SharePoint

TechEd Day 1

Patrick Tisseghem — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 11:56:00 GMT

Yesterday, Ted and I delivered the pre-conference workshop on building solutions with Windows SharePoint Services v3. Hopefully, people who attended the 5 hour session went away with a filled bag of new knowledge and experienced the true power of WSS as a solutions platform. Because that was all we talked about... building, integrating, customizing, branding... all of the stuff developers can do with WSS v3.

And of course, we had a little party afterwards. The first one this week, tasting the local absente in a couple of bars. Really powerful stuff!

SharePoint Manager 2007

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 06:59:00 GMT

Carsten Keutmann is posting about a new tool he has created - the SharePoint Manager 2007. Of course a useful tool, but where have I seen this before? Lars :)?

New Office Online Site

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 06:45:00 GMT

I really like the way they have redesigned the Office Online site. Very very cool.

CAML Boy and CAML Girl - Building tools to support designing CAML Queries

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 05:45:00 GMT

CAML! A lot of people hate it, but there are some people who love it (including myself). Creating CAML queries is often a challenge though and now we have two tools that can support you when you are in need to construct these CAML queries. Remember that for developers building custom solutions (like Web Parts) that work with data in lists and document libraries, executing CAML queries are still the best way to do it. And definitely now with the powerful SPSiteDataQuery class for doing cross-site queries and building roll-up Web Parts. So, if you need help, you have now the CAML Builder created by our U2U CAML Girl and Renaud Comte has published a few days ago his version of a CAML Builder. Nice work Renaud and you should definitely meet the CAML girl at TechEd in Barcelona so you two can have some CAML talk :)

BIWUG Meeting: Records Management

Patrick Tisseghem — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 06:58:00 GMT

The new year has started also for the Belgian Information Worker User Group (BIWUG). Next Tuesday, there is a first evening meeting with the central theme 'Records Management'. Feel free to drop by, attendance is free.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006 from 18:00 - 20:30

location:
DigiPoint Oudenaarde
Meersbloem-Melden 46 B4
B - 9700 Oudenaarde
Route description

Topic: Records Management

Records management is often very important for companies that want coverage of the full document life cycle. The Windows SharePoint Services v3 and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 introduces major innovations to support this now. We are moving definitely to an integrated enterprise content management platform with SharePoint. The goal of the session is to discuss this, see some demos and presentations and hopefully we can get a partner such as Meridio to demonstrate their products.

Agenda:

18:00 – 18:30      Welcome and Introduction
18:30 – 19:00      Community Briefing
19:00 – 19:15      Break
19:15 – 19:45      Overview Records Management with MOSS 2007
19:45 – 20:45      Demonstration Meridio Products
20:45 – 21:00      Closing Note

Hectic week

Patrick Tisseghem — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 09:35:00 GMT

It has been a very busy week for me and probably for all of you interested in keeping up with the forthcoming releases of the new Microsoft information worker products. Beta 2 technical refresh is out and the best place to get you started is the SharePoint team blog. Note that you SHOULD read the documentation before you actually start playing with the bits. A lot of MVPs have worked hard the last couple of weeks to get you transitioned as smoothly as possible. Thanks all!

Me, I was in Instanbul (Turkey) for the whole week starting the EMEA MOSS 2007 sales enablement tour. It is always an interesting experience to look at the 2007 Microsoft Office System from another angle than the developer/technical one. It reminds me that although us developers and geeks can be so enthousiastic about the new version as we possibly can be, the stuff still needs to be sold to customers. Now, for that last, I think it is going to work out much better than the previous version. I saw a lot of scepticism from the sales/business folks with the previous version and the previous tour. There still is, but I start to see the same twinkles in the eyes of the participants of my sales sessions as with the developers in my workshops. For me that is a good sign :) Twinkles are good in the eyes of sales people :) They mean dollars/euros and lots of work for the dev guys!

Anyway, Istanbul is probably one the most hectic cities in Europe. Driving in a taxi is like being in an game except that in a game you smash the pedestrians. In Istanbul you horn as a driver very loudly and they seem to be able to jump out of the way just in time. Overall though it was an excellent experience and I want to thank all of you for the participation and hope you will have a lot of SharePoint opportunities the next couple of years (sure of it!). Thanks also to Onur from Microsoft Turkey for the nice demo on how Enterprise Search works live on the Microsoft intranet.

Next week...Russia!

