One of the cool features of SharePoint 2010 (currently in beta) is that you can set it up on a Windows 7 machine. This means that as a SharePoint developer you no longer have to run a Server OS.

To get started I downloaded the SharePoint 2010 Foundations beta from here. You will also need Visual Studio 2010 which you can download from here.

To setup SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 you need to follow this guide which explains how to configure the setup process to run on Windows 7 (it is only one change to an xml file).

Make sure you install all the prerequisites which I won’t list here (they are listed in the guide). It will still install even if you don’t, but you will get errors when you try to configure SharePoint (voice of experience here).

Once you have everything installed and have completed the configuration tool, your site should come up in the browser! Now you can start working with Silverlight and SharePoint.

Tip: Install the SQL Service Manager so that you can turn SQL Server off when you’re not doing SharePoint development. 

A some great resources for getting started with Silverlight and SharePoint 2010 are the PDC sessions which you can watch for free:

• Developer Patterns to Integrate Microsoft Silverlight 3.0 with Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• Developing Solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Using the Client Object Model

For this example we will primarily be utilizing the information in the first session by Paul Stubbs. With SharePoint 2010, Silverlight can live just about anywhere in the user interface, but this example will be geared toward how simple it is to publish a Silverlight application to a SharePoint site and use it in a web part.

Fire up Visual Studio 2010 and create a new Silverlight Application:

At the prompt asking you if you want to create a web application to host the Silverlight application uncheck the checkbox. We don’t need to host Silverlight in a separate web app since SharePoint will be the host.

In the Silverlight Application, edit the MainPage.xaml to have the following Xaml:

          <
          Grid 
          x
          :
          Name
          ="LayoutRoot" 
          Background
          ="PowderBlue">
<
          TextBlock 
          Text
          ="Silverlight
In SharePoint" 
          TextWrapping
          ="Wrap" 
          FontSize
          ="56" 
          FontWeight
          ="Bold"
/> </
          Grid
          >
        

Now let’s add the SharePoint part of the project. Before we add the SharePoint project though we need to be running Visual Studio as the Administrator. Save your work and close the solution. Then right click the Visual Studio 2010 shortcut and select Run As Administrator. Back in the solution, right click the solution and select Add -> New Project. Select SharePoint –> 2010 as the project type and select an Empty SharePoint Project:

If you aren’t running as an Administrator then Visual Studio will tell you that the project requires elevated permissions in order to run.

The SharePoint customization Wizard dialog will pop up asking if you want to deploy as a sandboxed solution or a farm solution. Leave the sandboxed solution checked and click ok. Next, right click on the SharePoint project in the Solution Explorer and select Add -> New Item. Add a new Module to the project as shown below:

Now right click the new Module and select Properties. In the Properties window click in the Project Output References and then click the ellipse button (…). In the Project Output References dialog click the Add button. Expand the deployment location property on the new reference then change the Project Name to the Silverlight project name and the Deployment Type to ElementFile. You should end up with something that looks like this:

Next expand the module we created in the SharePoint project and delete the Sample.txt file. Then open the Elements.xml file. Edit the file to include the xap file that will be generated from our Silverlight application:

          <?
          xml 
          version
          ="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<Module Name="SilverlightModule">
<File Path="SilverlightModule\SilverlightInSharePoint.xap" Url="_catalogs/masterpage/SilverlightInSharePoint.xap" />
</Module>
</Elements> 

At this point your application is ready to be deployed. Right click the SharePoint project and select Set as Startup Project and hit F5. Visual Studio will build and deploy your project to your local SharePoint site and then open it in the browser. However, at this point our Silverlight application isn’t active in any of the pages. Let’s add the Silverlight application as a web part in the default page.

On the SharePoint site click the edit icon then the insert tab, select Web Part, and choose the Silverlight Web Part in the Media and Content category:

Click Add and in the Silverlight Web Part dialog enter the value from the Url field in the Elements.xml file but add a leading slash. So for our example we would enter:

/_catalogs/masterpage/SilverlightInSharePoint.xap

The web part will give you a message that it could not download the xap file. You can ignore this message and just click the save icon. You will get the Silverlight application on the web page, but it will look messed up:

The problem is the default size for the Silverlight Web Part is 400x300 but our text is bigger than 300. So we need to set the size to be 400x400. Click the drop down arrow on the top right of the web part and select Edit Web Part. In the web part properties dialog set the height of the web part to 400 and set the chrome type to None. Click Ok and you should get a better looking page:

Congratulations! You’ve now gotten started with Silverlight 3 and SharePoint 2010. Silverlight development with SharePoint 2010 is much improved in this new version. Happy SharePointing!

I'll be speaking on this coming Sunday at the SoCal Code Camp at Cal State Fullerton.

My session is at 9:00 AM on Sunday and is titled Bridging the Desktop/Web Divide with WPF and Silverlight. I'm hoping to demo (still working on my code) a simple application I built in WPF and show how easy it is to port it to XBAP and Silverlight with a few potential extras (exporting to XPS and a very short demo of ADO.Net Data Services which is the data provider).

My fellow Avanaut Elmer Morales will also be presenting on Sunday afternoon on Building Stunning Sites with SharePoint 2007. Elmer has been building SharePoint 2007 sites well before the product was released and from what I've seen of his presentation so far it should be great.

I'll probably miss the Saturday presentations since I still have some work to do on my own :)

So see you at Code Camp!

From LLiu on the SharePoint Team Blog

You are invited to take the following exams in their beta versions. If you pass either or both of the beta exams, the exam credit will be added to your transcript and you will not need to take the exam in its released form.

·         Exam 70-542: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Application Development

o    Counts as credit towards Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Application Development

·         Exam 70-541: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development

o    Counts as credit towards Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Application Development

Plus I noticed that both the exams for the MCITP: BI certification are available and a few Windows Vista exams too.

