henricodolfing.com

How does Visifire Rendering Works?

2009-10-27T10:44:00.017+01:00

Since the release of Visifire 2.0 I am using the toolkit for chart visualization. Mostly within SharePoint (see here and here), but lately also within Windows Azure. I like the simplicity, the looks and the customizability of Visifire. It is challenging to provide this functionality in an easy to use toolkit, but Visifire does an excellent job at it.

The secret of Visifire is of course the underlying set of algorithms that determine the best visualization for a given set of parameters. So even when you provide bare minimum data required for rendering, Visifire renders a nice looking chart which has tooltips, default interactivity like explode in Pie Chart, auto font-color for labels depending on the Chart Background color, auto indexing of DataPoints when XValue is not provided, etc. Though Visifire makes effort to find the best visualization for any given case, its not perfect. Sometimes you just want to make it a little different.

Sunil Urs wrote a great post at the Visifire blog that explains the default rendering behavior of Visifire and how you can adapt it to your needs. A must read when you use, or plan to use, Visifire.

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How to use ASP.NET MVC in combination with ADO.NET Entity Framework

2009-10-19T16:54:00.009+02:00

As mentioned in a previous post I am currently working on a web application that we are building on top of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. The framework allows for a very clean implementation of the MVC pattern.

Because there is a database behind the application we decided to use the ADO.NET Entity Framework to access this database with help from model classes. The Entity Framework is a modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information. Benefits include easier to understand and easier to maintain application code that is shielded from underlying database schema changes.

In theory this all makes perfectly sense, but you have to implement it as well. There are two resources that I want to pass on because they were an incredible help to us.

The first is the tutorial Creating Model Classes with the Entity Framework on www.asp.net. The goal of this tutorial is to explain how you can create data access classes using the Entity Framework when building an ASP.NET MVC application. This tutorial assumes no previous knowledge of the Entity Framework. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll understand how to use the Entity Framework to select, insert, update, and delete database records. And in my opinion this tutorial meets its goal.

The second is a sample application written by Brad Abrams and Lance Olson. You will find a link to the sample and a description in his article ASP.NET MVC Example Application over Northwind with the Entity Framework. The sample application is a little outdated, but still an excellent reference point.

Related Posts:

How to use ASP.NET MVC in SharePoint

The Intersection of People and Process

2009-10-12T20:15:00.006+02:00

Saturday I wrote a guest post on the blog "The Intersection of People and Process" which is owned by my buddy Jeff Shuey. It is Jeff's place to talk about Cloud Computing, Workflow, BPM, ECM, CRM, UC and other work related stuff, but also about other things that interest him - mountain biking, wake surfing, and anything else that strikes a chord.

Jeff spent the better part of the last 16 years working in various aspects of the ECM space. He spent time at Kofax, Microsoft, FileNet, K2, and most recently Captaris (which was acquired by Open Text in Nov 2008). Prior to that he was a Unix VAR running his own company. Follow him on Twitter and/or check his blog. It is definitely worth it!

My guest post is titled "Where is my data?", and is about the the apparently simple question where your data is located within a cloud service. Go check it out, and let me know what you think about the data issue in the cloud computing space.

How to use ASP.NET MVC in SharePoint

2009-10-10T12:40:00.001+02:00

Currently I am working on a web application that we are building on top of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. The framework is pretty impressive and allows for a very clean implementation of the MVC pattern.

As some of you know I do some SharePoint development as well, and I decided to try to run an application developed with ASP.NET MVC within SharePoint.

Why I want to do this? Because we could leverage all strong points of ASP.NET MVC like separation of concerns, testability, clean HTML together with the huge foundation that SharePoint offers. I am definitely not the first who wanted to do this, so help was allready on it's way.

SharePointMVC from Simon Cropp which is available for download on CodePlex is a great start for getting your ASP.NET MVC application to run in SharePoint.

Here is how it works:

A SharePoint Master Page contains all SharePoint styles and theme
A custom ASP.net page (MVCHostingPage) is based upon the SharePoint Master Page
MVCHostingPage contains a web control called RenderControl
RenderControl (and other internal classes) interrogates the current request and forwards it onto the ASP.NET MVC rendering engine.
A HttpHandler takes all requests to *.mvc and redirects them to the MvcHostingPage.aspx page.

