Welcome to my blog on all things SharePoint. I have a range of articles that will interest you if you've made it as far as visiting my blog. I was awarded as an SharePoint MVP by Microsoft in July 2010. I currently live in New York and am an Enterprise Architect at AvePoint Inc.. I co founded www.NothingButSharePoint.com with Mark Miller in 2010.

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Whitepapers

NBSP

Check out my articles on NothingButSharePoint.com

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007

This series was inspired by the chatter amongst SharePoint blogs on the best ways to approach customisations in SharePoint using Solutions.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8

Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

This series was inspired by a discussion had with Andrew Coates at a Perth SharePoint User Group meeting. This then turned into a 6 part series on Arno Nell's SharePointMagazine.net web site.

Initial post - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6

Webcasts

I have recorded various web casts that I present at User Groups or just on a specific topic by request:
How ASP.NET Developers can leverage SharePoint webcast
SPSource Webcast: Reverse engineer Lists to ListTemplates and much more
SharePoint Development with Unit Testing webcast
Perth SharePoint UG Web Cast on approaches to deploying artefacts (SPSource)
More...


Podcasts

I have been interviewed about Leveraging the SharePoint Platform by the SharePoint Pod Show: listen here .

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Archives

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Ajax, Apple, DotNetNuke, Enterprise Content Management, Error Resolution, Gadgets, General, Governance, Microsoft .Net Development, Mobile, SharePoint, Sharepoint Business Forms, Sharepoint Business Intelligence, Sharepoint Collaboration, SharePoint Development, Sharepoint Enterprise Content Management, Sharepoint Enterprise Search, Sharepoint Portal, US Migration, Web 2.0, Workflow
Oct 012008

Perth User Group Meeting: Presenting external data sources using SharePoint Business Data Catalogue (BDC) and SQL Reporting Services.

It's the first month I've put my hand up to help with the Perth User Group with organisation. I've presented a few times in the past and I've managed to convince (bribe with beer) my good friend Richard Greene to present. He will be talking about "Presenting external data sources using SharePoint Business Data Catalogue (BDC) and SQL Reporting Services". The presentation is on the 21st October 12:30 at Microsoft Perth - Level 14, QV1, 250 St George's Tce, Perth.

Richard has a large background in .NET 3.5 (WCF, WF) and BizTalk over the last few years and has a solid grounding in Team .NET Development as a whole. Recently he has been involved in various SharePoint implementation where external information is required to be presented. Richard will be discussing this and the lessons he learnt along the way with regards to the development side of this.

Thanks go to Richard Greene for volunteering to present at the User Group. Feel free to speak to either Rick Rosato or Jeremy Thake if you are interested in presenting at the next Perth meeting.

If you'd like to be notified of new Perth SharePoint User Group meetings, please register your interest.

Published: 10/1/2008  5:05 AM | 0  Comments | 2  Links to this post

Sep 262008

Best Practices for deploying to the 12 HIVE

I've had yet more discussions in the office about best practices, this time referring to deploying to the 12 Hive.

Here are some hard and fast rules.

  • Don't modify out of the box (OOTB) files
    • There's always a way around modifying OOTB files...even if it does mean selling a extra step to the Business Users. Just explain the risks of making them!
      • You can extend with new files in the HIVE in some cases
      • In other cases you can add extend the User Interface Menu Items to add a function to do something similar to the OOTB functionality but jumps to a customised application page etc.
    • If you really have to here's
      • Microsoft take on it
  • Create new files in sub folders of each out of box folder eg. IMAGES
    • This will make it easier to identify customisations
  • Deploy new files via Solutions not manually!
    • That way in source control you store what you're adding to the HIVE
    • Also means that the process of deployment is repeatable in other environments and also in a standardised way that all SharePoint Consultants will understand
    • STSDev makes it simple once you've created your Visual Studio project, just create the folder structure and Build the Project and the wsp will deploy it to the HIVE
  • Prevents issues with upgrades to OOTB files
    • You can't simply run SP1 upgrade and then re-run your solution as your code is branched from RTM and SP1 may have additional stuff you need to merge back in.

image

NOTE: My drawings will get better as I get used to my new Tablet ;-)

 

Phil Wicklund also gives  some more detailed guidance on this.

Published: 9/26/2008  3:40 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Sep 252008

SharePoint Site Templates VS. Solution Features

I've been putting a few development standards together recently to drive the way things are done in a SharePoint development environment. One of the discussions that introduced discussion was Site Templates.
Site Templates can be created from the Web User Interface or SharePoint Designer. A Site Template is a .stp file, that renamed to .cab file contains various elements that make up a Site Instance that the template is generated by.
For simple sites that have a few lists with various columns and a few pages with various web parts on it it is great. But the stp is a black box file that is not easily made sense of when it is extracted. It also will not contain certain things that if moved to a completely new SharePoint farm would mean it would work. examples of this are event receivers defined in a dll stored in the GAC, Content Types, Master Pages, Web Part definitions etc.
What I'm trying to get at is these things I've listed are deployed via Solutions as best practice and manually by bad practice. All of the things a site template can do can be done by a Solution Feature. For this reason I have stated that Site Templates are bad practice. Solution Features may be new to a development team, but once this technique is understood it's just as easy as Site templates and exposes some key extras:
1. Feature Event Receivers - ability to do anything in C# code and SharePoint API.
2. Ability to source control individual files rather than black box stp
3. Ability to have Feature dependencies on other Features
4. Features are commonly used in SharePoint development and is the advanced method of extending the platform. Site Templates paradigm does not extend it, it simply implements it.
5. Feature Versioning
6. The ability to hide Features from the UI so can only be activated by stsadm on server.
7. The ability to encapsulate in a Solution Feature all elements of an extension to the platform: dlls, site collection elements (web parts, master pages, page layouts, style sheets, images, etc.), hive files (custom controls, images, resource files).

