Posts Tagged ‘SharePoint 2010’

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

Since we kicked off the Sweden SharePoint User Group (or SSUG) a couple of years back, we’ve managed to keep a great flow and balance in keeping free meetings and sessions throughout the Swedish SharePoint community. Recently I launched (actually re-launched) the SSUG group down in the southern parts of Sweden – and with great success. It’s awesome to see what a huge interest there is for SharePoint in general and our user group in particular.

Popular: Coming events

I’ve re-mapped the domain www.ssug.se to point to our EventBrite page, which is where you’ll find any and all upcoming events with the SSUG group in Sweden.

Stockholm – September 24th, 2012

There is only 50 seats. PLEASE - if you cannot attend and have registered, please unregister. It’s not fair to our host or the people on the waitlist to not show up!

• 17:30 Registration – you need to register here on Eventbrite to get a seat
• 18:00 Wictor Wilén introduces SSUG and kicks off this season
• 18:05 Steria welcomes everyone
• 18:10 Matthias Einig (Steria) will present Application Life Cycle Management in SharePoint
• 19:00 Beer and something to chew on
• 19:15 Wictor Wilén (Connecta) will give you an introduction to all the new and shiny stuff in SharePoint 2013
• 20:00 All good things must eventually end, but we’ll wrap up with a quick Q&A session about SharePoint 2013

Malmö – Oktober 4th, 2012

There is only 50 seats. PLEASE - if you cannot attend and have registered, please unregister. It’s not fair to our host or the people on the waitlist to not show up!

• 17:30 – 18:00: Mingle and meetup
• 18:00 : Tobias Zimmergren (TOZIT AB) introduces SSUG and kicks the meeting off
• 18:05 : Carl-Johan Tiréus (Connecta) welcomes us to Connecta
• 18:15 : One year with SharePoint – Alfa Laval presents their experiences and lessons learned from introducing SharePoint in their organization
• 19:00 : Food & Beer!
• 19:15 : Wictor Wilén (Connecta) talks about the most important news in SharePoint 2013
• 20:00 : The End. Who’s up for a SharePint?

Where can you find us?

Upcoming events: www.ssug.se

Facebook Group: www.facebook.com/SharePointSweden

• Posted in Business
• 1 Comment
• Tags: SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, SSUG, Sweden SharePoint User Group

Introduction

During the last few years, we’ve been enabling our clients with enhanced discussion forum solutions for SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 in their intranets, extranets and public facing web sites. Given the great success of the last few years implementations of discussion solutions with our clients, we have now dedicated an entirely new initiative to manage the discussion solution suite.

Head on over to www.sharepointdiscussions.com to take a closer look!

We’re live!

We’ve successfully launched a new site called SharePointDiscussions.com which will now host the content of our products and services related to our discussion forum solutions and software. All new features and updates to the solutions will be accessible from this location and any requests related to these products and solutions can be relayed to the support team at support {at} sharepointdiscussions.com

Highlights

Some of the things I’d love to highlight are:

- Competitive pricing!
    – We can offer a single server license for only $399 per server
    – You purchase it once, and then you’re done. No annual fees!
- Language support!
    – We support multiple languages, including these:
    – English – Swedish – Danish – German – Greek – Farsi – Norwegian – Dutch
    – If you need your language localized, get in touch
- Features
    – Mark posts as answers
    – Mark posts as helpful
    – Mark posts as abusive
    – Collect user statistics
    – Earn points for posts, helpful posts and answers
    – Categorize discussions in different forums
    – Multiple threads in each forum
    – Create posts and threads easily
    – Delete entire threads easily, or single posts
    – RSS: Subscribe to new threads in a forum
    – RSS: Subscribe to new posts in a thread
    – Additional free Web Part: Recent Posts
    – Additional free Web Part: Top Viewer
        – Display users with most total points
        – Display users with most total posts
        – Display users with most answered posts
        – Display users with most helpful posts
    – Additional free Web Part: Forum Search

… and much more.

