MSDN Live Meeting - FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint: a developers walkthrough

I will be presenting a MSDN live meeting on the 24th of May around at 14:00 (GMT+1) around FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint from a developers perspective.

Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint extends the SharePoint search functionality and provides an exceptional search experience by incorporating features such as an extensible content processing pipeline, contextual search, extensible
relevance models and an advanced query language.

This session will introduce the FAST search platform from a developer's perspective and will explore the different functionalities as well as talk about common developer tasks around Fast Search 2010 for SharePoint 2010 such as:
-     Configuration and extension of the FAST search webparts
-     Extending the content processing pipeline
-     Building search applications using the SharePoint object model combined with the capabilities of the FAST Query Language (FQL).

Click here to register for this MSDN Live Meeting.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SPS2010,SharePoint+Server+2010,Search,FAST+Search+Server,FAST,MSDN,development

ECM Maturity Model and SharePoint

If you don’t know the ECM Maturity Model – definitely take a look at http://ecm3.org/about/ – they are currently at version 2.0. The ECM Maturity Model provides a framework for creating a roadmap in the context of an overall ECM strategy. It categorizes an organization across 13 maturity dimensions into one of the 5 levels of ECM maturity:

• Unmanaged
• Incipient
• Formative
• Operational
• Pro-active

I’m wondering if anyone has already applied this model to a typical SharePoint implementation. Please leave a comment if you have.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint+2010,ECM,maturity+model,roadmap

Windows Phone Developer Tools January 2011 Update

Just finished installing the Windows Phone Developer Tools January 2011 update. Now off to finalize my WP7 app. Expect more news about this in the coming weeks.

Technorati Tags: windows+phone+7,wp7dev,visualstudio2010,development,microsoft

How to get SharePoint 2010 people search to work together with FAST Search 2010

If you install FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint you will notice that you get some extra service applications – a FAST Query Search Service Application and a FAST Content Search Service Application. The people search is actually handled by the FAST Query Search Service Application – so this is where you need to do some extra configurations:

• Go to Central Admin and click Manage Service Applications > Select the FAST Query Search Service App and click Manage in the Ribbon)
• Create a new crawl rule:
• Path http://[servername];sps3://[servername]
• Crawl configuration : Include all items in this path - crawl SharePoint content as http pages
• Specify authentication: Use the default content access account
• Content sources - Make sure that both http://[servername] and sps3://[servername] are listed in the content source listing.
• Configure security on the User Profile Service Application. Go to Central Admin and click Manage Service Applications > Select the User Profile Service Application and click Administrators in the ribbon. Make sure that you add the default content access account in this screen and give it at least permission to "Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers".

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint+2010,sharepoint,fast,fast+search+2010,search,microsoft

Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on a single box demo environment–the Excel file is corrupt using edit in Excel

A typical SharePoint 2010 demo environment has everything installed on a single machine (Office 2010, SharePoint, etc…). Unfortunately this has some side effects – one of the things you might encounter is the fact that it seems that Excel integration does not work correctly anymore. Every time I uploaded an Excel document to SharePoint 2010 and tried opening it using the Edit in Excel option – I got an error stating that the file was corrupt.

Luckily I knew this had something to do with theTrust Center settings. Go to File Options > Trust Center. Next click the Trust Center Settings button. On the new screen which popups – go to Protected View and unselect all the three protected view options displayed on the top of this settings page.

Close Excel and try the “Edit in Excel” option again …

Related post: Getting Office 2010 to work on a single box SharePoint 2010 demo environment

Tags van Technorati: office+2010,excel,sharepoint+2010,sharepoint,office,sps2010,microsoft,trust+center

Installing client side TFS certificate on Windows 7

Apparently with Windows 7 you can’t simply use the wizard to import the client certificates for Team Foundation Server connections. You will need to do this manually.

Open Internet Explorer and go to Internet Options. Select Content and next the Certificates tab. Select Trusted Root Certification authorities when importing the certificate.

Tags van Technorati: windows+7,development,microsoft,visual+studio,TFS,team+foundation+server

Search suggestions in SharePoint 2010

One of the new features for end users with SharePoint 2010 is that suggestions are provided while you are typing a search query - for a complete list of enhancements - check out – What’s new in Enterprise search(SharePoint Server 2010) . Now if you want to force these suggestions for demo scenario’s you can use some powershell scripts – the next code sample is meant to be used in a setup with Fast Search 2010:

$SearchApp = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication "FAST Query SSA"
New-SPEnterpriseSearchLanguageResourcePhrase -SearchApplication $SearchApp -Language En-Us -Type QuerySuggestionAlwaysSuggest -Name "SharePoint"
New-SPEnterpriseSearchLanguageResourcePhrase -SearchApplication $SearchApp -Language En-Us -Type QuerySuggestionAlwaysSuggest -Name "SharePoint Server 2010"
Start-SPTimerJob -Identity "Prepare Query Suggestions"

