I’ve been slacking on my SharePoint posts.  Midi (the organizer for our Sleepless in Dallas development event) sent me the information on a new series of webcasts.  There are some really good topics in there!

21-May-08

Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Data Lists

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20-May-08

Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Web Parts

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27-May-08

Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Silverlight and SharePoint

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28-May-08

Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Using Event Handlers

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3-Jun-08

Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Page Branding

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4-Jun-08

Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Workflows

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10-Jun-08

Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Web Services

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11-Jun-08

Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Page Navigation

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17-Jun-08

Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: User Management

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18-Jun-08

Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Custom Content Types

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Tags: SharePoint

(Wow, that’s a long title)

I always get a lot of questions around how to develop with SharePoint.  The team that’s been releasing the VS extensions for SharePoint have just released a developer user guide with about 200 pages of information on the hows and whys of using the extensions to help you with your SharePoint projects.

And if you read the post, you’ll also find this little gem – “an update for Visual Studio 2008 is planned for release in June 2008.”   Go ahead and set your reminder, or just subscribe here and I’ll make sure to post on it as soon as it comes out.

Oh yeah, and you can find that user guide at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=A8A4E775-074D-4451-BE39-459921F79787&displaylang=en

Tags: SharePoint

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been doing a lot of work on the infrastructure on my blog.  One of the items I did was upgrade from my old V1 Beta of the EBE to the new V2 relase of the template (shiny!)  One of the objectives of the upgrade was to start doing a bit of metrics on my blog.  SharePoint has some very good tracking built in for page views, but the RSS.XML file that the EBE provides doesn’t participate in that (for a couple of good reasons.)  So, I gave into some peer pressure and did a redirection of RSS.XML to FeedBurner.  So why the post?  Well there were some interesting steps that are required to actually pull this simple statement off. 

I started out creating a blank text document named (amazingly enough) rss.xml.  Using IIS, it was very easy to the take this file and provide the URL redirect to my new feed location.  This gave a nice permanent redirect and kept everyone in synch with the new feed.  The only problem with this was that it works great for readers, but the beta version of EBE didn’t provide a way to make a secondary location for the feed.  Or not one that would work anyway – you can go directly to the list RSS feed and it’s not a bad feed, but FeedBurner doesn’t like the fact that it’s an ASPX page that provides the feed instead of just a plain XML file. 

After scratching my head for a couple of hours (I’m stubborn) I finally decided that this was the reason I was looking for to upgrade to EBE 2.0.  Once I convinced myself of that step, the upgrade was super easy, especially considering I was NOT on a sane version of EBE.  It was a simple task to just pull down the release version from www.codeplex.com, extract the package and then run the upgrade batch file (which is VERY nice.)  The upgrade batch handles everything from installing the feature itself to scheduling the job for ensuring that the feature is on all servers (if you’ve got a multi-server configuration) and then kicking off the job if the scheduler looks like it’s going to take it’s time to execute.  And once this was done I had two additional options that made the rest of the update simple.  The first was to go to the EBE settings and putting in my custom feed URL – this takes care of updating the page RSS locations to my new location without doing a redirect bounce from the original RSS.XML (which is a nice thing to do.)  The second was to go into the Web.Config file and change the httphandler for custom RSS feeds to RSS2.XML which lets me leave the redirect in place, but provide a way for FeedBurner to get posts for itself. 

So that’s the long of it, my next step is going to be setting up a custom template to fix some of the items on the page and put my “cards” up on the site.  I had them on my original template, but that was one of the items that didn’t make it through the upgrade process (as expected.)

Tags: SharePoint

How do you install SharePoint 2007 on Windows Server 2008 is a question I’ve been asked a number of times at the launch events.  As usual, if I’ve been asked about it more than once, then there’s probably LOTS of people that have that question.

The Issue

Windows Server 2008 is happy to install SharePoint 2007, but only if SP1 is slipstreamed with the install.  That’s great, but MSDN only has the non-sp version.

The Solution

For right now you can find the WSS installs with SP1 at

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 x64 with Service Pack 1

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 1

For MOSS itself, there’s a bit more to it, but the details are at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb735844.aspx

Further Information

For more details, the SharePoint Team has additional information and some discussions in the post comments at their blog.

Tags: SharePoint