Summary

It’s about time to continue writing on our SharePoint 2013 versions of our Apps, products and solutions – so with that, I thank you for your time to read this!

Enjoy!

• Posted in Business
• No Comments
• Tags: Products, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Discussion Web Part

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

A while back an announcement was made that TFSPreview.com had been made available for general testing. Various bloggers at Microsoft put an invitation token in their MSDN blogs so everyone can have a go at it.

In this article series we’ll take a very quick look at what the hosted TFS solution by Microsoft looks like.

Articles currently in the series:

Steps to hook up a project to your new build server

This article obviously assumes that you’ve already followed along with the previous articles and hooked up a build configuration for  your TFSpreview account. Now we’ll take a look at how we can get our projects hooking up in a CI/Automated Build scenario with Team Foundation Services.

The steps from this point onwards are basically the same as if it would be an on-premise TFS server in your own domain. Your build server is configured, your code is hosted in TFS and all you’ll need to do is connect your project to the actual TFS and then create a new build definition.

Create a new project (or connect an existing one) and connect to TFS

We’ll start from the beginning and create a new Visual Studio 2010 project (in my case it’ll be an Empty SharePoint Project), and remember to tick the Checkbox "Add to source control":

Make sure that the project is connected to your TFS server, check in the source and we can get started:

Create a new build definition

At this point (if you’ve followed the articles in this article series) you should have a TFS server, a connection from Team Explorer to your TFS server and also a new project hooked up in your repository. Now its time to create our first build definition so we can automate the builds and deployments.

Start by navigating to your Team Explorer and right-click on Builds and then click the "New Build Definition…":

This will give you the following new dialog where you can specify details for your build:

Move on to the "Trigger" tab. In my case I want to enable CI (Continous Integration) for my project:

Move on to the "Workspace" tab. In my case I’ll leave the Source Control Folder as the default root as seen below. You can choose to specify a specific TFS project if you don’t want to include all.

Move on to the "Build Defaults" tab. You’ll need to specify a build controller (you should have one here since we created one in the previous article). You will also need to specify a drop folder, where your binaries are going to be delivered upon the build: 

Move on to the "Process" tab. This is where things get really interesting. You can from this dialog specify a variety of different variables for your project when it builds. I’m not going to dig into details here because my good mate Chris O’Brien have covered all of that in his article series about automated builds.

Save the build definition and validate that it appears in the Team Explorer:

Test the build configuration

In order to validate that our setup now works with TFSpreview.com and our own build server and to validate our newly created build definition, simply make some changes to your project and check it in and have it automatically schedule a new build (We chose Continuous Integration, which will build on each check in). You can see that the build is now scheduled and currently running:

And after a while you can validate that it is Completed:

The final validation is of course to see the drop folder that we specified and make sure that it now contains our newly built sources:

Voila. Build seems to be working.

Summary

This post was intended to give you an overview over the simplicity of creating a simple build definition and getting started with automated builds in TFSpreview (hosted Microsoft TFS). Pretty neat and it seems to be working just the way we want.

Obviously there’s some apparent questions like:

• What if I want to output my .wsp files as well?
• What if I want to execute a specific script upon the execution of the build so I can automate test-deployments?
• Etc. etc.

My first recommendation is to visit Chris O’Brien and read all the posts in his CI/automation series which is simply amazing.

• Posted in Technical
• 3 Comments
• Tags: Automation, CI, Cloud, SharePoint 2010, SP2010, TFS

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

A while back an announcement was made that TFSPreview.com had been made available for general testing. Various bloggers at Microsoft put an invitation token in their MSDN blogs so everyone can have a go at it.

In this article series we’ll take a very quick look at what the hosted TFS solution by Microsoft looks like.

Articles currently in the series:

Connect Visual Studio 2010 to your new hosted team project

In order to be able to connect to the hosted TFSPreview team project, you’ll need to comply with the prerequisites I’m listing here.

