Welcome to my blog on all things SharePoint and .NET. I have a range of articles that will interest you if you've made it as far as visiting my blog. I currently live in Perth, Western Australia and am a Independent Sharepoint Consultant. I founded the SharePointDevWiki.com and help facilitate the Perth SharePoint User Group.

Whitepapers

Conferences

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 .

Latest Posts

Australian TechEd 2010 in QLD (DEV330 and OFS3002)

July 17, 2010

  I’m really honoured to be asked to present twice at the Australian TechEd 2010 conference in Queensland. I presented last year alongside Andrew Coates and had a great time! I’m really looking forward to going back again this year! For SharePoint’ers there is an Office Track along with a Development Track. I have sessions in each, one on my own in Dev Track and one with William Cornwill (my Mana more...

 

zevenseas answer to the SharePoint App Store - webcast

July 14, 2010

Daniel McPherson demoed me two products zevenseas have been working on, TunnelPoint and ProduShare. Dan really got me thinking about the possibilities here to write assembly free solutions such as .webpart, .stp and themes that can be deployed to ProduShare. These can be free products or licensed products. It was really cool to see how seamless it was to click in ProduShare and see the web part more...

 

I’ll be showing off Project Server 2010 at Perth SharePoint User Group tomorrow night

July 14, 2010

I’ve been looking into Project Server 2010 for various clients lately and figured I’d show off it’s features at the User Group tomorrow night in Perth, Western Australia. Hope to see you there! My good mate, Jose Flores is also presenting on using SharePoint Designer 2010 to create data centric applications so hopefully he’s showing off the XSLT List View Web Part in all its glory etc! Details more...

 

Naming SharePoint 2010 Service Accounts and Databases

July 7, 2010

At CSG we’ve been ploughing through SharePoint 2010 installations of late and have been trying to learn from our build experiences from SharePoint 2007. I just read Wouter’s post on naming service accounts that he’s just posted and figured I’d put my 2cents in. Service Account naming Completely agree on giving these things: readable names - that any AD person can make sense of prefix with SP – more...

 

Is honoured to be recognised as a SharePoint MVP!

July 1, 2010

It is a real honour to be recognised by Microsoft as an SharePoint MVP and to be associated with such amazing SharePoint Heroes of mine. Check out the list of SharePoint MVPs here and here. WOW! I can’t wipe this smile off of my face. What made this discovery even funnier is that as a Virtual Technology Specialist working under William Cornwill he rang me to congratulate me…I saw the announceme more...

 

Photo from Australian SharePoint Conference #AUSPC

June 29, 2010

I had a great time at the Australian SharePoint Conference (#AUSPC) thanks to Debbie Ireland et al for organising such an amazing event! Looking forward to the next one next year! Part of the conference circuit is catching up with like minded SharePoint nutters from around the World. This time round I got to catch up with Paul Swider (US), Michael Noel (US), Nick Hadley (NZ) and Daniel McPherson more...

 

SharePoint 2010 Development with Feature Versioning

June 29, 2010

So for those of you that were at the Australian SharePoint Conference a fortnight ago, hopefully you came and saw me present on the brand new v1 functionality in the SharePoint 2010 platform around Feature Versioning. No more deactivate, retract, remove, add, deploy and activate people! We have a new approach…albeit with some limitations and gotchas. Rather than me write a huge blog post a webcas more...

 

Using Windows Live Writer with WSS 3.0 and CKS:EBE 2.0

June 29, 2010

I had a very annoying issue with Windows Live Writer integration with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with CKS:EBE 2.0. If you add a new Blog to Live Writer and just use the host address of your WSS 3.0 site it didn’t work for me and I was getting “Access Denied” errors in Live Writer. Thanks to Ivan Sanders (@iasanders and http://dimension-si.com/blog/default.aspx) he recommended that I add the more...

 

Sandboxed Solution interview panel with Arpan Shah

June 29, 2010

I was lucky enough to get some quality time with Arpan Shah from Microsoft in Redmond to facilitate an interview for the SharePointDevWiki.com with a panel of amazing SharePoint community member: Todd Bleeker, Paul Swider and Mark Rhodes. We discussed Sandboxed Solutions and the pros and cons from End User, IT Pro and Developer perspectives. It’s a great interview that I recorded on my camcord more...

 

Two weeks to the Australian SharePoint Conference in Sydney … see you there!

May 29, 2010

Only TWO weeks to go! Don't miss out on Australia's biggest SharePoint event of the year! Something for everyone - one of the few IT events that specifically reaches out to multiple audiences 20 sessions of end user/power user/business content including some great case studies including Telstra, Volvo and a number of Industry verticals such as finance,  insurance, legal and engineering 2 more...

 

My last 30 days most favourite SharePoint Blogs (May-2010)

May 17, 2010

This month's listings sees some new blogs that have caught my attention namely Waldek's who's smashed this month with some amazing articles of late! Yaroslav continues to pump out some great code snippets for working with SharePoint via the API. And the BCS team are pushing out some great content. Two other blogs of note that are really producing some great stuff are 'SharePoint Blues' and 'Will more...

