SharePoint Guys Blogs

Joining the Telligent team and very excited about it

N/A — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:55:00 GMT

I am excited to announce that I have the opportunity to join the Telligent team to work on a new product called Community Server Evolution. This product is going to allow me to follow my passion for social computing in the enterprise while still working with SharePoint (and ASP.NET). I have been using and following the Telligent team for many years now and currently use both Community Server and Graffiti CMS for the community web sites I run. I am so excited to join a product team again and build a product I believe will be the next generation of software.

I have had a great time working for Slalom Consulting working on some of the most challenging projects that SharePoint can offer for some of the largest companies in the world. I will take my years of working with Fortune 500 companies to hopefully solve the problems that I have heard.

I have been quite working hard on a new book that will come out in February of next year called Social Computing with Microsoft SharePoint 2007. Wish me luck and look for more posts about Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, and Community Server Evolution in the next few months as I finish the first deadline for the book and join Telligent next week.

About Telligent

Telligent is a leader in enterprise ready, secure, scalable and fully supported solutions for online communities and social networks. Telligent’s flagship offering, Community Server, provides a fully integrated platform utilizing social media to enhance customer relationships, brand engagement, increased ROI and provide channels for valuable customer insight and feedback. With its software solutions and extensive development and customization service offerings, Telligent empowers digital marketing and Enterprise 2.0 collaboration for many of the world’s largest brands. Clients include: Associated Press, Conde Nast, Dell, Electronic Arts, GlaxoSmithKline. Honda, Intel, Mazda, Microsoft, MSNBC, MySpace.com, National Geographic, NFL, Visa. For more information, visit Telligent.com

About Slalom Consulting

Slalom Consulting (www.slalom.com) is a national business and technology consulting firm, headquartered in Seattle. Following its motto, “Business is a Race. Win it.” Slalom’s services range from broad areas including program management, business process improvement, and software development, to specialized solutions such as CRM, ERP and Sarbanes-Oxley. Slalom is best known for its highly experienced, locally-based teams and consultants who consistently take client projects from strategy through successful implementation. In addition to Seattle, Slalom has offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Portland, San Francisco and Southern California.

Redirect to your own MySite Landing Page

N/A — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:28:00 GMT

Have you ever wanted to redirect a user to your own MySite landing page. It is very easy to do with a single delegate control. This will allow your SharePoint sites to have a profile page such as MyDevCow at any location in the site. This code would run when you click the persons profile and click My Settings

First create a user control with nothing on the page. Something like the following

<%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="DevCow.SharePoint.Controls.DevCowUserProfileRedirect,DevCow.SharePoint,Version=1.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken= 0528d6137835b00a" %>

Now create the code behind for a user control that receives a userprofile from the user information list.

public class DevCowUserProfileRedirect : UserControl, IFormDelegateControlSource
{
#region IFormDelegateControlSource Members

    public void OnFormInit(object objOfInterest)
    {
        SPListItem user = objOfInterest as SPListItem;
        if (user != null)
        {
            this.RedirectIfNecessary(user);
        }

}

    private void RedirectIfNecessary(SPListItem user)
    {
        //Redirect to hard coded site
        SPUtility.Redirect("http://sharepoint.devcow.com/Pages/DevCowProfile.aspx", SPRedirectFlags.Default, this.Context);
    }

    public void OnFormSave(object objOfInterest)
    {
    }

#endregion
}

Finally create a Feature with an elements manifest that has the delegate control lower than 100. Make sure to use the ID of ProfileRedirection

Connecting the CQWP without changing ItemStyle.xsl

N/A — Sun, 11 May 2008 04:07:00 GMT

Reading over Liam's post on a good tip for using the Content Query Web Part (CQWP) to connect your XSLT styles by putting a reference in the ItemStyle.xsl file is a good idea, but it still modifies the Out of the Box (OOB) ItemStyle.xsl. In many cases, in large companies you can't change the OOB files and this file is no exception, especially since your changes would be overwritten by any product that changed the file also.

