Blogs

Five years! It’s been five years seen I first published the Microsoft Teams apps generator - yo teams, and in a few days we also have the 5th anniversary for the official Microsoft Teams launch. It’s been five very interesting years that has changed how we collaborate and communicate. It all started long before March of 2017. I had the opportunity to work for an organization that was one of the early adopters of Microsoft Teams, and driven by my curiosity I immediately saw that with this new tool had some amazing opportunities to create even better experiences for my customers.

Today I thought that I should step out of my normal blogging content and share some of my personal pet project and hobbies. I always been keen of tinkering, testing and building things - being software, hardware, or our house or garden. Over the last few years I’ve been trying to make as much things as possible “smart” in our houses, and particularly in my home office. This home automation project consists of tons of different third party options, but also quite a few devices and gadgets that I built myself.

We’re getting closer to the holidays and we all like to both give and receive gifts at this time of the year. Here is an early Christmas gift from me, and the amazing Microsoft teams that’s been building out these new features, to all of you fantastic people out there. A few months ago Microsoft announced the capabilities where we can deploy Microsoft Teams apps and use them across other high-usage areas of Microsoft 365 and now those areas has been extended even further and covers Office.

When building applications for Microsoft Teams, the very first hurdle essentially all developers will try to jump over is the one with getting an access token to be able to communicate with Microsoft Graph. This is something that can be done fairly easy, if you know what to do, but requires you as a developer to connect a few dots. Over the last year this has become way easier, and there are a few great examples out there - you can find some great ones in the PnP Teams Samples.

Today I handed in my Orange badge to Avanade and signed out of my Avanade account. It’s been a six and a half year long adventure where I had the opportunity work with amazing colleagues and exciting clients. I’ve been given the opportunity to grow my career and skills in directions I did not think about, and I’m very proud of what we achieved and what we delivered to clients.

I’ve been using Ring cameras for several years now and a while back they introduced the option to have the cameras take snapshots periodically. This is awesome as you can fire up the Ring app and see a timelapse of your cameras. However, this only works in the app, you can’t export a timelapse! But, as a proud geek this should not be a problem to me and can be solved!

Yesterday Microsoft released the anticipated set of scripts required for you to add the Microsoft Viva Connections app to your Microsoft Teams environment. It’s a very simple approach that only requires you to download a PowerShell script, install the latest Microsoft SharePoint Online PowerShell module and then answer a set of questions, and voila you have the Viva Connections Desktop app ready for installation in Microsoft Teams. Note: as the time of writing this and testing the PowerShell script, I was not able to download the required SharePoint Online PowerShell module and received an error while running the script.

When building software the most common scenario is that you have a team building the solution, application and/or service. You typically have front-end, back-end and full-stack developers, you have testers and designers, and more. However, working in a team is not always easy. Back in the days we could all have our software running locally and we just grabbed the latest version/commit and hacked away. For web applications the use of localhost worked just fine for almost everyone.

The growth of using Yo Teams - the Microsoft Teams Apps generator - has been tremendous over the last year, and I can really tell that it’s not just being used for development and testing by the number of questions and requests I get on how to make a proper deployment of the solution to Azure. In this post I will share how I most often do it. The initial version of Yo Teams shipped with simple instructions on how to do Git deploy of your application to Azure.

ngrok is a fantastic tool, that I use on an everyday basis when building solutions cloud. It allows me to host and debug an application locally and at the same time host the website or API’s with a publicly accessible https endpoint. As I work quite a bit with Microsoft Teams development this is essential when building bots (Azure Bot Service cannot talk to localhost) or building out Teams Tabs with SSO.

When you’re working with building applications or services there’s always a need to store configuration. For Azure there’s a great service called Azure App Configuration that allows you to securely store, manage and retrieve configuration settings. It’s a perfect service for both smaller and larger projects and it keeps your configuration in control, and of course secured and audited. When I’m building solutions using node I typically start with storing my configuration in a local .

Such a great week this is, after being accepted into the Microsoft Regional Director community earlier this week, today marks the 11th time I’m awarded with the Microsoft MVP for Office Apps & Services. Dear Wictor Wilen, We’re once again pleased to present you with the 2020-2021 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in recognition of your exceptional technical community leadership. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in the following technical communities during the past year:

I’m incredibly proud to announce that I’ve been accepted into the Microsoft Regional Director program. The Microsoft Regional Director (RD) program is a global community of passionate technology thought leaders, where Microsoft once a year appoints a small set of leaders as Regional Directors, to serve on a two years basis. It’s a fantastic opportunity for me to play a small role in this group of people - that I look up to as leaders, superstars, humans.

While migrating my site from Orchard to Hugo I wanted to add some JavaScripts. Specifically I wanted that to power the search experience using some simple JavaScripts. However, I’ve grown quite fond over using React (and TSX/JSX) to any kind of user experiences for the web and I did not want to go back to pure JavaScript or use some DOM manipulation scripts such as jQuery. Hugo, that I use for my static site, does not directly have support for transpiling React.

When refurbishing my site and setting up Github workflows and actions I wanted to have a way to correlate any of my deployments of code to the statistics I have on the site and any telemetry/data in Application Insights. Application Insights has an API to add Annotations in your timeline. It adds an entry into your Application Insights instance at a specific time with a set of comments. This annotation is visible throughout many reports such as Sessions, Failures, Events and more, see below.

Eventually time caught up with me, and with the help of some isolation, boring weather and some recent announcements from Microsoft Build, I had to go and update my/this web site. It was way overdue and it’s been on my to-do list for far to long - for a number of reasons. First of all this site has been hosted on Orchard on Azure since 2012 - without any hiccups. The setup was a dynamic web site, using Orchard, which was a state-of-the-art web and blogging CMS at that point in time.

Hey, I’m back. Long time since I did some writing on this blog. But I needed to get this one out. As you all know I’m a huge fan of the Microsoft Teams extensibility model and now with the SSO support for Tabs, it’s even easier to create integrated experiences for your end users where they can consume data and information from the Microsoft Graph or LOB systems. I recently did a small appearance at the Microsoft 365 PnP webcast showcasing how to configure and scaffold a Microsoft Teams project that uses this new SSO Tab feature.

Happy Easter everyone, I have fantastic news. After seven preview versions (and even a skipped version - 2.6) the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator 2.7.0 is now available for you to use! Just like tons of others do; there’s been over 6.000 downloads of the generator, it’s generating a handful of new Teams projects every day and it’s done from all parts of the world! Join the movement! As usual it is just a simple npm command to install:

I’m excited to be returning to Las Vegas in May of 2019 to speak at the SharePoint Conference 2019 in May 21st to 21rd, at the MGM Grand. This event is one of the two major events, second one being Microsoft Ignite, that the SharePoint, OneDrive and Yammer product groups are announcing their greatest and latest features and also where you will meet some of the finest speakers and community members of our great SharePoint family.

Imagine you want to create a chat bot for Microsoft Teams in order to automate tasks, enhance the discussion or just feeling lonely and want someone to talk to. There’s many ways of doing this; you can start from scratch building a bot, using the Microsoft Bot framework and/or using the Microsoft Teams Yeoman generator, you can use the Azure Bot Service, you can use the FAQ bots to essentially create a no code solution.

A long overdue update of the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator – we’re now up to version 2.5.0! It’s a fairly substantial update both in the generator and in the generated code – this update will make future updates a lot smoother and will allow for enabling more features going forward. Thanks to all who provided feedback and input and has tested the generator over the last few months.

SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is a fantastic development model on top of (modern) SharePoint, for user interface extensibility, and it have evolved tremendously over the last year since it became general available. The framework is based on JavaScript extensibility in a controlled manner, compared to the older JavaScript injection mechanisms we used to extend (classic) SharePoint, that comes with a lot of power. Using SharePoint Framework our JavaScript has access to the whole DOM in the browser, meaning that we can do essentially what we want with the user interface – however, of course, we shouldn’t, only certain parts of the DOM are allowed/supported for modification.

Microsoft Ignite is just around the corner and the sheer number of new announcements for SharePoint and SharePoint Online has been almost overwhelming. The team is making such a tremendous job right now! One of my favorite features, that I have requested both privately and openly with Microsoft, is the ability to have custom themes for SharePoint. Yes, we had the old “look and feel” thing, custom CSS thing, Office 365 suite bar branding, but there has never been a good way of using this in Modern sites or even the possibility to turn of the default themes.

I’ve been building chat-bots for a while now and I’m seeing more and more requests of building these bots for enterprises. For bots targeted at the enterprise, perhaps being hosted in Microsoft Teams, one of the first requirements is that they should get data from their internal systems and most specifically from Office 365, through the Microsoft Graph. The problem here is that we need to authenticate and authorize the user, through Microsoft Azure AD, to be able to access these resources.

Today is the day where the Microsoft community officially award the community with the Microsoft MVP award. We will all receive some new friends and old friends and also we loose some dear friends (that we of course hope to see back into the program again). I’ve been fortunate to be re-awarded with the Office Servers and Services Microsoft MVP award, for the 8th consecutive year. Thank you Microsoft! As usual, being an MVP is not something you can take for granted and you have to work hard to stay in the program.

A couple of months back I started creating a Yeoman generator to make it easier for me to scaffold, build and deploy the Microsoft Teams extensions (now apps). I’ve received very good feedback on it and had some very nice contributions to the project, which was hosted on my public Github account. To really make this available for everyone to use I’ve been discussing this project with the Microsoft Teams team about having it “officially backed” by the real team and nut just me as an individual.

If you are an ISV or SI with multiple clients and are interested in building SharePoint Framework (SPFx) solutions that you would like to re-use you will face a huge issue when it comes to reference SharePoint JavaScript files and reference your SharePoint Framework bundles. All these URL’s are hardcoded into your solution configuration files and requires you to update these files and rebuild for each and every client environment. And not only that even in your own development team this will cause issues if you don’t have a shared development environment.

A couple of weeks back I published a Yeoman generator to build Tabs for Microsoft Teams. Since then I’ve continued to add stuff to it as the Teams team has continued to add features to their extensibility story. So, this generator is not only for creating Tabs, but now also for adding Bots and Custom Bots to Microsoft Teams. With that I decided to rename the generator to yo teams (generator name is generator-teams).

A big round of applause for Microsoft and the team behind Microsoft Teams for now being general available (GA) worldwide. Today, they lit up the Teams icon in the Office 365 waffle for all tenants (unless your admins are being boring and has turned it off). It’s been awesome to be a part of this preview journey, which started last summer. Avanade was selected as one of the TAP members, in a preview program shrouded in a secrecy I’ve not seen at Microsoft before.

I’m happy to announce that today at SharePoint Saturday Munich I presented a new Yeoman generator for building Microsoft Teams Tabs projects. Tabs in Microsoft Teams is a great way to extend the user interface and to do integrations to other systems and provide visualizations. Tabs are based on a JavaScript framework, a set of web pages and a manifest describing the Tab. It requires a set of manual steps to both build out the pages, configuring CSS, hooking up the JavaScripts, deploying it all to a web site hosted in the cloud, writing the manifest, packaging the manifest into a zip file and more.

Let me start with congratulating the SharePoint Framework team on an amazing job and an amazing journey reaching this GA milestone. A Big Thanks from the team here in Redmond to everyone who helped us to get to GA! #SPFx #SharePoint #SharePointFramework pic.twitter.com/czo2Duon7z — Chakkaradeep (@chakkaradeep) February 24, 2017 The SharePoint Framework plays a significant part of the SharePoint future, yes - this is only the first version with a lot of new features on the way, and it is a part of the new SharePoint wave.

Over the last few days the issue on how to prevent users to create Office 365 Groups has popped up in all sorts of conversations. This blog post will show you how to do it in the correct way, and serve as a future reference. I’m not the only one who have blogged about this, it’s in many places including official documentation. But in many places both scripts and some caveats are either wrong or outdated.

One of the key parts of SharePoint Web Parts is the ability to have them configurable using the Web Part properties. This story is still true with client-side Web Parts in the new SharePoint Framework. In this post I will show you one of the more common scenarios; how to populate drop downs (and other fields) in the property pane dynamically. But also show you how what’s wrong with the current implementation.

Today, Mr Vesa, announced the availability of the (long awaited) CDN features for SharePoint Online. The SharePoint Online CDN features allows you to turn one or more libraries in your SharePoint tenant into a repository for assets that you want to store in a CDN for performance reasons and geo-distribution reasons. How to set things up I’m not going to rehash everything that is outlined in the announcement post, but rather highlight a few important things.

SharePoint developers - we do like GUIDs, don’t we. We all read RFC4122 both once and twice. And now with SharePoint Framework and the goal to embrace all them Macintosh and open source people - they gotta have their fair share of GUIDs. And to aid with that the SharePoint Framework got some really nice GUID features, although a bit unpolished as you might notice - but this is all preview bits at the time of writing.

I guess that almost every application or solution you ever built has contained some portions of a logging mechanism. And how many of you have written your own - yup, all of you! But what about the SharePoint Framework - yes, it has built-in logging! How to log in the SharePoint Framework Logging is a very convenient and easy way to keep track of events happening, instead of having breakpoints, or in JavaScript even worse - alerts.

Do you write code that potentially can throw an error or an exception? Oh, you don’t - but sure you use a web service or external service or something that can throw an error. Well, it is you responsibility to handle the error and make sure to inform the user in a good way that something bad happened. With that I mean, do not show just a Guid. With the SharePoint Framework being all client side I think it is important to have control of your client side Web Parts and make sure that you properly handle and display error messages in a consistent way.

SharePoint Framework is all about rendering stuff on the client side, avoiding the long overdue ASP.NET Web Forms technology that SharePoint (Online) is still fundamentally based on. When rendering things client side everything is done asynchronously, to avoid locking down the UI threads and having a user experience that is fluent. In order to give the user good feedback that things are happening in the background, you need to have some kind of visual cue that tells the user - hey I’m doing stuff now, gimme a minute.

Summer is over, slacking time is over, it’s time to get up to speed and learn some new stuff. There’s very much to talk about this fall if you’re interested in SharePoint. And this fall I will do a couple of conferences as a speaker, which I very much looking forward to. TechDays 2016, Amsterdam For the first time I will attend and present at the TechDays 2016 in Amsterdam, the 4th and 5th of October.

At the Future of SharePoint event in San Francisco on May the 4th Microsoft announced the new and improved customization option and/or development model called the SharePoint Framework. This is a development model that solely focused on client-side development. There’s been some confusion going on on Twitter and other social medias and podcasts and I thought I should put together an Q&A post for this. This Q&A post is totally unofficial, all of this is currently in private preview and some comes from my (awesome) DevKitchen experiences, so things can and will change and I take no responsibility of any errors in this post or any financial, physical or mental issues caused by reading this.

Today is the day many of us have been waiting for since the big SharePoint event at May the 4th. The highly anticipated SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is here and announced in at the SharePointFest, in this blog post, as well as in the new Github repo for SharePoint. Personally I’ve been waiting for this even longer after being involved by the product team to give early feedback and also attending the first top secret DevKitchen “hackathons” where we could try out very early bits.

Here’s one of these real life stories that caused some headache for quite some time but was in the end very easy to resolve. I’ll write it down and hopefully some of the search engines pick it up and help some other poor soul out there. Background We have a solution that uses publishing pages to manage news articles and information pages in SharePoint Online. These articles and pages have a custom page layout with a custom content type, so they look decent and have proper metadata.

I have long thought that GUIDS are unique, well GUID actually stands for Globally Unique Identifier. And SharePoint is one unique product using GUIDS everywhere. There are 2^128 possible GUIDs to choose from, so there should be no need to reuse GUIDs as long as I’m alive methinks. SharePoint uses GUIDs to uniquely identify Site Collections and Sites, and more, and this is for instance exposed through the ID property of the SPSite and SPWeb objects.

This is by no means an official support statement from Microsoft, rather an unofficial compilation of official statements. Last week the SharePoint Online team rolled out the preview of the Modern SharePoint lists. Modern Lists are the new incarnation of ye ole Classic SharePoint lists that we all loved and hated over the last decade or so. The Classic SharePoint lists and libraries has been one amazing and powerful tool and I would say that they have been a big part of the success SharePoint has had.

As many of you have noticed I have not been posting my What’s new on the Office Roadmap updates. Well, I’ve been on a vacation not trying to think of Office 365 to start with, and then also, I’m ending my series of these posts. Sorry. I have to start with saying that I love the amount of changes we see now in the Office 365 service. The team(s) is/are doing an amazing job with kicking out new features and updates in some areas.

Happy Friday and welcome back to another Office Roadmap update. This time the day before the big SharePoint Saturday, here in beautiful Stockholm, where we all are going to indulge on the goodness that was announced a couple of weeks back at the SharePoint Futures event. Lot of new stuff in the mobile space this time around. Changes 2016-05-20 Launched Windows Universal App: OneDrive UWP (Universal Windows App) are now launched and live (new) User Activity Reports: Compliance center improvements for OneDrive/SharePoint on document views/edits/downloads etc (from in development) Intelligent Discover for Android: Discover (Office Graph) view in the Android OneDrive app (new) Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for iOS: Access your SharePoint files from the OneDrive app (new) Office 365 Groups: easily add users from a distribution list to a group: this is cool, now you can add all members from a DL to an O365 Group instead of one user at a time (new) Self-service NGSC setup and goove.

Hey, happy Friday the 13th! Here’s a small Office Roadmap update for all of you Jason fans! Not that many changes this time around, but still interesting, and a lot of Outlook 2016 for Mac releases. Changes 2016-05-13 Now Launched eDiscovery Case Management, Hold & Permissions: the new eDiscovery features are now fully rolled out (from in development) Enter full screen view in Outlook 2016 for Mac: the full screen view for Mac Outlook as announced in January are now out.

The Office Roadmap updates with the new announcements from the Future of SharePoint event has arrived (they arrived May the 4th to be precise). I’m back from the event and San Francisco and I’m full of the energy that the SharePoint team transmitted. You should specifically take a look at the In Development part here. That’s where we got the new and fresh stuff from the Future of SharePoint event.

Today at The Future of SharePoint event Microsoft have announced the next iteration in SharePoint development - the SharePoint Framework. As one of the old ones who started with the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit, to the COM+ event handlers in SharePoint 2001, over to custom built DDFs, to WSP’s to Apps and Add-ins - this new framework is a very welcome change. For years SharePoint Developers have been forced to walk in shame in the outer rims of the developer guild.

About a year ago I wrote a blog article called SharePoint Team sites are dead. An article that stirred up many feelings in the community and started an interesting (and somewhat harsh) discussion - which was kind of the point. Fast forward to May 2016 and this is a totally different ball game! SharePoint Team Sites are back! Modern team sites Jeff Teper, CVP at Microsoft, writes in the just now published The Future of SharePoint blog post: “Team sites has always been at the heart of collaboration with SharePoint”, a statement I absolutely agree with.

Updates, updates and updates. This time around there’s a great deal of clean up on the Office Roadmap. Mayhaps they are adding space for all the neat SharePoint things we expect to see next week at the SharePoint Future event. There’s also a bunch of new stuff added to the In Development category, scroll down and learn something. Also worth noticing is that the Yammer team has started to catch up on the feedback they received over the last few years.

Here’s some really big updates of the Office Roadmap this time around. Two major themes of this update, part from the now more or less traditional copy paste errors; Planner - the Planner team have tons of nifty and neat stuff coming our way. Edu - Microsoft is all in on school and Edu features at the moment! Check the “In Development” section - you will like it. Wonder how much more good stuff they are saving for the May 4th event!

I’m happy to just have recieved the e-mail that informs me that I’m renewed as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), for the seventh time. This time it’s in the Office Servers and Services category after last years change in the program. Previously I was awarded within SharePoint Server. To be honest with you, the last few years has been well…average, but this year will be epic in the history of SharePoint, Office and Office 365!

Here’s some more updates on the Office Roadmap. A couple of days late due to me being offline and chasing bunnies and chickens. Highlights of these updates are the awesomeness going on in the Office 365 Video team and also that the OneDrive sync team is back! Changes 2016-03-28 Launched Class Notebook Add-in for OneNote: The Class Notebook add-in for Onenote is released. (NEW) February Updates in Office Mobile Apps for Android devices: Android apps received some updates with auto-save and collab authoring in Word and PowerPoint (NEW) February Updates in Office Mobile Apps for iOS: And iOS got some as well with Box integrations (NEW) February Updates in Office Mobile Apps for Windows devices: And Windows Phone did too (these users can be counted on one hand nowadays); inking and Excel updates was on the menu (NEW) Office 365 Admin app - Group functionality: Group admin options in the admin app, nice but for me the UX works fine with 10-15 groups, imagine an enterprise with thousands (from in development) Office 365 Admin app - Push Notifications for Message Center: Get them push notifications from the admin app and always know when there is Office 365 issues.

I got some news for you. The Office Roadmap is updated, actually it was updated yesterday but I had other stuff to do. Let’s jump right into the changes and look at them Groups thingies!! Changes 2016-03-17 Launched Dark theme for Outlook 2016: Somehow someone thought this was important. Personally I’m not a fan of the dark theme in Office, specifically not in Outlook - it looks all weird and funky since e-mails have a white background.

Ok, let me first start by saying that I might have overreacted in the last blog post about the roadmap. I still don’t think it is ok to have this kind of chaos on such an important and official document/page. But stuff happens, we all know that (I’ve done some pretty serious dumba** stuff with my blog posts over the years). So back to the good news. We have an Office Roadmap update.

Spring is closing in, astronauts are returning from a year in space, the US has an election going on and there’s update on the Office Roadmap. The roadmap mess saga continues…with Microsoft making even more fools out of themselves!!! Changes 2016-03-01 Launched No new things are rolling out…instead they are rolling them back! Rolling out All of the following was previously Launched but are now rolling out instead. Microsoft, you need to think about how you update this page.

Updates! Updates! Updates! Yup, that would happen if Stevie B was still in the house rocking the Office Roadmap. Another round of updates, this time it looks like a fixup of the mess that happended last time. So some things are reported as NEW in here, but they aren’t really new, they just disappeared for a week or two… Changes 2016-02-13 Launched Apps for Project Pro for Office 365 write support: If you’re building Apps, sorry Add-ins, you can now do write back for Project Apps/Add-ins (from Rolling out) Auto Generated Project IDs in Project Online: more control of the ID’s generated in Project (from Rolling out) Cloud PBX in Skype for Business: Enterprise voice is now live (from In Development) Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in SharePoint Online: DLP features in SPO is now Launched, from Rolling out Designer: The new Designer feature in PowerPoint should be in your desktop application by now (from rolling out) DLP in SharePoint - Policy Management: It says private preview only and public in september 2015, we’re already way beyond that, so I guess nobody bothered update the text.

Here we go again! The Office team keep a steady pace of updates coming to the Office Roadmap. This time it’s a bit weird, but we have a lot of things being rolled back!? Also I noticed that the site was down today for maintenance. So, is this just a DR solution and they lost data or have they just messed things up? I smell that someone actually MANUALLY updates this list, but hey, they can’t be that crazy, can they?

Time for some updates on the Office Roadmap again, these updates was actually published yesterday, but since writing these blog posts isn’t what pays for the bread on my table I needed to do other stuff before writing this. Last week the location of the Roadmap changed and today there seems to be some issues with the site; you can now find it at https://fto365siteprod.azurewebsites.net/roadmap. There are some real highlights here and as usual some Yammer funkiness…

Hello and welcome back to an awesome new year – 2016 is here and we have our first Office Roadmap update. First things first; the Office Roadmap URL has changed. The new home for the Office 365 Roadmap is: http://fasttrack.office.com/roadmap. As usual when it comes to changes on the Office level - the communication is kinda poor. Ye olde URL just now gives you an error. Didn’t someone think about having a redirect or something from success.

Wow, 2015 has been one really interesting year for me! For the 9th year I will do my summary post (here’s the olde ones: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006). 2015 started really cool with me joining Avanade here in Sweden and boosting the Collaboration efforts. It is an incredible team we have here and some amazing customers and opportunities ahead and I don’t regret this move for a second.

A christmas update to the Office Roadmap! It looks like Microsoft has abandoned their bi-weekly update schedule and is now updating whenever they can (please, I got a job to do!). This time it’s a few new thingies but mostly a clean up of old released stuff. Happy holidays everyone! Changes 2015-12-18 Now Launched Analyze Office 365 data with Equivio Zoom: the eDiscovery features now allows you to integrate Equivio machine learning capabilities.

Third update in about a week on the Office Roadmap, and just as the last update this one isn’t that big. A couple of “fixes” and two new things Changes 2015-12-11 Rolling out Multi-select Attachments in Outlook 2016: This was “Launched” a couple of weeks ago, but now it’s not. Perhaps a new category – “Rolling Out”? (from Launched) Public Folder eDiscovery & In-Place Hold: Compliance search on public folders.