 

Photos from Perth SharePoint User Group: Office Launch #ANZOfficeLaunch

May 14, 2010

We had a great Perth SharePoint User Group meeting this week for the launch day. Sezai Komur did an awesome session on Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 with a sample SharePoint 2007 site live in his presentation! Got some good laughs too as he wrote a web part that picked the winners of the raffle prizes. We had reasonable amount of luck with the LiveMeeting call with the other states, but unfortun more...

 

SPDispose…what...

May 8, 2010

I've spoken at a few online and community events recently and have been really disappointed by the amount of people who had heard of SPDisposeCheck. This tool should be the first thing installed on a Development machine after installing Visual Studio 2008/10. I have also spoke to a few people who have attended SharePoint Development courses and have been really disappointed to hear that this too more...

 

SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010 Australia & New Zealand Launch Party - Perth

May 7, 2010

Myself and Sezai Komur have organised the Launch Party locally in perth which will run in parallel to user groups in 7 other locations! Should be a good night please register below to attend!  http://www.aunz2010launch.net  Local Launch Party With the release of the new SharePoint, Office & Project Server platforms, there are a number of User Group events being planned around Australi more...

 

Feedback from HP TRIM Product team on my webcast

May 5, 2010

So my screen cast on the HP TRIM 7 integration with SharePoint 2007 seems to have been popular which makes it all worth while re-recording it after the sound was so terrible from the live presentation! To top this off I got lots of feedback from the HP TRIM product team answering both queries I had and also backing up their architectural decisions along the way. I have summarised below in easy re more...

 

Save as Template/Import WSP in VS2010 is as useful as sticking my hand in a blender

April 27, 2010

Developer Continuity I have been hearing a lot in presentations about "Developer Continuity" in SharePoint 2010 Development but unfortunately I still don't think the tools are there still. A common scenario is for work to be done quickly in SharePoint Designer as a prototype, as let's face it, it's a lot quicker to do things in the Web UI/SharePoint Designer than in Visual Studio. A goo more...

 

Introducing SharePoint 2010 (SP2010) Development to ALM (TFS2010) Screencast

April 16, 2010

In this web cast @jthake introduces SharePoint 2010 development in Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 targeted at a non SharePoint dev crowd including SharePoint Projects, F5 debugging experience, Solution Package designer, Static Code Analysis, check-in policies and TFS Team Build. This is the same content I presented at the Inaugural ALM Conference (Visual Studio 2010 launch) in Sydney last week more...

 

My last 30 days most favourite SharePoint Blogs (Apr-2010)

April 16, 2010

So I have been keeping up again with my reading and here is this months most starred posts within the community from my opinion (mainly development focused SharePoint blogs). Marc and Yaroslav is continue to storm the top of this list and Corey Roth creeps to 3rd with Joel Oleson, Chris Givens and Sahil Malik pumping out some good stuff too! Obviously no one but the product team blog got starred more...

 

SharePoint 2007 and HP TRIM 7 Integration Screencast

April 16, 2010

As promised, I've uploaded a webcast that demonstrates and gives my opinion on the integration between SharePoint 2007 and HP TRIM 7. I did have to re-record this from the UG session because the sound didn't work (too much background noise). I have invested in a new Samson CO3U USB Condenser microphone on order from US so hopefully in future they'll be lots better! Click here to watch the screenc more...

 

Technical Whitepaper: SharePoint Content & Application Lifecycle Management Guidance

April 16, 2010

I'd like to announce the release of my Technical Whitepaper on SharePoint Content & Application Lifecycle Management Guidance. With organizations expanding their usage of SharePoint as a development and web infrastructure platform, managing team development, release cycles, and updates across distributed SharePoint farms can be a complex undertaking.  To make sense of this Lifecycle, Mr. Thak more...

 

My SharePoint 2010 Development with TFS 2010 webcast is available

April 7, 2010

The great guys who organised SharePoint Saturday Arabia (#SPSArabia) have uploaded the web casts from the online event done in LiveMeeting. Check out the sessions, there were some great ones on the day! Obviously I encourage you to watch my one which walks through using VS2010 and TFS 2010 to build WSP as part of continuous integration along with integrating SPDisposeCheck Code Analysis rules more...

 

SharePoint 2010 Development Environment Rig

April 2, 2010

So I finally bit the bullet 3 weeks ago and decided that my Fujitsu T5010 Tablet with Windows 7 Ultimate 8Gb RAM (1033Mhz DDR3), G.Skill Vortex 128SSD and secondary 320Gb 7200rpm HDD was just simply not cutting it running VM's in VMWare Workstation 7. So I invested in a new Lenovo W510 with 12Gb RAM (stole the 8Gb out of tablet and put base 4Gb back in that) and put my SSD in this and used the Ul more...

 

Sandboxed Solutions in SharePoint 2010: Quota breach stops ALL solutions in Site

March 20, 2010

I presented on Sandboxed Solutions at the Perth SharePoint User Group on Thursday night alongside Sezai Komur (he did Client OM). I went through the standard bits and pieces on Sandboxed Solutions (see references for more detailed info): why benefits what you can do what you can't do resource points and quotas about the Services that monitor them and execute them how to debug them I then showed a more...

 

My last 30 days most favourite SharePoint Blogs (Mar-2010)

March 16, 2010

So I have been keeping up again with my reading and here is this months most starred posts within the community from my opinion (mainly development focused SharePoint blogs). Great to see some new names near the top too…Marc has been pumping out some great XSLT content. Yaroslav is continue his storm on #SP2010 code snippets and has now started cross-posting on the SharePointDevWiki.com which is more...