You voted, the judges decided, and the winners are ...

2009-09-29T17:17:00.004+02:00

As some of you know I participated in the World's Best Presentation Contest 2009 at SlideShare with my presentation "24 Reasons Why Twitter Sucks!".

Yesterday the results were announced at SlideShare, and I won in the category Technology! The complete results you can find here. Dan Roam's Napkins on Healtcare absolutely rocks! No matter if you agree with it's content or not.

Thanks to all the people who voted for me, the people that spread my presentation through social media, and of course the judges Padmasree Warrior, David Armano and Guy Kawasaki. I really appreciate it!

View more documents from Henrico Dolfing.

Yugma: A web conferencing software that does not work

2009-09-29T12:35:00.007+02:00

Yesterday I had my first real life experience with Yugma, a web conferencing software. I work a lot with WebEx and really like it, but i thought let's try something different.

So last weekend I surfed to the home page of Yugma and signed up for a free account. The free account includes a 15 day trial of the pro version and setting it up was a no brainer. After signing up I downloaded the installer and ran it at one of my PCs at home (OS is Windows Vista Home Edition). It worked like a charm and a few minutes later I was able to start my first meeting with Yugma.

I had planned a web conference for yesterday, and decided in all my naivity to run the conference with Yugma. That was a big mistake...

It started with the installation of Yugma on one of my other PCs (OS is Windows Vista Ultimate Edition). The installation worked like a charm, but when I wanted to start Yugma the following message popped up:

Application cannot run without client.properties file

After some searching on the web I found multiple blog posts describing the error. The most promising was this post about the yugma client.properties file. But it did not solve my issue. I never moved my user directory. I made a fresh install and I still get the error.

Wat was wondering me about the post is that it describes the exact same error as I had, and it was written in June 2008. This makes you think that Yugma had enough time to solve this issue. Even greater was my astonishment when I saw a comment from nobody else then the CEO of Yugma.

Thanks for tracking this down. I recently joined Yugma as CEO and I want to sincerely thank you for your helpful research.

Best,
Vas Bhandarkar

So next stop was the website of Yugma itself, and after some searching I found an entry on their forum. Be aware that when you follow this link you have to wait very VERY long before the page is loaded. Here Yugma states the following:

The "client.properties" error comes from a rare bug in Vista where an important Registry setting is set incorrectly by default. This entry must be fixed manually before Yugma can work.

Please note that making changes to the Windows Registry can cause major damage to your Windows installation if done incorrectly - it is highly recommended to have a professional perform this change or have someone from our technical support staff walk you through it.

The entry was made in November 2008, and that is where I got really dissapointed. When you know you have this issue you will make a solution for it. A manual entry in the register is NOT a solution. Especially not for less experienced computer users.

A quote from one of the comments on the forum entry:

This configuration is not rare, and I am quite sure it never works. I have seen on other blogs other user having this problem for months, without correction made from yugma. It cannot be so rare, as when you start googling yugma and a space, google suggest "yugma client.properties file" automatically.

But because I was still interested in how Yugma works I followed the described steps and got the darn thing working. So last night the mentioned web conference took place based on Yugma. The other participants had no problem installing and running the client, so that was good news, and we actually got going with our conference.

We used the telephone conference provider from Yugma that allowed us to dial in a number, give in the meeting ID and that way talk to each other. This worked for about half an hour and then we got kicked out of the telephone conference. We were not able to dial in anymore since we only got the busy tone when we dialed the provided number. So we had to move to an alternative.

That made it final. Yugma sucks. Their software sucks, their support sucks, and their telephone conferencing sucks. So bye bye Yugma, you will never ever be installed on one of my machines again. And I would have been a paying user, cause the pro version contains stuff I need for my conferencing ...

How to Create a Good API

2009-09-02T22:40:00.003+02:00

As a consultant that actually programms as well I interact with APIs on a regular basis. Some are good, some are bad, some are just hopeless. Most programmers know what they like about an API and what not, but actually creating a good API is a whole different story...

