Wictor Wilen

In most custom SharePoint solution projects you will have to create your own Application Pages, Web Part Pages or other ASP.NET pages to fulfill your requirements. If you are coming from the ASP.NET world you are pretty used to building web forms and similar .aspx pages. Your pages will most of the times then be derived from the System.Web.UI.Page class, but when working with SharePoint you should not use this class as a base.

The new Office 2010 clients have been released as a Technical Preview and I’m fortunate to get my hands on them and free to talk about them. The new clients are awesome! Visio is one of the applications from the Office suite that I use on a daily basis to design, model and draw diagrams, workflows and solutions. Visio 2010 has gotten a really nice facelift and a whole new set of features. The Ribbon has been one of the things I really missed in the 2007 release and the SharePoint integration, that can be seen in the Sneak Peak, looks awesome!

Introduction Microsoft SharePoint contains functionality for Records Management, which essentially is a storage for documents that you would like to store and manage in a separate records center to meet certain legal or other requirements or just to make backups of certain document revisions. To be able to create a Records Center you need to have Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). On the other hand you only need Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) to send documents to the Records Center.

About two months ago I tried to reach out to the SharePoint community with a small survey on how Virtualization is used with SharePoint. The survey was primarily for my own interest to benchmark what others are doing, but I also thought that I should share this with everyone. SharePoint and Virtualization is an interesting piece of discussion; some despise it and some love it. For more information on SharePoint and virtualization read this great article from SharePointMagazine.net.

Just in time for next version of SharePoint to arrive I just completed the final certification exam for SharePoint 2007, the 70-630 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring. As always I did think that it should be some tricky questions or problems to solve in the exam, I even installed a MOSS RTM last night just to walk through the admin interfaces before the infrastructure upgrade. But to my disappointment this certification was by no means any challenge. This was by far the easiest of the four exams.

When developing applications or custom solutions for SharePoint you will on several occasions have to store settings for you application of some kind. When developing database driven or other custom solutions you easily create a database table or make the settings in app/web.config file. You can of course use these approaches when developing for SharePoint, but there are some things to consider when doing this. This post will outline some approaches you can use to store your settings.

I’m really glad that we have managed to get a really nice release of the SharePoint Extensions Lib, SPExLib, out. This brand new release (12.0.0.0) has significantly been improved since the first release a couple of weeks ago. Keith Dahlby has made some really nice Linq extensions for SharePoint which is available in this release. These extensions are also IDisposable safe when using on SPWeb and SPSite collections. By referencing the SPExLib.dll and include the namespaces you can easily write code like this (taken directly from one of my current projects):

Microsoft has updated SharePoint Online with a patch that resolves the bug that prohibited you from getting the service descriptions from the web services, that I previously described. This means that you now can use Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer (or any other tool that you like) to connect to the SharePoint Online web services and code away, instead of going to some local instance to get the descriptions. Does anybody know where the Microsoft Online team posts all updates/changes to the BPOS? I got this information from Troy (from the BPOS team) commenting on my post.

Installing a new service pack onto a server product is not just firing up the installer and hit next->next->finish. You should carefully read through the documentation and test it thoroughly. Service Pack 2 for SharePoint has been long awaited and I’ve seen people the last 24 hours installing it like madness just wanting to get their hands on the new features/updates. I did also install it just minutes after it was released (on my dev machine that is being reinstalled any hour now, when Windows 7 RC is out).