• 071-445 - TS: Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence - Implementation and Maintenance
• 071-446 - PRO: Designing a Business Intelligence Infrastructure by Using Microsoft® SQL Server 2005
• 071-621 - UPG: Upgrading your MCDST Certification to MCITP Enterprise Support
• 071-622 - PRO: Installing, Maintaining, Supporting, and Troubleshooting Applications on the Microsoft® Windows Vista Client - Enterprise
• 071-624 - TS: Deploying and Maintaining Vista Client and Office 12 System Desktops using the BDD

The promo code for all these exams seems to be BTA + last three digits of the exam number (071-445 would be BTA445). If you've been working with these technologies then the beta exams are a great deal since they are free and even if you don't pass at least you know what you need to study.

From Patrick:

VPC images are saving my life as a trainer. Managing your VPC images however can be a daunting task if you don't know all of its capabilities. Andrew has an extremely well-documented process & strategy for using Virtual PC and how to optimize and manage disks to (1) maximize my disk space and (2) facilitate rapid creation of new Virtual PC’s when needed for testing/kicking the tires. Thank you very much Andrew for sharing this with all of us.

I've been doing my development on using Virtual PC for the last six months and the tips in this post are very useful. My setup is much simpler, but I can see some of the advantages this type of setup can give. However, I'm curious as to the drawbacks.

• Is there a performance hit for using that many disks instead of a single disk? If so, how much are we talking about?
• If you need to make a change to the base OS, can you make the change on the base disk or will this wipe out all your machines?

For my dev work I've just been creating a base VPC image with the OS and common tools and then setting the file to read-only and making a copy of it for each VPC I need to create. I've even been using fixed disk size in an attempt to eek out every last bit of performance that I can get. I have to pay for it with a larger hard drive, but that isn't too much of a price to pay.

From Clemmens talking about technology overload:

Enter VS2005 and the summary of trying to achieve the same knowledge density is: “Frustrating”.

I feel his frustration. I remember going to PDC 2003 and realizing that it was getting very hard to keep up on all the new stuff coming out of Microsoft. Clemmens continues...

For “generalists” like me, these are hard and frustrating times if they’re trying to stay generalists. Deep and consequent specialization is a great opportunity for everyone and the gamble is of course to pick the right technology to dig into and become “the expert” in. If that technology or problem space becomes the hottest thing everyone must have – you win your bet. Otherwise you might be in trouble.

This statement not only applies to technology in general, but also to specific technologies: think SQL Server 2005. As Kimberly Tripp says, you must become a “Jack of all trades, master of some”. The hard part, as Clemmens mentions, is chosing the some.

For me it all comes down to what I'm working with. For instance, I just found out today that I will not be getting renewed as a Microsoft MVP for SQL Server. I expected this because I haven't had the time to contribute much to the SQL Server community lately. I tend to contribute based on what I'm currently working on. I haven't been a project that used SQL Server 2005 yet, so I haven't had time to really dig into it. If you read this blog you can probably figure out what kind of projects I have been on recently: a SharePoint (and RS) project last year and mostly BizTalk projects this year. I learn based on need.

I'm sure at some point in the near future (at least I keep telling myself this) I'll have time to dig into the new SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 stuff (team system and all), but for now I'm pretty much focused on BizTalk 2004, test-driven development,  continuous integration, etc., since that is where I'm at.

I'll miss hanging out with the other SQL Server MVPs who are a great bunch of guys, but it has been fun being an MVP for the last five years.

From Eli Robillard:

After a year and 32065 web views, I've reorganized and moved the SharePoint resource page into an article. In addition to giving it a more sensible URL, the switch reflects the fact that this is a continuously updated resource and not a one-time posting. I've also added hand-tuned searches, making it easy to locate the most current information for each topic. Don't forget to update your bookmarks and links, and as always, enjoy!

I noticed that the RsWebParts are not listed in the Web Parts section, but other than that it looks like a great list of stuff. My own SharePoint Resource Page has gotten pretty stale (though that isn't entirely my own fault, it is a wiki after all :)

From Patrick:

Ted Pattison has polished an old article on solving the problems developers encounter when programming role-based security within a SharePoint Web part. Required reading material for every SharePoint developer.

The best part is, since Ted is no longer “writing under the fin name of Barry Kouda”, you can now link directly to his blog posts!

Unfortunately I had to cancel on Tech*Ed. I was looking forward to it and I didn't want to miss it. However, since Hisham and I are both on the same project and they didn't think it would work for us both to be gone for the same week. So even though I got my cool badge (staff even) in the mail, I won't be there. :(

But I will be going to PDC05 which both Euan and Fitz are already promoting. I actually started this blog right before heading to PDC03 which was a great event even though it totally overwhelmed me with tons of new stuff. Funny how two years later 90% is still in beta so I really didn't need to be overwhelmed.

So if you're going to Tech*Ed have a great time and learn some stuff for me. If not, get ready to sign up for PDC05 (5 days until the registration opens). See you in October (or maybe in September at PASS).

I've been working for Avanade for about two months now, and I really like it. I've gotten a few emails from people who are interviewing with the company and want to know what it is like. It is a great company to work for, especially if you like working with Microsoft technology. In fact, Gartner just released a publication that listed Avanade as one of the “cool” vendors (along with three other companies). The big issue with working for Avanade is that you will travel. How much depends on what region you work for. The region that I work for, the west region, has a lot of work in each area so the traveling I do is all close by (at least so far).

The west region is also looking to hire developers (especially in SoCal). So if you live in the Western US, like to work with MS technologies, and don't mind some travel, this is a great opportunity. The company is mainly looking for .NET developers with skills in other MS products like SQL Server, BizTalk, SharePoint, Reporting Services, etc.

If you're interested, send your resume to me and I'll pass it along to the right person.

Some of the benefits of working for Avanade include things like $1000 every six months to spend on gadgets and a trip to one major conference per year. They want all developers to get MCSD certified and will pay for your training materials and exams (pass or fail). You are also allocated three weeks per year for training and this is allocated in the same way that vacations are allocated. Plus you get to work with a bunch of great people and have a lot of fun.

Here is a basic job description:

Short Description : Join Avanade and you will be part of a premier consulting organization focused on the Microsoft
enterprise suite. You will help build reliable, scalable solutions.

