Wictor Wilen

Wictor Wilen is Product Leader at Microsoft. Former Microsoft Regional Director and SharePoint MVP, as well as an author and a well known international speaker

SharePoint 2010

Conference and presentation season - fall 2011

This fall is going to be pretty busy in terms of conferences and presentations and I’ll have my fair share. Here’s what I’ve planned for this fall, so far. Webinar: No Farm Solution in sight! On Tuesday the 6th of September I will do a webinar discussing SharePoint Online and Office 365 and how you can build solutions using SharePoint Online, Silverlight, Windows Azure and more without creating any farm solutions:

SharePoint 2010

Yet another object to dispose correctly in SharePoint 2010 - SPUserSolution

If you’ve been in the SharePoint business for a while (at least a couple of days) you should be aware of the SharePoint objects that needs to be properly disposed; SPSite and SPWeb in particular. Objects that need disposal inherits from the IDisposable interface and requires that you call the Dispose() method when you’re done with the object - this is to ensure that the object frees up resources that the .

Personal

I'm on the SharePoint Pod Show talking about Web Parts

The 65th SharePoint Pod Show is out featuring…tada…me :-) The SharePoint Pod Show is THE podcast about SharePoint and is done by Rob Foster, Nick Swan and Brett Lonsdale and has featured a lot of great SharePointers from all around the world throughout the years. If you haven’t already listened to the podcasts, then you got 65 episodes to catch up on! There are some epic ones, such as my favorite one #50 - which is about performance tuning.

SharePoint 2010

Improve performance of your SharePoint 2010 applications using Windows Server AppFabric caching

Besides SharePoint my very dear topics is performance optimizations and new technologies, so here’s a post mixing all these together. Background Caching is one way to improve the performance of any application, there are several ways to do it in-memory, disk etc etc. SharePoint 2010 has a set of caching capabilities, most of them are in-memory caches and some involve disk or even SQL based. One problem with (especially) in-memory caching is that if you have a farm different servers may display different results, which is due to the fact that the different servers cached information at different times.

SharePoint 2010

Stale Managed Metadata Databases in SharePoint 2010

This is a short story about how you can get and resolve stale Managed Metadata Service (MMS) databases in SharePoint 2010. I’ve been working with Managed Metadata quite much and done some backup/restore juggling from production to test and to dev environments. Which by the way works really smooth. I’ve also recreated the MMS databases a couple of times. After applying Service Pack and the re-released June 2011 CU I went into Central Administration to take a look at the databases and their upgrade status.

Web Parts

Deploying Web Parts Farm-wide using the WebPartAdderExtension element in SharePoint 2010

Here goes another post using the WebPartAdderExtension Element. I previously wrote an introduction to custom Web Part Gallery sources and a second one on how to enhance the end-user experience when adding new Web Parts. Now I’m going to show you another trick that this technique can be used for. Introduction Deploying Web Parts are normally done by using the Module element in the Elements manifest and using that element uploading/deploying Web Part Controls Description files (.

Web Parts

Improve the experience using Modal Dialogs when adding Web Parts in SharePoint 2010

This is a follow-up post on yesterdays introduction to the WebPartAdder (which lately has been one of my favorite features of SharePoint 2010). In that post I mentioned that you could invoke a JavaScript function when a Web Part is added using a custom Web Part Gallery source. The Silverlight Web Part If you have been working with SharePoint as an end-user you’ve probably seen the nice modal dialog that pops up when you’re adding a Silverlight Web Part to a page, see the image to the right.

Web Parts

Dynamically populate the Web Part Gallery using the WebPartAdder in SharePoint 2010

Writing this post has been on my agenda for some time, initially I intended to put it into my SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action book, but there was not enough time, you know how it is! This is an excellent new feature to SharePoint 2010 which allows you to dynamically populate the Web Part Gallery with Categories and Web Parts. So here we go. Introduction to the Web Part Adder and the Web Part Gallery Think of the List and Libraries category in the Web Part Gallery - it is dynamically populated with the lists and libraries available in the current web.

SQL Server

The SharePoint 2010 4TB content database limit fine prints - just a warning!

I guess by now we all seen or read about the new SharePoint 2010 guidance on scaling limits announced by the product group today. To sum it up it this is the new guidance on content database sizing: up to 200GB - still the recommendation 200GB to 4TB - yes, it’s been done and can be done (with the help of a skilled professional architect :-) 4TB or more - only for near read-only “record centers” with very sparse writing This looks good right, and it can be in some cases.

SharePoint 2010

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 is here

About a year has passed since SharePoint 2010 RTM:ed and now the first Service Pack is released, Service Pack 1. A Service Pack is always a big deal for SharePoint. Service Packs contains all the previous cumulative updates and in most cases some new features. SP1 for SharePoint 2010 is all that. Before diving into some of the new stuff I want to raise a finger of warning. Plan and test your SP1 upgrade thoroughly!