This video of the Google Techtalk "How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters" by Joshua Bloch is a great start. Joshua is a Principal Engineer at Google. He led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features, including the Java Collections Framework.

Battledecks and Pecha Kucha at PodCamp Boston 4

2009-08-10T20:50:00.007+02:00

Part of PodCamp Boston 4 last weekend was the so called Battledecks and Pecha Kucha.

Pecha Kucha is when presenters have 20 slides, and only 20 seconds allowed per slide for their presentation, making a presentation just shy of 7 minutes long.

Battledecks is another presentation challenge. Like Pecha Kucha, each presenter is giving 20 slides, with about 30 seconds per slide, but the speaker has no idea what slide is coming up next. This means there is a total improv presentation, based on the surprise slides that randomly go up.

Gradon Tripp (@gradontripp) participated in Battledecks and Pecha Kucha at PodCamp Boston 4. The reason I am writing about this is that Gradon presented my slideshow "24 Reasons why Twitter Sucks!". You can see the video below. Remember he's never seen this slide show before but as part of the "battle", he's presenting it. Awesome job!

The video was made by @trishofthetrade and the picture was made by @jonathanbloom Thanks!

Don't Cheat on Your Time Sheet

2009-08-08T17:13:00.009+02:00

A consultant dies on in a fishing accident on his 40th birthday and finds himself greeted at the Pearly Gates by a brass band. Saint Peter runs over, shakes his hand and says, “Congratulations!”

“Congratulations for what?” asks the consultant.

“We are celebrating the fact that you lived to be 160 years old,” Saint Peter exclaims.

“But that’s not true,” says the consultant. “I only lived to be 40.”

“That’s impossible,” says Saint Peter, “we added up your time sheets.”

Related Posts:

How To Make a Project Fail Step by Step

24 Reasons why Twitter sucks!

2009-08-05T22:48:00.007+02:00

24 Reasons why Twitter sucks!

View more documents from Henrico Dolfing.

This is my entry in the SlideShare World's Best Presentation Contest 2009. I would like to ask you to check out my entry and vote / tweet / share it. The Twitter hashtag for the contest is #bestpreso.

If you really liked the presentation I would be really grateful when you would ask your friends/contacts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to do the same.

Thanks, I really appreciate your help!

Update:

Just got this email form the SlideShare Team. Thanks!

Your presentation 24 Reasons why Twitter sucks! has been selected amongst the 'Top Presentations of the Day' on the SlideShare homepage.
Our editorial team would like to thank you for this awesome presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everday.

Congratulations! Have a Great Day!

- The SlideShare team

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Top Ten Lies of Web 2.0

How To Create a Silverlight Slideshow of your SharePoint Picture Library

2009-07-13T16:10:00.005+02:00

Allthough I try to post as much original content as possible, I see sometimes "How To" articles that are just absolutely amazing. And when they are in an area that I think is particulary interesting, like Silverlight within SharePoint, I just have to try if it works and write a post about it.

The article I am referring to is "Using Silverlight SlideShow and a SharePoint Picture Library" from Isaac Stith. He is a SharePoint Developer, Silverlight Hobbyist, and WPF Student from Copenhagen, Denmark and posts tons of great content on his blog "SharePoint Evolved".

The goal of his two part article is to explain how to get the SilverLight SlideShow working with your Picture Library as a data source for the slideshow. The end result should look something like this:

The work of Isaac is based on the Silverlight Slideshow that you can find on Codeplex. Silverlight Slideshow is an open-source, light-weight and fully functional image slideshow developed by Koen Zwikstra from First Floor Software. Visit the Silverlight Slideshow page on his site and watch the demos to get an idea of what this Slideshow is capable of.

Many thanks to both Koen and Isaac for their great work in the area of using Silverlight within SharePoint!

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My First Sky Dive

2009-07-07T22:13:00.009+02:00

I really like to dive under water, but last Sunday it was time for a rather different diving experience. It was time to fulfill a long time dream and do my first dive in the sky.

Me and a good friend went to Leutkirch (Germany) where Sky Dive Nuggets is located at the local airport. They offer tandem jumps from april to october on a daily basis, as well as AFF courses every week.

