OK, this is more an aide memoir than shouting to the world...

Ever wanted to put Vista style icons of people in your presentations? I found the people icons quite a while back, but could not remember where.

Today, Gayashan pointed me in the right direction - the online clipart collection, using the keyword 'head' (I had tried people, person, icon, pawn, engineer... )

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

Well last time i had network problems with WinPE in a virtual machine it was as a result of not having enough RAM allocated, remember it really wants at least 512MB. This time thought it took a little while to find the answer, and then I had to use Google's cache of a web page as the blog it pointed me to was down!  Anyhow Jason Huitt has a simple explanation - you need to add a Legacy Network addaptor under Add Hardware in the VMs Settings page.

Soemtimes we need to find the identity or other details about a user within Sharepoint from a list column. As a example, to find a user's login name from the 'Created By' column.

you may have looked at the values stored in this or similar columns & noticed that the name is stored in the form of id#loginname. You could manipulate the string to get the values, but there is a ready made function to let us do this and more - SPFieldUserValue.

The function provides 4 properties...

LookupId - the id before the #
LookupValue - the text displayed in the column
SIPAddress - the SIP (Messenger) address used for presence
User - a SPUser object

By using the last property we can quickly gain access to all of the SPUser properties. The code below give a quick example

[code:c#]

//we assume we have already referenced a list / web / site and the example is getting the first item...

SPListItem item = mySPList.Items[0];

SPFieldUserValue userVal = new SPFieldUserValue(item.ParentList.ParentWeb, item["Created By"].ToString());

string userLoginName = user.User.LoginName;

string userDisplayName = user.User.Name;

//etc

[/code]

An example of useage is programatically assigning workflow tasks to a document creator

Whilst InfoPath has dataconnection capabilites to 'talk' direct to SQL & retrieve data, these can be a little problematic. An alternative approach is to implement a simple webservice in front of SQL.

The following example shows a simple service... (note - the code is not optimised & is passing the SQL query over http!)

[code:c#]

[WebMethod]
   public DataSet GetSQLData(string SqlStatement, string connection)
   {
     string conn = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings[connection];
     DataSet wsDataSet = new DataSet();
      SqlConnection sqlConn = new SqlConnection(conn);
      SqlDataAdapter adapter = new SqlDataAdapter(SqlStatement,conn);
      adapter.Fill(wsDataSet);
     

    }
    return wsDataSet;
   }

[/code]

We can create an InfoPath data connection now to talk to this service.

A similar approach can be taken to 'write' to SQL. This can be useful where you need InfoPath to submit only partial data to SQL rather than the whole form

[code:c#]

   public string UpdateSQL(string SqlStatement, string connection)
   {
    string message = string.Empty;
    try
    {
     string skey = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["SecurityToken"];

      SqlConnection sqlConn = new SqlConnection(conn);
      SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(SqlStatement, sqlConn);
      sqlConn.Open();
      cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();
      message = "succesful";
     else
      message = "Security Token Invalid";
    }
    catch (System.Exception e)
    {
     message = e.ToString();
    }
    return message;

[/code]

To use, you can create 'Read' type web service

After configuring the Type (Web Service) and path, your service will be available as a secondary data source. Importantly, remove the check box on 'Automatically retrieve data'

Once completed, you can dynamically set the SqlStatement node (e.g. via a button rule)

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).

For those using Sharepoint and perhaps more importantly creating e-Learning content you will be interested to learn that Microsoft have recently announced the release of their Learning Content Develiopment System (LCDS) ... more info on the Microsoft Learning Site.

With the LCDS, you can:

Basically it is a simple to use SCORM based e-learning creation tool.  Well worth checking out.

I stumbled across this download today on Microsoft's site, but the KB article 948515 doesn't exist yet and even the virtualization team blog doesn't mention it! Hey ho, I'm sure they'll blog it soon! So it seems that they have releaed today an update for Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 that provides support for the following Host and Guest Operating Systems

Additonal Guest Operating System support:
Windows Vista® Ultimate Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
Windows Vista® Business Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
Windows Vista® Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
Windows Server® 2008 Core
Windows Server® 2008 Standard
Windows Server® 2008 Datacenter
Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise
Windows Server® 2008 Small Business Server
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3

Additional Host Operating System support:
Windows Vista® Ultimate Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1) (non-production use only)
Windows Vista® Business Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1) (non-production use only)
Windows Vista® Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1)(non-production use only)
Windows Server® 2008 Core
Windows Server® 2008 Standard
Windows Server® 2008 Datacenter
Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise
Windows Server® 2008 Small Business Server
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3 (non-production use only)

I haven't tried it on my Virtual Server yet, but will do soon and let you know what i find.

You can find the update here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=A79BCF9B-59F7-480B-A4B8-FB56F42E3348&displaylang=en

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:

[code:xml]

c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -i

[/code]

only to get this answer:

[code:xml]

The error indicates that IIS is in 64 bit mode, while this application is a 32 bit application and thus not compatible. 

[/code]

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:

[code:xml]

c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework64\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -i

[/code]

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.

I still have some clients running WSS 2. As good IT guys, the IT team patched their WSS 2 farm with Service Pack 3.

Concurrently, I was putting together some dataview web parts to render some web services. Everything worked great on the development virtual server, but try as I might, I could not get the webparts to render for nayone other than administrators on the live servers.

Eventually, we tracked down the problem. SP3 has broken some of the dataview functionality, as noted by SporkBomb. It took a lot of head scratching and crawling the web to find this. (The development machines are were still at SP2  )

Microsoft has issued a hotfix to rectify this, but you will have to contact your support centre to obtain the fix. If the blogs are anything to go by, this could be a painful hotfix...