Technorati Tags: sharepoint+2010,sps2010,fast,search,enterprise+search,microsoft,sharepoint

Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge Management NextGen and digital marketing

One of my predictions for 2011 is that we will finally witness the boom or bust of social media apps within the enterprise for the Belux market. Here’s some background info that might get you thinking

• Second wave smart working : what role HRM?
• Collaboration by Design
• Knowledge management is not just information delivery and just in time is not enough
• Social Media is dead – Long live common sense 
• Social media in product management

This is one of my pet peeves  about which I have written a couple of blog posts:

• Enterprise 2.0 and organizational culture
• Knowledge and talent in a people ready business
• Knowledge is power! So why share your knowledge?
• SharePoint and Web 2.0
• The value in social networks
• Colleagues, Social Distance & Relevance in People Search, and other Social Networking tools in SharePoint

Technorati Tags: knowledge+management,enterprise2.0,social+apps,digital+marketing

Web Content Management in SharePoint 2010 – some random links

Mental reminder – check out this collection of links about Web Content Management in SharePoint 2010

• Introducing web content management in SharePoint 2010
• Introducing web analytics in SharePoint 2010
• Accessibility and SharePoint 2010 
• Web Authoring in SharePoint 2010
• How to apply corporate branding (themes) to all SharePoint 2010 team sites
• Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010 – Insights into reports 
• View changes makes in-browser content localization easier
• What’s new with the content query web part 

Technorati Tags: sharepoint+2010,sps2010,sharepoint,wcm,development

Porting oAuth with Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 to RTM version

Recently I stumbled upon this interesting blog post Windows Phone 7 with Twitter which showed how to use oAuth on Windows Phone 7 but it was unfortunately built with the beta versions of Windows Phone 7. As an exercise I decided to upgrade the code to get it to work with the RTM release.

Some things which needed fixing or which bugged me during the upgrade

You will need to remove references to Microsoft.Phone.Controls, Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Navigation, Microsoft.Phone.Controls.WebBrowser, Microsoft.Controls.WebBrowser.interop. Don’t forget to to change the namespace declarations in the XAML files as well.

Add a reference to Microsoft.Phone assembly – all the previous dll’s have been combined into one dll.

Be carefull about some changes in the APIs - WebBrowser is now a sealed class. You cannot inherit from it. IsScriptEnabled, Source, and Base are now dependency properties. NavigatedEventArgs change to NavigationEventArgs.

Changes have been made to WMAppManifest.xml - http://10rem.net/blog/2010/09/16/announcing-the-windows-phone-7-release-wp7-silverlight-toolkit-and-xna-40 – you can find this xml underneath the properties folder in your project

This will probably get you going … have fun

Technorati Tags: windows+phone+7,wp7dev,microsoft,development,visualstudio2010

Tips to get the Social sample for SharePoint 2010 to work

There’s an interesting code sample that you can download from MSDN called SharePoint to LinkedIn Connector which is part of the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SDK. Here’s a number of extra steps that I took to get it to work on my SharePoint 2010 dev box.

Some tips:

• I needed to add a reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.dll assembly – you can find it underneath C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\CONFIG\ADMINBIN.
• It has a hard coded reference to http://mysite in the feature activated event receiver – don’t forget to change that.
• During deployment I got an error stating - “No User Profile Application available to service the request. Contact your farm administrator.” – thankfully Steve to the rescue – “No User Profile Application Available Mystery” in SharePoint 2010

After that everything worked smoothly.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint+2010,linkedin,socialdata,microsoft,sharepoint,sps2010,development,sharepoint+sdk

Code profiler for Windows Phone 7

EQATEC  has recently release comes a code-profiler that can profile your WP7 Silverlight app on real phone hardware, as well as on the emulator. The profiler is free for single-assembly applications. You can download it now from www.eqatec.com.

For more info check out Channel 9 – World’s first profiler for Windows Phone 7 or the Eqatec  profiler website.

 

Technorati Tags: Development,visualstudio2010,vs2010,c#,windows+phone+7,wp7,wp7dev,microsoft

Crop the webbrowser control in a Windows Phone 7 app

When building my Windows Phone 7 app – I needed to login into LinkedIn – unfortunately the login page of LinkedIn does not seem to scale as well as the Twitter login page so I decided to only show a specific part of the page within the WebBrowser control for Windows Phone. I kind of got it working by using the Clip property (for reference see How to: Crop an object (Silverlight))

<phone:WebBrowser HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 
Name="webBrowser1" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Height="466" Width="480" 
IsScriptEnabled="True"  Visibility="Collapsed">
 <phone:WebBrowser.Clip>
        <RectangleGeometry Rect="0,0,400,300" />
   </phone:WebBrowser.Clip>            
 </phone:WebBrowser>

Technorati Tags: wp7,wp7dev,windows+phone+7,development,vs2010,silverlight,visualstudio2010

Windows Phone 7–Solving the missing dll issue in Training Kit Lab–Using Pivot and Panorama controls

The lab Using Pivot And Panorama Controls seems to be missing file that supports the reference to the Syndication namespace - System.ServiceModel.Syndication.dll . You can copy that one over from the install directory of the Silverlight 3.0 SDK (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v3.0\Libraries\Client).  You can ignore the warning message when adding the dll – everything will work correctly.

