April 2007 Blog Posts
Over on the SharePoint Team Blog, Lawrence has announced the availability of the WSS 3.0 for Hosters Solution Kit. Go check it out!
Microsoft has released the April 2007 Cumulative Update for Media Center for Windows Vista. This update contains several improvements, and it resolves several issues. This cumulative update is intended for computers that are running Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932818
As I hope you are all aware, WSS Solution Packages (WSPs) are the solution to world hunger. Well not quite, but these CAB files on PCP are the way to package and install SharePoint custom code. If I was an American, I'd say that they "rock!".
Despite the numerous benefits they offer, they are still a little esoteric in so much as a command line is needed to add them to the Solution Store. Once they are there, you can use Central Administration to deploy the solutions to your Web Applications. Lars has his Solution Installer, a very nifty solution (no pun intended) for...
Not unsurprisingly it is very straightforward to build an Office SharePoint Server Field Control for Silverlight (previously known as “WPF/E”) content, or so you would think…
We can simply take the same approach as detailed in the SDK article, How to: Create a Custom Field Control, which renders a Windows Media Player control during presentation, and makes use of the Asset Picker when in Edit mode.
For a Silverlight Field Control, we just need to alter the MediaPlayerHtmlMarkupFormat constant, to include the block of JavaScript needed to load Silverlight content, rather than the Object HTML element needed by Media Player:
However, for anything...
Tech·Ed, this year, June 4th to 8th, is in Orlando and there will be a number of breakouts and labs of interest to those working with the Web Content Management features (a.k.a Publishing Sites) of Office SharePoint Server. Of course SharePoint in general will be all over Tech·Ed this year - with over 97 sessions, never mind all of the associated technology sessions, and a ton of community experts and events. This post simply highlights some pertinent to WCM professionals: First up, Arpan Shah will provide an overview of the core feature set, including details on the page processing model and...
Blimey! I hacked out a little utility a week or so back and surprisingly it's turned out to be rather popular. According to my web trends, there's been over 600 downloads of the thing, now obviously I have no idea how many people immediately deleted it, but that's a pretty amazing number. Four individuals have shown significant interest and requested tweaks or new capabilities directly. In addition, I noticed a fundamental flaw in the the original "design" whereby the app pools were only enumerated on start-up. This was obviously rubbish - should you delete or create app pools either with inetmgr or SharePoint Central...
SharePoint Solutions are the first to hit the street with something many folk are building, tools for configuring Forms Based Auth for SharePoint 2007. I haven't tried this yet so I neither recommend this nor pour scorn upon it! Jeff Cate, however is a allround solid dude, so it surely must be decent. I will post back more once I've given it a go. Link to SharePoint Solutions Blog: Released: Free Utility Quickly and Easily Configures Forms Based Authentication for SharePoint
Due to popular demand (well AC anyways - that's popular in my book) I've updated my Application Pool Widget to include: IIS ResetPost Event "Warm Ups"Event Notifications These were pretty simple to implement, but I couldn't figure out an easy/quick way to make it work from a keyboard shortcut, if anyone knows how to do this (without using a third party control) please leave me a comment. Get it from here: Application Pool Recycle Utility for SharePoint Developers.
System Center Operations Manager 2007 offers many new and significantly enhanced features for providing operational service management of your SharePoint farms. Of note are the vastly improved deployment, reporting enhancements and PowerShell integration. In addition Audit Collection Services has finally shipped in this release after nearly three years of promises. While Operations Manager 2007 is an essential part of your SharePoint infrastructure, it doesn't ship with Management Packs for SharePoint 2007 and this version also introduces a new Management Pack file format. This means the Management Packs for SharePoint 2007 (released in January) are not compatible and require conversion to the...
[Update 9th April 2007] A new build with new features is available at Application Pool Recycle Utility for SharePoint Developers. If you are doing any substantial SharePoint development, chances are you are using iisapp.vbs to recycle your application pools. This script, introduced with W2K3 SP1, does a bunch of useful stuff and you've probably got a shortcut to it configured with the name of your app pool. If you don't know about this, recycling the app pool, rather than doing an IISRESET is much quicker and often times is all you need. I'm not saying you don't sometimes...
So, at the weekend I posted about shell additions and wot not, and I made a mess of it by calling Start++ "slow and crappy". It isn't. It's not much of an excuse, but I was actually talking about Expose and got the names mixed up - Expose is a dodgy shell addon that mimicks some Macism or other. It's slow and crappy cos it uses a ton of resources and doesn't do anything useful especially if you have a decent microsoft mouse. which gives you non sucky tiled windows in Vista, when you click the scroll wheel. So just...
The SharePoint Configuration Wizard (and Central Admin) does a decent job of ensuring the neccessary privileges are applied to various users and resources, but one slipped through the 'net. You know the one - it's that pesky DCOM 10016 which will fill up your System Log with noise everytime your application pool spins up. Now it just so happens that the error doesn't actually matter a stuff and won't break anything, other than your sysadmin's patience and respect for SharePoint! It's especially annoying if you are running Operations Manager or a Managed Security Auditing system which will bleet when this...
Licensing for Office SharePoint Server is widely seen as pretty confusing, especially when figuring the "for Internet Sites" edition into the equation. Now in general these things are best left to your Microsoft Account Manager or a Licensing Specialist - top tip - don't trust the "specialist" at the reseller if you are on a volume licence deal!!
Anyways - the links that Cornelius (a SharePoint MVP) recently posted are considered the authorative info, check these before those random "let me explain MOSS licensing" posts you may find (like this one :)):
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX101865111033.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX102176831033.aspx (US List Prices)
http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=XT102011901033&CTT=5&Origin=HA1019780331033 (an XLS which is handy)
But wait,...
SharePoint developer extraordinaire, Andrew Connell is working on a monster custom command for SharePoint's STSADM utility. I've been beavering away trying to input something useful into AC's test phase and I am lost for words to describe it's uber-functionality. I have no idea how he'll finally decide on a name. If you are working with SharePoint you need this command, so head on over to his blog and keep your eyes peeled for his next post.