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SharePoint Cumulative Update August available

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:31:23 GMT

On Stefan Gossners blog I saw that the August CU for SharePoint 2007 AND 2010 is available. Find more information on his blog.

Downloadlinks:

WSS 3.0
MOSS 2007
SharePoint Foundation 2010
SharePoint Server 2010
SharePoint Server 2010 and Project Server

Regular expressions action in nintex workflow

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:35:01 GMT

A short post about how to use regular expressions in a Nintex workflow. This example, that is part of a big workflow for a call registration system, shows how to use the Regular expressions action to check if the logon name of an user (\) contains a specific pattern. If this results in the value “true” (or yes) a Run if … action is executed.

Read how to build the workflow here.

Nintex Workflow 2010 useful links

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:27:33 GMT

Download the .msi installation file:
http://www.nintex.com/en-US/Products/Pages/DownloadRequestComplete.aspx?l=English&v=NWF.2010&d=true

Request a trial license key (valid for one month):
http://www.nintex.com/en-US/Products/Pages/TrialDownload.aspx?v=NWF.2010 (fill in the form, and you’ll get an email with key)

Download the installation guide:
http://nintexdownload.com/Nsupport/NW2010_Installation_Guide_English.pdf

Nintex Workflow 2010 version 2.0.0.6 available

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:16:54 GMT

The new translations are: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Swedish

Find more information in this document.

More Nintex Workflow information here.

Easy editing meta tags for Publishing Pages with Mavention Meta Fields

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 21:22:58 GMT

Including meta tags for pages on Internet-facing websites is very important. Additional information included in meta tags makes it easier for search engines to find and classify the content. Still many websites either don’t use meta tags at all or don’t provide content editors with a simple mechanism for managing the meta tags making managing the meta tags a one-time process. In many situations meta tags are not even a part of the information architecture for Internet-facing websites and are easily being forgotten in the development process. Additionally, as they are not being displayed on the screen, they are not a part of the branding what makes it challenging for the developers to provide an intuitive editing interface for. Mavention Meta Fields is a turn-key solution that allows you to easily add support for managing page-level meta tags even if your website is almost ready to go on-line.

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Simple SharePoint 2010 Replaceable Parameters with Mavention Replaceable Parameters Snippets

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:55:13 GMT

The new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools ship with Replaceable Parameters which allow you to provide values for SharePoint solution items whose actual values are not known at the design time. And while the Replaceable Parameters are without a doubt a great improvement in the development process, there is one problem with them: there are quite a few of them and looking up the right one might get you out of element when developing. And this is exactly where Mavention Replaceable Parameters Snippets come in.

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Publishing Pages in multiple locations with Mavention Virtual Pages

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:31:01 GMT

Many popular Web Content Management Systems allow you to reuse content across the site. Once published you can then include (fragments of) the page in other places on your website, providing a seamless experience to your visitors. And if you ever need to change something, you can do it in one place and those changes will be automatically pushed to all other locations. Reusing content is probably one of the most desired capabilities in WCM, so it’s pretty surprising that it isn’t available out of the box in SharePoint 2010. While SharePoint 2010 has the concept of Reusable Content it’s meant more for creating small content snippets rather than using it for republishing content on your website. And this is exactly where Mavention Virtual Pages gets useful.

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Programmatically provisioning Variations in SharePoint Server 2010

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 10:14:01 GMT

Last year I wrote an article about programmatically provisioning Variation Hierarchies in SharePoint 2007. The point of that article was that there was really no way you could provision Variations in repeatable way in a supported fashion and had to use reflection to get the job done. The situation in SharePoint 2010 has changed a little. The process of creating Variations has been made more reliable my moving it completely to a Timer Job. So a new approach, requires new code, and here it is.

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Programmatically determining which Claims Authentication Type has been used to login with Claims Based Authentication

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 08:07:13 GMT

Claims Based Authentication introduced with SharePoint 2010 allows you to login to a SharePoint site using multiple Authentication Providers. In some scenario you might need to determine which Claims Authentication Type has been used to login in order to conditionally show some content. Find out how this can be done using the new Claims API provided with SharePoint 2010.