Published: 9/25/2008  8:01 AM | 2  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Sep 162008

SharePoint + Silverlight = ?

I attended the Perth SharePoint User Group meeting today kindly presented by Young Oh of ReachPoint title "SharePoint + Silverlight = ?". Young covered:

  • Silverlight – What, How, and Why?
  • Silverlight for SharePoint – extending SharePoint capabilities with Silverlight
  • SharePoint for Silverlight – developing Silverlight applications using SharePoint object model and content database

Young demonstrated the Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint CodePlex projects. He demonstrated consuming SharePoint Web Services via a interim WCF web service within Silverlight hosted in a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Application in Vista, a normal Web Application and also a Web Part within SharePoint.

My concerns around this whole subject are around the already enormous Roles and Responsibilities required around SharePoint that I've discussed previously and now adding Silverlight to the equation which means XAML, Expression Blend and the Silverlight .NET Runtime.
I can see the advantages Silverlight will give to a user interface.

  • Drill Down Organisation Chart
    I have done some work around Organisation Charts in Silverlight consuming Active Directory details and SharePoint User Profiles to enhance the OOTB SharePoint Org Chart Web Part available on MySites which are very basic.
  • Advanced SharePoint List View Web Part
    Imagine not having post backs when clicking through the pages on a SharePoint List View Web Part that appears everytime you see any List in SharePoint. Or the ability to filter/sort and see almost immediate results. The perception of SharePoint as a platform will increase amongst users who find old school ASP.NET page refreshes out of date compared to what they are used to in the Consumer space with Facebook as an example.

"WCF is easy"

I'd just like to point out that WCF is easy on the demo circuit, but in practice is a very complicated beast. If your project works fine using the "New Project" in Visual Studio then count yourself lucky. IF you messages return large result datasets or you want to pass files around, then you're in a whole world of WCF web.config pain. I'm sure this will become easier over time with Wizards etc. or templates you can just steal, but for now it's heart ache.

Silverlight and WPF

Young did also bring up a pertinent point about one difference between the Adobe Flash platform (of 10+ years) and Microsoft Silverlight in that Flash will run natively as a Application on an Operating System. Whereas Silverlight will not because it has a bigger brother in terms of WPF. There are ways of developing XAML applications that will run on both Silverlight and WPF, but for now these aren't "out of the box" paradigms.

Silverlight maturity

You have to remember that Silverlight isn't that old and v1.2 became v2.0 overnight. There are still a heap of things that need to be sorted out in Silverlight such as printing support.

Silverlight did got a lot of "geek exposure" during the Olympics held this year with streaming from the MSNBC web site. Rumours are rife that the reason Silverlight vNext has been delayed is due to the scaling issues that have become apparent from this experience. NBC reportedly dropped Silverlight for it's streaming technology during the games and reverted back to Flash technology which again highlights it's maturity in the marketplace. Other issues are occurring after the games due to Flash's dominance in the market with a 98% market share. Maybe Microsoft were just too late to the party on this.

Personally, I found Expression do be less than stable and I think another few versions need to appear before it's an IDE that will not taunt users.

Conclusion

I really can't see Silverlight taking over entire interface for SharePoint quite yet for a lot of reasons. The main one for me being that it puts all Microsoft eggs in one basket with UI. People are still coming to terms with ASP.NET 2.0 Master Pages and Page Layouts, moving the whole thing into Silverlight within the next two versions would be a huge migration for companies that have invested heavily in the existing UI.
I think a more realistic scenario is for Silverlight Web Parts to be released to cater for more advanced UI, such as the Silverlight List View Web Part...who wants "sexy" config screens anyway...bring on Powershell commands ;-) (if you listen to the rumour mill).

For my collection of diigo'd links Silverlight and for Silverlight and SharePoint.

Published: 9/16/2008  7:27 AM | 1  Comment | 0  Links to this post

Sep 022008

SharePointMagazine.net: Leveraging the SharePoint Platform (Part 2)

So I've posted the second part in my series on SharePointMagazine.net. Big thanks goes out to Richard Greene and Ryan Liu for reviewing my post before I submitted it to Arno Nell's online magazine. Looking forward to some great debates that hopefully are triggered from me putting my thoughts on Quick wins etc. out there into the SharePoint wild!

Starting to write the third part now, so wishing I was at Tech Ed in Sydney though..sigh!

Published: 9/2/2008  5:47 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post