 

What will May the 12th mean to you?

March 6, 2010

As announced by @ArpanShah via twitter yesterday SharePoint 2010 will be available in RTM "in April" (no date yet) and the launch will be the 12th of May. I'm assuming this means that customers will be able to start using SharePoint 2010 in production sometime in April, but I suspect not everyone will have access to it until the 12th May. I will speak to my local team and update this po more...

 

My initial thoughts on SharePoint 2010 Certification

March 6, 2010

I have commented on the SharePoint 2007 examples a few times in the past : The 12 factors to turn ASP.NET developers to SharePoint 2010 Microsoft Infrastructure Administrators need to face the facts…SharePoint is here to stay! The SharePoint Implementation Market needs to grow up! I've just read the announcement on the Microsoft Born to Learn blog about the coming SharePoint 2010 exams. The more...

 

SPoint.me is LIVE!

March 2, 2010

Arno Nell (@arnonel) has been working hard for over 18 months to come up with SPoint.me which is a new social networking site just for the SharePoint community. He announced it here on SharePointMagazine.net which he also founded. Yes, the community already has: EndUserSharePoint.com for end users SharePointBlogs.com for free hosting of blogs SharePointDevWiki.com for devs and admins SharePointMa more...

 

My last 30 days most favourite SharePoint Blogs

February 16, 2010

I read A LOT of blog posts in Google Reader, at last count it was around 500 feeds. I try to get through all of them and the way I've built up priorities on what to keep up with has been a challenge. For the last few months I have been "starring" and "liking" posts that have been of value to me. Basically unique content that isn't just cut and paste of MSDN or another site, or more...

 

SPSPerth Feb 2010 Slide Decks published

February 11, 2010

I've managed to chase down the majority of the speakers from SPSPerth and have uploaded all their slide decks. I've found in the past that just blogging that they are available doesn't raise interest. So below I have put some info on what they are about to rustle some larger interest in Global SharePoint Community ;-) A big thanks again to all the 18 speakers and also to all of the 125 attendees more...

 

SharePoint Conference 2010 Sydney, Australia

February 9, 2010

16th and 17th June, 2010, The Hilton, Sydney, Australia    Don't miss the Australian SharePoint Conference for 2010, proudly sponsored by Microsoft and leading partners, and organized by members of the Australian and New Zealand SharePoint community.  I have submitted a few speaker sessions so hopefully you'll get to see me present there!  For details and registration, visit the following si more...

 

I’ll be speaking at ALM conference in Sydney

February 8, 2010

Antony Borton et al have organised a Australia ALM Conference (Application Lifecycle Management) at Luna Park in Sydney on the 13th and 14th of April 2010. I will be speaking on "Introducing ALM to SharePoint Development Implementations": "The SharePoint Platform adoption is growing at a rate of knots among the customers of the development community. With the new SharePoint 2010 pl more...

 

SharePoint Saturday Perth wrap up

February 7, 2010

SharePoint Saturday Perth was run on Saturday. I organised this over the last few months and from what I have heard, it was a very well received event. We had over 115 people attend with a full 100 at the keynote and wrap up sessions at the end! I think that makes it the biggest SPS in Australia to date which is awesome! The speakers had great feedback on their sessions with Information Worker, I more...

 

Independent SharePoint Consultant for hire

February 7, 2010

I have decided to move on from my role as Principal Consultant at Readify after handing in my notice last week. As of March, I will be pursuing a career as an Independent SharePoint Consultant in the Perth area. I am looking to assist customers to lead and mentor their teams on SharePoint based projects or simply review or architect their solutions up front and oversee the project throughout its more...

 

I am now a Microsoft Virtual Technical Specialist

February 4, 2010

Today I went and signed a contract with Microsoft here in Western Australia to join the "Virtual Technical Specialist" programme. I've had plenty of questions on what this role actually is…so here goes from what I know already. Effectively as a Virtual Technical Specialist I will be reporting to William Cornwill (@codejedi) who is based in Victoria as a SharePoint Technology Solutions P more...

 

Quest Site Administrator Reports for SharePoint OnDemand - Quick thoughts

January 28, 2010

I saw a tweet from the Quest guys promoting their new cloud based app called 'Site Administrator Reports for SharePoint | OnDemand'. A bit of a mouthful, but a pretty compelling little tool! Essentially you download an app to your local machine and then it opens up the cloud based app in a browser again (not sure what client app is for, maybe a requirement for some security bits the app does). more...

 

SharePoint Saturday Perth Event!

January 11, 2010

I have organised a SharePoint Saturday Event with the help of a few other guys in Perth for 6th February, if you happen to be in the area…please come along! Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007/2010 for 'SharePoint Saturday' event. SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with se more...

 

SharePoint Dependent Assemblies in Event Receivers

January 4, 2010

I got bitten today by having an EventReceiver in a separate assembly to my actual WSP Visual Studio Project. The EventReceiver was using the Unity and OpenXML framework and I had not referenced these in my WSP Visual Studio Project. When I deployed my WSP and ran a FeatureReceiver that was adding this EventReceiver programmatically to a List I was getting the below error: Feature receiver assembl more...

