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SharePoint 2010 Site templates : how to deliver with custom assemblies

2010-08-19T17:11:00.002+05:30

The site templates are no longer .stp file in 2010, but they are improved upon as solution files (.wsp). That changes the delivery equation a lot, as earlier we could deliver site templates as a part of solution. But never-than less, in Visual studio 2010 we have the option to import the solution and operate it upon.

Follow these steps to deliver a site template customized with a custom assemblies (web part, event handler etc)

Save the site as template to generate the .wsp file
Import the solution in Visual Studio 2010 to create a new project
Next, right click on the package to open Solution Designer
In the advanced tab, you can specify new assemblies (ensure that they are included in the project)
The default features can also be modified in the edit options of the features. The properties specified here will overwrite the existing feature properties
All set, simply create the package of the project and deliver the wsp file.

Custom DLLs in Bin folder

2010-06-09T12:10:00.000+05:30

Untrusted solutions
Deploying custom code in bin folders can cause slow server performance. Every time a page containing untrusted code is requested, SharePoint Server 2010 must perform security checks before the page can be loaded.Unless there is a specific reason to deploy untrusted code, you should install custom assemblies in the GAC to avoid unnecessary security checking.

10 Steps to optimize Sharepoint Performance

2010-05-25T16:44:00.000+05:30

An article by Eric Shupps, Network World shed light on the 10 steps to improve the performance of our SharePoint servers.

Separate user and database traffic
A common misconception is that servers connected to a high-speed network segment will have plenty of bandwidth to perform all required operations. But SharePoint places a tremendous amount of demand on SQL - each request for a page can result in numerous calls to the database, not to mention service jobs, search indexing and other operations. In order to mitigate the conflict between user and database traffic, connectivity between front-end servers and SQL should be isolated, either via separate physical networks or virtual LANs. Typically this requires at least two separate network interface cards in each front-end Web server with static routes configured to ensure traffic is routed to the correct interface. The same configuration may also be applied to application and index server.
Isolate search indexing
A typical medium server farm consists of one or more Web front-end servers, a dedicated index or application server and a separate SQL database server. Search traffic initiated by the index server must be processed by the same servers responsible for delivering user content. In order to prevent search and user traffic from conflicting, an additional server may be added to the farm, which is dedicated solely to servicing search queries (in smaller environments, the index server may also serve this function). The farm administrator would then configure the search service to perform crawls only against this dedicated server. This configuration may reduce traffic to the Web front-end servers by as much as 70% during index operations.
Adjust SQL parameters
One quick way to avoid future headaches is to provision the major SharePoint databases on separate physical disks (or LUNs if a storage-area network is involved). This means one set of disks for search databases, one for temporary databases and still another for content databases. Additional consideration should be given to isolating the log files (*.ldf). Although these do not incur the same level of I/O as other files, they do play a primary role in backup and recovery and they can grow to several times the size of the master database files.Another technique is to proactively manage the size and growth of individual databases. By default, SQL grows database files in small increments, either 1MB at a time or as a fixed percentage of database size (usually 10%). These settings can cause SQL to waste cycles constantly expanding databases, and prevents further data from being written while the databases are expanding. An alternative approach is to pre-size the databases up to the maximum recommended size (100G) if space is available and set auto growth to a fixed size (e.g. 10MB or 20MB).
De-fragment database indexes
SQL Server maintains its own set of indexes for data stored in various databases in order to improve query efficiency and read operations. Just as with files stored on disk, these indexes can become fragmented. It is important to plan for regular maintenance operations, which includes index defragmentation. Special care should be taken to schedule these types of operations as they are resource-intensive and, in many cases, can prevent data from being written to or read from the indexes.
Distribute user data across multiple content databases
Most SharePoint data is stored in lists: tasks, announcements, document libraries, issues, picture libraries, and so forth. A great deal of this data is actually stored in a single table in the content database associated with the site collection. Regardless of how many sites and subsites are created within the SharePoint hierarchy, each site collection has only one associated content database. This means that a site collection with thousands of subsites is storing the bulk of the user data from every list in every site in a single table in SQL. This can lead to delays as SQL must recursively execute queries over one potentially very large dataset. One way to reduce the workload is to manage the mapping of site collections to content databases. Administrators can use the central administration interface to pre-stage content databases to ensure that site collections are associated with a single database or grouped logically based on size or priority. By adjusting the 'maximum number of sites' setting or changing database status to "offline", administrators can also control which content database is used when new site collections are created.
Minimize page size
For SharePoint users connected to the portal via a LAN it is easy to manage content and find resources, but for users on the far end of a slower WAN link the heavyweight nature of a typical SharePoint page can be a real performance-killer. If you have many remote users, start with a minimal master page, which, as the name implies, removes unnecessary elements and allows designers to start with a clean slate that only contains the base functionality required for the page to render correctly. Second, most SharePoint pages contain links to supporting files, including JavaScript and style sheets, which require additional time to retrieve and execute. Designers can alter how SharePoint pages retrieve these files using a technique called "delayed loading", which essentially loads the linked files in the background while the rest of the page is rendering.
Configure IIS compression
SharePoint content consists of two primary sources -- static files resident in the SharePoint root directories (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\12 for 2007 and \14 for 2010) and dynamic data stored in the content. At runtime, SharePoint merges the page contents from both sources then transmits them inside an HTTP response to the requesting user. Internet Information Server (IIS) versions 6 and 7 both contain various mechanisms for reducing the payload of HTTP responses prior to transmitting them across the network. Adjusting these settings can reduce the size of the data transmitted to the client, resulting in shorter load times and faster page rendering.
Take advantage of caching
Much of the content requested by users can be cached in memory, including list items, documents, query results and Web parts. Site administrators can configure their own cache profiles to meet different user needs. Anonymous users, for example, can be assigned one set of cache policies while authenticated users are assigned another, allowing content editors to get a more recent view of content changes than general readers. Cache profiles can also be configured by page type, so publishing pages and layout pages behave differently, and administrators have the option to specify caching on the server, the client, or both. In addition, the SharePoint Object Cache can significantly improve the execution time for resource-intensive components, such as the Content Query Web Part. For example, large objects that are requested frequently, such as images and files, can also be cached on disk for each Web application to improve page delivery times.
Manage page customizations
SharePoint Designer is a useful tool for administrators and power users but page customization can be harmful to overall performance. When customization occurs, the entire page content, including the markup and inline code, is stored in the database and must be retrieved each time the page is requested. This introduces relatively little additional overhead on a page-by-page basis, but in larger environments with hundreds or even thousands of pages, all that back-and-forth to the database can add up to significant performance degradation. To prevent this problem, administrators should implement a policy that restricts page customizations to only those situations where it is absolutely necessary. Site collection and farm administrators also have the option to disable the use of Designer or, when necessary, use the 'reset to site definition' option to undo changes and revert back to the original content.
Limit navigation depth
One of the most significant design elements on any portal site is the global, drop-down, fly-out menu at the top of each page. It seems like a handy way to navigate through all the various sites and pages -- until it becomes so deep and cluttered that all ability to navigate beyond the first few levels is lost completely. Even worse, fetching all the data to populate the navigation menus can be resource-intensive on sites with deep hierarchies. SharePoint designers have the ability to customize the depth and level of each navigation menu by modifying the parameters for the various navigation controls within the master page. Administrators should limit that depth to a manageable level that does not impact performance.

SharePoint 2010 Themes : DIY

2010-05-25T16:26:00.000+05:30

Activating the publishing feature on the SharePoint 2010 site gives you an option to customize the pre-installed theme and save it as "Custom Theme". There can only be one custom theme per site and if somebody else tries to play designer and customize any other theme, then it overwrites your changes. So at a time there is only one custom theme allowed.