Another session at TechEd Europe

Patrick Tisseghem — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 18:01:00 GMT

Boy! TechEd is normally a week of relaxing and lots of social activities in the evenings. This time however I will have to be very careful what I will do and keep in shape during the day because in addition to the pre-conference workshop together with Ted and the two sessions on Web Content Management in MOSS 2007, I am scheduled for a third one. Luckily I am doing this with my buddy Jan Tielens so I will let him do most of the work :). We are delivering, what will be a quite exciting session to attend I think, titled 'Building Web Parts the Smart Way'. I have delivered this presentation a number of times in the US and got a lot of positive feedback on it. It is an honour to deliver the session with Mr. Smart Part himself. Here is the abstract and yesterday we brainstormed already on the cool demos we are planning to give :)

Building Web Parts the Smart Way

In this session, Web developers will get a wide but deep overview of Web Part development. You will first see how WSS v2 style Web Parts can be upgraded and deployed to a WSS v3 environment. Next, you'll learn about the Smart Part and the Son of the Smart Part providing an alternative but very productive way of creating Web Parts. You will see more than the usual Smart Part demos with a lot of tips and tricks to benefit the most from the Smart Part. ASP.NET 2.0 introduces its own Web Part infrastructure and you will get a quick overview of the essential steps of building ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts. Guess what? WSS v3 utilizes the same Web Part infrastructure so all of your work can be re-used in WSS v3. But there are some pitfalls that will be discussed and you will see some demonstrations of scenarios where you are forced to choose for building Web Parts the WSS v2 style. Next, you will learn about what the combination WSS Features and Web Parts can do for you and the session concludes with the announcement and demonstration of the latest version of the Smart Part, appropriately called by Mike Fitzmaurice as the 'Return of the Smart Part'.

Level 300

Btw, if you are interested and live in Belgium, you can book a TechEd package (including flight and hotel) for a nice price on our U2U site. Check it out!

Application Development on MOSS 2007

Patrick Tisseghem — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 14:25:00 GMT

Chris Johnson has a nice overview of the various options you have to build applications in MOSS 2007 (better would be WSS v3). Great to see that the Smart Part is one of them .

Sample solution: Authoring Features and Web Parts in VS.NET 2005

Patrick Tisseghem — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 14:12:00 GMT

Last week at the SharePoint Advisor Summit in Phoenix, Tony Bierman showed off a couple of great examples for authoring features and Web Parts using VS.NET 2005. He has posted the slides and the sample solution on the SharePoint Solutions blog. Great work Tony.

Specifically, the solution illustrates:

Creating and deploying a WSS Solution
Using makecab.exe and directive files (DDF) to create WSS Solutions distributable
Using MSBuild scripts to iteratively develop and deploy WSS Solutions from Visual Studio
Declaring WSS Features including:
- ContentType
- ContentTypeBinding
- Control
- Field
- CustomAction
- CustomActionGroup
- Module
- ListTemplate
- ListInstance
- Receivers
- Workflow
Programattically associating a workflow with a WSS v3 List

Controlling ASP.NET 2.0 web part serialization through the use of type converters
Creating and associating custom EditorParts with ASP.NET 2.0 web parts
Dynamically loading user controls into a web part from the WSS v3 Control Templates (_controltemplates) path at runtime
Associating the SPDataSource object with a WSS v3 List
Binding a WSS v3 List to the SPGridView
Binding the SPTreeView to a hierarchical data source
Using the SPSiteDataQuery object for cross-site queries of WSS v3 Lists
Implementing Web Part connections in ASP.NET 2.0

Round-Up Day 3 SharePoint Advisor Summit

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 16:52:00 GMT

Yesterday was the final day of the SharePoint Advisor Summit here in Phoenix. I delivered a session on one of my favorite topics in the next version of WSS, namely event handlers. They are an extremely powerful way of extending SharePoint. Next, I went to a talk by Bill English on the Shared Service Provider (SSP). SSP's are engines delivered with MOSS 2007 that can provide services within your server farm (index, search, user profiles, business data catalog, ...).

In the evening, the left-over SharePoint geeks (Dustin Miller, Todd Bleeker, Tony Bierman, Todd Baginski, Darrin Bishop and of course me) went out for a nice dinner (tx Dustin :)) and a couple of beers. Todd Baginski told me he is working very hard on a new version of his BDCManager. Really looking forward to that one!

One final note, thanks to all of the attendees, I again enjoyed the whole gig. And also thanks to the Advisor team for inviting me. Hope to see you next year again.