Wictor Wilen

I’m glad and proud to tell you all about that next month I will start a new job. I will start as a SharePoint Architect at Connecta. This is a fantastic opportunity for me and it will let me work with some of the finest SharePoint minds and developers here in Sweden as well as some really awesome customers. I’ve been working with basically the same company now since 2000, when I and two good friends founded it, iBizkit. We all came from consultancy firms working with WCM, portals and intranet solutions and had a dream of making a really good semi-product for these kind of solutions. And we did! In 2001 we integrated our product with the first version of SharePoint. We continued this integration in the upcoming versions of SharePoint, but have since the release of SharePoint 2007 focused more and more on the SharePoint platform, and I have personally lived in that world for the latest years. About two years ago, we sold the company to Pdb DataSystem, a natural step to expand and evolve the business.

Developing solutions and features for SharePoint is a nightmare for all beginners, and even for the experienced SharePoint developers. If you ever have had the opportunity to create a SharePoint solution you most probably have had to make a lot of hacking in a bunch of XML files, just to build a simple feature. This is the way you have to do it, and the way taught by tutors and Microsoft, when using it with Visual Studio and no add-ins. This is the way it was, and has been, for most of us SharePoint programmers since the beta releases of SharePoint version 3.

Finally I’ve found the time to make the last work on ChartPart 2.0 for SharePoint. I have been working on and off on this release for quite some time – but now it’s here! ChartPart 2.0 for SharePoint is a Web Part that allows you to instantly create charts based on your existing SharePoint lists. You can make columns, bars, pies and even 3D charts. ChartPart version 1.0 was released last year and have had up until now close to 10.000 downloads, which I’m very proud of. I’ve received awesome feedback on the Codeplex site, on Twitter, my blog and when I met people and told them that I was the one who made it.

Last night we had a SharePoint User Group Meeting here in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a great evening with a lot of attendees, thank you all for showing up. It’s always fun to see new and old faces, sorry I didn’t have time to talk so much with you (due to my VM’s crashing just before my demos…). First, a big thanks to KnowIT and Jonas who provided us with a great place to host the meeting and some good food and beer!

The latest version, 4.0, of the great SharePoint Administration Toolkit has been released, read all about it in the post by the SharePoint Team. It contains a lot of interesting and great stuff that you could use for everyday usage. One new part of the Administration Toolkit is a SharePoint solution called Permission Reporting Solution. This is a solution package that hugely improves the permissions management of your Site Collections and Sites in SharePoint.

Today I stumbled upon Yet Another SharePoint Problem (YASP) with a custom timer job. The custom timer job is supposed to synchronize some user information between site collections (on a WSS 3.0 installation). In some cases the timer job has to add users to site collections. Sounds like a no-brainer, right! The problem is that we are using this installation as an internet facing site and the external users are stored in AD LDS (Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services, formerly known as ADAM) and our own custom authentication provider.

This is the first post in a series on Web Parts Connections. This spring I had a series on Web Part Properties that I think was very successful, they got some good comments and feedback and they get a lot of hits from search engines. Please help me out and evolve this new series of posts with some feedback and questions. What is Web Parts Connections? Web Parts Connections allows you to connect the Web Part server controls so that they can exchange information. Web Parts can either be a consumer and/or a provider. Once you connect a consumer with a provider the consumer starts receiving data from the provider, all this is done on the server side. Web Parts can be constructed in such way that it can have several consumer and provider connection-points, i.e.it can consume or provide information from several different sources. A provider connection-point can have several consumers but a consumer connection-point can have only one provider.

SharePoint Saturday Copenhagen is over after an awesome Saturday in Copenhagen. Thank you all organizers, attendees, speakers and sponsors, I had a blast. I will definitely attend more SharePoint Saturdays when I can. These kind of events really are special; everyone attending are there because they really love working with SharePoint, on a Saturday, when the sun is shining outside, for free… You can find my presentation SharePoint Online and Windows Azure - better together here and the solution that I used for the demo here.

If you have been installing SharePoint you have probably also seen and fixed the DCOM 10016 error. This error occurs in the event log when the SharePoint service accounts doesn’t have the necessary permissions (Local Activation to the IIS WAMREG admin service). Your farm will still function, but your event log will be cluttered. On a Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 machine you would just fire up the dcomcnfg utility (with elevated privileges) and enable Local Activation for your domain account.