An article by Todd Bagsinki details the method of creating .thmx files and using them as SharePoint designer. Though the idea is simple but the output isn't always sweet. Mapping all the classes and images etc. isn't easy at all.

Raymund Macaalay visual guide on SharePoint 2010 has take a clever approach and here is what you have to do to get it done.

Goto theme gallery <site>/_catalogs/theme/Forms/AllItems.aspx
Download a pre-installed theme as sample.thmx file
Get the theme builder free from Microsoft's connect portal and edit the theme so easily
All done, simply save the .thmx file and upload back to site's theme gallery to use it.

SharePoint 2010 Technology Stack

2010-05-14T15:06:00.003+05:30

SharePoint 2010 is launching today!!!
Here is 3 minute video for the developers explaining the basics.

Another very good video showing SharePoint 2010 bird eyes view

CAML query for searching users with their ID and not name

2010-04-07T12:39:00.000+05:30

When building a CAML query using U2U CAML Query builder, if you need to search for a user then the only option is to provide user's login name. That's not neat and you can beat it by providing an extra parameter called "LookupId" with the field. For example

MyQuery.Query = "<Where><Eq><FieldRef Name='Employee' LookupId='TRUE' /><Value Type='User'>UserID</Value></Eq></Where>";

After specifying the attribute, you can select a user by his/her ID.

Microsoft SharePoint: Three Social Networking Alternatives

2010-02-08T14:13:00.002+05:30

Another good article by Shane O'Neill, CIO.com

"Microsoft's SharePoint suite started out in the early 2000's as a place to store and manage Office documents, but it has quickly evolved into a vast enterprise information portal and content management system. And more and more it's becoming a "social networking platform." read more...

As the social networking influence of Facebook and Twitter (profile pages, news feeds, status updates, 140-character microblogs) spill over into workplace, more enterprises are deploying social media tools to improve efficiency and communication, and vendors both young (startups SocialText and Jive) and old (IBM's Lotus Connections) are eager to provide the tools.

MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) integrated social tools through partnerships with companies like NewsGator for RSS feeds and Atlassian for enterprise wiki software. But the MOSS 2007 social features have been viewed as clunky.

"Blogs and wikis in MOSS 2007 were weak compared to best-of-breed solutions," says Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at research firm Forrester.

SharePoint 2010, now in beta and set for general availability in June, is upping the ante with more native social networking features that Microsoft promises will be easier to use.

Microsoft is relying on the smooth integration of profile pages, RSS and activity feeds, wikis, blogs, and microblogs as it faces the threat of Enterprise 2.0 SaaS (software as a service) vendors that offer specific social tools to businesses at a fraction of SharePoint's price.

"SharePoint 2010's biggest strength, its breadth of capabilities, is also its greatest weakness," says Koplowitz. "For companies not currently invested in SharePoint that are looking to only fulfill a basic need, like deploying a set of publicly facing blogs, the full SharePoint platform will look like a sledgehammer compared to products from companies like Socialtext, Jive, and others."

Such SaaS startups have the advantage of developing new features quicker than big companies like Microsoft and IBM can. But SaaS companies have much to fear now that Microsoft has made social tools a priority in SharePoint 2010, says Koplowitz. SaaS upstarts also have to walk the thin line of both competing with SharePoint and making their software compatible with it.

Yet the fact remains: social tools are just a portion of the SharePoint platform and procuring and managing the entire SharePoint suite is a huge task. It entails license and server costs, the training of staff, providing virus protection and backup, and possibly paying for consultant help. It's worth noting that a stripped down, online version of SharePoint has been available since November 2008 and Microsoft cut prices for it in November 2009. SharePoint 2010 will come as both as an on-premises and hosted online offering.

Nevertheless, if you're a company that just wants a powerful set of social networking tools, implementing the whole SharePoint suite is not a wise choice, says Koplowitz.

"That's like killing a whole buffalo when all you want is a sandwich," he adds.

Here are three SaaS vendors that provide specific enterprise social tools.

SocialText

SocialText, founded in late 2002 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., is one of the earliest vendors to adapt Web 2.0 tools to the business world, now referred to as Enterprise 2.0.

SocialText's flagship product, the SocialText Workspace wiki tool, allows workers to communicate, share information and content, add comments, and pose questions to groups.

The integrated SocialText suite also includes: a personalized homepage called Dashboard where users can access employee profiles, wiki pages and other social networking features; a Twitter-like microblogging tool called Signals; and SocialText People pages, the equivalent to Facebook's profile pages.

SocialText platform is available as a hosted service or an on-site or hosted appliance. It can be purchased as a standalone suite (click here for pricing information) but it is also designed to work within SharePoint and Lotus Connections.

Jive

Portland, Ore.-based Jive has been around since 2001, and, like SocialText, is a SaaS company that aims to connect the enterprise through consumer-friendly social networking technologies.

Jive's software suite, Jive SBS (social business software), combines collaboration software and social applications. SBS is in its fourth generation. Some of its features include: wikis, blogs, discussion forums, dashboard-like homepages, personalized profile pages, status updates, tagging, bookmarking, document creation and management, and private storage.

Jive reported an 85 percent year-over-year increase in revenue for 2009 and last month acquired social monitoring company Filtrbox for an undisclosed sum. SBS is a standalone suite that, like SocialText, also connects with SharePoint.

Atlassian

Atlassian, an Australian company founded in 2002, has a broad set of software tools that help IT pros and developers track software bugs, manage help desk tickets and test and edit code.

Atlassian's software development tools are led by JIRA for issue tracking and project management and JIRA Studio, a hosted suite of tools for development teams. But it is probably best known for its enterprise wiki software, Confluence, through which workers create intranet pages and communicate with co-workers in real time, blog, and edit and share documents. Like the Jive and SocialText offerings, Confluence provides a main page (dashboard) with access to all workspaces, people and content.

The Confluence enterprise wiki can be purchased on its own, although Atlassian is a Microsoft partner and Confluence connects with SharePoint.

Shane O'Neill is a senior writer at CIO.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/smoneill. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter at twitter.com/CIOonline.

The Great Debate: SharePoint Designer vs. Custom Site Definitions

2010-02-08T14:06:00.002+05:30

A good post by Eric Shupps :

"I often get asked about the pros and cons of using SharePoint Designer versus custom site definitions for branding purposes. There seems to be a great deal of confusion surrounding this topic so I'll offer my two cent's worth in hopes that it clears the air and helps you, the SharePoint developer or administrator, make a more informed decision on which to use and where." read more...

First, let's be clear on the difference between the two. SharePoint Designer is an off-the-shelf tool that provides add-on functionality for SharePoint – namely workflows, data view web parts, and UI customization (by this I mean the HTML structure, styles, and overall design of individual layout and master pages). It is targeted mostly at power users but can also be employed by developers to create quick data-driven applets or implement serial workflows quickly with minimal coding. Site definitions, on the other hand, are a set of Features and XML-driven configuration files which provide a framework for deploying SharePoint sites with a certain look, feel, structure, and functionality. For the most part, the two are mutually-exclusive in that a site must already be deployed for it to be customized by SharePoint Designer and site definitions are only applicable during the creation of a new site. The confusion arises from the ability of both methods to implement advanced interface customizations; however, the manner in which they do so is drastically different.

