Friday, September 29, 2006

MOSS 2007 Solve problems with standard workflows after Beta2TR upgrade

When you upgrade MOSS 2007 to Beta2 Technical Refresh and you notice that your standard workflows do not function - make sure that you have performed step 10 in the upgrade process as documented by Amanda in the SharePoint 2007: Updating MOSS Beta2 to Beta2 Technical Refresh (Beta2 TR)

Step 10: Update Existing Form Services Templates In order to upgrade any form services or workflow form templates to the technical refresh update, run the following operation from the command line using the stsadm.exe tool. %windir%\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\bin\stsadm.exe -o reconvertallformtemplates

tags: , , , , , ,

Monday, September 25, 2006

TechEd Europe 2006 - I'll be there as well ...

I noticed Paul Gielens his post about TechEd Europe and decided to add it to my blog as well - if you are doing .Net development - especially SharePoint or Office development and living in Belgium, let me know so that we can exchange some ideas at TechEd ...







Friday, September 22, 2006

Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 Second Edition Beta

Whow, that is a mouthfull, isn't it ... It seems that there now is a separate Office Developer Center for the VSTO 2005 SE Beta  - VSTO 2005 SE is specifically targetted at developing with the Office 2007 clients but there are some enhancements for Office 2003 development as well.  The previous version of this beta, was called Cypress - another important thing to know that this is not VSTO "v3" since VSTO "V3" will only be available in the Orcas timeframe. For some more detailed information, take a look at this posting from the Release Program Manager for VSTO

There are two articles which I strongly recommend, you should take a look at - Get a hands on introduction to VSTO 2005 SE and An Inside Look at VSTO 2005 SE Design

Some new features in VSTO 2005 SE:

  • Managed code application-level add-ins for some of the most popular Office applications: Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, InfoPath and Visio.
  • Programming model and runtime support for key Office 2007 features including the ribbon, custom task panes, and Outlook form regions.
  • Design-time support for InfoPath 2007 form templates.
  • Compatibility and maintainability assurances. The VSTO 2005 SE Beta assures that the applications you’ve built on Office 2003 with VSTO 2005 continue to run with the 2007 Office system.
  • Support for more versions of Visual Studio 2005. VSTO 2005 SE Beta now runs in Visual Studio 2005 Professional (stand-alone), in addition to those versions already supported, including all of the MSDN subscriptions and Visual Studio Team System.

You can download VSTO 2005 SE here - but take a look at the installation notes, there are some things you should watch out for:

  • Make sure you only have one version of Office installed
  • Completely remove previous versions of VSTO v3 CTPs

tags: , , ,

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Some more Beta2TR stuff

If you run into trouble with the Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh take a look at the Office 2007 Beta Known Issues/Readme list . I also saw a strange warning from Eric Lam - Important file format notice for 2007 Office System Beta 2 Technical Refresh 

Any files save in the new file formats from Beta 2 will not open in Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh.  You should save these files in the legacy file formats prior to upgrading to B2TR.

Up untill now, I haven't had any problems with opening Beta2 files with the Beta2TR release - only some warning in Excel 2007 about loosing some formatting (very low impact - I did not even notice what was lost).

Andrew also posted a workaround for the problem with MOSS 2007 Beta 2 WCM/publishing sites which were broken during the Beta2 Technical Refresh installation.

tags: , , , , ,

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Upcoming meetings BIWUG (Belux Information Worker User Group)

After a long and deserved summer break, we are ready again to start our monthly sessions. And be ready for some exciting stuff the coming months. As you all are aware, the next 6 months will be very important for anybody who follows up what Microsoft is doing in the IW space with of course the release of the new 2007 Office System. We have two meetings planned so far. Here are the details:

September Meeting

Tuesday, 19th of September, 18:00 PM – 21:00 PM

Location: DigiPoint, Oudenaarde – see the route description on the www.biwug.be site

Theme of the evening session is Records Management – a very exciting new addition to SharePoint.