 

The year that was

December 30, 2009

The year that was Well 2010 is just 10 hours away here in Perth, Australia! I'll be nursing a hangover when my fellow SharePoint community over in the west coast of America are tucking into their first beer! This year has been a huge year for me in the SharePoint community so I just thought I'd reflect on that, some of you may not have been aware of some of the posts etc. so you can take a read n more...

 

Movember is nearly over!

November 29, 2009

No…I wasn’t growing a moustache as a fashion statement…it was for a charity event called Movember ;-)   If you’d like to sponsor my efforts and put some money towards a good cause just click here (it’s tax deductable too)!   more...

 

CKS:EBE 2.0 feedburner bug

November 25, 2009

I found an error with CKS:EBE 2.0 which I submitted to CodePlex Issues. So I finally worked out what was wrong with my CKS:EBE 2.0 SharePoint blog and links coming off of Twitter which is feed from my Feedburner.com RSS feed. Turns out Feedburner in their wisdom have added some querystring goodness to the urls potentially for tracking ability. http://wss.made4the.net/archive/2009/11/21/pspugw more...

 

New release of SPSource on CodePlex

November 21, 2009

I’ve finally got round to putting a new official release of SPSource on CodePlex. This one has added a few new fixtures and fixed a few issues highlighted by great community guys such as @coreyroth, @miches, @grumpywookie! Big thanks to them for taking the time to add issues into CodePlex and blog about it too! If you do find any issues please submit them, I have alerts on the project ;-) What more...

 

SharePoint 2010 Overview webcast recorded from Perth SharePoint User Group #SP2010

November 21, 2009

I've attached the PowerPoint deck as well as the web casts from the User Group. Watch the web casts with the links below: Perth SharePoint User Group Nov 09 - SharePoint 2010 Overview by Jeremy Thake. Add SharePointDevWiki.com iTunes podcast/webcast feed to your iTunes to watch on the go! RSS feed here Here are the links I walked the guys through on Tuesday lunchtime: My Movember don more...

 

How to install SharePoint 2010 Public Beta on Windows Server 2008 R2 (on @SPAdmWiki)

November 20, 2009

I've put together screen shots to allow people to walk through an installation from scratch. I found this useful when I first started out in SharePoint because not everyone knows how to install Windows, AD, SQL etc. so this should help you through. Please check out this page Install SharePoint 2010 Public Beta on Standalone Windows Server 2008. The @SPAdmWiki has also got a page with some guida more...

 

SPDevWiki and SPAdmWiki moving to SharePoint 2010 Beta 2!

November 12, 2009

[Cross Posted] With the "very close" release of SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 with a go-live license I'm pleased to announce that the SharePointDevWiki.com and SharePointAdminWiki.com will be migrating to the new platform! Why is this good for you...well when you are contributing to the new site you'll be using the new SharePoint 2010 platform for starters! Going back over old ground the more...

 

SharePoint SPSource bonnet open

October 30, 2009

If you have been using SPSource to reverse engineer Content Types, Site Columns, Module (files), List Templates etc. please take some time to provide some feedback over at CodePlex. I have the bonnet up on the source this weekend fixing some loose ends. SP… what? If you haven’t used SPSource…why not? ;-) Seriously check out the webcast (list template demo) to get an idea of what this can do fo more...

 

SharePoint 2010 is one greedy beast…and will block adoption

October 28, 2009

So I saw the Setting Up a Development environment for SharePoint 2010 was posted on MSDN. I nearly fell off my chair when I read this: “In any development environment, you should use a computer with an x64-capable CPU, and at least 2 gigabytes (GB) and preferably 4 GB of RAM for SharePoint Foundation, and 6 to 8 GB of RAM for SharePoint Server.” I think it’s great that Microsoft have been so more...

 

The 12 factors to turn ASP.NET developers to SharePoint 2010

October 26, 2009

I’ve already posted a webcast and created a wiki page that has caused a lot of discussion on the wiki on “How ASP.NET developers can leverage the SharePoint 2007 Platform”. This post will reflect on the SharePoint 2010 conference last week and to nominate 12 factors that will hopefully be the tipping point for ASP.NET developers to start leveraging the SharePoint 2010 platform. I will be using m more...

 

Thoughts on SharePoint Conference 2009

October 26, 2009

So I’m sitting at San Francisco airport, terrible international area by the way *sigh*. Anyways, thought I would start to write my thoughts on #SPC09. The Keynote It was very exciting to see Steve Ballmer start the keynote off with so much energy and knowledge of the platform, but it slowly went from him being very business focused to the other guys coming on and jumping directly into a techni more...

 

Does JavaScript/jQuery Enhancements to SharePoint Count as Development?

October 16, 2009

I had a great twitter discussion today with @bsimser & @sympmarc about SharePoint and jQuery which was triggered by an End User SharePoint post by @sympmarc. I pointed them to my “jQuery: The SharePoint band aid” and @bsimser came back with well does jQuery enhancements in SharePoint count as development? So here’s my opinion on this: Are jQuery enhancements development? YES! jQuery is a Ja more...

 

MySPC 09 schedule

October 13, 2009

So I’ve spent a while coming up with my schedule. My main criteria was to stay development track focussed and as many Level 400’s as possible, I can watch the Level 200’s at 4x later ;-) There were some tough calls, but have to stay focused on the dev tools over specific features. Also going to be busy in the evenings too, but that’s the way I like it! No plans for Friday yet, was thinking maybe more...

