For those interested in unit testing, and particularly unit testing for Sharepoint Typemock have released their Isolator product for Sharepoint.  You might even be able to get a free license if you are quick...

Quote from Typemock:

Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.

The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.

For those that haven't yet looked at Powershell, please do. Aside from being an extremely powerful means to interact with SharePoint and control items that are not available from the web UI, it is more than likely that as with Exchange, Powershell will be the means of interacting with SharePoint v.next (as opposed to stsadm)

Some links to interesting resources and example scripts....

http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/karine/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=9

http://darrinbishop.com/blog/archive/2007/04/08/54.aspx

http://blogs.flexnetconsult.co.uk/colinbyrne/PermaLink,guid,1665700b-e0de-4b8a-bb1c-014d6fbcf2db.aspx

Powershell download

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/download.mspx

Useful Powershell editor

http://www.powergui.org

I travel by train  to the office regularly now. Although this sometimes takes longer than driving, it is more consistent and it gives a couple of hours a day where I can do some reading without interuption (plus I feel I'm doing my bit for the planet! :) )

This will seem geeky, but I get fed up listening to CD's or the radio (though Classic FM is a great soother) and have recently started getting the SharePoint podcasts. personally I find the podcasts easier than webcasts (perhaps because I don't have the distraction of the PC?). You can download the mp3's or find them via iTunes

These are hosted by our friends at Lightning and have some great content for developers and administrators.

Quite often you will need to customise the search results and ensure that your custom metadata mappings are displaying correctly.

To view the raw results, I undertake the following...

a) Edit the results page (results, or people depending on what you are looking to modify

b) Add a new core results web part (again people or results)

c) Add your columns, fixed queries etc

d) Click the Edit XSLT button and replace the XSLT with the following

Save everything and you can now see the raw results.

Following the previous post on search, this shows how to simply and quickly show a single users profile details on a page. Note, that this intended for MOSS (where we have the profile database) but could be re-worked for WSS to show details from the user list.

On our page, we need to add the People Search Core Results Part

Once added, open the web part properties so we can configure the part. We need to make several changes....

a) Under the Results Display / View group, set the Results Default View to Relveance and Results per page to 1

b) Under the Results Query Options group, change the Cross Web Part Query ID to Query 2 (see also note below)

c) Under the Miscellanous group, uncheck all the options except  Show Search Results

d) Finally, in the Fixed Keyword Query option, enter the query required (e.g. LastName:Piper)

Save the changes.

The final result will be basic details from the profile databse about our user

If the appearance needs to be changed, then you can edit the XSLT (another future post I think!) to suit.

Note - you may need more than one profile - in this case, the Cross Web Part Query ID needs to unique for each part on the page.

If you have more than 3 user profiles to display, then consider using different queries to get multiple results. For example, to show all users who have the property Department:Sales to show all sales members. If doing this, the number of search results should be increased from 1!

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Microsoft Office Project Server 2007
• Microsoft Search Server 2008
• Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

• Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007

Get over to the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog site to read all about it....
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/07/15/announcing-availability-of-infrastructure-updates.aspx

For a quick overview of the updates for SharePoint check this site out...
http://blogs.technet.com/tothesharepoint/archive/2008/07/14/3088801.aspx

When planning a Sharepoint implementation, I often use Visio to diagram a site hierarchy. In the past, I've used standard shapes, but wante something a bit more representative of the sites / lists / libraries.

Maxime has produced a basic stencil set, but this didnt include everything I wanted (plus I really wanted to use the WSS 3 style icons!  ) and TamTam has one for page design

I've attached my stencil for the community. This is the first pass, and is very much work in progress!

The shapes are taken from the Sharepoint icons, as shown below. Each shape has the option of attaching data (URL, Template, Title) and I hope to be able to extend this in future (what about linking to Kivati to graphically build a portal?)

If there are any comment, please send them in so we can improve

MOSSSiteStructureStencils.zip (193.73 kb)

One of the main complaints (?) of developers is that they have to undertake Sharepoint development inside of a virtual machine, or on a server. Personally, I don't find this a problem as long as you are not working against a live server!. Our new development environment (that I'm sure Iain will blog about) is almost entirely virtual, development, staging and test.

Although not supported by Microsoft, there are a few options to get around this....

a) Install WSS on Vista

Yes it can be done (although I haven't personally tried it yet) and the guys at Bamboo have posted an article on this

b) Install the various assemblies, XSD files onto the client PC as noted here (this is the route I've taken with the laptop so that I dont have to always work inside Virtual Machines)

The downside of both of these is that debugging gets more difficult - you will have to configure remote debugging on the server, plus some of the tools (such as WSS extensions) won't install or run correctly

Yes you heard it right - Microsoft are paying customers to adopt Sharepoint technology!  Well sort of...

Microsoft have now officially announced their SPDS programme.  See here for further details.

SDPS matches up SharePoint partners with customers who are eligible for deployment planning services as part of their Software Assurance benefits. Microsoft then provide a process for certified SDPS partners to conduct, and be compensated for, 1, 3, 5, 10 or 15-day programmatic planning sessions according to the level of their customers’ Software Assurance benefits.  This enables clients to become more aware of the benefits of Sharepoint in their organisation, the implications of adopting Sharepoint technology and even implement a pilot solution. 

This work is funded by Microsoft as part of the clients software assurance benefits.

Novotronix are pleased to announce that they are one of the initial partners who are qualified for delivering the SPDS service.  So if you would like to take advantage of this 'free' benefit then feel free to contact us (either via the contact form to the left or on 01902 424277).

I was helping a client upgrade their existing SharePoint Services 2 infrastructure to a shiny new 64 bit MOSS farm this week. In the process we came across a couple of problems, one trivial and one not so trivial. I've done many MOSS installs on 32 bit but this was my first 64 bit install.

Starting the installer gave the familiar response that ASP.NET wasn't enabled on IIS, please go away and fix it first. Now I am quite used to finding on a new server build that the ASP.NET v2.0.50727 extensions aren't enabled or registered on the IIS server, usually becuase the server admin has fervently applied all the updates from microsoft and hence the .NET framework has been installed before IIS. Anyhow, I opened a command prompt and issued my normal command:

only to get this answer:

The solution is that on a 64 bit server there is a second framework folder in the Windows folder called framework64. Simple, eh? So correct command on 64 bit server is:

So that was fairly easy after a short google.

The second was a little more difficult to solve. Our client had some web parts that were in use in the WSS2 sites that they wanted to use in the upgraded sites, and when we installed them although the installer completed things didn't seem to run as they should. It transpires that the web parts are written on .Net 1.1 which didn't seem to be a problem in itself they should work under WSS3 and indeed we could find people with them running ok, but the difference was again the fact that we were running IIS on 64 bit Windows 2003. So by default IIS is running in 64 bit mode and as noted in the KB article below in order for IIS to use .net 1.1 you have to run it in 32 bit mode. At this point we took the decision to leave the webparts out of the final solution and keep IIS in 64 bit mode!

From KB Article ID 894435 

IIS 6.0 supports both the 32-bit mode and the 64-bit mode. However IIS 6.0 does not support running both modes at the same time on a 64-bit version of Windows. ASP.NET 1.1 runs only in 32-bit mode. ASP.NET 2.0 runs in 32-bit mode or in 64-bit mode. Therefore, if you want to run ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 2.0 at the same time, you must run IIS in 32-bit mode.