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Programmatically converting login name to claim and vice versa

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 22:09:44 GMT

SharePoint 2010 introduced Claims Based Authentication. One of the consequences of this is the fact that in order to use Forms Based Authentication (FBA) you need to configure your Web Application to use Claims instead of Classic Authentication. One of the many changes that you notice while working with claims are different login names: while in SharePoint 2007 you used something like myprovider:myuser, SharePoint 2010 makes the claims-soup of it: i:0#.f|myprovider|myuser. And while this is something you can take into account for newly created solutions, it can get confusing when upgrading SharePoint 2007 solutions to SharePoint 2010, especially if all you need is the user name. So is String.Replace the only way to get it out or is there a better way?

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Programmatically creating Sites and Site Collections from a Custom Web Template

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:43:35 GMT

One of the great improvements in SharePoint 2010 are Web Templates. a great article about why using light-weight Web Templates is a better approach than using full blown Site Definitions. While using Web Templates for creating sites and Site Collections is pretty straight-forward things get complicated when you need to create the Site Collection programmatically.

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Mavention Scan Page Headings

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:25:12 GMT

Proper usage of headings is very important on the web. It helps you structure your content making it more readable, it makes it easier for visually challenged readers to navigate through the content and helps you optimize your content for search engines. And while it’s so important, it’s quite surprising that there is no standard mechanism available within SharePoint that would allow you to quickly verify that your page has a valid headings structure. However thanks to the great extensibility of SharePoint it’s history: proudly presenting Mavention Scan Page Headings!

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Mavention Scan Page for Broken Links

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 15:25:10 GMT

Hyperlinks are a great feature of web publishing. Using hyperlinks you can easily link from one page to another providing the reader with information from different, and often also independent, sources. However as soon as you include a hyperlink in your content, the external content becomes a part of your page: not physically, but virtually. People reading your page expect your links to work because they assume that you wanted to provide them some additional information relevant to the page they reading. So knowing that, there is nothing bad as broken links in your content. In some situations you might get to hear from your visitors that some links don’t work, but wouldn’t it be better if you could find out about it first? Doing it manually can get very time consuming, but why bother if you can do it automatically using Mavention Scan Page for Broken Links?

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Mavention XML Sitemap for SharePoint 2010 Server

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:48:05 GMT

About two years ago I created a Feature for SharePoint 2007 which allowed you to generate an XML Sitemap for your site. XML Sitemaps are a standard way to notify search engines about the content on your website. And while you might consider creating an XML Sitemap for your website manually for a small site, having to manage a few hundred pages makes it quickly a pretty tedious process. Being able to do that automatically would be a great improvement and so I’ve made the XML Sitemap Feature v1.0. While it did the job it was more of a proof-of-concept than a solution that you would use in real-life. It had too many limitations to be really useful in real-world scenarios. And so the v2.0 has been born.

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Waldek Mastykarz is Microsoft Certified Professional Developer SharePoint 2010

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:25:15 GMT

Last May I’ve taken the beta versions of the two SharePoint 2010 Developer exams: 70-573 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development and 70-576 PRO: Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications. Today I received an e-mail saying that I successfully passed both exams and received the Microsoft Certified Professional Developer SharePoint 2010 status.

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CKS:DEV soon with even more support for Content Types and Site Columns

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:48:15 GMT

Defining custom Site Columns and Content Types is the very basis of almost every SharePoint project. Using Site Columns and Content Types you can define the information architecture of your Solution. And although this process is something that is very important and something you do very often, it is surprising how little support there is for it from the development point of view that would allow you to do it in a productive manner. CKS:DEV has already had some support around Content Types and Site Columns but still it was far from ideal, so including some improvements in that area was something we couldn’t really leave behind…

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CKS:DEV now with support for Importing Site Columns

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 14:58:51 GMT

Creating custom Site Columns is something you do in almost every single SharePoint Solution. Unfortunately even in spite of great SDK documentation and intellisense for SharePoint XML files, it’s still a tedious process to create new columns directly in the XML. Using the SharePoint web UI is way easier but then again: how would you get that out of SharePoint and put into your Solution? There is an answer to that question and it is: use CKS:DEV!

