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1/26/2010

SharePoint 2010 - The local-only collaboration tool?

Here's a funny SharePoint 2010 observation.

Install SharePoint 2010. You know, the business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Web.

Create your team site, and examine the picture that is on that site.

For your comfort, here it is.

People, collaborating... Cool! Looking all enabled and such.

Around a single laptop.... !

WTF? haha.

Now I am wondering. Is that the Enterprise part? Because it sure ain't web!

Happy SharePointing!

Posted at 11:10 AM by Wouter van Vugt | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/18/2010

Announcement: CKS: Development Tools Edition is born

Recently my little pet project SharePoint Dev Tools saw the light of day when I hit the rounded Publish button on CodePlex. Born out of interest in the Visual Studio extensibiltiy model for SharePoint projects and a hefty addiction to writing tools, especially for the platform that I invest so much of my time in.

Well, it was awesome to learn that there are more likeminded people out there also creating amazing tools on top of Visual Studio 2010. Check out Waldek with his Imtech extensions, and be sure to visit the SPVSX project with Matt, Wesley and Todd.

So, in order not to polute the community with a large amount of small tools, we decided that it would be for the good of us developers if we create a small amount of tools with large amounts of features. #CKSDEV is the result! The merger of all the existing tools into one neat package.

The Community Kit for SharePoint - Development Tools Edition is building on the popular set of CKS tools. This time focusing on the development experience and not on the solutions themselves (e.g. we don't deploy anything in production). We hope to provide the one toolkit that we'll all use and benefit from. Thus ensuring a streamlined development experience wherever there is SharePoint (and there is lots of SharePoint right? :) We are planning an alpha release early February. Be sure to check it out as soon as it is there!

Posted at 2:04 PM by Wouter van Vugt | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/16/2010

Update: Some new topics for the SPC 2010 Post Conf

It seems there is some overlap between some of the talks on the SPC 2010 event next week and the post conference I'll be delivering there. So, in order to allow you to learn about as many facets of SharePoint 2010 as possible I thought I'd swap out two of the topics I was going to cover.

So, instead of Office Service Apps and BCS, I'll cover two topics that everyone needs. The first new topic might just revolve around a big announcement to be made tomorrow. The next one is a personal favorite: building Ribbon components. Got some amazing demos lines up! Hope to see you there! Note that you'll be able to go to the original topics during the regular event, so you will definitely not miss out (I hear there is going to be some recording done…!)

Posted at 10:44 PM by Wouter van Vugt | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/13/2010

Upcoming Conferences

The next few months will be filled with many great conferences to look forward to. Some SharePoint specific and others more general, but I think for all of them SharePoint 2010 will take the main stage!

First is the SharePoint Connections event in Amsterdam on the 18^th and 19^th of January. For more information visit the conference website at http://www.devconnections.com/SPEurope/. I'll be giving a few SharePoint development sessions and also a full day post conference! Exciting stuff, mash-ups with Excel and Visio, advanced Silverlight integration and more! Got an awesome demo going with Bing Map integration into List Forms. F5-baby!

Next up in February is a SharePoint 2010 Virtual Conference. Dates are still to be decided, so I'll keep you up to date! No VR Goggles required, but who knows, it might provide you with an unprecedented experience to use them anyway!

After the virtual conference is another physical one, namely the SharePoint and Office Conference in Italy. This conference is held the 9^th of March through the 11^thin Milan. Find more information on the conference website at http://www.sharepointconference.it. I will be giving three development sessions on a variety of topics. Workflow for one!

March is month for the DevDays in the Netherlands, which this year is joined with the Belgian tech days. Lots of fun topics at this event, of course broader in scope than SharePoint 2010, but hey, any developer should be a SharePoint developer right? For more information visit either http://www.devdays.nl/ or http://www.microsoft.com/belux/techdays/2010/, or perhaps…both! J

Next is April with a non-European event. I'll be visiting Montreal for the SharePoint Summit 2010. Visit the following website for more information: http://sharepointsummit2010.com/overview.htm.

Hope to meet you at any, if not all, of these events!

Happy coding!

Posted at 9:30 PM by Wouter van Vugt | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/5/2010

SharePoint Dev Tools Beta 1 Released!

I was one of the lucky few that had a very early opportunity to meet with the product team that builds the SharePoint project system in Visual Studio 2010. One can only be impressed with the work that was done to enable SharePoint developers more than any other tool currently in use. I was happy to learn that the SharePoint development environment was built around the core concept of extensibility. Meaning you are able to bridge any gaps and tune the environment to your needs. Great stuff!

Since then I have been spending my evenings building the toolset that will further enable SharePoint developers world-wide. With added features to discover SharePoint content using the new SharePoint Explorer, new and exciting templates that make it easy to author solutions and many enhancements to the deployment of your solution into your testing environment.

May I present the SharePoint Dev Tools. Version beta 1 is ready for your approval. And I believe it will exceed your expectation! Some of the exciting features that you find within this advanced toolset are summed up below. You can go over to the project site and download the beta.

One of the first areas that has been extended is deployment. Out of the box Visual Studio 2010 is capable of retracting / redeploying your solution packages. The DevTools provide X-Copy deployment and solution upgrades on top of that. Along with many other deployment steps you have the tools you need to lower the round-trip time for small changes in your codebase. Go to the site and check out the video!

Next are some of the very exciting templates that you can use. One that I am particularly happy with is the Sandboxed Visual Web Part. This template allows you full visual design of a Web Part, while allowing it to be deployed into the solution sandbox (which does not allow ASCX files to be deployed). With SharePoint Dev Tools you can, and in a totally supported way! Also don't forget the Linq To SharePoint integrated template. Just change one XML file and get your proxies regenerated immediately. No need to leave your comfort zone. Think of it as an Office Business Application for SharePoint Developers, and SDBA J.