More updates on the Office Roadmap! This time around just a few ones but also some interesting things to notice. But before we list the updates let’s take a look at the actual roadmap site that has received an update which should make it easier for you to filter and find out what’s new. This is a very welcome update and could possibly make the roadmap site useful, but I’m sad to say unless they have a proper change log.

December updates incoming! The Office Roadmap has once again been updated and this time with quite a few new additions to the roadmap. Note that there is very anticipated and important updates to Office 365 Groups - have a read and enjoy!! Changes 2015-12-14 Now Launched Capacity Management capabilities in Project Online: Colored heatmaps and stuff in Project Online (from Rolling out) Compliance Search Conditions: Improved search experience in the compliance center (from Rolling out) Data Loss Protection (DLP) for Office desktop: Data loss prevention features in the Office client (Excel, PowerPoint and Word).

Updates! Yes, updates! After some awesome announcements at the Connect(); 2015 conference the Office Roadmap is updated with some news, and a decent bunch of additions, specifically some nice new stuff in the In Development bucket. Love the Yammer updates - looks like someone has been listening after all, or have they - read the fine prints… Changes 2015-11-20 Now Launched Contact sync for Outlook for Android: Outlook for Android now syncs contacts to the native contacts application.

Wow, what a day for developers in the Office 365 land! Tons of new features was announced at the Microsoft Connect(); 2015 virtual conference. We’ve seen the GA of the Microsoft Graph and a bunch of new API’s added to the Microsoft Graph beta end-point and more. One of the features that I really have been waiting for is the Office 365 Connectors for Groups and the Office 365 Connector Cards.

Office Roadmap updates again! This time I’m reporting this from the MVP summit in Redmond. A couple of new and exciting things added to the In Development list! Changes 2015-11-05 Now Launched Clutter for your inbox on by default: For tenants/users that have the Clutter feature it will from now on be on by default Create and collaborate on Visio diagrams using Office-like experience: Visio is getting even sexier with dark themes, Delve and High DPI support FastTrack | Providing the customer success service: Get Microsofts help to start your Office 365 experience Getting started experience in Visio: Visio n00b improvements Information Rights Management (IRM) protection now added for Visio files: We now have direct support in Visio to protect our most valuable assets Keyboard access for Shape Panel in Visio: use F6 to work faster in Visio Optimized file picker in Outlook on the web: Pretty soon OWA will be favored over Outlook Outlook for Android opens IRM protected emails: Really important feature rolled out for Android Quick data linking in Visio: Make your Visio diagrams rock Refreshed stencils and smart shapes in Visio: New and slick stencils for architecture draqwings SharePoint Online will start to transition to using TLS to send email securely in our datacenters: internal service change but a really important one Sway for Windows Document Import: Something with Sway Yammer to use Azure Media Services for Video Encoding: Ooops, a Yammer update Rolling out Compliance Search Conditions: Improved Compliance search is rolling out Delve People Experiences - Praise: The Praise features is now rolling out in the Delve experience.

I have to admit it I have succumbed to Visual Studio Code and now also Gulp tasks, well almost at least. I was working the other day with some display templates and page layouts and needed a more efficient way than uploading the files to SharePoint Online. Open with Explorer could have worked, but since I used a customers Office 365 tenant I did not want to store credentials and do all the required voodoo to get that to work.

Almost a month has passed since we had the last update on the Office Roadmap and quite a lot of things has happened. There are some new things this time and also some clean up of the items. Make sure you read through the In Development section, there are some hidden gems as well as the stuff that has disappeared!! Changes 2015-10-20 Now Launched Automatic Relationship Detection: Make it easier to detect relations between two models with no relationships configured Automatic Time Grouping: All these new Power* are rolling out now.

And is Yammer dead? It is now three and a half years since Microsoft acquired Yammer and I think this is the end of Yammer, as a product/service. Let me explain myself, to avoid the flame war and hate mails that happened when I shared that my thoughts in the Team Sites are dead post. I think Yammer as a brand will stay for a while, it’s a strong brand and it’s worked into so many PowerPoint decks from Microsoft that it would be hard to wash that away.

Hey, look at that - a surprise update of the Office Roadmap! This time around we just have a couple of minor updates AND a couple of features that actually is removed from the Roadmap - all related to FastTrack. My guess someone was to trigger happy earlier this month when releasing this… Changes 2015-09-28 These features are no longer listed on the roadmap! FastTrack | Yammer Onboarding Expansion FastTrack | Project Online onboarding FastTrack | Azure Rights Management Onboarding FastTrack | Adoption planning services FastTrack | Skype for Business Onboarding Expansion FastTrack | Data migration to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business All that is left of the FastTrack items are

The second update of the Office Roadmap this months is now live. This time a huge set of features that are rolling out, most of them has to do with the updated Office ProPlus client (2016). There are some hidden gems in this such as the “Likes” in OWA, huge Sway licensing changes and (the not so hidden) announcement of Office 365 Planner. Changes 2015-09-25 Now Launched Cortana & Office 365 Productivity Scenarios: The Cortana and Office 365 feature should now be launched (from rolling out).

Almost a month has gone since Microsoft did an update to the Office Roadmap. But fear no more, it is here stuffed with new and interesting stuff. It’s quite a long list this time around. A lot of them are just Office 2016 features that we’ve known about for some time, but now added to this Roadmap. But also some really interesting FastTrack features, with very sparse descriptions. Changes 2015-09-09 Now Launched About Me Update and New Authoring Tool: The updated About Me, part of Delve, is now fully launched, including the new Stories authoring tool.

Updates to the roadmap, again! This time around it is all about Yammer. This major update of Yammer features that’s already rolled out or in development just shows how disconnected the Yammer and Office 365 teams are. Changes 2015-08-13 These are the changes since yesterday. Now Launched New Capabilities for Yammer iOS app: better photo and file sharing, better search, better this and better that. Directly to launched Real-time Yammer group activity indicators: a feature that’s been rolling out for a while, but still new on the roadmap.

We have updates, and quite a few of them, to the Office Roadmap. Some clean up, some awesome Visio features rolling out and a set of new features in the In Development segment. Also noticeable quite a few of the “refresh” features and one cancelled item. Changes 2015-08-12 Now Launched NDR backscatter protection: has been rolling out for a while Office 365 Admin Center June Updates: the June stuff is launched Office 365 Store: launched.

It has been a while since Office 365 introduced the suite wide themes. These themes are applied on all services within the Office 365 suite, or at least the ones using the Suite Bar navigation. Up until the very last few weeks the suite wide theme has been something you can set but your SharePoint site owners and all end-users has been able to override them. Finally these things has been resolved and fixed (no info about this on the Office Roadmap, hence this blog post)!

In this post, in the Office 365 Groups for Admins series, I will leverage what we learned in the previous posts, combine it with some PowerShell magic and create some basic reports. You can use these reports as a base for your Office 365 Groups reporting in your organization. Note: all these reports require that you have connected to your Exchange Online tenant with appropriate permissions, see this post about more details.

As you might have noticed I’m a big fan of Office 365 Groups, aka Unified Groups. I do think they will play a major role in the future of Office 365 Collaboration. Office 365 Groups consists of many moving parts, some that are half baked, some that are not working at all and some that is a bit difficult to understand. In this series of posts, will be published over the next few weeks and after that when needed, I will describe how you as an Office 365 Admin can and should work with Office 365 Groups.

In the last post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I showed you how to manage the Unified Groups using PowerShell. Let’s continue on that journey and take a look at how you can manage the Group memberships using PowerShell. All membership management are done using the *-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlets, you can access them using PowerShell and connecting to Exchange Online as shown in the previous post. The cmdlets is at the moment that well documented.

One of the loudest complaints I hear from people when we talk about Groups is the lack of management features, so in this post in the Office 365 Groups for Admins series we will take a look at how you can manage your Unified Groups using PowerShell. In the previous post I actually already showed you how to use PowerShell to create Groups, but let’s take a step back. Connecting PowerShell to Exchange Online To start working with the Unified Groups in PowerShell we need to connect to Exchange Online and we do that by establishing a PowerShell session to a specific Uri, see code sample below, and then import that session to our local session.

In this post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series we will take a look at how you as an admin and your end-user can create Office 365 Groups. The option to allow end-users to create Unified Groups or not are determined by the Mailbox Policy, as described in a previous post. End-user creation of Office 365 Groups End-users have two ways of creating new Groups; either use the Office 365 web interface or using Outlook 2016 (works on the PC edition, not sure about Office on Macintosh).

In this post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I will talk about the small but important policies we can apply to Group creation. At the moment there is very little control of the actual Office 365 Group creation in Office 365. And this tends to be one really important aspect of the Unified Groups discussion - can we allow them or not? I do hope that I over the time can update this post with new and improved governance features.

This is the third post in my Office 365 Groups for Admins series and it will focus on one of the primary tasks an Office 365 Admin has to do once their tenant is up and running; should we allow our users to create Office 365 Groups or not? I’m not going to give you an answer to this. It is something you need to evaluate properly within your organization, but I do recommend that you initially always turn off Groups, so that you can get some governance into the game before promoting it to everyone.

In this first post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I will show you where you have the different entry points for the Unified Groups. It’s important to understand this as it is important in the posts to follow. Office 365 Mail (end users) The first and perhaps the most obvious point of Office 365 Groups is in the Office 365 Mail application (Outlook Web App, OWA). On the left hand side you will see the Groups heading.

Some “small” updates this week on the Office Roadmap Changes 2015-07-22 Now Launched Office 365 Groups: Power BI Integration: A new and easier way for teams/groups to collaborate in Power BI. Directly to launched. In Development Office 365 User Purchases: An interesting new option for the Store. Individuals can with this feature in place “purchase and individually own a subscription to additional software”. Looks like if your manager doesn’t approve of your Visio request, you can buy it on your own :)

A week has gone since last update to the Office Roadmap and it looks like the Office 365 team is on a good pace. Changes 2015-07-16 These are the changes I’ve noticed on the Roadmap, including my personal comments/take on some of them. One big shocker here and it’s in the Cancelled section, check it out! Now Launched Multi-Tier Cloud Standard for Singapore: something brand new that is just for Singapore that is launched?

JavaScript is the new black and each and everyone has re-discovered JavaScript and it’s inevitable not to have JavaScript as one of your tools. Especially if you’re working with SharePoint, Office or Office 365 Apps or Add-Ins. In this short post I’m just documenting and sharing a small and nifty JavaScript hack that is very handy when you’re doing for instance JavaScript injection, one of the most popular customization patterns for Office 365 and SharePoint Online at the moment.

Hello everyone and hope you’re not reading this, it’s summer time and great weather, except in Sweden of course. We have some updates to the Office Roadmap today, the first set of updates in FY16 for Microsoft. Last week I complained about Microsoft changing URL’s to the roadmap site - they are now fixed ;-) Changes 2015-07-09 This are the changes I’ve noticed since the 26th of June including my take on the additions and changes.

Some interesting summer news on the Office Roadmap this week. But first of all something that is not very cool at all; the Office roadmap URL has changed. I’ve used and linked to http://success.office.com/roadmap/, http://office.com/roadmap and http://success.office.com/roadmap/en-us but the only one that is working right now is http://success.office.com/en-us/roadmap/. Booh! Thou shalt not change URL’s without redirects… Changes 2015-06-26 This is the detected changes in the Roadmap. If you use the newly released feature on the Roadmap that shows the Recently Updated Features, you will see that it states about 50 changed features, since we don’t know their “algorithm” behind the feature, just ignore it and keep reading…

No updates to the Office Roadmap today! But - a new huge feature to the actual Roadmap page that might make these posts obsolete A new button has been added to the Roadmap page, called “Show only recently updated features”: Once you toggle the button it will show you only what has been updated since sometime (this is not specifically clear at the moment). Currently it only shows the last update from last week.

Updates to the Office Roadmap today as well. Changes 2015-06-11 Since yesterday, only one item has change, or rather been added to the Roadmap. In Development Office 365 Settings pane: the unification of all Office 365 services continue (time to forget SharePoint, Exchange etc). A new Settings Pane is in the works that contextually adjusts the settings depending on where you are in Office 365.

More updates to the Office Roadmap! This time around we have a few interesting new additions to the roadmap. Changes 2015-06-10 This is what has been added to roadmap since the last couple of days. Notice that all of these are new things on the Roadmap. Now Launched DMARC Support in EOP: DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, http://dmarc.org/) in EOP. Directly to launched! Rolling out OAuth and MFA for Outlook for iOS & Android: just as it sounds, the new ADAL based authentication is rolling out for iOS and Android In Development Advanced administrative controls for archiving: Enables SEC 17a-4 record retention.

Summer is almost here, and I’m currently in the air over Hungary after a short but great weekend in Budapest. And the Office team in Redmond and all around the world keeps on pumping out updates. This is the summary of what has changed since the last update in May. If you’re into compliance or a Vision fans, there’s a great amount of new stuff added to the In Development category.

SharePoint Team Sites are dead, there you have it! The era when SharePoint Team Sites was the king of SharePoint and web based collaboration are over. SharePoint Team Sites are dead, I said it again. Ok, you might think this is a link bait, a scam or something else - it’s not. This is how I foresee the future of online collaboration in SharePoint Online/Office 365. Team Sites are based on a decade old construct in SharePoint.

Both Build and Ignite has passed and we finally have the first update on the Office Roadmap in a month. It’s quite a few new interesting things in the pipe this time and but no new Yammer features :) Changes 2015-05-15 Since the 15th of April the following items has changed on the Office Roadmap. Now Launched Change copy/paste behavior in the Outlook Web App: brand new updates directly to production.

It was a couple of weeks since last, but this time we got some major updates on the Office Roadmap, following the recent announcement on the Office blogs. Changes 2015-04-15 Since the 26th of March, these are the changes. Quite a few of them… Now Launched Bulk Updates in Project Online: Directly to launched status Improvements to Demand Management in Project Online: Another Project thingie, directly to launched Changing support for LinkedIn in Outlook: LinkedIn connections in Outlook no longer supported, another that went directly to launched Clutter Control and admin capabilities: from rolling out Document deletion policies for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online: A really interesting and important feature, now live Lync Online Active User Activities Report: previously rolling out MAPI over HTTP for Outlook 2013 and Exchange Online: one of the oldest things on the roadmap now rolling out More control over Sent Items for Shared Mailboxes: from in development New preview features for Power BI: from rolling out Option for Passwords to Never Expire: new on the list the last time, but now launched Removing Deleted Items Retention Period: from in development.

It’s just less than three weeks until the SharePoint Evolution Conference 2015 has kicked off - and I’ll be there speaking. The Evolution Conference is by far the most important and interesting conference when it comes to SharePoint - online and on-premises. The lineup of speakers are incredible - no other conference will ever get this assembly of crew from all around the world. And in this case this really is “no marketing, no bullshit” (thanks AC & CJ).

Aprils fools day and for the sixth time I have been awarded with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) recognition for SharePoint Server. Dear Wictor Wilen, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2015 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Server technical communities during the past year.

Here we go, another round of updates of the Office Roadmap. Don’t we love them! And sometimes they roll out even before the roadmap is updated ;-) Changes 2015-03-26 These are the change since yesterday. Now Launched Office 365 Admin App Update: Directly to launched status Features now rolling out Office 365 Groups: adding Like to Conversations: New stuff on the roadmap. Seems like the Office 365 (Exchange) team is building a whole new Yammer… Office 365 Notification Pane: (from development) This feature seems to cause some disturbance in the force.

Another day with some changes in the Office Roadmap, and some really interesting ones actually! Changes 2015-03-25 These are the changes since last time. Now launched Compliance Center for Office 365: From rolling out. Now no one can be less compliant than anyone else, or… Office 365 Groups Notebooks: Coming from nowhere direct to launched. Each Office 365 Group now has a OneNote Notebook. Features now rolling out Edit Office 365 profile details page update: Another newcomer on the list, only this one didn’t make it directly to production :).

One very common requirement in SharePoint, and other portal solutions for that matter, is to have the possibility to target content to a dynamic audience of users and even secure information based on dynamic rules. Traditionally this has been done with Audiences in SharePoint. Audience is a dynamic set of users that is compiled, usually once a day, and at compile time the rules of the Audience is evaluated. A SharePoint Audience is used to target information, but cannot be used to protect content - ie as a security group.

Some small but interesting additions on the roadmap today. Changes 2015-03-19 New stuff on the roadmap Yammer support for Android Wear devices: (Directly to Launched) Yammer on your wrist! Ok, where’s the Microsoft Band app? Enhanced NDRs: (In Development) Microsoft will now help you understand the cause and reason of NDRs in a much easier way. ExpressRoute for Office 365: (In Development) You want your own redundant fat pipe to the Office 365 Data Centers - then this is your feature.

It’s not easy to keep up on what is happening in the Office and Office 365 world. Everything is changing so fast. Fortunate for us Microsoft and the Office product group has created the Office Roadmap site (http://office.com/roadmap) with all (almost at least) the details on what is in development and rolling out etc. It became quite famous the other week when the new forms solution went from In Development to Cancelled.

It’s not easy to keep up on what is happening in the Office and Office 365 world. Everything is changing so fast. Fortunate for us Microsoft and the Office product group has created the Office Roadmap site (http://office.com/roadmap) with all (almost at least) the details on what is in development and rolling out etc. It became quite famous the other week when the new forms solution went from In Development to Cancelled.

Here’s a little nugget that I’ve planned to blog about for some time, that I needed today for a small task. I needed to do a background job to SharePoint Online that at a scheduled interval downloads list data, process them and optionally updates some data in my site. This can of course be done by creating an executable storing username and password combos, and with the help of the TokenHelper.

It’s been way to long since we had a Sweden SharePoint User Group meeting in Stockholm, but the wait is now over. On the 26th of February we are all invited to the local Microsoft offices to learn more about SharePoint. Specifically this evening we will be able to hear from Erwin van Hunen, who will talk about the Office 365 Patterns and Practices project. We will also be able to hear from Microsoft about their Hybrid OneDrive for Business experiences.

I’m very excited and glad to announce that this is my last day at Connecta/Acando and starting on Monday I will be joining the Avanade forces here in Sweden. I will take the role as the Collaboration lead, continuing my passion for SharePoint and the future of collaboration on the Microsoft stack. Joining Avanade and in this role seems like one of the most exciting things I could do at the moment.

The time has come for me to do, as I’ve done now for eight years (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006), my annual post to sum up the year. It is always fun to look back to what happened the past 12 months. This past year has been a somewhat “in-betweeners” year. We (me, my clients, colleagues etc.) are standing on the edge of something big and the bridge over to the other side is really, really long.

Here’s a quick tip/solution on how to shut down your VMWare Workstation 10 and 11 Virtual Machines if you’re using the Windows 10 Tech Preview (basically all builds, but only tested on 9879). Currently if you’re using Windows 10 Tech Preview as your host operating system and if you’re trying to shut down a VMWare Workstation Virtual Machine you will crash Windows 10, and potentially corrupt your machine and virtual machines.

You should mark the 29th of October at 1pm EST (18:00 CET) in your calendar. The MVP Chats are back! A couple of years back we regularly held MVP chats where anyone could ask SharePoint MVPs anything (almost at least). These chats was really successful and we received really good feedback. Unfortunately the tool we used for the chats was abandoned and we have been looking for a new way to do this.

Today the Office Updates blog added a new blog post titled “Web Apps Server Removal from Download Center”. The contents of that blog post is short: As of 11-24-2014 Office Web Apps Server will be removed from the Microsoft Download Center. At that time it will only be available for download under Volume Licensing agreements. For more information please visit the site Volume Licensing Service Center. Office Web Apps Server, used by SharePoint, Exchange and Lync to view, preview and edit Office documents is and has been one of the key features/add-ons of these products and allows for browser based editing and collaboration.

I’m so excited to be once again going to Singapore and speak at the Share-The-Point Southeast Asia 2014, held November 25-26 2014. It is one of my favorite conferences and this will be my third time in the awesome country and city of Singapore! Everything is just great about this; the people, the speakers, the attendees, the city, the food – you name it! This year I will have two sessions:

I’m thrilled to be presenting at TechDays 2014 in Stockholm the 19-20 November. This is the 5th time the TechDays conference is held here in Sweden and I know that this years edition will be even more awesome than the previous times. As usual the best speakers from Sweden will be there and some international really interesting speakers, such as the well-known Mary Jo Foley. I will be presenting a session about the new and interesting Office 365 APIs.

There’s a lot of stuff happening right now at Microsoft, they innovate, create great software and services, the new CEO accepts and wins almost all challenges and the SharePoint and Office team is listening! This is the Microsoft that I like and this is how I want Microsoft to continue to be. But Microsoft and the SharePoint team can’t just listen in blind – they listens to us out here in the real world, customers, clients etc.

Introduction One of the blog post I receive the most e-mails about is the How to do active authentication to Office 365 and SharePoint Online. Some of the feedback I get is “thank you” etc. and some of them are people that are modifying it for all kind of things, especially when trying to do “background jobs” or integrations using user credentials. And this is what this post is all about.

After doing the Microsoft Cloud Show interview with Andrew Connell I thought it might be a good idea to write some of my tips and tricks for running SharePoint 2013 on Azure IAAS. Some of the stuff in this post are discussed in more depth in the interview and some things we just didn’t have time to talk about (or I forgot). I really recommend you to listen to the podcast as well and not just read this post.

A couple of weeks back I was interviewed by Andrew Connell for the Microsoft Cloud Show. The Microsoft Cloud Show is an (almost) weekly podcast where Andrew (AC) and his wingman Chris Johnson (CJ) discusses everything related to Microsoft cloud offerings including benchmarks with other cloud vendors. If you’re not subscribing and listening to the show already then I urge you to do that as soon as possible! Me and AC sat down for almost an hour discussing Microsoft Azure IAAS and specifically when running SharePoint 2013 in that service.

Introduction The other day I posted about the patching procedure for the SharePoint 2013 Distributed Cache (Microsoft AppFabric 1.1) and on that post I got a great comment from Riccardo: Hi Wictor, is it possible to discover the patch level of the Distributed Cache without looking at control panel? Powershell? That is a great question Riccardo! But the answer is not that simple… Check the version using Installed Updates The easiest way to manually check what version of AppFabric you are using, or rather which CU that is applied to AppFabric 1.

Introduction In SharePoint 2013 the Distributed Cache plays a very important role, it is a key component for performance and caching. An incorrectly configured or managed Distributed Cache will cause issues, with your farm. I’ve even seen blogs recommending turning it off, most likely due to that they don’t manage the cache properly and get into a situation where it causes even worse performance problems. One of the good things with the Distributed Cache is that is not a SharePoint service, it is a standalone service called AppFabric 1.

Introduction SharePoint 2013 (and earlier versions) allows you to use alternative authentication “sources” than Windows. We can part from the different options with Windows login, use Forms Based Authentication (FBA) or use a federated/trusted identity provider. Forms based authentication is a good approach if you don’t want to manage your users in Active Directory or if you don’t want to use Windows Login. The downside with FBA is that you must manually do some web.

Introduction The other week I posted an article about how to use SharePoint Hosted Apps when using SAML Claims, I did not expect that amount of feedback I had on that blog post, in e-mail, comments, tweets etc. Some of that feedback was how do you do it with Provider Hosted apps. Well you’re about to find out. It took me a while to get it properly done and there are some things that you should be aware of.

Introduction By now each and every SharePoint developer out there should spend their time building SharePoint Apps instead of the old trusted friend of ours; Full Trust Code. Ok, Apps doesn’t solve the equivalent of world hunger in SharePoint at the moment, but that’s a discussion for another time. I assume you get my point. We have two types of apps (we used to have three little monkeys jumping in the bed, but one just bumped his head); Provider hosted apps and SharePoint hosted apps.

For no one out there, in the SharePoint space or any other space, Microsoft Azure has gone unnoticed. Microsoft Azure is a really great service, or rather set of services, that for a (Microsoft or SharePoint) developer or IT-Pro is something that they should use and embrace. Personally I’ve been using Azure since the dawn of the service and I’ve been using it more and more. I use it to host web sites, host SharePoint and Office Apps, Virtual Machines, Access Control and a lots of other things.

April 1st 2014, for many a day full of jokes, but for 966 individuals this is the day they either is being awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award or being renewed as MVPs. I’m fortunate to be one of those this time, and now for my fifth year! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.

