SharePoint Resources

SharePoint 2010

• FAST Search Server 2010 trial - Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint is a new search solution that delivers the power of FAST with the simplicity and TCO of Microsoft. It provides the best general productivity search on the market AND makes it easy and economical to build high-value search applications.
• SharePoint 2010 Virtual Machine - This download contains a two Virtual Machine set for evaluating and demonstrating Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Additional training material can be found here and here. Here are resources for VS2010
• SPG2010 Guidance – SharePoint Guidance drop notes
• Technical Diagrams (posters) - these resources are visual representations of recommended solutions. include poster-sized documents available in formats including Microsoft Office Visio 2007 files (.vsd), PDF files, and XPS files
• Evaluation Guide SP 2010 - This evaluation guide is designed to help IT pros gain sufficient knowledge and understanding to evaluate Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Broadcast PowerPoint on SharePoint 2010 - Guide to installing and configuring a solution for broadcasting Microsoft PowerPoint slide shows
• Professional Developer Evaluation Guide - The SharePoint 2010 developer evaluation guide describes the SharePoint 2010 developer platform, including walkthroughs of some of the new capabilities for developers
• SharePoint Developer Platform Wall Poster - The SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform wall poster shows a view of the SharePoint 2010 developer tools, community ecosystem, execution environment, Sharepoint Server 2010 workloads, and target application types. The poster is intended to be printed at 24 inches x 36 inches (61 centimeters x 91 centimeters)
• Developer and IT Professional Learning Plan - A guide to learning about SharePoint 2010 for Developers and IT Pros
• Getting Started with Development on SharePoint 2010 handson labs - Use these 10 hands-on lab manuals for SharePoint 2010 to get started learning SharePoint 2010 development

 

WSS

• WSS Diagrams (posters) - These are visual representations of recommended solutions of WSS
• ULS Viewer - Winforms application to display ULS messages
• How to disable the Virtual PC image clock from the host server

 

SharePoint 2007

• Technical Diagrams (posters) - poster-sized documents with visual representations of recommended solutions
• Sharepoint Designer
• Sharepoint Services 3.0 + Service Pack 1
• Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS) Trial
• Sharepoint Server 2007 Virtual Disk - This download comes as a pre-configured VHD. This download enables you evaluate Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Virtual Server 2005 R2 is required to run this VHD.
• Sharepoint Services 3.0 Templates: All
• Sharepoint 2007 SKD - The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SDK contains conceptual overviews, “How Do I…?” programming tasks, developer tools, code samples, references, and an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) starter kit to guide you in developing solutions based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• MOSS Service Pack 1
• MOSS Virtual Disk - This download comes as a pre-configured VHD. This download enables you evaluate Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• VisualStudio 2008 Extensions 1.3 (VSeWSS) - SharePoint project and item templates for Visual Studio 2008 - VSeWSS 1.3 (Feb 2009 CTP)
• Accessibility Kit For Sharepoint - free downloadable kit that helps you to quickly implement WCAG 1.0 compliant sites
• Sharepoint Guidance Kit - This guidance helps architects and developers design, build, test, deploy, and upgrade SharePoint intranet applications. A reference implementation demonstrates solutions to common architectural, development, and application lifecycle management challenges.
• WSP Builder - A SharePoint Solution Package (WSP) creation tool for WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007
• STSDEV - A SharePoint developer's utility designed to quickly transform your ideas into real-world components that you can deploy into a staging or production Web farm with confidence.
• Ten Themes for Sharepoint in VWeWSS - This is a set of ten Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint projects containing designed themes for SharePoint
• Microsoft Web Platform Installer – One-click setup your whole development environment
• Governance Check List for Sharepoint – A collection of hand-selected checklists and tips to provide comprehensive governance when implementing Sharepoint
• Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 SKD - The Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 software development kit (SDK) contains conceptual overviews, programming tasks, samples, and references to guide you in developing solutions based on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Managed Stack Explorer - if you want to troubleshoot hangs/performance issues in a process but don’t want to go through the hassle of getting and analyzing a dump.   What it will do is basically attach, snap the .net call stack and detach so you can see what all the .net threads are doing without using a debugger.
• SharePoint Productivity Hub – The Productivity Hub is a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 site collection that offers training materials for end-users.

By Edge Pereira

Disabling workspace meeting creation from SharePoint Calendar

In many big implementations for SharePoint, TeamSites is a great tool for collaboration and for user-driven participation.
There is also another functionality in SharePoint called Workspaces, which is a small cut-down version of what a TeamSite can offer. Workspaces normally can be used to track meeting minutes, small task forces and general gatherings and its automatically creation is found inside the calendar items, which makes the creation so easy by the users. All they have to do is to flick the checkbox and click OK.