Description : Avanade is the only global technology integrator dedicated to the Microsoft enterprise platform. Avanade helps customers use Microsoft technology to cut costs and improve business results through standardization, consolidation, and integration of IT infrastructure and applications.

As a Developer, your focus will be developing and testing mission critical enterprise solutions. You will build management, technical and planning skills by participating in internal development projects. You will improve your abilities to think creatively and design solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Participate in business requirements gathering and rules definition.
• Participate in design of desktop and web-based application architecture.
• Develop components/modules/scripts implementing business process rules.
• Perform code walk-through of software components.
• Document software components sufficient for on-going support and enhancement.
• Effectively communicate status of tasks and projects

Minimum Requirements:

You will be degree qualified with excellent communication skills and will have hands-on experience working on component based applications in a distributed environment. Qualified candidates should possess:

• 1+ year technology consulting
• 2 to 4+ years as a programmer
• 1+ years experience with C#
• Deep MS platform Skills
• .NET Framework
• Full lifecycle experience developing large scale, scaleable applications
• Willing to travel

Preferred Requirements:

• MCSD Certification

Via Andrew Watt:

Service Pack 2 for Reporting Services 2000 is available for download.

Visit SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services Service Pack 2.

Bug fixes in SP2 are listed at Microsoft Knowledge Base article 889640.

I'll be interested to hear what people think of the new web parts versus the RsWebParts. The fact that they are included out-of-the-box makes a big difference in what people use.

Since I'm starting at Avanade on Monday, I've been doing some reading and watching to prepare myself a little for the job. Namely, I've been watching all the Enterprise Library webcasts.

• Enterprise Library Overview
• Enterprise Library Configuration Application Block
• Enterprise Library Data Access Application Block
• Enterprise Library Caching Application Block
• Enterprise Library Logging and Instrumentation Application Block
• Dennis Mulder's EntLib Slide Deck (w/ ACA.Net info) [via Baz]

I also wanted to make sure I find time in the near future to read and watch:

• WebParts: From SharePoint to ASP.NET 2.0 [via Jan]
• Best Practices for Developing and Deploying Web Parts
• The .Net Show: SQL Server 2005
• Indigo CTP docs [via Don Box]
• Enterprise Library Exception Handling Application Block [Mar 17]
• Enterprise Library Cryptography Application Block [Mar 22]
• Enterprise Library Security Application Block [Mar 24]
• Enterprise Library Building Your Own Application Block [Mar 28]
• Enterprise Library Applied [Mar 31]

So this is a reminder for myself so that I can find all these later on...

Update: There are also hands-on labs for that go with the Enterprise Library webcasts here [via Scott Densmore]. After watching the Logging Application Block webcast I decided to add it into an existing application so that some of the other developers could get emails when the processed failed. It took me about five minutes to add it. Watching the webcast made the job easy for me.

From Tim Heuer's blog (via Tony Dowler):

inspired by scott hanselmen's post about What Great .NET Developers Ought to Know, as well as the rush of interviews i've been conducting lately to fill sharepoint positions, i started compiling a list of questions for what a sharepoint consultant ought to know...here it is...

Go read it to see how you measure up. Some good questions in there that will help you see what areas of SharePoint you're weak in (if any). It seems like a pretty well-rounded list of questions.

If you do really well on the SharePoint questions and feeling like you know everything go read Scott's What Great .NET Developers Ought to Know and it will probably bring you back down to earth :)

This morning I came across this article: Impersonation, Single Sign-on, and SPS. It is a very interesting article that lays out how to use Single Sign-on with impersonation. So the first thing I did was to get Single Sign-On setup using this MSDN article which was linked in the article. Wow! That was pretty easy. I actually have SSO working for the first time and now it seems pretty simple.

The next step for me was to take the sample code and try it out. I created a new WebPart library and created my new SSO sample webpart. Everything was setup just like the article (I think) but when I ran it I got the dreaded:

Login failed for user '(null)'. Reason: Not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection.

Ok. So why doesn't this work. Well after doing some testing myself (using Page.User.Identity and WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name) I came to the conclusion that something doesn't work, although I'm not sure what it is. It must work in some situations because Jay Nathan has done a lot of work on this (here and here), this article references it, and so does Barry's Blog here on January 24, 2005 (could we get a permalink Barry?). So these guys must be using it and it must be working.

Patrick seems to come to a different conclusion here. He seems to be saying that impersonation doesn't work and that it is easier to just use COM+ instead. A third example of impersonation can be found at this MSDN article. All three of these examples do the same thing, and in all three cases I get the same error message above when I try to connect to the database using a trusted connection.

I can solve Patrick's problem by creating a new WindowsPrincipal object and assigning it to the current context (after making a copy of the current IPrincipal in order to return things on undo). Here is an example of how to do this.

1) First you will need to change the Impersonate method on the Impersonator class:

          public WindowsIdentity Impersonate()
{ // authenticates the domain user account and begins impersonating
it WindowsIdentity id = this.Logon(); this.impersonationContext
= id.Impersonate(); return id; }

2) Next you will need to store the current Principal and then set the new one.

IPrincipal p = base.Context.User;

WindowsPrincipal wp = new WindowsPrincipal(Impersonater.Impersonate()); base.Context.User
= wp;

3) You can then do stuff using the SharePoint object model since the Context.User has now been replaced with the impersonated user. When you're done you put back the orginal user.

Impersonater.Undo();
base.Context.User
= p;

Using this code both the WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name and Context.User.Identity.Name return the name of the impersonated user.

All this to say that it still doesn't seem to accomplish what I need to accomplish. I still get that error and I'm really not sure why. Any ideas?

Just finished uploading the RsWebParts 1.3 package to the project site. I added in a quick fix for the parameters issue. The fix is that you can now include the standard Reporting Services toolbar and parameters which should fix the problem. It isn't as flexible and it takes up some of the report view space, but it works until I come up with something better.

Thanks to everyone for all the great feedback, especially David Korn for testing out the new version.

Not a very exciting release. You can get the installer and the source code (and the DwpGenerator binary and source) at the RsWebParts SourceForge Project.

I'm still working on resolving the parameters issue. I think I'm close on a solution but there were several people who needed the source files ASAP so I went with a much simplier release for now.