Agenda:

18:00 – 18:30      Welcome and Introduction

18:30 – 19:00      Community Briefing

19:00 – 19:15      Break

19:15 – 19:45      Overview Records Management with MOSS 2007

19:45 – 20:45      Demonstration Meridio Products

20:45 – 21:00      Closing Note

All attendees will receive that evening a CD-ROM with plenty of material to prepare for the upcoming Office release.

Register here.

 

October Meeting

Saturday, 14th of October, 09:30 AM – 13:00 AM

Location: to be determined

Theme of this session is Upgrade and Migration – a very hot topic indeed

Agenda:

09:30 – 10:00      Welcome and Introduction

10:00 – 10:45      Community Briefing
10:45 – 11:00      Break

11:00 – 12:00      Upgrading Windows SharePoint Services v2 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003

12:00 – 13:00      Migrating CMS 2002 Sites to MOSS 2007

An important decision we have made during the latest board meeting is that from now on, anyone can attend the sessions. No fee is applied anymore. So, spread the word ...

tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, September 15, 2006

Installing WSS 3.0 Beta2 TR – the slipstream approach with screenshots

Installing updates during an initial product installation is something we are already used to from Windows installations - this process is called slipstreamed installation. However for Windows SharePoint Services Beta2 Technical Refresh this is something new. In a slipstreamed WSS 3.0 installation, the WSS setup files are able to find update files in the product's Updates folder, sequence them and then apply those files during product installation. This is similar to the same model which is also available for the Office 2007 clients - as described in Streamlined customization model for the 2007 Office System and Consolidated updated process for the 2007 Office System

Step 1: Preparing your environment

Setup a clean Windows 2003 Server with Service Pack 1 applied - in this example I have also installed a SQL Server 2000 with SP4 applied on the same server. You will also need to install the IIS components .

Install the .Net Framework 2.0 and enable ASP.NET 2.0 Web Server extensions in IIS. If you don't see the ASP.NET 2.0 components in the MMC snap in, enable them with the aspnet_regiis tool – see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/k6h9cz8h.aspx












Step 2: Install .Net Framework 3.0 RC1

Install the .Net Framework 3.0 RC1 (Formerly know as WinFX) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=19E21845-F5E3-4387-95FF-66788825C1AF&displaylang=en

Accept the End User License Agreement and click the Install button.
















A message will appear when the setup has completed successfully.















Step 3: Unpack the SharePoint Beta2 installation files and the Beta2TR patch files

Windows SharePoint Services Beta2 was distributed as an executable package - sharepoint_setup.exe. You will need to extract these installation bits – go to command prompt and use the following command:

sharepoint_setup.exe /extract:c:\WSS














Navigate to the extracted files and notice that there is an Updates folder - this should only contain a README.TXT file. You will need to extract the Beta2TR patch files to this folder - use the following command:

WSSv3b2tr-kb000000-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:c:\WSS\Updates

This will extract 3 msp files in this folder : sts.msp, wss.msp and wssmui.msp
















Step 4: Install Windows SharePoint Services Beta2TR in slipstream mode

Install Windows SharePoint Services Beta2TR by clicking setup.exe.

Accept the User License Agreement and click Continue

















Choose the Advanced Setup for installation on a single server or in a web farm. Choose the Advanced Setup if you are going to use a SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005. If you choose the Basic installation option – SQL Server 2005 Express will be installed and used as database.


















In the next step, you can choose Stand Alone install – which will also install the SQL Express database engine or you can choose web front end. If you specify web front end – you will need to specify the database server you will use later in one of the steps of the SharePoint Configuration Wizard.


















The installation wizard will first install the Beta2 files and afterwards the Updates as you see in the screenshot below.

































Step 5 : Running the SharePoint Configuration Wizard.

If you left the checkbox in the previous screen, the SharePoint Configuration Wizard will start up immediately. To run the configuration wizard manually, select Start, then Programs, Administrative Tools and SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard.


Click Next to launch the wizard - A window will appear advising of the services that will be reset during the configuration process. Click the Yes button to continue.
















Select your server farm configuration - select "No, I want to create a new server farm" when you are doing a new installation (Even when you will only do a single server installation).

