Prerequisites

• Make sure you’re running Visual Studio 2010 SP1
• Install KB2581206 – (KB2581206 – Visual Studio 2010 SP1 TFS Compatibility GDR)

Hook up Visual Studio to your new repository/project

Alright, if you’ve downloaded and installed KB2581206 (which means you’re spinning VS2010 SP1 already) you are read to connect. The procedure to connect to the hosted TFS service is basically the same as if you were to connect to any other TFS repository, which is easy and awesome.

In Visual Studio 2010 SP1, simply make these smooth ninja moves and you’re done:

Make sure to fetch the URL of your account (As seen in your dashboard, like depicted below):

Enter this URL in the Visual Studio 2010 dialogs and we’re ready to kick off:

It’ll ask you for your credentials which you need to use to verify your account details:

You should now be authenticated and your repository should be available:

You’ll go ahead as you normally do and choose the projects that interests you and then you’re basically done:

Your Team Explorer should contain your TFS project and you should be able to work with it as you normally would from Visual Studio 2010:

This means you’ve got all of your standard tasks and operations available straight from VS 2010 (So you don’t have to go to the website to make changes …):

Summary

Easy enough. As soon as you’ve downloaded the required tooling to get connected, you can hook up your new cloud-hosted team project in Visual Studio 2010 without any problems. Give it a spin, it flows quite nicely!

Enjoy.

• Posted in Technical
• 6 Comments
• Tags: Cloud, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SP2010, TFS, Visual Studio

Author: Tobias Zimmergren | www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

Sometimes when you’re in a development project you can feel the pain of debugging. If there’s a lot of code floating around it may be hard to sort out the method calls and how the depend on each other if it’s a very complex solution. To ease the task of debugging there’s a great VS 2010 plugin called Debugger Canvas, which will help you to sort out a lot of the hassle while debugging.

In this article we’ll just take a quick look at what Debugger Canvas is and how it can assist us in our daily debugging adventures.

Getting Started with Debugger Canvas

Firstly, you obviously need to download the extension for Visual Studio 2010, which can be done HERE.

Debugger Canvas in Action

When you’ve installed the extension, there’s a few new opportunities presented when debugging. Your new “F5” experience will be based on the new Debugger Canvas UI instead of the traditional debugging experience which means you’ll be able to more easily follow the calls within your code, like this:

When you step into the code deeper, you’ll see how the calls were made quite easily:

Summary

You should definitely take a look at Debugger Canvas if you haven’t already as it’ll be most helpful for you in your development adventures.

Get a better overview here and watch the introductory video!

Enjoy.

• Posted in Technical
• 3 Comments
• Tags: Debugging, Development, SharePoint 2010, VS2010

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

In most of my recent projects I’ve been required to hook up some custom functionality and add custom forms, pages and Web Parts. Some of the forms and pages I designed needed to be launched from the Ribbon menu, which of course is contextual. This basically means that when you visit a specific list which inherits from a specific content type, we can choose to display our custom Ribbon controls. One of the most common requirements I bumped into was having some kind of conditional check whether to enable or disable the button based on a set of conditions.

In your Ribbon XML for the CommandUIHandler there’s a property called “EnabledScript” which is a tag that enables you to enter a validation script to determine whether or not the ribbon button should be enabled. In my case I need to disable the custom Ribbon-controls if one item is selected, but otherwise always disable it.

Use the following snippet from the SP.ListOperation, which contains the Selection.getSelectedItems method:

<CommandUIHandler
Command=”Ribbon.Awesome.NavButton_CMD”
CommandAction=”javascript:Alert(‘My Awesome Button Was Clicked’);
          EnabledScript=”javascript:SP.ListOperation.Selection.getSelectedItems().length == 1;” />

It’s really only the last line that is of interest here since that’s where the script magic happens to determine if the control should be enabled or not.

MSDN have some nice samples in one of their articles over here.

Results

If you select one (and only one) item in the list, your custom command will be enabled:

If you didn’t select or selected more than one item, the command will be disabled as such:

Summary

I know many people have been struggling with the Ribbon and making it behave. In this article I simply wanted to highlight one of the very common tasks I’ve seen developers looking for and trying to achieve in some of the last few projects I’ve been involved.