SharePoint Designer

To begin with, SharePoint Designer must be attached to an existing site in order to change anything related to the site's look and feel (what we commonly refer to as the "chrome"). This makes it an "out-of-band" process (to borrow an old networking term) in that the site is deployed first then edited later. This has the advantage of providing a comfortable GUI environment for the developer as SPD can render a view on-the-fly of how HTML and style changes impact the chrome. It is also able to enforce certain security requirements, such as the need to check out documents before they can be edited, and provide contextual assistance for style references and easy-to-use HTML design tools.

This out-of-band approach may sound easy (and it is) but it comes with some major drawbacks. First, editing a master or layout page in SPD causes the evil "unghosting" monster to rear its ugly head. You've probably heard this term before, especially if you worked with Frontpage in the previous version of SharePoint, but you may have also heard its new, more politically correct variant, "customized". Whatever you call it, the results can have a significant impact on the overall performance and maintainability of your SharePoint farm. In order to understand why this issue is so important, you first need to understand how SharePoint renders pages to the requesting web browser. The following diagram illustrates the rendering method for both customized (unghosted) and uncustomized (ghosted) pages.

Figure 1 – The SharePoint Page Rendering Process

As the diagrams demonstrate, the unghosting process can be significantly less performant because page content must always be loaded from the database before it can be rendered. Ghosted pages, on the other hand (so-called because they actually live on the file system of each front end server and only a pointer is held in the content database), are loaded locally from disk. SharePoint already creates a tsunami of network traffic between front-end servers and the database; adding another request to the stack, especially for large blocks of text that are transferred over long-running TCP sessions *during* the ASP.NET Just In Time (JIT) compilation and page-rendering process, can completely overwhelm physical resources if the traffic load is high enough. To make things worse, because the content is dynamically retrieved from the database, it cannot be cached effectively by IIS (it still gets cached and compressed to a certain degree but much less efficiently than static resources on disk). That being said, the situation may not be so desperate as it first appears, as SharePoint employs its own caching mechanisms on top of IIS and a single site collection with a custom master page, no matter how many levels deep it goes, still only uses one dynamic resource for page rendering. But – and this is a biggie – the same cannot be said of any form pages (editform.aspx, dispform.aspx, newform.aspx, etc.) and pages which include data view web parts (DVWP). Yes, MOSS still employs some caching, but each page instance is stored in the database. And, it should be noted, the caching benefits only apply to MOSS farms; if the portal is based on WSS then no caching mechanisms are available within SharePoint.

Second, customizations achieved with SPD are static. That is, they cannot be replicated from site to site. Want to deploy a new site collection for Finance using the same branding you created for Human Resources? Sorry, proceed to the back of the line; you'll have to start all over from the beginning. Need to have a set of common templates for ad-hoc site creation? Nope, can't do that either – each site either inherits the parent master page or uses its own that you create from scratch (or copy over from another site). Need to make sure that all Wiki pages (remember, Wiki's and Blogs are custom templates that you choose when creating the site) deployed in your organization have the same set of functionality? Dream on.

Finally, SPD customizations "break" the connection with the site and its underlying site definition. Once the master or layout page has been customized, any changes to the template it was based on (such as "Team Site" or "Collaboration Portal") from an update or service pack will not be available. The design is effectively frozen at the point in time at which it was created. This makes deploying updates, such as a new set of header images supplied by Marketing, across multiple site collections a nightmare as you must open each customized page in SPD and apply the changes (or copy the page from site gallery to site gallery).

So all of these issues beg the question "Just what is SharePoint Designer good for?". Well, for one thing, it makes creating new master and layout page designs a quick and enjoyable experience. Because it duplicates the ASP.NET JIT model in the design view (meaning it merges the layout and master pages together into a single view), modifying these pages is much easier than doing it all by hand in HTML. It's quite difficult to envision what impact your changes have in a child page when you can't see its parent. Secondly, it makes the devilishly difficult task of applying new styles much simpler as you have a context-aware CSS editor at your disposal (this is especially true for MOSS pages as they often employ several interrelated CSS files that override each other). Finally, it's a great prototyping and RAD tool as new designs can be envisioned and tested very quickly in situ.

Custom Site Definitions

Now that we understand the limitations and advantages of SPD, we still have to ask ourselves: What about those pesky unghosting and replication/maintainability issues? That's where custom site definitions and the SharePoint Feature framework come in (note that when I use a capital "F" I am referring to an element in the SharePoint Feature framework, not an element of functionality within the overall system, which I differentiate with a lower case "f"). When you create a new site or site collection in SharePoint, it gives you a list of available templates to use, grouped by functionality into a set of four tabs. The first two tabs are for WSS and the second two are for MOSS. SharePoint uses these definitions, which are sets of features and configuration files that provide the underlying structure for site creation and the deployment of associated functionality, to determine what type of site to create and what to put in it once it's in place (web parts, sub sites, workflows, etc.).

Figure 2 – Site Definition Structure

Thankfully, Microsoft gave us the capability to create our own custom site definitions that mimic the way in which the product itself functions. If you think about it, that's quite a powerful statement; it's like buying a shirt and getting the tailor who made it thrown in as a freebie in case you ever want another one. By building our own site definitions, we can control what gets provisioned during site creation and how it looks when the process is done. Even more importantly, the custom code will follow the same rules as the built-in definitions (assuming it's written properly, of course) and thereby avoid all the pitfalls of SPD's out-of-band model. Our master pages will be stored on disk, new sites will be able to use a pre-defined template, and a single change to the ghosted source files will immediately replicate across all of the sites that rely upon them. In addition, custom site definitions allow the developer to programmatically restrict what features are available to the user – including the use of other definitions and templates – and provide a more controllable environment with only those features necessary to meet the requirements.

Naturally, there are some drawbacks to this method as well. First and foremost, custom site definitions are complex and difficult to create. They involve numerous XML files and code-only HTML files (sorry, no GUI's here) and they must follow a strictly defined structure. I've known many an ASP.NET developer to sit with their mouth hanging open after the first hour of learning how to do a basic site definition thinking "You've got to be kidding me! Is all this stuff really necessary?".

Second, for maximum effectiveness, site definitions should be deployed using the Solution and Feature framework and make extensive use of Feature Stapling (attaching features to a definition in a specified order, not to be confusing with Feature Dependencies, in which one feature calls another feature from within the Feature definition file). As both Features and Solutions require their own learning curve, they invariably introduce further confusion into the process.

Third, due to the stapling function of site definitions, along with some of the various content type associations and layout dependencies required for MOSS, there is no way to avoid getting your hands dirty with at least the superficial aspects of Microsoft's Collborative Application Markup Language (CAML). CAML isn't necessarily difficult to learn but it is tempermental, laborious and poorly documented, all of which doesn't exactly add up to a rich and rewarding developer experience.

Finally, site definitions are only applicable during provisioning; that is, they have no effect after a site has been created. Certain Features of a definition may be applied after provisioning, such as a custom master page, but the entire definition is applied only once when the site is created. This means that sites which are already in place cannot be customized using site definitions. This doesn't completely prevent their use post-provisioning, as any child sites created after the new definition is in place may use it, but it does effectively limit the scope to new deployments.

Making the Right Choice

Fortunately, choosing between SPD and site definitions isn't a zero-sum equation. The SharePoint platform is flexible enough to allow the use of both and they can be employed interchangeably in a single environment quite successfully. The decision of which route is best often depends upon the stage of the deployment and the nature of the application. If a portal is to be used primarily as an outward-facing public Internet site it is very unlikely that multiple templates will be required that have different chrome elements; in that situation, provisioning the site using an out-of-the-box template then customizing it with SPD might be a perfectly acceptable solution. Similarly, if an Intranet site has been in place for some time, or has been upgraded from a previous version, there may be no other option but to implement customizations in place.