Specify the Configuration Database Settings - the database server,the database name and the database access account.

















Choose the location where the SharePoint Central Administration site will be created and configure the authentication provider for the SharePoint Central Administration site. Kerberos is the preferred installation option but requires some extra configuration – see http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=832769
















After you have completed the previous steps you will see a summary of the configuration settings which will be applied. Click Next to complete the configuration.
















When the configuration has completed successfully you will see the "Configuration Successful" screen.
















Open the SharePoint Central Administration site , you should see the Administration task list.










Click on the Application Management tab and click the Create or Extend Web Application. A Web Application is the equivalent of what was called a Virtual Server in Windows SharePoint Server 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. When you create a new web application you extend an IIS website to be serviced by Windows SharePoint Services

















Once the Web Application has been created, you can create a new site collection.














So here you have it, your own nice clean Windows SharePoint Services Beta2 TR site ... happy sharepointing ...

Thursday, September 14, 2006

WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Beta2 Technical Refresh (Beta2TR) are finally here

The Beta2 Tech Refresh is finally available for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (32 bit version) (64-bit version here) , Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (64-bit version here ), Forms Server (64-bit version here), SharePoint Designer and the Office 2007 clients – this is a patch for the current Beta2 versions. As Dustin already pointed out – if you need a full install you will need to create a slipstreamed install – he has added a nice screencast about the slipstream install and take a look at Steve Smith’s Beta2TR installation doc.

Besides the Beta2 TR patches there are also a number of other plugins and tools released targeted at the Beta2TR release:

· Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 - Release Candidate - Build 3.0.04324.17

· Microsoft® Office Word 2007 Redaction Add-in (Beta) - Version 2.0 - The Microsoft® Office Word 2007 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically. In the redacted version of the document, the redacted text is replaced with a black bar and cannot be converted back to text or retrieved.

· Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007 Calendar Views Add-in - Version 2.0 - With the Outlook® Calendar Views Add-in, you can easily create and manage filters to display subsets of appointments in Outlook Calendar. Filtered views are based on categories that you apply to appointments.

· 2007 Microsoft Office Addins : Microsoft Save As PDF or XPS

If you are working with Publishing sites in Beta2 – also take a look Andrew Connell his posting - Upgrade issue for WCM/Publishing Sites (a ~must~ read before upgrading your beta environment

This is the text as it appeared on Betaplace:

We've listened carefully to your feedback and have developed a technical refresh with significant performance improvements and redesigns to address your needs and to enhance your user experience. New features of the Beta 2 Technical Refresh include an updated user interface, better accessibility support, improvements in the robustness of the platform, and greater functionality. For example, you can now deploy code access security policies with your SharePoint sites, as well as experience TimeZones and TimeZone objects that provide object model support in Microsoft Office Outlook. Look out for the Beta 2 Technical Refresh SDKs as well, which add many more articles and code samples to help jumpstart development.

Before starting an upgrade also take a look at this posting on the SharePoint team blog - Installing Beta 2 Technical Refresh (B2TR) – What you need to know before you double click update.exe. But you can also go directly to the updates guides:

  • SharePoint Server 2007 B2TR Update Guide – This includes all of the update steps, known issues, workarounds and planning guidance.

o http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/f49862ab-e067-4723-bb90-7eb1182c65ce1033.mspx?mfr=true 

There are already a couple of stories and blog posts out there:

· Review: Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh

· Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh Adds UI, Performance Improvements

· New Office Release Tomorrow,

· Permanent Link to Yeah! Office Beta 2 TR...

· Final Public Office 2007 Test Build Due...

· Office 2007 Beta 2 TR: Start Revving Those...