While the aircraft was climbing up to 4000 meters altitude in about 10 minutes, we were able to enjoy a great view over the alps and Lake Constance. Once our jump altitude was reached adrenaline was rushing through my veins. My tandem master, Steve, got us out with a foreward role, and then somehow managed to do a backward as well. An awesome experience! My free-fall with aprox. 200km/h velocity lasted for almost one minute.

At 1500 meters altitude Steve deployed the chute and the rather relaxing part of the jump began. During my flight I was able to enjoy another great view over the Allgäu. You can see the video of my first sky dive below.

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SharePoint and Financial Graphs

2009-06-29T19:17:00.008+02:00

I am not sure if there are a lot of people who store financial data in SharePoint, but when you do you have to check out the newest release of Visifire. Visifire is a set of open source data visualization components powered by Microsoft Silverlight and WPF. And in their newest release they implemented Candle Stick Charts and Stock Charts.

Visifire is your best bet to create some astonishing graphs in SharePoint. Have a look at two of my previous posts on how to do this.

Disclaimer:
I am in no way what so ever involved with Visifire, except that I am a big fan!

Top Ten Lies of Web 2.0

2009-06-23T17:46:00.005+02:00

I read the article The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0 from Dan Fost at SFGate.com and found it very compelling to morph it into a slideshow. So that is what I did ...

The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0

View more Microsoft Word documents from Henrico Dolfing.

Update

Just got this message from the SlideShare Team. Thanks!

Your presentation The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0 has been selected amongst the 'Top Presentations of the Day' on the SlideShare homepage.
Our editorial team would like to thank you for this awesome presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everday.

Congratulations! Have a Great Day!

- The SlideShare team

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Zoho Office For SharePoint

2009-06-23T14:34:00.006+02:00

Zoho has launched Zoho Office for SharePoint that allows Zoho Office to integrate with SharePoint. Zoho is a suite of web applications that you sign up for and access from their website. The applications are free for individuals and some have a subscription fee for organizations. Their applications range from Invoicing to Project Management to a Wiki. Zoho Office for SharePoint has some interesting features.

Features

Real-Time Collaboration - In SharePoint, a document can be edited by only one person at a time. With Zoho Office for SharePoint, multiple users can collaboratively edit a document seeing each others changes in real-time. This means all users can truly view the latest version of the document.
Edit existing documents - Documents that are stored in SharePoint can be edited by right-clicking and opening the document in Zoho. Documents are not limited to Microsoft Office formats. Zoho Office is also compatible with Open Office, Star Office and a variety of other formats.
Create new documents - New documents can also be created using Zoho Office. When a document is saved, it is automatically stored in SharePoint.
Save documents in their original format - Documents edited in Zoho Office retain their original format. For example, if you edit a Microsoft Word document with Zoho Office for SharePoint, the document will be saved in Microsoft Word format.
Your data stays safe - When you open a document with Zoho Office for SharePoint, a copy of it is securely transmitted to Zoho's servers using a strong encryption key. A copy of the document will temporarily reside on Zoho's servers as long as you have the document open in SharePoint. After you close the document in SharePoint, the copy is automatically removed from Zoho's servers. Your documents are never stored long-term in Zoho [this is the claim of Zoho, and not verified by me].

Overview Video

Pricing

You can try Zoho Office for SharePoint free for 30 days for unlimited users. After the trial period, Zoho Office for SharePoint is licensed at $3 per user/month. Zoho Office for SharePoint licenses need not be purchased for every SharePoint user. The plug-in can be licensed only for users who will be using its functionality.

Scuba Diving at Sint Maarten 2009

2009-06-18T16:37:00.004+02:00

March this year I visited my little brother who lives at the island Sint Maarten in the Caribbean. Since he had to work during the day I spend most of my vacation on scuba diving. This slideshow gives an impression of my experiences there.

View more Microsoft Word documents from Henrico Dolfing.

Sailing is Life

Storing Images in SharePoint

2009-06-17T14:58:00.018+02:00

I started my career in the scanning, document analysis and archiving industry. One question that always comes up in this industry is the following;

Is SharePoint suitable to store images, and when yes, how should this be done?

