crawl hasn’t been run for a few days - actually it stopped working on the 31st of December last year (sounds like ages ago now :-). In this farm we have three Search Service Applications and only this one hadn’t been incrementally crawled - the other two worked just fine. I fired up an incremental crawl manually and that worked, waited for the next incremental crawl to start - and it didn’t. Also tried a full crawl manually - which worked fine, but the scheduled crawls never started.

It’s that time of the year, when you’re thinking about what you’ve done and accomplished the last twelve months. I’ve been writing a summary for the last five years (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010) and I always think it’s fun to look back at the year gone and do some predictions for the upcoming one. This year has been totally crazy - I’ve been enjoying my work and clients/projects at Connecta and I totally love that we have such a strong team and offering. I can really feel the momentum we have in our team and projects, and nothing is stopping us now…

The last week I stumbled upon a really interesting new and shiny User Profile Synchronization issue - one of these things that just make your day! We had to manually initialize a full synchronization, after doing some updates to one of the user profile properties, and the user profile synchronization would not just start… Everything looked fine (on the surface) and we tried the incremental sync, which also looked like it was starting but nothing happened. The sync service was up and running and the FIM services was started, the MIISClient showed no activity. We took a look at the timer jobs, which are responsible for kicking of the synchronizations and saw that they all failed with the error message Access Denied.

It was some time since I did a real blog post and I have been fiddling with a specific topic, which I’m going to write about, for quite some time now. I’ve been working an Office 365 Intranet and been doing two conferences lately where I’ve demonstrated Office 365 and Windows Azure integration. One of the challenges (and boy, there are many) of Office 365 and SharePoint Online are access to External Data or services. In a few blog posts I will describe how you can work around these issues using some very simple techniques. All that is to it is that you have to “think outside the box” and not always go down the traditional SharePoint way of doing things.

Back home after a few days in Berlin for the European SharePoint Conference 2011. It was a great conference with good speakers and really nice attendees. It was three days full of sessions, expert panels, shoot-outs and SharePoint fun! Thanks to everyone who was there (especially those who came to my sessions :-) and the team behind the conference! And as always it great to meet up with the SharePoint MVP’s, MCM’s and now even MCA’s!

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.

A couple of days ago the SharePoint 2010 Cumulative Update for August 2011 was released. Always a good time to see some things fixed and some things break. Installing a Cumulative Update is always a risky business, and you should only install them if you any experience problems that the CU resolves and only when you thoroughly tested it. One CU to rule them all! Without going into details about the content and fixes in the August 2011 CU there is one other thing that is of real interest - and that is how MIcrosoft has changed the packaging process for the Cumulative Updates. Since the release of SharePoint 2010 there has been talk and discussions about über-packages. That is Server Cumulative Packages that contains both the Server hotfixes as well as the Foundation hotfixes, which makes the update process a bit easier and faster - you only need to install one package. Up until now there has been mixed messages on the über-packages and caused some confusion. The recommendation has been that you need to install both SPF and SPS CU’s on a SPS installation and all three if you’re using Project Server.

This fall is going to be pretty busy in terms of conferences and presentations and I’ll have my fair share. Here’s what I’ve planned for this fall, so far. Webinar: No Farm Solution in sight! On Tuesday the 6th of September I will do a webinar discussing SharePoint Online and Office 365 and how you can build solutions using SharePoint Online, Silverlight, Windows Azure and more without creating any farm solutions:

If you’ve been in the SharePoint business for a while (at least a couple of days) you should be aware of the SharePoint objects that needs to be properly disposed; SPSite and SPWeb in particular. Objects that need disposal inherits from the IDisposable interface and requires that you call the Dispose() method when you’re done with the object - this is to ensure that the object frees up resources that the .NET managed garbage collector cannot free up automatically. This includes objects such as non-managed SQL connections, resource handles, file handles etc. Disposing objects is nothing unique for SharePoint - all (real) .NET developers know how to dispose of a SQL connection. You can read more about the best practices around disposing SharePoint objects in the MSDN Disposing Objects article. Not doing this properly will eventually lead to application crashes, high memory usage and/or bad performance.

The 65th SharePoint Pod Show is out featuring…tada…me :-) The SharePoint Pod Show is THE podcast about SharePoint and is done by Rob Foster, Nick Swan and Brett Lonsdale and has featured a lot of great SharePointers from all around the world throughout the years. If you haven’t already listened to the podcasts, then you got 65 episodes to catch up on! There are some epic ones, such as my favorite one #50 - which is about performance tuning. And make sure that you subscribe - you don’t want to miss their SPC11 Road-trip…

Besides SharePoint my very dear topics is performance optimizations and new technologies, so here’s a post mixing all these together. Background Caching is one way to improve the performance of any application, there are several ways to do it in-memory, disk etc etc. SharePoint 2010 has a set of caching capabilities, most of them are in-memory caches and some involve disk or even SQL based. One problem with (especially) in-memory caching is that if you have a farm different servers may display different results, which is due to the fact that the different servers cached information at different times. Another problem with in-memory caching is that it’s per process, that is that you have different caches for different web applications and application pools.