The approach to use if you are using a different style than the out of the box style is to deploy your own .webpart of the Content Query Web Part that references a different style sheet than the ItemStyle.xsl file.

First let's look at what the .webpart would look like, the change to notice is that we have added an import statement to the supporting XSL element not to the ItemStyle.xsl

           <webParts>
              <webPart xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v3">
                <metaData>
                  <type name="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls.ContentByQueryWebPart, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
                  <importErrorMessage>Cannot import this Web Part.</importErrorMessage>
                </metaData>
                <data>
                  <properties>
                    <property name="Title" type="string">Custom XSLT Style Content Query WebPart</property>
                    <property name="Description" type="string">Adds other templates to the ItemStyle.xsl</property>
                    <property name="ItemXslLink" type="string">/Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/DevCowItemStyle.xsl</property>
                  </properties>
                </data>
              </webPart>
            </webParts>

The ItemXslLink contains a link to the XSLT file that has the item templates. Make sure that the XSLT file is available or the webpart will display that it cannot import the XSLT file. Also notice that the path is relative, so you will need to put your files in the based site collection or you will need a way to update the location based on sub site collections. I couldn't find a way around this, but maybe the product team will know how.

Now just create your separate file for your XSLT and make sure to add it to you Solution and Feature.

<xsl:stylesheet
version="1.0"
exclude-result-prefixes="x d xsl msxsl cmswrt"
xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/dsp"
xmlns:cmswrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v3/Publishing/runtime"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt">
    <xsl:template name="ShowXML" match="Row[@Style='ShowXML']" mode="itemstyle">
        <xsl:for-each select="@*">
            <br />
            Name: <xsl:value-of select="name()" />
            <br />Value:<xsl:value-of select="." />
        </xsl:for-each>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Here is what the drop down would now look like. Keep in mind if you want all of the ItemStyle.xsl items to show up, you can simply copy them from the ItemStyle.xsl. This will allow you to manage your customizations and not be impacted during changes to the ItemStyle.xsl.

If you have questions about how to package these files correctly or how they should be deployed, let me know and I can do a quick blog post on that also.

Partner TV talked with Dan Rasmus on the New World of Work

N/A — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:54:00 GMT

Lawrence Liu Twittered an interesting video by Dan Rasmus on the New World of Work, he talks about Social Computing in the Enterprise as well as why companies might start to add these applications.

Dan's views remind me a little bit about my post Is Social Networking behind in the Enterprise?. One thing I talk about is the CIOs adding Social Networks for their employees in order to get good employees.

Check out the video: Partner TV: The New World of Work http://blogs.msdn.com/ptstv/archive/2008/04/30/partner-tv-the-new-world-of-work.aspx

Crack the Code - SharePoint Designer Webinar

Matt Ranlett — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:53:00 GMT

I'm giving a sort of intro to SharePoint Designer webinar for Intellinet on Wednesday at noon. Rather than attempt to re-craft the descriptive text, check out what the Intellinet marketing department (Rebecka, Laura, Alysha, et al.) put together.

We're going to cover some customizations to master pages, data view web parts, a bit of no-code application logic, and some workflow. The challenge is getting it all to fit in a single hour!

April 2008

Live One-Hour Webinar:
{Crack the Code, Empower Your Portal with SharePoint Designer 2007}
Learn more!

Wed., April 23
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT

Coined in 1959, what term was used to refer to a small receiver that delivered a radio message individually to those carrying the device?

Easily Customize SharePoint Sites with SharePoint Designer 2007

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 provides powerful tools that enable you to create dynamic SharePoint sites. The intuitive what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) environment allows you to quickly build advanced solutions such as Data Views, reports, and workflow tracking without the use of complex code.

Get the most out of SharePoint Designer 2007: View an overview demo or register now for a free, one-hour webinar on building collaborative applications, workflows and custom websites with SharePoint Designer.