Technorati Tags: windows+phone+7,wp7,wp7dev,silverlight

Slidedecks BIWUG on SPS2010 WCM and FAST Search 2010 available

Thanks to the people who showed up on the december 2th BIWUG session despite 600 km of traffic jams  - the slide decks are now available only:

• Building a public website with SharePoint Server 2010 – the VIB case
• Introduction to FAST Search Server 2010

Also thanks to Sven and Pieter for delivering their presentation.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sps+2010,biwug,community,microsoft,sharepoint+server+2010

Which business books influenced you?

A while ago I tagged – 36 best business books that influenced Microsoft leaders – here are the ones I read and definitely liked together with some extra books (the ones in bold come from the original list):

• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.)
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
• Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
• Founders at work : Stories of startup’s early days
• The singularity is near: when humans transcend biology
• The Black Swan : The impact of the Highly improbable
• The conversation manager
• The Long Tail: Why the future of business is selling more of less
• The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century
• The wisdom of crowds
• My organisation is a jungle
• Bill Gates – Business at the speed of thought
• Who moved my cheese
• Giant Killers: thirty four cutting edge management strategies from the worlds leading tech companies
• Complexity: life at the edge of chaos
• Naked conversations: How blogs are changing the way business talk with customers

So which business books influenced you?

SharePoint Server 2010 Capacity Management– talking about software boundaries and limits

Some interesting stuff about software boundaries and limits in SharePoint Server 2010 – take a look at the table below. You should make a distinction between hard limits (which you simply should not exceed) and soft limits – which are a sort of recommendation.

Soft limits
	2007	2010
Content DB Size	100 GB	200 GB
File Size	2 GB	2 GB
DB’s per web app	100	300
Site collection size	100 GB	100 GB
List items per view	2000	5000
Application Pools	8 per web server	10 per web server
Managed Paths	20 per web app	20 per web app
Documents in a library		30 million with nesting. Depends heavily on usage and size of the documents
Indexed items in search	50 million	100 million

There is also a Technet article – SharePoint Server 2010 Capacity Management: Software Boundaries and limits – which provides some additional guidance – this also puts the numbers listed above a little more in perspective.

Content database sizes up to 1 terabyte are supported only for large, single-site repositories and archives with non-collaborative I/O and usage patterns, such as Records Centers. Larger database sizes are supported for these scenarios because their I/O patterns and typical data structure formats have been designed for, and tested at, larger scales.

For a full overview of the different white papers  - check out SharePoint Server 2010 performance and capacity test results and recommendations.

In general the new scale targets for 2010 go above and beyond the ones set in 2007 but design is still important although it becomes more difficult to bring a farm down by just putting millions of docs in one library – check out It looks like you’re building a large library. Would you like help? as well as Working with large lists in SharePoint 2010 – List Throttling .

Happy SharePoint-ing

 

Technorati Tags: sharepoint+2010,sharepoint,capacity+management,sps2010,sps+2010,microsoft,administration

BIWUG Session on SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search Server 2010 on December 1th

Agenda

18:00-18:30 Welcome with sandwich lunch

18:30-19:30 Building a public website with SharePoint Server 2010 – a practical case – www.vib.eu

19:30-19:45 Break

19:45-20:45 Introduction to FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010

Location: RealDolmen, Industriezone Zenneveld, Vaucampslaan 42, 1654 Huizingen, Belgium

Registration is now opened on the BIWUG site www.biwug.be

Technorati Tags: sharepoint+2010,sps2010,fast,enterprise+search,biwug,community,microsoft

SharePoint 2010–Training videos overview

SharePoint 2010 on Chopsticks Belux

• The SharePoint Client Object Model – Part 1 (Serge Luca, MSDN Chopsticks)
• The SharePoint Client Object Model – Part 2 (Serge Luca, MSDN Chopsticks)