 

#SPC09 Sessions for #SP2010 conference!

October 12, 2009

I’ve quickly taken screen shots of the sessions in the schedule builder for SPC09. Full credit to them in producing a usable Session Builder unlike the interface provided for Australia Tech.ED this year which was terrible! There’s a lot of sessions with only 8 level 400 Developer sessions and 35 Level 300 ones. I’m guessing they’ve been a bit more honest with the levels as this was another t more...

 

SharePoint 2010: The Enterprise Platform

October 9, 2009

I’m repeatedly cornered to discuss SharePoint and a common discussion that occurs is the wide spread usage of SharePoint as an “Enterprise Platform” or “Enterprise Portal”. SharePoint in Organisations (state and local government, private enterprises, etc.) are moving towards a Microsoft Platform in droves and migrating their SAP, Oracle, BEA, IBM, OpenText and EMC enterprise stacks. I’m exagger more...

 

How to manage the noise of #SPC09

October 5, 2009

So the more I speak to people on NDA e.g. MVP’s,people on the TAP etc. the more I get concerned about how much content is going to burst at the seams after the NDA is released on SharePoint 2010. So here is my advice on how to manage this information once the gun goes off on the starting line! Just like “SharePoint Designer is free!” syndrome, there's going to be a lot of this going on on Twitt more...

 

SharePointDevWiki: SharePoint 2010 hub #SP2010

September 26, 2009

So I have finally had time to create a new Confluence Wiki Space for WSS 4.0 and SP2010. This wiki will grow as more information about the platform becomes available and it will be a central hub for me whilst at SPC09 to log all the information I find. I want to try and make this a collective site to map all the information on WSS 4.0 and SP2010 from around the web in blogs, forum, twitter and more...

 

Lessons learnt from attending #AuTechEd09 and plans for #SPC09

September 12, 2009

I’m currently a few thousand feet up in the air travelling back from Brisbane to Perth after a intensive week at TechEd Australia 2009. It’s been a great week and I’ve got to meet some amazing individuals in the Microsoft ecosystem for the first time such as Reed Shaffner, Alistair Speirs, Ian Palangio, Gayan Peiris, Christian Longstaff, Andrew Parsons and Sara Ford. I also got to meet some famil more...

 

#SP2010 New sessions announced for #SPC09

September 8, 2009

Another few sessions have been announced for #SPC09. I’m getting so excited about all this stuff! Check out the full information on the #SPC09 web site more...

 

#SP2010 New sessions announced for #SPC09

September 8, 2009

Another few sessions have been announced for #SPC09. I’m getting so excited about all this stuff! more...

 

SharePoint Conference 2009 (Las Vegas) (+ join the tribe!)

September 4, 2009

So I’ve decided to bite the bullet and drag myself over on a 30 hour flight to Las Vegas for the public unveiling of SharePoint 2010! WOOOOO! I’m extremely excited not only to see everyone from across the globe attending in the SharePoint community in one place…but also to see all the Microsoft Product team and MVPs present on all the new functionality within SharePoint 2010! You can guar more...

 

TechEd Australia 2009 & SharePoint Presentation #DEV340 #AuTechEd

September 4, 2009

TechEd Australia is on next week in the Gold Coast. I’ve never been to a TechEd before so I have no idea what to expect really. I went to the SharePoint Conference in Sydney in 2007, but TechEd is going to be a lot bigger than that! I am actually speaking at the event, co-presenting with Andrew Coates on VSTO and SharePoint Development (#DEV340) and am really looking forward to it! We’ve got more...

 

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (01Sep)

September 1, 2009

TOP THIS WEEK Deployment Survey If you haven’t already filled in the survey on how you do Deployment in SharePoint…please please please fill it in! Put a clients hat on and fill it in as if you are them…just need more data ;-) PowerShell for developers - Waldek Mastykarz Waldek keeps keeping on keeping on with his guidance…this time around PowerShell! JOPX on SharePoint 2007 ( more...

 

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (25Aug)

August 25, 2009

TOP THIS WEEK How I Benefit from Native Boot From VHD Reza Alirezaei’s Blog All the cool kids are doing it! Even me! Love it! Pre-filling fields on EditForm.aspx Great work by Andy Burns on Event Receivers! How to Create Killer SharePoint Applications with Four Simple Techniques Some good advice around leveraging the SharePoint Platform from dev perspective Server-si more...

 

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (18Aug)

August 18, 2009

[Cross Posted on SharePointDevWiki.com] TOP THIS WEEK Implementing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Solutions : SharePoint Products and Technologies White Paper “oldie but a goodie” Virtual User Group Meeting Featuring a Developer Panel! SharePoint 2007 Weblog » Blog Archive » SharePoint Nation! - “this is on tomorrow” Getting Your more...

 

#SharePoint Site Collections and 100Gb Content Database guidance

August 14, 2009

I’ve been in Adelaide for a few days reviewing a company building a product on top of SharePoint. Some of the team had been on the 4 day “boot camps” that are run here in Australia that cover developing solutions with SharePoint. One of the common things I continue to see in the “wild” is the fact that developers tend not to keep track of the information published on TechNet and MSDN. Some of thi more...