Since my awesome mate Wictor covered a bunch of awesome posts about the Ribbon, I’m not going to dive into any more details than so

Enjoy.

• Posted in Technical
• 5 Comments
• Tags: Development, Ribbon, SharePoint 2010, VS2010

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

SharePoint 2010 developing for performance article series:
In this series of articles I will briefly introduce you to some key concepts when it comes to developing for performance in our SharePoint 2010 applications.

Related articles in this article series

Part 1 – SP 2010: Developing for performance Part 1 – Developer Dashboard
Part 2 – SP 2010: Developing for performance Part 2 – SPMonitoredScope
Part 3 – SP 2010: Developing for performance Part 3 – Caching in SharePoint 2010
Part 4 – SP 2010: Developing for performance Part 4 – Logging
Part 5 – SP 2010: Developing for performance Part 5 – Disposal patterns and tools
Part 6 – SP 2010: Developing for performance Part 6 – CSS Sprites
Part 7 – SP 2010: Developing for performance Part 7 – Crunching those scripts
Part 8 – SP 2010: Developing for performance Part 8 – Control that ViewState

Part 8 (this article):
As most of you know, in any ASP.NET project (SharePoint included) there’s something you know as ViewState.  With the ViewState we can persist state of our properties in the page controls and objects across postbacks that happen in our solutions. If we are not careful and plan the usage of ViewState properly, we can end up with a performance hit that will slightly decrease the performance in the page rendering process.

In this article we will take a look at what impact the ViewState can have if we “forget about it”, and of course how we can prevent our pages from being unnecessarily big in page size.

ViewState in our SharePoint projects

If you’ve been developing SharePoint projects of any type, you’ve most certainly been doing some kind of asp.net UI development as well. (Application Pages, Web Parts, User Controls and so on) that are inheriting the asp.net capabilities and hence the ViewState.

What you should know as an ASP.NET developer: Be sure to know when you should, or shouldn’t use the ViewState. You can disable the usage of ViewState for certain components, or the entire page.

Performance considerations

With an increased ViewState you get an increased Page Size which in turn obviously means that the page will take a bit longer to render.

We’ll take a quick look at how the performance can differ when we’re using ViewState and when we’re disabling the ViewState in a SharePoint project.

Taking a look: ViewState

In order for us to really understand what impact the ViewState can have on the page rendering process, we’ll dig into the details of the what the ViewState looks like. To do this we can check out the source of the rendered page, and of course we’ll rely on our faithful squire; Fiddler2.

Before we’ll start digging with the Fiddler2-application, we can simply check the Page Source of any given page being rendered and we’ll most likely find a heap of ViewState madness going on in there.

In my sample application that only consist of a simple GridView control and a few rows of data – the ViewState is turned into this:

 <input type= "hidden "

 

  name= "__VIEWSTATE "

 

  id= "__VIEWSTATE "

 

  value= "/wEPDwULLTE5NjIxMzI1MDIPZBYCZg9kFgICAQ9kFgQCAQ9kFgICDw9kFgJmD2QWAgIBD

 

  w8WAh4HVmlzaWJsZWdkZAIDD2QWBgIRD2QWBGYPZBYEAgEPZBYCZg9kFgQCAg9kFgYCAQ8WAh8Aa

 

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  QRIb21lZGnihW5zRhNmmnQef2E5KXJlKgIU" />

 

If you compare the aforementioned ViewState with the very same page but with the ViewState disabled, it would look like this:

 <input type="hidden"

 

  name="__VIEWSTATE"

 

  id="__VIEWSTATE"

 

  value="/wEPDwULLTE5NjIxMzI1MDJkGAIFH2N0bDAwJFBsYWNlSG9sZGVy

 

  TWFpbiRHcmlkVmlldzEPPCsACgEIAilkBUdjdGwwMCRQbGFjZUhvbGRlclR

 

  vcE5hdkJhciRQbGFjZUhvbGRlckhvcml6b250YWxOYXYkVG9wTmF2aWdhdG

 

  lvbk1lbnVWNA8PZAUESG9tZWTEsK7AlAZmIZYt/bke1dmkbPKxhg=="/>

 

What impact can these few lines of markup have on the page rendering process anyway, you say? Well, in order to find out – let’s summon our good friend Fiddler2 and do a quick comparison.

