edhild's WebLog

Demoing Geneva Beta 2 with MOSS 2007

I put together a little video demo of using Geneva Beta 2 stuff with MOSS 2007. You can get these VMs using the links from the previous post, but it is an awful lot to download and setup. So I thought a video might be appealing.

Geneva Beta 2 support for MOSS 2007

Since a lot of the customers I serve are government agencies, there has always been a lot of interest in ADFS with SharePoint. But there has always been lots of issues... ADFS being targeted to only federating Active Directory, what about Office client integration, SAML protocol support, etc... Well there is something new on the horizon and last month at Tech Ed there was some interesting announcements that impact the SharePoint world.

 If you haven't been watching the MS beta name list, it was probably an easy miss, but there is a new Windows Server service coming that currently goes by the beta name of Geneva Server. This service brings a Security Token Service to the windows platform building on top some new .NET libraries (the Geneva framework). This STS is an evolution of the ADFS Windows service adding support for more standards, a claims transformation rules engine, support for SQL attribute stores, and much more.

 At Tech Ed, there was an announcement that MOSS 2007 will support Geneva. In fact, there is now a set of hyper-v VMs that will allow you to play with Geneva Beta 2, MOSS 2007, RMS, and Card Space. This also has the SP2 updates for client integration so it is quite a demo when you are done. You can register and get the images here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd440951.aspx

There is only 1 error that I found going through the docs. On page 87, the Url should be https://docs.contoso.com. And I would change the demo a bit and only add the RMS protection to the confidential documents.

Building Presentations from SharePoint Content

This is really just a publish of an old demo I have had for some time, but finally got around to putting a video together. This demo is about two different ways to build PowerPoint presentations based off of SharePoint content. The first uses an Office Add-in approach and the second does everything on the server using Open XML. Enjoy!

By the way, both solutions are in my book: Pro SharePoint Solution Development

Local DC SharePoint Conference Early Registration Is Open

It's that time of year again. A local sharepoint user group that I am involved with is putting on a regional sharepoint conference. The dates are June 26th and 27th. Visit their web site for more information: http://www.sugdc.org/Events/Conferences/tabid/58/Default.aspx

Been Reviewing DPM 2007 SP1 Updates

And came across a series of webcasts that I had to share:

 What's new for SharePoint in DPM 2007 SP1: http://edge.technet.com/Media/What-is-new-in-DPM-2007-SP1-for-protecting-SharePoint/

DPM Licensing Changes: http://edge.technet.com/Media/DPM-2007-sp1-Licensing/

Deep Dive on how DPM works: http://edge.technet.com/Media/DPM-2007-SP1-How-does-DPM-really-work/

Code sample for merging SharePoint list data into Word documents

A few posts ago, I put up a silverlight video of a solution from my book on how to merge sharepoint list data into templatized Word documents. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/edhild/archive/2008/10/29/merging-sharepoint-list-data-into-word-documents.aspx

Of course the book has been out for quite a while and this new demo utilized a few new toys since then: Visual Studio 2008, the Word Content Control Toolkit, and the Open XML SDK (all discussed and links are in the prior post). I've been asked a few time for a copy of the new solution so I've posted it here:

http://cid-601cfa765e7a6fd3.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/MergeSharePointWord/CustomerDocumentsFeature.zip

As usual, the code is for learning purposes only! All the usual caveats about not supporting it, etc all apply.

Working on updating my Silverlight 2.0 stuff to RTM

And of course there would have to be an error that I had to work around... I had built several samples with the pre-release stuff of Silverlight 2.0 and just started the processing of updating my environment. So I uninstalled everything in my dev environment related to silverlight and started over. This included Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Expression Blend 2 SP1, as well as the new Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio. After getting everything in the environment, I created a simple Silverlight app along with the default web test application...and my Hello World demo gave me a wonderful parser error saying it couldn't find the Silverlight assembly.

I checked the reference and it was point to the correct dll. If I changed the setting for this to copy local then it would work fine, but i didn't want tons of copies floating around on my dev machine. I used gacutil and installed it into the Global Assembly Cache - same error. Interesting, if I changed the Register directive in the aspx page then so that it specified the strong name of the assembly then it worked. But I didn't want to have to do this for every aspx page or project that I create... So the end state solution I came up with was to add the assembly reference in the framework's root web.config file. This is located at: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG. It is called web.config. The additional line I added was an assembly directive:
<add assembly="System.Web.Silverlight, Version=2.0.5.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />

 I still haven't gotten to my previous projects, but at least Hello World works now :)

Webcast on the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint

PDC Video: SharePoint Online - Extending Your Service

This is a pretty good video on some of the developer options for customizing SharePoint Online. If you are not familiar with SharePoint Online, it is SharePoint hosted by Microsoft for use by small organizations or companies as well as large ones. As this video explains, there are two different flavors Standard and Dedicated. Development in the Standard offering is a bit more challenging since the current offering does not allow you to deploy code to the multi-tenant infrastructure. I liked the content of this demonstation, but the presenter could have been a bit more prepared.

You can try out SharePoint Online at http://www.microsoft.com/online

And the video I am talking about can be seen here: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB53/

Video Demo: Merging SharePoint List Data into Word Documents

I've recently been moving a lot of my older demos from when MOSS first RTMed into my new dev environment. During the move, I am also taking the time to update them to VS.NET 2008 and any other nicer tools that have come along. A popular demo of mine is a solution that shows you how to merge SharePoint list data into MS Word documents leveraging the Open XML file format. This example was originally published as part of my book: Pro SharePoint Solution Development by Apress. While moving the demonstration to my new development environment, I made two significant changes that simplify the development experience.