Introduction This is the first “real” posts in the Workflow Manager Disaster Recovery series. In this post I will show you what you need to do to prepare for Disaster Recovery (DR) situations when working with Workflow Manager and Service Bus. The obvious Let’s start with the obvious pieces. You should run your Workflow Manager farm on three (3) servers (for more on this discussion see the SPC356 session). Running on three servers are important not just for high-availability it might save you from going into DR mode.

Introduction Welcome to a new series of blog posts in which we will focus on the Disaster and Recovery (DR) routines for Workflow Manager 1.0 in combination with SharePoint 2013. During SharePoint Conference 2013 me and SharePoint sensei Spencer Harbar presented a session called “Designing, deploying, and managing Workflow Manager farms” (watch the video recording). During that session we discussed different DR options for Workflow Manager and the Service Bus and we got tons of questions on that specific topic.

Introduction When using the Web Platform Installer to download and/or install Workflow Manager you can no longer download and install Workflow Manager 1.0 and Workflow Manager 1.0 CU1. The only option is to download Workflow Manager 1.0 Refresh (which essentially is CU2). So when installing a new Workflow Manager farm for SharePoint or just because you want to rock some workflows you have to use Workflow Manager (WFM) 1.0 Refresh. Unless you’ve been smart and previously downloaded and saved the original Workflow Manager.

When I first heard about SharePoint Online at the PDC 2008 I was a bit disappointed that you could not use custom code but had to rely on the built-in functionality and the things you could do with SharePoint Designer (which is quite powerful anyway, especially with jQuery). To read more about SharePoint online, head over to Tobias Zimmergrens blog. But with some clever techniques you can take advantage of the Windows Azure Hosted Services and create your custom code.

Here’s another post with scripts from my sessions at SharePoint Conference 2014 – this time from the Mastering Office Web Apps 2013 Operations and Deployments session (SPC383). To get a more in-depth explanation of all the details, please watch the recording at Channel 9. Let’s start…but first! OWA = Outlook Web App and WAC = Office Web Apps (Web Application Companion). Preparing the machine before installing Office Web Apps Before you install the Office Web Apps bits on the machine you need to install a set of Windows Features.

As promised I will hand out all the scripts I used in my SharePoint Conference 2014 sessions. The first set of scripts are from the demo used in the Real-world SharePoint Architecture decisions session (SPC334). This session only contained one demo in which I showed how to set up a Single Content Web Application and using Host Named Site Collections when creating Site Collections. Creating the Web Application and the Root Site Collection The first part of the script was to create the Web Application using SSL, configure the certificate in IIS and then create the Root Site Collection.

Wow, that was an awesome conference! SharePoint Conference 2014 is over and I’m very glad I attended the conference – both as a speaker and attendee. Finally Microsoft and the SharePoint Product Group told us about their future and vision for SharePoint and SharePoint Online. If you knew how long we have waited for this… I’m glad they start to sort out the service (ie Office 365) and now can add new capabilities into the platform.

I’m really proud to announce that I will be speaking at the long anticipated SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vegas, March 3-6 2014. The SharePoint Conference hosted by Microsoft is returning to Las Vegas, but this time located at the Venetian, bigger and perhaps more interesting than in a long time. If you are in the SharePoint business as a developer, IT-Pro, architect, business analyst, power user or executive, then this is the conference where you would like to be next year.

Introduction We all know that one of the most important parts of SharePoint 2013 (and 2003, 2007 and 2010) are SQL Server. Bad SQL Server performance will lead to bad SharePoint performance! That’s just how it is! There are tons of ways of doing this by having enough cores, adding more RAM, using fast disks, using multiple instances and even servers. You should all already be familiar with this. Search is one of the components in SharePoint that requires A LOT of resources, especially when crawling and doing analytics.

Introduction We all know that one of the most important parts of SharePoint 2013 (and 2003, 2007 and 2010) are SQL Server. Bad SQL Server performance will lead to bad SharePoint performance! That’s just how it is! There are tons of ways of doing this by having enough cores, adding more RAM, using fast disks, using multiple instances and even servers. You should all already be familiar with this. Search is one of the components in SharePoint that requires A LOT of resources, especially when crawling and doing analytics.

Introduction This is a story from the trenches where Excel Web App in Office Web Apps 2013 refuses to render Excel documents, while other Apps such as Word and PowerPoint works just fine. The end-users are met with the generic error message: “We’re sorry. We ran into a problem completing your request.” The problem is easy to solve but can be somewhat difficult to locate and in this post I will show you how to find the issue and fix it.

If you have been working with SharePoint you should know by now how to get the build version of an installation using PowerShell. Knowing the version of the installation is crucial for troubleshooting and knowing what features or limitations the current installation has, given the new release cadence. If you don’t know how to do it then Bing for it and then return here. But how do you do the same for Office Web Apps Server 2013?

Introduction SharePoint 2013 (and previous versions) uses a client side “token” to validate posts back to SharePoint to prevent attacks where the user might be tricked into posting data back to the server. This token is known by many names; form digest or message digest or request digest. The token is unique to a user and a site and is only valid for a (configurable) limited time. When building Apps or customizations on top of SharePoint, especially using patterns such as Single Page Applications (SPA) or using frameworks such as knockout.

This year has barely started but the conference season is already running at full speed. The first conference for me of this year will be the TechX Office 365, here in Stockholm, Sweden. This is a conference organized by Microsoft with sole focus on Office 365. There will be national and international speakers of top class. I will do two presentations, one about Building Apps for SharePoint [Online] 2013 and one about Building Apps for Office 2013.

Introduction A couple of weeks back I blogged about the March Update for Office Web Apps 2013 and also how you could use that update to show PDF previews in a SharePoint 2013 Search Center. Since then I’ve received a lot of requests on how to enable PDF Previews in a Document Library, which isn’t there by default. Of course it is not a WAC thing, it’s a SharePoint 2013 thing – but the SharePoint 2013 updates (up until now at least) does not provide this capability either.

Wow, 2013 was an interesting year and the time has come for my annual blog post to sum up the year that soon has passed us and looking a bit into the crystal ball for the next one. This is my seventh summary post and it is always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006). For me the year has been really intensive on all levels; I don’t think I´ve ever experienced such a huge demand for my professional services as of now, there is so much new stuff to learn and it´s harder and harder to keep up, I have a hard time resisting doing tons of community stuff and at the same time we had a huge construction work at our house, and of course having two soon-to-be teenager girls takes its toll!

Happy Holidays everyone! At the upcoming SharePoint Conference, next year in Las Vegas, I will be presenting a session called Real World SharePoint 2013 Architecture decisions. The session will discuss and give examples of real world decisions and trade-offs you might be faced with as a SharePoint Architect. In order to make the session even more interesting I would like you all to help out with some statistics. Therefore have I created a small survey with a few questions.

I remember a person who clearly stated “I will never ever write a book again”. Yup, twas me. I managed to hold that promise for a year and a half. But when an interesting opportunity appears, I’m usually all-in again. And so it was. Early this year I got the request from some dear friends to help with writing another book, fortunately this time not as the single responsible author but instead together with a really experienced bunch of SharePoint people, whose knowledge and resume are really impressive.

Introduction In this post I will show you how to fix the “Could not find Stored Procedure ‘Search_GetRepositoryTimePerCrawl’” exception in SharePoint 2013. This is an exception that you can get when looking at crawl log details for a Search Service Application. The error might go unnoticed since it will not affect indexing or querying. Symptoms In SharePoint 2013 when you are trying to inspect crawl logs and statistics for indexing and querying you might see exceptions that say “Could not find stored procedure ‘Search_?

Finally we’re getting SharePoint Saturday to Stockholm! Next year in January, or to be more precise the 25th of January 2014, the global SharePoint Saturday event will come to central Stockholm and World Trade Center. What is a SharePoint Saturday? SharePoint Saturdays are a free events that happens in cities around the world, unfortunately most of them are on the other side of the pond. But once in a while we see these great events pop up in Europe.

Introduction JavaScript is the future of SharePoint development (and please don’t quote me on that :-). JavaScript is everywhere in SharePoint 2013 and upcoming incarnations, and you will see a couple of posts on this topic from me in the future. The JavaScript language is easy (well, sort of), but the many different implementations and API’s built using JavaScript might cause confusion. One of the things in SharePoint 2013 that makes JavaScript development quite problematic is the Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) in SharePoint 2013.

Introduction I’ve been reading and seeing a lot of blog posts, articles, videos etc over the last few months discussion Host Named site collections vs Path Based site collections in SharePoint 2013, and 2010 for that matter. What I find interesting is that a lot of those articles are either misinterpreting the official guidance and documentation on TechNet or are just plain wrong. In this post I will try to clear up some of the confusion, and hopefully I’m not that wrong in this post.

It’s been over a week since I got home from an amazing trip to the other side of the globe (literally). It was a long way getting to New Zealand but definitely worth it. It was my first ever TechEd, both as attendee and presenter and first trip to New Zealand. I had a great couple of days meeting the SharePoint community and other Microsoft junkies, and also had the opportunity to have a quick breakfast with Scott Guthrie.

Two weeks ago the ship returned to Stockholm from a 48 hour cruise on the Baltic Sea hosting the 10th edition of SharePoint and Exchange Forum. As usual the conference was a great show arranged by MVP Göran Husman and his Humandata crew. Thank You! We enjoyed a lot of great sessions from well-known speakers around the world and we spent the nights in the bars (and on the tables) during the nights.

This is a sad and dark day for the Microsoft community, especially for us who love products such as SQL Server, Exchange, Lync and SharePoint. Microsoft Learning (MSL) has decided till kill their advanced certifications; Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) formerly known as Microsoft Certified Master (MCM). This is also a post I hoped not to write, as the matter of fact I started drafting a post a couple of weeks back that should recommend these certifications to the community out there, that post will never see the light now.

Overview and background This post is intended to show and explain why you see the intermittent (and annoying) “To start seeing previews, please log on by opening the document.” message when using previews from Office Web Apps Server 2013 (WAC) with SharePoint 2013. Unfortunately I do not have the magic bullet (yet) on how to solve it completely, this post is more on why you get it and how you can avoid seeing it too often.

For the fifth (if I recall correctly) year in a row I’m proud to present that I will speak at the annual SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2013 conference, September 30th to October 2nd. This year Office 365 MVP Göran Husman not only managed to bring some of the top-notch speakers around SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Office 365 to the conference, he also convinced them all to dress up in sailor suits and have the conference on a cruise ship between Stockholm, Sweden and Helsinki, Finland.

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at TechEd in New Zealand the 10-13th of September. This is really cool and my first trip down to Kiwi land. TechEd is a conference for all Microsoft technologies, not only SharePoint, but the lineup of SharePoint speakers and sessions at this conference just looks awesome; Dr. Search aka Neil Hodgkinson, MCA Wayne Ewington, MVP Mark Rhodes, MVP Debbie Ireland amongst others.

Introduction I frequently see one specific question asked on distribution lists, Twitter, Yammer and other social networks: “How do I install Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC) on the same machine as SharePoint 2013”, very frequently also followed by “any hacks accepted”. Those who have tried have noticed that there is a hard block – SharePoint cannot be installed on an Office Web Apps machine and Office Web Apps cannot be installed on a SharePoint machine.

Here goes a post in the middle of the summer, directly taken from yet another e-mail conversation with information that I thought was well known. It has been blogged before, but perhaps you readers (thanks mum and the other one) don’t follow those blogs, so here we go. Introduction Who doesn’t like Excel? Most people love it so much that they can’t get enough of it and uploads the Excel files to SharePoint and view and edit them using Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC).

Introduction This is a follow-up post on the SharePoint 2013, Office Web Apps 2013 and Excel files with Data Connections post that I previously wrote. That post talked about how you needed to do, so called, WOPI Suppressions if you had Excel files with Data Connections and had those data connections configured to use the authenticated users account. The WOPI Suppression made sure that the rendering of the Excel book was done by Excel Services in SharePoint 2013 rather than with Office Web Apps 2013.

As you might have noticed I have somewhat fallen in love with Office Web Apps 2013, or WAC as we say now that we’ve gotten this close to each other. It’s an amazingly well written server product with the good side benefit that it is also very usable for the end-users. Even though me and WAC has been hanging around for a while and by now know each other pretty well, WAC has constantly been reporting that it is Unhealthy.

Over the last few months I’ve been asked numerous times and I’ve seen quite a few e-mail conversations on how to work with new Host Named Site Collections (HNSC) and Content Databases. In this post I will show you how I have solved the problem using the native API hooks in SharePoint. Background Host Named Site Collections are not a new thing in SharePoint, it has been with us for quite some time, but not been extensively used due to previous limitations (and there still are some).

In SharePoint 2013 JavaScript is the new default language and all our (at least mine) solutions and projects are using JavaScript more and more, even though everything is not built as SharePoint Apps. Farm or Full-trust solutions built using JavaScript will in many situations create a better user interface and an improved perceived performance. The more we build user interfaces using JavaScript we cannot just forget about some of the basic UX rules, such as using localization.

Yesterday I got the really cool news that I completed all recertification requirements for the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master: SharePoint certification. Couldn’t be a happier SharePoint professional right now! What is the MCSM and what about MCM? The Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) program has during the latest year transitioned into the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) program. It is not only a change in name but also a change made to adapt to the new world order.

Today at the SharePoint Evolutions 2013 Conference I announced my latest pet project called Open WOPI. Open WOPI is an open WOPI client that allows you to extend SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013 and Lync 2013 with file previews and editors for any type of file formats. The project is now (at least very, very soon) available to download from openwopi.codeplex.com and is published under the Ms-PL license. This is currently an early beta (or what you would like to call it) but will be improved over time.

Just discovered a really interesting and just awesome nugget in SharePoint 2013 that solves a problem that have been annoying me for a long time. The problem manifests itself when you’re having multiple URL’s for your SharePoint farm or when using SAML or Forms based login (like in Office 365 and SharePoint Online) and you’re using the profile pictures on sites not residing on the My Site Host Web Application (or host named site collection).

If you still haven’t picked up on my book about SharePoint Web Parts – SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action, then this is the chance for you. Today (5th of April) the book is featured as the Manning Deal of the Day. All you have to do is browse to http://www.manning.com/wilen/ and then use the dotd0405au promotion code. This will give you 50% percent discount, for you non-math-geniuses that’s half off the full price!

In less than two weeks I’m speaking at the SharePoint Evolutions Conference 2013 in London. It is as exciting for me as it is for all attendees. The conferences held by Combined Knowledge has proven over the last years to be the highlight of SharePoint conferences around the world – everything from the venue, to the people, to the sessions and to the parties are surgically planned and executed – no one leaves without a smile on their face and pumped with knowledge!

I just received the confirmation that I am renewed as SharePoint MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) for my fourth consecutive year. It’s an honor being chosen among all the professionals around the world, especially now when SharePoint is getting more and more widespread and is being adopted by more and more companies worldwide. I’d like to take the opportunity to say thanks all my colleagues at Connecta, that put up with me, and all my friends around the world that I’ve learnt to know throughout these years.

Introduction SharePoint 2013 introduces a new model on how Site Collections are upgraded using the new Deferred Site Collection Upgrade. To keep it simple it means that SharePoint 2013 can run a Site Collection in either 2010 mode or 2013 mode, and SharePoint 2013 contains a lot of the SharePoint 2010 artifacts (JS files, Features, Site Definitions) to handle this. When you’re doing a content database attach to upgrade from 2010 to 2013, only the database schema is upgraded and not the actual sites (by default).

I’m really glad to see some patches being rolled out for Office 2013, SharePoint 2013 and Office Web Apps 2013. There’s some really important fixes and some very interesting fixes that I’ve been waiting for. In this post we’ll take a look at the first Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC) update – specifically we’re looking at how to patch your WAC farm to minimize the downtime. If you follow my instructions you will have zero downtime (except for a brief moment where Excel stuff will not be accessible).

In my last post (still smoking fresh) I showed you how to update your Office Web Apps 2013 farm to the March 2013 update, connect it to SharePoint 2013 and being able to view PDF documents in the browser. What I didn’t explain or show in that post was how to enable the PDF Previews in Search – but I’ll do it now. Pre-requisites Before you start fiddling with this, you need to make sure that you have the March 2013 update of Office Web Apps Server 2013 (WAC) installed and connected to your farm – if you don’t know for sure, ask your admins – sometimes they know…if they don’t give them the link to my previous blog post.

Introduction The search engine and search experience in SharePoint 2013 has been totally re-written, since its predecessors. In SharePoint 2010 we had something called Best Bets or Visual Best Bets if you worked with FAST for SharePoint. A best bet was a promoted result that was triggered by one or more keywords, used by the search admins to promote certain links or banners for specific search queries. In SharePoint 2013 this is now called a Promoted Results and the procedure of creating them is different and so much better – there’s more ways to trigger on, more ways to render the results etc, but the actual shown result isn’t that smart, until now…

Here’s a short post with a tip that I find very useful. In many scenarios you have several SharePoint 2013 installations to handle – it might be different farms, production environments, testing, staging, development etc. Do you know which Central Administration you’re working in at the moment? They all look the same, SharePoint Blue, the regular Status Bar warning that you’re running out of disk space etc. Unless countermeasures are taken you don’t know what environment you’re in unless you take a look at the URL – which in many cases is just another server name and port.

In SharePoint 2013 the way Personal Sites (aka My Sites) are created have been totally rebuilt to support the new way of utilizing the Personal Sites. In this post I will go through how Personal Sites are provisioned, asynchronously, and bust a couple of myths about how interactive Personal Site instantiations should be “prioritized” and increase throughput. Background Personal Sites or My Sites were previously created “on-demand”. When a user went to his or hers non-existing My Site the provisioning started while the user waited for the site to be created, painfully watching the spinning animated gif.

Last week the Forefront team finally released Service Pack 3 for Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) 2010. This is a long awaited release for us working with SharePoint 2013 and for those using non-legacy operating systems and browsers. In this post I will show you how to publish SharePoint 2013 Host Named Site Collections through UAG 2010 SP3 and consume the published site using Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8.

The SharePoint Health Score was introduced in SharePoint 2010 and plays an even more important role in SharePoint 2013. The Health Score determines the health of a SharePoint server/web application on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is the most healthy state. SharePoint automatically starts throttling request once the Health Score is to high. The Health Score is can be calculated using many parameters, such as memory usage, concurrent requests etc.

With this new wave of SharePoint, the Office Web Apps Server (WAC – I don’t like the OWA acronym, that’s something else in my opinion) is its own server product, implementing the WOPI client protocol, which allows a client to retrieve documents from SharePoint on the behalf of the user. Documents will flow from the WOPI servers (SharePoint, Lync, Exchange etc.) to the Office Web Apps Server – this means that potentially confidential information will be transferred from the SharePoint environment and stored/cached on another server.

SharePoint 2013 introduces a whole set of new and improved features. One of the things that is both new and vastly improved is the Workflow platform. Workflow is no longer a part of the SharePoint core infrastructure, but instead a separate server product. Even though ye olde Workflow platform, 2010 style, is still in the product for backwards compatibility. SharePoint 2013 leverages the Azure service called Workflow Manager 1.0. (Not the cloud version but a local on-premises installation).

Only one day and a few hours left of the year of 2012 and the time has come for me to make my (now traditional) summary post. I’ve done it now for six years (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006) and it’s always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months. This year has been an interesting year to me and contained some really interesting milestones, happenings and events.

This blog has been powered by my own custom implementation of the Metaweblog API , because I wanted to test Windows Live Writer. As I posted before the current implementation of the Metaweblog API by WLW is not correct in the beta. According to the WLW newsgroup, on this issue, the team are taking a second look at the Metaweblog specifications. Funny thing is that WLW does not even follow the specifications found at MSDN.

George Trifonov has written a nice tutorial on how to implement your own MetaWeblog based blog engine on his site and published the article on Codeprojectt. He also provides the full implementation in C# as a download. With the sample George enables you to use Windows Live Writer, for example, when writing blog posts.

You all know that you need to install the SharePoint 2013 pre-requisites before installing SharePoint 2013 – this is done either online or offline using the pre-req installer. All the requirements are listed in the Hardware and Software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Technet article. Once in a while you need to do the installation on a disconnected machine, that is a machine that is not connected to the interwebz. Then you typically Bing for a fancy script that downloads all the pre-reqs for you and you run the pre-reqs installer in unattended mode.

Well, I thought I should write another episode of my Building your own WOPI Client series, here’s the links to the previous episodes part 1, part 2 and part 3. This time around we’ll dig into another of the different actions that a WOPI Client can surface – the interactivepreview mode. Background As you’ve seen in the previous posts we can build a viewer and an editor for C# files, to be used in document libraries for instance.

This is part three (and counting) of my Building your own WOPI Client series. In part 1 I discussed the WOPI Protocol and especially how to implement the Discovery process of a WOPI Client. In part 2 we built a viewer application as a WOPI Client and connected it to SharePoint. In this part we’re modifying our WOPI Client to support basic editing of the files. Modyfing the WOPI Client Discovery data The first thing that we need to do is to modify our Discovery method, in our case the static XML file, to tell the WOPI Server that we support editing of the files.

Welcome back to another part in my Building a WOPI Client series. In the previous and first post I walked you through the basics of the WOPI protocol, how the WOPI Discovery mechanism worked and how to implement it and finally how to register a WOPI Client with SharePoint 2013 as WOPI Server. In this post we’ll continue to build on our C# Viewer and now actually add the viewer – we ended the last post quite dull with just showing a simple Hello WOPI web page which we now are going to turn into a real C# viewer.

Hi friends, finally time for some posts with some real code samples, and not some silly scripts. In this post, and a couple of follow up posts, I will walk you through the basics behind the WOPI protocol and WOPI Apps and WOPI Hosts. In the end you will see how we can create our own viewers and editors for files just like the WAC Server 2013 can view and edit Microsoft Office files in SharePoint 2013.

When testing SharePoint or any other software that uses Active Directory or any kind of data storage it is important to test with lot of data, data with variations and real life data. One area that is often forgotten is Active Directory, ok you create 10 or 20 test users, perhaps 50 or 100 users called Mr. Test Testson32 or similar, but that is not enough. I like to use some real world data for my Active Directories both for testing and for sure it looks more fancy when doing a demo with SharePoint (especially with these new social features in SharePoint 2013).

Here we go again! The conferences are piling up one after another now when we have our new and shiny toy (=SharePoint 2013). For me personally this is an exciting time and gives me the opportunity to travel, meet old and new friends, to network and first and foremost learn more about SharePoint. A lot of us are currently experimenting with the beta bits, actively running some projects on it and just wondering how it will work when Microsoft finally will make the golden master.

It’s been some time since we had some Sweden SharePoint User Group (SSUG) meetings. But now we’re back and more excited than ever. We’ll start with the first meeting in Stockholm the 24th of September and have another one coming the week after, the 4th of October, in Malmö. Stockholm, 24/9-21012 This time our host is Steria AB. We will have two sessions, one delivered by Steria with a yet not announced session and another one by me which will be an introduction to SharePoint 2013.

In todays episode of discovering awesome features in SharePoint 2013 we’re going to take a look at something really interesting, a feature that has been requested for years, a better management of end-user licensing in SharePoint. Even though this article contains a lot about SharePoint 2013 licensing I must make it very clear that nothing has yet been communicated from Microsoft regarding licensing on SharePoint 2013, and I am no expert on licensing and this is a Preview and this article must be considered as-is, things will and might change over the course of time.

A year and a half ago I posted the Visual guide to Windows Live ID authentication with SharePoint 2010 series, a post that got a tremendously amount of hits (and still gets) and tons of comments (and new ones still coming in). It showed quite a cumbersome way to Live ID enable your SharePoint 2010 Web Applications using the Microsoft Service Manager, MSM, (which works some times and some times not).

Introduction SharePoint is based on a very rich web interface containing lots of moving parts and lots of customizable areas. As you know the Interwebz is based on a request-response approach where you request a page and get a response back. The approach is the same whether you update the whole page or portions of it. The last decade we’ve seen smart approaches working around this “problem” using DHTML, JavaScript, AJAX, UpdatePanels, you name it.

For some reason I get a lot of questions in my inbox about different SharePoint problems people have. I don’t mind, as long as they are polite. If I have time I do try to help out, but sometimes time is not enough. I’m sorry if I don’t answer all of them. But in order to help more people I have compiled a set of rules for SharePoint Troubleshooting. First rule of of SharePoint troubleshooting: You should always check the ULS logs The Trace Logs, often called ULS Logs, is where you find your answer to most of your problems.

While fiddling, developing and configuring SharePoint 2010 I use the Service Application management a lot. This requires that you go to Central Administration, click on Manage service applications and then click on the service application that you need to configure or manage. I believe that managing the service applications are one of the most common tasks for people like me (I know some of you readers gets more fired up about the monitoring and upgrade parts of CA though).

