Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint & .NET Framework 4.0

Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint Announced at TechEd EMEA Developers 2008

This week at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona, Jason Zander, the GM for Visual Studio, announced and demonstrated the Visual Studio 2010 tools for SharePoint. Here's a quick summary of what he showed:
•Server Explorer for SharePoint viewing Lists and other artifacts in SharePoint directly inside of Visual Studio
•Windows SharePoint Services Project (WSP file) Import to create a new solution
•Added a new web part project item and showed the Visual web part designer which loads a user control as a web part for SharePoint
•Showed adding an event receiver for SharePoint and using the wizard to choose the event receiver and to just create a source file with that event receiver.
•Added an ASPX workflow initiation form to a workflow project and showed how this workflow initiation form has designer capability
•Showed the packaging explorer and the packaging editor which lets you structure the SharePoint features and WSP file that is created

Web Url: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2008/products/cc948977.aspx

Visual Studio 2010: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2010/overview.mspx

.NET Framework 4.0 [Dublin] : http://www.microsoft.com/net/Dublin.aspx

Custom Site Theme for SharePoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) and WSS 3.0

The easiest and the fastest way to apply the same look and feel on any SharePoint site is creating a site theme. A SharePoint site theme basically consists of theme.inf, theme.css, and image files. Theme.inf file simply represents the title of the theme. Theme.css is a stylesheet file that defines colors, header images and layouts of a site and image files can be referenced here to display on the page. By creating a custom site theme, you can easily change the style but in fact, writing and editing the stylesheet can be somewhat chanllenging when you have more than a hundred of elements to deal with.

Here is a short procedure of creating a custom site theme named "India":
1. Copy any theme folder in "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES" folder and paste with its name replaced with "India". In this example, copy GRANITE folder.
2. In India folder, rename GRANITE.INF file to INDIA.INF in upper case.
3. Open INDIA.INF file with notepad.
4. Change the value of title under [Info] to India.
5. Replace every word, Granite, under [titles] with India.
6. Open "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\SPTHEMES.XML" file with notepad.
7. Add the following lines under tag:
Templates>
TemplateID>India
DisplayName>India
Description>We love India .
Thumbnail>images/India.gif
Preview>images/India.gif
/Templates>

Notice that preview and thumbnail paths are images/India.gif. By default, MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 will not have such image files.

8. In order to display thumbnail and preview correctly, you will need to capture the screen and save the file in "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES" folder with India.gif name. You can change the .gif file name if you change the thumbnail and preview file names in tag.

9. Do an iisrest for the server to recognize the new theme.

Pretty simple procedure. Now you are ready to test your new theme. In Site Settings, you can now choose India theme; however, the theme will not differ from Base theme. Now, it is time for you to play with theme.css file!

Patrick, you'll be greatly missed...

Yesterday I got word that the legendary SharePoint developer, presenter, author, instructor, and friend Patrick Tissghem suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. I had just talked to him over IM just a day earlier. If the name isn't familiar to you, well you have surely used some of this work. From the blog posts, the books, the screencasts... you name it, he's been instrumental in the SharePoint world for years.
But it isn't just SharePoint. Patrick was a great person... someone who was a ton of fun and a real joy to be around. I consider myself quite fortunate in working with him over email and virtually over the last few years and fortune to get to finally meet him last year at TechEd.

My thoughts are with Patrick's family and extended family at U2U. You will be greatly missed.

Integrating ASP.NET AJAX with SharePoint

How does Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX integrate with SharePoint? Here are some notes I've collected on this.

Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX 1.0: A Background

Microsoft ASP. NET AJAX 1.0 lets developers build Web 2.0 sites using the latest Ajax techniques.
ASP.NET AJAX extends ASP.NET 2.0 and makes several new tools and techniques available to help you build applications more quickly:

• Extensions to JavaScript. ASP.NET AJAX extends the JavaScript library to bring standard object oriented concepts to JavaScript. It brings a formal type declaration system, with support for inheritance. It also provides a significant number of out of the box types, including types such as Sys.Net.WebRequest for working with web services. Finally, it helps to abstract some cross-browser issues such as XML element traversal. This makes it much easier to create robust JavaScript libraries and frameworks which are commonly needed by rich internet applications.
• ASP.NET Control Extenders. Extenders are additional ASP.NET controls which can extend the functionality of existing controls with additional Ajax capabilities. A common example is an extender which allows existing textbox controls to have autocomplete functionality with no modification to the extended control. (The autocomplete extender is included with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.)
• UpdatePanels. UpdatePanels allow your existing ASP.NET controls and web parts to achieve the fluid, no-postback updates of Ajax-based applications with minimal re-coding of your control or part. Quite simply, controls within the UpdatePanel control which ordinarily would post back to update their data will now be routed through an Ajax-style callback, resulting in a silent update back to the server. This makes your application “postback” much less, making interaction with your control more seamless.

