SharePoint Learning Kit Team Blog

Sharepoint Learning Kit, now with Easy Build

slkblog — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 01:39:00 GMT

Posted By: Jay Beavers

We've recently posted Sharepoint Learning Kit release 3a to the community site. This release contains the exact same functionality as CTP 3 but has been tweaked to make it easier to build. With CTP 3, we released instructions on how to build it on the community wiki site but you had to jump through some hoops to copy files and change references to get everything working. In release 3a, we've jumped those hoops for you. The shortened build steps are:

Download and unzip the CTP 3a Source Code from the Codeplex site. If you don't have Visual Studio 2005 installed on your machine, download and install Visual C# 2005 Express Edition from MSDN.
Note: Visual C# 2005 Express Edition does not include aspx designers for easy editing. If you want to edit the aspx pages too, it's better to have one of the other editions of Visual Studio such as Visual Studio Standard Edition or better.
Copy Microsoft.Sharepoint.dll from your Sharepoint 2007 Beta 2 server's hard drive into the References directory. This DLL is found at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\ISAPI\Microsoft.Sharepoint.dll.
Note: If you have unziped the source code onto a computer that has Sharepoint installed, the build process will copy this file for you.
Disable Strong-Name validation on your .NET runtime since these assemblies are unsigned. Open a Command Prompt, type 'Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\sn.exe -Vr *,abc4ed181d6d6a94'.
Open SLK-SourceCode-1.1.0.633-ENU\Slk\Dll\SlkDll.sln and build. This will install the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache automatically which makes for easy debugging. More detail to come in a future blog post on debugging.
Note: If you are running Vista, make sure that you are running in a full permissions window. Otherwise, installing the assemblies in the GAC will fail.
(Optional) Create the new WSP file. You only need to do this if you are intending to perform a "fresh install" with your updated code.
Open a Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt. Change directory into SLK-SourceCode-1[1].0.633-ENU\Slk\Solution. Type 'msbuild wsp.proj' to build SharepointLearningKit.wsp.
Note: Visual C# Express does not include support for the command prompt or MSBuild, so you will need Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition or better to perform this step.

This release concentrates on simplifying the process of compiling the core SLK code. Future releases will work on improving the development process for aspx pages and sample code.

Coming soon: deploying a custom build

CTP3 Cool New Features and Contest

slkblog — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 23:53:00 GMT

Posted By: David Gorbet, SLK Group Manager

This week we released our third community technology preview of SharePoint Learning Kit. CTP3 has a host of cool new features, including instructor queries and the Grading page, which completes the assignment workflow. You can download CTP3 at http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=SLK.

Cool reporting samples in CTP3

Two of the new samples in CTP3 show how you can easily create cool reports from SLK data via the LearningStore. Samples are in the SLK-SDK-1.0.[build]-ENU.zip package.

Report 1 shows how you can create a report that uses a SharePoint master page that includes the SharePoint chrome. This simple report shows a list of all fully graded assignments for which the current user is an instructor. Clicking an assignment title opens the Grading page for that assignment.

Report 2 demonstrates a report page that displays a grid of "final score" values for each graded learner assignment for which the current user is an instructor. Clicking an assignment title opens the Grading page for that assignment. This report also uses DHTML to highlight assignments as you mouse over them.

The coolest thing about both reports is that because they use LearningStore, they automatically observe the SLK security rules. The person running the report will not have access to any assignment data that they shouldn’t have.

I think you’ll be amazed at how simple it is to generate this kind of report. Let us know what you think by posting on CodePlex, and feel free to send suggestions for future samples to slkfb@microsoft.com.

OK, and now for the contest!

You’ve seen the reporting samples from our resident samplemeister SLicK Rick. Now it’s your turn. We’re having a contest to see who can create the most interesting and useful report or reporting tool for SLK. The prize? Your very own unique SLK Team Bowling Shirt. If you were at NECC, you’ve seen some of the SLK Team members wearing these awesome shirts. They’re customized shirts embroidered with your unique SLK nickname, followed by the words “SLK Bowling League.” Full details to follow on the CodePlex site.