On the other hand, a new internal deployment that may have multiple branding components or departmental functional requirements may be better served in the long run by employing site definitions via the Features and Solutions framework. In those cases where SharePoint serves as a middle-tier operating environment for line of business applications, site definitions are a better method for stripping out those functional elements which are not absolutely required, rather than repetitively having to deploy a standard template and manually remove those elements which do not serve the core purpose.

One factor which may have a definitive impact on the decision behind which method to use is overall portal performance. All the evidence suggests that site definitions, which make the best use of disk-based caching and compression mechanisms, will perform better under heavy loads, especially when scaled to thousands of concurrent users. While site definitions may require a heavier investment on the front end, they pay off in terms of delivery cost and resource utilization.

Furthermore, the use of custom site definitions improves maintainability and reduces operational overhead by requiring less manual intervention to effect changes. Various update mechanisms are available within SharePoint to push changes out to local file systems on every server in a farm; in turn, the definitions which rely on these files are automatically updated. The same cannot be said for SPD customizations. While it may be argued that a change to the UI within SPD is, in fact, a global change as the customizations are stored in the content database, that argument overlooks the fact that the changes will not cross site collection, web application, or content database boundaries, and may not be propagated within a single site collection if a child site has broken its inheritance on the parent master or layout pages. In the same vein, any system-wide updates, such as those introduced by a service pack or hotfix, will also not be inherited by SPD-customized sites and must be introduced manually (if possible).

Conclusion

In my experience, SPD is most appropriate in small, static deployments where the organization does not possess the requisite development skills (or budget) to implement custom site definitions. It is also the only effective solution for upgraded legacy installations. For larger deployments, and those where performance is a key consideration, the benefits of site definitions make them a much more attractive option. Site definitions may also be the only answer when the specification calls for many customized sites to be provisioned programmatically (such as in hosted and Software-as-a-Service environments).

But these are not the only options. It is quite common to use SPD to prototype new designs, export the resulting master page, and include it as a Feature in a custom site definition. In some cases, portions of the portal which are lightly stressed or "one off" sites designed for a particular purpose, SPD customizations my coexist side-by-side with a more robust definition-based environment.

In the end, it comes down to suitability for purpose, resource availability, and, of course, cost. What may work in a portal that starts out as a small departmental deployment may not work quite so well when the portal grows exponentially into an enterprise information resource. Likewise, the overhead of an enterprise-class solution may be overkill for a portal whose primary purpose is a small user base focused on a particular set of tasks. As with any new system, consider first what the application is supposed to do, then determine which tools are right for the job. This may mean trying both methods before eventually deciding that one or the other is right for a particular environment.

Resources

For more information on branding and customization using SharePoint Designer:

SharePoint Products and Technologies Customization Policy [MSFT]
Heather Solomon's List of SharePoint Branding Resources [Heather Solomon]
Understanding SharePoint Branding Options [Robert Bogue]

For more information regarding custom site definitions, Features, solution packages and custom master pages:

Site Definitions and Configurations [MSDN]
Creating a Custom WSS Site Definition [Eric Shupps]
Creating a Custom Site Definition in WSS v3 / MOSS [Todd Baginski]

Sharepoint 2010 : Lookup Column

2009-11-23T23:39:00.000+05:30

The lookup column in Sharepoint 2010 packs a very nice & practical feature.
Now while populating a lookup value, corresponding column values of the looked up item can also be populated (from the source list).
In Moss 2007, that would have required an event handler. That's simple, the way things should be.

Sharepoint 2010 Beta is here......

2009-11-19T16:27:00.000+05:30

Get your 64bit OS/PC ready!!!
The wait is over, SharePoint 2010 beta is here, follow the direct download link.

Why developers like SharePoint 2010?

2009-11-18T14:55:00.000+05:30

Article by Paul Krill

Integration with Visual Studio is one change that makes SharePoint much easier to develop collaboration apps, developers say

SharePoint 2010, the newly announced upgrade to Microsoft's popular Web and collaboration platform, is receiving a thumbs-up from developers pleased with the product's capabilities, including its use of Visual Studio as a tool for building SharePoint applications.

A feature-completed version of SharePoint 2010 was detailed by Microsoft late last month.

[ InfoWorld's J. Peter Bruzzese provides a first look at SharePoint 2010, while InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes a sneak peek at Visual Studio 2010. ]

"It's getting better and better" for developers, says Serge van den Oever, a specialist software developer with Macaw, a systems integrator. Previously, Macaw created its own solutions "factory" to provide tools for building with SharePoint 2007 (officially named Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007). With the SharePoint 2010 version, Visual Studio integration will let Macaw bypass having to use a lot of its own tools, van den Oever says.

Overall, the full breadth of capabilities in SharePoint 2010 is on the rise, van den Oever says: "One of the things [improving] is the whole hosted platform, where you can run sandboxed applications."

"The Visual Studio integration is wonderful," says Navid Falconer, a software engineer at Arctic Slope Regional, an oil field services firm. While he did not do that much development in SharePoint 2007, Falconer notes, "I did enough to know how painful it was."

"I think [SharePoint 2010 is making it] easy for developers to come through and help progress SharePoint further, " says Jesse Backof, a desktop applications specialist at the Miles & Stockbridge law firm. "Visual Studio is definitely being more refined now" for use with SharePoint, he says.

The Visual Studio integration removes obstacles in deploying systems, says Benjamin Bach, a staff development consultant at General Mills: "[Visual Studio integration] provides a much more complete and easy system to actually package up and deploy and debug and work directly with SharePoint. The integrated feeling of being able to work with that is a huge plus."

SharePoint 2010 offers a better development platform and probably faster search capabilities as well, says Bert Sandie, director of technical excellence at games maker Electronic Arts. Visual Studio appears "to be much better integrated by the looks of it," he notes.

Improvements in capabilities such as connectivity to data sources are anticipated in the SharePoint 2010 release, Sandie says. Overall, SharePoint offers an economical development solution, he adds: "For us, from a development perspective, developing on top of [SharePoint], it's actually pretty cheap" with Electronic Arts using ASP.Net code.

"I think [Microsoft is] doing a lot of good stuff around social collaboration" in SharePoint 2010, Sandie says. Electronic Arts has an estimated 2,000 SharePoint sites for 9,000 employees, with about 1,000 active sites.

Short Overview of SharePoint Features in Visual Studio 2010

2009-10-29T12:29:00.001+05:30

Original article by Peter Jausovec
"As you probably know, Visual Studio 2010 was announced earlier this week and it contains a lot of cool features and project templates for SharePoint developers. Below is a short overview for some of the SharePoint development related features and project templates.

Configurable deployment

With all new SharePoint project templates you can leverage new configurable deployment feature which lets you configure the way you want to deploy or retract your project. Besides using provided, out of the box deployment steps (Run Pre-Deployment Command, Run Post-Deployment Command, Recycle IIS Application Pool, Retract Solution, Add Solution, and Activate Features) you can use SharePoint extensibility to create your own, custom deployment steps and deployment configurations.

Sandboxed and farm solutions

Some SharePoint projects can be deployed either as sandboxed or farm solutions. Sandboxed solutions run in a secure and monitored process that has limited resource access and with farm solutions user must have SharePoint administrator privileges to run or deploy the solution. You can read more about SharePoint sandboxed solution here.

Extending SharePoint Tools

Even though Visual Studio 2010 contains a set of project templates you can also extend them. You can create extensions for projects, project items, define your own project item types and create deployment extensions. You can read more about extending SharePoint tools on MSDN.

Feature and Package Designer

Feature and package designers give you the ability to customize features in your solution and with packaging designer you can customize which features are getting deployed and how. More about feature and package designer is here.