As usually there is not a simple definitive answer to this question, but in this post I will try to explain when and how you can use SharePoint as an image repository.

Some of the benefits of storing images in SharePoint are metadata storage, custom views, check-in/check-out, version history, basic workflow, and in the case of SharePoint Portal Server, full text indexing from OCR information. But SharePoint is designed to be a collaboration platform and is not designed to be a replacement for local file servers as a pure storage platform.

In general terms, SharePoint is an excellent image repository where users can store their images, whether for personal or shared use. There are, however, specific scenarios in which SharePoint is not the optimal storage location. This is depending on a number of variables that I will describe in detail below.

Size of the images
You can store any type of files on SharePoint as long as the files are each smaller than 2GB, and are by default around 60MB (this can be configured to be changed up to 2GB). But the 2 GB maximal file size is really a hard limit that cannot be changed. So when you have image files that are bigger, you cannot use SharePoint as a storage location.

Of course it is possible to store the actual file on a fast network device and only keep the path in a SharePoint Document Library (or create a simple list item and store the link). You need to make sure that only the process account has direct access to the network device and you may also need to write custom code to prevent unauthorized access.

This way you can take advantage of the SharePoint UI, Security, Target Audience and Search feature and also optimize the user experience and performance. But this solution requires careful planning, coding and security testing.

Number of images
Before you decide to store all your images you have to make a simple calculation: average image size * number of expected images to store = expected database size. According to the official documentation on TechNet the expected database size should not exceed 100 GB;

In most circumstances, to enhance the performance of Office SharePoint Server 2007, we discourage the use of content databases larger than 100 GB.

• If your design requires a database larger than 100 GB, follow the guidance below:
- Use a single site collection for the data.
- Use a differential backup solution, such as SQL Server 2005 or Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, rather than the built-in backup and recovery tools.
- Test the server running SQL Server 2005 and the I/O subsystem before moving to a solution that depends on a 100 GB content database.
• Whenever possible, we strongly advise that you split content from a site collection that is approaching 100 GB into a new site collection in a separate content database to avoid performance or manageability issues.
• Limit content databases that contain multiple site collections to approximately 100 GB.

But this is only a recommendation. There are numerous examples of SharePoint using databases bigger than a terabyte. There is no size limit per se in SharePoint. Your size limitations are defined by what version of SQL Server you are using.

However, your backup and restore times will increase more than linear with your database size, and could cause degradation in performance as the database is backed up unless you have a SAN infrastructure that offloads this process. The issue with splitting the content database into smaller sizes is that this may change your navigation due to storing the content in separate site collections.

Invalid Characters and Long File Names
SharePoint has some limitations in the characters that can be used. The following characters cannot be used in the naming of files to be uploaded to SharePoint:

" # % & * : < > ? \ { | } ~ .

Additionally SharePoint file names cannot exceed 128 characters in length. So you have to make sure your image file name will follow these two restrictions.

Method of adding images to SharePoint
When you add your images programmatically to SharePoint you are good to go. But when users upload large files by browser you have to consider the following.

Your browser could timeout while uploading a large file
Your browser could run out of memory due to spooling
If your upload fails for any reason, your upload will not resume itself. You will need to start all over again.

See also the article MOSS 2007 - Uploading and Indexing Large Files from Suleman Ibrahim.

Access Frequency
If lots of users are uploading/downloading large files at the same time, it could impact the overall performance of your SharePoint server. So you might want to think about setting up a dedicated Front End Web Server to serve the image repository.

Need for backups
All SharePoint content has to go in the SQL database. That's just how it is. Having images in the SQL database can be an advantage or a disadvantage when it comes to backups. At one hand, all image data will be contained in a database backup, instead of having to sync database backups with file system backups. On the other hand your backup file size may grow to very large proportions.

SharePoint Picture Library
When you made it this far, and all the variables mentioned above make you think that for your use case SharePoint is suitable to serve as image repository I have good news. SharePoint has a picture library list type for doing exactly what you're trying to do. Microsoft wrote a very nice article about working with the SharePoint picture library.