This is a short story about how you can get and resolve stale Managed Metadata Service (MMS) databases in SharePoint 2010. I’ve been working with Managed Metadata quite much and done some backup/restore juggling from production to test and to dev environments. Which by the way works really smooth. I’ve also recreated the MMS databases a couple of times. After applying Service Pack and the re-released June 2011 CU I went into Central Administration to take a look at the databases and their upgrade status. This is what I found: four MMS databases, of which two didn’t upgrade, and I only have two MMS service applications in this particular environment.

Here goes another post using the WebPartAdderExtension Element. I previously wrote an introduction to custom Web Part Gallery sources and a second one on how to enhance the end-user experience when adding new Web Parts. Now I’m going to show you another trick that this technique can be used for. Introduction Deploying Web Parts are normally done by using the Module element in the Elements manifest and using that element uploading/deploying Web Part Controls Description files (.webpart or .dwp files) into the Web Part catalog. These Element manifests for Web Parts must be scoped to the Site Collection level, since it is there where the Web Part catalog lives (~/site/_catalogs/wp). So if you want do deploy a solution containing a set of Web Parts you need to activate that Feature on each and every Site Collection. You can do it in a number of ways such as Feature Stapling, code, scripting etc. Could be quite tedious work if you have a large farm with many site collections and web applications. Also when retracting solutions with Features that uses Modules we manually have to clean up the files provisioned.

This is a follow-up post on yesterdays introduction to the WebPartAdder (which lately has been one of my favorite features of SharePoint 2010). In that post I mentioned that you could invoke a JavaScript function when a Web Part is added using a custom Web Part Gallery source. The Silverlight Web Part If you have been working with SharePoint as an end-user you’ve probably seen the nice modal dialog that pops up when you’re adding a Silverlight Web Part to a page, see the image to the right. It allows you to very easily configure the Web Part with the appropriate XAP file without editing the Web Part properties. If more Web Parts were like this it would be a whole lot easier working with Web Parts.

Writing this post has been on my agenda for some time, initially I intended to put it into my SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action book, but there was not enough time, you know how it is! This is an excellent new feature to SharePoint 2010 which allows you to dynamically populate the Web Part Gallery with Categories and Web Parts. So here we go. Introduction to the Web Part Adder and the Web Part Gallery Think of the List and Libraries category in the Web Part Gallery - it is dynamically populated with the lists and libraries available in the current web. This is all done using the WebPartAdder class which loads all the Web Parts available in the gallery from a number of different sources, see figure below. These source include the List and Libraries category, the local Web Part catalog, files in the wpcatalog, closed and uploaded Web Parts etc.

I guess by now we all seen or read about the new SharePoint 2010 guidance on scaling limits announced by the product group today. To sum it up it this is the new guidance on content database sizing: up to 200GB - still the recommendation 200GB to 4TB - yes, it’s been done and can be done (with the help of a skilled professional architect :-) 4TB or more - only for near read-only “record centers” with very sparse writing This looks good right, and it can be in some cases. But now on to the fine prints, which actually are written in the updated Software Boundaries and Limits article. If you read the announcement and the boundaries article you see that to be supported you need to follow a number of hard rules (such as IOPS per GB) and you must have governance rules (such as backup and restore plans) in place. Ok, if I got the IOPS needed, the best disaster recovery plans ever made and a skilled professional - should I go for the 4TB limit then? I think not, unless you really need the scale and have the hardware requirements.

About a year has passed since SharePoint 2010 RTM:ed and now the first Service Pack is released, Service Pack 1. A Service Pack is always a big deal for SharePoint. Service Packs contains all the previous cumulative updates and in most cases some new features. SP1 for SharePoint 2010 is all that. Before diving into some of the new stuff I want to raise a finger of warning. Plan and test your SP1 upgrade thoroughly! Even though Service Packs are tested more than CU’s they are not tested in your environment and with your customizations. Read more on this topic.

SharePoint 2010 allows you to configure your Service Application in Application Proxy Groups. By default all Service Applications ends up in the Default Proxy Group, named default. This Proxy Group is used by all Web Applications unless otherwise specified. Sometimes there is need to create specific Proxy Groups for different Web Applications, the reasons may vary but often it is a result of having different service offerings. For instance you would like to have different Managed Metadata Service Applications for different Web Applications.

Post is updated, see comments at the end of the post. We’re really getting close to the go live of Office 365 and I am, and I guess a lot of you are as well, preparing to launch a couple of Intranets and sites. As you know by now there are some major differences between SharePoint 2010 on-premise and SharePoint Online in Office 365. And there are also some more subtle ones that jumps up right in your face.

Now with the Microsoft Certified Master course two and a half weeks behind me and the great news that I accomplished all the exams, and might call myself a Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2010, only a few days old I thought I should write something about the program, experience and value of it. Recent blog posts about the Microsoft certification programs also put some extra fuel onto the urge of writing about it.

This is a post detailing how you perform active authentication to SharePoint Online in Office 365. Active authentication is required when you need to authenticate in code to programmatically access SharePoint objects, using for instance Client Object Model, web services or WebDAV from outside of Office 365. When you are “in” SharePoint Online or using the web browser this is not needed since you are either already authenticated and the web browser handles the authentication using active authentication.

I’m proud to announce that I have been selected to speak at the European SharePoint Conference, held in Berlin 17-20 October 2011. This is the largest SharePoint conference in Europe this year and there are plenty of good speakers and sessions, so get your seat while they still are available. I will have two sessions: Integrating Office 365 and Windows Azure - Tuesday, 18th at 11:15 This session focuses on how to extend Office 365 using Windows Azure. Playing in the Sandbox - Wednesday, 29th at 11:15 One of my favorite topics; understand the SharePoint 2010 Sandbox and overcome its limitations. I will be bringing a few copies of my book, so make sure that you attend my sessions and have a chance to win one.

The by far best utility for SharePoint 2010 developers is the CKSDev extension (Community Kit for SharePoint - Developer extensions). It’s an extension to Visual Studio 2010, available through the built-in Extension Manager. To install it, just hit Tools > Extension Manager and then search for “CKSDEV” in the Online Gallery. Version 2.0 of CKSDev was released yesterday, and if you already have it installed you should have been notified about the update.

For quite some time I’ve been pretty annoyed (and that’s an understatement) of the strange span-tags generated by the output of pages in SharePoint 2010. Not only are they annoying they also make the markup invalid, since the span tags are omitted after the closing html tag (duh!). So in order to get to the bottom of this I decided to face my fears and entered debugging mode. It only took me a few minutes to find out what was going wrong, and I didn’t even have to step (almost) through any SharePoint code to find it out. Here’s what I found and how I found it…

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 Web Analytics feature in SharePoint 2010 is a great new addition and allows you to get some insights on how your users behave whether it’s an Intranet, Extranet or a public facing web site. One of the reports is called Top Browsers and shows which web browser that the users are using to access the site. For a public facing web site this report might make sense but for an Intranet the results may cause you a headache if you do not understand how to interpret the data.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now it’s time for the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Button Control in the Ribbon Control series (full series index can be found here), What is the Button control? The Button control needs no further description - it’s a button on which the users can click to execute commands. Buttons can exist alone or in menus (which will be covered later in the series). Sample Button control A Button control could be implemented as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This years SharePoint and Exchange Conference, the seventh in order, took place this week. For the second year I was there as a speaker and had just as great time as last year. It is currently the largest conference in Scandinavia focusing on SharePoint and Exchange technologies and its growing for each year. Göran Husman (MVP) and Beatrice from Humandata has done an excellent job in putting this conference together and finding such good speakers; both national and international. Thank you!

Here is the third part of my Visual guide to Windows Live ID authentication in SharePoint 2010. This part takes off just where we ended the last part. If you haven’t read part 1 and part 2 then make sure to read them through before continuing. Submitting site for compliance In order to get your INT site into the PROD/production environment you need to make sure that your site follows the compliance rules. If you do not follow the rules then you will not be able to run your site using the “normal” Live ID accounts. The compliance criteria and verification cases can be found at the MSM site as Word or PDF format. Note that this document is dated way back in 2006 so some things are quite outdated. Here is a short but not complete summary of the compliance criteria:

Recently came across a really interesting bug in SharePoint 2010. It’s when you are trying to upload multiple files using the ActiveX control, where you can drag and drop files or select multiple files. I started receiving “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” exceptions from the STSUpld control. The usual Google, ahem, Bing check revealed nothing. Just that I was not alone having this problem (hence this post).

An intense Twitter conversation initiated by Fabian about how Managed Metadata is updated in SharePoint 2010 gave me the idea to note down a few interesting bits about the Taxonomy Fields and how they work within a Site Collection. I hope/guess that Fabian will write a good post (as usual) about his findings as well. Introduction The possibility to tag documents in SharePoint is one of my favorite features and one of the reasons that I think you should move to SharePoint 2010 as soon as possible. As every new function added to the huge SharePoint spectrum I have an urge to dive deep into these new additions to really know how to use them fully. I’ve spent some time with the Managed Metadata Service Application and the taxonomy fields used with it. I can’t say it has been a smooth ride all the way - but digging into the actual bits and understanding how it all works made it a whole lot easier. And you know what - why keep everything a secret!

Welcome back to the SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 Better together series for this third part. In part 2 I showed you how to use Visio 2010 to convert your business requirements into workflows that later could be used in SharePoint 2010, using SharePoint Designer 2010 as the man in the middle. This time I’ll show you how Visio comes into play even after you have deployed your workflows and running them in your organization.

UPDATE 2012-02-01: A new and better approach to this is detailed in a new Visual Guide - Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. I’m back with the second part of the Visual guide to Windows Live ID authentication with SharePoint 2010 series. Part 1 was a huge success and has received a lot of feedback and hits - I hope many of you out there successfully configured your web sites and extranets. I’m currently working on getting the new Swedish SharePoint User Group website up using Live ID…

Introduction After a long and well deserved vacation we’re now back with new strength! It’s time for our first SSUG meeting for the fall! Please do remember; This is a FREE event – we never have and never will charge anyone for loving SharePoint and sharing the awesomeness :-) Meeting details Let’s meet up at Microsoft HQ for our first SSUG meeting this fall! You will have the possibility to mingle around with SharePoint MVPs, folks from Microsoft and of course all our splendidly cool members!

The other day I had an interesting and great workshop with a customer about the BI features in SharePoint 2010. SharePoint Insights is one thing that really gets me going - so much great stuff can be unleashed using Excel, Visio and PerformancePoint Services. One thing that annoys me with the default settings in SharePoint 2010 is the BI Center. A BI Center does not support the “BI for everyone” mantra - that center only turns numbers and KPI fans on. What you should do is enable BI features on all of your sites; your Intranet home page, your department sites or even on project sites etc. But it isn’t as easy as you could imagine. So here’s some tips for you all to BI-enable all your sites. Oh wait, don’t say to your end-users that you BI-enabled their site - tell them that you have Insight enabled their site instead so you don’t scare them off.

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.

This is the second post in the SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 - better together series. And it is time to really check out what this great combination have to offer, and the most obvious subject to start with is that we can now use Visio to design the workflows, which then are imported to SharePoint via SharePoint Designer 2010. So let’s get started. If you ever built workflows for previous versions of SharePoint you either used SharePoint Designer 2007 or Visual Studio 2005/2008. SharePoint Designer 2007 had a very limited workflow designer (you can’t actually call it a designer) that took quite some time to get used to and you were very limited in what to do. Visual Studio of course offered you the full set of workflow features. I’m not trying to get to deep into the actual workflow stuff here but it is important to understand how hard it was for the organizations to get their hand-drawn or Visio-drawn workflow into SharePoint. If you used SharePoint Designer to build the workflows then the most problematic situation was when you were supposed to move the workflow from you development environment to production - this was just impossible (yea, there was ways to work around it - but not for mere mortals).

One of the really great features in SharePoint 2010 is the Sandbox, which allows the end-users to upload solutions using the web interface, instead of relying on administrators adding the solutions directly to the farm. One of the things that that can be deployed to the Sandbox is custom workflow activities. These activates can then be used by the end-users building workflows with SharePoint Designer. It is really powerful to add custom sandboxed activities and it is very easy as well! In this post I will show you how to really fast build a custom sandboxed activity that breaks the permission inheritance on the item which the workflow is executed on.

UPDATE 2012-02-01: A new and better approach to this is detailed in a new Visual Guide - Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. Using Windows Live ID as login provider for SharePoint is a really huge thing. It makes the scenario for public facing web sites, extranets etc. much more easier, for instance there is no need to maintain passwords and users in the same degree. For SharePoint 2007 there is no native support for this, so I built a custom Live ID login provider (available at http://spwla.codeplex.com), but SharePoint 2010 has native support for claims based access. And that is what’s on the menu for tonight…

This is the first post in a series about SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 and how the two products integrate with each other. I remember when I first saw Visio many, many years ago. It was before Microsoft acquired it from Visio Corporation. It was my dad using it to make blue prints of our summer house. As most of the gadgets and software he buys he needs a helping hand, not saying he is not technical, but I tend to catch up on such stuff faster than him, so I learnt the basics. I have used Visio since then, during my years in school and university and especially in my job as a developer and architect. (I have also made exact blue prints of our house, including the electrical wiring - call me crazy but I do love that product.) Visio is a great tool for technical diagrams and representations and extremely effective in drawing flowcharts and business processes.

This is a follow-up post to the Understanding folders and namespaces in Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Solutions, Packages and Features (probably my longest blog post title, except this one…). In that post I discussed how folders and namespaces are handled in Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint projects. I will continue to show some details and tips on how you can affect the outcome of your project/packages. Long feature folder names As the previous post showed the features generated by Visual Studio ends up as a subfolder in the {SharePoint Root}\TEMPLATE\FEATURES folder. The feature folder will get the name as the concatenation of the project and the feature - which possibly can be quite long.

UPDATED 2010-10-03: Obviously the KB2276339 is not a Aug CU hotfix KB2352342 is the correct one. The second Cumulative Update (CU) is out for SharePoint 2010. It contains two hotfixes; one for Foundation and one for Server. The Foundation fix contains the really important update that should fix the problem with LINQ to SharePoint and anonymous users. You can get the fixes here: SharePoint Foundation 2010 August 2010 CU hotfix (KB2266423) SharePoint Server 2010 August 2010 CU hotfix (KB2276339) SharePoint Server 2010 August 2010 CU hotfix (KB2352342) - KB article not live yet but you can request the hotfix here. (by looking at the updated components in CA you can see that it patches Access Services, Document Lifecycle components, Shared Components and Word Server) Caution when installing hotfixes (as usual), they are not that thoroughly tested as Service Packs and only install them if you experience the problems mentioned in the KB articles. Nevertheless since this SPF hotfix contains the above mentioned fix for LINQ to SharePoint - this one is pretty important!

Yesterday Todd Bleeker (SharePoint MVP) wrote a post about the SharePoint Project SPI’s where he explains how SPI effectively are folders within a SharePoint solution. I thought that I should continue that discussion a bit and looking at how these folders and other things such as packages and features affects the actual deployed artifacts. Packages A package (#3 in the figure to the right) is the actual WSP file that will be created containing all your objects from your solution that will deployed to the SharePoint application servers. The project can only contain one package.

Visual Studio 2010 LightSwitch is a new kid on the block in the Visual Studio suburbs. Basically it is a rich client application editor for Visual Studio that allows you to develop (or should I say “click-through”) an application very easy without any programming skills at all. You can create a custom database, attach to an external data source or WCF RIA service and last but not least hook it up to SharePoint. And this is what I’m going to give you a quick peek at.

Summer is not yet over (at least not according to the calendar) and this autumn is already being planned and filled with some great stuff. Part from working on a great SharePoint 2010 project, waiting for the book to be ready and some other stuff I also have planned a few speaking events - which I’m really thrilled about. SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2010 Stockholm - 18th-19th October For the second consecutive year I will speak at the largest SharePoint and Exchange event in Scandinavia, arranged by my good friend and SharePoint MVP Göran Husman - the SharePoint Exchange Forum 2010 (#SEF). I will do a session called Playing in the Sandbox where I discuss the SharePoint 2010 Sandbox and how you can use it and how it affect you as a developer. There will be a lot of good speakers and great content - and if you’re around I hope to see you there!

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.

As you know the usage of JavaScript has been more and more used in web applications over the past years for technologies such as AJAX. JavaScript can accomplish really cool stuff on the client side and make the user interface more interactive and responsive. Just take a look at SharePoint 2010 - that’s some heavy JavaScripts there (a bit to heavy IMHO). So lets assume that you are building some new cool stuff, in SharePoint of course, and why not a Page Component for a contextual Web Part. That’s a lot of JavaScript (apart from the server side XML chunks)! So now you are making your web page payload even heavier. This is when minifying comes in. Minifying is a way to minimize the payload of a resource such as removing unnecessary comments and whitespace, shortening function and variable names etc - all to make the payload as small as possible. The only problem with these minified scripts are that they are virtually impossible to debug (and believe me if you are building a Page Component for SharePoint - you need to debug).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DevSum 2010 is over two days packed with cool sessions. I had the last session of the day and conference but some brave SharePointers showed up and eagerly listened. I hope you enjoyed it and if you need some evening lecture you can download the presentation below, which was about SharePoint 2010 Composites and especially Business Component Services. DevSum 2010 had some great content from local gurus and MVPs and the Microsoft Pattern & Practices group was here and shared some valuable knowledge! Thanks Cornerstone for arranging it!