· Beta 2 Technical Refresh available tomorrow – some explanations from Jensen Harris about the new UI improvements

· Office 2007 Beta2TR now available

· Office 2007 creeps toward release

 

tags: , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Office 2007 Beta2 Technical Refresh (Beta2TR) release imminent

The SharePoint team blog just published something about the Office 2007 Beta2 Technical Refresh (TR) and Lawrence posted some guidance as well… all things which point to imminent release of the technical refresh. If there is only one thing that you will remember from these postings it is the fact that you will definitely need to READ THE INSTALLATION GUIDE BEFORE RUNNING THE UPGRADE …

Bill posted more or less the same advice but also pointed to an Excel sheet which gives an overview of new features in WSS 3.0 and the different versions of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Tags:
sharepoint2007
, sharepoint+2007, moss, moss2007, wss30

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Usercontrols (ascx), webparts and SharePoint 2007

One of the few things we are still missing in Visual Studio 2005 is the ability to visually design webparts for SharePoint 2007. In ASP.Net 2.0 you can use a web user control (ascx) as web part when it implements the IWebPart interface because  of the ASP.Net 2.0 GenericWebPart class . The GenericWebPart control exists to provide a run-time wrapper for server controls that are not WebPart controls, so that such controls can be used in Web Parts pages and applications. Unfortunately, this GenericWebPart is not available SharePoint 2007 - so you have to build your own wrapper - but this is not very hard as I will show in this posting.




First create an empty web site, afterwards add one user control wpgrid.ascx  To make things easier, uncheck the "Place code in a separate file" when adding the user control.  Switch to design view and add a GridView Control - let's call it gvDemo, set autogeneratecolumns to false and add one bound column (Datafield=Title). Now create a directory usercontrols at the root of your SharePoint site - for my default SharePoint 2007 site, this is C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80. Copy the wpgrid.ascx file to this location.

Now let's create a new web part - as you probably already know, you can now uses ASP.Net 2.0 webparts in SharePoint 2007 - if you don't have any experience with web parts - check out Marts  - Create a SharePoint 2007 web part step by step. The web part will show the title of all items in a list in the grid with paging enabled  - so first create a web part property with the name of list you want to show.

 

public class UCWebPart : System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart
{
private UserControl usercontrol;
private GridView gvDemo;
private const string defaultlist = "";
private string _listtolink = defaultlist;
protected DataTable dtDemo = null;

[Personalizable(), WebBrowsable(),
WebDisplayName("List to display"),
WebDescription("Name of the list in this site to display")]
public string ListToLink
{
get { return _listtolink; }
set { _listtolink = value; }
}

 


 


Override the CreateChildControls method, where you will load the user control, set the necessary properties and create an event handler to implement the paging on the gridview.


 

protected override void CreateChildControls()
{
try
{
base.CreateChildControls();
this.Controls.Clear();
this.GetData();
usercontrol = (UserControl)Page.LoadControl(@"/usercontrols/wpgrid.ascx");

gvDemo = (GridView)this.usercontrol.FindControl("gvDemo");
gvDemo.AllowPaging = true;
gvDemo.DataSource = dtDemo;
gvDemo.PageSize = 3;
gvDemo.PageIndexChanging += new GridViewPageEventHandler(gvDemo_PageIndexChanging);
this.Controls.Add(usercontrol);

gvDemo.DataBind();


}
catch (Exception ex)
{
EventLog.WriteEntry("WebParts", "UCWebPart" + ex.ToString());
}
}

void gvDemo_PageIndexChanging(object sender, GridViewPageEventArgs e)
{

gvDemo.PageIndex = e.NewPageIndex;
gvDemo.DataBind();
}

 


The GetData() method loads the DataTable with the title of the different items in the list:


 

private void GetData()
{

try
{
if (ListToLink.Length > 0)
{
dtDemo = new DataTable();
dtDemo.Columns.Add("Title", Type.GetType("System.String"));

SPWeb site = SPContext.Current.Web;
SPList list = site.Lists[_listtolink];

foreach (SPListItem item in list.Items)
{
DataRow newRow = dtDemo.NewRow();
newRow["Title"] = item["Title"];
dtDemo.Rows.Add(newRow);

}
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
EventLog.WriteEntry("WebParts", "UCWebPart - Retrieving items from " + _listtolink + "-" + ex.ToString(), EventLogEntryType.Error);
}
}

 




PS. You can also use the  SmartPart v2 (aka SonOfSmartPart) to load ASP.Net 2.0 user controls in SharePoint 2007 web parts ... but as you have seen above, it is quite easy to do it yourself...