Although you can also store images in other types of SharePoint lists and libraries, there are many advantages to using picture libraries. These advantages include viewing images with one of three unique display styles, sharing images by using slide shows or by sending images directly to Microsoft Office programs, downloading images directly to a computer, and editing images with SharePoint Services-compatible image editors.

Gavin Clabaugh went one step further, and wrote a very interesting post about how he build a simple Digital Asset Management system on top of SharePoint.

Related Posts

Learning a Language

2009-06-16T10:05:00.010+02:00

No, not a programming language. This time I am talking about a natural language. In my youth I was not a big fan of school, and I did everything to avoid spending time at it. And although my curriculum on the Dutch equivalent of high school included German, English and French, I definitely did not get everything out of that learning opportunity because of my own attitude.

Fortunately I was able to catch up later in my life. Because I lived In Germany for 4 years, and in the USA for 1.5 years I was able to bring my knowledge of German and English to a level that I feel totally comfortable doing business in both of them. My English and German are not perfect, but I can speak/write/understand both of them on such a level that I can communicate without any problems.

After moving to Zurich (Switzerland) in April this year a new challenge arose; “Switzerdeutsch”. Hearing it for the first few days it is like hearing Germans speaking Welsh. But after a few weeks I was really comfortable with it. Of course I have to ask for the exact meaning of words sometimes, but I understand really the most of it. I can`t speak it, but lucky for me the Swiss people understand German, so I am able to communicate. And for me that is the key issue of learning any language;

Being able to communicate.

And this got my interest lately because of two events. A few weeks ago I spend 5 days in the beautiful city Sofia (Bulgaria). I was visiting a friend (Моника, thanks for the invite!) and had really a blast.

Before my visit I learned a few words Bulgarian from my friend and her sister, but since I only knew them in Latin this did not do me any good in Bulgaria, because they write in Cyrillic.

Inspired by a post from Timothy Ferris titled “How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months”, I decided to give learning Bulgarian a fair shot. So I asked my friend to teach me Cyrillic. After practicing those few days on street signs, restaurant menus, magazines and news papers, I am actually pretty fluent in translating Latin in Cyrillic and the other way around now.

The last day I bought a book; “приказки от хиляда и eдна нощ” which is "One Thousand and One Nights" in English. Also known as the “Arabian Nights”, it is a collection of folk tales and other stories. Because I know the book from my childhood, I have at least a rough idea of what is told in each story. At the hand of the book I am further improving my Cyrillic, and start growing my vocabulary.

The next step will be learning some grammar. Additionally I am practicing Bulgarian by exchanging messages with Bulgarian friends on Facebook whom I met in Sofia, and during my studies in Germany.

Is this the right way to learn a new language? I don´t know (probably not), but it sure is a lot of fun, and I feel very comfortable with the process. I really feel like I make progress on a weekly basis, and I do not have to force myself, because I like doing it.

The second thing that happened and awakened my interest in learning languages is a project at work. I will spend 3.5 months in Lausanne (Switzerland) and they speak French over there. Timothy Ferris wrote another very interesting post titled “How To Resurrect you High School Spanish (Or Any Other Language)”, and that is exactly what I plan to do.

I want to use this opportunity to resurrect my high school French. Five years I had classes in French, but I have hardly used it the past 12 years. So it is far away, and I want to bring it back.

So as Timothy suggests I am actually watching some French videos (you got to love Youtube), and reading some French texts. In Lausanne I will practice conversations, grow my vocabulary and catch up on my grammar. I am really looking forward to it.

I will keep you posted on my progress. And when you have some good tips on how to learn a language (or some places I have to see in Lausanne); don´t be shy and leave a comment.

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Personal MBA?

Technical Documentation

2009-06-11T11:49:00.012+02:00

Last few weeks I had the pleasure to work with an awesome team, on a great project that had nothing to do with SharePoint. I was working on a proof of concept based on SAP CRM and MS InfoPath, and it actually turned out great. But, oh boy, working with SAP CRM, SAP PI, ABAP, BAPIs and IDocs is a real challenge. Not because it is so hard, but because of the lack of technical documentation.

When all else fails, read the documentation.