	ViewState Enabled	ViewState Disabled
Body size (bytes)	14 534 bytes	12 883 bytes
Load time (seconds)	0.3765430 seconds	0.2031263 seconds

A visual comparison of the same page with versus without ViewState enabled:

Body Size comparison (bytes)	Load Time comparison (seconds)

So what can I do to tune and tweak the ViewState?

There’s generally two good initial tips for tuning the ViewState.

• Disable ViewState for the entire page
• Disable ViewState for selected components

The first option is good if you don’t need to use ViewState in any of the components on your page. Then you can simply disable ViewState by setting the ViewStateEnabled property to false:

  <%@ Page Language="C#"

 

     AutoEventWireup="true"

 

     CodeBehind="ViewStateSample.aspx.cs"

 

     Inherits="Zimmergren.Samples.ViewState.ViewStateSample"

 

     DynamicMasterPageFile="~masterurl/default.master"

 

     EnableViewState="false"  %>

 

The second option is good if you need the ViewState for certain components, but you want to disable it for others. You can disable the ViewState for specific components;

     <asp:GridView ID="GridView1"

 

         runat="server"

 

         AutoGenerateColumns="False"

 

         AllowSorting="true"

 

         AllowPaging="true"

 

         PageSize="25"

 

 EnableViewState="false"

 

         />

 

Additional Tip: Take a look at HTTP compression

In addition to being aware of the ViewState in any asp.net project, you should take a look at HTTP Compression that you can enable in IIS.

Read more on HTTP Compression

Summary

Alright – the summer is officially over (at least of you take a look at the recent weather) and I’m back in the saddle. In this article I’ve been talking a bit about how the ViewState can impact your performance in any asp.net project (hence SharePoint project). The reason for talking about it is that I’ve seen quite the amount of projects as of late that doesn’t think about the impact a huge ViewState can have on the time it takes to download and render a page on the client.

An important consideration that I’ve learned throughout all our projects to create Internet-facing sites based on SharePoint (or plain old ASP.NET) is to measure the performance in different scenarios, including some stress testing and load tests. In most of these projects we’ve seen an increased performance if we take time to select what components or pages should disable ViewState. It might be worth considering.

Note that this is a minimal sample with minimal impact. Consider when you’ve got a huge page with 10+ Web Parts and all using the ViewState, even if they don’t really need to – can you imagine the page load times increasing? The answer is probably yes

Enjoy.

• Posted in Technical
• 8 Comments
• Tags: ASP.NET, Performance, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010

     public partial class VisualProductSalesUserControl : UserControl

     {

         private const string connectionString = "Server=tcp:YOURSERVER.database.windows.net;Database=ZimmergrenDemo;User ID=Username@YOURSERVER;Password=myAwesomePassword++;Trusted_Connection=False;Encrypt=True;" ;

         private string selectCommand = "select * from ZimmergrenDemo.dbo.ProductSales;" ;

         private DataTable productSalesData = new DataTable ("ProductSales" );

         protected void FetchAndFill(string connectionString, string selectCommand)

         {

             using (var connection = new SqlConnection (connectionString))

             {

                 var adaptor = new SqlDataAdapter

                 {

                     SelectCommand = new SqlCommand (selectCommand, connection),

                 };

                 adaptor.Fill(productSalesData);

                 salesGrid.DataSource = productSalesData;

                 salesGrid.DataBind();

             }

         }

         protected void Button1_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

         {

             FetchAndFill(connectionString, selectCommand);

         }

     }

• Posted in Technical
• 5 Comments
• Tags: Featured, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, Windows Azure

• Posted in Technical
• 2 Comments
• Tags: Performance, Scripts, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010

• Posted in Misc
• No Comments
• Tags: Best Practice, Conference, Downloads, London, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, Silverlight, Speaking, Training