I thought it was about time to bust one quite common myth in the SharePoint world (and there are lot of them!). This one in particular is interesting because it can cause you some interesting troubles, or at least some embarrassment. This is about that you can determine the current SharePoint [2010] version by checking the HTTP Response Header called MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices. So let’s bust that myth, or at least try!

Introduction In this small post I’m going to show you a really nice new feature to SharePoint 2013. It’s the Access Request and Invitations feature that allows you to easier manage access requests to your sites. Access Requests has been in the product for quite some time but required that your admins checked their e-mails once in a while. Using the new Share feature in SharePoint 2010 this process is so much easier.

Introduction SharePoint 2010 introduced the Service Application concept and that architecture model also includes the possibility to publish and consume service applications between farms. For instance you could have the Managed Metadata service application in one of your farms and use it in another farm. There are several interesting and valid scenarios for this and some of them include having dedicated Shared Services farms, that is a farm that’s only hosting service applications and not any content applications.

One of the best things introduced for developers in SharePoint 2010 was the SPMonitoredScope, which can be used to trace your application, and to pin down potential bottlenecks. I wrote a post on how to use it way back in 2009 – Improve you SharePoint 2010 applications with monitoring using SPMonitoredScope. It’s still worth a read and still true for SharePoint 2013. But the SharePoint team has continued to evolve the SPMonitoredScope in SharePoint 2013, with two small but interesting changes.

I hope you all had the pleasure to try out the new and improved Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2013 Preview. It’s a fantastic improvement to its predecessor and contains a huge number of improvements. One of the most notable ones is that it’s no longer a control on your page which only shows you information about the current request. It’s now a separate window which shows you all requests since you started the developer dashboard session.

As usual a new version of a product has new requirements of all different kinds; especially when it comes to resource usage. With SharePoint 2013 there is no difference. The Hardware and Software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Preview is published and I thought I should walk through the new and updated requirements and compare them with SharePoint 2010. And also talk about some other key changes that you need to be aware of when planning your SharePoint 2013 installations.

Well, by know everybody living in the SharePoint world are sitting with their best tin foil hats on and installing, configuring and fiddling with SharePoint 2013 Preview, which was announced today by mister Steve. I’ve been fortunate to be a part of the (debated) closed beta for some time and have been trying out the new version of our favorite product. You probably will be overwhelmed with blog posts over the next couple of months, up until the SharePoint Conference 2012, and continuing after that.

I’ve seen it asked numerous times on forums and I’ve been asked over and over how to interpret the encoded claims - so here it is: a post which will show you all the secrets behind how claims are encoded in SharePoint 2010. Updates: - 2012-03-09 Added Forms Authentication info. - 2012-03-11 Updated with information about how the claim type character is generated for non-defined claims Background If you have been using previous versions of SharePoint 2007, been working with .

A couple of months back, when the weather was grey and it was cold (well, it still is here in Sweden, glad I did a tour to the Riviera last week), I wrote a post about how Claims encoding works in SharePoint 2010, simply called “How Claims encoding works in SharePoint 2010”. In that post I discussed how SharePoint encoded Claims from relatively long descriptive claims, containing URN’s, to a smarter and shorter format - smaller to store, faster to compare format etc.

Building the metadata structure in the Term Store Manager in SharePoint 2010 is not the most convenient way. I prefer working with the metadata structure and terms in an Excel document so that I can discuss the structure with colleagues and clients before implementing it. The Term Store Manager allows you to import a comma separated text file containing a Term Set. By default the Excel 2010 Save as CSV does not save in the correct format and for that I have made a Excel 2010 macro enabled template which produces the correct format.

A couple of days ago I started the migration of my blog to the new and shiny Windows Azure Web Sites (AWS - I don’t think that acronym is a co-incidence) and the Orchard CMS platform. The whole reason behind doing this migration is that I felt the need for a more modern (and stable) platform than the one I’ve built from scratch, years ago, and of course that I want to fiddle with some new toys.

The Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2010 can be configured using STSADM commands, PowerShell or some coding. To easy turn the Developer Dashboard on and off I have created a Farm scoped feature that allows you to configure the Developer Dashboard from Central Administration > General Application Settings > Development Settings. The Developer Dashboard contains more configuration options than just to turn it on or off. With this feature you can configure all of the options available for the dashboard:

YES! I’m finally alive with a new hosting provider - this time it’s Microsoft (who could have guessed that!). Thanks to the just released Azure Web Sites I have now moved my blog from my old custom blog implementation (that has been a fun project though), to running Orchard on Azure Web Sites using SQL Azure. This finalizes my cloud migrations - last year I moved e-mail and everything but the site to Office 365 and started with a hosted service for this site, but for running this little blog that was a bit to expensive (you’re not clicking the ads enough).

In this article I would like to give you some information about a very important timer job in SharePoint 2010 - the Application Addresses Refresh Job. If you do not understand what it is used for you might see some strange (to you) error messages when configuring SharePoint. Even if you’re familiar with it it might be a good idea to continue reading. Purpose of the Application Addresses Refresh Job The Application Addresses Refresh Job has one specific job to do - keep track of all available and online instances of all service application end-points.

It’s been almost a week since the International SharePoint Conference ended, the first of its kind – and what a conference it was! I was honored to be part of the developer track, together with top-notch speakers and developers such as Andrew Connell, Ben Robb, Eric Schupps, Matthew McDermott, Mirjam van Olst, Paul Schaeflein, Todd Carter and Waldek Mastykarz. We’ve been working together on this “project” for a couple of months having weekly calls trying to build a solution that we would use for the developer track.

It’s Aprils fools day and together with a lot of other MVP’s around the world we’re checking our junk mail folder for the e-mail that says that we have been renewed. I just got mine (actually not in the junk for the first time). This was my second renewal and I have now been awarded MVP for three consecutive years (2010, 2011). Thanks to everyone, colleagues, friends and Connecta, who have supported me the last year.

In less than a month the greatest SharePoint conference on this side of the pond will take place in London - the International SharePoint Conference (ISC). The ISC is the new name for the conference held in London and previously called Best Practices Conference and Evolutions Conference. This will actually be my first year at the conference, but I always wanted to go there - and now I’m one of the speakers in the fantastic line up!

Last Friday I got the fantastic message that I had successfully passed the Microsoft Certified Architect - SharePoint 2010 (MCA) certification, something I’m really proud of - but something most of the community never ever heard of. During this weekend I’ve been pinged and messaged by a lots of people asking the question “What is a Microsoft Certified Architect?". In this post I intend to answer it as thorough as possible, including my own personal aspects of it.

The best free SharePoint magazine published online, the DIWUG SharePoint e-Magazine, did yesterday release their sixth edition. As usual this is a great edition with a mix of articles for every aspects of the SharePoint universe. The articles are written by SharePoint community members and the magazine is compiled and managed by Mirjam van Olst and Marianne van Wanrooij. This edition contains articles ranging from hard core Service Application federation, to SharePoint Online and Azure development to articles on how to engage your users and project teams in SharePoint.

Another post you think! Does this guy have a life? Well, actually I do. But once you get me started , I’m hard to stop… This sixth post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010 is going to show you how to leverage some of the features that Azure ACS provides you with when using Facebook as Identity Provider. I’m going to show you how to use the Facebook Graph API and retrieve information about the user (and possible his/hers friends) - this is of interest if you’re going to build a community or something similar on top of SharePoint 2010.

This is the fifth post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010 and this time it is time to augment some claims using the Azure ACS. We’ll do this to prepare for the next exciting part. For this post I assume you have configured at least one Web Application to use Facebook login using Azure ACS - make sure that you’ve followed post 1 and post 3 and optionally post 4 thoroughly.

This post serves as an index for all the articles in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. This series is a set [not yet determined amount] of articles where I show you how to leverage the Azure Access Controls Services (ACS) in combination with SharePoint 2010 to make it easier for you to use identity providers such as Google ID, Windows Live ID, Facebook AuthN etc.

Back with another promised post in the Visual guide to Azure Access Controls Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. This time I’m going to show you how to work with multiple web applications. We’re going to use the stuff we configured in part 1 (basic setup) and part 3 (Facebook setup), and hopefully we’re avoiding the problems discussed in part 2 (common problems). Scenario In this article I would like to show you how to use Azure ACS and SharePoint 2010 when we have multiple Web Applications in SharePoint.

Welcome back to a third post in the Visual Guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. In the first part I showed you how to do the basic configuration of Azure ACS and SharePoint 2010 and log in using a Google Id. The second part discussed the most common problems I’ve seen so far. In this post we’ll continue extending the ACS Relying Party to support another Identity Provider - namely Facebook!

This is a the second part of the Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. I hope you’ve read part 1 which showed you how to configure SharePoint 2010 to use Windows Azure Access Control Services, ACS, as the federated Identity Provider, IP. In this post I’ll go through the most common errors that you might stumble upon (most likely due to the fact that you didn’t follow part 1 thoroughly).

The SharePoint Enterprise Search Migration Tool (SMT), created by Microsoft, is a great little tool for moving/migrating search settings from one SharePoint Search Service Application to another, and even from a SharePoint 2007 SSP to a SharePoint 2010 SSA or FAST for SharePoint. The tool is available for download from the MSDN Archive - both as a binary and its source code. It is a console application that creates an XML when exporting the settings and uses the same XML when importing the settings, and it works great in a scripting environment.

I bet you will! The Advanced Certification Team at Microsoft Learning will start a new Live Meeting series where you can learn more about the Microsoft Certified Master and Microsoft Certified Architect programs. It will be regularly held meetings where they will go into details about the programs. The program managers will make you understand the program mission and vision, how to prepare for a certification, how to apply for participation and the value of the programs.

For a couple of weeks (ahem, months) I’ve been struggling with a strange Search Service Application issue. Some time back I went to check out on some Crawled Properties when making a tool to help copying settings between SSA’s (more on this tool in another post). Then I noticed that there were tons of Crawled Properties with just garbled binary data(!) as the property name. I searched like crazy for a while to find where these came from, there was nothing in the logs of any kind related to this.

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is now available for download für alles and it does not only include the Windows 8 stuff like the previous preview did - this one contains the thing we all want - the SharePoint Developer tools. Overall the performance of Visual Studio 11 is blazingly fast! I regret I tested it - since I will go back to 2010 tomorrow (or even tonight). They team has done a great job and included a lot of the PowerTools natively; such as the new Solution Explorer, the improved search feature etc.

It is always fun to get back on site after a couple of days off work. SharePoint 2010 is like an annoying little critter, if you’re not there to cuddle with it it will do the most strange things. I currently have a support case open regarding some issues with crawled properties (I hope that will be another story to tell another day) and went into the Search Service Application admin pages in Central Admin to check some things.

It’s that time of the year, when you’re thinking about what you’ve done and accomplished the last twelve months. I’ve been writing a summary for the last five years (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010) and I always think it’s fun to look back at the year gone and do some predictions for the upcoming one. This year has been totally crazy - I’ve been enjoying my work and clients/projects at Connecta and I totally love that we have such a strong team and offering.

The last week I stumbled upon a really interesting new and shiny User Profile Synchronization issue - one of these things that just make your day! We had to manually initialize a full synchronization, after doing some updates to one of the user profile properties, and the user profile synchronization would not just start… Everything looked fine (on the surface) and we tried the incremental sync, which also looked like it was starting but nothing happened.

It was some time since I did a real blog post and I have been fiddling with a specific topic, which I’m going to write about, for quite some time now. I’ve been working an Office 365 Intranet and been doing two conferences lately where I’ve demonstrated Office 365 and Windows Azure integration. One of the challenges (and boy, there are many) of Office 365 and SharePoint Online are access to External Data or services.

Back home after a few days in Berlin for the European SharePoint Conference 2011. It was a great conference with good speakers and really nice attendees. It was three days full of sessions, expert panels, shoot-outs and SharePoint fun! Thanks to everyone who was there (especially those who came to my sessions :-) and the team behind the conference! And as always it great to meet up with the SharePoint MVP’s, MCM’s and now even MCA’s!

I’ve now been home for about 48 hours since visiting Anaheim, California, for this years edition of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference. It has been a great week in California with colleagues, friends, clients and new acquaintances. This year, eight people from my company, Connecta, travelled over for the conference. We all had a blast with some spare time before and after the conference, which included a visit to Six Flags - Magic Mountain and a drive along the Pacific coast.

A couple of days ago the SharePoint 2010 Cumulative Update for August 2011 was released. Always a good time to see some things fixed and some things break. Installing a Cumulative Update is always a risky business, and you should only install them if you any experience problems that the CU resolves and only when you thoroughly tested it. One CU to rule them all! Without going into details about the content and fixes in the August 2011 CU there is one other thing that is of real interest - and that is how MIcrosoft has changed the packaging process for the Cumulative Updates.

This fall is going to be pretty busy in terms of conferences and presentations and I’ll have my fair share. Here’s what I’ve planned for this fall, so far. Webinar: No Farm Solution in sight! On Tuesday the 6th of September I will do a webinar discussing SharePoint Online and Office 365 and how you can build solutions using SharePoint Online, Silverlight, Windows Azure and more without creating any farm solutions:

If you’ve been in the SharePoint business for a while (at least a couple of days) you should be aware of the SharePoint objects that needs to be properly disposed; SPSite and SPWeb in particular. Objects that need disposal inherits from the IDisposable interface and requires that you call the Dispose() method when you’re done with the object - this is to ensure that the object frees up resources that the .

The 65th SharePoint Pod Show is out featuring…tada…me :-) The SharePoint Pod Show is THE podcast about SharePoint and is done by Rob Foster, Nick Swan and Brett Lonsdale and has featured a lot of great SharePointers from all around the world throughout the years. If you haven’t already listened to the podcasts, then you got 65 episodes to catch up on! There are some epic ones, such as my favorite one #50 - which is about performance tuning.

Besides SharePoint my very dear topics is performance optimizations and new technologies, so here’s a post mixing all these together. Background Caching is one way to improve the performance of any application, there are several ways to do it in-memory, disk etc etc. SharePoint 2010 has a set of caching capabilities, most of them are in-memory caches and some involve disk or even SQL based. One problem with (especially) in-memory caching is that if you have a farm different servers may display different results, which is due to the fact that the different servers cached information at different times.

This is a short story about how you can get and resolve stale Managed Metadata Service (MMS) databases in SharePoint 2010. I’ve been working with Managed Metadata quite much and done some backup/restore juggling from production to test and to dev environments. Which by the way works really smooth. I’ve also recreated the MMS databases a couple of times. After applying Service Pack and the re-released June 2011 CU I went into Central Administration to take a look at the databases and their upgrade status.

Here goes another post using the WebPartAdderExtension Element. I previously wrote an introduction to custom Web Part Gallery sources and a second one on how to enhance the end-user experience when adding new Web Parts. Now I’m going to show you another trick that this technique can be used for. Introduction Deploying Web Parts are normally done by using the Module element in the Elements manifest and using that element uploading/deploying Web Part Controls Description files (.

This is a follow-up post on yesterdays introduction to the WebPartAdder (which lately has been one of my favorite features of SharePoint 2010). In that post I mentioned that you could invoke a JavaScript function when a Web Part is added using a custom Web Part Gallery source. The Silverlight Web Part If you have been working with SharePoint as an end-user you’ve probably seen the nice modal dialog that pops up when you’re adding a Silverlight Web Part to a page, see the image to the right.

Writing this post has been on my agenda for some time, initially I intended to put it into my SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action book, but there was not enough time, you know how it is! This is an excellent new feature to SharePoint 2010 which allows you to dynamically populate the Web Part Gallery with Categories and Web Parts. So here we go. Introduction to the Web Part Adder and the Web Part Gallery Think of the List and Libraries category in the Web Part Gallery - it is dynamically populated with the lists and libraries available in the current web.

I guess by now we all seen or read about the new SharePoint 2010 guidance on scaling limits announced by the product group today. To sum it up it this is the new guidance on content database sizing: up to 200GB - still the recommendation 200GB to 4TB - yes, it’s been done and can be done (with the help of a skilled professional architect :-) 4TB or more - only for near read-only “record centers” with very sparse writing This looks good right, and it can be in some cases.

About a year has passed since SharePoint 2010 RTM:ed and now the first Service Pack is released, Service Pack 1. A Service Pack is always a big deal for SharePoint. Service Packs contains all the previous cumulative updates and in most cases some new features. SP1 for SharePoint 2010 is all that. Before diving into some of the new stuff I want to raise a finger of warning. Plan and test your SP1 upgrade thoroughly!

SharePoint 2010 allows you to configure your Service Application in Application Proxy Groups. By default all Service Applications ends up in the Default Proxy Group, named default. This Proxy Group is used by all Web Applications unless otherwise specified. Sometimes there is need to create specific Proxy Groups for different Web Applications, the reasons may vary but often it is a result of having different service offerings. For instance you would like to have different Managed Metadata Service Applications for different Web Applications.

Post is updated, see comments at the end of the post. We’re really getting close to the go live of Office 365 and I am, and I guess a lot of you are as well, preparing to launch a couple of Intranets and sites. As you know by now there are some major differences between SharePoint 2010 on-premise and SharePoint Online in Office 365. And there are also some more subtle ones that jumps up right in your face.

Now with the Microsoft Certified Master course two and a half weeks behind me and the great news that I accomplished all the exams, and might call myself a Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2010, only a few days old I thought I should write something about the program, experience and value of it. Recent blog posts about the Microsoft certification programs also put some extra fuel onto the urge of writing about it.

This is a post detailing how you perform active authentication to SharePoint Online in Office 365. Active authentication is required when you need to authenticate in code to programmatically access SharePoint objects, using for instance Client Object Model, web services or WebDAV from outside of Office 365. When you are “in” SharePoint Online or using the web browser this is not needed since you are either already authenticated and the web browser handles the authentication using active authentication.

I’m proud to announce that I have been selected to speak at the European SharePoint Conference, held in Berlin 17-20 October 2011. This is the largest SharePoint conference in Europe this year and there are plenty of good speakers and sessions, so get your seat while they still are available. I will have two sessions: Integrating Office 365 and Windows Azure - Tuesday, 18th at 11:15 This session focuses on how to extend Office 365 using Windows Azure.

The by far best utility for SharePoint 2010 developers is the CKSDev extension (Community Kit for SharePoint - Developer extensions). It’s an extension to Visual Studio 2010, available through the built-in Extension Manager. To install it, just hit Tools > Extension Manager and then search for “CKSDEV” in the Online Gallery. Version 2.0 of CKSDev was released yesterday, and if you already have it installed you should have been notified about the update.

Once in a while even a SharePoint addict does something else but SharePoint and so has I. I’ve been fiddling a bit with a Windows Phone 7 application. Actually the application has been available in the Windows Phone marketplace for two months now (thanks to those who downloaded it or even purchased it). But now it’s up to version 2.0 where all my initial wanted features are in place, thanks to a huge delay when flying into Seattle this weekend.

For quite some time I’ve been pretty annoyed (and that’s an understatement) of the strange span-tags generated by the output of pages in SharePoint 2010. Not only are they annoying they also make the markup invalid, since the span tags are omitted after the closing html tag (duh!). So in order to get to the bottom of this I decided to face my fears and entered debugging mode. It only took me a few minutes to find out what was going wrong, and I didn’t even have to step (almost) through any SharePoint code to find it out.

Earlier today Jeff Teper, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, wrote about the 10th birthday of SharePoint. This post made me lean back and close my eyes for a while and think back of what has happened during the last decade - and it is a lot of stuff! And I’ve playing with SharePoint more or less since then! The SharePoint story for me started back in 2000. I was running my own company, iBizkit, and we built a “SharePoint like” Intranet portal product.

The Web Analytics feature in SharePoint 2010 is a great new addition and allows you to get some insights on how your users behave whether it’s an Intranet, Extranet or a public facing web site. One of the reports is called Top Browsers and shows which web browser that the users are using to access the site. For a public facing web site this report might make sense but for an Intranet the results may cause you a headache if you do not understand how to interpret the data.

The 1st of April is one of those days when a fourth of all MVPs just waits for the renewal e-mail from Microsoft. Luckily I got mine this year, just before heading home from work this afternoon. This means that I will do my second term as a SharePoint MVP and I’m already looking forward to the paintball in a cold a rainy Seattle! Congrats to all other renewed and new MVPs all around this globe.

Back in the saddle from another TechDays event here in Sweden. This year it was all about the cloud! It was as always a great show and an awesome party. Thank you Microsoft, all presenters, all attendees and sponsors. I did two sessions - or actually one session divided into two segments about Office 365 and Windows Azure. I tried to squeeze in as much cloud technology as I could in a one big demo.

In less than a week Sweden’s largest Microsoft conference will take place in Örebro - TechDays 2011, same place as last year. The conference is already fully booked with 1.700 participants, but there’s a waiting list! The theme of the conference is “The Cloud Story”. This year I will do two sessions, or rather one long sessions split into two parts on Office 365 + Windows Azure. This will be over two hours full of great demoes and information.

Today an article was published on the SharePoint Developer Team Blog called Calling a WCF Service using jQuery. The content and purpose of the article is good and interesting but the way it is implemented can not be considered best practice and is definitely not the way we (I) teach SharePoint 2010 development. For instance this article manually registers assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache! Something that we never should do!

The other day I was setting up another SharePoint 2010 farm and got the usual question to participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). As always I bailed out of this. Why? Sending information to a third party about my SharePoint farm doesn’t appeal me, even if it’s Microsoft. You know, they might check how I configure my farm, how I use it etc., and then sit back and laugh at me.

The SharePoint 2010 user interface relies heavily on JavaScripts, just take a look at the Ribbon which is completely generated by a bunch of JavaScripts. Often customizations of SharePoint also involve JavaScripts. You need it to open modal dialogs, add notifications, create Ribbon Page Components etc. etc.. JavaScript is just one of the programming languages you must know as a SharePoint developer - and you can do amazing stuff with it (just take a look at SPServices by Marc D Anderson).

Back again (sorry about the delay) with a new part in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (all parts available here). This time I’m going to show you an interesting control - the Spinner control. What is a Spinner control? The spinner is an up/down (increase/decrease) control with some smart abilities to handle different units. For instance it is used when setting image and table sizes in the default ribbon. The Spinner control has a value (number) and a unit (pixel, percent, points etc.

I’ve just published a page, which I plan to update regularly, containing links to web sites, tools, products, solutions, articles, posts, books etc. which I recommend and talk about during my SharePoint 2010 classes. You can find the page here: Class Links If I did promise you during my classes to add a link to it and have forgotten - drop me an e-mail and remind me.

Back with another SharePoint 2010 Server Ribbon Controls post, this time a shorter one, compared to previous posts. We’ll take a look at the ToggleButton control. I know I said I’m going to talk about the DropDown in this post, but I’d reconsidered and take the easy ones first - since the DropDown control will be divided into several posts. What is a ToggleButton control? The ToggleButton control is very similar in behavior to the Button control with the difference that you can toggle the state of the button; it can either be on or off.

Welcome back to part 6 of my SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (full series index can be found here). This time we’ll take a look at the CheckBox control. What is the CheckBox control? If you’ve not been hiding under a rock you should now what a CheckBox is - it’s a box you can check. It can have two states - checked or not checked. Sample CheckBox control A CheckBox can look like this when implemented in the Ribbon:

Now it’s time for the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Button Control in the Ribbon Control series (full series index can be found here), What is the Button control? The Button control needs no further description - it’s a button on which the users can click to execute commands. Buttons can exist alone or in menus (which will be covered later in the series). Sample Button control A Button control could be implemented as follows:

Welcome back to another post in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (full series index available here). Now it is time to introduce the TextBox control, which can be used to allow users to enter text information in your Ribbon customzations. What is the TextBox control? If you’re familiar with .NET development (WinForms or ASP.NET) then you already know what a TextBox is. It allows your users to enter and change text.

The first control in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (full series index available here) will be about the Label control. What is the Label control? The Label control is a simple control that allows you to add a Label to any of your Ribbon groups. Labels are most often used in combination with other controls such as text boxes and drop downs. You can using a label target another control so that if you click on the label then the other control gets focus.

This first real post in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Controls series (full series index available here) will be about some of the common properties that most or all of the Ribbon controls shares. I assume that you have some basic knowledge of SharePoint 2010 Ribbon customization, if not check out one of my previous posts. What is a Ribbon control? A SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Control is the interactive parts of the Ribbon.

Welcome to 2011, this will for sure be an exciting year! I thought I start this year off with a series of blog posts about the different controls that can be used in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon. Hopefully a bit better than the current MSDN documentation. The series will discuss each control that are available for usage in the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon and show you through examples and code how to use them.