For More...

Fix for Forefront Update Timeout Errors

I use Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint Server on my SharePoint Server 2007 .Recently I noticed the following error in the Application Event log:

Event Type: ErrorEvent

Source: GetEngineFiles

Event Category: Engine

ErrorEvent ID: 6014

Date: 2/9/2008Time: 10:08:43 AM

User: N/A

Computer: GATEWAY

Description:Microsoft Forefront Server Security encountered an error while performing a scan engine update.Scan Engine: Kaspersky5Update Path: http://forefrontdl.microsoft.com/server/scanengineupdate/x86/Kaspersky5Proxy Settings: DisabledError Code: 0xC0001F58Description: The operation timed out.

Followed immediately by:

Event Type: Information

Event Source: GetEngineFiles

Event Category: General

Event ID: 2017

Date: 2/9/2008

Time: 10:08:43 AM

User: N/A

Computer: GATEWAY

Description:Forefront Server Security has rolled back a scan engine.Scan Engine: Kaspersky5This was happening every 5 minutes after Event ID 2034, which reports that Microsoft Forefront Server Security is attempting a scan engine update of the Kaspersky5 scan engine.

To solve this error make the following change to the registry on the server running Forefront:

> Open Regedit
> Navigate to the following key:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Forefront Server Security\Exchange Server
>Click New DWORD Value
>Type EngineDownloadTimeout, and then press ENTER
>Right-click the new value and select Modify
>Select Decimal as the base, enter 600 in the Value data box, and then click OK. This setting causes the scan engine download process to time out after 600 seconds (10 minutes, instead of 5 minutes)
> Exit Regedit

Note: You do not have to restart Forefront Server services or Exchange Server services after you change this registry entry.
Now perform a manual scanner update in Forefront:
Open Forefront Server Security Administrator
Click Scanner Updates under Settings
Select the appropriate scan engine that was previously timing out. In my case, Kaspersky Antivirus Technology
Click the Update Now button on the right side of the screen
Check the Application event log to ensure that the scan engine has updated properly (Event ID 2012).

WSS 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions, Version 1.1 on Win2k3 64bit

I got this to work for me using Orca to edit the MSI using the following:

1. Download Visual Studio 2005 Extensions, Version 1.1 for Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition 64-bit
A. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3E1DCCCD-1CCA-433A-BB4D-97B96BF7AB63&displaylang=en
2. Save the install file: C:\Temp\VSeWSSv11.exe

3. Extract the MSI using this command: C:\Temp\> VSeWSSv11.exe /Extract

4. Output MSI file: C:\Temp\VSeWSSv11.msi

5. Downloaded Windows® Server 2003 SP1 Platform SDK
A. Installed just Orca

6. Edit MSI using Orca
A. In the Tables column
1. Select: InstallExecuteSequence
2. In the right pane, drop these two rows.
a. X64System
b. WSSNotInstalled
3. Select: InstallUISequence
4. In the right pane, drop these two rows.
a. X64System
b. WSSNotInstalled
B. Save MSI

7. Run edited MSI and follow the prompts.

Hope this helps someone else, it sure did for me!

Where is the change log?

Shane today in class was looking for where the SharePoint change log is. I did a quick search and found a decent answer on MSDN with detail on Change Log Freshness...

"The Change Log is a physical table in each content database, and each transaction writes to the log." The Change Log recevied by hitting the lists web service http:///_vti_bin/Lists.asmx GetListItemChanges with GetListItemChangesSinceToken method of the Lists Web service to get changes starting from a specified point in time."

Found a great WSS 3.0 web service one page quick reference on Look Alive blog which I'm sure came from across the various MSDN pages.

Note: The change log is security trimmed. "The change log returns a list of SPChange objects for changes that happened, for example, to the following object types:

• Items, files, and folders
• List metadata
• Site metadata
• Security