SLK team members in their SLK Bowling League shirts

Grading page is now implemented

CTP3 also comes with our Grading page. This page completes the assignment workflow, allowing instructors to assign grades, add comments, and control the workflow of assignments:

A few cool things about this page:

You can immediately stop work on all learner assignments by clicking Collect All on the toolbar. This is a sort of “pencils down” button that allows you to call in all outstanding assignments at once.
You can use this page to access the Assignment Properties page (where you created the assignment) so that you can change things like the title, description, due date, and even who it’s assigned to.
The Grading page shows you the autograded score, and allows you to enter a different final score if you want. It even allows you to leave the final score blank in case someone has been excused from the assignment.
SCORM 2004 has a concept of “primary objective success status,” a fancy way of saying that the content thinks that the learner passed or failed. If the content reports this status, we present it to the instructor as a diamond icon. In this case, I failed and Mark passed (you know Mark’s the smart one from all the posts he answers on CodePlex).
You can enter as many lines as you like in the comments field. The field will auto-grow to fit your comment. You can even enter comments before the learner has started the assignment, perhaps to give them a bit of extra instruction. These comments appear on the learner’s “lobby” page.
Clicking the learner name for any assignment that has been submitted (or collected) will show the actual learner work, although in CTP3 this is not yet implemented. For now, we take you to a placeholder page where you can experiment with different graded score values that ultimately will be set in the frameset’s Grading view.

There are other cool things in CTP3, including support for SCORM 1.2 content (please try it out and let us know how it works with your favorite content). CTP3 also has an updated Solitaire example, which is really useful for those of you who are trying to figure out how to create interesting SCORM 2004 content (or who need to learn how to play Solitaire).

Pre-populating sites to which users can assign

Many of you have asked if it’s possible to pre-populate an instructor’s site list. The answer is yes, and of course we have a sample to show you how. CTP3 comes with a sample (AddToWebUserLists) that shows how to read data from an Excel XML Spreadsheet and use the SLK API to populate this list with the spreadsheet data.

What do you want to tell us about? What do you want us to tell you about?

We’d like to make our community as interactive as possible. Tell us what you’re doing or planning to do with SLK, and maybe we’ll have some suggestions for how you can use SLK to accomplish your goals. Tell us what you like and don’t like. We’ll share what you like with the team so that they can feel good about the hard work they’re doing, and we’ll share what you don’t like with the team so that we can make SLK better. Also, tell us how you’d like us to communicate with you. Would you like to see monthly status updates in email? Maybe some tips and tricks? A “feature of the month?” Let us know; we aim to please!

Finally thank you for your interest in SLK. We aim to make it a great free tool for enabling e-learning in SharePoint, and your feedback and support will help make that possible.

How do you "unconfigure" SLK?

slkblog — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 19:10:00 GMT

Posted By: Eric Ledoux, SLK Development Manager

SharePoint Learning Kit provides a user interface, integrated into SharePoint Central Administration, for configuring a SharePoint site collection for use with SLK. The association between a site collection and SLK data is called a "SLK mapping". (In the SLK software development kit (SDK), it's called a "SlkSPSiteMapping". "SPSite" is SharePoint's internal term for "site collection", which is a set of SharePoint Web sites.)

A SLK mapping consists of the following information:

The GUID (globally unique identifier) of the SharePoint site collection.
The name of the SLK database, and the name of the server containing the database, that will be used to hold all assignments created in Web sites in that site collection. Multiple site collections can share the same SLK database, but a site collection can map to only one database.
The names of the instructor and learner permissions (e.g. "SLK Instructor" and "SLK Learner") used by that mapping. For example, when you create an assignment using the SLK UI, you'll see one checkbox for each learner with the "SLK Learner" permission.

SLK mappings are stored in the SharePoint configuration database when you use the "Configure SharePoint Learning Kit" page in SharePoint Central Administration.

