WSS Development

The Last Pint - Remembering a Friend

Darrin Bishop — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:53:07 GMT

I almost did not check my emails before I left the house today… One cannot explain the grief I felt when I checked the mail on the phone and realized the SharePoint community lost a dear friend. Wading though way too many eamils this morning to my disbelief I leaned that Patrick Tisseghem passed away.

Patrick was practically a SharePoint icon, not only in the European community but world-wide. Many of us have had the pleasure of meeting Patrick at one of his training sessions, SharePoint conference or by reading one of his many books, articles or posts.

For myself, I distinctly remember the first time I met Patrick. We were both speaking at an Advisor Summit in Phoenix, Az. As the speakers made their way across the hot pavement quiet and soft spoken Patrick and I introduced ourselves and made our way with the pack to dinner. It was during that time that Patrick made some SharePoint fame with his famous Beer database.

Over the years we connected primarily on the conference circuits, in and out of the speaker room and the after hour events. Patrick was always there, pint in hand, quiet and on the edge of the crowd. Always willing to talk and listen. Strange quality for an instructor, Patrick was more of a listener than a speaker after hours.

I can easily recount the events and parties that we happened to be together at, many now are all a blur over the years. I can say that my parting memory of Patrick will be TechEd 2008 in Orlando. Heading back to the speaker hotel from an event, my Matt and I happened upon Patrick taking a break on the bench outside the hotel. We sat an talked for a few minutes and as usual headed to the hotel bar. Over pints we discussed his current book, watched some sports and just kicked back. For me personally I will be left with a fond Patrick memory of TechEd, Pints, Books and Friends.

AddSolution - Failed to extract the cab file

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:40:17 GMT

Seems like I have been building and deploying features and solution for weeks. I have run into this error while attempting to add a solution to the solution store: Failed to extract the cab file in the solution.

Seems like there is more than a few reasons why you might see this return from your STSADM addsolution command but for myself each time was this error was associated with a duplicate entry in my .ddf file. I spent some time trying to determine what was causing this error and then happened upon Rob's post on the topic: STSADM strikes again, Failed to extract the cab file in the solution...

You can check your DDF files for duplicates. If you can't seem to located the offending duplicate then try renaming your web solution file to .CAB extension and open it. The cab file will open sorted by name and you might be able to more easily find the duplicate file.

Infrastructure Update Issues

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:59:13 GMT

Microsoft's Infrastructure Updates have been out for about a week now. There does seem to be some potential big issues with the updates breaking third party products. Microsoft also has posted a KB article on Alternate Access Mappings issues associated with the Infrastructure updates.

Here are a few key posts you should be looking at if you have installed or are considering installing the Infrastructure Updates:

AAM issue with Infrastructure Update

Description of the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: July 15, 2008

KB: When is the SPContext.Current available ? (SharePoint dev)

Tech Ed 2008 - OFC07-TLC - Building Windows PowerShell Cmdlets for Microsoft SharePoint

Darrin Bishop — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 02:26:37 GMT

For those that attended OFC07-TLC - Thanks!

Here are the files and slide deck for OFC07-TLC Building Windows PowerShell Cmdlets for Microsoft SharePoint. The demo builds a simple Get-Web cmdlet and a Web Feature Provider. Remember this is "conference" code and not production code :) demo purposes only!

As always, I am interested in comments and feedback about the demo, slides, or session.

File: http://www.darrinbishop.com/files/OFC07_TLC.zip

Speaking at a Free Half Day SharePoint Seminar in Springfield, Il.

Darrin Bishop — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:53:05 GMT

For those of you located in or around Springfield, Illinois there will be a half day session on SharePoint at the Springfield Crowne Plaza on Tuesday, May 13, 2008.

Crowne Plaza Hotel
3000 S. Dirksen Parkway
Springfield Illinois 62703

There will be an opening session presented by Microsoft for everyone and followed by sessions in two tracks each with two break-out sessions.

Here is a breakdown of the sessions. I will be providing the content for the Technical Track breakouts.

8:30am - 9:15am Opening Session: Overview of Microsoft Office Capabilities and Solutions

9:30am – 10:30am: Breakout Session 1 (Business Track)

Learn why organizations are choosing the Microsoft platform to run their most critical business applications. This session will discuss how Microsoft solutions can provide innovative solutions to address business challenges around Collaboration and Enterprise Content Management. During this session we will look at several real world examples of using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the 2007 Office System to address real world business challenges and scenarios and we will be taking an in-depth look at one solution that exemplifies how Microsoft's Collaboration strategy within the context of a powerful strategic planning process created by the County of Los Angeles.

