Wictor Wilen

Back at the hotel and watching some Monday Night Football (which I could do that in Sweden!). Here is a summary and some reflections on my day. Woke up early and walked down to LA Convention Center and got me some breakfast (tomorrow I’ll eat at the hotel). I tried to get to the keynote hall as early as possible for some good seating. I ended up in 6th row and had a good overview of the stage and the huge screens. As this is my first PDC and first conference of this magnitude I’m really impressed with the size and organization of it all.

I have arrived at my first PDC and it’s an awesome experience. The conference is huge and I arrived here for the registration and breakfast and met up with some nice guys. I fetched my bags of goods which contained mostly magazines and a bunch of sponsor commercials. We’ll have to wait until Tuesday until the real bits (the hard-drive stuffed with goods) are released and revealed. The keynote on Tuesday morning will really be interesting.

Sitting here in Zürich waiting for the delayed flight to Los Angeles and PDC 2008. This PDC is my first and I really look forward to it. I will suck in as much as I possibly can during the next few days. I have a couple of things on my agenda that I want to accomplish: Go through all of the Office Systems and SharePoint sessions to find out what’s going on Meet with the SharePoint MVPs, Product team and other cool SharePointers Listen and learn from the Experts Understand the Microsoft cloud vision even better, especially how do these services fit in a larger enterprise (I have not understood this yet) And of course be one of the first to try out all this new stuff! I will be staying at the Westin Bonaventure hotel and drop me a line if you would like to meet and have a pint or two.

I gladly received the news that the Office team announced Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007. Not only for the clients but also for the server products (read SharePoint). First of all it’s the support for the different file formats that I long for (ODF for example) and then there is the Outlook performance – both of these are addressed! XPS and PDF will be supported from scratch – no need to install a free plugin (just as it was in the Office 2007 betas).

Yesterday I did a short post on how to make a really simple SharePoint application with a .aspx page inside a document library and some coding with SharePoint Designer. I ended the post with giving a hint that you can also place the code in an assembly. To aid you in your self studies, here comes the solution… Make an assembly First of all we need to make an assembly to host our code behind. Start Visual Studio and create a Class Library project. Add a reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.dll and System.Web. The Microsoft.SharePoint.dll can be found under c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\ISAPI (who came up with the idea to place this stuff here by default?).

Recent discussions in the SharePoint forums led me to write this article on how to create the simplest form of SharePoint applications without using Visual Studio and only SharePoint Designer. Just follow these simple steps to create your own Hello World application in a .aspx hosted in a SharePoint document library. Create the document library First of all we need somewhere to host our applications; create a new Document Library, I called it Applications, and set the default template to either Basic Page or Web Part Page. This sample uses the Basic Page as template.

Emma Healy of Emma Explains Microsoft Licensing in Detail has written a post on how to calculate what Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 license you should use for your public facing/extranet MOSS site. The post has a flow chart to aid you in your decision to choose a MOSS for Internet Sites license (expensive!) or CALS (less expensive). To sum it up you should use the MOSS FIS if you have more than 435 users when using MOSS Standard or more than 242 users when using MOSS Enterprise.

When using Lists with Content Types enabled and you have your custom columns there are some things to remember, such as the custom columns are not part of the list content type items until you configure it so. For example; when you add a custom column to your list you have to option to add your column to all content types.

Everyone, every company, small or large has some kind of file server for storage of documents and other files. The file server are in many cases the heart of the operations. Some have several file servers and some have even more. Almost every file server looks the same; some kind of shared folder with subfolders (in absurdum). Most of these file servers uses file/directory permissions to have control over who are allowed to view or edit the files. Most often this is configured through groups, but far to often permissions are set on user accounts directly.