shadowbox | 2010 wave for developers

SharePoint 2010 – the Status Bar, Notifications & Dialogs

David Baliles — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:43:07 GMT

One of the new & useful features in SharePoint Server 2010 is the enhancements to events & notifications, the addition of the Status Bar & Dialog Framework, and how all of these features work together to provide a more productive experience for users. From a developer’s perspective, these seemingly small features can be used in very creative & interesting ways to enhance your own custom SharePoint applications. Below is a tiny video illustrating the new Status Bar, Notifications & Dialogs:

Click either the Status Bar or Notifications & Dialog screenshot for the video:

In my next few postings I’ll walk you through the modification & customization of the Status Bar, Notifications, Alerts & the Dialog Framework using Visual Studio 2010.

SharePoint 2010 – Configure it for SharePoint Designer 2010

David Baliles — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:29:40 GMT

If you’ve used SharePoint Designer for SharePoint 2007, it seemed pretty much like a standard web editing tool like Expression Web…not so with SharePoint Designer 2010, which is not only a brand new, fully capable user experience, but is reliant on the SharePoint Server to allow it to do certain things, such as modify Master Pages, configure site structures or even be used at all. A SharePoint 2010 farm administrator must first & foremost allow SharePoint Designer 2010 clients to even connect to their web applications, and once that is allowed, specify the other permissions. Let’s take a look at the administration console for SharePoint Designer-specific capabilities within SharePoint 2010 Server:

Figure 1. Accessing SP Designer Administration Console

Figure 2. Configuring what a SharePoint Designer client can perform against a Web App.

QuickStart: Using Hyper-V 2008 R2 for Developer Virtualization

David Baliles — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:27:45 GMT

So I embarked on setting up a new server to run my Windows Virtual images and decided to use the barebones but powerful Windows Hyper-V 2008 R2 instead of a more conventional Windows 2008 R2 server with Hyper-V installed on top. If you’re new to the concept of a Windows Server “Core installation” it can be daunting at first…no UI, no way to get around…but don’t throw in the towel just yet. If all the server’s going to do is boot up and spawn a few of your VPC images, then don’t waste the resources on a full server just so you can have a GUI. Here’s the quick start to tackling this project:

Burn Windows Hyper-V 2008 R2 from your MSDN Subscription to a DVD and boot it – run the install like you normally would
Once you log in the first time, you’ll see a blue screen with some basic configurations – nothing fancy here…just walk it through, then exit to a command prompt
Command Prompts can be the standard ones, or PowerShell prompts. To get elevated permissions from the standard command line, simply type

C:\Powershell

this will return the following:

PS C:\

Once in Powershell, you can do anything else we need to do
Map a drive letter from your new Hyper-V server over to your laptop or workstation which you’ll use to download stuff & remotely manage your VPC images

PS C:\ net use Z: \\workstationname\sharename /user:domain\user pwd

If you’d like a quick list of common server commands, go here

Now go download a couple scripts & utilities:

Core Configurator 2.0 for Windows 2008 R2 – download & docs are here
this utility basically lets you run it from the PS C:\ prompt, launches a GUI, which lets you tweak the basic OS, networking, firewall & essential things. I recommend downloading the .cab file (instead of the ISO)

HVRemote – download is here, good blog entry is here
this utility quickly configures the Hyper-V server to be remotely administered, and configures your remote laptop/workstation to hit the server via a Hyper-V admin console that is installed with the Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 (think of this as a Windows Update).

Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 - download here.

Once everything’s downloaded, do the folowing:
- Install the Remote Server Admin Tools for Win7
- Go into Control Panel, Programs, Turn Windows Features On/Off, find the Remote Server Admin Tools, Role Administration Tools & select Hyper-V Tools
- Map the network drive from your new Hyper-V server core back to your laptop/workstation if you didn’t already do it
- copy the HVRemote.wsf & CoreConfig.cab files to the server
- unzip the CoreConfig.cab to a directory, such as c:\CoreConfig using the command:

expand CoreConfig.cab -f:* C:\CoreConfig

Run the CoreConfigurator from a PS C:\ prompt by typing:

PS C:\ cscript c:\coreconfig\start_coreconfig.wsf

Run the HVRemote from a PS C:\ prompt on the Hyper-V server first by typing:

PS C:\ cscript HVRemote /add:workstationname\user

Run the HVRemote from an elevated command line on the workstation machine second by typing:

C:\ cscript HVRemote /mmc:enable
C:\ cscript HVRemote /AnonDCOM:grant

To test everything out and make sure there are no other gotchas on the Hyper-V server, run the following command on BOTH the server & workstation, and correct anything you find either using normal utilities or using the aforementioned Core Configurator script/GUI

PS C:\ cscript HVRemote /show (on Hyper-V server)
C:\ cscript HVRemote /show (on workstation)

If there is anything failing about permissions connecting, make sure you’ve run the unique commands specific to a mix of workgroup/domain machines listed here (ie the cmdkey commands).
Now that everything is configured properly, let’s run the workstation’s Hyper-V MMC and see if we can connect to the remote Hyper-V server. Open either MMC.msc from a command line or Run prompt and add the Hyper-V snap-in, or just run the Hyper-V Manager that is now under your workstation’s Administrative Tools menu.
The rest should be self-explanatory

I hope this helps some of you get going. Thanks as always to those who contributed all of the hard work for getting this stuff working…John Howard & the CoreConfig team!