9:30am – 10:30am: Breakout Session 1 (Technical Track)

Looking at the SharePoint Development Landscape – An overview of WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 SDK. In this breakout we will take a high-level overview of the SDK and common SharePoint development tasks.

10:45am-11:45am: Breakout Session 2 (Business Track)

This session will address how the Microsoft platform can be leveraged to address Compliance, Enterprise Content Management and E Discovery business challenges within Government. This session will discuss how Microsoft solutions can provide innovative solutions to address Enterprise Content Management needs. During this session we will discuss Enterprise Content Management strategies. How to improve content controls and processes via while achieving regulatory, and operational standards with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the 2007 Office System.

10:45am-11:45am: Breakout Session 2 (Technical Track)

Setting the Stage for SharePoint Development – This session will discuss development environments. We will discuss common development environments including individual dev, integrated dev, test and production. Time permitting we will cover solution and feature deployment.

Updated WSS and MOSS SDK Ready for Download

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:25:46 GMT

The newest version of the WSS and MOSS SDK has been posted to Microsoft Download. It is available at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6D94E307-67D9-41AC-B2D6-0074D6286FA9&displaylang=en

Dev Utilities and The New Dev Environment

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 12:18:28 GMT

Here is a quick look at the current utilities I make sure I get on all my development servers:

Reflector - Unless you live under a rock you have heard of Reflector. Number one go to utility to view the object model ( and then some!) to better understand the underlying product.

PowerShell - Microsoft's newest "command-line" application is always on my dev machines. PowerShell is probably best known as a "scripting" tool and an administrator tool From the development side I frequently use PowerShell to create test harnesses, manipulate and dump .Net objects as well as a scriptable interface to manage SharePoint. If you have not gotten into PowerShell you really are overlooking a powerful development tool.

ClassMaster - This is the newest utility to make it on all my development machines. ClassMaster is a testing, learning and profiling tool from Certified Development. ClassMaster allows me to qucikly load one or more assemblies and easily create and test's its object. ClassMaster displays a user interface that lists an assembly's classes, methods and properties. From there I can create and store objects, set (and test) method parameters, view results and drill down into the resulting object's methods and properties. For SharePoint development I load the Microsoft.SharePoint assembly, create a SPSite via one of the many constructors. From there I can easily view the SPSite object's properties, run methods such as OpenWeb and view the resultant SPWeb object's properties. Did I mention you can save these objects off to a clipboard for use as parameters in other method calls? Want/need to understand how to use one or more SharePoint objects - grab ClassMaster, select a constructor, pick a method and try various parameters.

DbgView - This tool picks up trace and debug statements from running applications. This is a little gem of a tool that I run whenever I am start debugging an application. To use debug view all you need is to write in trace and debug statements which DbgView will pick up. This tool fills in the debugging gaps for those SharePoint assemblies that require GAC deployment. Yes I know you can debug from the GAC but a splash of Trace or Debug statements and DbgView for me is much quicker.

VCdControlTool - This is my "Go To" tool for mounting ISO images - particularly those large images > 2Gig which are not accessible via Virtual PC's Mount ISO. There appears to be no default location to downnload this tool. A search for VCdControlTool will return many download locations.

Fiddler - Fiddler is the tool I use to track down authentication issues with SharePoint. This utility will act as a HTTP proxy and dump all sorts of HTTP information to the screen for review.

Thats the basic list of utilities that make it on my machine. I would be curious what other utils should make it to my dev machines by default.

SPSiteDataQuery - Greater Than 10 Lists Issue

Darrin Bishop — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:19:29 GMT

The Good, Bad and the Ugly - well Ugly at least...

SPSiteDataQuery is used to query across multiple lists/libraries within a site collection. Apparently there is a confirmed issue when you query over 10 or more lists/libraries where columns and column order are not the same.

Read Steve's post on this issue at: SPSiteDataQuery limited to 10 document libraries or lists

ManageFeatures.aspx - not authorized to view ….

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 02 May 2007 12:54:07 GMT

Note: Migrated from previous blog..

Features are the new way to add functionalities to WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007. If you are working with features a lot there is good chance you occasionally get a "You are not authorized to view this page" - Error 403 - when you try to manage your features - either site or web scoped. To manage features in the user interface you navigate to ManageFeatures.aspx.