SharePoint Explorer

SharePoint Explorer is a new tool window that gives you a view into your SharePoint server. You can get a hierarchical view of lists, sites and workflows on your SharePoint server.

SharePoint Project and Project Item Templates

The following SharePoint specific project templates and project item templates are available in Visual Studio 2010:

Project Templates

Empty SharePoint project
Visual Web Part project
Sequential and State Machine Workflow
Business Data Connectivity Model
Event Receiver
List Definition
Content Type
Module Project
Site Definition

Project Item Templates

Empty Element
Web Part
User Control
Application Page
Association Form
Initiation Form
Business Data Connectivity Resource Item
List Instance
List Definition From Content Type
Global Resources File

Besides above mentioned project templates, there are two import project templates for importing .WSP file contents and importing reusable workflows:

Import Reusable Workflow
Import SharePoint Solution Package

How to download, install and get started

If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download Visual Studio 2010 from here. Download will be available to everyone on October 21st.

If you want to know how to download and install Visual Studio 2010 watchChannel9 video.

To get you started, head over to MSDN and read some of the walkthroughs on SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010."

SharePoint 2010 Snack! a must for Developers

2009-10-20T12:44:00.000+05:30

5 Videos of SharePoint 2010 for developers. It will all seem very easy for those who are familiar with MOSS 2007
Link

SharePoint 2010: Professional Developer Evaluation Guide and Walkthroughs

2009-10-20T12:30:00.002+05:30

The SharePoint 2010 developer evaluation guide describes the SharePoint 2010 developer platform, including walkthroughs of some of the new capabilities for developers.
Download

Overview
This evaluation guide is designed to give you an overview of the feature set and extensibility points for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and an understanding of how the professional developer can use these features and extensibility points to create comprehensive solutions. This guide begins with an overview of the types of solutions that you can build by developing on SharePoint. It then addresses the developer tools for SharePoint 2010, the new platform features, and the solution deployment enhancements. The guide concludes with six walkthroughs that show example developer customizations in SharePoint 2010. The goal of this guide is to provide a framework for an effective evaluation of SharePoint 2010 as a solution creation platform. This guide is intended for the professional developer, development lead, and software architect. An evaluation guide focused on the SharePoint 2010 product and an evaluation guide for the IT Professional are also available.

SharePoint 2010 : Jeff Teper, Microsoft

2009-10-20T11:58:00.001+05:30

A very interesting post by Jeff Teper – Corporate Vice President, SharePoint Server, Microsoft on SharePoint 2010, read more...

This is my third and final post as part of our disclosure of SharePoint 2010 today. The previous posts covered the SharePoint History and how we Engineer SharePoint. This morning, Steve Ballmer and I are kicking off the SharePoint Conference so it is time to talk about SharePoint 2010! It is incredibly fun and rewarding to unveil this release driven input from you and innovative ideas from the team. As Steve announced, we will release the Beta of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 in November and look forward to your feedback as we finalization the product and documentation for release in the first half of next year.

Describing SharePoint 2010 in 1 Sentence, 8 Categories and 40 Feature Areas

SharePoint is a broad solution so we often get asked how we would describe it in a sentence. For SharePoint 2010, we settled on “The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web”. A few words are worth explaining. We decided “Collaboration” was broad enough to cover the spectrum of publishing, sharing, finding, analyzing and managing information that SharePoint enables. We chose “Platform” not only because custom solutions are a major focus of the 2010 release but also "platform" conveyed a solid base for all the out-of-box usage that never requires a developer. Finally, we want to call out “the Web” to highlight both internet scenarios reaching customers and partners and the cloud-based delivery of SharePoint Online. For SharePoint 2007, we used a pie diagram chart to describe the major SharePoint categories such as “Enterprise Content Management”. This release, we picked words we thought were both simpler and gave us more freedom to innovate beyond traditional category boundaries. We settled on Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights andComposites as the new category names. Within each of these plus Administration andDevelopment, I will highlight 5 major feature areas for a total of 40. At the next level down are hundreds of exciting new features which will be covered on www.microsoft.com\sharepointand subsequent posts from the team. Needless to say, this is the biggest release of SharePoint yet and we hope you find it as exciting as we do!

Sites

In 2007, we expanded SharePoint to a single platform for intranet, extranet and internet sites. For SharePoint 2010, we improved the experience for this range of sites spanning browsers, Microsoft Office and mobile devices. The top five investment areas here are:

1. SharePoint Web Experience – We updated the SharePoint UI to make it simpler to access a growing range of tools. Highlights include incorporating the Office ribbon, in place web editing, AJAX responsiveness and richer navigation. We also expanded the reach of SharePoint sites through multi-lingual support, improved accessibility including WCAG 2.0 support and cross-browser support built on XHTML compliance.

2. Office Client – We continue to support previous versions of Microsoft Office working against SharePoint 2010. Office 2010 enhances this with features like offline editing with asynchronous saves as well as exposing SharePoint features through the new Office Backstage UI. Via the Backstage, you can access the context around the document including tags, related tagging and people.

3. SharePoint Workspace – In this release, we evolved and renamed Groove as SharePoint Workspace which provides great local and offline read-write access to SharePoint lists and libraries. SharePoint Workspace has a consistent experience with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 including the Office ribbon. It supports advanced features like bringing external business data offline and is smart about synching changes and not entire files.

4. Office Web Apps – We made SharePoint 2010 a great place to host the new Office Web Apps so you can view and update content from within a browser and include Office content as part of your web site (e.g. an Excel spreadsheet as part of “Sales Metrics Portal"). The Office Web Apps provide a familiar user experience, high fidelity viewing and essential editing without loss of data or formatting. They include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The OneNote client and Web App support is one of the coolest features of the release to enable multiple people to collaborate on a rich canvas online or offline. In addition to the Office Web Apps, we updated InfoPath Forms Services and Excel Services and added, new for 2010, Visio and Access Services.

5. SharePoint Mobile Access – We both improved the experience for mobile web browsers and are introducing a new SharePoint Workspace Mobile client so you can take Office content from SharePoint offline on a Windows Mobile device. These clients let you navigate lists and libraries, search content and people and even view and edit Office content within the Office Web App experience running on a mobile browser.

Communities

In the first post, I talked about breaking down organization and technology silos as key driver of our vision. Since then we have tried to make SharePoint the ultimate Swiss army knife for collaboration with smart connections across people and teams. You told us you want to embrace new Web 2.0 approaches within a unified experience which we included in SharePoint 2007. For SharePoint 2010, we expanded and enhanced the set of collaboration and social networking tools for both organic and managed communities across your organization. The top five investment areas:

1. Collaborative Content – Building on the new SharePoint user experience, we made it much easier to create and find content in SharePoint sites. This includes not only improved blogs and wikis (both simple and enterprise) but also calendars, discussions, tasks, contacts, pictures, video, presence and much more. With Office 2010, multiple people can simultaneously author content on a SharePoint site.

2. Social Feedback and Organization – With SharePoint 2010, we are introducing a consistent experience for organizing, finding and staying connected to information and people including bookmarks, tagging and ratings. We have taken a holistic approach across search, navigation, profiles, feeds and more. We are bringing together informal social tagging with formal taxonomy described below so you can choose the right approach for a given set of content. We have been using these features internally for a while and I think you will find the not only useful but fun.

3. User Profiles – We enhanced user profiles to reflect colleagues, interests, expertise – either via explicit tagging or recommendations based on Outlook and Office Communicator. The model is opt-in so users can manage what information is shared publically. They decide when an interest is something they want to share or be asked about by others in the organization.