But when the documentation is minimal, incomplete, and badly organized, if it's present at all, it is pretty hard to do your thing successfully in a timely manner. Even Google gave up on us (as well as Bing).

Did we do something extraordinary, that no one did before? Or did people just not share their experience. I don’t know, but I do know that I won´t complain so hard about the SharePoint documentation as I did before this project.

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Virtualization of SharePoint

2009-05-25T16:17:00.006+02:00

Working on the virtualization of a SharePoint environment I came across the blog of the SharePoint Team from Microsoft Consulting Services, UK. They have a great series of articles on the virtualization of SharePoint that is a must read in my opinion when you start virtualizing.

Green IT

Protect Yourself Against SharePoint Designer

2009-05-19T13:02:00.013+02:00

SharePoint Designer provides you with a set tools to brand and customize SharePoint, build efficient applications on top of the Microsoft SharePoint platform, but most of all it makes navigation in your SharePoint site(s) very easy. Not for nothing it made my 9 Excellent Resources for and about Branding SharePoint list. But SharePoint Designer in the wrong hands can seriously damage your SharePoint sites!

Robert Bogue, a SharePoint MVP, discusses the need for governance with SharePoint Designer on his blog. I highly recommend reading this if you are an administrator, consultant, or are involved in SharePoint deployments.

Because SharePoint Designer is free, any user can just download and install it from here. If you work in an enterprise-level organization, you probably already have policies in place that control what can be installed on user PCs, but even then it might be wise to restrict access from SharePoint Designer to your sites.

Here comes the good news. There are actually options to restrict the access of SharePoint Designer to your preciously builded and maintained SharePoint sites. There are options for locking down SharePoint Designer:

At the server level per site definition
At the Web application level for all users
At the Web application level per user or group
At the site level per user or group
At the site level per user or group
Per computer or per user

All the different options are very nicely explained in this post on the Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog.

Have a look at the posts mentioned, and decide for yourself how far you want to go in protecting yourself from SharePoint Designer. Better be save, then sorry...

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How To Create Drilldown Silverlight Graphs in SharePoint with Visifire

2009-05-15T16:30:00.019+02:00

In my post "How To Add Awesome Graphs To SharePoint with Silverlight" I explained how you can create Silverlight graphs in SharePoint with help from Visifire. A very cool feature of Visifire is the ability to create so called drilldown graphs. For an example of what a drilldown graph is have a look here.

One question that was asked at the Visifire forum is how to create drilldown graphs based on SharePoint lists, and that was for me the trigger to give it a shot. And it actually worked out great!

So what did I do?

Step 1: First of all I downloaded the drilldown sample application from the Visifire website. In this sample application, the chart can be drilled down till 2 levels. The default chart would show yearly sales of a fictitious company for the period 2006-2008. On click of column representing the sales for an year, monthly sales for that year is shown up. Further it can be drilled down to find product wise sales for the selected month.

The sample uses Javascript API to generate charts. The complete application can be downloaded from here. The code is completely commented and explained wherever necessary. Read the blog post if you need more help.

Step 2: Create a new Custom List in SharePoint that will hold the sales data. I called my list SalesData. The list should have the following fields: Year, Month, ProductX, ProductY, ProductZ. After that you can fill it with data.

Step 3: Create a new page in SharePoint that will hold a Data View Web Part. You can use SharePoint Designer for this, with a Web Part Zone selected, from the top menu click Data View -> Insert Data View. From the Data Source Library in the right hand task pane select the SalesData list and click Show Data. Then select the Year, Month, ProductX, ProductY and ProductZ fields and add them to the Data View. After adding the Data View Web Part just make sure you do not have selected any paging option. Select display all items.

Step 4: Unzip the Visifire sample application that you downloaded in Step 1 and grab "Visifire2.js" and "SL.Visifire.Charts.xap" and add them to the same location as the page you just created in your SharePoint site.