 

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (11Aug)

August 11, 2009

[Cross Posted on SharePointDevWiki.com] TOP THIS WEEK Bad Practice #1: Not using Solutions for deploying artifacts to the server(s) - Ben Curry, CISSP, SharePoint Server MVP I want to sing this from the rooftops…use Solution Packages pleeeasssseee! Getting Your Feet Wet Writing Code For SharePoint – Part 1 of 4 Very good introduction to SharePoint Development TOOLS/ENVIRON more...

 

#SharePoint Implementations: the 80/20 rule

August 11, 2009

I had an e-mail from Mahdi Sheikhi who was asking me to talk more about the 80/20 rule which I mentioned in a previous article: “if you can earn 80 percent of your requirement with current SharePoint features and need to development for other features , SharePoint is your solution.” SharePoint is a Development Platform with lots of functionality available out of the box. SharePoint MVP, Sahil M more...

 

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (04Aug)

August 4, 2009

[Cross posted on SharePointDevWiki.com] Top This Week SharePoint Deployment survey Building a Knowledge Blogging System in SharePoint - brainlitter.com :: Ramblings from the Victoria SharePoint Trenches Automatically add ‘Search As You Type’ to every SharePoint page using Infuser Storing SharePoint List meta data without adding an column #SP2010 I think everyone is too busy more...

 

SharePoint Application/Content Lifecyle Management anonymous survey

July 29, 2009

So I’ve repeatedly been questioned by various clients, user group members, SPDevWiki consumers and Twitter followers about this area and figured I’d gauge the landscape by doing a survey much like I did with the SharePoint Implementation one. If you are a Microsoft Partner/Integrator please fill in this case study in the context of one of your clients. Some of the questions relate to size of t more...

 

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (28Jul)

July 28, 2009

[Cross posted on SharePointDevWiki.com] Top This Week SharePoint’s Branding Limitations, Part 1 - SharePoint Magazine An awesome set of articles on Branding even showing the source broken up in Firebug Toolbar! SharePoint; from an Engineer's Perspective : MOSS Pre-Installation Health Check Awesome blog post on great way to check the health of your farm! Copy Sharepoint SP more...

 

SharePoint 3.0/2007 PSconfig error: IIS not installed

July 21, 2009

So I’ve been using psconfig to build SharePoint Farms rather than using the SharePoint Configuration Wizard as I can automate it with scripts with environment variables. One thing I came across was that the Wizard does more validation for me. I was getting an error on step 2 in creating the Configuration Database: 07/22/2009 13:22:18  7  ERR          Task configdb has failed more...

 

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (21Jul)

July 21, 2009

[Cross posted on SharePointDevWiki.com] No surprises that #SP2010 is the big hitter again this week. Also seems everyone is quiet…no doubt a lot of the MVPs are quietly off playing with SharePoint 2010 and it’ll be nuts once it goes public after conference…I’m sure they are all drafting lots of posts to pull traffic to their blogs ;-) Important June Cumulative Update Packages Ready for Down more...

 

Is VSeWSS 1.3 CTP ever coming out of CTP?

July 15, 2009

So with the message from Paul Andrew on the Sneak Peek webcast to start using VSeWSS now so that you will be familiar with Visual Studio 2010 tools, I started to take a look at VSeWSS 1.3 CTP (March not Feb). It is truly painful to work with compared to WSPBuilder and STSDev. The community has been maintaining this page on the comparison between the tools and I’ve been adding a few extra bits tod more...

 

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (14Jul)

July 14, 2009

[Cross Posted on: SharePointDevWiki.com] Ok, so I’ve managed to start breathing again over the excitement of the Sneak Peak of SharePoint 2010…but also of being on the Office 2010 Technical Preview too (more to come!). SharePoint 2010 Technical Preview SharePoint 2010 ”Sneak Peak” at SharePoint 2010…lots revealed Developer Changes in SharePoint 2010 My opinion on what was p more...

 

Oh good they got rid of the SharePoint 2007 Pie…oh crap they replaced it with a SharePoint 2010 Pizza

July 13, 2009

This is not just a “SharePoint Designer free” blog spam post…so please read on ;-) First impressions of the new SharePoint 2010 sneak peak…and the new Overview Video by Tom Rizzo. “Value Pillars” Connect and Empower People Heavily pushing on multiple devices: multiple Browers (IE, Safari, Firefox); mobile Cut Costs with a Unified Infrastructure One platform with multiple solution more...

 

Developer Changes in SharePoint 2010

July 13, 2009

Paul Andrew talks about the new Developer functionality in SharePoint 2010 in a webcast on the new SharePoint 2010 site. The is also a download of 2010  (Technical Preview) Developer Documentation too. The webcast goes through and shows the new SharePoint integration with Visual Studio 2010 which I’m hoping will be available in the next public beta as it got missed out of the first. Paul also s more...

 

#SharePoint 2007 SP2 Preupgradecheck rocks the earth – use it now for health check!

July 13, 2009

At @JoelOleson’s presentation on Friday, he highlighted the features available in preupgradecheck. For a developer/administrator this is awesome as it’ll highlight lots of issues that are good to know now, regardless of SharePoint 2010 next year! Feature References One of the big ones is highlighting the Features that are not installed in a farm but referenced somewhere! The below log highlight more...