SharePoint 2010 Connections event

• KEYNOTE: The Evolution of SharePoint from Two Pet Projects to a Multi-Company Ecosystem – Mike FitzMaurice
• MSC02: Overview of the SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform – Steve Fox
• MSC03: Social Computing Overview – Daniel McPherson, Robin Meure, Mark van Lunenburg
• MSC04: Web Content Management in SharePoint 2010 – Donald Hessing
• MSC05: Silverlight and SharePoint 2010 Better Together – Jan Tielens
• MSC06: Client Side Technologies in SharePoint 2010 – Jan Tielens
• MSC08: Server Free Solutions: Sandboxed and Client-Only Solutions for SharePoint 2010 – Daniel McPherson
• MSC09: FAST Search for SharePoint: Capabilities Deep Dive – Sam Hassani
• MSC11: SharePoint 2010 Search – Richard Taylor
• MSC16: SharePoint BI Overview – Mike Fitzmaurice
• MSC17: Upgrading Your 2007 Solution to 2010 – Mirjan van Olst, Serge van den Oever
• MSC18: Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010: Top 5 Great Things to Know! – Asif Rehmani
• MSC19: Overview: Creating Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2010, Infopath and Visio – Asif Rehmani
• MSC20: Creating Data-Centric Composite Applications Using SharePoint Designer 2010 – Asif Rehmani
• MSC21: What’s New in Office 2010? – Bart Wessels
• MSC24: Managing and Sharing Rich Media in SharePoint 2010 – Donald Hessing
• MSC26: Pex – Unit Testing of SharePoint Services that Rocks! – Peli de Halleux
• MSC27: Claims-Based Identity in SharePoint 2010 – Spencer Harbar
• MSC28: SharePoint 2010 Overview and What’s new for End Users – Matthijs Hoekstra
• MSC30: Advanced Web Part Development – Jan Tielens
• MSC31: SharePoint UI Customization – Marianne van Wanrooij
• MSC35: Integrating Workflows into Backend Systems using External Data Exchange Services – Wouter van Vugt
• MSC36: Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Tools Extensibility – Wouter van Vugt
• Creating Code-Free Mashups with InfoPath and SharePoint Web Parts

SharePoint 2010 Advanced developer training

• SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform
• SharePoint 2010 UI Features
• Visual Studio & SharePoint Tools Oveview 
• Business Connectivity Services
• REST and LINQ | SharePoint 2010

TechEd 2009 Videos

• SharePoint Admins, the Reluctant DBAs. Todd Klindt of Solanite Consulting and Shane Young of SharePoint 911 discuss SQL Server for SharePoint admins.
• Following Best Practices and Avoiding Common Errors with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Development. Eric Shupps, president of BinaryWave, presents proven methodologies and common API mistakes in SharePoint Server 2007 projects.
• Building High Performance Features and Solutions on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Andrew Connell of Critical Path Training demonstrates proven publishing strategies for SharePoint developers.

• Top Five Ways to Make Your End Users Heroes with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. Asif Rehmani of SharePoint-eLearning.com shows how to instill best practices for your company and users with SharePoint Designer 2007.

• Go Beyond with the Business Data Catalog. Todd Baginski, enterprise solution strategist at Advaiya Inc., provides a series of demos using BDC runtime APIs and custom Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services in Silverlight applications.

• Social Networking and User Profiles for Business. Matthew McDermott, MVP with Catapult Systems Inc., explains social networking profile integration in SharePoint.

• Saving the World, One Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Deployment at a Time: Backup and Disaster Recovery. Todd Klindt of Solanite Consulting, and Shane Young of SharePoint 911 discuss data protection and recoverability in SharePoint Server 2007.

• Automate Business Processes Using InfoPath Forms with Integrated SharePoint Designer Workflows... All without Coding! Asif Rehmani, of SharePoint-eLearning.com, provides a deep dive into Office SharePoint Designer workflows, which let ordinary business users build and validate complex data-driven forms in InfoPath.

• An Introduction to SharePoint Applications using InfoPath 2010
• Building SharePoint Applications with InfoPath 2010
• Form-Driven Mashups using InfoPath and SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 – Visual How to’s

• Visual How To: Creating SharePoint 2010 List Definitions in Visual Studio 2010
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg276355.aspx
• Visual How-to Video: Creating SharePoint 2010 List Definitions in Visual Studio 2010
  http://www.microsoft.com/resources/msdn/en-us/office/media/video/sharepoint.html?uuid=5dc5a521-3451-4445-a829-ad5a9339642c&from=mscomsharepoint
• Visual How-to Sample: Creating SharePoint 2010 List Definitions in Visual Studio 2010
  http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=odcsp14h2&ReleaseId=5007
• Visual How To: Creating SharePoint 2010 Site Definitions in Visual Studio 2010
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg276356.aspx
• Visual How-to Video: Creating SharePoint 2010 Site Definitions in Visual Studio 2010
  http://www.microsoft.com/resources/msdn/en-us/office/media/video/sharepoint.html?uuid=efdb4d4d-1201-4a29-aa31-f63bfa1434b0&from=mscomsharepoint
• Visual How-to Sample: Creating SharePoint 2010 Site Definitions in Visual Studio 2010
  http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/odcsp14h2/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=5008
• Visual How To: Adding SharePoint Project Items to SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg241249.aspx
• Visual How-To Video: Adding SharePoint Project Items with Visual Studio 2010
  http://www.microsoft.com/resources/msdn/en-us/office/media/video/sharepoint.html?uuid=21665af4-e7fc-4574-b9f3-9d5a08fd22c5&from=mscomsharepoint
• Visual How-To: Creating Custom Extensions for SharePoint 2010 Development Tools in Visual Studio 2010
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg241221.aspx
• Visual How-To Video: Creating Custom Extensions for SharePoint 2010 Development Tools in Visual Studio 2010
  http://www.microsoft.com/resources/msdn/en-us/office/media/video/sharepoint.html?uuid=d8c70185-6fb2-4b64-b696-921a58a575d9&from=mscomsharepoint

