Wictor Wilen

Yesterday SharePoint Community Sweden was launched, initiated by Andreas Kviby. This is a new community site for Swedes and those who speak Swedish about the SharePoint platform. There are a lot of great SharePoint sites and communities out there on the web, but none in Swedish. Having a great community “nearby” will enable the personal interaction to be even better and it will create a lot of interesting spin-offs. I’m glad to be onboard and I will put some effort into this new community and helping out new and old SharePointers as good as I can and I will try to do some blogging about interesting topics in Swedish there - once in a while I will probably double post information here and on the community site (long sentence…).

Part four of my Web Part Properties series. Now it’s time for default values and what you should do when there are values that are incorrect or missing . Last post discussed the .webpart file and I showed you how to do when setting up a Web Part in the Web Part Gallery with default values. Web Parts created using the SharePoint WebPart class can also define default values using the DefaultValue attribute, like this:

The Technet and MSDN sites are great to have when you have to look things up when developing or maintaining solutions for the Microsoft Office Servers, such as SharePoint. But I also like to have this information closer to me and have even faster access to it. Microsoft is providing much of the content as downloadable CHM files, which is a great feature. Here are a list of some of the downloadable help files

Hot from the presses! Today Microsoft announced that Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server will not be a separate product in the future, instead it will be incorporated into the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition. This is some great news for all of us that work with and develop BI solutions. Microsoft is focusing their BI solutions to three products; Excel, SharePoint and SQL Server. This is due to several factors; BI solutions have been very expensive (read PerformancePoint) and have had hard to reach out to the end-users. By incorporating PerformancePoint into SharePoint these factors will be eliminated - BI for everyone.

I thought that it would be time to look up all Swedish SharePoint bloggers, like my former colleague Johan Dewe did about a year ago, he has now left the SharePoint consultant scene, and I thought that it would be time to have a new and updated list. This list is compiled from my own feeds, Johan’s list and some searches on the web. Since blogging nowadays isn’t the “only” way to keep up with what’s happening I’ve also included some Twitter links.

This is the third part of my Web Part Properties series and this post will focus on the .webpart file. Every SharePoint developer have seen it and perhaps edited it, but what is the purpose of the file and when and why should I edit it. Background The .webpart file is an XML file containing metadata about the Web Part. In previous versions of SharePoint this file had an extension of .dwp. Although these files may look similar it’s a crucial difference between those files. The .webpart file uses the http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v3 schema and the .dws file uses http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2. The v2 schema is intended for Web Parts derived from the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart class, which is the base class used for developing Web Parts for previous SharePoint versions. When developing Web Parts using the .NET 2.0 WebPart class (System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart) the v3 schema must be used, see previous article on why you should use the latter.

The more I use/test Windows 7, the more I get confident that this release will get Microsoft back on track. Windows Vista introduced a lot of new and interesting stuff, but was not that polished as one could expect. Service Pack 1 of Vista did take it up one notch, but not far enough. As the statistics nerd I am I like to know exactly what my laptop is doing, how much memory is used, which program accesses disk etc. Vista have a quite good Resource Monitor application and of course the Task Manager (even though I use Process Explorer quite a bit). Windows 7 contains some really good updates to these built-in applications.

This is the second part of the Web Part Properties series. The last post walked through the basics on how to make editable properties on a Web Part. As a sample I used a Web Part that displayed tweets from Twitter - called TweetPart. Using the standard approach, by marking the properties using specific attributes, we made the Web Part editable as we wanted. But the user experience, for editing, was not optimal. First of all the properties we wanted to edit was located in their own category at the bottom, not that easy to find for inexperienced/untrained users. Secondly the properties has dependencies and requires validation.

Windows 7 beta was released into the wild today (or tomorrow if you’re not an MSDN subscriber) and I’m seriously considering running it on my main development machine. But to be able to do this I have one main requirement and that is that I can run SharePoint on it, just as I can on Vista. So after installing the beta bits on a Virtual PC I had to give it a try.