 

Joel Oleson visits Perth

July 10, 2009

It was great to finally meet @JoelOleson again and I really appreciate he making the effort to fly to Perth to present at the SharePoint User Group. It was really surreal actually, much like meeting the Brisbane crew a few weeks ago. You speak to these guys on Twitter, read their blogs, add them as a friend on Facebook and yet you still are not sure what to expect when you meet them in person! I more...

 

I will be presenting at #AUTechEd

July 9, 2009

With the announcement yesterday, I can finally openly jump up in the air and celebrate being asked to speak at TechEd Australia! The session got published yesterday on the TechEd web site that I am co-presenting with Andrew Coates (@coatsy) from Microsoft! It is a real honour for me to be able to present at TechEd, but also to be presenting alongside someone I have so much respect for also! more...

 

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (07Jul)

July 7, 2009

[completely biased] How ASP.NET Developers can leverage SharePoint webcast @jthake (me) presents on the findings from the collaborative efforts on the SharePointDevWiki.com page…a huge thanks to the community on this! SPTDD: SharePoint and Test Driven Development, Part Two - Eric Shupps @eshupps continues the discussions around TDD referencing big guns like Sahil Malik and Andrew more...

 

How ASP.NET Developers can leverage SharePoint webcast

July 6, 2009

I presented at the Perth dotNet User Group last Thursday, if you didn’t happen to make it I have recorded the presentation. More Info More information is also being collaborated on at the SharePointDevWiki.com so feel free to comment here! I’d just like to say a big thanks to the community for collaborating on this. Speaker Rate As mentioned on the web cast, I’d really appreciate your fee more...

 

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (30Jun)

June 30, 2009

[Cross posted on  SharePointDevWiki.com] Think this is the biggest week yet! Please support my efforts to compile this by tweeting the link! Development Environment Tip: Convering your Virtual PC 2007 disks to Windows Virtual PC (on Windows 7) - Tobias Zimmergren's thoughts on development Saved a few of my colleagues today playing with the new VPC stuff in Windows 7! more...

 

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (23Jun)

June 23, 2009

[Cross Posted on www.SharePointDevWiki.com] It seems every week more and more great content appears! These could almost become daily Coffee break posts! WSP Carsten Keutmann: Beginning SharePoint Development (Bonus part #3 WSPBuilder overview) Hot off the press! Carsten has released a fix for an installation issue with WSPBuilder! This man is the shining light of all things Sh more...

 

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (16Jun)

June 16, 2009

[Cross Posted on SharePointDevWiki.com News] SharePoint Saturday Sydney (8th August) @BrianFarnhill et al are organising Australia’s first SharePoint Saturday. @DanielBrownSA is also organising one in Adelaide too. Winsmarts SharePoint WCF Support @SahilMalik has gotten around to releasing on CodePlex the Solution Package with a feature to activate WCF for Share more...

 

Importing a stsadm export package from a MOSS Farm to a WSS Farm

June 3, 2009

So I’ve been doing some work in a MOSS Farm Development VM for a release to a WSS Farm. I created a a Site Collection using the Collaboration Team Site Definition thinking it wouldn’t use any of the MOSS Features (as you may know that MOSS is a superset of WSS). When I did an stsadm –o export from my MOSS Farm and then did an stsadm –o import into my WSS Farm I got the following errors: C:\Prog more...

 

Results from the SharePoint Implementation Approach Survey

May 26, 2009

A big thank you to the 182 people that responded to the Survey! It has been a real eye opener for me in terms of the amount of approaches that are available out there! Here’s summary: So many not on 64bit SharePoint Dev environment yet! Most are working off laptops with their environments Most are running their environment in a Virtual Machine Too many not running VM off a sepa more...

 

SharePoint Web Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2010 Team Suite beta

May 22, 2009

So I’m sitting on the plane on the way back to Perth for the weekend and thought I’d throw together a post on the new improved Web Testing capability within Visual Studio Team System 2010 beta . I remember first getting Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite and trying the Web Testing capabilities with SharePoint. It failed horribly due to the way in which SharePoint renders it’s XHTML. Fort more...

 

SharePoint User Profile Updates and AD Synchronisation

May 22, 2009

I have been focusing my efforts recently on client projects around SharePoint User Profiles which are part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Editions (Standard and Enterprise). The User Profiles are one of numerous components making up Shared Service Providers (SSP’s) which also include Excel Services, InfoPath Forms Services, Business Data Catalogue and Enterprise Search. User P more...

 

FACT: You can’t be a SharePoint Developer unless…

May 22, 2009

I’ve just been on a training course and was shocked to find out that some of the Developers hadn’t heard of various SharePoint Resources online, including the SharePointDevWiki.com . I know, I know! Where have they been since December last year! LOL Seriously, it wasn’t so much the wiki, as I know that it is only promoted in various inner circles and not as mainstream as MSDN as a resource. I w more...

 

Microsoft Infrastructure Administrators need to face the facts…SharePoint is here to stay!

May 22, 2009

I have been on the Microsoft Partner Services training for Collaboration and Portal technology for two days presented by Ian Morrish from MCS NZ. @IMorrish is well known in the community for http://www.wssdemo.com/ . One thing that just niggled at me over the two days was the massive pressure that is on SharePoint Architects’ to take responsibility not only for SharePoint as a Platform but also more...