4. MySites – We significantly enhanced MySites in SharePoint 2010 building on the updated SharePoint UI and user profile. We streamlined MySites to give you quick access to your content, profile and social network while continuing to let you customize, target and personalize pages to the needs of different roles and users in your organization. The enhanced newsfeed helps track interests and colleagues.

5. People Connections – In SharePoint 2003, we introduced a universal person hyperlink and presence icon so you can always navigate to a user’s MySite, send them mail, start an IM, call, etc. In this release, we enhanced this UI in conjunction with Outlook and Office Communicator as well as greatly improved the colleague tracking and people search features with new algorithms and user experience leveraging expertise, social data and more. MySites also include a new interactive organization browser built using Silverlight to give you another way to navigate the organization. In larger companies, org. chart browsing via the address book is one of the most popular features in Outlook and we think this takes that experience to the next level.

Content

SharePoint 2007 brought together document management, records management and web content management with a consistent user experience, architecture and platform. We built a common platform for metadata, security, workflow, etc. SharePoint 2010 adds scale and depth in these areas as well advancing the user experience. The top five investment areas:

1. Large Lists and Libraries – We made architecture and user experience investments so you have much larger document libraries with metadata driven navigation to help users go quickly to the content that is most important to them. Libraries will scale to tens of millions and archives to hundreds of millions of documents. This is a key investment for high-end document and records management but also helps organizations with lots of smaller sites. We enhanced the workflow capabilities and tools in SharePoint Designer.

2. Enterprise Metadata – We are addressing your feedback to support content types and taxonomies across not only across sites but also server farms. We have made applying this metadata easy (and valuable to users) in both the SharePoint and Office client user experience. The top-down taxonomy and bottoms-up social tagging (sometimes called folksonomy) combine to help improve search, navigation and people connections.

3. Document Sets – We are introducing a way to manage a collection of documents as a single object for workflow, metadata, etc. within SharePoint and Office so experience more closely models your work product (e.g. a proposal that may contain a presentation, budget, contract, etc.).

4. Web Publishing including Digital Asset Management – We made a number of key improvements to make it easier to publish rich sites on the intranet or internet. We used the new browser ribbon and editor experience to speed site customization, content authoring and publishing tasks. We added digital asset management features like thumbnails, metadata and ratings for images as well as video streaming from SharePoint. Finally, we improved content deployment robustness from authoring to production for larger scale sites.

5. Governance and Records Management – Compliance is an increasingly important requirement for organizations. We enhanced the Records Managements features in 2010 building on the scalable storage and enterprise metadata support described above. We improved the sophistication and flexibility of our governance tools. Just a few new features include location-based file plans, multi-stage dispositions, in-place records and e-discovery.

Search

As discussed in my first post, enterprise search is a big investment area for Microsoft from Search Server Express to SharePoint’s standard search to the new FAST Search for SharePoint. We added depth at all levels in 2010. While many customers will be fine with the base SharePoint search capabilities, FAST Search for SharePoint will meet the most sophisticated needs. FAST Search for SharePoint supersets the base SharePoint user experience, APIs and connectors. This is the first step, but a big one, and we will add more consistency and enhancements across our tiers of search in the future. We will continue to sell and enhance FAST ESP standalone as well. The top five investment areas here:

1. Interactive Search Experience – We built a richer search experience providing flexible navigation, refinement and related searches. Both Standard and FAST Search for SharePoint get query completion, spell checking, wild cards and more. FAST enhances this experience enabling feature content for common queries and providing more flexible navigation and document thumbnails and previews including in slide navigation of PowerPoint presentations which is a common end user scenario.

2. Relevance – We improved the out-of-box ranking and expanded the relevance factors including social data such as tagging and usage (clicks). FAST Search adds more configurable set of relevance inputs for custom applications and specialized corpuses.

3. People Search – We greatly improved people finding based on social networking and expertise algorithms and tailored user experience for people including getting views of authored content. As users frequently do not know or recall the spelling of people’s names, we built a new phonetic search algorithm that works much better than previous approaches to spell checking for names. In testing, we had a lot of fun coming up with crazy ways to misspell each others' names to see if we could stump it.

4. Connectivity – We know lots of data lives outside SharePoint so expanded and improved our connectors to index web sites, file servers, SharePoint, Exchange, Lotus Notes, Documentum and FileNet. The updated Business Connectivity Services (previously the BDC) described below makes it much easier to index an arbitrary source such as a custom database. You can create this search connection without code using the new SharePoint Designer.

5. Scale and Platform Flexibility – We made significant performance and scalability improvements through our search technology. Optimizing for 64-bit helped but we also introduce partitioned indices and scale-out query servers in SharePoint search this release. FAST scales-out even further and has significantly more pipeline extensibility to handle the largest collections and most complex value-added processing and search applications. We think both end users and IT will be immediately excited about the new capabilities supporting hundreds of millions of documents with great index freshness and query latency.

Insights

Historically, business intelligence has been a specialized toolset used by a small set of users with little ad-hoc interactivity. Our approach is to unlock data and enable collaboration on the analysis to help everyone in the organization get richer insights. Excel Services is one of the popular features of SharePoint 2007 as people like the ease of creating models in Excel and publishing them to server for broad access while maintaining central control and one version of the truth. We are expanding on this SharePoint 2010 with new visualization, navigation and BI features. The top five investment areas:

1. Excel Services – Excel rendering and interactivity in SharePoint gets better with richer pivoting, slicing and visualizations like heatmaps and sparklines. New REST support makes it easier to add server-based calculations and charts to web pages and mash-ups.

2. Performance Point Services – We enhanced scorecards, dashboard, key performance indicator and navigation features such as decomposition trees in SharePoint Server 2010 for the most sophisticated BI portals.

3. SQL Server – The SharePoint and SQL Server teams have worked together so SQL Server capabilities like Analysis Services and Reporting Services are easier to access from within SharePoint and Excel. We are exposing these interfaces and working with other BI vendors so they can plug in their solutions as well.

4. “Gemini” – “Gemini” is the name for a powerful new in memory database technology that lets Excel and Excel Services users navigate massive amounts of information without having to create or edit an OLAP cube. Imagine an Excel spreadsheet rendered (in the client or browser) with 100 million rows and you get the idea. Today at the SharePoint Conference, we announced the official name for “Gemini” is SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint.

5. Visio Services – As with Excel, users love the flexibility of creating rich diagrams in Visio. In 2010, we have added web rendering with interactivity and data binding including mashups from SharePoint with support for rendering Visio diagrams in a browser. We also added SharePoint workflow design support in Visio.

Composites

The single biggest area we increased our investment from SharePoint 2007 was making it easier for everyone – users, IT, partners, etc. – to build custom solutions on SharePoint that automate processes and connect disparate information. Some of the scenarios are more IT driven. Analysts often call them “Composite Applications”. Others are more end user centric or “Mash-Ups”. We thought “Composites” was a good short word to describe the breadth of solutions built with SharePoint. The top five investment areas:

1. SharePoint Designer – We revamped the SharePoint Designer experience to focus on the building blocks of a SharePoint solution vs. HTML source code. The user experience gets easier including the Office Ribbon and new tools for building workflows and connecting to external data. We have made SharePoint Designer customizations safe out-of-box in 2010 so IT can let users customize sites without risk. SharePoint Designer is also a great tool for mashing-up SharePoint (which now exposes REST) and external data.

2. InfoPath Forms Service – InfoPath is the best way to have a common form definition render in the browser as well as in a rich and offline client. For 2010, we improved the design environment to make it easier to build rich forms declaratively with little to no code and more client-side validation. We have also made it straightforward to use InfoPath forms as native SharePoint forms both on the web and when offline from within the SharePoint Workspace client.