Just ran across this today: the Google Mini.

Meet the Google Mini. Designed to help small and medium-sized businesses make the most of their digital assets, the Mini is a hardware and software search appliance that delivers the power and productivity of Google search across your organization’s documents and websites.

The Google Mini:

• Indexes and searches up to 50,000 documents.
• Works with over 220 different file formats, including HTML, PDF and Microsoft Office.
• Can be set up in under an hour and requires minimal ongoing administration.
• Costs $4,995 for all hardware and software, including a year of support and hardware replacement coverage.

This has some interesting implications for SharePoint. While it isn't as feature rich as SharePoint, it is definately a competitor in the information aggregation space.

Update: Sahil Malik  asks how this relates to SharePoint. Perhaps I should have clarified and said SharePoint Portal Server. In order to see the relation take a look at Microsoft's Top 10 Benefits of SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

Find and reuse timely and relevant information from systems and reports, and quickly locate and access documents, projects, and best practices by searching or browsing—all through the portal.

...

The industry-leading search technology in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 enables you to locate files, project plans, and best practices in file shares, Web sites, Microsoft Exchange Public Folders, Lotus Notes, Windows SharePoint Services sites, and databases instead of re-creating the wheel.

Now I'm not saying that the Google Mini is a direct competitor to SharePoint since SP offers much more than search. However, when it comes to information aggregation the Google Mini is clearly a competitor. I've no idea if it can search Lotus Notes or Exchange, but you could probably figure out a way to make it work.

I looked into backing up SharePoint awhile back and didn't come away with a good solution. Recently MSDN published a new articled on How to Write a Back Up and Restore Application for SharePoint Portal Server 2003. The first time I looked at the article I skimmed it and didn't find it very useful and wrote it off. However, Brian E. Cooper blogged that it was Worth a Read!

So I went back and downloaded the sample and went though the article and I must admit, it was worth a read. There were several things I did like and some that I did not.

First, I liked the fact that I was able to do a full backup and restore of a SharePoint Portal. I built a Portal on a Virtual Server, backed it up, messed it up, and then restored it. It worked pretty well. Everything was restored except for the WebPart packages. For some reason I had to uninstall/reinstall my web part packages to get them to work. However, this isn't too much of an issue. The main thing was that the content and structure was restored successfully.

Second, the application that comes with the article is a sample application (as referenced by the application name SPSBackupSample). So, what is a SharePoint junkie to do with a sample application except to create a full blown application. I spent much of the day yesterday building my own version of the application written in C#. Everything was going well until I hit the section that backs up the indexes using the CSPSBackupClass. This class is used to backup the indexes to a stream using a method BackupToStream.

In the sample application (which is written in C++) you pass in an IStream pointer. In C# you should be able to do this (if I understand things correctly) by passing the pointer to a UCOMIStream object (using Marshal.GetIUnknownForObject). However, it doesn't seem to matter what I do, I get an exception from the CSPSBackupClass object. So I'm stuck at this point.

I could use the BackupToFile option but I was hoping to keep my sample compatible with the original sample. Any ideas?

Update: In case anyone is interested, here is the exception details that I'm getting:

System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied.
   at mssctlbm.CSPSBackupClass.BackupToStream(String bstrHostName, Object pStream, String bstrPassword, String bstrSite)
   at BackupSPS.BackupSite.Backup(String location, String backupName)

Update: Ok I was able to get this to work. I ended up writing a C++ console application that calls my C# class library. The problem was that I needed to make these two calls when my program started up:

    CoInitializeEx(NULL,COINIT_MULTITHREADED);
    
    HRESULT hr = CoInitializeSecurity(NULL, -1, NULL, NULL, 
                                      RPC_C_AUTHN_LEVEL_DEFAULT,
                                      RPC_C_IMP_LEVEL_IMPERSONATE,
                                      NULL, 
                                      EOAC_NONE, 
                                      NULL);

According to PInvoke.net you shouldn't call CoInitializeSecurity from managed code:

That's because the CLR will almost always call CoInitialize upon startup before execution enters your main method, and CoInitialize will implicitly call CoInitializeSecurity if it hasn't already been called.  Therefore, calling this from managed code will usually return RPC_E_TOO_LATE.

Once I switched to using a C++ app that called my class library everything started working. Once I get this completed I will probably post it up to a new project on source forge in case anyone is interested.

Mark Bower notes:

Gates went on to add more detail: InfoPath ‘with rich controls, on top of the Avalon runtime’, but also with the ability to ‘project onto classic HTML’.  So InfoPath is likely to evolve into a Forms package that can target thin-client HTML delivery and rich client Avalon delivery.  Look forward to it.

I watched the keynote as well and I thought Bill's response on this “it has taken us awhile to get forms right” was interesting. I didn't pick up on the Infopath connection like Mark did which is an interesting take. A good forms package with thin and rich client delivery would be a good thing. The other interesting thing that stood out to me was that Bill likes SharePoint as noted by Mark Muller:

He also mentioned that he was a big fan of Sharepoint 2003 and the solutions build around it. According to him, Sharepoint provides a foundation for Office applications and system integration. Good to hear this from him ;). Seems like Sharepoint developers won't have to fear to get bored.

For some reason I have this idea in my head that something was said about WinFS and SharePoint merging, but I don't remember if I heard it directly in the keynote or if I just munged some ideas together from all the blogs I read. Anyhow, the keynote is worth watching (hopefully they will post it up in the webcast archive).

Mads created a GotDotNet workspace for tracking issues with SharePoint and non-IE browsers. I installed Firefox some time ago but but it aside since I didn't appear to do NTLM authentication which is needed for SharePoint access. One of the first posts in the form there is TIP: Use current Windows credentials in Firefox (warning: we are talking about GotDotNet so the link to the post may be unusable about 50% of the time while the GotDotNet crew does some “maintenance“). The tip explains how to enable NTLM in Firefox. However, it didn't work for me and after some googling I found this post which adds another setting to the mix but didn't solve the problem for me either. Turns out I had to add the server names to the bypass proxy list for it to work.