The time has come for me to do my summary post of 2010. This is my fifth summary post (2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009). This year has been truly amazing. Working in the SharePoint world has been so interesting and challenging with the brand new Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 products. I have been knee-deep in SharePoint 2010 work both for my employer (Connecta) and for personal reasons (pure fun, book, learning…).

Recent discussions I’ve been involved with and blog posts have highlighted some of the SharePoint 2010 Sandbox limitations (either as bugs or as a feature). I have also talked about this during SEF 2010 and SPCSEA 2010. While writing my book SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action I had the opportunity to discover these limitations early on and have learned to live with it. If you read my book you will find a lot of references to “this does not work in the Sandbox” (you’ve already ordered it huh?

Finally back in the blogging saddle, keep stacking ideas and post embryos but never time to finish them. This post is about how you create custom Health Rules for SharePoint 2010 and this health rule is of particular interest since it checks for debug build assemblies in all installed farm solutions. Health Rules Health Rules in SharePoint 2010 is a great way to make administrators aware of possible problems and issues with your farm; such as running out of disk space, living up to best practices etc.

Yesterday the SharePoint Team posted on their blog about a major issue with the latest Cumulative Update for SharePoint 2010 and recommending not to install it. If you have installed it you might experience major problems with User Profile services - contact Microsoft Support as soon as possible for help. So what about these Cumulative Updates? Everyone that has been in the business for some time working with products such as SharePoint and other products such as SQL Server knows that the CU’s are coming every each month or quarter.

I just came home from a great trip to Singapore and the Southeast Asia SharePoint conference. It has been a great adventure travelling that far and meet so many SharePoint fans, Southeast Asia is really hot. The conference has been perfectly arranged by Debbie, Randy and Steve at a great location. Thank you! A new conference in the area was announced during the closing session, and if I’m allowed I’ll gladly come back!

Today Microsoft released a bunch of external Search connectors for their search products such as SharePoint Server, FAST and Search Server or for clients such as Windows 7. The external search connectors are based on the OpenSearch specification, so it’s quite easy to integrate with whatever product you like. Downloads These are the new released connectors: Bing Image Search Local Search News Search

This years SharePoint and Exchange Conference, the seventh in order, took place this week. For the second year I was there as a speaker and had just as great time as last year. It is currently the largest conference in Scandinavia focusing on SharePoint and Exchange technologies and its growing for each year. Göran Husman (MVP) and Beatrice from Humandata has done an excellent job in putting this conference together and finding such good speakers; both national and international.

Here is the third part of my Visual guide to Windows Live ID authentication in SharePoint 2010. This part takes off just where we ended the last part. If you haven’t read part 1 and part 2 then make sure to read them through before continuing. Submitting site for compliance In order to get your INT site into the PROD/production environment you need to make sure that your site follows the compliance rules.

Recently came across a really interesting bug in SharePoint 2010. It’s when you are trying to upload multiple files using the ActiveX control, where you can drag and drop files or select multiple files. I started receiving “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” exceptions from the STSUpld control. The usual Google, ahem, Bing check revealed nothing. Just that I was not alone having this problem (hence this post).

An intense Twitter conversation initiated by Fabian about how Managed Metadata is updated in SharePoint 2010 gave me the idea to note down a few interesting bits about the Taxonomy Fields and how they work within a Site Collection. I hope/guess that Fabian will write a good post (as usual) about his findings as well. Introduction The possibility to tag documents in SharePoint is one of my favorite features and one of the reasons that I think you should move to SharePoint 2010 as soon as possible.

Welcome back to the SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 Better together series for this third part. In part 2 I showed you how to use Visio 2010 to convert your business requirements into workflows that later could be used in SharePoint 2010, using SharePoint Designer 2010 as the man in the middle. This time I’ll show you how Visio comes into play even after you have deployed your workflows and running them in your organization.

UPDATE 2012-02-01: A new and better approach to this is detailed in a new Visual Guide - Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. I’m back with the second part of the Visual guide to Windows Live ID authentication with SharePoint 2010 series. Part 1 was a huge success and has received a lot of feedback and hits - I hope many of you out there successfully configured your web sites and extranets.

Introduction After a long and well deserved vacation we’re now back with new strength! It’s time for our first SSUG meeting for the fall! Please do remember; This is a FREE event – we never have and never will charge anyone for loving SharePoint and sharing the awesomeness :-) Meeting details Let’s meet up at Microsoft HQ for our first SSUG meeting this fall! You will have the possibility to mingle around with SharePoint MVPs, folks from Microsoft and of course all our splendidly cool members!

The other day I had an interesting and great workshop with a customer about the BI features in SharePoint 2010. SharePoint Insights is one thing that really gets me going - so much great stuff can be unleashed using Excel, Visio and PerformancePoint Services. One thing that annoys me with the default settings in SharePoint 2010 is the BI Center. A BI Center does not support the “BI for everyone” mantra - that center only turns numbers and KPI fans on.

Next Wednesday I will sit in the SharePoint MVP Experts panel for a Q&A session where you can ask your questions about SharePoint. The SharePoint MVP Experts Q&A chat is your opportunity to chat and get instant answers about any SharePoint related questions, including topics such as development, design, configuration and setup. There will be several SharePoint MVP’s ready to answer your questions… When? The chat will take place the 29th of September at 9AM PDT.

This is the second post in the SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 - better together series. And it is time to really check out what this great combination have to offer, and the most obvious subject to start with is that we can now use Visio to design the workflows, which then are imported to SharePoint via SharePoint Designer 2010. So let’s get started. If you ever built workflows for previous versions of SharePoint you either used SharePoint Designer 2007 or Visual Studio 2005/2008.

One of the really great features in SharePoint 2010 is the Sandbox, which allows the end-users to upload solutions using the web interface, instead of relying on administrators adding the solutions directly to the farm. One of the things that that can be deployed to the Sandbox is custom workflow activities. These activates can then be used by the end-users building workflows with SharePoint Designer. It is really powerful to add custom sandboxed activities and it is very easy as well!

UPDATE 2012-02-01: A new and better approach to this is detailed in a new Visual Guide - Visual guide to Azure Access Control Services authentication with SharePoint 2010. Using Windows Live ID as login provider for SharePoint is a really huge thing. It makes the scenario for public facing web sites, extranets etc. much more easier, for instance there is no need to maintain passwords and users in the same degree.

This is the first post in a series about SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 and how the two products integrate with each other. I remember when I first saw Visio many, many years ago. It was before Microsoft acquired it from Visio Corporation. It was my dad using it to make blue prints of our summer house. As most of the gadgets and software he buys he needs a helping hand, not saying he is not technical, but I tend to catch up on such stuff faster than him, so I learnt the basics.

This is a follow-up post to the Understanding folders and namespaces in Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Solutions, Packages and Features (probably my longest blog post title, except this one…). In that post I discussed how folders and namespaces are handled in Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint projects. I will continue to show some details and tips on how you can affect the outcome of your project/packages. Long feature folder names As the previous post showed the features generated by Visual Studio ends up as a subfolder in the {SharePoint Root}\TEMPLATE\FEATURES folder.

UPDATED 2010-10-03: Obviously the KB2276339 is not a Aug CU hotfix KB2352342 is the correct one. The second Cumulative Update (CU) is out for SharePoint 2010. It contains two hotfixes; one for Foundation and one for Server. The Foundation fix contains the really important update that should fix the problem with LINQ to SharePoint and anonymous users. You can get the fixes here: SharePoint Foundation 2010 August 2010 CU hotfix (KB2266423) SharePoint Server 2010 August 2010 CU hotfix (KB2276339) SharePoint Server 2010 August 2010 CU hotfix (KB2352342) - KB article not live yet but you can request the hotfix here.

Yesterday Todd Bleeker (SharePoint MVP) wrote a post about the SharePoint Project SPI’s where he explains how SPI effectively are folders within a SharePoint solution. I thought that I should continue that discussion a bit and looking at how these folders and other things such as packages and features affects the actual deployed artifacts. Packages A package (#3 in the figure to the right) is the actual WSP file that will be created containing all your objects from your solution that will deployed to the SharePoint application servers.

Visual Studio 2010 LightSwitch is a new kid on the block in the Visual Studio suburbs. Basically it is a rich client application editor for Visual Studio that allows you to develop (or should I say “click-through”) an application very easy without any programming skills at all. You can create a custom database, attach to an external data source or WCF RIA service and last but not least hook it up to SharePoint.

Summer is not yet over (at least not according to the calendar) and this autumn is already being planned and filled with some great stuff. Part from working on a great SharePoint 2010 project, waiting for the book to be ready and some other stuff I also have planned a few speaking events - which I’m really thrilled about. SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2010 Stockholm - 18th-19th October For the second consecutive year I will speak at the largest SharePoint and Exchange event in Scandinavia, arranged by my good friend and SharePoint MVP Göran Husman - the SharePoint Exchange Forum 2010 (#SEF).

A little more than a year ago I wrote a post after finishing all four SharePoint 2007 exams called “70-640 passed! Do you really call this a certification!”. I thouht the exams were to easy and did not say much about your SharePoint skills at all and I had hopes for the new SharePoint 2010 exams. I did hope that they would stop focusing on IntelliSense and API knowledge and more focus on best practices, design decisions and problem solving.

As you know the usage of JavaScript has been more and more used in web applications over the past years for technologies such as AJAX. JavaScript can accomplish really cool stuff on the client side and make the user interface more interactive and responsive. Just take a look at SharePoint 2010 - that’s some heavy JavaScripts there (a bit to heavy IMHO). So lets assume that you are building some new cool stuff, in SharePoint of course, and why not a Page Component for a contextual Web Part.

If you have been working with SharePoint 2010 development using Visual Studio 2010 you have most certainly stumbled upon the new replaceable parameters that replaces data in your solution files during the packaging process. For instance Visual Studio uses $SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$ in the Web Part control description (.webpart) files and this is replaced with the assembly full name (strong name) during packaging. By default it looks like this when you create a new Web Part:

I have been updating a couple of SharePoint 2010 servers and farms to the latest June 2010 Cumulative Update (CU) as well as installing a slipstreamed package. The slipstreamed install worked flawless using the same technique as with SharePoint 2007. But patching some of my servers seriously failed on both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 with both SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. Here are some of my experiences of the patching.

This post continues in the same neighborhood as yesterdays post about provisioning Managed Metadata columns. This time we take a look at the Ratings in lists (and while we’re at it check out another earlier post about how to customize the look and feel of ratings). The ratings allows anybody to rate items in lists and libraries in SharePoint 2010 Server. This is another highly usable and awesome feature tied to the Managed Metadata Service Application (MMS).

This post will show you how to provision Site Columns that uses Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2010. Managed Metadata is one of the new and exciting features of SharePoint Server 2010. It allows you to centrally manage metadata terms and keywords. Creating Managed Metadata columns using the SharePoint web interface is a simple task but the problem is that it does not allow you to move your Site Columns from one farm to another that easily.

The first cumulative update (CU) for SharePoint 2010 is here. The CU was promised in to be ready in June, but have not arrived until a couple of days ago. I’ve been on vacation (last day today actually) so it fits perfect starting out next week with patching some farms. As you probably know by now the Microsoft SharePoint Team has improved the update cycle a bit compared to its predecessor.

After about six months of writing I have now written a total of 400 pages and 15 chapters about SharePoint 2010 Web Parts for my book called SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action. This is a book focusing on Web Part development in SharePoint 2010 and I think that it covers all that is needed for developers who wants to enhance their SharePoint 2010 and Web Parts development skills. The chapters are:

When you create a Site Definition for SharePoint 2010 you should provide an image that illustrates the Site Definition. It allows the users to separate the Site Definitions from each other, find the correct one faster and it looks quite nice! In SharePoint 2010 Silverlight is used when selecting Site Actions > New Site. This gives you a nice and fast interface to search for the correct Site Definition. The image of the Site Definition is here very prominent.

The Tag Profile Page in SharePoint 2010 is used by the Managed Metadata Service (MMS) as a landing page for a term or a keyword. It is used to describe the tag, its location in the taxonomy, synonyms etc. It also contains all the latest tagged items and a note board. The page is quite dull out of the box. Fortunately this page is a Web Part Page and can be customized as you like!

I have recently been getting quite a few requests and comments about the status of ChartPart for SharePoint - a charting Web Part that I built about a year ago and shared on Codeplex. This latest version have had more than 6.000 downloads which I think is amazing, version 1 had close to 10.000 downloads. I temporarily put this project on hold a couple of months a go, due to two major reasons; the built-in Chart Web Part in SharePoint 2010 and that I’m currently writing a book (which essentially means that I have no time at all).

DevSum 2010 is over two days packed with cool sessions. I had the last session of the day and conference but some brave SharePointers showed up and eagerly listened. I hope you enjoyed it and if you need some evening lecture you can download the presentation below, which was about SharePoint 2010 Composites and especially Business Component Services. DevSum 2010 had some great content from local gurus and MVPs and the Microsoft Pattern & Practices group was here and shared some valuable knowledge!

This Wednesday the SharePoint User Group Sweden (#SSUG) had an awesome meeting sponsored by Sogeti at Hotel Anglais in Stockholm. The event was sold out when announced in a few hours and we had to change conference room a few times at the hotel to fit everyone. More than 80 people showed up - our new record that we have to beat the next time. On the agenda for the day was first Christoffer von Sabsay (Sogeti) presenting about the Handelshögskolan SharePoint 2007 WCM case.

The 2nd edition of the Dutch Information Worker User Group SharePoint eMagazine is out! It’s a free SharePoint magazine, focusing on SharePoint 2010. The first edition released a couple of months ago was a fantastic opening issue with awesome content and It looks like this edition is keeping up the high standard. Looking forward to the series continuing… This issue contains some really interesting content ranging from an article about WCM in SharePoint 2010 from Waldek Mastykarz, CKS:DEV from Wes Hackett and feature/solution life-cycle/versioning by Anders Rask.

This is just a friendly reminder for you who tries to build a Sandboxed Web Part for SharePoint 2010 and trying to use the FileUpload or HtmlInputFile controls - it will not work. The uploaded files are not transferred to the sandboxed processes and cannot be used in the sandbox. The SharePoint 2010 sandbox runs in a separate process and all requests from the IIS to SharePoint are marshaled over to the User Code process.

The Sandbox in SharePoint 2010 allows Site Collection administrators to upload solutions in their Site Collections without access to the physical server. This is a great way to open up for creativity and for each Site Collection owner to expand the functionality of their Site Collection without adventuring the stability of the SharePoint farm. Sandbox Solutions do have some limitations, for instance we cannot add new Application Pages. Application pages are normally pages added to the _layouts folder, which are located in the {SharePoint Root}\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS physical folder on each server.

The Office Web Apps, OWA, in SharePoint 2010 is a great way to enhance the SharePoint experience. It allows users without a decent OS or a locally installed Office client to view and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents. When you install and correctly configures Office Web Apps (yea, can be a bit of a hazzle if you like me avoid the Farm Configuration wizard) and then enable the required Site Collections feature a cache will be created.

I am currently setting up SharePoint 2010 farms back and forth testing out the most optimal ways using least privileges and different configurations. The by far most complex part in the configuration is the User Profile Service Application and the User Profile Sync. Spencer Harbar have fortunately documented how to do it properly in his Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization article. Following that you will likely not fail…

Timer jobs is a great feature of SharePoint to use when you need to perform background execution at regular or specific times or when you need to execute code on all or selected servers in the farm. A timer job is a persistable object deriving from the SPJobDefinition class. SharePoint 2010 has updated this class in many ways, to the better. Not only can the timer jobs be configured and monitored better through Central Administration they can also be invoked on demand.

It’s Friday and thought that I should share some small tips on how to make your SharePoint demonstration experience better. I assume that you have a quite powerful laptop with virtual machines running SharePoint. I used to do my demos directly in the virtual machine, in full screen mode. This requires that I have all the necessary client components installed such as Office, SharePoint Designer, the Windows Server Desktop Experience feature enabled etc.

Currently setting up a new environment on SharePoint 2010 (which was made available for download yesterday if anyone missed that :-). One of the new features of SharePoint 2010 is to set up a Content Type Hub (which is a part of the Metadata Service Application), which is a hub for all Content Types that other Site Collections can subscribe to. That is you only need to manage your content types in one location.

SharePoint 2010 is just around the corner and Microsoft is starting to release guidance and planning documents for the new and shiny version. Up until now there has been little guidance on hardware and software limits/boundaries/recommendations of SharePoint 2010 and comparisons with SharePoint 2007. But now when the release is imminent is essential to get up to speed on this. Here is a compilation of some of them that I find really interesting and will take for weekend reading.

SharePoint 2010 contains functionality for rating documents and items using a classic five-star rating approach. But those starts looks a little bit like the Google stars, right? Wouldn’t it be cool to brand the rating and use custom icons like this: The solution is quite easy actually. You need to create a set of images and then set a few properties on the SPWeb object of the top-level site in the Site Collection.

The release SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 is imminent and I can already smell them! Microsoft Sweden with André Henriksson will take a tour around our beautiful country and show all the good stuff that is coming for us developers called SharePoint 2010 - The Developer Tour. Me and my awesome MVP mate Tobias Zimmergren will help out during some stops of the tour. It’s a half day full with developer goodies that you can’t miss out on!

I’d like to take the opportunity to tell you about some of my upcoming engagements this spring. SharePoint 2010 - the Developer Tour - May 17th, Stockholm A half day introduction to SharePoint 2010 development arranged by Microsoft in Stockholm. If you are new to SharePoint development or a skilled SharePoint 2007 developer you should not miss this out. Together with Microsoft we will dive into the wonderful world of the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools and SharePoint Designer 2010.

While commuting home this beautiful afternoon I received an e-mail from Microsoft containing the following: Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Server technical communities during the past year. I am very, very proud of receiving this award and it gives me a real boost to continue exploring the SharePoint world…

SharePoint 2010 the logging has been extended with a new Correlation ID which is unique for each request or operation. The Correlation ID makes it very easy to track down any unexpected errors since you can search for the id in the trace logs. This unique ID is also maintained between servers for instance when making a call to a service application. The SharePoint 2010 error page also shows this Correlation ID so that any end-users seeing the message can contact support and give the the Correlation ID.

In SharePoint 2010 there are more ways to deploy custom code than in its predecessors, the reason is the introduction of the Sandboxed solutions. There are basically now three different ways to deploy custom assemblies: Full trust solutions, aka Farm solutions - The assemblies are registered in the GAC and runs under full trust Partial trust solutions, aka Web Application solutions - The assemblies are deployed to the bin folder of a specific Web Application Sandboxed solutions, aka User code solutions - The assemblies (solutions) are deployed to the Site Collection gallery These are the basic variants of how to deploy custom assemblies.

If you have been developing with SharePoint for the last few years you probably are very aware of the SPWeb and SPSite naming is a bit confusing. SPWeb is actually a site and SPSite is a site collection. It’s always fun explaining this to new SharePoint developers… In SharePoint 2010 this naming convention confusion continues and now expands to the administration of SharePoint. Let’s for example take the example when you are activating or deactivating features.

As some of you know I’m writing a book on SharePoint 2010 Web Parts development to be published by Manning Publications. I have set up a site dedicated to this book project where you can follow the progress of it. You can find the site at http://www.sharepointwebpartsinaction.com/ I am currently half way through the writing and we are closing in on the Manning MEAP program. So if you are interested in the latest news on the book head on over to the site…

The CssRegistration class (in Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls namespace) is one of the most useful controls in SharePoint 2010. It existed in SharePoint 2007 but was fairly limited then. I thought I should guide you through why it is so useful in SharePoint 2010 and why and when you should use it. I briefly mentioned the CssRegistration control in my previous post on SharePoint 2010 themable CSS files. But first some background. Why the CssRegistration control?

SharePoint 2010 has a completely rebuilt theme engine. Instead of having to modify .inf files, create folders and copy and pasting CSS files and images in the SharePoint root we can now create a theme in PowerPoint and upload it to the server. The default SharePoint CSS files are tagged with comments that tells SharePoint to substitute colors and images with the values from the theme. When you switch theme SharePoint generates a new set of CSS files and images with the result of this substation.

I thought I should share my experience on working with SharePoint 2010 development on Windows 7. My previous posts on installing SharePoint 2007 on Vista and Windows 7 are posts that are quite popular. The downside with the “old” SharePoint version is that it was not officially supported to install it on a client machine, but SharePoint 2010 is supported for installation on Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP1 for development purposes.

While I was testing building some mashups using SharePoint 2010, Web Parts and SharePoint Designer I found an interesting bug. Initial problem Here’s what I did; I set up a Wiki Content Page (the new kind of Web Part Pages) in SharePoint 2010 that was supposed to be called with Query String parameter named ID which should be used by a Web Part. Another page contained items linking to this page using different integer values for the ID query string parameter like this:

The SharePoint 2010 Development Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is great and I really like the way that the project is built using the different artifacts. One thing really annoys me though and that is the way that the code is generated and named when you add items. For example if you create a project and then add a Web Part item to that project then Visual Studio will create a Web Part class with a namespace and class name like this:

SharePoint is an amazing product and there are some fantastic opportunities to make awesome applications. It also has a great API which has had improved further in the upcoming SharePoint 2010 release. But there are several features available in the platform/API that just isn’t available to all of us, unless we sit in Redmond and are building the actual product. There are so many classes or methods that are marked internal or sealed, that I really would like to use.

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the SharePoint 2010 Ignite training and after a great, but quite hard, interview and discussion I have been approved as a SharePoint 2010 Ignite Developer trainer. I really look forward getting out there and teaching developers about all the awesome features and improvements in SharePoint 2010. If you are interested in training don’t hesitate in contacting me. Together with AddSkills I have planned for a couple of SharePoint 2010 upgrade classes this spring.

It is 2010 now and SharePoint 2007 have been out forever, it feels like it anyways. The last two years has been about best practices in SharePoint both for developers and IT-pros and especially the Disposing of SharePoint objects has been discussed in absurdum. So I guess we should have to talk about it - but guess what - we certainly do! The reason I bring this up today is that I was about to join a new WFE to a farm and it failed once it started to provision the web applications.

This is the second post in my mini series on how to extend the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon. First post can be found here. The goal with this excersice is to extend the Editing Tools Insert tab with a smaller Insert Web Part drop-down, so we don’t have to expand the whole Web Part Gallery to insert a Web Part. In the last post we created a Visual Studio 2010 solution and added the drop-down to the correct tab in the Ribbon using the CustomAction element and some new SharePoint 2010 XML syntax.

SharePoint 2010 contains numerous of improvements in the user interface and it has been built to be able to be extended. I guess that all of you have seen the Ribbon in SharePoint 2010 by now and probably even tried to add a button and fire away a Hello World JavaScript alert (it’s one of the HOLs available also). That’s quite an easy task. But doing some more advanced contextual and dynamic customizations to the Ribbon really makes you sweat!

This is the first post for the year of 2010 and what could be better to start with than announcing that I’m writing a SharePoint 2010 book. More specifically I’m writing a book about SharePoint 2010 Web Parts development with the working title SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action. This is a dream come true to me and I have been thinking about writing a book on and off for quite some time.

The year of 2009 is about to close and it’s time for me to summarize this year, as I’ve done for the last few years (2006, 2007 and 2008). This year has been one of the most inspiring and exciting years for me in a very long time. I have been doing so much fun stuff this year. The most significant change has been starting to work for my new employer Connecta (after nine years at basically the same employer).

SharePoint 2010 comes equipped with a set of new tools to improve the monitoring of your custom applications, there are built-in functionality to check how long your operations take, how many SQL Server calls are done etc. All this is logged and can be visualized in the Developer Dashboard. Another good thing with this is that it’s not something that just automatically is there but you can also hook yourself into the monitoring and the actual Developer Dashboard.

Yesterday we had a Swedish SharePoint User Group meeting, hosted by Connecta (yes, my new employer). We had a new record with number of participants, over 60 interested SharePointers of all kinds showed up to listen to MVP Göran Husman, Humandata, talk about the news in SharePoint 2010 and Peter Karpinski, Microsoft Services, talk about how to do Rapid Application Development with SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010, Visio 2010 and InfoPath 2010 and how to script you SharePoint 2010 installs.

Working with SharePoint 2010 is really a joy, you stumble upon great things all the time. The API has not had any revolutionary changes to be backwards compatible; but small changes here and there, both publically visible and internally, really makes the API better than before. SPListItem.SPContentTypeId To get the Content Type Id of an SPListItem you had to first get the SPContentType from the SPListItem.ContentType and then get the Id of the content type.

SharePoint 2010 is one greedy beast and you can’t settle with your plain old laptop; first of all you need a x64 bit environment and second of all you need some RAM. Developing for SharePoint 2007 required just a 32-bit machine, less than 4 gigs of RAM and Virtual PC and you could do most of your work without complaining to much. SharePoint 2010 requires some more thought through development environment .