VSTS 2010’s Project Types for SharePoint 2010

David Baliles — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:45:42 GMT

With the same behavior as the many other project types developers are familiar with in Visual Studio, the VSTS 2010 release includes new projects specific to SharePoint 2010. I will be walking through each of these types of projects & how you can use them, but for now, here is a taste of what’s available in VSTS 2010 if you’d like to work with SharePoint 2010:

Here is a list of the default SharePoint 2010 project types within Visual Studio 2010 that are available to you as a developer:

Empty SharePoint Project
Visual Web Part
Sequential Workflow
State Machine Workflow
Business Data Connectivity Model
Event Receiver
List Definition
Content Type
Module
Site Definition
Import Reusable Workflow
Import SharePoint Solution Package

VSTS 2010’s SharePoint Explorer

David Baliles — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:43:45 GMT

Included in VSTS 2010 is a new Server Explorer enhancement that lets you work with SharePoint 2010 servers & instances. Most developers are already very familiar with the Server Explorer for browsing IIS, File & Database servers…and this just adds the support for SharePoint 2010. You will not be able to browse older SharePoint 2007 or 2003 servers through this feature, so keep that in mind if you have multiple environments. Below is a quick snapshot illustrating the VSTS 2010 SharePoint Explorer’s behavior:

If you’d like to see a slightly more interactive demo of the VSTS SharePoint Explorer, hit the Jump below:

VSTS 2010’s SharePoint Explorer (video)

How to install TFS 2010 – Quick Video

David Baliles — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:23:41 GMT

If you’re wanting to see how involved (or not) the installation of TFS 2010 is…check out this quick video. Obviously the more complex the deployment type (one server vs. multiple), the more complex the installation type. I’ve used a single server installation as this is the most common implementation scenario.

Click to view the brief walkthrough video (and yes I did edit it so it’s shorter)

I am running a Beta1/Beta2 build…install process may change as the product release progresses…so stay tuned to the most current TFS 2010 installation procedures!

Resize your Virtual Machine Hard Disk

David Baliles — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:47:00 GMT

Download the Clonezilla live ISO image and mount it as a CDROM drive for your virtual machine

Once loaded, press enter on the first option(default). It will then ask for a language (defaults to English) and a keymap. If you are not sure, just press enter on the defaults. It will then ask to start clonezilla or to open a shell. Choose to open clonezilla:

Then choose the type of cloning you want to do. In this case, choose disk/partition to disk/partition:

and then choose disk to local disk. Choose your source disk(the old smaller size one) which will probably be /dev/hda and your target hard disk(the bigger one) which will probably be /dev/hdb.

Next, we have the parameters window. I’ve unchecked the first option which was to reinstall grub in the target disk, which we don’t want since we only have Windows. So it will look like this:

On the next screen, choose to use the same partition table as the source disk.

I will then warn you a couple of times that all data in your target partition will be lost. Since we are sure about this, we continue with the process.

This may take a long time depending on the size of the source disk, so you can download GParted’s ISO image in the meanwhile for the next step.

Once the process is finished, power off the machine using clonezilla’s menu options(or just power it off).

Now, remove the old hard drive from the VM and add the new one as master. Unmount clonezilla’s ISO. If you boot your VM now, Windows should boot normally, but if you check your disk size, it will tell you the same size as the old drive. WTH! Don’t panic.

Shut down your VM again and mount GParted’s ISO so it boots from it. Choose the auto-configuration option(the first one) and once it starts up it will show you a partition manager window. It will show your current partition plus some unallocated space to the right. Right click on the current partition an choose ‘resize/move’.

The new screen will let you drag the arrows to the desired size. So go ahead with it to the far right(if you want the entire disk space for windows) and click apply.

That’s it! once it is done, you can shutdown, unmount GParted and boot into your Windows VM with brand new hard drive space and everything working as it was before.

**Parallels users can first resize the virtual hard drive using the included “Parallels Image Tool”, but will need to use GParted to make Windows recognize that new size.

External links:

http://www.clonezilla.org

http://gparted.sourceforge.net

*** Credit to Marcos for the stellar steps for this process!