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sps+2010,training+material,training,microsoft,videos,community

Big Bang Theory and Information Management videos

• Big Bang Theory and Information Management Part 1 – Introduction
• Big Bang Theory and Information Management Part 2 – The Facebook Dilemma
• Big Bang Theory and Information Management Part 3 – The mobile exigency
• Big Bang Theory and Information Management Part 4 – The SharePoint Paradox
• Big Bang Theory and Information Management Part 5 – The shutterfly effect
• Big Bang Theory and Information Management Part 6 – The black swan

MVP for another year

About a month ago I found out that I have been renewed as SharePoint Server MVP. For people who don’t know what a MVP is– here’s Microsoft’s definition:

“This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Services technical communities during the past year.”

I became an MVP in 2005 and have been working with the Belgian SharePoint community ever since – it has been a great experience and I look forward to the next year.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint+2010,community,mvp,sps+2010

Rational Guide to Multi tenancy in SharePoint 2010

Spence has an interesting series of articles about multi tenancy in SharePoint 2010 – a must read

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Planning your deployment
• 3. Example scenario and what multi tenancy brings to the party
• 4. Configuring the base infrastructure
• 5. Configuring Partitioned Service Applications
• 6. Provisioning Tenants

Technorati Tags: sps2010,sharepoint+2010,multi+tenancy,administration,sharepoint,microsoft

Quick Tip–Accessing guest from host with VMWare Workstation

Most SharePoint 2010 developers probably use VMWare workstation (or Virtualbox). But what if you needed to access your SharePoint 2010 environment running in a VM from your host environment? I actually needed this to write a Windows Phone 7 app for SharePoint Server 2010 and since I can’t install the Windows Phone Developer Tools on Windows Server 2008 – I decided to use the install on my Windows 7 host and access SharePoint 2010 from there.

Quite easy – just change network settings to use VMWare Network Adapter VMNet1 (Host only) - A private network shared with the host - this way you can access the host from on your guest OS.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,vmware,tip

Overview of SharePoint 2010 powershell cmdlets

Ever wondered how you can quickly generate an overview of the available Powershell commandlets for SharePoint 2010? Try the next command:

Get-Command –PSSnapin “Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell” | select name, definition | format-list > C:\SP2010_PowerShell_Commands.txt

Technorati Tags: powershell,cmdlet,sps2010,sharepoint,sharepoint+2010

BIWUG Presentations september 2010 online

The presentations from the BIWUG session in september 2010 are available on www.biwug.be in the meeting presentations document library :

• Upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010
• Administrating SharePoint with Quest

I would like to thank the people from Quest for providing the excellent location as well as our two speakers – Fouad and Karine.

Technorati Tags: biwug,sharepoint,sharepoint+2010,upgrade,sharepoint+server+2010,quest,administration,community

SharePoint Server 2010 “System.ServiceModel.EndPointNotFoundException” in OWSTimer.exe

If you get this error on your SharePoint Server 2010 development machine – ""System.ServiceModel.EndPointNotFoundException” in OWSTimer.exe – then you probably need to manually start the ForeFront Identity Manager Service – it did the trick for me …

SharePoint Stef provided the solution (and additional explanation) in his blogpost – SP2010 “System.ServiceModel.EndpointNotfoundException”.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint+2010,sharepoint+server+2010,sharepoint,administration,sps2010

Building a claims viewer webpart for SharePoint 2010

When running through the MSDN article – Claims Walkthrouhgh: writing claims providers for SharePoint 2010 – I noticed that it did not clearly showed how the webparts where build which showed the overview of the claims for a specific request. Reza pointed me in the correct direction by sending me the link to a post from Steve Peschka (a must read blog for people who work with SharePoint and claims) – Figuring out what claims you have in SharePoint 2010.

Some things you should know when you try to build a claims viewer webpart of your own:

• First download the Windows Identity Foundation SDK
• Read the basics about Claim Based Identity from the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group – A guide to Claims-based Identity and Access control

The code is actually pretty simple – you can use a Visual Web Part (new in 2010) or a standard webpart – here’s a snippet

IClaimsPrincipal cp = Page.User as IClaimsPrincipal;   
if (cp != null)  { 
  IClaimsIdentity ci = (IClaimsIdentity)cp.Identity;   
  foreach (Claim c in ci.Claims) {
       sb.Append(c.ClaimType + " " + c.Value + "<br>"); 
  }
} 

Have fun ….