Tags: , , , , , ,


Currently listening : Adema - Unstable Disc 1

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Rendering an InfoPath 2007 form in a web part

The white paper - Hosting the InfoPath 2007 Form Editing Environment in a Custom Web Form shows how you can use the XMLFormView control to load InfoPath forms in a web page, but it is also quite easy to do this in a SharePoint web part. This posting will show you how to do this. For some nice screenshots, check out Patricks posting, unfortunately he forgot to post some code ;-) ...

If you want to use the XMLFormviewer control, you will first need tot add a reference to the Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server dll - which you can find it in the Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\bin directory. The XMLFormviewer control determines which InfoPath form to load through the XSNLocation property - so I will create a web part property for this as well.

It is also quite easy to read/write fields within the InfoPath fields - this provides some interesting possibities in combination with the fact that you can easily define web part connections.  You can do this from within the OnInitialize event handler without having to call the DataBind. To access the InfoPath fields you can use the new InfoPath 2007 object model - check out Design once and the new InfoPath 2007 Object Model . Add a reference to the Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.dll ( Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\bin directory ) to manipulate the InfoPath form. Tip: Retrieve the  xNavMain.InnerXml first - and use a program such as Visual XPath to find the appropriate namespace and XPath expression.

 

namespace WebParts
{
public class InfoPathViewerWebPart : System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart
{
private const string defaultxsnlocation = "";
private string _xsnlocation = defaultxsnlocation;
private XmlFormView viewform;

[Personalizable(), WebBrowsable(),
WebDisplayName("XSNLocation"),
WebDescription("URL of the web-enabled InfoPath form to display")]
public string XSNLocation
{
get { return _xsnlocation; }
set { _xsnlocation = value; }
}


protected override void RenderContents(System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer)
{
base.RenderContents(writer);
this.EnsureChildControls();
}

protected override void CreateChildControls()
{
base.CreateChildControls();
viewform = new XmlFormView();
if (_xsnlocation.Length > 0)
{
viewform.XsnLocation = _xsnlocation;
}
viewform.Initialize += new EventHandler<InitializeEventArgs>(viewform_Initialize);

this.Controls.Add(viewform);
}

void viewform_Initialize(object sender, InitializeEventArgs e)
{
try
{
XPathNavigator xNavMain = viewform.XmlForm.MainDataSource.CreateNavigator();

XmlNamespaceManager xNameSpace = new XmlNamespaceManager(new NameTable());
xNameSpace.AddNamespace("my", "http://.../office/infopath/2003/myXSD/2006-08-07T07:37:16");
XPathNavigator fSummary = xNavMain.SelectSingleNode("/my:myFields/my:Summary", xNameSpace);
if (fSummary != null)
{
fSummary.SetValue("Hello InfoPath");
}
else
{
EventLog.WriteEntry("InfoPathWebPart", "fSummary not found", EventLogEntryType.Information);
}

}
catch (Exception ex)
{
EventLog.WriteEntry("WebParts.InfoPathViewerWebPart", ex.ToString(),EventLogEntryType.Error);
}

}


}

 


 


Tags: , , , , , , ,


Currently listening: Alien Ant Farm - ANThology

Saturday, September 02, 2006

InfoPath 2007 and Forms services : opening forms from a hyperlink

If you want to integrate web-enabled InfoPath 2007 forms into your own web pages, you can just add a link to them. You will need to use a href to an ASPX page http://<server>/_layouts/FormServer.aspx with the followingQuery parameters:

  • XsnLocation - What form to open and from where
  • XmlLocation - What initial data to use
  • OpenIn - Open in browser / client / either
  • SaveLocation - Save Location for data (Make sure that you add this one, if you want the close button to be visible …)
  • Source - Navigate URL when form is closed

Example :

http://servername/_layouts/formserver.aspx?xsnlocation=/formservertemplates/loanapplication.xsn&openin=browser

Technorati : , , , , ,,

Friday, September 01, 2006