3. Access Services - Users have long loved the ability to create database applications quickly with forms and views. Access Services lets you publish new Access solutions to a SharePoint site where they can be managed centrally and accessed (necessary pun) from a web browser.

4. Sandbox Solutions – In SharePoint 2007, custom code requires the farm administrator to trust the code running on the server. In SharePoint 2010 we are introducing a new SharePoint custom code sandbox with isolation and resource limitations (memory, SQL, CPU) that allows administrators to let others safely add and consume custom solutions without impacting overall farm performance and stability. While it does not cover the full SharePoint object model it addresses key scenarios like custom web parts and event receivers. We will use this and the client side object model described later to support custom SharePoint solutions in SharePoint Online as well.

5. Business Connectivity Services – We expanded the read-only Business Data Catalog from SharePoint 2007 to support create, read, update, delete, search and offline access to line-of-business (LOB) data. This data, such as a customer record from a database, web services, etc. is called an External List in SharePoint 2010 and it is mapped to an External Content Type so this data looks and behaves like native SharePoint lists. You can not only update this data from within SharePoint but can take it offline from SharePoint Workspace and, where it makes sense like contacts, in Outlook with offline editing. There is great support for BCS in SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio 2010. This perhaps our biggest “Wow, how did you do that?” demo. We will be building on the BCS for future LOB connectivity solutions.

Administration

We understand the most critical capability for you to introduce these features to your users is making it easier to manage. We have gotten a lot of great feedback in this area and made big investments for SharePoint 2010. As I have mentioned in previous posts, our experience with our CAT team, running SharePoint Online with SharePoint 2007 and targets for higher scale informed the design of SharePoint 2010. You have the choice of Server, Online or a mix. Even if you run SharePoint yourself, you benefit from our design and experience with Online. Beyond the fundamentals of scalability and reliability which got a lot of focus, the top five investment areas:

1. Improved Upgrade – We changed the model for SharePoint 2010 vs. the previous release. We will get your existing sites up and running with the existing SharePoint 2007 user interface including your customizations. You can preview and switch to the new UI at your convenience. With SP2 of SharePoint 2007, we released an upgrade checker tool that reports any potential issues. There are two key things to think about in planning the migration. First, as we announced a while ago, SharePoint 2010 is 64-bit only. Second, thin about places where you may have invested in custom code than can be replaced with out-of-box features such as the new enterprise metadata features described above.

2. Throttling, Health Monitoring, Analytics – Performance and reliability was a big focus for this release to address the scale of the largest organizations, web sites and the SharePoint Online service. We invested in optimizing the SharePoint, Windows Server and SQL Server architecture for scale and availability. We introduced more resource governors throughout SharePoint to prevent bulk operations or asynchronous jobs from slowing down the server. We built in proactive and extensible health reporting, monitoring and resolution in SharePoint 2010 based on analyzing a wide range of deployments. We will enhance this based on your feedback and our experience during the Beta and beyond. We are introducing a new usage analytics logging and reporting and are publishing the SQL schema for this analytics database so you can create your own reports.

3. Web and PowerShell Admin – We improved the web based administration interface for SharePoint 2010 and put it through the level of usability testing we had previously focused on for end user features. However, the biggest thing we heard from you was an improved scripting interface for SharePoint for simplified administration of farms. With the release of PowerShell, we were able to switch over all our administration to that framework and will ship with hundreds of commandlets you can use, edit and enhance. The administration framework is built on a new multi-tenant model we are be using on SharePoint Online but know is also of interest to 3^rd-party hosters and large organizations looking to do server consolidation.

4. Scalability and Availability – We made the shared services and federation model much more flexible to support richer scale out as you add services, sites and applications to SharePoint. We reduced the downtime for SharePoint 2010 with improved patching and SQL Server configuration, backup-restore, log shipping support and more.

5. Identity Management and Security – We have introduced more flexibility identity lifecycle management including updates between SharePoint with identity sources like Active Directory, LDAP servers and HR applications.

Development

I covered the higher-level solutions features under “Composites” above. Many of these enable building solutions with much less code than possible before. We also invested in a number of lower level development features as well for hard core developers. The top give investment areas:

1. New SharePoint APIs – This bullet is a blog post itself! The new UI framework has more extensibility in the ribbon and natively uses XSLT DataViews in lists vs. previous CAML views. There are new APIs for AJAX and Silverlight applications that make it make it much easier to access SharePoint data with less code and better performance. We significantly improved list access and programmability with REST, ATOM, JSON and LINQ including richer data relationship, validation, joins and projections over SharePoint lists which as described above can now reach far higher scale points.

2. Application Lifecycle – We have converged and improved on WSP as the packaging and deployment format for SharePoint solutions. You can save as WSP in SPD and bring that into Visual Studio 2010.

3. Visual Studio 2010 Support – SharePoint 2010 is a first class target for Visual Studio 2010. This includes F5 deployment and debugging (applause welcome …) as well as designers for various SharePoint project types, web parts, workflow, business connectivity services and integration with the VS Server Explorer. The early feedback on this has been so great, we decided to highlight it in Steve Ballmer's keynote at the SharePoint Conference.

4. Developer Dashboard View – If you have the rights, you can turn on a mode for a SharePoint page which will render at the bottom to show full trace and latency through the SharePoint, .NET and SQL layers. You can use our reporting tools described earlier to identify any slow pages in your site and then turn on this view to see a custom web part has bogged down the page by making repeated expensive SharePoint object model calls.

5. Development on Windows 7 – We now support development on Windows 7 and Vista client machines. Although it isn’t a supported configuration for production, we heard you that you want to use it as a development environment.

Summing Up

I hope this was a helpful overview. There will be many more details shared onwww.microsoft.com\sharepoint and this blog in the coming days. We will follow the Conference, Blog and Forum traffic to update the answers to common questions and feedback and get the documentation ready for RTM. I thought I’d address two big questions quickly:

· Timeline – As Steve Ballmer announced today, Office and SharePoint Server 2010 will be available for broad Beta in November. The release is on track for the first half of 2010 as we have said for a while. We are upgrading all of Microsoft after having used earlier builds in production for thousands of users for the last year. While we have some tuning to do on the way to release, expect the Beta to be feature complete. We encourage and welcome all your feedback for this release, the documentation and beyond. We are committed to making this a solid release so your data will help tell us exactly when we are ready to ship in the first half of next calendar year.

· Packaging – We incorporated your feedback as we simplified packaging and naming this round. Here is the quick tour. The Server family includes SharePoint Foundation (simpler new name for “WSS”) and SharePoint Server (simpler name for “MOSS”). SharePoint Server continues to have Standard and Enterprise CAL tiers of features. We are enhancing our free basic search offering in Search Server Express 2010. The FAST Search capabilities will be available via the FAST Search for SharePoint add-on server for customers with the Enterprise CAL. For internet access by customers, we are enhancing the existing per server licensed SharePoint for Internet Sites and introducing a lower priced “Standard Version” for small to medium sites. As we announced a while back, SharePoint Designer is free. We think this combined with enhanced usability, designers and safety in SharePoint Designer 2010 client will expand the number and robustness of custom solutions. SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove) is included in Office Professional Plus. We will announce updates to the SharePoint Online offerings closer to release. We will post additional details on this blog as we get closer to release.

Thanks again for reading the posts. I hope to see you at the SharePoint Conference. We look forward to your feedback and seeing your great sites and solutions on SharePoint 2010!