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Dynamically resizing images with Mavention Smart Images

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 08:02:56 GMT

A picture is worth a thousand words. In many situations images help illustrate and explain thoughts. Without images the Web would be boring and colorless. And while we all are convinced about the power of image and how it enhances telling a story, it is surprising how complex it is to get it right on the Web. Many large images on your website make it download and display slowly. No matter how great the content is, the odds are high that your visitor will not take the time to wait for it. Large images is not something specific to SharePoint. Many Content Management Systems suffer from not being able to automatically provide resized images. And while in many cases there are solutions to that, they are either complex, expensive or both. However the great thing with SharePoint 2010 is, that using its extensibility capabilities you can easily change this…

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Inconvenient Reusable Content List

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:08:13 GMT

One of the great capabilities of SharePoint Server is the ability of including reusable content: standard snippets of HTML which you can use in different places over and over again without having to copy & paste it. The great thing about Reusable Content is that you have the option to insert a reference instead of the copy of the content so that if the content snippet ever changes, you won’t have to manually check every single page in your site to ensure that the content is correct: SharePoint will do this for you automatically. While this piece of functionality is really great you wouldn’t believe how inconvenient it is to get to this list to add new content snippets in there.

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Inconvenient Pages List Name

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:28:09 GMT

While working on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Web Content Management (WCM) Solutions you might have relied on the fact that the name of the Pages Library was always Pages. Well almost always, because in some languages, like German, it was translated along with the Title. Given that fact, changed the way we had to deal with the Pages Library in code. Instead of hard coding the URL part of the Pages Library, all of a sudden we had to retrieve it dynamically, just because someone accidentally translated the URL of the Pages Library. But looking at SharePoint Server 2010 tells us otherwise. Now the URL parts of Pages Libraries in all languages are translated. So was it a mistake in MOSS 2007 that in German the Pages Library was called Seiten or was it a mistake that the Dutch one was called Pages instead of Paginas?

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Creating multilingual Site Definitions with Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Development Tools

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:58:30 GMT

When working on SharePoint Solutions one of the common requirements is delivering multilingual solutions. Depending on your scenario you might either need to localize a single Web Part or a complete Solution. Thinking of multiple languages you have to take into account not only the development but also the packaging process for all the different assets in your Solution. One of such assets, where implementing support for multiple languages in SharePoint 2010 might seem complex at first sight, are Site Definitions. However you can easily create a multilingual Site Definition using nothing more than the standard capabilities of the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools.

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Did you know: configuring Solution Dependencies in SharePoint 2010

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:59:08 GMT

When SharePoint 2007 shipped with the Features and Solutions framework we thought we had it all sorted out. We were able to package our work and deploy it in a structured and repeatable manner. Using Feature Activation Dependencies we were able to ensure that all the functionality that our components require are available prior to provision our custom functionality. And while Feature Dependencies are definitely a great concept they are unfortunately incomplete. If all the different pieces come from a single Solution then Feature Dependencies are sufficient. However if your resources are spread across different Solution the only piece of feedback you will get from Feature Dependencies is message saying that a Feature with some id is missing in your Farm. Luckily this situation has changed with SharePoint 2010 and the introduction of Solution Dependencies.

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Did you know: provisioning AppGlobalResources in SharePoint 2010

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 07:22:13 GMT

Developing localized solutions on the SharePoint 2007 platform wasn’t as straight-forward as we wanted it to be. First of all you had to make your code support globalization and then you had to provision the localized Resource files to your Web Application. As SharePoint 2007 didn’t provide any mechanism to do that, you had to use custom Timer Jobs to get this done correctly. Luckily this situation has changed with SharePoint 2010 which introduces the new App_GlobalResourceFile element in the Solution Manifest which makes it possible to declaratively deploy Resource files in a structured and repeatable fashion.

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Did you know: using Developer Dashboard for monitoring performance of your solutions

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:49:26 GMT

SharePoint 2010 ships with Developer Dashboard which allows you to see how well different pieces of SharePoint are performing. And while it’s extremely useful by itself, it becomes even more important when used to measure the performance of your custom code!

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Web standards & Accessibility – SharePoint Server 2010 deck available

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:55:06 GMT

Yesterday we had a great evening here at Mavention talking about web standards and accessibility on the SharePoint platform.

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