Step 5: In the SharePoint .aspx page that you created in Step 3 you have to locate the following peace of code:

<xsl:template match="/">
 <xsl:call-template name="dvt_1"/>
</xsl:template>

This code you will replace by:

<xsl:template
match="/"
xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/dsp"
xmlns:asp="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ASPNET/20"
xmlns:__designer="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/designer"
xmlns:SharePoint="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls">

<script type="text/javascript" src="Visifire2.js"></script>

<!-- Code from Step 6 will come here -->

</xsl:template>

Step 6: You just copy all the JavaScipt code from drilldown.html (this file is part of the example from Visifire you downloaded) and place it in the xsl. The same goes for the actual display of the graph. Because it is far to much code to display here I will just show the important stuff. For more details you can have a look at examples that display a simple Visifire graph in SharePoint here and here.

When you look at the JavaScript code in the example you will notice a large array called "sales", and that is were we have to change something to display the data in our SharePoint list. You have to replace the JavaScript code that generates the array with data with the following XSL.

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[
<script type="text/javascript">
        var sales = [
        ]]></xsl:text>
<xsl:for-each select="/dsQueryResponse/Rows/Row">
 <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[{year: ]]></xsl:text>
 <xsl:value-of select="./@Year" />
 <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[, month: "]]></xsl:text>
 <xsl:value-of select="@Month" />
 <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[", ProductX: ]]></xsl:text>
 <xsl:value-of select="@ProductX" />
 <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[, ProductY: ]]></xsl:text>
 <xsl:value-of select="@ProductY" />
 <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[, ProductZ: ]]></xsl:text>
 <xsl:value-of select="@ProductZ" />
 <xsl:choose>
   <xsl:when test="position() = last()">
     <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[}]]></xsl:text>
  </xsl:when>
   <xsl:otherwise>
     <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[},]]></xsl:text>
  </xsl:otherwise>
 </xsl:choose>
</xsl:for-each>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[]; ]]></xsl:text>

The code just loops through your SalesData list, and creates an array from of the data. You do the looping by using the <xsl:for-each select="/dsQueryResponse/Rows/Row"> statement. The only tricky thing is the comma after the last array item, that is why you need the <xsl:choose> element in combination with <xsl:when test="position() = last()">.

When all went well this XSL will generate exactly the JavaScript code from the example but then with the data from your SharePoint list, instead of hardcoded data.

This worked for me and resulted in some cool graphs. When you have any questions or you want the complete .XSL code just Contact me.

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Green IT

2009-05-14T19:23:00.008+02:00

Inspired by the article "25 facts you should know about green IT" from Ted Samson I decided to make a SlideShow about green IT. You can see the result below. Let me know what you think about it.

View more presentations from Henrico Dolfing.

Update: May 15

Cool, just got this message from SlideShare:

Congratulations! Your presentation 'Green IT' is a 'Top Presentation of the Day' on SlideShare

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SharePoint Manager 2007

2009-05-13T10:54:00.010+02:00

SharePoint Manager 2007 (SPM2007) is a SharePoint object model explorer. It enables you to browse every site on the local farm and view every property. It also enables you to change the properties. This is a very powerful tool for SharePoint Developers and Administrators that like to know what secrets SharePoint holds.

SPM2007 is developed by Carsten Keutmann and he was so friendly to make the tool available for everybody by placing it on CodePlex. You may know Carsten from one of his other projects – WSPBuilder, a SharePoint Solution Package (WSP) creation tool for WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007.

Many times I have written small console utilities to dump things like list fields, view CAML, and so on. All these you can now simply browse with SPM2007. It provides all information you need in the following areas:

Farm setting
Farm servers
Web App overview
Web App on server
Central admin options
Definitions export (list, content type)
Account Security overview

I think SPM2007 can save you a lot of time, and will increase your understanding of the SharePoint Object Model. It does for me. SPM2007 is a single executable file that does not require any additionale software installed on your MOSS / WSS servers.

Warning: SPM2007 enables you to update the data in the SharePoint Object Model directly. Therefore be very careful when changing the data!

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Managers vs Engineers

2009-05-08T15:15:00.005+02:00

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realises he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts, "Excuse me, can you help me?"

"I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man below says, "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude."

"You must be an engineer," says the balloonist.

"I am" replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "Everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."

The man below says, "You must be a manager".

"I am," replies the balloonist, "But how did you know?"

"Well," says the man, "You don't know where you are, or where you are going. You have made a promise, which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem."

"The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."

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