MOSS 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)

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.

Custom Actions - Simple Steps to Add Your Touch to Site Actions

Darrin Bishop — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 18:16:48 GMT

WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 now have a supported extensibility mechanism allowing developers to easily add items to existing menus. Custom Actions - most easily installed as a feature means no more hacking of JavaScript files and ASPX pages.

Custom Actions can be used to add new custom functionality to many places in WSS and MOSS. Depending on where the custom action is located determines the user interface of the custom action. For example if you create a custom action for the Site Actions menu the result is a menu item anchored in the control. If you create a Custom Action for the Site Settings page you will see a link. Creating a custom action for a list's display form toolbar results in a toolbar button. As you can see just from this small list a Custom Action provides a lot of extensibility in WSS and MOSS.

For this post I will walk you through creating, installing and activating custom actions that will be located on the Site Actions dropdown control. If you are a developer working with features, like I do, you usually find yourself activating and deactivating features frequently. If you use the feature management pages for activation and deactivation you have more than a few clicks to get to either the site features management page or the site collection feature management page. This example will create two custom actions for your Site Action control allowing you to quickly jump from a site page to either the site or site collection feature management page. The great thing about using a feature to install these links into the custom action control you will be able to activate or deactivate and thereby add or remove these links as needed.

To start with create a new folder to contain the custom actions feature. This folder must be located inside the Features folder located on the WSS or MOSS server. I create a folder titled "FeatureManagmentLinksFeature". Somewhat redundant name but I like adding Feature to the end of my feature folder. This folder is located at: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES. The Feature directory is where WSS and MOSS will look for new features.

We need a feature.xml file to describe our feature and place in our newly created folder. A feature file is an Xml file that contains information about the feature including the location of the custom action definition we will be using. For this example simply create a new text file using your favorite editor. Include the following Xml in the file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Feature Id="Place your GUID here!"
    Title="Feature Management Links"
    Description="The Feature Management Links feature will create two links within the Site Actions menu control."
    Version="1.0.0.0"
    Scope="Site"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<ElementManifests>
    <ElementManifest Location="FeatureManagementLinks.xml" />
</ElementManifests>
</Feature>

It is absolutely required that you replace the text "Place your GUID here!" with a valid GUID!. GuidGen comes to mind. Save the file with the name Feature.xml to the newly created folder within the feature directory. Make sure that the file is saved as an Xml file and not a text file.

The feature file provides us with the basic elements of our feature - id, descriptions, references to required files. It should be noted that the Scope of this feature is set to "Site". This means this feature will be activated at a site collection level. The ElementManfiest element and it's Location attribute refers the feature to our next file "FeatureManagmentLinks.xml". It is this file which will contain our Custom Action definitions.

The "FeatureManagementLinks.xml" file will contains an "Elments" Xml element as the top node. This element contains one ore more feature elements that are well-known to WSS and MOSS. For our example we will need to use the CustomAction element so that WSS and MOSS will create the appropriate menu items in the Site Action control. This example will contain two custom actions. One will link the user to the site-level feature management aspx page and another action that will link the user to the site collection -level feature management aspx page.

Create a new text file using your favorite text editor and add the following Xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<CustomAction
    GroupId = "SiteActions"
    Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.StandardMenu"
    Sequence="1000"
    Title="Site Features">
    <UrlAction Url=" ~site/_layouts/ManageFeatures.aspx"/>
</CustomAction>

<CustomAction
    GroupId="SiteActions"
    Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.StandardMenu"
    Sequence="1000"
    Title="Site Collection Features">
    <UrlAction Url="/_layouts/ManageFeatures.aspx?Scope=Site"/>
</CustomAction>

</Elements>

Save this file to the newly created directory using the same name that is listed in the feature.xml's ElementManifest element. In this example we will save the file as FeatureManagementLinks.Xml in the FeatureManagmentLinksFeature directory.

Before we install and activate this lets look at the first of two CustomAction elements. The CustomAction element has the basic attributes to allow us to define where the custom action should reside, the text displayed by the custom action as well as the action. In these examples the custom action should reside in the StandardMenu of SiteActions. The Sequence attribute allows us to provide a relitive position among the other actions. In these examples the action we want is to navigate to a page. This is accomplished by the UrlAction element.

The first custom action has a UrlAction element that will direct us to the ManageFeatures.aspx page relative to the site we are located on. The ~site token provides us with a way to generically specify the site we are currently on. The second custom action will take us to the site collection feature management page.

The next step is to install and activate the feature. STSAdm.exe is a command line tool for WSS and MOSS and can be found in the bin directory in the 12 hive. Generally this is located at: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\. Open a command prompt by clicking the Start button, then Run. Type in CMD and then click the Ok button.

The Command Prompt will open. To install the feature type the following command:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\STSADM -o installfeature -filename FeatureManagmentLinksFeature\feature.xml

Hit enter to run the command. Assuming you have no spelling errors STSADM will tell you it has installed the feature. To activate the feature run the following command in the Command Prompt.

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\STSADM -o activatefeature -filename FeatureManagmentLinksFeature\feature.xml -url http://{Servername}

Make sure you replace {Servername} with the server name and port. The url parameter should point to the site collection that the feature will be activated on.

After running this command your feature should be installed. To test it go to any web (or subsite) within the site collection and click on the Site Action menu control. You should she two additional links allowing you to easily move from a site page to either feature management page. If you are constantly activating or deactivating features this small feature will save you some time.

Custom Actions really provide us with a great mechanism to place our needed extensions into the menus of WSS and SPS. This post about Custom Actions is a very simple start to what you can do. Normally I add this little feature to all site collections I am working on and disable it when the sites go "live". A slightly more advanced scenario would security trim these new actions by a user's rights. I could easily require a set of rights before this custom action would be accessible.

If your interested about more advanced Custom Action scenarios then check out Tony Bierman's posts on Quick Site Settings: Adding Sub Menus to Site Actions in SharePoint .

KnowlegeLake shows up in new Microsoft MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 Book

Darrin Bishop — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 17:42:35 GMT

For those who attended Tech Ed 2006 and managed to get a copy of 7 Development Projects For Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services Version 3.0 make sure you read the introduction. page xix in the intro you will find a section on KnowlegeLake including images of our capture product, Imaging List Template and Imaging Viewer all running on WSS 3.0.

For those of you who did not make it to Tech Ed 2006 or did not manage to get a copy Microsoft has made it available in pdf form: 7 Development Projects For Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services Version 3.0

Best Practices: Using Disposable Windows SharePoint Services Objects on MSDN

Darrin Bishop — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 17:41:25 GMT

Scott Harris and Mike Ammerlaan has a new best practice article titled Best Practices: Using Disposable Windows SharePoint Services Objects covering the various objects in WSS 3 and MOSS that implment the IDisposable interface. Scott and Mike uses this article to list techniques that will help developers write code that will result in proper clean up and disposal. This article covers the various classes and methods that create objects that a developer will need pay particular attention to when coding to avoid memory leaks from underlying unmanaged code.