Question: How do you remove a mapping? How do you "unconfigure" SLK?

You may think that uninstalling SLK (i.e. "retracting" and "deleting" the SharePointLearningKit.wsp solution) will remove mappings, but that's not the case. (That's a good thing—it means you can upgrade to a new version of SLK software without losing your assignments, assuming the new version is compatible.)

You may think that deleting the SLK database will remove mappings. That won't work either, since the mappings are stored in SharePoint's configuration database, not the SLK database.

The easiest way to remove a mapping is to use the "slkadm.exe" console (command-line) application provided with SLK. This tool is modeled after "stsadm.exe", a console application included with SharePoint as a way to configure SharePoint from the command line or from batch files. slkadm.exe is included in the SLK-Install-1.0.nnn-ENU.zip file (where nnn is the build number).

Here's an example of a simple use of slkadm.exe within a Command Prompt window on a SharePoint front-end server. Yellow text is what I typed. (This example assumes you've copied the contents of SLK-Install-1.0.nnn-ENU.zip to C:\Install, and you've installed SLK.)

C:\Install>slkadm -o enummappings
http://ericle1/districts/bellevue (696119ae-dd2f-42fb-b1c2-f57cef818553) --> Server=ERICLE1;Database=SharePointLearningKit
http://ericle1 (936ca441-9a5a-4cbb-b772-185d011fba5c) --> Server=ERICLE1;Database=SharePointLearningKit

C:\Install>

Above, "-o enummappings" means "perform the operation: enumerate mappings". The output from slkadm.exe is the list of mappings that are currently on my machine. In the example above, there are two mappings:

The SharePoint site collection "http://ericle1/districts/bellevue", which has a GUID of 696119ae-dd2f-42fb-b1c2-f57cef818553, is mapped to the SLK database named "SharePointLearningKit" on the server named "ERICLE1". (In this case, the front-end server, "ericle1", is the same as the database server.)
The SharePoint site collection "http://ericle1", which has a GUID of 936ca441-9a5a-4cbb-b772-185d011fba5c, is mapped to the same SLK database as the first mapping.

These two mappings were created by me using the Configure SharePoint Learning Kit page (in SharePoint Central Administration) twice: once to configure "http://ericle1/districts/bellevue" and once to configure "http://ericle1".

Suppose I want to delete the second mapping. Here's what I'd do:

C:\Install>slkadm -o deletemapping -guid 936ca441-9a5a-4cbb-b772-185d011fba5c
SLK mapping deleted for SPSite GUID 936ca441-9a5a-4cbb-b772-185d011fba5c

C:\Install>

I can verify it's deleted as follows:

C:\Install>slkadm -o enummappings
http://ericle1/districts/bellevue (696119ae-dd2f-42fb-b1c2-f57cef818553) --> Server=ERICLE1;Database=SharePointLearningKit

C:\Install>

As you can see, the only mapping left is the first one.

Keep in mind that removing a mapping does not delete the SLK database or any information in that database associated with that site collection. Currently there's no one-step way to delete all information in a SLK database associated with a given site collection. It wouldn't be that hard, though—e.g. a batch file with a bunch of calls to sqlcmd that delete rows from various tables given a SPSite GUID. Perhaps that can be a subject of a future blog posting...

By the way, slkadm.exe does more than just manage SLK mappings. It can also be used to configure SLK and upload a SLK Settings file from the command line or a batch file. But that, too, is another story...

The SharePoint Learning Kit Team Blog

slkblog — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 21:43:00 GMT

Posted By: Mark Knight, SLK PM

We have decided to launch an “official” team blog for the SharePoint Learning Kit project. This will be a space where team members can post various facts about the project, tips and tricks, information about design decisions, or whatever other tidbits of knowledge might be interesting. I have high hopes for this blog and I think it will be a great forum to talk about SLK.

We will try to keep a steady flow of interesting information coming your way. As always, we would like to hear your feedback. If there is a particular topic you would like to see, drop us an email with your suggestions.

Let the blogging begin!