SharePoint seems to work except for ActiveX controls, which I see Mads already posted about. The most interesting thing to me though was checking out Reporting Services from Firefox which is pretty much unusable. Very ugly. I will have to look into seeing if I can make them work using the RsWebParts (which I'm still working on version 1.2 (parameters are a pain)).

Note to self:

The Page.RegisterStartupScript just outputs the text you pass to the method and doesn't add script tags. If you don't add script tags your text will be output at the bottom of every page (which is embarrassing). Why can't I remember this....

P.S. - In case you were wondering, I just discovered this is a bug in the RsWebParts version 1.1 which will be fixed in 1.2.

P.S.S. - I hear this is “fixed” in ASP.Net 2.0...

From Barry's Blog via Serge van den Oever on RenderWebPart:

When things go the way you expect, you want to render an entire batch of HTML. However, you don't want to render any of that HTML in the case of an exception when the logic in your Web Part determines that it should display an error message instead. Things can really get ugly if you render the opening tags for an HTML table and do not properly close them due to an exception. This can upset the high-level rendering logic of the page as well as other Web Parts.

The solution to this problem is to use some technique that allows you to write HTML into a buffer and then send it all in a single batch once you know that all the rendering logic has executed successfully. You can create a string buffer using an instance of the System.Text.StringBuffer class. You can then create an instance of the HtmlTextWriter class and use that to render HTML into the buffer.

Barry then gives some code that will allow you to buffer your HTML output which lets you manage your exceptions gracefully. I liked the idea so much that I've already added it to the latest version of the RsWebParts (version 1.2 which I'm still trying to tidy up for release on sf.net). Since the RsWebParts all inherit from the RsBasePart I simply did this:

          /// 

          /// Renders the HTML contents of the webpart. 
          ///
The base webparts calls this and buffers the output in order to 
          ///
prevent the webpart causing the SharePoint page to fail. This code
          ///
was take from Barry's Blog (http://www.barracuda.net/barrysblog.aspx?Date=10/22/2004)
          /// 

          /// 

HtmlTextWriter to writer content with.
          protected
          override
          void RenderWebPart(HtmlTextWriter
output) { // create buffer for output  StringBuilder buffer
= new StringBuilder(10240); StringWriter InnerWriter = new StringWriter(buffer);
HtmlTextWriter BufferWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(InnerWriter); try { //
call method to write HTML to buffer WriteWebPartContent(BufferWriter); //
write HTML btach back to browser output.Write(buffer); } catch(Exception
ex) { output.Write("Web Part Error: " +
ex.Message); } } /// 
/// The webpart must call this method to render
its content instead of/// overriding RenderWebPart./// 
/// 

HtmlTextWriter to writer content with.protectedabstractvoid WriteWebPartContent(HtmlTextWriter
output);

Next I just renamed the RenderWebPart methods of each web part to WriteWebPartContent and now I have buffered output! Very cool.

Barry has some other great articles on his blog and his company offers SharePoint training. My boss and one of my coworkers took the class and both learned quite a bit (I didn't take the class because I'm not really the SharePoint admin, just a web part developer).

Ok, I've created a new project site at SourceForge.net which you can find here. Everytime I try to figure out the CVS stuff I end up feeling dumb because I can't figure it out. So hopefully I'll “get it” this weekend so that I can put some files up there. For now the project site is just an empty shell.

In the meantime I would really like to figure out this reported bug about a security issue with the web parts. I'm not really sure if I understand what the problem is but I don't think it is really an issue with the web parts but rather a configuration issue.

The reason I think it is a configuration issue is because the main web part (the report viewer) is basically just an iframe that loads a report services report. The machine that I test my web parts on  is a different machine than the reporting services server so that shouldn't be an issue. I'm just wondering if the problem is that the user viewing the web parts doesn't have access to the reporting server. But I don't really know so let's talk more about this problem either here in the comments or in the forms.

While we're at it, please post any other bugs you've run into at the project site.

I haven't done much with the RsWebParts for since I released the last beta version (sorry if you've sent me email or posted questions in the comments, I've been too busy), but it looks like they are getting somemoreattention with the release of Reporting Services SP2 beta.

One thing that seems to have gone unnoticed is that the new version of BI Portal has been released [via Duncan and Patrick]. What does BIP have to do with Reporting Services WebParts? Well the BIP viewer can view Reporting Services Reports (and the BIP Viewer is a WebPart). It also has a Report Browser. In fact, the BIP viewer was the inspiration for the RsWebParts and you will even see that I borrowed some of my client side scripting from the BIP viewer.

So now there are 4 Reporting Services WebPart Packages (that I know of) so it will be intereting to see what happens next. I would expect the MS WebParts to come out on top unless they don't provide the functionality that people need. I would really like to continue working on the RsWebParts or at least get it out as an open source community project (especially since GotDotNet is so pathetic, right now the workspaces are down and there is no message explaining why or when things will be back).

What would you suggest? Should I create some kind of open source project for the SharePoint/Reporting Services community to extend? If so, how should I go about this?

One of my recent projects was to develop a new menu system for our SharePoint portal to replace our old menu system (which was a custom menu as well). I decided to create an ASP.Net server control to do this. I created my control, signed it, deployed it to the GAC, added it to the safe control list, and then our web master put it into production after we did some basic testing. So far, so good.

However, today our web guy hit a snag when he put the menu on the SharePoint administrator pages (located in the  layouts/1033 folder). When the menu was put into these pages the menu would display but the scripting didn't work. I looked into the problem and quickly realized that my client side script was not being rendered into the page, basically my RegisterClientScriptBlock calls were being ignored (or so it seemed).

After some doing some googling and running some tests I finally realized that the SharePoint admin pages have no form tags (mark this down as YASPQ). So the problem I was running into was that since there were no form tags, the client side script blocks were not rendered as decribed here:

Server controls that post back or use client-side script will not work if they are not enclosed in the HtmlForm server control (

). These controls can call this method when they render to provide a clear error message when they are not enclosed in the HtmlForm control.