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint2010,sps2010,claims,CBA,WindowsIdentityFoundation,WIF,claims+based+authentication,sharepoint+server+2010

SharePoint 2010 Software Development Kit – august 2010 release

On september 9th a new version of the SharePoint 2010 SDK (august 2010) was released – a must have for every developer.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sdk,sharepoint+2010,sps2010

Form Based Authentication in SharePoint 2010 and what it has to do with Claim Based Authentication.

Starting from SharePoint Server 2007 it is possible to use the ASP.NET membership and role provider for authentication purposes (meaning you are not limited to pure windows authentication). SharePoint Server 2010 extends on this model by providing claim based authentication.

For authentication 2010 in SharePoint you can choose between 2 models:

• Classic mode authentication
• Claims based authentication mode

Classic mode is provided mostly for legacy purposes since claims is the way forward – take a look at Plan Authentication Methods (SharePoint 2010) on Technet for more details.

If you plan to use anything other then plain windows authentication you have to go for claims based authentication (CBA). Claims based authentication in 2010 supports the following underlying authentication mechanisms:

• Windows claims (when you log on with NTLM or the Kerberos protocol)
• Forms-based authentication claims (when you use an ASP.NET membership and role provider – so use a SQL Server or Oracle database as back-end store)
• Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML) claims -when you log on by using a security token service (STS), such as Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0.

Claims based authentication in 2010 is implemented on top of Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) – so I recommend that you take a look at this blog post to get you started with a number of resources – Windows Identity Foundation resources for SharePoint 2010 developers.

I wanted to try out Forms-based authentication claims using SQL Server as back-end store and I tried out a number of walkthroughs but this one worked like a charm – Configuring claims and form-based authentication for use with a SQL provider in SharePoint 2010  (Thanks you, Spence for pointing me in the correct direction)

Some additional remarks:

• I first tried this article – How to:Forms Based Authentication(FBA) on SharePoint 2010 but it did not complete correctly – at least for me. It however provides an interesting alternative for managing your ASP.NET users using the IIS 7.0 MMC that I was not aware of. When I find the time I will probably try it again to see how this works.
• It might be interesting to take a look at this Codeplex project – http://fba.codeplex.com
• The steps outlined are mostly manual steps – in a production environment you would probably want to automate it more or less – take a look at SharePoint 2010 Forms Based Authentication Configuration Manager which provides a possible solution

References:

• Forms authentication in SharePoint Products and Technologies (2007): Introduction
• Forms Authentication in SharePoint Products and Technologies (2007 - Part 2): Membership and Role Provider Samples
• Forms Authentication in SharePoint Products and Technologies (2007 - Part 3): Forms Authentication versus Windows Authentication.
• Configuring custom providers using SharePoint 2010 claim based authentication.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint+server+2010,sps2010,claims,CBA,authentication,security,WIF

BIWUG goes Facebook...

I just started a BIWUG group on Facebook - join us if you are interested in sharing information around the Microsoft Information Worker Community in Belgium and Luxemburg

Powershell changes from SharePoint 2010 beta to RTM

When testing some SharePoint 2010 Powershell scripts I noticed that there have been some changes in the naming from beta to RTM – for a good overview check out Changes in SharePoint 2010 powershell commandlets (Forums)

Update: Apparently there is also a Technet page which describes the changes – Updates to Windows PowerShell cmdlets (SharePoint Server 2010)

Technorati Tags: SharePoint2010,sharepoint,powershell,Microsoft,sps2010,administration

10 extra seats available for BIWUG september 2010 session

The number of available seats for the BIWUG session of september 16h has been increased to 45 people (previously 30 people) so 10 people can still register – go quickly to www.biwug.be

Technorati Tags: biwug,sharepoint,community,sharepoint+2010

Free Microsoft training sessions available at MIC Belgium

The Microsoft Innovation Center in Belgium organizes a number of interesting events:

• SharePoint Developers Day  - 15 september
• Club des experts: BPOS & Office Online & Office Web App – 16 september
• Testing Visual Studio 2010 – 21  september
• Silverlight 4 – 7 october
• Club des experts – SharePoint & gestion documentaire
• Construire son Mock up en quelgues heurs – 4 november 4t

All sessions are in French – and registration is possible through – www.mic-belgique.be

Technorati Tags: MIC,microsoft,silverlight,sharepoint,BPOS,developers

BIWUG IT Pro session on september 16th

BIWUG (www.biwug.be) is announcing another session about SharePoint on September 16th at the Quest offices in Diegem.

Agenda

• 18:00-18:30 Welcome
• 18:30-19:30 SharePoint administration and granular recovery (Speaker Quest)
• 19:30-19:45 Break
• 19:45-20:45 Upgrading from SharePoint Server 2007 to SharePoint Server 2010 (Speaker – Karine Bosch)

More details and registration on the BIWUG site – www.biwug.be

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,community,biwug,sharepoint+administration,sps2010,upgrade

SharePoint 2010 Meeting Workspaces and Blogs are not MUI enabled

A while ago I wrote about the new multilingual capabilities of SharePoint 2010 based on the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) – see Multilingual User Interface (MUI) in SharePoint 2010 – Part I and Multilingual User Interface (MUI) in SharePoint 2010 – Part II. But beware – apparently not all site definitions support the MUI.