This can be very frustrating and may have you scratching your head. The fix is actually simple. Chances are you manually added a new feature to the FEATURES directory and did not inherit the FEATURES permissions. The error is slightly misleading. You are most likely authorized to view the page but the account is not authorized to access one or more of the files contained inside of the new feature. The most common reason the new directory and files do not inherit the correct permissions is because you cut and pasted one or more of the files to the new location. Cutting and pasting will bring along it's permissions while copying and pasting will inherit the parent permissions. This is a file system issue and not a SharePoint or IIS issue.

The fix is simple, cut and paste the file out of the feature directory to another directory or the desktop and then COPY this newly created feature file(s) back to the features directory. The new files should now inherit permissions and ManageFeatures.aspx should load correctly.

SPSiteDataQuery for Cross-Site and Cross List Searches

Darrin Bishop — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 18:20:40 GMT

Practically everyone who deployed and developed in WSS 2.0 wished for a cross-site or cross-list search. SPS 2003 using the search service already allowed for aggregate search, though to limit it to lists only one had to do some fancy pruning of results. Effectively many were looking for "rollup" searches - Show me all my issues, show me all my tasks...

SPSiteDataQuery is a new type in WSS and MOSS that allows for cross-site/cross-list searching. Similar to SPQuery found in WSS 2.0 and still available in WSS 3.0 SPSiteDataQuery is CAML-based. CAML being that oh so fun Xml syntax for defining SharePoint views and queries.

Where SPSiteDataQuery and SPQuery differ SPSiteDataQueries ability to search more than a single site or single list. SPSiteDataQuery can be configured to search in all lists of a particular list type or list base type located in either
1) The complete site collection
2) a particular site and sub-sites

Note that you cannot pick individual lists only lists types nor can you select only certain sites. Your choices are all sites within a site collection or a particular site and all sub-sites. Via the Where clause if you are clever you can achieve a more limiting search.

Creating a search using SPSiteDataQuery is simple. The SPSiteDataQuery is documented in the WSS 3.0 SDK. Unfortunately there are no extremely useful examples to explain the limits of the query object. In this post I want to demonstrate a simple SPSiteDataQuery. In the next posts I will cover more details and point out a few gotchas.

To create a simple SPSiteDataQuery in Visual Studio.NET 2005 follow these steps:
(These steps assume you are working on the WSS or MOSS server!)

1. Create a new Console project. For this demonstration we will create a console application. Feel free to create a web control or Web Part if you wish buut the code below assumes Console app.
2. Add the WSS 3.0 reference to the new project
3. Replace the existing content in Program.cs with the following

using System;
using System.Data;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;

namespace SPSiteDataQueryDemo
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Program app = new Program();
            app.RunQuery();
        }

        private void RunQuery()
        {
            SPSiteDataQuery q = new SPSiteDataQuery();
            q.ViewFields = "<FieldRef Name=\"Title\"/>";
            q.Lists = "<Lists ServerTemplate=\"1100\"/>";
            q.Webs = "<Webs Scope=\"SiteCollection\"/>";
            q.Query = "<Where>" +
                        "<Contains>" +
                           "<FieldRef Name=\"Title\"/>" +
                           "<Value Type=\"Text\">Share</Value>" +
                        "</Contains>" +
                      "</Where>";

            DataTable dt=null;
            using (SPSite s = new SPSite("http://[site]"))
            {
                SPWeb w = s.OpenWeb();
                dt = w.GetSiteData(q);
                w = null;
            }

            foreach (DataRow dr in dt.Rows)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(dr["Title"]);
            }
            Console.Read();
        }
    }
}

Once compiled this code will search all issues lists contained within the site collection as defined by the SPSite object s. The ViewFields property contains the fields to be returned such as Title. The List property defines the type of lists to query for example 1100 which represents the id for Issues lists. Each lists template has a unique id. Built in list template ids can be found in the WSS SDK.

The Webs property defines the scope of the search. The Scope attribute of the Webs node can either be Recursive or SiteCollection. Recursive will search the web and any sub webs. SiteCollection will search all webs contained in the site collection regardless of which site the query is performed on.

The Query property contains the optional Where or Orderby clause. In this example the where clause is searching for "Share" within the Title field by using a Contains node. The WSS SDK details the available supported syntax. Multiple clauses can be nested to create more complex queries.

Once the query is defined the code binds to a site and then opens web as defined in the passed in URL to the SPSite constructor. The GetSiteData method of the SPWeb class accepts the query as a parameter and returns a dataset.

The rest of the code simply outputs the title field to the console and waits for a character input at the console before dismissing the console.

There is more to the SPSiteDataQuery then what this simple application demonstrates. But for today that is enough to get you started.