The method referred to here is Page.VerifyRenderingInServerForm. I could call this method in the Render method of my menu control, but this just throws an HttpException (which in this case is clearly not beneficial). Instead of allowing the exception to bubble up I simply trapped for the exception and if it was thrown I added an HtmlForm control to my menu's controls collection and then rendered it after my menu was built.

This allowed the client script to be rendered even if the form tag was missing. So if you're developing a control and run into this problem this is a quick work-a-round. If your control has other controls that need to be posted back you could add them as child controls to the HtmlForm control and it should work as expected.

Scott posted a cool trick to map a WebDAV or FontPage website to a drive letter. Since I do a lot of SharePoint work I immediately started thinking of all the cool things I could do with this once I had a folder mapping to my SharePoint portal site (like start using VisualStudio to edit pages, easy backup, etc.). However, I was disappointed that it didn't seem to work with SharePoint. YASPQ!*

* Yet Another SharePoint Quirk

That is all I can say, wow.

This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. A zero footprint cube browser that is built using Adomd.net and ASP.net. I've been looking for this for a long time. But not only is it everything I've wanted, it is free and you can download the source.

My next project will be to convert this into a web part for SharePoint and add save state. Then life will be good and I will drop the Office Web Components (and all the problems we've had with them).

Thanks to Mosha Pasumansky for linking to this and to Duncan Lamb for linking to Mosha. (In case you don't do much with Analysis Services, Mosha is the development lead on the AS engine team and is the MDX/OLAP/AS guru (see his website and books)). I'm now subscribed to Mosha's blog and already learning quite a bit...

If you're interested in the RsWebParts I just uploaded the installer for the beta of the next version.

RsWebPart Workspace

See the news for the list of fixes and enhancements. This is a beta and so what I'm really looking for is feedback, suggestions, and most of all: bug reports. I'm sure there are going to be some since I put this together pretty quickly.

Update: Post any feedback you have here (or just reply to this post).

If you do web development you may find these tools invaluable:

Toggle Borders

The accepted way to debug complex table-based HTML pages is to add a border="1" attribute to the <TABLE> element. Toggle Borders is a utility which automates this and more. It is accessed from the context menu in Internet Explorer and will color-code tables, spans and divs for you to see how your website, or a third party website has been layed out. Select Toggle Borders again and the color-coding is removed.

Full Source

Full Source is an Internet Explorer menu extension which displays the source Internet Explorer is displaying, directly from the Internet Explorer object model. This is useful wherever javascript is dynamically writing HTML into the DOM, or where XSLT has been used to generate HTML.

I use both of these tools, and while they aren't something you use every day, when you need them they come in very handy.

[via Duncan Lamb]

Finally after 2 ½ years – I can talk about the work we’ve been doing in .NET. I work for Databeacon and we produce "Web Reporting and Data Analysis" software. Last week we launched what we believe to be the world's first commercial No Touch Deployment application with .NET.

More here.

Duncan asks the first question that came to my mind: Does it support Analysis Services? I would hope it does since the product would only be useful if I can connect it to the work we've already done (and plan to do with SQL 2005). I'm hoping this might be zero-footprint analysis client that we could use to replace Office Web Components, which leads to my second question:

Is the product extensible enough that I can somehow create SharePoint web parts with it?

I'm still looking for the perfect cube browser web part...

As I mentioned in my last post I'm upgrading some web parts. More notably, I'm moving from an unsigned assembly to a signed assembly. This presented me with an interesting problem.

If you upgrade a web part assembly, and the assembly is signed, you can force all the existing web parts that use that assembly to use the new version via the runtime element of the web.config file. You simply change the version number of your assembly, add it to SharePoint, and all your web parts get upgraded to the new version. Easy.

Okay, so what if your assembly was not signed and now it is? Good question. As far as I can tell the answer is that you are SOL. I tried every combination that I could think of and couldn't get it to work. Of course, since I'm an idiot so this doesn't mean much (as you can see this also isn't my first SharePoint hack :).

So what's a SharePoint hack to do? Hack, of course. First I put a couple of the old webparts onto a page, then ran a SQL trace and opened the page. From that trace I was able to figure out that there is a table called webparts (how original) that contained all the webparts for the page and what database this was in. I was also able to figure out the tp_webparttypeid for each of my old web parts. Next I added the new webparts to the page and went through the same process to get the tp_webparttypeid for each of my new webparts.

*** DISCLAIMER: DO NOT TRY THIS ***

Once I had the old and the new tp_webparttypeid I simple ran an update on the webparts table. I updated all the tp_webparttypeid to the new tp_webparttypeid where the webpart had the old id (that matched part for part in the assemblies). I really didn't expect it to work so I was very surprised when it did. It worked perfectly.

*** END DISCLAIMER ***

Okay so I've told you not to do this so don't blame if you try it and you break something. So far I've only tried it on my test machine which doesn't mean much. Tomorrow I'm planning on backing up our production database and then seeing if I can make this work on the production site. It will save us tons of time because as far as I can tell this is the only way to do this upgrade.

Now you can add one more hack to my list of SharePoint “resources” :)

Update: Well the upgrade went pretty smooth. There was one little glitch with the Xml Serialization namespace which I had somehow changed on a couple of the web parts. This meant the settings weren't showing up. So I changed them back, recompiled, uninstalled/installed the web parts and everything worked. Pretty cool! Not sure how else you could do this.

I spent the whole day working on upgrading some web parts to fix some bugs and to make sure they meet some new web part standards that we have at my work. One of those standards is that the assembly must be signed. If you've built web parts then you probably know about the PartImageLarge element in the DWP file (if you don't, the rest of this post probably won't be too interesting). In the PartImageLarge element you specify the path to the image for the web part which shows up in the Add Web Part dialog.

Now, if an assembly is not signed, your resource path will look like:

/wpresources/[AssemblyName]/.