If you try to enable alternate languages for a SharePoint 2010 meeting workspace you will get an error stating “this site is based on a template that does not not support alternate languages”.

Now if you want to find out which webtemplates support MUI you can run the following Powershell script:

$siteUrl = "http://hades/"
$site = get-spsite $siteurl

$site.GetWebTemplates("1033") |foreach {Write-Host $_.Title $_.Name  $_.SupportsMultilingualUI;}

you will get a listing of all installed webtemplates within thesite collection specified by the url parameter. Notice the SupportsMultilingualUI property of the SPWebTemplate object – for the Meeting Workspaces and Blog site definitions this will return False.

Next is the complete listing returned on an install with SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition.

Global template GLOBAL#0 True
Team Site STS#0 True
Blank Site STS#1 True
Document Workspace STS#2 True
Basic Meeting Workspace MPS#0 False
Blank Meeting Workspace MPS#1 False
Decision Meeting Workspace MPS#2 False
Social Meeting Workspace MPS#3 False
Multipage Meeting Workspace MPS#4 False
Central Admin Site CENTRALADMIN#0 True
Wiki Site WIKI#0 True
Blog BLOG#0 False
Group Work Site SGS#0 True
Tenant Admin Site TENANTADMIN#0 True
Access Services Site ACCSRV#0 True
Assets Web Database ACCSRV#1 True
Charitable Contributions Web Database ACCSRV#3 True
Contacts Web Database ACCSRV#4 True
Issues Web Database ACCSRV#6 True
Projects Web Database ACCSRV#5 True
Document Center BDR#0 True
(obsolete) Records Center OFFILE#0 True
Records Center OFFILE#1 True
Shared Services Administration Site OSRV#0 True
PowerPoint Broadcast Site PowerPointBroadcast#0 True
PerformancePoint PPSMASite#0 True
Business Intelligence Center BICenterSite#0 True
SharePoint Portal Server Site SPS#0 True
SharePoint Portal Server Personal Space SPSPERS#0 True
Personalization Site SPSMSITE#0 True
Contents area Template SPSTOC#0 True
Topic area template SPSTOPIC#0 True
News Site SPSNEWS#0 True
Publishing Site CMSPUBLISHING#0 True
Publishing Site BLANKINTERNET#0 True
Press Releases Site BLANKINTERNET#1 True
Publishing Site with Workflow BLANKINTERNET#2 True
News Site SPSNHOME#0 True
Site Directory SPSSITES#0 True
Community area template SPSCOMMU#0 True
Report Center SPSREPORTCENTER#0 True
Collaboration Portal SPSPORTAL#0 True
Enterprise Search Center SRCHCEN#0 True
Profiles PROFILES#0 True
Publishing Portal BLANKINTERNETCONTAINER#0 True
My Site Host SPSMSITEHOST#0 True
Enterprise Wiki ENTERWIKI#0 True
Basic Search Center SRCHCENTERLITE#0 True
Basic Search Center SRCHCENTERLITE#1 True
FAST Search Center SRCHCENTERFAST#0 True
Visio Process Repository visprus#0 True

 

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint+2010,MUI,Multilingual,SPS2010,microsoft

CustomErrors setting in SharePoint 2010 for debugging purposes

On a SharePoint 2010 development machine you typically want to see the full stack trace when an error occurs. In SharePoint 2010 you will need to modify 2 web.configs:

• Underneath “[systemdrive]:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\<port>”
• In the layouts directory underneath the SharePoint root directory or 14 hive – “[systemdrive]:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS

The settings that you need to change are still the same:

• Change Debug=”true”
• CallStack=”true”
• CustomErrors=”Off”

Happy SharePointing …

Technorati Tags: sharepoint+2010,sps2010,microsoft,development,sharepoint

SharePoint 2010 training material for developers

If you are a SharePoint developer and you are planning to start with SharePoint 2010 – definitely take a look at these links:

• Download the SharePoint 2010 SDK
• Sharepoint 2010 Developer Training Kit
• SharePoint Server 2010: Advanced Developer Training Presentations
• Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 (32-bit) – yes, even you as a developer should definitely take a look at SharePoint Designer. This a must have tool in your development toolkit.
• SharePoint 2010: Getting Started with Development on SharePoint 2010 Hands-on Labs in C# and Visual Basic
• SharePoint 2010: Professional Developer Evaluation Guide and Walkthroughs 
• Certification exams (availability 9/2010):
  • Exam 70-668 Pro:Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Administrator
  • Exam 70-667 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring
  • Exam 70-576 Pro: Designing and developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 applications
  • Exam 70-573 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint+2010,development,microsoft,sharepoint+server+2010,sps2010,SDK,training+material,certification

Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010

In Access 2007 you were able to publish data to SharePoint 2007, Access 2010 – in combination with SharePoint Server 2010 extends this functionality by allowing you to publish full Access applications to SharePoint including forms, reports, queries, etc … This can be done without involvement of developers or server administrators. Once published, your Access application can be worked with from within the SharePoint native web interface.