For the big enterprises, it does not make much sense to implement TeamSites and still have to manage Workspaces due to the similarities it had to Team Sites, and specially when it is so easy to create on a uncontrolled manner.

So what how to disable workspaces creation and avoid the meeting workspaces proliferation?

you can achieve this in many ways. I can tell you the most common use found on the Internet: the JavaScript solution.
It is very simple to implement. Basically you drop JavaScript in the page and the JavaScript will look for the html row that contains the workspace checkbox creation, then once found make it invisible. In fact the option is still there, the users just cant see it anymore.

From an implementation point of view, that's straight forward and many users of many levels can actually do this. From a governance and architectural point of view, that's not the best recommended:

1. it will introduce new code into SharePoint ecosystem, and potentially a new debug variable.
2. it does not scale well.
3. it is vulnerable to malicious code.
4. an advanced enough user can in fact bypass that barrier by cross-scripting himself that option to be visible again

The other approach would be to understand SharePoint and how it works internally. Always have in mind that SharePoint was not meant to be modified, but extended or configured. If you research enough might find that this setting can be controlled.

To remove the option to create workspaces in SharePoint, you need to go to:
...12 hive folder\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\EventsList\Events
Edit the file called schema.xml (I would recommend to make a backup copy, as well) and edit the field to be like that:

59 <Field ID="{08fc65f9-48eb-4e99-bd61-5946c439e691}"

60 Type="CrossProjectLink" Name="WorkspaceLink"

61 Format="EventList" DisplayName="$Resources:core,Workspace;"

62 DisplayImage="mtgicon.gif" HeaderImage="mtgicnhd.gif"

63 ClassInfo="Icon" Title="$Resources:core,Meeting_Workspace;"

64 Filterable="TRUE" Sealed="TRUE"

65 SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3"

66 StaticName="WorkspaceLink"

67 ShowInEditForm="FALSE" ShowInNewForm="FALSE">

the 2 new attributes ShowInEditForm and ShowInNewForm will control the workspace checkbox visibility.
Did you like that? :)
Update: Aapo from SharePoint Blues just mentioned another way to perform this operation. You should check that out.

By Edge Pereira

How to programmatically configure RSS feed for a list in SharePoint

Here's another interesting story. SharePoint will overwrite all the RSS columns you might have setup for a list.

One of the tasks I was working was to process across all the list in all the sites of a specific site collection, then enable RSS settings for each list and set a predefined group of columns as the RSS output. Once that's done, one could easily go to the list settings and verify them like the figure below:

The whole process executed with no problems. No error messages and no warnings.

However, when I went to take a look at my modified RSS settings that's the screen I saw:

It means, nothing was setup the way I planned. Apparently nothing happened when the code executed.

So I went to debug and inspected the line one by one. No error and when I went to see the screen, that's what I've got:

 

Yep. Everything was there and working.

How come it fails in first place and worked well on my second try?

This behavior continued on and on and and on, with many other libraries. Fails the first time, succeed in the second. So I went to look at the data definition using SharePoint Explorer. For a brand new library, that's what I saw:

And that's how it looks like once I execute my code to create a new RSS feed:

 

All right. It means the RSS is actually there. So I went to see the RSS settings in the page and guess what...That's what I see:

The RSS is blank again!!!

Then I came back to see using the explorer and...

Voila... something is kick-starting the creation of a brand new RSS setting and overwriting my one for usage.

I had a guess but it was just too weird to believe: SharePoint creates automatically a RSS feed for the first time and only during the first time an user visits the settings page.

I decided to debug the page and try to understand what SharePoint calls are made via UI. I've got my hands on the _layouts/listsyndication.aspx page from SharePoint

and I attached a debugger to it. I chose a brand new document library to test my theory and during the first page load I got this breakpoint:

 

During the page load there is javascript call to the server triggering SPList.EnsureRssSettings()

Then using .NET Reflector I opened the Microsoft.Sharepoint.Dll version 12 and found the method signature:

Looking inside the method I noticed:

1. SharePoint does use a hardcoded string ("RssView") to control the RSS name and which view is a RSS type.
2. EnsureRssSettings in fact creates a brand new Rss feed for you, without your request.

 

So, debriefing the case. When you open up the settings page, the listsyndication.aspx page automatically performs a call to SPList.EnsureRssSettings() which automatically creates a RSS feed (if syndication is enabled) and makes it invisible (see property Hidden=true). When my code ran, it created another view with the same name RssView, but actually the web address was different. The next time the code executed, I was not working anymore with my view but with the previously automatically created Rss from SharePoint.

Closing up the case: Next time you need to create a Rss feed, you don't have to create a view. You just have to make sure you call in your code SPList.EnableRssSettings() and then go ahead and modify the SPList.View called "RssView"

Now, the code:

and then to save the Rss feed...

 

See you later,

By Edge Pereira