Visual Web Parts are a nice addition for SharePoint 2010 developers. A Visual Web Part is essentially SmartPart revisited and is one of the project types of the new SharePoint extensions for Visual Studio 2010. Sandboxing is one of the most interesting features of SharePoint 2010, especially for large scale implementations and hosting providers. The Sandboxing feature, or User Code Solution, allows you to easily upload a SharePoint feature into your farm into a special controlled environment – called a Sandbox.

SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2009 (#SEF09) is over and I’m pretty tired but really excited. Two full days, here in Stockholm, Sweden, of SharePoint 2010 information with some awesome speakers and topics. SEF09 was a great conference, about 200 participants – just about the right size to have the time to chat with a lot of people and having a good time. This year the SEF conference also was the official launch of Exchange 2010 and the first larger showing of SharePoint 2010 bits in Sweden.

Just hours before the SharePoint Conference 2009 starts in Vegas, and all information will flood out from the conference, blogs and twitter, Microsoft released three four posters that should help you in planning and updating your SharePoint 2007 installation to SharePoint 2010. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Upgrade Approaches (added since original posting) Visually describes the different upgrade approaches Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Upgrade Planning Takes you through how to upgrade hardware and software on your servers.

The long awaited service pack for PerformancePoint Server 2007 is now released to the web - Service Pack 3. This is the last service pack for PerformancePoint Server since the PerformancePoint Server bits will from next week be turned into PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010. Service Pack 3 is the last update to the standalone version of PerformancePoint, which was announced in January this year when Microsoft changed their BI strategy.

Delegate Controls in SharePoint is a blessing when you are customizing the features and interface of SharePoint. The Delegate Controls are areas in the out-of-the-box SharePoint pages where you are allowed to inject your own controls. This is heavily used by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which essentially is a set of features on top of Windows SharePoint Services. For example the standard WSS user information page redirects to the MOSS My Site, this redirection is done by inserting a delegate control into a specific delegate control on the userdisp.

Inspired by the latest SharePoint PodShow topic; The SharePoint Data View Web Part-Episode 31 and Laura Rogers post on building a permissions dashboard I just had to write this post. In the last paragraph Laura quickly mentions how you can reuse the created Data View Web Part. I think this is really important to know how to export and import this Web Part. What I don’t want people to do is to fire up SharePoint Designer and create these Data View Web Parts in the production environment so that the pages get’s unghosted or customized.

I’m glad and proud to tell you all about that next month I will start a new job. I will start as a SharePoint Architect at Connecta. This is a fantastic opportunity for me and it will let me work with some of the finest SharePoint minds and developers here in Sweden as well as some really awesome customers. I’ve been working with basically the same company now since 2000, when I and two good friends founded it, iBizkit.

Developing solutions and features for SharePoint is a nightmare for all beginners, and even for the experienced SharePoint developers. If you ever have had the opportunity to create a SharePoint solution you most probably have had to make a lot of hacking in a bunch of XML files, just to build a simple feature. This is the way you have to do it, and the way taught by tutors and Microsoft, when using it with Visual Studio and no add-ins.

Finally I’ve found the time to make the last work on ChartPart 2.0 for SharePoint. I have been working on and off on this release for quite some time – but now it’s here! ChartPart 2.0 for SharePoint is a Web Part that allows you to instantly create charts based on your existing SharePoint lists. You can make columns, bars, pies and even 3D charts. ChartPart version 1.0 was released last year and have had up until now close to 10.

Last night we had a SharePoint User Group Meeting here in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a great evening with a lot of attendees, thank you all for showing up. It’s always fun to see new and old faces, sorry I didn’t have time to talk so much with you (due to my VM’s crashing just before my demos…). First, a big thanks to KnowIT and Jonas who provided us with a great place to host the meeting and some good food and beer!

The latest version, 4.0, of the great SharePoint Administration Toolkit has been released, read all about it in the post by the SharePoint Team. It contains a lot of interesting and great stuff that you could use for everyday usage. One new part of the Administration Toolkit is a SharePoint solution called Permission Reporting Solution. This is a solution package that hugely improves the permissions management of your Site Collections and Sites in SharePoint.

Today I stumbled upon Yet Another SharePoint Problem (YASP) with a custom timer job. The custom timer job is supposed to synchronize some user information between site collections (on a WSS 3.0 installation). In some cases the timer job has to add users to site collections. Sounds like a no-brainer, right! The problem is that we are using this installation as an internet facing site and the external users are stored in AD LDS (Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services, formerly known as ADAM) and our own custom authentication provider.

This is the first post in a series on Web Parts Connections. This spring I had a series on Web Part Properties that I think was very successful, they got some good comments and feedback and they get a lot of hits from search engines. Please help me out and evolve this new series of posts with some feedback and questions. What is Web Parts Connections? Web Parts Connections allows you to connect the Web Part server controls so that they can exchange information.

SharePoint Saturday Copenhagen is over after an awesome Saturday in Copenhagen. Thank you all organizers, attendees, speakers and sponsors, I had a blast. I will definitely attend more SharePoint Saturdays when I can. These kind of events really are special; everyone attending are there because they really love working with SharePoint, on a Saturday, when the sun is shining outside, for free… You can find my presentation SharePoint Online and Windows Azure - better together here and the solution that I used for the demo here.

If you have been installing SharePoint you have probably also seen and fixed the DCOM 10016 error. This error occurs in the event log when the SharePoint service accounts doesn’t have the necessary permissions (Local Activation to the IIS WAMREG admin service). Your farm will still function, but your event log will be cluttered. On a Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 machine you would just fire up the dcomcnfg utility (with elevated privileges) and enable Local Activation for your domain account.

SharePoint Saturday is a free informational and educational event that has been held over-there in US several times with a huge success the last year and it is now coming to Europe and Copenhagen, Denmark to be more specific. A SharePoint Saturday is an event for anyone interested in SharePoint and who like to meet similar-minded people and listen to SharePoint professionals and celebrities. I’m going to be there - it will be a blast!

In most custom SharePoint solution projects you will have to create your own Application Pages, Web Part Pages or other ASP.NET pages to fulfill your requirements. If you are coming from the ASP.NET world you are pretty used to building web forms and similar .aspx pages. Your pages will most of the times then be derived from the System.Web.UI.Page class, but when working with SharePoint you should not use this class as a base.

The new Office 2010 clients have been released as a Technical Preview and I’m fortunate to get my hands on them and free to talk about them. The new clients are awesome! Visio is one of the applications from the Office suite that I use on a daily basis to design, model and draw diagrams, workflows and solutions. Visio 2010 has gotten a really nice facelift and a whole new set of features.

Introduction Microsoft SharePoint contains functionality for Records Management, which essentially is a storage for documents that you would like to store and manage in a separate records center to meet certain legal or other requirements or just to make backups of certain document revisions. To be able to create a Records Center you need to have Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). On the other hand you only need Windows SharePoint Services 3.

About two months ago I tried to reach out to the SharePoint community with a small survey on how Virtualization is used with SharePoint. The survey was primarily for my own interest to benchmark what others are doing, but I also thought that I should share this with everyone. SharePoint and Virtualization is an interesting piece of discussion; some despise it and some love it. For more information on SharePoint and virtualization read this great article from SharePointMagazine.

Just in time for next version of SharePoint to arrive I just completed the final certification exam for SharePoint 2007, the 70-630 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring. As always I did think that it should be some tricky questions or problems to solve in the exam, I even installed a MOSS RTM last night just to walk through the admin interfaces before the infrastructure upgrade. But to my disappointment this certification was by no means any challenge.

When developing applications or custom solutions for SharePoint you will on several occasions have to store settings for you application of some kind. When developing database driven or other custom solutions you easily create a database table or make the settings in app/web.config file. You can of course use these approaches when developing for SharePoint, but there are some things to consider when doing this. This post will outline some approaches you can use to store your settings.

I’m really glad that we have managed to get a really nice release of the SharePoint Extensions Lib, SPExLib, out. This brand new release (12.0.0.0) has significantly been improved since the first release a couple of weeks ago. Keith Dahlby has made some really nice Linq extensions for SharePoint which is available in this release. These extensions are also IDisposable safe when using on SPWeb and SPSite collections. By referencing the SPExLib.

Microsoft has updated SharePoint Online with a patch that resolves the bug that prohibited you from getting the service descriptions from the web services, that I previously described. This means that you now can use Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer (or any other tool that you like) to connect to the SharePoint Online web services and code away, instead of going to some local instance to get the descriptions. Does anybody know where the Microsoft Online team posts all updates/changes to the BPOS?

Installing a new service pack onto a server product is not just firing up the installer and hit next->next->finish. You should carefully read through the documentation and test it thoroughly. Service Pack 2 for SharePoint has been long awaited and I’ve seen people the last 24 hours installing it like madness just wanting to get their hands on the new features/updates. I did also install it just minutes after it was released (on my dev machine that is being reinstalled any hour now, when Windows 7 RC is out).

I’ve had an idea for some time to gather all mine and others nifty extension, utility and helper methods into a shared library so that these can be reused in different projects and I finally got my act together and created a new project on Codeplex called SharePoint Extensions Lib, http://spexlib.codeplex.com/, SPExLib. This is a library filled with extension methods to the SharePoint object model and to the Microsoft.NET 3.

Windows 7 has an upgrade to Virtual PC which allows you to run Windows XP applications virtualized on your Windows 7, without having to run the whole desktop running. I still have to use Visual Studio 2003 to support some old good applications including SharePoint 2003 apps. So I have used a Windows XP virtual machine to run it, but now I can fire up Visual Studio 2003 directly from my Start menu in Windows 7.

I’ve been annoyed for some time at that you cannot prohibit your users from selecting “No Quota” when creating Site Collections. Yes, you can set a default to use but the “No Quota” option is still there. Most probably you have some governance plan or similar that says that you should set quotas when creating Site Collections, but you know that sometimes you forget or somebody doesn’t even care or know what setting No Quota implies.

The day has come when Microsoft officially started to talk about the next version of Office 2010 clients and SharePoint Server 2010 (no longer Office SharePoint Server). We have since some time known that SharePoint 2010 will be supported only on a 64-bit platform, just as Exchange 2007. The new stuff revealed yesterday (as preliminary) are that not only is 64-bit required, it will only be supported on the Windows Server 2008 64-bit platform (including R2) and it will require that you have SQL Server 2008 on a 64-bit platform.

I just had to try out Community Clips from Microsoft Office Labs and made a short video demonstrating the new version of ChartPart 2.0 for SharePoint . The video shows rendering and customization of the graph, how you connect the graph to a list and some of the 3D features. Community Clips is an awesome and simple video capture utility that from now on definitely will be a preferred tool in my toolbox.

After doing some experimental stuff (don’t ask me what!) with my local (Windows 7) SharePoint installation I uninstalled it completely and was going to install it from scratch once again I encountered a strange error. A dialog as below popped up: First I thought that SharePoint did not uninstall correctly and searched the registry as a maniac and found nothing. Then I checked the installation log files, which did not make things much clearer:

Here is a tip for you Codeplex users out there. If you are using the Visual Studio and the Team Foundation source control then you are prompted for username and password every time you open up a project. This dialog does not contain any functionality to store the username and password. If you are often opening projects and/or switching projects entering usernames and passwords can get annoying. If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7 you can store the usernames and passwords in a pretty secured way using the Credentials Manager.

The Office 2007 Service Pack 2 are here and for the server products (WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007) we have a new STSAdm command called; preupgradecheck. This command allows you to check any WSS 3.0 SP2 based installation for potential issues that may prevent an upgrade to Windows SharePoint Services 4 (WSS 4.0) or SharePoint Server 2010. For full reference of the command check out KB960577. The pre-upgrade check command uses a set of rules found in the 12\CONFIG\PreUpgradeCheck\WssPreUpgradeCheck.

I’m glad to announce that from now on you can find my project Windows Live ID Authentication for SharePoint on CodePlex. Windows Live ID Authentication for SharePoint is a project that has been developed for some time for the upcoming Swedish SharePoint Community Site, which will be an awesome site with some really cool features of which this is one. I have previously tried some of the available Windows Live ID providers for SharePoint that are out there on the market and the best (previously) one is the provider from the Community Kit for SharePoint, originally developed by Keith Bunge.

A few days ago I posted a small survey that asks a couple of questions on how you virtualize your SharePoint environments. I will keep the survey open for a couple of more days to get some more results (compared to the number of readers of this blog and number of Twitter followers - the response is really bad…) Click Here to take survey Anyways I thought that I should put up some preliminary results.

Virtualization is a really hot technology right now, and forward and so are SharePoint. I’ve been discussing SharePoint virtualization internally and externally for sometime now and I have my opinions. In order to get a broader view on how SharePoint is virtualized around the globe I put together a small survey that will enlighten this subject. I would like you to fill out the survey and forward it to your colleagues, partners, clients, friends and better halves.

A few weeks back I wrote a post on how to mix Windows Azure and SharePoint Online called Custom code with SharePoint Online and Windows Azure. Since then both Windows Azure and SharePoint online have had some updates. First of all you no longer need to create the bindings in the code to make it fully trusted. Good to know but it does not affect the solution. A Bug in SharePoint Online Web Services More important is the fact that you cannot longer use the Visual Studio Add Service Reference function and add the services from your SharePoint Online site to your solution.

The SharePoint 12-hive contains by default a number of interesting files that every developer should be aware of. The more you know the better you understand the inside of SharePoint and it allows you to create more efficient and better solutions. Here are my top five favorite files: ctypeswss.xml (in TEMPLATE\FEATURES\ctypes) This is the feature elements file for all the default WSS Content Types. When creating new content types, most often I find it useful to derive them from existing content types.

SharePoint Designer is now a free tool and available for download. What does this mean really? Anybody can download it and customize their SharePoint installations which is good in some ways, but really bad in others. If the users are not aware of what they are doing they can cause severe damage to your SharePoint, but it can also make really nice enhancements to their installation. There are a lot of nice things you can do with SPD in your sites that you can’t do using the web interface.

Today almost everyone have more than one computer; one at work, a few at home, a media center, a PC, a Mac etc, your family members, friends and colleagues have the same. One problem is that a lot of us need access to files on one machine when we are using one of the others. For example I want to access my images when I’m at work sometimes and I do not want to copy all of these images onto my work laptop, when I’m at home I want to have the same favorites and documents that I use at work and so on.

Have you ever wanted to get rid of the Welcome text before the user name in the SharePoint user menu? At least I have! If you are like me - here is a solution that you can use to customize the text of the Welcome Control (Welcome.ascx). The approach is pretty simple, and can be made in several ways, but I wanted a pretty clean solution that didn’t affect any other behavior of SharePoint and I wanted to write as little code as possible.

Microsoft has released a set of ten free Themes for SharePoint for use with the Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services. These ten themes provides a far better experience than the out-of-the-box themes delivered with SharePoint (WSS and MOSS), of which some are really annoyingly ugly! But the new themes needs some tweaking before looking really good, there are several design flaws in some of them, like black text on dark-grey background…

I’m glad to announce that I finally got my stuff together and stitched together the last pieces of the beta of ChartPart for SharePoint 2.0. ChartPart for SharePoint is a SharePoint Web Part that allows you to draw charts from existing SharePoint lists. It’s available at CodePlex, at http://chartpart.codeplex.com/, and is free for use. ChartPart 1.0 have had over 4.000 downloads since it was released and is translated to six different languages.

I have been answering questions on the SharePoint forums at MSDN Forums, and while some are really tricky and interesting, some are really basic beginner mistakes. A couple of questions lately have been about Web Part development and how to and where to create your controls. Most of these is easily solved if you understand how the Web Part event model works. First of all you need basic ASP.NET understanding and know how the Page and Control objects work together, how a postback works etc.

A Web Part, in SharePoint or not, has a Verb that allows the Web Part to be Closed. Closed means that the Web Part is just closed (not rendered) and not deleted, which is a separate Web Part Verb. Closing Web Parts can cause headache for your users and even a really bad performance. Note: To delete a Web Part you have to go in to Edit mode for the page.

After passing the developer exams of WSS (70-541) and MOSS (70-542) I thought that I should make the deck complete by taking the configuration exams. Today I passed the first one, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Configuration (70-631). I’m mainly a developer so I had some worries about questions on DNS, network configs and load balancing. But this exam was too easy and kept at a very basic level. I missed one question though.

Canvas for OneNote is another new and interesting innovation from the Office Labs team. Canvas for OneNote creates a new way for you to manage your OneNote section and pages in a more “inspirational” and “irregular” way. OneNote is traditionally organized into Note books, sections, groups, pages and subpages - just like a classical book shelf filled with note books. It works really nice if you know in which note book you placed your notes (of course you can search to find it…faster than you search your shelf).

At CeBIT 2009 it today was announced that SharePoint Online is now available worldwide*. SharePoint online is a part of the Business Productivity Online Suite which also contains Exchange Online and Live Meeting. More services will be available at a later date. There is a free 30 days trial option if you would like to try it out, which I really recommend, before you subscribe/buy the solution. You can find more information about the Microsoft Online Services at http://www.

Not that unexpected, but Microsoft chief executive office Steve Ballmer has confirmed that the new Office 14 clients and servers (read SharePoint) will not be released during 2009. The products will be “generally available” during 2010. Generally available may indicate (I’m always positive) that we have a release for volume licensees and partners in late 2009 and in the shelves during 2010 (just like the previous version). Read SharePoint Daily Special Edition for more information.

To end my series of Web Part properties I would like to show how to store more complex values than just strings or integers. What happens if you would like to store a more complex object; an array or a coordinate etc? Editing these properties with the standard generated interface using the WebBrowsable and Personalizable attributes will not work, since it only accepts basic types, shown in part 1. To make these properties editable you have to (almost…continue reading) create an EditorPart, shown in part 2, and control the properties in the SyncChanges and ApplyChanges methods.

Computer Sweden has an article in today’s issue, also published online yesterday, called “Impossible to get rid of the cash cow of Microsoft”. To sum it up briefly it discusses how hard it is to get rid of Microsoft SharePoint once you have it installed in your environment and that the licensing costs flies away. An interviewed CTO states that companies he met don’t have control of their SharePoint installations and that they had to step back and look at the ownership and licenses.

The Sweden SharePoint User Group had the first meeting of this year this evening and it was a great and interesting meeting. I really enjoyed the session by Rickard Löfberg from Credit Suisse when he talked about their globally rolled out collaboration platform, how they handled the massive amounts of data and customized the platform to have a smooth transition to upcoming versions of SharePoint. I did two short sessions; one about Web Part development with 10 tips and a very short introduction to the Geneva Framework.

The latest version of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit has been released and it contains a new feature called SPDiag (SharePoint Diagnostics Tool). It’s a new tool for IT-Pros (or admins and developers for that matter) that helps you have a look at all of your SharePoint server (including hardware) configurations in a nice application. You can check everything from log file locations to web.config content to database configurations to…  You have two views, one tree view in which you can drill down in your server/farm configuration and read all of the data and one Trends view in which you analyze and examine the usage of your farm and sites using the different logs in SharePoint and Windows.

For the SharePoint Community Sweden community site I have created a master feed containing interesting blog feeds from Swedish SharePoint bloggers, with posts both in Swedish and English. This master feed can be found at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/wictorwilen/spcs_all?_render=rss Add this feed to your subscriptions if you are interested about how we Swedes think and elaborate on SharePoint. It’s built using the amazing Yahoo Pipes.

If you are building a reusable web part that you would like to sell or give away you should look into localizing your web part. The localization support is great with .NET 2.0, using resource files, and there are tons of built-in functionality for this. If you are creating an Editor Part for you web part, then your life is pretty easy, just use the standard techniques. But if you are using the approach by tagging the properties of your web part with the Personalizable attributes, then you are out of luck.

A recent discussion about how the licenses of Windows, SQL and SharePoint Servers should be handled when we are developing solutions using Virtual Machines made me throw away a mail to Emma Explains Licensing. The concern was that; do we have to pay licenses for every VM or test server? That would have been insane! But I wanted to have this explained how this licensing works - a lot of you perhaps already know but I always have a hard time getting all the different licensing options and rules.

Yesterday SharePoint Community Sweden was launched, initiated by Andreas Kviby. This is a new community site for Swedes and those who speak Swedish about the SharePoint platform. There are a lot of great SharePoint sites and communities out there on the web, but none in Swedish. Having a great community “nearby” will enable the personal interaction to be even better and it will create a lot of interesting spin-offs. I’m glad to be onboard and I will put some effort into this new community and helping out new and old SharePointers as good as I can and I will try to do some blogging about interesting topics in Swedish there - once in a while I will probably double post information here and on the community site (long sentence…).

Part four of my Web Part Properties series. Now it’s time for default values and what you should do when there are values that are incorrect or missing . Last post discussed the .webpart file and I showed you how to do when setting up a Web Part in the Web Part Gallery with default values. Web Parts created using the SharePoint WebPart class can also define default values using the DefaultValue attribute, like this:

The Technet and MSDN sites are great to have when you have to look things up when developing or maintaining solutions for the Microsoft Office Servers, such as SharePoint. But I also like to have this information closer to me and have even faster access to it. Microsoft is providing much of the content as downloadable CHM files, which is a great feature. Here are a list of some of the downloadable help files

Hot from the presses! Today Microsoft announced that Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server will not be a separate product in the future, instead it will be incorporated into the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition. This is some great news for all of us that work with and develop BI solutions. Microsoft is focusing their BI solutions to three products; Excel, SharePoint and SQL Server. This is due to several factors; BI solutions have been very expensive (read PerformancePoint) and have had hard to reach out to the end-users.

I thought that it would be time to look up all Swedish SharePoint bloggers, like my former colleague Johan Dewe did about a year ago, he has now left the SharePoint consultant scene, and I thought that it would be time to have a new and updated list. This list is compiled from my own feeds, Johan’s list and some searches on the web. Since blogging nowadays isn’t the “only” way to keep up with what’s happening I’ve also included some Twitter links.

This is the third part of my Web Part Properties series and this post will focus on the .webpart file. Every SharePoint developer have seen it and perhaps edited it, but what is the purpose of the file and when and why should I edit it. Background The .webpart file is an XML file containing metadata about the Web Part. In previous versions of SharePoint this file had an extension of .

The more I use/test Windows 7, the more I get confident that this release will get Microsoft back on track. Windows Vista introduced a lot of new and interesting stuff, but was not that polished as one could expect. Service Pack 1 of Vista did take it up one notch, but not far enough. As the statistics nerd I am I like to know exactly what my laptop is doing, how much memory is used, which program accesses disk etc.

This is the second part of the Web Part Properties series. The last post walked through the basics on how to make editable properties on a Web Part. As a sample I used a Web Part that displayed tweets from Twitter - called TweetPart. Using the standard approach, by marking the properties using specific attributes, we made the Web Part editable as we wanted. But the user experience, for editing, was not optimal.

Windows 7 beta was released into the wild today (or tomorrow if you’re not an MSDN subscriber) and I’m seriously considering running it on my main development machine. But to be able to do this I have one main requirement and that is that I can run SharePoint on it, just as I can on Vista. So after installing the beta bits on a Virtual PC I had to give it a try.

I thought that I should kick off this new year with a series of posts on how to make your SharePoint Web Parts editable and how to enhance that out-of-the-box Web Part property editing combined with some tips and tricks. This first post may be to most of you SharePoint developers somewhat basic, but I have chosen to start from scratch here. Many of this first post topics are repeatedly asked in the MSDN development forums.

The time has come to make a summary of the past year and have a look into the future – the year of 2009. About a year ago I made a similar post with a summary and some predictions. This year has been a fast year and I have made so much, both personally and at work. For a few months in the spring I was at home taking care of my daughters and tried not to work (which I find really hard).

When working with SharePoint Web Parts and features it is easy to get into trouble if you are changing the version of your Web Part DLL file. The easiest way to get around this is to never change the version of the Web Part, which is a pretty common scenario. But if you are developing a product or feature that you expect to have a longer life cycle and that you will upgrade or enhance over time you should really use the assembly version features.

If you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on a new server you will find that your Office 2007 (.docx, .xlsx etc) files is not indexed as they should but the old binary document (.doc, .xls etc) format is indexed. This is due to the fact that the Office 2007 IFilters is not installed by your WSS installation. To resolve this issue you have to download the Microsoft Filter Pack and install it on your server.

Today I have spent a few hours tagging photos using the incredible Windows Live Photo Gallery application. It’s quite slow and still has some buggy features, but it’s so good for cleaning and tagging photos. As I tagged along I found some images I took during the PDC 2008 at the LA Convention Center entrance hall. From the Windows Live Photo Gallery I fired up Microsoft Photosynth and made me a Synth.