Jeff

c# : Read XML from URL

2009-10-05T12:37:00.000+05:30

There are multiple methods to capture XML from a URL, but this particular example is helpful when you are dealing with special characters of foreign languages. The loaded XML will display them in correct format for the charset specified.

//Include the following packages
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

//request the particular web page
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://feeds.feedburner.com/pointsharepoint?format=xml");

//define the login credentials of the requested file/page
request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(”UserName”, “Password”);

//get the response from the request
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

//create a stream to hold the contents of the response
Stream receiveStream = response.GetResponseStream();

//create your XML document
XmlDocument mySourceDoc = new XmlDocument();

//load the file from the stream
mySourceDoc.Load(receiveStream);

//close the stream
receiveStream.Close()

Today's Sharepoint Tip : _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames

2009-09-14T10:20:00.007+05:30

In most cases SharePoint pages are based on a master page that contains the "body" element. These content pages can’t directly add a function to the body’s onload event. In order to work around this limitation, SharePoint provides the "_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames" array. When the body is loaded, the onload event handler executes each function whose name is contained in this array.

'<'script language="javascript"'>'
_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("FunctionName");
function FunctionName()
{
// Code
}
'<'/script'>'

What is SharePoint?

2009-09-08T21:09:00.001+05:30

This is that :-) SharePoint in plain English

SharePoint & it's Competitors

2009-08-31T17:30:00.002+05:30

Shawn from CMS watch has a very interesting point in the latest trend for competing with (by alternate CMS systems) SharePoint head on. Though at these times, the best bet for them is to move along.

"As any product gains in popularity, especially if it's seen as dominant, you tend to see more and more news about alternatives that inevitably get dubbed "killers." The news media and the product's competitors are continually trying to best the dominant solution and predict a product's demise. We can see this clearly with the iPhone and, as Seth Gottlieb pointed out, "who isn't working on a SharePoint killer?" But in many cases, these "killers" are only hopefuls with virtually no evidence they could harm a fly."

How to get Raw HTML from a Page : System.Net.WebResponse

2009-08-31T17:26:00.000+05:30

Retrieving a page's HTML can sometimes be necessary in applications. You could be filling columns for actual meta data of sites or may retrieving remote web sites for specific content. It's require very simple code to do all the stuff

// pass the site URL
string strHTML = Strip(Request(strWebURL + "/" + file.Url, "GET"));

//The Request Function
String Request(String uri, String verb)   {

   WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(uri);
   request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
   request.Method = verb;
   request.ContentLength = 0;
   WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
   if (response == null) return null;
   StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
   return reader.ReadToEnd().Trim();
   }

// The Strip function, to remove style, scripts & Html tags from the text

public string Strip(string text)
   {
   text = Regex.Replace(text, "", "", RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
   text = Regex.Replace(text, "", "", RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
   text = Regex.Replace(text, @"<(.|\n)*?>", string.Empty);
   text = text.Replace("\r\n\t", " ").Replace("\n", " ").Replace("\r", " ").Replace("\t", " ");
   return text;
   }

// That's All

Making Sense of the SharePoint 2010 Pie

2009-08-21T14:42:00.012+05:30

With so many blogs now on SharePoint, it has become more like a box of choclates, You never know what you're gonna get.

Mark bower in his article has explained the Sharepoint 2010 pie, here is a repost

"A new version of SharePoint gives us an updated SharePoint Pie. Like the SharePoint 2007 pie, SharePoint 2010 has six slices, most subtly renamed."

Collaboration becomes Communites

Renamed, perhaps to emphasize the intent to make SharePoint 2010 a more social experience.
Aim to empower people to work together in new ways through ad-hoc collaboration in communities of interest or in work-group communities

Content Management becomes simply Content

Does this imply a de-emphasis of SharePoint as a serious content management platform? I think not. I suspect this is a desire to move people away from traditional equation of content management to web content management, towards a broader view of content management…covering document management, records management as well as web content management.

Search stays as Search

What’s publicly known right now is inclusion of FAST technologies and improvements to people and line of business application search. At the top end of the market Microsoft is loosing out to the likes of Autonomy, and they’ll want to put the brakes on that.

Business Intelligence becomes Insights

The new name emphasises the business impact, rather than the technology function, which is powerful. Perhaps again, Microsoft is taking a broader view of this capability, thinking about getting insights in a more human way, through crowdsourcing or collaborative approaches, as well as simply through data crunching. Just speculating.

Business Process and Forms becomes Composities

Composite Applications being a more corporate-friendly word than mashups.
The idea once again I think is to broaden the category to include other user and developer tasks of creating custom business solutions through mashing together web parts, forms and processes.

Portal becomes Sites

This moves away from positioning SharePoint as an Intranet Portal product to being a product capable of serving as a intranet, extranet or Internet site

SharePoint Object Hierarchy: How it all fits together

2009-08-21T14:37:00.001+05:30

A very useful article by Martin Kearn about How objects in SharePoint relate to each other? It gives you a bird eye view of the country called SharePoint.

From the article:
"I often get asked to clarify how all of the objects in SharePoint relate to each. For example, people do not always understanding the differnence between a site collection and a site or how a web application and content database relate to each other.

To help out, I have produced this diagram which I think explains all of the main SharePoint objects and how they relate to each other. I did consider writing some kind of description to go with this, however I think it is better that I just do my best to answer any questions via the comments. If there are any re-occuring themes, I'll add to this article and try to explain them."

10 Things SharePoint Can Do for Your Firm

2009-07-31T17:18:00.003+05:30

By Mark Gerow

Special to Law.com

July 28, 2009

"I often find myself staring at Microsoft SharePoint and wondering how I can do more with it to enable a 21st century law firm; one in which attorneys, clients and staff can easily share ideas, expertise and information across time and distance. How can it be used to reduce costs while expanding the ways in which we collaborate?

In this article I'll suggest 10 ways you can use SharePoint today in your firm to improve attorney effectiveness, deliver better client service and reduce costs. This is not a "how to" but a "what now" article, written to answer that perennial question: "now what?" "

1: REPLACE YOUR DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

2. AUTOMATE NEW BUSINESS INTAKE

3. SEARCH ACROSS ALL YOUR SYSTEMS

4. ENCOURAGE 'COMMUNITIES OF INTEREST' USING 'MY SITES'

5. CREATE A FIRMWIDE CALENDAR

6. CREATE A PRACTICE GROUP WIKI

7. COLLABORATE WITH CLIENTS USING EXTRANETS

8. MANAGE PROJECTS

9. DISPLAY 'KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS'

10. CREATE A 'MASHUP'

How to programmatically determine customized pages in a site

2009-07-31T17:05:00.001+05:30

What happens when the need is to determine programmatically that a given page has been customized/ghosted or not?

We can use the "vti_hasdefaultcontent" property of the "SPFile" class to determine whether a file is customized or native.

SPFile file = SPContext.Current.Web.RootFolder.Files["default.aspx"];

bool IsCustomized = (bool)file.Properties["vti_hasdefaultcontent"];

SharePoint 2010 Technical Preview

2009-07-29T18:02:00.002+05:30

From SharePoint's team blog:
"Today, we’re announcing that SharePoint 2010 has reached the technical preview engineering milestone. The SharePoint team is running a limited, invitation only Technical Preview program. While we’re not sharing SharePoint 2010 details at this point, we did want to give our customers & partners a sneak peek at SharePoint 2010! We’re very excited about SharePoint 2010 and looking forward to the SharePoint Conference this October where we’ll talk about all the investment areas across workloads and the platform. What we’re sharing today is just a fraction of what will be in SharePoint 2010!"
More here...