 

Reviewing open source SharePoint products: First look at CompleteSharePoint.NET v2.0

May 18, 2009

CompleteSharePoint.NET v2.0 was released today by Tommy Segoro, another local Perth SharePoint Developer. This open source project provides functionality to Windows SharePoint Server (WSS) 3.0 similar to the Publishing Feature within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Right now I’m sitting on a plane on the way to Sydney and figured this was a great time to deploy the source to a Wi more...

 

SharePoint Development MVP Panel Discussion Review

May 14, 2009

So if you watch one web cast this year…it has to be the MVP Panel Discussion SharePoint Development recorded at TechEd in LA (#TeLA09). It included Rob Bogue (@RobBogue), Matthew McDermott (@MatthewMcD), Todd Bleeker (@ToddBleeker), Eric Shupps, Andrew Connell (@AndrewConnell), Todd Baginksi (@ToddBaginski), Maurice Prather and Scott Hillier. Some crazy pictures of the crew can be found on Rob more...

 

“#IfIHadAYearAtMicrosoft I would…”, the SharePoint Product team and SharePoint 2010 migration path…

May 13, 2009

So last night before calling it a night I decided to post a tweet: #IfIHadAYearAtMicrosoft...I would ensure #SharePoint UI was 100% W3C compliant & be able to develop remotely off the server and got a reply within an hour from @LougeFlyZ aka Chris Johnson from the SharePoint Product team headed up by Arpan Shah (@arpanshah): @jthake one year?!? You can't do these things outside of a releas more...

 

Perth SharePoint UG Web Cast on approaches to deploying artefacts

May 13, 2009

I finally got round to uploading the User Group web cast where i talk about the approaches of deploying artefacts into a SharePoint environment. I discuss multiple approaches and also show the SPSource product that i have been on with @RichFinn. Check it out here: Download WMV Watch in Silverlight Player more...

 

Help the SharePoint Community out of the Twitter/Social bookmarking blur!

May 9, 2009

After reading @JoelOleson’s latest post on how the Community has evolved I thought I’d raise some ideas to save all of our time ;-) As we’re all very busy people! The main reasons I use Twitter is: to discover new people in the community talking about twitter…and discover their blog…and subscribe to their RSS feed to try and answer peoples’ questions around SharePoint to ask questions more...

 

SharePoint MVPs vs SharePoint Knights

May 5, 2009

So the title got your attention, @JoelOleson posted quite a controversial post (in my opinion) today proposing a new group be setup called the SharePoint Knights. You can read about it and then come back to this post asI have put my thoughts down in this post. Why do we need this group? Being extremely blunt, the reason it appears this is needed is because the SharePoint MVP group does not awar more...

 

SPSource v1.0.0.0 Released!

May 4, 2009

SPSource will reverse engineer: Site Columns, Content Types, Modules (Master Pages, Page Layouts, CSS Files, XSLT Files, etc.) and new List Templates functionality in your existing Solution Package Visual Studio Project structure. It will also automatically add entries into your existing Feature file (feature.xml) to include these entries providing a completely automated process. Why use it over more...

 

SharePoint Implementation Environment Survey – Please complete it

April 22, 2009

Thought I’d post this so that those of you not in the Twitterverse don’t miss out ;-) I have created a survey quickly in my lunch break yesterday…and was quite impressed with the flow of it and beta tested it with a few guys: Andrew Cox (Readify) and Kristian Kalsing. I put it live pretty soon after that and am humbled by how many people have re-tweeted and given positive feedback. The survey t more...

 

‘The password specified for the username account is invalid’ on Install of SharePoint

April 22, 2009

I had an issue today when specifying the details for the specific content access account e.g. the Farm Account as specified in the MSDN guidance. Now according to the documentation SharePoint should provision all the necessary privileges for the Farm Account, but it didn’t! Having a look at the event viewer showed the error below: After looking around on the web, basically the client had more...

 

SPSource Webcast: Reverse engineer Lists to ListTemplates and much more

April 14, 2009

Rich Finn released SPSource on CodePlex a while ago…something very similar to what I had on my mind to do, because of seeing how poorly VSeWSS Solution Generator reverse engineered Lists to ListTemplates (another post to explain this). You could use other tools to reverse engineer Content Types and Site Columns, but it meant a lot of cut and pasting. SPSource takes all that away and even update more...

 

The Essential SharePoint RSS Feeds to follow and how I manage my reading

April 10, 2009

So I’ve been reading over 450+ feeds for the best part of 2 years now and have come up with a system to ensure that I always get round to the essential ones. When I discover a feed it goes in the ‘SharePoint X’ bucket. I have 3 other buckets ‘SharePoint Priority 1’, ‘SharePoint Priority 2’ and ‘SharePoint Priority 3’. I ensure that I always every day keep up to date with the 1’s and without fai more...

 

Site Definition Issues - File or arguments not valid for site template 'CustomPortalTemplate#0'

March 31, 2009

I’ve recently had to finally take a look at Site Definitions after always taking the approach of creating a blank site and using Features to build up a site. 03/31/2009 20:32:52.05     Quest.PowerGUI.ScriptEditor.exe (0x102C)    0x11B0    Windows SharePoint Services       General                           8e27    Medium      Ensuring module folder _catalogs/masterpage     03/31/2009 20:32:52.1 more...