A couple of days ago I made a quick poll on how people preferred to install their SharePoint features. The results are as follows: Using STSADM is the favorite one, probably due to that fact the audience answering to the poll is mostly IT-Pros or developers. Using an MSI based installation is, surprisingly, the first runner up together with scripts. I totally understand why but there are many problems having an MSI based one but the problem is that installation and uninstall is tied to one specific server.

With the recent release of ChartPart for SharePoint I created a simple command file to simplify the installation of the .wsp file. What I did not expect was that so many should download it – about the same amount of people who download the ChartPart. Some really nice people have asked me to release it as an MSI package, which I will do as soon as possible to make it even easier for non developers or IT-pros to install the ChartPart.

After a few weeks of testing and great feedback, ChartPart for SharePoint 1.0 is available for download on CodePlex. CharPart for SharePoint is a free chart web part for SharePoint (WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007) that enables you to easily create charts based on existing lists and views in SharePoint. These are some of the features of ChartPart 1.0 Generate a graph from a SharePoint list in just a few clicks Multiple graph types (bars, columns, splines etc) Legend Title Multiple built-in palettes Custom palettes Size of graph Supports columns such as dates, lookups, calculated, users etc ChartPart is currently translated into English, Swedish and Portuguese and German coming soon.

ChartPart for SharePoint is a new Web Part for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that allows you to create graphs and charts from existing lists in SharePoint in a very easy way. The ChartPart for SharePoint is developed using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and the Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft.NET Framework, which means that there is no need for any third party licenses to create the charts (read Dundas or similar).

Microsoft is currently extremely offensive on their new cloud services targeted to consumers and business users with their Live services. I use a number of them daily with the Live Mesh as the newest addition. A couple of months back I started to move my and my family’s documents to Skydrive, 5Gb free online storage, and I’ve made some efforts to get started with the Office Live Workspace, to have a better place work working with the documents.

I have just struggled a while with a SharePoint Web Part that constantly threw an error, see below. This Web Part is creating a SharePoint list when it is first loaded by a user and it should create a list with permissions so that only the user has access to it (i.e. a personal list). This is done by breaking the role inheritance of the list using BreakRoleInheritance(false), so that no inherited roles are copied.

I made some updates to my Windows Search Index Tool so it also displays all the inclusion and exclusion rules and even functionality for adding and removing rules. So now you can easily exclude folders by creating a rule like this: On the Rules tab, click on the Add button. The button should only be enabled if you are running in elevated privileges on Vista. Enter the pattern, like the image shows and choose if it is an inclusion or exclusion rule and hit Add.

SharePoint 14 is the next version of Microsoft SharePoint and during the PDC 2008 nothing new was revealed about SharePoint 14, but some small parts of the Office 14 clients were seen. SharePoint 14 will, most certainly, be released at the same time as Office 14 which most probably will be released when Windows 7 is released. My guess is that this point in time is in about a year.

Windows Search is a great for indexing your files and is included in Windows Vista by default (version 3). Version 4 is available for download from the Microsoft site. I recently had some problems when my index suddenly was corrupt and I had to restart indexing all files, which takes a long time if you are using your computer and do not want it to interfere with your work. Somehow it started working again but I have not been able to get it to index up all my files, there are always files left to index.

The buzz about XPS has unfortunately faded away during the last year, probably due to the discussions about the Open Xml formats. XPS is still here and will eventually submitted to ISO and proposed as a standard. Windows 7 has of course support for XPS. When you install Windows 7 (note build 6801) you get the Microsoft XPS Document Writer printer which is used to print anything into an XPS document.

Now sitting here at LAX and reflecting over what we have experienced during the PDC 2008 the last few days. We learned a lot about technical stuff and what’s growing up in Redmond, but I think the most important stuff is what’s happening to the software business in large. With Windows Azure as the first large scale service host and with the number of online services that Microsoft will release in the upcoming years we have a real challenge to adapt to these new business models.

I have now done some initial testing and evaluation of the 6801 build of Windows 7, which we got at PDC 2008. First of all I was a bit disappointed that we did not get the updated UI that were shown during the keynote, instead we got a previous build that does not have that much changes in the UI. It boots pretty quick on my Virtual PC, yes I run it there – a little to early to switch out my main OS, and it has a nicer loading screen than Vista.

So the last day of PDC 2008 is over. The brain has been cooked for a few days… This very day did not have any keynote and I kicked off with a session on the Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint. I have note used this add-in since the first releases of it since I didn’t like it that much but had instead relied on manual packaging and deployment as well as STSDev.

The Fantastic 40, the set of application templates, for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 has been updated with new language support. Among the new supported languages are Swedish, Danish, Portuguese and some more. Some of the DLL’s have also been updated (haven’t checked what). You can download them from here: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Template: Application Template Core Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates: All Templates Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates: All Server Admin Templates

Day three is officially over, I’m pretty tired today after staying up to late yesterday and playing around with the “goods”. I installed Windows 7 and tried it for a while, but to my disappointment I found out that the nice stuff that were shown on the keynote was missing in my release… This morning started with the last keynote of PDC 2008 and it was Microsoft Research that should be in the spotlight.

Day two is official over. I’m just back from the attendee party at Universal Studios. Keynotes This Tuesday started with a couple of keynotes. I was fortunate and arrived just as they opened the keynote hall and got myself a seat in the front row. After Ray Ozzies intro Steven Sinofsky took over and showed Windows 7 for the first time in public. You can read about the demos on almost every blog, but here are the stuff that caught my attention:

Back at the hotel and watching some Monday Night Football (which I could do that in Sweden!). Here is a summary and some reflections on my day. Woke up early and walked down to LA Convention Center and got me some breakfast (tomorrow I’ll eat at the hotel). I tried to get to the keynote hall as early as possible for some good seating. I ended up in 6th row and had a good overview of the stage and the huge screens.

I have arrived at my first PDC and it’s an awesome experience. The conference is huge and I arrived here for the registration and breakfast and met up with some nice guys. I fetched my bags of goods which contained mostly magazines and a bunch of sponsor commercials. We’ll have to wait until Tuesday until the real bits (the hard-drive stuffed with goods) are released and revealed. The keynote on Tuesday morning will really be interesting.

Sitting here in Zürich waiting for the delayed flight to Los Angeles and PDC 2008. This PDC is my first and I really look forward to it. I will suck in as much as I possibly can during the next few days. I have a couple of things on my agenda that I want to accomplish: Go through all of the Office Systems and SharePoint sessions to find out what’s going on Meet with the SharePoint MVPs, Product team and other cool SharePointers Listen and learn from the Experts Understand the Microsoft cloud vision even better, especially how do these services fit in a larger enterprise (I have not understood this yet) And of course be one of the first to try out all this new stuff!

I gladly received the news that the Office team announced Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007. Not only for the clients but also for the server products (read SharePoint). First of all it’s the support for the different file formats that I long for (ODF for example) and then there is the Outlook performance – both of these are addressed! XPS and PDF will be supported from scratch – no need to install a free plugin (just as it was in the Office 2007 betas).

Yesterday I did a short post on how to make a really simple SharePoint application with a .aspx page inside a document library and some coding with SharePoint Designer. I ended the post with giving a hint that you can also place the code in an assembly. To aid you in your self studies, here comes the solution… Make an assembly First of all we need to make an assembly to host our code behind.

Recent discussions in the SharePoint forums led me to write this article on how to create the simplest form of SharePoint applications without using Visual Studio and only SharePoint Designer. Just follow these simple steps to create your own Hello World application in a .aspx hosted in a SharePoint document library. Create the document library First of all we need somewhere to host our applications; create a new Document Library, I called it Applications, and set the default template to either Basic Page or Web Part Page.

Emma Healy of Emma Explains Microsoft Licensing in Detail has written a post on how to calculate what Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 license you should use for your public facing/extranet MOSS site. The post has a flow chart to aid you in your decision to choose a MOSS for Internet Sites license (expensive!) or CALS (less expensive). To sum it up you should use the MOSS FIS if you have more than 435 users when using MOSS Standard or more than 242 users when using MOSS Enterprise.

When using Lists with Content Types enabled and you have your custom columns there are some things to remember, such as the custom columns are not part of the list content type items until you configure it so. For example; when you add a custom column to your list you have to option to add your column to all content types. As you can see from the image above to the right, the Test column is present in two content types and Test2 in none.

Everyone, every company, small or large has some kind of file server for storage of documents and other files. The file server are in many cases the heart of the operations. Some have several file servers and some have even more. Almost every file server looks the same; some kind of shared folder with subfolders (in absurdum). Most of these file servers uses file/directory permissions to have control over who are allowed to view or edit the files.

I noticed some interesting stuff on some “leaked” screenshots from Windows 7 (M3) – there are some changes going on in the lower right corner. I can see a couple of changes that draws my attention. “Hidden icons” icon The icon you can click on to show the hidden icons in the notification area has changed. Is it more than this? By the looks of the icon my guess is that it is more than just showing the hidden ones.

Everybody has something to say about Windows Vista, good and bad. Most often I hear complaints and especially on the User Account Control. Today the Swedish IDG website had an article about the 10 most annoying things with Vista and how to solve them, and of course one of them was about the poor UAC. I must say, and I have been using Vista since before RTM, and only found the UAC annoying during the first few days, when installing the machine.

Lot of web sites uses a login page so you can identify yourself and so that the application can target information for you. I use a lot of different sites and does a lot of logins and I must say most of these login pages are not user friendly. A login page normally consists of two input fields, for username and password, and a button to make the actual login. In most cases there are a checkbox which you can check to make the application remember your login, by using a permanent cookie.

Once upon a time Microsoft decided to give the users of Windows Vista the opportunity to buy an extra expensive version – called Vista Ultimate. Buyers of this version would eventually get some nice and exclusive content and applications to their sweet new operating system. Microsoft did deliver some nice enhancements such as animated backgrounds and new sound schemes – certainly worth the extra cost. As time went on people waited for the real Ultimate Extra to be delivered…

Microsoft SharePoint is a great development platform but it have some major areas where it could be improved. As of today you can create mediocre applications using the current SDK (which is not so well documented), but to create great applications you really need to understand how the internals of Windows SharePoint Services really works! I would like to show you an example of how bad the documentation and implementation is with a pretty common scenario.

I have a few times failed to install Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft Search Server Express, when I have come to a location where the SQL Server 2005 is already in place with custom configuration. The failures have occurred during the phase when the WSS is trying to create and configure the SQL Server. First time I had some troubles working it out, since I’m not a DBA, so I would like to share my solution since nothing is found on Google on this matter.

In my case I often create SharePoint sites and lists in a development environment or on a demo server, just to set up and verify the architecture and design. From that point I often have to sit down and start writing the actual feature, which involves some heavy Xml coding most of the times – now I have found a shortcut that will save me an awful amount of time.

I recently received my new HTC Touch Pro smartphone, which is by far the best phone I ever owned so far – it has all that I need to complete my daily tasks. Over the years I had a few phones, of course the latest one has nearly almost been the best for me at that time. I decided to take a look down the memory lane and see what phones I have owned and used for daily usage.

Today I passed the 70-542 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Application Development), with a score of 1000 (same as 70-541). It was a pretty tough test, but spending the last few days reading through the late Patrick Tisseghems book, Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 made me succeed. I dedicate this result to him – thanks! Technorati tags: SharePoint, MOSS

So everyone by now knows that Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 is available for download, and you all have read positive and/or negative reactions (why do people bother to repeat complaints such as; Firefox already has that feature, Safari is still better, yadda yadda…). Anyhow I have tried it out during the day and have had a really nice experience. Aside from the improved performance (will be back with more on that later on, but Firefox is still way ahead) I have found some really nice improvements.

I have recently seen Wordle images here and there on blogs and sites and I could not resist creating one of my own site, to see what words do I write often here. As you can see it’s lot of stuff about Microsoft (surprise), SharePoint, Visual Studio and .NET. I also seems to like a lot of things. Have you created a nice Wordle?

Microsoft has now released the final bits of Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1, download here. A lot of stuff has been improved such as stability and performance, no need for me to repeat all this since you can find it a gazillion of blogs as well as in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. One improvement I did not read about is that they have fixed/updated the icon of the devenv.

Working and developing with Microsoft products is a great, but when it all comes down to deliver a full solution to your clients you must know how the different products from Microsoft are licensed – and this is a mess (SharePoint?). Hopefully you have some in your organization that has some knowledge of the Microsoft licensing or you have a nice licensing partner that can help you out. But once in a while you end up with a client that wants to know how much it costs – and right now!

Finally I have registered for PDC 2008. It will be awesome to head over to Los Angeles and attend to the conference. Since there has not been a PDC for a few years I expect some interesting stuff revealed, like what’s happening with C# 4.0 and the SharePoint team will also have a few sessions (Lawrence Liu has not revealed it’s content though). I will be staying at the Westin Bonaventure hotel, like some other Swedes.

Ecma International is currently asking ISO members for comments on the XPS standard. XPS is a new XML based standard for a paginated document format, somewhat like PDF. The current working draft 1.2 is now publicly available for anyone and the technical committee (TC46) of Ecma is requesting comments on the XPS draft. They also provide an issue list with all identified problems and an optional status. XPS has gained a lot of support from hardware/printer manufacturers, such as Konica Minolta and Xerox and software companies such NiXPS and SANATech.

It’s summer and time for some vacation, finally. This year has been hard work so far – and I don’t expect it to get lighter this upcoming autumn and winter. I’ve had fun though! Microsoft SharePoint has really been one thing occupying my work – it feels like everyone is not just looking at SharePoint, they want to use it now! We have a couple of cases that is really interesting and I hope that I have convinced them and proposed a nice solution.

So the F-day is here and Mozilla Firefox 3.0 is ready for download. Servers are currently down but you can get it from the FTP site. Mozilla has not even had time to fix their first-run page – it’s still referring to the Release Candidate 3. I guess we will see a record in downloading the next 24 hours.  I had some strange experiences while installing it. I installed it over beta 5, therefore the location of Firefox was in the Program Files\Mozilla Firefox Beta 5\ folder and after a few minutes I had the first crash of Fx since beta 3 or something.

Microsoft recently released the Origami Experience 2.0 for Windows Vista, download it here. This is an update to the Microsoft UMPC interface. The Origami Experience is designed for small screens with touch-capabilities, but after just trying it out on my laptop with Vista Ultimate I figured – some of these features would fit into the Media Center interface perfectly. There are a lot to say about the Windows Media Center interface, I think it is quite good – needs some fixes though; why are films divided in three categories – Videos, Recorded TV and DVD’s?

Microsoft SharePoint is a great Enterprise Portal framework and contains a lot of collaboration and management features out of the box. SharePoint also has the abilities to find users and their knowledge using a social distance algorithm, but it has lacked some of the social features that applications such as Facebook successfully has implemented and been recognized for. Microsoft even owns a smaller part of the Facebook company. The enterprise equivalent of Web 2.

Wow, two heavy-weight Windows Mobile phones; Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 and HTC Touch Pro. In a few months I am ready to get me a new phone. I currently use the HTC TyTN, which has been a very pleasant ride (except for the glitching screen right now, to many drops…). When Sony Ericsson announced XPERIA X1 in march I got so excited and decided to get me one as soon as it hits the stores.

The Windows Live Writer has once again been updated, it’s still a Technical Preview. The new and updated version contains numerous improvements to the interface and introduces a brand new plugin model. New and improved features The interface has received some updates such as a tabs for switching between views and a nice feature which allows you to edit your post using your blog theme (might have been in previous builds, but this was the first time I’ve seen it).

Yes, you heard it right - now you can install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on Windows Vista! No need for a Windows Server 2003/2008 or virtual machines, remote debugging or any other weird workarounds! Jonas Nilsson of Bamboo Solutions has come up with a way to allow you to install WSS onto a Vista x86/x64 machine using a special installer file. The post contains detailed instructions on how to install WSS 3.

I have repeatedly had Visual Studio 2008 hang or stop responding when I’m checking in files to Visual SourceSafe, especially when checking in large amount of files. It just stays there and eventually dims out (as non responding application does in Windows Vista). The ultimate solution is to kill the devenv.exe process and start over. But I have discovered that it is not just hanging, it’s just the main application window that stops responding.

A couple of weeks ago I bought the Belkin N1 Vision router and was really impressed with the design, usability and performance of it. This was until I tried to connect to my work using a Cisco VPN - it just did not work! The specifications for the router states that it has VPN support; IPSec pass-through and PPTP. On other routers I have seen methods to enable/disable IPSec pass-through in the router configuration, but I could not locate it in the N1 setup utility.

Today I passed another SharePoint exam; the 70-541, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development, with a score of 1000 of 1000. This one was pretty easy, compared to the ones for WSS 2/SharePoint 2003. If you have had chance to do some advanced developing and knows the SharePoint class library and Xml schemas you should give it a shot.

I have several times needed a way to sort XML, retrieved from a file or a web service, inline without invoking XSL transformations, which is the most common way to do it as I have seen. The .NET Framework contains the System.Xml.XPath namespace and is available from the .NET Framework 1.1 and up. This namespace contains a number of classes which can improve the performance of your .NET classes when working with XML.

The Swedish Standards Institute has as a result of the chaotic OOXML vote in August changed their rules for participating in technical committees and voting in them. Previously you could just before the vote sign the agreement and participate. From now on you must have been a member of the technical committee at least three weeks ahead of the votes you would like to participate in. The new rules also clearly points out that you only have one vote (I’m still wondering who voted twice…).

Author, editor and blogger, Ed Bott is currently publishing a series called Fixing Windows Vista, which contains really nice information and instructions on how to get the most out of your Vista machine. Currently three parts has been published: Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time Ed Bott shows how to install a clean Vista with the latest drivers (which is the most important thing on any Vista system) on a Sony Vaio.

I am really keen on gadgets and devices and have for some time had troubles with my current wireless routers so today I acquired a brand new Belkin N1 Vision wireless router. The reason for choosing this one was many but one of the most important ones was the WAF, Wife Acceptance Factor. Since it is placed central in our home the router must be good looking and that is exactly was Belkin N1 Vision is.

The Microsoft Office Labs team have now launched their own web site/community at www.officelabs.com. This is a site dedicated to “Concept testing”. This means that we can expect to see some nice productivity enhancements to the Office family and get a chance to take them for a test-drive. The aim of the site is for the Office Labs team to gather information from their “tools” and evaluate the usage of them and get a discussion started.

Two new sound schemes (glass and pearl)…c’mon you could do better than this in a year and a half… And a whole bunch of language packs. This time not announced as an extra but the details still tags them as Vista Ultimate content (but just not extra…)

ISO has published an official FAQ on ISO/IEC 29500 aka Office Open XML. The FAQ contains official answers from ISO to common questions such as: Why two standards? The ICT industry has a long history of developing multiple standards providing similar functionalities. After a period of co-existence, it is basically the market that decides which survives… What about contradictions? …but these can be taken care of during the maintenance of the standard.

During the Virtual Earth that I attended yesterday we were shown a really nice beta in which you easily can create your custom 3D Models for Virtual Earth called 3DVIA. The tool is a browser plugin which will open when you, from the Virtual Earth 3D mode right-click where you want to insert a new model and select Add a 3D Model. Since this is a beta it will take a while until the 3DVIA interface opens up.

Today I attended a really interesting event at the Microsoft Stockholm location about the Microsoft Virtual Earth Platform. The event was a result of large amount of questions from partners and customers and the bi-weekly webcasts by the VE team. During the day the team from UK presented the Virtual Earth platform including the Virtual Earth AJAX controls and the MapPoint web services as well as SQL Server 2008, which contains impressive spatial data management.

When .NET 2.0 was introduced, quite a long time ago, the whole System.Xml namespace was re-written, due to the poor performance of the System.Xml implementation. Despite the fact that the CLR 2.0 has been around for a few years there are still implementations using CLR 1.x and especially the XSL transformation bits, since that part is completely re-written and marked as obsolete. But note that they are only being marked as obsolete!

After a lot of turmoil the ECMA Office Open XML document format has been approved as an ISO/IEC standard - IS 29500. The news came out a day earlier than stated, due to a leak which made ISO to go public with the news. The process has not been easy for any part in the process and it has for sure made footprints in the standardization history. A lot of lobbying money as been spent (Politics matter) and a lot of committed people has engaged in verbal and written battles.

Welcome to the new design, I hope you like this one better than the previous. Personally I got tired of the old one and decided to make a change. Please leave a comment if it behaves bad or does not look good on any weird browser (I’ve tried it on FF3b4, Safari and IE8b1). Tomorrow I’ll be back for work after a month and a half of parental leave, which was so nice.

Today is the last day that the national bodies can change/update the votes on the Office Open Xml, DIS 29500, approval as an ISO standard. I really hope that enough NB’s change their votes so we can have OOXML as an ISO standard - I know we will all gain on this. To get a hint in which direction the result is going Andy Updegrove has set up a Vote Tracker, which he will continuously update until we have the final result.

Due to the large amount of users still using Internet Explorer 6 a campaign has started to save developers from having to making specific adaptations to IE6 - SaveTheDevelopers.org. The Save The Developers site contains a script that anyone can place on their web site and it will show a warning to IE6 users and urge them to upgrade to any of the four major browsers; Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari or Opera.

Apple have now released the final version of the Safari browser to Windows, which has not gone unnoticed since they are pushing it as a pre-selected optional update to QuickTime or iTunes. I still refuse to install iTunes on my machines so this approach from Apple is not new to me. As soon as there are any updates to QuickTime Apple recommends me to install iTunes, via Apple Software Update.

A few days ago I compared the JavaScript performance of Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 and Firefox 3 beta 4 and Firefox won that round pretty easy. Previous versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox have a bad history of consuming memory, which annoys me really much. You should not have to close and start your browser several times a day just to free memory, you should be able to start an instance in the morning and have that one running all day without having your memory trash.

Recently my laptop (DELL XPS m1210) has been really sluggish and I have had several BSOD’s when I have been working with it. I try to keep it pretty optimized and up to date so it will behave nice. I think I’ve read most of the optimize Vista articles and posts and I always keep track on which processes and services running and how much memory is used etc etc.

Mozilla Links has an article about the Firefox ultimate feature - Performance, in which they compare the JavaScript performance on different web browsers. Firefox 3 beta 4 as some really impressive JavaScript performance and outruns Internet Explorer 7 with about 700%. But the article did not test Internet Explorer 8 beta, which I think should have been there (at least for reference). Since the IE8 team claims the performance is so much better, and my feeling after a few days of IE8 usage says so I had to do some testing on my own.

ECMA International TC46 has updated the XML Paper Specification documents to working draft version 1.1. The new drafts can be found here as PDF or XPS and the changes can be found here (only as PDF :-) in the issue list. It seems like there are no major changes, mostly minor and editorial changes. I think we can expect some more changes when Office Open Xml has gone through the last steps of the ISO Fast-Track procedure, especially the references to the OPC.

Finally Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 has been released into the wild and of course I had to install it right away and try it out, and these are my first impressions. Installation The installation went smooth and just a reboot on a Windows Vista Ultimate machine. Speed This is by far the best experience so far. It starts really fast, it opens a new tab/windows faster and it renders the pages even faster.

Microsoft has published the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit site, since IE8 Beta will be available for download very soon. The site contains information on some of the various new and interesting stuff that IE8 will deliver for consumers and developers. Most of the links are currently not working as this post is written… Here are some of the highlights if you ignore all the improvements such as CSS compliance etc.

Breaking news! Good news! Finally! Microsoft and the Internet Explorer team has finally decided to change their previous decision and decided that Internet Explorer 8 will render pages using web standards by default, instead of having some backwards-compatible mode. To catch up and read more head on over to these posts/links. I guess the blogosphere will be flooded with this today… Microsoft Press Release on the subject IEBlog - Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8 Mary Jo Foley - Microsoft caves: ‘Super-standards’ mode to become IE 8 default This is by far the best news in ages from Microsoft (the new open Microsoft?

The Ballot Resolution Meeting, BRM, on DIS 29500 is currently taking place in Geneva and I’m really curious on what’s going on in down there in Switzerland. There has not leaked anything of interest, just some rumors and photos. I guess we all have to wait until the weekend and then we will be flooded with upset|angry|joyful|content|happy comments from the delegates.

The SDKs for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been updated and are now available at the Microsoft Download site. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Software Development Kit (SDK) (version 1.3) SharePoint Server 2007 SDK: Software Development Kit (version 1.3)This contains several updates and worth to notice is the Search sample protocol handler, Custom Content Source and the BDC editor.

A few days ago Microsoft dropped the news that they are increasing their openness regarding interoperability. This is great news for the world of software, even though everyone has their own opinions in this matter. What now have been made public is more than 30.000 pages of documentation of the various protocols used within Microsoft server products (Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007).