This is pretty simple so my DWP files had this hard coded in them for each image. However, once you sign a web part assembly your resource path suddenly changes to something much more cryptic:

/_wpresources/[AssemblyName]/[AssemblyVersion]__[PublicKeyToken]/

Okay, so it isn't terribly cryptic, but enough to make me want to figure out a better way than to hard code it. So, I do what I usually do when I need to figure out something like this: I look at what MS did in their web parts. After a quick look at the Office 2003 web part DWP files I found my answer. It is actually very simple. Just replace the path with _WPR_ and SharePoint will work its magic. So the PartImageLarge element get changed to:

_WPR_/someimage.gif

Wow! The cool thing is that this works no matter what your path is.

Update: BTW, I forgot to add you can get this same coolness when you're programming webparts. It is the ClassResourcePath property of the WebPart class (you can reference it in your class via base.ClassResourcePath). Somehow I missed this cool property so I wanted to pass this along so you didn't.

Back in March I collected a bunch of SharePoint resources and stuck them in an article. Of course, the article became quickly outdated. Soon to follow were other resource lists here, here, here, and here. (all of which are much more comprehensive than my list).

So I've added a wiki (running FlexWiki) to my personal homepage (which I really need to redo) and on my wiki I've added a SharePoint Resource Page. This is a collaboration experiment to see if maybe a list that anyone can edit will be more effective than a list that one person maintains (I know it will work better for me since I'm terrible at keeping sites up-to-date).

I've added most of the resources from my resource page and I'll soon add the rest. If you have a resource you like please add it to the page as well. (And it would be really cool if some of the other resource lists were to add some of their resources but I'll probably just have to copy them)

It will be interesting to see if this gets used at all. If it gets a lot of use then it might be worth setting this up somewhere more central like the WSSFAQ site.

Is GDN the worlds slowest website or is it just me? If you were Microsoft, wouldn't you want to at least put a bandaid on it? Sheesh.

I'm digging into FABRIQ and wanted to ask a couple of questions about it so I figured I would hit the workspace. However, it seems that the GDN is having some major issues so I can't access the workspace.

I was already planning on moving the RsWebParts off GDN because it is just too slow. You spend at least 75% of your time waiting for things to load. I'm sure that it is a very complicated application so it must not be an easy fix, but there must be a better way.

First an insensitive validator and next an Impersonating WebPart. What is web development coming too? :)

Jay Nathan now has a .Text blog! After you subscribe you should read his article on the Impersonating WebPart. It covers the basics of how to use the WebPart to impersonate users along with an overview of things like CAS.

If you're new to SharePoint development and you don't know what CAS stands for then you really need to read Maxim Karpov's article on the subject. Jan also talks about it in reference to the SmartPart here. While CAS is not something I really enjoy, it is essential to understand. If you don't at least understand the theory then you're going to run into real trouble the first time you get a security exception in the web part you're developing.

But back to the article. One thing that caught my attention since it is something that I've struggled with before:

Impersonator i = new Impersonator("SharePointRead", "MARINER", 
"password123").Impersonate();

// Code requiring higher permissions...

i.Undo();

Note: Instead of hard-coding the account credentials, they should probably be stored in the SharePoint's web.config file or a SQL Server table.

I really don't want to put the username and password in the code (as noted), but I also really don't want to put them in a database or a web.config file either. What I really want to do is figure out how to make this work with single sign-on. Unfortunately I haven't even got single sign-on running so I haven't looked at if this is possible.

Overall I think the Impersonating WebPart is a great idea and will probably cover 99% of what you would use it for. However, there are some cases (like Reporting Services) where I think you might need to have something like single sign-on in order to deal with who sees what data.

RsWebParts made the Cool SharePoint Stuff list on Greg Hughes blog. There is some very cool stuff on that list that I'm hoping to have time to dig into myself. Here are some cool things from that list plus a bunch of my own:

• Building Custom Alert Result Channels in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 by Patrick Tisseghem.
• Workflow Lite for SharePoint RC1 by Jan Tielen
• SPS Document Library Treeview
• The “SmartPart for SharePoint“ also by Jan and with a GotDotNet Workspace.
• Treeview navigation webpart for Sharepoint by Tom van de Kerhof
• Adding a Custom View Style to Windows SharePoint Services via Mark Harrison
• 17 White Papers from the SharePoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit also via Mark
• Alternate Header Magic to Style Your SharePoint Pages by Serge van den Oever

Wow. That should keep you busy for awhile! I'm sure there is more that and this doesn't include all kinds of interesting SharePoint discussions such as Sharing your bookmarks: http://del.icio.us, wikis, and the zen of SharePoint. Enjoy!

I've updated my SharePoint resources page to include some more blogs and webcasts. I've also added a link to Lamont Harrington's SharePoint resource page which has a ton more resources that the page I created. Take a look.

Also I spoke with the WebCast guys at Tech-Ed and it sounds like there is an RSS feed in the works for webcasts (and it will probably have categories). So hopefully keeping a list of SharePoint webcasts will get much easier soon.

I've just posted a walkthrough that explains how to install and configure the RsWebParts.

Reporting Services WebParts - Walkthrough

I've also just released the CAB file for the first version of the RsWebParts on the RsWebParts workspace. Please check them out and let me know what you think.

In this article I'm going to walk you through how to setup the RsWebParts with SharePoint. The first thing you will need to do is download the CAB file from the RsWebParts workspace. The current version is 1.0.0.0. Next you will need to install the CAB file on your SharePoint server. NOTE: please test these on a development box first. Below are the step-by-step instructions to install the WebParts.

1) Save the CAB file to your SharePoint server in a place that is easy to find (I use c:\temp).

2) On the server, open a command prompt. If you haven't added the STSADM tool to your path environment variable, then you will need to navigate to [c]:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\BIN in the command window (by using >cd program files, >cd common files, etc).

3) At the command prompt type stsadm -o addwppack -filename c:\temp\bml.rswebparts.setup.cab (changing c:\temp\ to the directory where you saved the cab file).

4) You should get a message telling you the wppack was successfully installed.

The next step is to start adding the parts to a page and then connecting them together. To do this you will need a WebPartPage in SharePoint. In the site menu click the create button and scroll down to the WebPartPage option. Create a new WebPartPage. I would suggest the layout that has three zones: header, left column, body. Now you can start adding the parts to your page.