First, I decided to use the Word 2007 Content Control Toolkit. This tool available from codeplex (http://www.codeplex.com/dbe) allows you to easily insert a custom XML part into the document and provides a drag and drop experience for binding the content controls. This cut quite a lot of time out of building the solution since the toolkit creates the supporting relationship XML parts for you and handles the XPath queries for the content controls.

My other improvement was deciding to incorporate the September CTP of the Open XML SDK 2.0. There was no such SDK when I built the solution the first time, so my only option was to use the packaging API available in the .NET framework itself. I had previously tried the 1.0 version of the SDK and found it lacking in a lot of basic areas, but this new 2.0 one looks very promising. I commented out more lines than I had written in the first version of the solution. You can get this SDK here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb448854(office.14).aspx

I'm also doing a lot more of video capturing of my solutions for other developers to follow. Updated the video to use the new Silverlight Streaming service available on Live.

Visio 2007 crashing on exit on Vista 64bit

I had a minor success today. For the longest time, every time I closed Visio 2007 SP1 on my Vista 64bit machine, I would get a crash and an error. It was a minor annoyance since it was on exit... but I finally solved it today. First I launched Visio by using Explorer on the file system and choosing Run as Administrator. With it open, I went into the Trust Center and went to the Add-ins tab. I clicked the Go button to manage the COM-addins and then disabled the "Send to Bluetooth" add-in. This completely solved my problem. Not sure what this feature is, but I never use it. I should point out that do have a bluetooth mouse I use with my laptop. And now I don't experience the crash when running as a non-admin.

 I know not anything MOSS related. But just in case anyone else is experiencing the same problem.

POP3 on Windows Server 2008 MOSS Dev Env

Just a quick note... If you are a MOSS dev setting up a new development environment on Windows Server 2008, you might have noticed that there is no POP3 service anymore. This makes it a bit difficult to shows workflow with email notifications, etc if you don't have the ability to have a user mailbox. And of course, you don't want the full blown Exchange app there because of the bloat on the VM and performance. Try out this free one:

http://www.download.com/ArGoSoft-Mail-Server-Freeware/3000-2165_4-10364910.html

I'm using it for both SMTP and POP3 with MOSS configured for outbound messages. Note that I didn't say inbound. For MOSS to do that, you have to use the SMTP in IIS. I didn't need that so sticking with this for the time being.

A SharePoint adventure in "Publish Links to Office"

So I had a need to do a little thing such as get a link to a MOSS site to show up in the "My SharePoint Sites" Save-As dialog in Office. First, this wasn't a site that I was indexing so, I couldn't rely on it picking up the fact that I was a member and automatically putting it into My SharePoint Sites list on my My Site. So let the adventure begin...

First, it seemed innocent enough. If you go to the SSP that your My Site uses, there is an Admin option to configure "Published Links to Office client applications". I went there, added a new entry http://partners.litware.com and set it to have the team site icon. Note that you can leave the audience field blank which will push the link to everyone. Very cool. There are more details on these steps half way down the page at this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/12/01/getting-started-with-personalization-in-moss-2007.aspx

My next step was to launch MS Word, go to the Save As dialog and click My SharePoint Sites. To my surprise the link wasn't there. Doh! First make sure you have visited your My Site and clicked the tab in the top-right corner to register the My Site with Office.

Also, it turns out Office client applications get this information by making a call to the web service and depending on the elapsed time, may not ask MOSS for an updated list of links. You can make Office forget it has a list by deleting this registry key (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Portal\LinkPublishingTimestamp ) and restart your Office application. Don't worry, it will recreate it the next time you click the My SharePoint Sites option in the Save As dialog.

Still no luck in my environment. Are you also using Windows Server 2008 as your dev environment? If so, WebDav and other desktop stuff needed to make this work is not turned on by default! You need to add the "Desktop Experience" feature (which requires a reboot). More info here: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=51

And then yes it will work. On an interesting note discovered why watching Word make these requests through Fiddler. After calling the web service, the Office client application then makes a HTTP request to each of the links that it is pulling down. If it is unreachable or you don't have access, Word will remove that link. So even if you setup everything right, you still might not see it. In my case, the site was being accessed through an ADFS authentication provider, not NTLM like I had hoped so it wasn't showing. After a quick Url change, everything was fine.

Like I said a very simple problem... Thanks to Chad Wach for going on the adventure with me!

My SharePoint Best Practices Presentation

While we are waiting for the decks to be officially postes on the sharepoint best practices portal, I've posted a copy on skydrive. It may not be the exact final copy, but it should be pretty close.

http://cid-601cfa765e7a6fd3.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/conference/SharePoint%20Best%20Practices%20Conference%20Hild.pptx

Most of the demos are already on this blog. Look at the resources slide in the presentation to find the links.

-Ed

SharePoint and CRM

It isn't too often that I get to share publicly some of the work we do at the MTC for customers. Fortunately, the US Air Force let Microsoft turn a proof of concept I worked on into a case study. This POC was done a while ago - in fact you'll recognize some of it is on older technology than the current revisions. The solution was focused on providing a tracking system for requests for forces that come in from JFCOM. The current system (at the time) was simply Outlook and Emails. The action officers described spending 50% of their time sorting and searching through complicated email folder hierarchies. We proposed and build a system leveraging Microsoft CRM and SharePoint. On Microsoft's site, you can see a video about this solution, a demo of it online, and even more info of how this solution has generalized to tracking just about any task:

http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/solutions/taskmanagement/default.mspx

By the way, they caked make up on me for the video...