Wictor Wilen

The time has come to make a summary of the past year and have a look into the future – the year of 2009. About a year ago I made a similar post with a summary and some predictions. This year has been a fast year and I have made so much, both personally and at work. For a few months in the spring I was at home taking care of my daughters and tried not to work (which I find really hard). It was a great time and I really need that. At work I think I’ve never felt this pressure from the market, no financial crisis in sight here. It’s mainly been about SharePoint, SharePoint and SharePoint. Our team at Pdb has had some really interesting projects and we have some even more interesting in the pipe.

When working with SharePoint Web Parts and features it is easy to get into trouble if you are changing the version of your Web Part DLL file. The easiest way to get around this is to never change the version of the Web Part, which is a pretty common scenario. But if you are developing a product or feature that you expect to have a longer life cycle and that you will upgrade or enhance over time you should really use the assembly version features. Having a version on your Web Part will make it easier for you to support it for multiple customers and/or installations.

If you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on a new server you will find that your Office 2007 (.docx, .xlsx etc) files is not indexed as they should but the old binary document (.doc, .xls etc) format is indexed. This is due to the fact that the Office 2007 IFilters is not installed by your WSS installation. To resolve this issue you have to download the Microsoft Filter Pack and install it on your server. This will install the actual IFilters which are used for indexing the Office 2007 files.

Today I have spent a few hours tagging photos using the incredible Windows Live Photo Gallery application. It’s quite slow and still has some buggy features, but it’s so good for cleaning and tagging photos. As I tagged along I found some images I took during the PDC 2008 at the LA Convention Center entrance hall. From the Windows Live Photo Gallery I fired up Microsoft Photosynth and made me a Synth. Creating the synth was really easy and done in a few minutes and here it is:

A couple of days ago I made a quick poll on how people preferred to install their SharePoint features. The results are as follows: Using STSADM is the favorite one, probably due to that fact the audience answering to the poll is mostly IT-Pros or developers. Using an MSI based installation is, surprisingly, the first runner up together with scripts. I totally understand why but there are many problems having an MSI based one but the problem is that installation and uninstall is tied to one specific server.

With the recent release of ChartPart for SharePoint I created a simple command file to simplify the installation of the .wsp file. What I did not expect was that so many should download it – about the same amount of people who download the ChartPart. Some really nice people have asked me to release it as an MSI package, which I will do as soon as possible to make it even easier for non developers or IT-pros to install the ChartPart.

After a few weeks of testing and great feedback, ChartPart for SharePoint 1.0 is available for download on CodePlex. CharPart for SharePoint is a free chart web part for SharePoint (WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007) that enables you to easily create charts based on existing lists and views in SharePoint. These are some of the features of ChartPart 1.0 Generate a graph from a SharePoint list in just a few clicks Multiple graph types (bars, columns, splines etc) Legend Title Multiple built-in palettes Custom palettes Size of graph Supports columns such as dates, lookups, calculated, users etc ChartPart is currently translated into English, Swedish and Portuguese and German coming soon. Please contact me if you would like to help out in translating it to other languages.

ChartPart for SharePoint is a new Web Part for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that allows you to create graphs and charts from existing lists in SharePoint in a very easy way. The ChartPart for SharePoint is developed using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and the Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft.NET Framework, which means that there is no need for any third party licenses to create the charts (read Dundas or similar).

Microsoft is currently extremely offensive on their new cloud services targeted to consumers and business users with their Live services. I use a number of them daily with the Live Mesh as the newest addition. A couple of months back I started to move my and my family’s documents to Skydrive, 5Gb free online storage, and I’ve made some efforts to get started with the Office Live Workspace, to have a better place work working with the documents. Then Live Mesh came into the picture, and it lets me automatically sync documents between our PC’s and cell phones – really awesome!