The Microsoft Office Binary File Formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt…) are now available for everyone under the Open Specification Promise, OSP. This is good news for all of you working with the traditional binary format, when for example moving them to the new Office Open Xml, OOXML, file format. The binary file formats have previously been available for download for a long time (under RAND-Z), but now you download them here.

I have several time stumbled upon clients who complain that their hyper linked Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) opens up in the web browser, Internet Explorer, instead of in their respectively Office application. In SharePoint document libraries these problems are solved using a special JavaScript that fires up the correct application, but today I had a client complaining about this problem when having Office documents linked in a Wiki. So I dug up some information from the Microsoft Knowledge Base on this matter and though I should share it (or at least have it written down for future reference).

The Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, also known as the Fab40, is a set of forty different templates that can be used within a SharePoint environment. These templates are good to use as a starter when creating new SharePoint sites or custom solutions and I recommend that you install them into your test or development environment. But the download contains 40 different .wsp and .stp files which has to be installed one at a time; either using STSADM or using the web interface.

You can now subscribe to this feed using Windows Live Alerts, just click the Windows Live Alerts logo and customize how you will receive the alert. This is another great Live service from the Microsoft Live team. You can sign up to create your own alerts here. Thanks to Michael Ganotti for the tip.

If you are about to plan capacity for your Microsoft SharePoint 2007 topology you can get great assistance from the Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007 and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Model. What is Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007? The Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) 2007 is a pre-deployment capacity planning tool for Microsoft Server products when creating distributed application deployments. The SCCP allows you to create a model of your hardware, network and applications/servers using a Model Editor.

The Release Notes for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 just appeared on the Microsoft Downloads Site. And just after this Microsoft posted a Media Alert: Microsoft Releases Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2008 to Manufacturing. Finally! Vista Service Pack 1 will be available “to customers in March” and Windows Server 2008 will “be available […] on March 1”. When will it be available on Microsoft Downloads or for MSDN/TechNet Subscribers?

Will Windows Vista Service Pack 1 be released to the web tonight? Let’s see how the download servers will handle this… Update (later this day): No need for any download servers…we will have to wait a month and a half before it will be available. Sigh…

Finally there is a possible workaround for the missing icons in the Vista Notification Area, see my post from march 2007. The workaround is documented in KB945011 - “System icons may not appear in the notification area on a Windows Vista-based computer until you restart the computer”. It’s the network, power and volume icons in the notification area that suffers from this problem. The KB article pins down the cause due to heavy processing on a Vista based machine during the first startup and that it typically not reoccur after the first reboot.

I found this pretty funny misspelling in the Office Server System Requirements today. Is it a tribute to Linus Torvalds?

A few months ago I wrote about the Architecture Journal Reader, a great demonstration app for a “occasionally-connected” Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF, application. I asked for source code and more samples like this, and sometimes dreams come true. Today Tim Sneath announced the public availability of a News Reader SDK and a Syndicated Client Experiences (SCE) Starter Kit and source code for it. At the same time the team created a MSDN Magazine reader application using the starter kit.

Here comes another “it sucks” post about McAfee anti-virus products. I recently was forced into using McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, due to domain policies at my new employer. This was not what I have wanted! For years I have been using Grisoft AVG both at work and at home (they have a great free product for personal use). AVG is great, I have not had a single virus or similar on any of my machines for six or seven years (that has not been intentionally installed - to see what will happen), and I’m sad to not use it on my primary working machine anymore.

Today ECMA International published the final responses to the more than 3.500 technical comments, submitted by the national bodies about four months ago, on Office Open XML (ISO/IEC DIS 29500). This is a milestone in the Office Open XML standardization and it is now up to the participating countries to review the answer on the comments and see if the agree or still disagree. The proposed dispositions are not public (they are only available to the BRM members) but ECMA has a summary of the major changes in their press release.

The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 contains a great new ASP.NET control called ListView. When using the ListView control you have much more control over how the output HTML will look like, which I think still is the main problem with the ASP.NET controls. To learn more about the ListView control, head over to Mustafa Basguns blog and read his excellent articles on the control. The ListView control is great when working with SharePoint (WSS3 and/or MOSS 2007) custom pages, since designing SharePoint pages which adapts into the current administration or takes advantage of all the CSS styles demands you to have pretty good control of your HTML.

Microsoft continues to strengthen their position in the Enterprise Search segment by acquiring the Norwegian Enterprise Search company Fast Search & Transfer (FAST). FAST is, according to Gartner, leader in the enterprise search segment together with Autonomy, where Microsoft was considered Tier 2 players. After releasing the Microsoft Search Server (MSS) and the MSS Express version, I’m glad Microsoft continues to emphasize on this interesting and “hot” area. Forrester stated after the Microsoft Search Server release that:

The year of 2007 is about to come to an end, and it has been a really exciting year. First of all I’ve had a great year with my family; my daughters turned four and one years old during 2007 and it’s so wonderful having them around giving me energy. My wife has been home with them the whole year and next year I will take a few months of parental leave and give them my full attention.

The ECMA Technical Committee 45, continues to comment the comments received during the Office Open XML ISO fast-track procedure and have now reached to two thirds of them. The response to comments are only sent to the national bodies The last set of proposed changes contains one major interesting thing; OOXML, or DIS 29500, is proposed to be a multi-part standard, which some national bodies suggested. The parts are: DIS 29500-1: WordProcessingML, SpreadsheetML, PresentationML and SharedML specifications DIS 29500-2: is the Open Packaging Convention, OPC DIS 29500-3: the extensibility specification This is not a big shocker, I imagined it coming, but anyway I’m glad they made the change(proposition to change).

Microsoft is currently in the middle of the process of creating the next generation Microsoft web browser, with the fantastic name - Internet Explorer 8. A few days ago, the IE team reports, the internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 browser test, which is used to ensure proper support for web standards. This is not the case with IE7, take a look at the picture on the right, it should render to a nice smiley…

Not only the Office clients and servers got patched yesterday, Microsoft also released an update to Visual SourceSafe 2005. The update contains a number of hotfixes which includes performance, usability and stability improvements, as well as improvements to compatibility with Windows Vista and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Download it here (KB943847)

Not only the Office 2007 clients got updated to Service Pack 1 today, Service Pack 1 is also out for the Office Server family and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Here are some of the downloads… Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 1 - for new installs Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 - for upgrades Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Packs Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1 - SharePoint Server, Project Server, Forms Server and Groove Server Microsoft Office Server Language Pack 2007 Service Pack 1 Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 Service Pack 1 All are 32-Bit Editions, you can find links to the 64-bits in the instructions.

The Microsoft Office Online now contains links to the Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1. The links are not currently working, but I will keep you updated. Here are the links: Office 2007 Service Pack 1 Visio 2007 Service Pack 1 Project 2007 Service Pack 1 Update: You can find all the updates and changes in this Excel. Let’s hope for a faster Outlook 2007 experience…Update: It feels faster at first glance…

Remote Debugging is a great feature to use, especially when you work with virtual machines. It allows you to develop and debug locally but have the code running on another machine, virtual or physical. Microsoft SharePoint can’t be installed on a Windows Vista or XP workstation, but needs to be installed on Windows Server 2003 or 2008, so the general recommendations has been for developers to have either Windows Server as their main OS or have a virtual machine with Windows Server.

For the last year I have had really annoying security troubles when working with documents in SharePoint (2003 or 2007, WSS or MOSS) on my Windows Vista machine with Office 2007. Every time I have opened up a document for editing the Office applications have asked me to log in to access the document. I have been able to press Cancel three times, but then the document is opened up in read-only mode.

It has been quite calm on the Office Open Xml OOXML scene for a while, but now the BRM on DIS 29500 meeting is approaching in late February of 2008 and the information on the process is increasing. This time I think the ongoing discussion is on a more “nicer” level than right after the ISO vote. Here are some interesting readings that I have read the last few weeks, that I would like to share:

Microsoft has released a new Windows Presentation Foundation demo sample that is a reader application for The Architecture Journal. The Architecture Journal is a quarterly online magazine focused on IT-architecture and contains nice articles and gives you some good reading. It is available online and as PDF (why not XPS?). The Architecture Journal Reader is a WPF sample, very much like the New York Times Reader that was one of the first killer-apps for WPF, that you can use for offline reading of The Architecture Journal.

Visual Studio 2008 is released and MSDN subscribers can download it, which I’m currently doing. .NET Framework 3.5 is also final and available for download. Bye bye Visual Studio 2005…

Neowin.net has posted a picture of suggestions of features for future versions of Windows, gathered from the Windows Early Feedback program. The list contains the top 61 suggestions which is to be presented to the Windows 7 team. I think it’s great that Microsoft tries to listen to the community, but a lot of these suggestions should have been in Windows by now or earlier! Just take a look at these few examples:

On Monday TechNet Edge will open at http://edge.technet.com. The Edge is a (social) network for Microsoft IT Professionals to connect with people at Microsoft “in an informal way”, as Jeff Sandquist says in one of the first forum posts on the site. There are no content so far, but the ReadMe.txt states that the site will contain screen casts, interviews and a discussion forums. It’s basically the same as Channel 9, but this time for IT-professionals.

Microsoft has announced their new enterprise search setup of server products, which include the Microsoft Search Server 2008 together with an Express version, that are free (currently a release candidate). This new server product is an evolution of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search. This is great news since the Search Server (MSS) has great possibilities to integrate to other search engines or data sources (something that you only could do with some heavy BDC programming using MOSS 2007 Enterprise Edition).

The great blogging application Windows Live Writer has left the beta phase and is now released, as a part of the Windows Live Wave 2, with version 12.0.1366.1026. Below is the previous About screen and as you can see there are no Beta remark anymore… I have not yet found any information on what’s new or what’s updated, but I guess we will soon here about it! Update 2007-11-07: The Writer team has written a post about this new release “Windows Live Writer: Out of Beta”.

When using BitLocker or encrypting your file system with EFS on Windows Vista, you will be using certificates and/or passwords. If these certificates or passwords are lost the chance that you loose the information and data on the disks that are protected is very likely. The certificates can of course be backed up on removable media or similar. But storing these kind of crucial information bits on a remote location is of course the best way and you should do that.

Apple just released their new version of Max OS X (10.5) called Leopard, which of course has a real neat user interface and really cool experience - the Apple trademark. I have seen a lot of people moving on to the Mac platform the last years, but then we talk about personal and niche users and so far the Apple OS X share is about 4% compared to XP’s 80% and Vistas 8%.

Finally the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras team released the remaining 19 language packs for Windows Vista Ultimate. The language packs allows Vista Ultimate users to easily switch between different languages in the Vista user interface. The language packs are maybe not the most exciting feature for Windows Vista and I believe that this should not just be an exclusive add-on for high-end users (the ones who buy the, as of today, very expensive Ultimate version) of Vista.

I’m currently in progress of making the third version of msfeedicon, a free plugin to the Windows RSS platform and Internet Explorer 7 feeds. The new version, 3.0, will include an updated interface as well as some requested features and some major changes that msfeedicon users have asked/begged me about. This is how the notification window currently looks like. I will need a few, 3 or 4 to start with, beta testers to make sure that I have a good release once it’s final, please contact me if you are interested and explain why you should be one of the beta testers.

Yesterday I wrote about Internet Explorer 7 starting to behave like mad when reading feeds with the built-in Feeds functionality. This morning when reading my feeds I specifically studied the usage of GDI Objects in the Task Manager, and these are my findings: GDI Objects Action 1.656 After started IE7 and watched first feed 6.037 After reading about 20 different feeds, in the same IE7 tab 811 Browsed to a non-feed site in the same tab

Internet Explorer 7 has great RSS reader features based on the Windows RSS Platform but I have seen it degrade over the last few months as my number of subscribed feeds and new posts has increased. Every morning when I get to the office I have a few hundred of unread items to go through, see sample statistics from msfeedicon to the right. I have a pretty modern Dell XPS m1210 machine with 2 GB of memory and as I start reading these feeds Windows starts to trash and finally totally goes nuts.

Today Microsoft announced that it will be extending Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with new enterprise social computing capabilities, by adding features from the partners NewsGator (Press release) and Atlassian. SharePoint Connector for Confluence This connector will integrate the Atlassian product called Confluence which is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge. The connector is allowing you to create more advanced wikis and blogs than the standard features of SharePoint or you can include SharePoint lists into Confluence, it even allows you to search both SharePoint content and documents as well as the Confluence content in one location.

The Microsoft SharePoint blog has a new post called “Known issue: Office 2007 on Windows Vista prompts for user credentials when opening documents in a SharePoint 2007 site”. The article is a result of many reported support cases on this issue and contains a few possible (I repeat possible) workarounds. We have had this problem ourselves and on several customers. In some cases these workarounds really work, but most of the times not.

Certificate problems with Windows Mobile and Active Sync seems to be a pretty common cause of not being able to synchronize you mobile phone with Microsoft Exchange, but despite the number of web pages and posts found around the net there are no simple solutions or shortcuts. I previously had some problems installing my certificate on to my Windows Mobile 5 phone, but now it’s upgraded to Windows Mobile 6, which has support for handling certificates.

A few links on XML Paper Specification that I stumbled upon the last few days. View XPS documents using Acrobat 8 The XPS Review Blog has an article that Acrobat 8 (8.1 to be precise) can be used to open XPS documents. I have not tried it, since I don’t own Acrobat 8, but it sounds great. Note: it’s not supported in Acrobat Reader 8.1. A new set of XPS tools from SANAtech SANAtech is has released a set of tools for XPS.

The news that Microsoft will be releasing the .NET 3.5 framework libraries source code for everyone. The code is under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL) which means that the code is available for you to use as a reference or for debugging, not to modify or extend (if you simplify it…a lot), i.e. it’s not open source. What’s in it for us? Scott Guthrie has all the goodies in his post, where he explains how this release of source code integrates into Visual Studio 2008, and how you can debug into (for example) the ASP.

Yes, you heard it right, Sandi Hardmeier (IE MVP) brings us the story that today Microsoft will re-release Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP. The interesting stuff is that the re-release will not have any Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) check during installation. My humble guess is that Microsoft is trying to get all non-legal copies of Windows XP to update to the more secure version of Internet Explorer. I have not seen any official words yet on this and it’s not available on Windows Update, but I’ll update this post as soon as I get more news.

Microsoft has released three more updates for Windows Vista mainly targeting performance, stability and reliability, one thing that Microsoft and Vista currently lacks. Service Pack 1 is in beta, but will not be ready for launch for several months, but to get get back some credibility for Windows Vista and to get the sales back on track I think Microsoft will continuously release these kind of updates. And of course they will get a wider target area for testing them.

Joost is now for everyone, no more invitations to get your hands on it! It’s still a beta but called Joost 1.0 beta and it’s getting better and more importantly it’s getting more channels and content (more than 15.000 shows). So if you have not tried Joost, head on over and download it. The one thing I think is missing, is a seamless Media Center Integration - wouldn’t that be something?

A few weeks ago I met a friend of a friend at a party who started to work for Accenture as a programmer a few months a go. After some talking we started discussion jobs, and I was wondering what she did at Accenture; what kind of development and projects. As a programmer I was eager to know what she was programming and stuff like that, I know that she had studied C++ at the university and that she had worked with that for a while.

Barry Goffe, Director of Windows Vista Ultimate, has now responded to the last days of angry posts on the non-existing upcoming Extras for Windows Vista Ultimate. In his post he announces that Windows DreamScene now is officially released. I really hope that this is not a release that has been forced out from the Redmond buildings, due to the complaints, but instead something that actually works smooth. The language packs are still on delay - let them wait until they are ready, but keep us informed (not only when you are forced to!

Today the Office 2003 Service Pack 3 popped up in my Windows Update (Vista Ultimate) as an important update. Duh! I have only installed Office 2007, as far as I know!? But after a check in Programs and Features of Vista I found out that I sometime installed the Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components and Office 2003 SP3 applies to the OWC. So the update was not for Office 2007…

The summer is now officially over and there has not been any Windows Vista Ultimate Extras as promised! In July, the Ultimate team the Ultimate Team directory promised us a that the remaining language packs and DreamScene would be released, so far no trace of them! Windows Vista Ultimate with the Ultimate Extras was a smart way to get consumers to pay a whole lot of extra money, about 60% more than the Home Premium version, to get nothing!

I’m really happy that CNET Download.com has reviewed my application msfeedicon, a free RSS plugin to the Windows RSS platform. The rating is 4 stars of possible 5 and here is the review: If you cant get through the day without checking your RSS feed subscriptions, you’ll be glad to know about Msfeedicon: It perks up and simplifies Internet Explorer’s RSS feature by adding some functionality. There’s one caveat: The tagging feature described by the publisher didn’t work in our tests.

The standardization of the XML Paper Specification (XPS) as an ECMA International standard proceeds. Adrian Ford reports that the initial working draft has been published on the ECMA web site. There are no major changes as of now to the original specification by Microsoft, but rather some editorial changes, read the latest draft here (available as PDF or XPS). Lets hope that the ECMA TC has learned from the recent Office Open XML ISO failure and get rid of all these non-issues that most of the OOXML comments really was about.

The net is crowded with SharePoint blogs, including this one, and I have missed one thing - information for the end-users. I think that there is a great void in knowledge for SharePoint users out there,for example how to use SharePoint as an end-user in the most efficient way, how to do the simple stuff such as creating sites or lists etc. Today I stumbled upon “Get the ‘Point” by Suzanne Ross, which has a focus on the SharePoint end-users.

 A new developers community for Windows Live developers - Via Windows Live - has just been launched. The community site contains sections about Silverlight, Live ID, Live Writer, Messenger, Alerts and all the other Live products. As of now the content is quite thin, but it’s up to you/us to fill it with useful information. Just register and then start using it. The site has a Wiki, a Gallery, Articles and more.

If so, then you have the chance of winning a grand prize by Microsoft. Microsoft has announced a Windows Media Center - Ultimate Install Contest in which they are looking for the best (finest and most creative) installation of Windows Vista Ultimate Media Center. If it is you, then send in your submission before November 1st, 2007 (for where to send the stuff, look at the link above). The winner will be announced at Electronic House (EH) Expo Fall 2007.

Finally Microsoft has released Silverlight 1.0 - Microsofts new streaming media platform which aims to compete with Adobe Flash. Silverlight is a cross-platform and cross-browser plugin with focus on delivering high performing graphical web interfaces, with support for Windows and Mac OS. Download the final release here. The download page still says Silverlight 1.0 RC , but the RC will automatically update to the final version. For Linux there is a project under the Mono umbrella called Moonlight which will provide a Linux implementation of Silverlight.

ECMA Office Open XML (ISO/IEC DIS 29500) will not get an approval from ISO, as of now. This is what almost everyone expected after the last week of turbulence. Now we can hopefully look forward to some constructive work on all the recieved comments on the specification from ECMA and Microsoft. This will in the end make a better OOXML specification and I hope it will be approved in february of 2008.

Yes, you read it right! Microsoft now offers a royalty-free file format program for the Microsoft Office Binary File Format (the old .doc, .xls and .ppt used in previous versions of Microsoft Office). Microsoft Office 2007 is built-upon the Office Open XML file format which is an ECMA International standard, and an ISO proposal (you have all read about it). But some of us still have application and/or customers that heavily rely on the old binary format.

When I was installing a new Windows SharePoint Services 3 site today I stumpled upon an error I’ve never seen in SharePoint before. It was when I was trying to add new users in the People and Groups administration. It was not a “normal” error page but instead a HTTP 403 Forbidden message was thrown when going to the /_layouts/aclinv.aspx page. This was on a brand new server instance, with everything patched and up to date.

It is now confirmed that Sweden will abstain from voting for the ECMA Open Office XML specification (DIS 29500). After the annullation of the result taken on monday the working group could not agree on having a new meeting before the ISO voting procedure. Some of the members did not like to have a new vote - guess who? So this is the end of the SIS vote for this time.

I just recieved new information (in Swedish) that Sweden will not vote Yes for DIS29500 Office Open XML, which I previously reported on. Sweden will instead abstain from voting in the ISO vote on September 2nd. The SIS board had a meeting this afternoon and annulled the previous result due to that one of the commitee members had participated with more than one vote. I do not know which member, but I figure we all soon will know it…

The NiXPS guys has done it again, they have created an XPS viewer for the Mac platform. Read all about it on their blog. The XPS viewer is a part of their upcoming version of the NiXPS platform, which is a cross-platform application for inspecting and manipulating XPS files. It is currently in beta but I think that this new version with the improved XPS previewing abilities will really boost the application.

Today was the meeting when the Swedish standardisation organisation, SIS, was to vote on the Office Open XML standard. I have observed this procedure, but not actively participated in it since the first working group meeting a few months ago. At that time it felt pretty comfortable and the Yes vote was in reach. When this day approached both camps, the pro Office Open XML team and the no-sayers both gathered their forces for the final battle.

The XPS site at www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps just had an extreme makeover, to fit in to the new Microsoft website. It is basically the same content but easier to read and look on. It seems like not all is done yet, some pages still have the old layout, so I expect some more improvements/additions… The most interesting thing is the new XPS Technology Showcase part which contains references of XPS enabled hardware and software.

Windows Vista contains nice functionality for reporting problems on your machine to Microsoft and to retrieve solutions for your problems using the Problem Reports and Solutions feature. To take advantage of this feature and to report problems or check for solutions you have to either enable the functionality, default behaviour, or do it manually. To access the Problem Reports and Solutions center open up the Control Panel and navigate to System and Maintenance and then click on Problem Reports and Solutions.

Windows Vista is currently suffering from some major issues with performance and reliability when for example resuming from standby, when you are using graphic intensive applications (read playing games :-) or when you are copying files (especially over a network). As of today Microsoft has two new updates for Windows Vista targets some performance and reliability issues. Update for Windows Vista (KB938194) This one covers some cases when Vista stops responding due to display driver problems as well as some other stuff.

istartedsomething dug up something interesting from the Steve Ballmer presentation at the Microsoft Show and Tell 2007. It’s a roadmap for Microsoft products for the fiscal year of 08 and beyond! Some things caught my attention: Expression Studio V2 - there will be a new version of the Expression series pretty soon Microsoft Tellme - this can be really cool. Windows Server 2008 Update Release and Service Pack 1 - wonder what nice stuff they have in the pipeline for these releases… Microsoft Surface - it will be a real product and is not just a showcase!

Microsoft Windows Vista has a whole lot of new and exciting stuff and some things that may be disturbing (at least when you’re starting with Vista), like the new structure of the folders; X:\Documents and Settings has been shortened down to X:\Users which is good but then everything you are used to are changed (well almost anyway), My Documents is now called just Documents and this folder does not longer contains for example My Music, which is moved to a new location, one step up, with the new name Music.

Here are some interesting links on the (summer) hot OOXML vs ODF discussion. INCITS issues a ballot of “yes” with comments by Doug Mahugh South Africa votes No with comments on the standardisation of Open XML Brian Jones comments on Setting a New Standard by Jason Brooks Wouter van Vugt announces his pocket-sized Open XML book and tells us about the Dutch ISO/IEC standardisaton of Open XML

The OOXML versus ODF discussions are getting more intense and either side lays out the same arguments why the other one are better than the other. Some arguments are valid - but some are definitley not! Why do the ODF side always use the “it’s to much to read” argument!? Just take a look at Andrew Updegroves open letter to the state of Massachusetts, two of his five points is about this argument!

It has been awfully quiet from the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras team; no new Extras, no new hints on upcoming Extras…no nothing… Yesterday we finally got some good news, nothing exciting really but a sign of life from the Extras team. Their current plan is to ship the remaining lanugage packs and a non-beta release of DreamScene, but not until they all meet the quality requirements. There are nothing said about the upcoming extras, only that they “plan to ship a collection” of extras “over the next couple of years”.

Since the news broke out that XML Paper Specification was submitted to ECMA International bloggers and authors has gone wild, here is a collection of reflections and reactions on it. Most reactions come from the say no to Microsoft team. Andy Updegrove declares “game over” for open standards and in my opinion; his post and thoughts declares game over for innovation! War and PDF: Microsoft submits XPS to standards body - ars technica

ECMA International has started a technical committee, TC46 - XML Paper Specification (XPS), to “produce a formal standard for an XML-based electronic paper format”. One of the points in the TC46 programme is to consider a submission of the XPS format as an ISO standard. This is really good news to all users of the XPS format and is really vital if XPS is going to be able to compete with the PDF format (which already is an ISO standard, ISO 19005-1:2005/ISO/DIS 32000).

I have recieved five invitations for the alpha of Freebase, the first five comments on this post with a valid e-mail adress will be invited. