BTS09 – New VPC

Just saw a new VPC for Biztalk 2009 has become available for download.

Seems like the demo has integration with Sharepoint

MOSS07 Exam 70-542 App Dev

Just passed the Exam 70-542 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Application Development.

Here is a short resume of that experience.

Here you can read about attending a certification exam.

The exam 70-542 were max 80 minutes long and there were 32 questions.

Moss07: Discovering samples from Book – Inside MOSS 2007 – Part 2

This post examines the samples from the book:  Inside MOSS 2007

To be able to execute the samples you need to:

1) Do part1:  http://rasor.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/moss07-discovering-samples-from-book-inside-moss-2007-part-1/

Chapter 2. P.58 – Walkthrough: Populating User Profiles Remotely – Sample FavoritesManagerApp

MOSS07: SSP and Search errors

In my development environment I get some errors with Moss Search and other SSP services once in a while – I haven’t found the cause, but a fix.

Moss07: Discovering samples from Book – Inside MOSS 2007 – Part 1

This post examines the samples from the book:  Inside MOSS 2007

To be able to execute the samples you need to:

1) Download samples and execute the setup

Chapter 2. P.32 – Walkthrough: Creating a collaboration Portal

WSS30/MOSS07 – Links

A handfull of links. Might be something I want to do something about later.

 

WSS30/MOSS07: Cleanup VPC

So how do you cleanup your VPC for making it look like a clean MOSS07 machine?

In this way you retain the patches from automatic update and whatever utilities, personalisations and whatever else you have to do from scratch.
This might be faster, be possible to automate or at least just to make a checklist of like here:

WSS30/MOSS07: WSPBuilder Documentation

Mr. WSPBuilder himself, Carsten Keutmann, has made a collection of WSPBuilder documentation. 

Thanks, Carsten.

WSS30/MOSS07: SPD07 is now free!

WSS30/MOSS07: SPD07 is now free!

Download at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42

WSS30/MOSS07: Navigation

A few navigation wonderings:

Why wouldn’t my custom breadcrumb menu show lists, when my leftnavigation would?

Andy Burns shows how much fun breadcrumbs can be.

For the current document two breadcrumb providers are provided:

        <add name="SPContentMapProvider" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation.SPContentMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode" description="CMS provider for Current navigation, no encoding of output" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Current" EncodeOutput="false" />

The former is from WSS and the latter from MOSS.

WSS3.0 Custom Workflow forms

Must take a test run of this one day.

WSS3 Workflow Tools on codeplex

WSS3.0 Exam 70-541 App Dev

Just passed the Exam 70-541 Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Application Development a few day ago.

Here is a short resume of that experience.

BarCampCph Nov 2008 Presentation

Wants to visit BarCamp Copenhagen. The idea is to share knowledge. This forces me to find some topics to precent…

Blogging gives me content for a presentation – A few .NET samples

So what is a topic I can present to catch other peoples interest? Luckily I have started blogging. WordPress (wp) gives me the answer. Wp has a statistics page. You will not be able to follow that link, since you need admin rights. 

TFS 2008 test drive

At work I use TFS only for Source Control for .NET source code. Since TFS is much more I will in this post just get started looking a little around…

TFS 2008 inst: Errors

While trying to install TFS 2008 as in standalone mode on a Win server 2003 several installation prerequisites had to be met:

WSS3.0 Adm: Farms, WebApps, SiteCollections and Sites

When you have to choose scope for your feature you have to choose between:

1. Farm
2. WebApplication
3. Site (SiteCollection)
4. Web (Site)

This post links those words with the visual presentation of sites.
First a look at sites in a browser and secondly a look at how to create them.

Visual Studio: Cool keyboard shortcuts

A few cool Visual Studio 2008 keyboard shortcuts…

WSS Dev: HowTo Link to a List from a ListItem (Or HowTo contain Collections)

How can a ListItem contain a collection?
By having a field contining a link to another list.

VPC: HowTo optimize VPC

When you are using VPC’s, there are ways to optimize performance and enhance usage.

In Bios:

• Create full isolation between VPC’s: In Bios: Enable Virtualization Technology.

In VPC Console:

• Enable use of special chars like “{” by using AltGr: File – Options – Keyboard – Change AltGr to RightCtrl
• Add RAM and increase memory amount allocated to the Virtual Machine: Select the VM – Settings – Memory – increase using the ruler, while the VM is shut down.

Each Virtual Machine:

• Sync the HW of your PC with your image: With the VM open: Action – Install or update VM additions – Select C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual Machine Additions\VMAdditions.iso

If your host is Win2k8 srv and the VPC is Hyper-V then use Remote Desktop as Client. Graphics update is faster and the look and feel is like when you are operating the production environment.

Link: http://blogs.msdn.com/Virtual_PC_Guy/

Thanx to Peter Karpinski

WSS Tool: Sharepoint Solution Generator

Exploring the tool Sharepoint Solution Generator (SSG)…

WSS Dev: WSPBuilder Templates

When you start out building WSS features from WSPBuilder then what is there to choose from?
What is in the WSPBuilder templates

WSS Dev: HowTo debug a WebPart

Can you debug a webpart in a WSS page? Yes – not a problem.

VB6 ADO upgrade to .NET

To ease the upgrade of VB6 it is possible to keep old VB6 ADO in .NET.
Microsoft has made some Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA’s) that are tweeked in a .NET way, so they are to prefer compared to generating them yourself.

WSS Dev: A simple feature – Type Custom Action

So what was a feature? Let’s see if I can come up with a good explanation. I think it is here explanations often is too vaugue.
A feature is zero or more elements. Elements can be list and/or what a lists consists of like content type, list items and fields, but also other kind of site content. See the list below.
A feature must be activated. If the feature has zero elements then it is only code in the activation/deactivation eventhandler that makes up the feature, but that code is optional.
With that definition a feature is a plug-in to sharepoint, that adds more than the standard elements.

In the below table the features are printed from a sample WSS site collection. The elements are printed from MSDN.

WSS: Exceptions

 In this post I will add exceptions when I meet them.

WSS: Development – Quick Start with WSPBuilder

So how to get started quick and easy with development of WSS features?

It is not that bad after all. You can

1. Use WSPBuilder as a starting point
2. Use an already build WSPBuilder feature as a starting point

For debugging a WebPart see here.

WSS: What is installed on a WSS3.0 server with VS2005?

This article was earlier posted togeter with this post: WSS terminology.

Look here http://rasor.wordpress.com/2008/08/25/wss-howto-build-a-wss-project/, if you want to get a running WSS.

In this section a WSS server is explored.

Refer to http://rasor.wordpress.com/2008/08/23/wss-request-lifetime/, to see the technology behind WSS.

WSS: A console program

Here is a console app, that demonstrates two things:

• You can code towards a site from outside of its boundaries just by adding the URL of the site. 
• You can see how the some of the internal objects hierarchies compared to the “All Site Content” page.  

WSS/MOSS posters

All posters are available from this site: http://blogs.msdn.com/andrew_may/

and here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms473633.aspx

CAS: Intro

Draft…

Microsoft hosted two events about Code Access Security (CAS) and Role Based Security (RBS) in august 2008.

LINQ: Entity intro

Draft…

Lessons learned while trying to learn ORM mapping with LINQ in .NET.

VSTO: Intro

Draft….

Michell Cronberg made a presentation of VSTO 3.0 SP1 intro at Microsoft 17/09-2008.

It was the first time I saw him live, so the expectations were big. And he didn’t disappoint – only the opposite. He knows his stuff and he presented it, so you got the feeling that this is a nice toy you want to play with.

With the easiness it has become to write office addins (and docs) and deploy them, then you only need to tell the customers that such a possibility exists.

WSS: HowTo edit a Site Page

Navigate to the page you want to edit and select Edit Page in the Site Actions dropdown list

WSS: HowTo navigate a WSS site

In order to get an overview let’s start by look at the difference between a WSS site and the SharePoint Central Administration (SPCA) tool.

HowTo: InProc WCF

Well I wrote in the last post about how to make an in-process WCF host.

In this post it is just the keep-it-simple and only about inproc WCF

Get the code her: http://www.box.net/shared/zqk2ltfi1i.

HowTo: LINQ Over WCF – An easy domain table Cache

In many apps tables containing ID’s and names for a domain – guess they are called domain tables – needs to be cached in the biz layer.
In web apps the caching procedure is well documented and implemented in System.Web.Caching. Cache is a thread-safe object, that doesn’t requires explicit locking.
In non-web apps then what to do?
This article suggests to use LINQ over self-hosted WCF.

PC Update to .NET3.5 SP1

I’ve just updated my PC from VS2008 + .NET3.5 to VS2008 SP1 + .NET3.5 SP1.

WSS: HowTo use SharePoint Central Administration

SharePoint Central Administration (SPCA) is started from Start Menu – Admin Tools.

WSS3.0: HowTo use STSADM.EXE

• STSADM is the cmd line tool for SP Central Administration
• PSCONFIG is the cmd line tool for SP Configuration Wizard

Each STSADM command line is using a shortcut to the program (shortcut to PSCONFIG, too):

@SET STSADM="%ProgramFiles%\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin\stsadm"
@SET PSCONFIG="%ProgramFiles%\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin\psconfig"

WSS: HowTo build a WSS project – Installation requirements

Here are some suggestions of how you can get the first touch on WSS.

Here might be supplemented with a list of installation requirement.

WSS request lifetime

When a request enters IIS then IIS looks up in its application map for the requested web site or virtual directory for an ISAPI extension.

WSS terminology

I am new to WSS, so I’ll start to learn the WSS terminology and how to find my way through this wilderness.

.NET Roadmaps

This roadmap mixes just some different stuff I wanted to store.

Cast a generic List. C# and VB.NET

Cast a derived list to a base list gives a compile error:
Cannot implicitly convert type ‘System.Collections.Generic.List’ to ‘System.Collections.Generic.List’

Define a generic method (VB.NET)

A reminder of how the VB.NET syntax is for defining a generic method.
Just a sample.

Lookup with generic List and Dict (VB.NET)

When using a Dictionary the key have to be unique. If you want to lookup another property than the key, then you can use ToLookup(), if the property is unique.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb549211.aspx

You could also choose to convert the List to a Dict using ToDictionary()

LINQ with VB.NET: Join SQL with a CSV file or List of objects

One of the big advantages with LINQ is that you can do operations on sets in the data access layer instead of doing them in the database.

An example of this is to join a table from a CSV-file with a table in a database. In this example the CSV-file has been loaded into a List(Of CsvRecord), where CsvRecord is an entity object representing the content of the file. Code for that class contains properties for each column. The code is not shown here. For this example it just contains the property CsvId, which is used for joining with the SQL server.

Update of the resultset back to SQL server is possible and easy (Wow), but not shown in this post.

Quick start from VS2k8

With VS2k8 the quickes way to add a WCF service and client is also done in an asmx-like way.

HowTo encode txt

    private string ParmToEncode(string parm)
    {
        return HttpUtility.UrlEncode(HttpUtility.UrlDecode(parm, Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1")), Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1"));
    }