• The Access Show – Publish a Access 2007 database to SharePoint with Access 2010 and the related article – Build an Access database to share on the Web
• The Microsoft Access Team Blog
• The Access Show (video channel on Channel 9)
• Utter Access (Access Discussion Forums)
• Access 2010 – Performance improvements against SharePoint lists
• Access 2010 on Channel 9  - Building solutions with Access 2010 lab
• Tips to migrate legacy databases to SharePoint and the web
• Develop advanced Access 2010 web databases and publish to SharePoint 2010 
• The Access show – How the Microsoft Legal Department uses Access 2010 web databases

PS Access Services is part of SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise edition – check out SharePoint 2010 edition comparison for more details

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,access+services,sharepoint+2010,sps2010,microsoft

Access Services: solving this report failed to load because session state is not turned on.

I noticed the following error recently in one of the Access web databases driven by Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010.

“This report failed to load because session state is not turned on. Contact your SharePoint farm administrator. Troubleshoot issues with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation. Correlation ID: 6968e6db-d139-4b88-bf5a-7c39c2e4a6be  Date and Time: 6/16/2010 7:37:01 AM”

The strange thing was that the State Service was in running state (within SharePoint Central Admin > Manage Service Applications). Underlying Access Services seems to use a ReportViewer Control so this article – Using Access Services with SQL Reporting Services provided the solution:

Enable the Session State for the farm by opening the SharePoint Management Shell. Enter the command [Enable-SPSessionStateService –DatabaseName “foobar”] — The DatabaseName value is the database that will be created on the computer that is running SQL Server. Perform an IIS reset.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,access+services,sharepoint+2010,sharepoint+server+2010,microsoft

Selling ECM,WCMS, BPM ….

Funny video  -  a fictional discussion between a business software salesperson and an IT Manager. …

Technorati Tags: fun,ECM,BPM,Acronyms

Dear CEO , why you should really consider moving to Windows 7 from Windows XP

Dear CEO, yes it is time to move away from Windows XP – here are some reasons why:

• Mainstream support for Windows XP has already ended last year and extended support is available until 2014 – so you probably won’t be able to wait until Windows 8. You can only hold off for so long …
• You might want to take a look at Windows 7 Business Value Analysis – depending on the type of organization you will have a different ROI and cost structure. “I haven’t heard about possible advantages” seems like a lame excuse for just sticking with what you know.
• There are some great improvements – maybe you will not notice a lot of difference but believe me – when your workforce will adopt it Windows 7 in their home environment – they will notice these differences and might be disappointed for the lack of these features in their work environment. Yuo can even guide them using the new Enterprise Learning Framework My favorite improvements:
• Performance improvements – yes even with older hardware I see that it just boots faster and that the settings screens load faster as well.
• Support for 64 bit – I’m a SharePoint dev so …
• Search desktop and programs (my personal favorite)
• Better wireless support – I haven’t had any issues since I moved to Windows 7 – both Windows XP and Vista gave me severe headaches when using it in combination with my wireless network.
• Productivity enhancement due to the new UI
• DirectAccess – accessing networks without the need to VPN – I can’t wait for this one.
• Boot from VHD option (yep probably not a typical end user operation)
• Use the Windows 7 refresh to assess your desktop environments and try to rationalize the application portfolio you currently need to support. A migration is not only a technical operation – if you approach it intelligently you might create extra value while migrating.
• Although the standalone user operating system becomes less relevant in a corporate environment – I do think that IT consultancy and services firms should typically lead the pack in migrations. Consider an account manager (or consultant for that matter) trying to sell the value of Windows 7 when giving a presentation with Office 2003 and Windows XP – must be a hard sell in my opinion.

If you agree or disagree … just leave a comment

Technorati Tags: windows7,upgrade,microsoft

SharePoint Saturday Belgium Presentations and code samples

I finally collected all the presentations and code samples from the different sessions about SharePoint 2010 at our first SharePoint Saturday here in Belgium. Enjoy

• Demos and slide decks of Stephane’s sessions about REST and WCF in SharePoint 2010
• Serge Luca did a presentation about SPLinq – download the SPLinq at SharePoint Saturday pptx.
• Steven explained about Sandboxed solutions – more about it here – BIWUG SPSaturday – wrap up
• Karine’s intro about SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010
• My presentation about Metadata in SharePoint 2010

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,wcf,sharepoint+2010,biwug,community,sharepoint+saturday,vs2010,metadata+folders,rest,splinq