Advanced Infrastructure | Business Process & Integration

Custom Development | Data Management | Information Worker
Networking Infrastructure | Security

atlanta | charlotte | houston | new york | www.intellinet.com

SharePoint 2003 flashback - create and deploy CAB files

Matt Ranlett — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:18:00 GMT

I really am only posting this so I don't forget again. 2003 doesn't have solutions and features so I couldn't remember how to deploy the SPS 2003 web part code I'd fixed.

If you have a CAB file and need to deploy it, use the STSADM AddWpPack command. I'd detail everything for you, but this guy already did it for me back in 2004. His post is excellent, well written, and includes better screenshots than I would create. I'm just going to link to his work...

Our reporting article got extended

Matt Ranlett — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:42:00 GMT

JOPX on SharePoint just released a blog post which extends the work Brendon and I started in our 2 part ASP.Net Pro magazine article (part 1, part 2). JOPX went so far as to release his extension on CodePlex.

Check it out!

Strange Problems with a mysteriously corrupted list

Matt Ranlett — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:02:00 GMT

I've got some custom code which looks at a SharePoint list for data which it renders to the screen. Of course, I used the delegate controls mechanism to put the control in question on the masterpage, so it basically shows up on every page in my publishing site. Notable exceptions include the admin screens, which use a different masterpage. I was using the site in question at 1:30pm. A coworker was using the site at about 3pm. At about 3:40pm, he noticed that the site's pages wouldn't load and instead he was getting this cryptic error message:

Cannot complete this action.
Please try again.

Some digging on the server found the following error message (I changed some details to protect the innocent):

Event Type:        Warning
Event Source:    ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0
Event Category:                Web Event 
Event ID:              1309
Date:                     4/2/2008
Time:                     3:11:07 PM
User:                     N/A
Computer:          APP1
Description:
Event code: 3005 
Event message: An unhandled exception has occurred. 
Event time: 4/2/2008 3:11:07 PM 
Event time (UTC): 4/2/2008 8:11:07 PM 
Event ID: 9e324f464c8044119c3beec6f1507bc6 
Event sequence: 3 
Event occurrence: 1 
Event detail code: 0 
 
Application information: 
    Application domain: /LM/W3SVC/1106951119/Root-1-128516406489363947 
    Trust level: Full 
    Application Virtual Path: / 
    Application Path: C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\site.company.com443\ 
    Machine name: APP1 
 
Process information: 
    Process ID: 996 
    Process name: w3wp.exe 
    Account name: DOMAIN\MOSS_AppPoolID 
 
Exception information: 
    Exception type: SPException 
    Exception message: Cannot complete this action.

Please try again. 
 
Request information: 
    Request URL: https://site.company.com:443/Pages/Biology.aspx 
    Request path: /Pages/Biology.aspx 
    User host address: 123.456.789.012
    User: admin@domain.local
    Is authenticated: True 
    Authentication Type: Forms 
    Thread account name: DOMAIN\MOSS_AppPoolID 
 
Thread information: 
    Thread ID: 1 
    Thread account name: DOMAIN\MOSS_AppPoolID 
    Is impersonating: False 
    Stack trace:    at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.GetListItemDataWithCallback(String bstrUrl, String bstrListName, String bstrViewName, String bstrViewXml, SAFEARRAYFLAGS fSafeArrayFlags, ISP2DSafeArrayWriter pSACallback, ISPDataCallback pPagingCallback, ISPDataCallback pSchemaCallback)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItemCollection.EnsureListItemsData()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItemCollection.get_Count()
   at CustomerAssembly.CustomUserControl.GetUserEnteredData(String emailAddress)
   at CustomerAssembly.CustomUserControl.AddUserDetails()
   at CustomerAssembly.CustomUserControl.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
   at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildrenInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ICollection children)
   at System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlForm.RenderChildren(HtmlTextWriter writer)
   at System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlForm.Render(HtmlTextWriter output)
   at System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlForm.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer)
   at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildrenInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ICollection children)
   at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildrenInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ICollection children)
   at System.Web.UI.Page.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
   at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)
 
