Wictor Wilen

Next Wednesday I will sit in the SharePoint MVP Experts panel for a Q&A session where you can ask your questions about SharePoint. The SharePoint MVP Experts Q&A chat is your opportunity to chat and get instant answers about any SharePoint related questions, including topics such as development, design, configuration and setup. There will be several SharePoint MVP’s ready to answer your questions… When? The chat will take place the 29th of September at 9AM PDT. Sign up here and add it to your calendar. Also sign up here at the Facebook event page.

This is the second post in the SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 - better together series. And it is time to really check out what this great combination have to offer, and the most obvious subject to start with is that we can now use Visio to design the workflows, which then are imported to SharePoint via SharePoint Designer 2010. So let’s get started. If you ever built workflows for previous versions of SharePoint you either used SharePoint Designer 2007 or Visual Studio 2005/2008. SharePoint Designer 2007 had a very limited workflow designer (you can’t actually call it a designer) that took quite some time to get used to and you were very limited in what to do. Visual Studio of course offered you the full set of workflow features. I’m not trying to get to deep into the actual workflow stuff here but it is important to understand how hard it was for the organizations to get their hand-drawn or Visio-drawn workflow into SharePoint. If you used SharePoint Designer to build the workflows then the most problematic situation was when you were supposed to move the workflow from you development environment to production - this was just impossible (yea, there was ways to work around it - but not for mere mortals).

One of the really great features in SharePoint 2010 is the Sandbox, which allows the end-users to upload solutions using the web interface, instead of relying on administrators adding the solutions directly to the farm. One of the things that that can be deployed to the Sandbox is custom workflow activities. These activates can then be used by the end-users building workflows with SharePoint Designer. It is really powerful to add custom sandboxed activities and it is very easy as well! In this post I will show you how to really fast build a custom sandboxed activity that breaks the permission inheritance on the item which the workflow is executed on.

UPDATE 2012-02-01: A new and better approach to this is detailed in a new Visual Guide - Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. Using Windows Live ID as login provider for SharePoint is a really huge thing. It makes the scenario for public facing web sites, extranets etc. much more easier, for instance there is no need to maintain passwords and users in the same degree. For SharePoint 2007 there is no native support for this, so I built a custom Live ID login provider (available at http://spwla.codeplex.com), but SharePoint 2010 has native support for claims based access. And that is what’s on the menu for tonight…

This is the first post in a series about SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 and how the two products integrate with each other. I remember when I first saw Visio many, many years ago. It was before Microsoft acquired it from Visio Corporation. It was my dad using it to make blue prints of our summer house. As most of the gadgets and software he buys he needs a helping hand, not saying he is not technical, but I tend to catch up on such stuff faster than him, so I learnt the basics. I have used Visio since then, during my years in school and university and especially in my job as a developer and architect. (I have also made exact blue prints of our house, including the electrical wiring - call me crazy but I do love that product.) Visio is a great tool for technical diagrams and representations and extremely effective in drawing flowcharts and business processes.

This is a follow-up post to the Understanding folders and namespaces in Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Solutions, Packages and Features (probably my longest blog post title, except this one…). In that post I discussed how folders and namespaces are handled in Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint projects. I will continue to show some details and tips on how you can affect the outcome of your project/packages. Long feature folder names As the previous post showed the features generated by Visual Studio ends up as a subfolder in the {SharePoint Root}\TEMPLATE\FEATURES folder. The feature folder will get the name as the concatenation of the project and the feature - which possibly can be quite long.

UPDATED 2010-10-03: Obviously the KB2276339 is not a Aug CU hotfix KB2352342 is the correct one. The second Cumulative Update (CU) is out for SharePoint 2010. It contains two hotfixes; one for Foundation and one for Server. The Foundation fix contains the really important update that should fix the problem with LINQ to SharePoint and anonymous users. You can get the fixes here: SharePoint Foundation 2010 August 2010 CU hotfix (KB2266423) SharePoint Server 2010 August 2010 CU hotfix (KB2276339) SharePoint Server 2010 August 2010 CU hotfix (KB2352342) - KB article not live yet but you can request the hotfix here. (by looking at the updated components in CA you can see that it patches Access Services, Document Lifecycle components, Shared Components and Word Server) Caution when installing hotfixes (as usual), they are not that thoroughly tested as Service Packs and only install them if you experience the problems mentioned in the KB articles. Nevertheless since this SPF hotfix contains the above mentioned fix for LINQ to SharePoint - this one is pretty important!

Yesterday Todd Bleeker (SharePoint MVP) wrote a post about the SharePoint Project SPI’s where he explains how SPI effectively are folders within a SharePoint solution. I thought that I should continue that discussion a bit and looking at how these folders and other things such as packages and features affects the actual deployed artifacts. Packages A package (#3 in the figure to the right) is the actual WSP file that will be created containing all your objects from your solution that will deployed to the SharePoint application servers. The project can only contain one package.

Visual Studio 2010 LightSwitch is a new kid on the block in the Visual Studio suburbs. Basically it is a rich client application editor for Visual Studio that allows you to develop (or should I say “click-through”) an application very easy without any programming skills at all. You can create a custom database, attach to an external data source or WCF RIA service and last but not least hook it up to SharePoint. And this is what I’m going to give you a quick peek at.