You have a few options for how to put the parts on the page (they are under the Virtual Server Gallery). I would suggest starting with the RsExplorer WebPart since it allows you to explore all the folders and reports on your report server. But you can also start with the RsFolder view, which allows you to browse all the reports in a single folder, or the RsStaticReportView, which connects to a single report. You should use one of these three webparts on your page (note: you can use the other webparts without these, but it makes it more difficult to change the report).

Once you have one of these on the page you will need to set some properties to allow it to work. On the RsExplorer you will need to set the Server URL and the Folder Path. To do this click the down arrow on the RsExplorer WebPart and select Modify Shared Web Part (see image below).

In the Server Url box put the URL to your report server. For example, if your server was named ReportServerA then you would set this URL to http://reportservera/reportserver. The Folder Path is just the root path where the explorer will start at. The RsFolderView and RsStaticReportView have similar properties (FolderPath and ReportPath) which do the same thing. Once you click OK the WebPart should load up the list of reports and you should be able to browse around your report server.

The next step is to add some of the other RsWebParts. You can add the RsReportView (for viewing reports), RsReportExport (for exporting reports), RsReportInfo (for getting report details), and RsParameters (for setting report parameters). After you added these items to the page you will need to setup their connections before you can start using them. The steps to make these connections are outlined below.

1) Put the page into design mode by clicking the dropdown at the top and selecting design this page (see image below).

2) Click the down arrow on the Rs Report View web part and under connections select Connections, Consumes a row from, Rs Explorer (see image below). This connetion is what sets the report that the viewer will display.

3) Click the same down arrow on Rs Report View but this time choose Consumes a row from Rs Report Parameters. This connection determines what parameters the report will use to render the report.

4) Click the same down arrow once more, but this choose Provides a cell to and select Rs Report Export. This provides the Url that the viewer is currently using so that the export webpart can export it.

5) Click the down arrow on the Rs Report Parameters and select Connections, Consumes a row from, and select Rs Explorer. This allows the parameters to get the right parameters based on the report you've selected.

6) Finally click the down arrow on the Rs Report Info and select Connections, Consumes a row from, and select Rs Explorer. This allows the web part to display the report information.

You should now be able to select a report and have all the other parts display the correct information. Changing the parameter should change the report. You should also be able to export the report using the export webpart.

I hope you like the web parts! If you find bugs please report them on the workspace and if you would like to add features to the project please apply to join the workspace.

Cheers!

I just posted the CAB file that is from the RsReportInfo WebPart that I demonstrated in the first Report Services WebParts article to the RsWebParts workspace. If you read the article but didn't feel like writing out all the code you can now download and install the CAB file to try it out. I'll be posted most of the code for the other parts during this week and I will post the full CAB file once I get that done.

Well I'm back from Tech-Ed USA (already). My work only gave me the first two days off since I'm currently pretty busy. It was great to meet everyone. I spent a lot of time in the Data Cabana and that was by far the best part of the conference. I'm always amazed at how easy it is to talk to all the SQL Server/Data Access people (MVPs and MS). They are more than happy to answer any and every question and they do a great job at it. I'll post more about some of the things I learned at Tech-Ed later this week.

There is a new SQL Server 2005 XML article up on the XML Developer Center. Take a look. It is worth a read. [via Dare].

While driving home from San Diego (I live in Los Angeles) I was thinking about my Reporting Services WebParts articles that I'm working on. I decided that I would probably get more done by sharing the code with a GotDotNet Workspace. So this morning I created the RsWebParts workspace and I'm planning on adding the source files this week. Hopefully the parts and the next article about them will be available by this weekend. If you want to collaborate on them with me apply to join the workspace and I'll be happy to add you.

I just posted another article that details how to futher extend SharePoint using the global.asax file. This article shows how to create a who's online webpart using the methods from the first article.

Extending SharePoint using Global.asax - Who's Online

In my last article on this subject I explained how to add some basic page tracking to SharePoint. In this article I will expand on this by adding a Who's Online WebPart. This WebPart will show who is currently online.

First we need to create the ActiveUsers table which will keep track of the users that are currently online. We also need to modify the Hit_Add stored procedure to update the ActiveUsers table. Finally, we need to create a very simple stored procedure to get the list of users that are currently online. Below is the SQL script for these tasks.

create table ActiveUsers ( UserID varchar(50) not null, LastHit datetime not null, LastUrl varchar(256) not null, constraint PK_ActiveSessions primary key clustered ( UserID ) ) go alter proc Hit_Add ( @Url varchar(256), @UserID varchar(50) ) as -- this needs to be changed to the userID -- that your site runs as if (@UserID = 'DOMAIN\PROCESSID') return insert into Hits values (@Url, @UserID, getdate()) delete ActiveUsers where UserID = @UserID or datediff(mi, LastHit, getdate()) > 30 -- minutes insert into ActiveUsers values (@UserID, getdate(), @Url) go create proc ActiveUsers_Get as select UserID, LastHit, LastUrl, datediff(mi, LastHit, getdate()) Age from ActiveUsers go

That is all there is to tracking the users that are currently online. You can adjust the time by changing the minutes in the delete statement. Next we need to create our WebPart. The WebPart I'm going to show you is somewhat simple and just displays a list of users. You can easily add more functionality to it if you want. Below is the code for the Who's Online WebPart.

using System; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Data.SqlClient; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using System.Xml.Serialization; using Microsoft.SharePoint; using Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities; using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls; using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages; namespace Bml.Stats.WebParts { ///

Once you've compiled the WebPart and added it to the server you will need to make one change to your web.config file before the part will work. You will need to change the trust level from WSS_Minimal to WSS_Medium. This will allow the part to use the SQL Connection which isn't allowed in the minimal trust scheme. After you add it to a page you should see something very much like the following image.

As I wrote this WebPart I thought of a lot of other uses for the hits data such as a Favorites list (based on urls with the most hits), recently viewed pages, and others. There seems to be a lot you can do once you start collecting this data.

I just posted a short article on Extending SharePoint using Global.asax. I'm very excited about using this technique in order to accomplish some things that I was unable to accomplish with WebParts and Custom pages. Take a look and let me know what you think!