Blogging Children

I’ve recently setup blogs for my two daughters, one is 9 (almost 10) and the other is 8. They both love to write, and we bought an iPad to make it more convenient (interesting) for them to actually get on and type up some of their hand written stories. Although they really like to write stories, I’m beginning to realize that the lack of strong typing skills means it is a turn off for them to have to transfer them to their blog.

Maybe my next experiment will be to have them use Dragon’s Naturally Speaking dictation app, to allow them to read their stories aloud as a starting point for getting their stories into the iPad.

Obnoxious ListInstance FeatureId and TemplateType

After several frustrating hours of trying to deploy and activate a simple ListInstance as part of our feature, we finally discovered the “magic” encoding in the FeatureId to get this to work. We continued to get the following error, until we made the change to append the TemplateType number to the FeatureId: Feature ‘{some GUID}’ for list template ’100′ is not installed in this farm. The operation could not be completed.

<Elements Id=”6330A8CD-2C66-4f12-83C9-9C350652A685″ xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/”>

<ListInstance FeatureId=”00bgea71-de22-43b2-a848-c05709900100“

                Title=”Number Generator List”

                RootWebOnly=”FALSE”

                TemplateType=”100“

                Url=”PPCounter”>

    </ListInstance>

<ContentTypeBinding ContentTypeId=”0x0100781AE3E9422A4256881E869733E0FBA4″ ListUrl=”PPCounter”/>

</Elements>

Office Business Applications (OBA) Workshop – Day 3

Agenda:

• Building, Packaging and Deploying Composite User Interfaces in SharePoint
• Business Entity Integration with the Business Data Catalog
• Enterprise Search
• Building Reporting, Analytics, and Dashboards with Excel Services and Report Center

Important links discovered during the second day of training:

• Mike Ammerlaan’s Blog – How to enable AJAX in SharePoint
• MondoSoft – Free search add-on to enable wildcard searches in SharePoint
• Ted Pattison website
  • Downloads
• Erika Ehrli’s Blog

Notes:

• Ted Pattison book sample code
  • ASP.Net forms custom workflow example
  • Custom application pages (stored in layouts directory)
• Override the RenderContents method, not the Render method. Render is the old way and is only there for backwards compatibility.
• Smart Part web part can host any ascx control as a web part. New beta version called “Return of the Smart Part”, that is AJAX enabled.
• Retracting solutions is not advised if they are in use.
• Announcement to be made with dedicated training resources for OBAs on http://msdn.microsoft.com/office
• Look for community developed web service against BDC API. (Scott Hillier example is close but isn’t complete.)
• Cannot create a site column that is a Business Data Column. It can only be defined at the list level.
• To add custom properties to advanced search drop-down you have to modify the web part that is used to display it. There is a property that is an XML based value that needs to be updated with your new managed property.
• Search tabs are stored in lists on the search site collection. Go to view all site content and look in the “Tabs in Search Pages” and the “Tabs in Search Results” lists. When creating a new tab you point them to the search and search results pages you create for your custom search experience.
• If we need to ask questions by email, add “OBA Student” to subject to get some priority!

Questions Answered by Patrick:

• Displaying icon for BDC items…
  • XSL is the only way Patrick could think of doing this
• Display presence information for owner column…
  • Look at exercise 6 in Lab 09 “Executing a People Search Query Programmatically” pgs. 22-23
• How to deploy search center customizations…
  • On feature activated use API to install extended features

Office Business Applications (OBA) Workshop – Day 2

Agenda:

• The SharePoint Web Site and Security Framework
• The SharePoint Storage Engine (Parts 1 & 2)
• Defining Business Process and Workflows

Important links discovered during the second day of training:

• SharePoint Community Portal
• Customizing and Branding WCM-Enabled SharePoint Sites
  • Understanding Web Content Management and the Default Features
  • Extending WCM
  • Creating and Configuring WCM-Enabled Sites
• U2U Community Tools
  • Specifically look at the CAML Query Builder!
• .Net Reflector
• Create custom activities for use in SharePoint Designer workflow wizard.
• Office Developer How-To Center
• SharePoint 2007 Visual How-Tos

Notes:

• Execute the following command when demoing without an active network connection: net stop sens
• Create features for all modular pieces of functionality. Then make features dependant on one another. Turning on/off a feature with dependencies will disable the dependant features as well.
• Custom list definitions treated as separate features when expected to be used in more than one site.
• Feature stapling is done by one feature connecting a group of sub-features.
  • Blog describing the use of feature stapling
• When developing feature:
  • Mimic the 12 hive directory structure starting from the “Template” directory and creating any necessary sub directories and files (i.e. Features, Layouts, etc.)
• Aspx files stored in the Layouts directory can contain inline server side code.
• Kerberos not used that often in real world, because it is complicated to setup and maintain. (At least this is what Patrick said when I spoke to him about this.)
• BDC custom actions that require authentication could point to an application level aspx page (in the layouts directory) that speaks to the SSO credential store and forwards the request to the OSM application server after attaching the credentials.
• Excel integration to create SharePoint list content! Could we utilize this for BOM creation?
• How can we utilize Access’s built in offline functionality?
• Versioning scheme cannot be customized (at least not like Model Manager). It is only number based with major and minor parts.
• In Word, use InsertàQuick Parts to insert document properties in document.
• Content type field generation tricks:
  • Create a custom list in SharePoint UI and use solution generator to reverse engineer custom list and use schema.xml
• SharePoint Visual Studio Extensions are good for development, but not so good for final build and packaging for real world deployment. Currently not enough control over solution packaging process.
• Need to make sure you dispose of SPSite or SPWeb objects (use a using statement).
• Use SPSiteDataQuery class to execute a cross list and cross site query of specific data.
  • Could be used for profile page web part to display tasks associated to the specific Masterdata
• Web services are faster than the object model a lot of times.
  • Web services utilize a lot of the in memory cache that SharePoint provides, and the object model always goes to the database and ignores the cache.
• XmlFormView can display InfoPath forms inside a webpart or any other ASP.Net based page.
• The workFlow history list is hidden, but can be accessed via the following URL: http://<site>/workflow%20history/

Office Business Applications (OBA) Workshop – Day 1

Agenda:

• Understanding Office Business Applications
• Integrating Business Data with Office Documents using Open XML file formats
• Integrating Business Data with Office Documents using Fluent UI Extensibility (Parts 1 & 2)

Important links discovered during the first day of training:

• “Using the Business Data Catalog and Smart Tags with the 2007 Microsoft Office System” – MSDN White Paper
• MOSS BDC Design Studio
• OpenXmlDeveloper.org
  • Microsoft SDK for Open XML
  • Office 2007 Content Control Toolkit
  • Office 2007 Custom UI Editor
• Open XML Package Explorer
• Camtasia – Screen recorder and editor
• Patrick Tisseghem’s Blog – Workshop Instructor
  • Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Patrick’s book that was recently published
• Development Tools and Techniques for Working with Code in WSS 3.0 (1 of 2)
• Development Tools and Techniques for Working with Code in WSS 3.0 (2 of 2)

Notes:

• Use BDC content to create office based reports via the Open XML file format.
• SmartTags disabled by default in Office 2007
• Patrick offered to give us the content of the four day Open XML file format training. (I need to remember to ask him for it!!)
• Patrick is presenting this workshop again in Europe in September.