 
Custom event details: 

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Custom event details: For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I did some research with my favorite search engine and found a pair of links which looked promising but were not really helpful:

This sounds the closest to our issue: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3031341&SiteID=1
This also sounds close: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=909455

One of my coworkers noticed the following message in the SharePoint logs:

w3wp.exe (0x0C6C)                 0x1544    Windows SharePoint Services       General       0    High        Failed to compile XML.     
w3wp.exe (0x0C6C)                 0x1570    Windows SharePoint Services       General       8kh7    High        Cannot complete this action.  Please try again.  
w3wp.exe (0x0C6C)                 0x1570    Windows SharePoint Services       General       8l1n    High        An SPRequest object was not disposed before the end of this thread.  To avoid wasting system resources, dispose of this object or its parent (such as an SPSite or SPWeb) as soon as you are done using it.  This object will now be disposed.  Allocation Id: {043EED0C-7CB5-44B4-9A26-429B51270C45}  To determine where this object was allocated, create a registry key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\HeapSettings.  Then create a new DWORD named SPRequestStackTrace with the value 1 under this key.

Another of my coworkers noticed, almost at the same time, that they could not view the list. The couldn't view the list, export the list, create a new view for the list, or even view the settings for the list. We either got the Cannot complete this action error or we got the even stranger  message. I attempted to use the Stramit CAML Viewer to look past the UI and got SoapExceptions trying to retrieve the list. Every other list worked just fine.

At this point we consider the list corrupted and are going to try to restore the site from backup to see if that helps.

When deploying code, please use Solution Packages for both our sakes

Matt Ranlett — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:06:00 GMT

This morning I spent another 30 minutes trying to figure out why my solution package wasn't deploying correctly. Oh, the deployment would report success. No errors in the Central Admin UI or in the error logs, but several of the files on disk were not getting replaced. Turns out that the problem was a combination of files being marked as read-only and due to manual copy and paste across networked machines, user accounts had not been kept in synch. Once I marked the files I was targeting for replacement as not read-only and available to the service accounts, the solution deployment successfully overwrote the files

The SharePoint Solution Framework neatly assists developers and administrators by granting them the ability to put code out on multiple web servers and application servers with a few scriptable commands. You can schedule deployments in production to occur late at night when no one is using the system. You can roll back code which isn't working correctly. You can upgrade code which is already in place without having to retract then redeploy.

C:\deploy>stsadm -o addsolution -filename UserLogin.wsp

Operation completed successfully.

C:\deploy>stsadm -o deploysolution -name UserLogin.wsp -allcontenturls -allowgac
deployment -immediate

Timer job successfully created.

C:\deploy>stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs

Executing .
Executing solution-deployment-userlogin.wsp-0.
Operation completed successfully.

C:\deploy>

WSPBuilder is a great addin for Visual Studio (2005 and 2008) from Carsten Keutmann which gives you some really excellent tools to work with the solution framework easily. First and foremost, it ships with a number of project templates which you can expose when you add items to a project.

The templates pre-create a folder structure inside of your project which works easily with the next set of WSPBuilder's addin functionality. Right-click on the project and you have the ability to easily deploy and upgrade code to your development machine. You can also instantly connect to the IIS worker process for debugging. I'd previously built a macro to do this based on blog posts from Andrew Connell but this mouse click option is even easier!

With tools like WSPBuilder working to make Solution Packaging and deployment so easy, it really should become the default way everyone creates SharePoint code, even in development. There is just no excuse for copying files around web servers manually anymore.

I'm now a SharePoint MVP

Matt Ranlett — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:12:00 GMT

I just received notification that I've been selected as a SharePoint Server MVP, after 2 years of being a SQL Server MVP. I'm glad someone more deserving got the SQL spot I'd been occupying, but not as glad as I am that I'm now able to hang out with my SharePoint buddies and not have to hide in the shadows!

Thanks everyone!