The 2nd edition of the Dutch Information Worker User Group SharePoint eMagazine is out! It’s a free SharePoint magazine, focusing on SharePoint 2010. The first edition released a couple of months ago was a fantastic opening issue with awesome content and It looks like this edition is keeping up the high standard. Looking forward to the series continuing… This issue contains some really interesting content ranging from an article about WCM in SharePoint 2010 from Waldek Mastykarz, CKS:DEV from Wes Hackett and feature/solution life-cycle/versioning by Anders Rask. And also an article about SharePoint 2010 Themes by yours truly.

This is just a friendly reminder for you who tries to build a Sandboxed Web Part for SharePoint 2010 and trying to use the FileUpload or HtmlInputFile controls - it will not work. The uploaded files are not transferred to the sandboxed processes and cannot be used in the sandbox. The SharePoint 2010 sandbox runs in a separate process and all requests from the IIS to SharePoint are marshaled over to the User Code process. It is during this process the files that are uploaded during the request are lost - you will always see that HttpContext.Current.Request.Files.Count is equal to 0, or similar properties on the upload controls are set to null.

The Sandbox in SharePoint 2010 allows Site Collection administrators to upload solutions in their Site Collections without access to the physical server. This is a great way to open up for creativity and for each Site Collection owner to expand the functionality of their Site Collection without adventuring the stability of the SharePoint farm. Sandbox Solutions do have some limitations, for instance we cannot add new Application Pages. Application pages are normally pages added to the _layouts folder, which are located in the {SharePoint Root}\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS physical folder on each server.

The Office Web Apps, OWA, in SharePoint 2010 is a great way to enhance the SharePoint experience. It allows users without a decent OS or a locally installed Office client to view and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents. When you install and correctly configures Office Web Apps (yea, can be a bit of a hazzle if you like me avoid the Farm Configuration wizard) and then enable the required Site Collections feature a cache will be created. This cache is used by Word and PowerPoint Web Apps to store the renditions (XAML) of the documents to speed up the process. Office Web Apps will create one cache per Web Application and the cache is stored in one of the Content Databases attached to the Web Application.

I am currently setting up SharePoint 2010 farms back and forth testing out the most optimal ways using least privileges and different configurations. The by far most complex part in the configuration is the User Profile Service Application and the User Profile Sync. Spencer Harbar have fortunately documented how to do it properly in his Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization article. Following that you will likely not fail…

Timer jobs is a great feature of SharePoint to use when you need to perform background execution at regular or specific times or when you need to execute code on all or selected servers in the farm. A timer job is a persistable object deriving from the SPJobDefinition class. SharePoint 2010 has updated this class in many ways, to the better. Not only can the timer jobs be configured and monitored better through Central Administration they can also be invoked on demand.

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.

Currently setting up a new environment on SharePoint 2010 (which was made available for download yesterday if anyone missed that :-). One of the new features of SharePoint 2010 is to set up a Content Type Hub (which is a part of the Metadata Service Application), which is a hub for all Content Types that other Site Collections can subscribe to. That is you only need to manage your content types in one location.

SharePoint 2010 is just around the corner and Microsoft is starting to release guidance and planning documents for the new and shiny version. Up until now there has been little guidance on hardware and software limits/boundaries/recommendations of SharePoint 2010 and comparisons with SharePoint 2007. But now when the release is imminent is essential to get up to speed on this. Here is a compilation of some of them that I find really interesting and will take for weekend reading.

SharePoint 2010 contains functionality for rating documents and items using a classic five-star rating approach. But those starts looks a little bit like the Google stars, right? Wouldn’t it be cool to brand the rating and use custom icons like this: The solution is quite easy actually. You need to create a set of images and then set a few properties on the SPWeb object of the top-level site in the Site Collection.

The release SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 is imminent and I can already smell them! Microsoft Sweden with André Henriksson will take a tour around our beautiful country and show all the good stuff that is coming for us developers called SharePoint 2010 - The Developer Tour. Me and my awesome MVP mate Tobias Zimmergren will help out during some stops of the tour. It’s a half day full with developer goodies that you can’t miss out on! The tour will stop in Umeå, Göteborg, Sundsvall, Malmö and Stockholm. I will be doing the last stop and that one is after RTM and general availability of SharePoint 2010 so be sure that I will show you the latest and coolest bits of the fantastic SharePoint platform!

I’d like to take the opportunity to tell you about some of my upcoming engagements this spring. SharePoint 2010 - the Developer Tour - May 17th, Stockholm A half day introduction to SharePoint 2010 development arranged by Microsoft in Stockholm. If you are new to SharePoint development or a skilled SharePoint 2007 developer you should not miss this out. Together with Microsoft we will dive into the wonderful world of the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools and SharePoint Designer 2010.