Finally there are numerous enhancements to the Visual Studio environment. For instance, you can find the SharePoint tab on the Add Reference dialog. Prime Visual Studio real-estate! Here's a screenshot:

As you can understand there is way too much to talk about for this single blog post. So much more good stuff to build! For now, please download and let me know anything that you find should be added. Or even better, join up with the project and add features yourself. I intend for this project to be the only toolset that SharePoint developers install outside of Visual Studio 2010. You can help make it just that!

Hope it helps!

Posted at 5:26 PM by Wouter van Vugt | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/23/2009

Managing your SharePoint Solution store

Typically after doing a training class my solution store is a true disaster area. It's best to board it up, cover it with a pile of dirt and restart from scratch by paving over my machine. Ok, I reinstall a backup. I do not really bury my laptop under tons of dirt (perhaps that would be fun when the laptop goes out of date).

Typically my solution store resembles this nightmare, but then counting up to SharePointProject6.12²³

In SharePoint 2007 I would typically do X-Copy based installation, meaning it's hard to clean up after yourself. In Visual Studio 2010 you only install solution packages, which can be retracted, returning your SharePoint dev install into a state of tranquility. It is however a big pain to manually retract / remove solutions. There is this thing called PowerShell which seemingly allows you to do this in a more easy way. I present version 0.1 of my "clean up after yourself" script. Perhaps not quite perfect yet since I only spent five minutes on debugging it J

$spAdminServiceName = "SPAdminV4"
Stop-Service -Name $spAdminServiceName
$deployedSolutions = Get-SPSolution | Where-Object {$_.Deployed -eq $true}
if($deployedSolutions)
{
    foreach($solution in $deployedSolutions)
    {
        if($solution.ContainsWebApplicationResource)
        {
            $solution | Uninstall-SPSolution -AllWebApplications -Confirm:$false
        }
        else
        {
            $solution | Uninstall-SPSolution -Confirm:$false
        }
    }
}
Start-SPAdminJob
Get-SPSolution | Remove-SPSolution -Confirm:$false
Start-Service -Name $spAdminServiceName

Save this out to a .ps1 file and run it. Afterwards your solution store is nice and empty again, ready for another day's training.

Hope it helps to bring some tranquility to your SharePoint dev box!

Posted at 12:06 PM by Wouter van Vugt | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

Feature: Developer Dashboard Manager

Sample Code: http://blogs.code-counsel.net/Wouter/Downloads/Dashboard Manager - Source.zip
Installable Feature: http://blogs.code-counsel.net/Wouter/Downloads/Dashboard Manager - WSP.zip

One feature every developer loves, or will love, is the Developer Dashboard. It's obvious right? Earlier SharePoint developers were in the dark as to what is causing slow pages and now you can gain valuable insights out of the tracing information provided in the dash.

To enable the Developer Dashboard you can write a bit of code:

SPDeveloperDashboardSettings settings = SPWebService.ContentService.DeveloperDashboardSettings;

settings.DisplayLevel = SPDeveloperDashboardLevel.On;

settings.Update();

You do this either in a console app (hella-lame), in PowerShell (semi-lame and a bit ITPro-ish), or….

You create a feature of course!

Find the Developer Dashboard Manager feature attached. First it adds some navigation items to Central Admin under both the landing page and the System Settings page.

The navigation leads to a page where you can manage the enabled state of the Developer Dashboard.

Hope it helps! Personally I use this feature as a quick overview of the new Visual Studio 2010 tools.

Posted at 9:59 AM by Wouter van Vugt | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/16/2009

SharePoint Dev Tools - Sandboxed Visual Web Part Teaser

More developer goodies. Release time is near! This time I'd like to show the Sandboxed Visual Web Part. This template allows you to create web parts using visual designers while still retaining your ability to deploy your solution into the site collection solution gallery. Good stuff!

View the video on the following page

http://blogs.code-counsel.net/Wouter/SharePoint%20Dev%20Tools/Sandboxed%20Visual%20Web%20Part.aspx

Don't forget to check out the first video on the SP Metal Item Template!

http://blogs.code-counsel.net/Wouter/SharePoint%20Dev%20Tools/SPMetal%20Item%20Template.aspx

Posted at 9:31 PM by Wouter van Vugt | Category: SharePoint 2010 Features | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/15/2009

SharePoint Dev Tools - SP Metal Item Template Teaser

Recently I have been spending my free time building the coolest SharePoint Dev Tools know to humans, extraterestials and SharePoint developers. One key feature is the SP Metal Item template. Together with the Sandboxed Visual Web Part and the Advanced Deployment steps this brings out the big guns for SharePoint developers. Here's a teaser video for the SP Metal Item Template. Enjoy!

http://blogs.code-counsel.net/Wouter/SharePoint%20Dev%20Tools/SPMetal%20Item%20Template.aspx

Posted at 8:53 AM by Wouter van Vugt | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

11/20/2009

Demos from the SharePoint 2010 Ignite

As I promised in class today, find the demos that I showed during the SharePoint 2010 Ignite in Berlin in the downloads section.

Hope you enjoyed the week as much as I did!

Here's a small overview of what you can find:

- Deploying AppGlobal resources

- Custom Field Type with XSLT rendering

- Logging Linq to SharePoint calls

- using SPMonitoredScope with the developer dashboard

- Upgrading content types

- Integrating with notifications and status bar

- (Very) Simple search web part

- Querying for SPFeature versions

- Using Excel REST / Word Automation to convert documents

- Synchronous events

- V3 custom actions in the Ribbon

Hope it helps!

Posted at 2:39 PM by Wouter van Vugt | Category: SharePoint 2010 Features; SharePoint; Event | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

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