SharePoint 2010 the logging has been extended with a new Correlation ID which is unique for each request or operation. The Correlation ID makes it very easy to track down any unexpected errors since you can search for the id in the trace logs. This unique ID is also maintained between servers for instance when making a call to a service application. The SharePoint 2010 error page also shows this Correlation ID so that any end-users seeing the message can contact support and give the the Correlation ID. Using the ID the support team can then track down the cause of the error.

In SharePoint 2010 there are more ways to deploy custom code than in its predecessors, the reason is the introduction of the Sandboxed solutions. There are basically now three different ways to deploy custom assemblies: Full trust solutions, aka Farm solutions - The assemblies are registered in the GAC and runs under full trust Partial trust solutions, aka Web Application solutions - The assemblies are deployed to the bin folder of a specific Web Application Sandboxed solutions, aka User code solutions - The assemblies (solutions) are deployed to the Site Collection gallery These are the basic variants of how to deploy custom assemblies. There are actually a few variants of them, but more about them later. So which one should I use and when? Let’s go through them all and look at the pros and cons.

If you have been developing with SharePoint for the last few years you probably are very aware of the SPWeb and SPSite naming is a bit confusing. SPWeb is actually a site and SPSite is a site collection. It’s always fun explaining this to new SharePoint developers… In SharePoint 2010 this naming convention confusion continues and now expands to the administration of SharePoint. Let’s for example take the example when you are activating or deactivating features. In the web interface of SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007 it is called Activate and Deactivate.

As some of you know I’m writing a book on SharePoint 2010 Web Parts development to be published by Manning Publications. I have set up a site dedicated to this book project where you can follow the progress of it. You can find the site at http://www.sharepointwebpartsinaction.com/ I am currently half way through the writing and we are closing in on the Manning MEAP program. So if you are interested in the latest news on the book head on over to the site…

The CssRegistration class (in Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls namespace) is one of the most useful controls in SharePoint 2010. It existed in SharePoint 2007 but was fairly limited then. I thought I should guide you through why it is so useful in SharePoint 2010 and why and when you should use it. I briefly mentioned the CssRegistration control in my previous post on SharePoint 2010 themable CSS files. But first some background. Why the CssRegistration control? There are plenty of times when you need to add custom CSS definitions to your SharePoint projects, for instance in pages and Web Parts. There are several methods of adding CSSes to your projects. You could use inline CSS styles - which results in a lot of markup which may slow your page/site down. Another approach is creating a CSS file and include it in your master page - better but the CSS is always loaded.

SharePoint 2010 has a completely rebuilt theme engine. Instead of having to modify .inf files, create folders and copy and pasting CSS files and images in the SharePoint root we can now create a theme in PowerPoint and upload it to the server. The default SharePoint CSS files are tagged with comments that tells SharePoint to substitute colors and images with the values from the theme. When you switch theme SharePoint generates a new set of CSS files and images with the result of this substation.

I thought I should share my experience on working with SharePoint 2010 development on Windows 7. My previous posts on installing SharePoint 2007 on Vista and Windows 7 are posts that are quite popular. The downside with the “old” SharePoint version is that it was not officially supported to install it on a client machine, but SharePoint 2010 is supported for installation on Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP1 for development purposes. There are many opinions on having SharePoint 2010 installed on your client OS. Some thinks it is despicable, but I think it is great and I’ve used local installations for years now. It’s perfect for rapid development, testing and demos. In seconds you can spin up a site and show some basic stuff for a client. Of course I use virtualization when testing my final bits etc.

While I was testing building some mashups using SharePoint 2010, Web Parts and SharePoint Designer I found an interesting bug. Initial problem Here’s what I did; I set up a Wiki Content Page (the new kind of Web Part Pages) in SharePoint 2010 that was supposed to be called with Query String parameter named ID which should be used by a Web Part. Another page contained items linking to this page using different integer values for the ID query string parameter like this:

The SharePoint 2010 Development Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is great and I really like the way that the project is built using the different artifacts. One thing really annoys me though and that is the way that the code is generated and named when you add items. For example if you create a project and then add a Web Part item to that project then Visual Studio will create a Web Part class with a namespace and class name like this:

SharePoint is an amazing product and there are some fantastic opportunities to make awesome applications. It also has a great API which has had improved further in the upcoming SharePoint 2010 release. But there are several features available in the platform/API that just isn’t available to all of us, unless we sit in Redmond and are building the actual product. There are so many classes or methods that are marked internal or sealed, that I really would like to use. I’m not going to nag about the search Web Parts this time, but instead focus on some classes that I really would like to be changed from internal to public.

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the SharePoint 2010 Ignite training and after a great, but quite hard, interview and discussion I have been approved as a SharePoint 2010 Ignite Developer trainer. I really look forward getting out there and teaching developers about all the awesome features and improvements in SharePoint 2010. If you are interested in training don’t hesitate in contacting me. Together with AddSkills I have planned for a couple of SharePoint 2010 upgrade classes this spring.

This is the second post in my mini series on how to extend the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon. First post can be found here. The goal with this excersice is to extend the Editing Tools Insert tab with a smaller Insert Web Part drop-down, so we don’t have to expand the whole Web Part Gallery to insert a Web Part. In the last post we created a Visual Studio 2010 solution and added the drop-down to the correct tab in the Ribbon using the CustomAction element and some new SharePoint 2010 XML syntax.

SharePoint 2010 contains numerous of improvements in the user interface and it has been built to be able to be extended. I guess that all of you have seen the Ribbon in SharePoint 2010 by now and probably even tried to add a button and fire away a Hello World JavaScript alert (it’s one of the HOLs available also). That’s quite an easy task. But doing some more advanced contextual and dynamic customizations to the Ribbon really makes you sweat!

This is the first post for the year of 2010 and what could be better to start with than announcing that I’m writing a SharePoint 2010 book. More specifically I’m writing a book about SharePoint 2010 Web Parts development with the working title SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action. This is a dream come true to me and I have been thinking about writing a book on and off for quite some time. I want to take my writing/blogging even further, it’s through writing that I educate and evolve myself. It makes me think twice and really make sure that I’m writing the correct stuff (who wants to be haunted down by all the readers and pros out there :-). So a book will be perfect to learn more about the SharePoint 2010 platform and dig down even further in Web Parts development.

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!

SharePoint 2010 comes equipped with a set of new tools to improve the monitoring of your custom applications, there are built-in functionality to check how long your operations take, how many SQL Server calls are done etc. All this is logged and can be visualized in the Developer Dashboard. Another good thing with this is that it’s not something that just automatically is there but you can also hook yourself into the monitoring and the actual Developer Dashboard.

Working with SharePoint 2010 is really a joy, you stumble upon great things all the time. The API has not had any revolutionary changes to be backwards compatible; but small changes here and there, both publically visible and internally, really makes the API better than before. SPListItem.SPContentTypeId To get the Content Type Id of an SPListItem you had to first get the SPContentType from the SPListItem.ContentType and then get the Id of the content type. This method was one marked as internal in version 12, but is now marked 14. It’s those little things. There are actually a lot of previously internal properties and methods that now are public, for example the CanBeDisplayedInEditForm property on the SPField class.

SharePoint 2010 is one greedy beast and you can’t settle with your plain old laptop; first of all you need a x64 bit environment and second of all you need some RAM. Developing for SharePoint 2007 required just a 32-bit machine, less than 4 gigs of RAM and Virtual PC and you could do most of your work without complaining to much. SharePoint 2010 requires some more thought through development environment .

Visual Web Parts are a nice addition for SharePoint 2010 developers. A Visual Web Part is essentially SmartPart revisited and is one of the project types of the new SharePoint extensions for Visual Studio 2010. Sandboxing is one of the most interesting features of SharePoint 2010, especially for large scale implementations and hosting providers. The Sandboxing feature, or User Code Solution, allows you to easily upload a SharePoint feature into your farm into a special controlled environment – called a Sandbox. These Sandboxed features can be controlled by the SharePoint administrators so that they do not consume to much resources and automatically disable them if the exceed their limits. Sandboxed solutions also have severe security restrictions – you cannot access all objects or resources that you would like.

SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2009 (#SEF09) is over and I’m pretty tired but really excited. Two full days, here in Stockholm, Sweden, of SharePoint 2010 information with some awesome speakers and topics. SEF09 was a great conference, about 200 participants – just about the right size to have the time to chat with a lot of people and having a good time. This year the SEF conference also was the official launch of Exchange 2010 and the first larger showing of SharePoint 2010 bits in Sweden. As an extra bonus the SharePoint 2010 beta 2 bits were released during the Monday night party, and during the Tuesday sessions everybody was downloading the bits.

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.

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.

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 new Office 2010 clients have been released as a Technical Preview and I’m fortunate to get my hands on them and free to talk about them. The new clients are awesome! Visio is one of the applications from the Office suite that I use on a daily basis to design, model and draw diagrams, workflows and solutions. Visio 2010 has gotten a really nice facelift and a whole new set of features. The Ribbon has been one of the things I really missed in the 2007 release and the SharePoint integration, that can be seen in the Sneak Peak, looks awesome!

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.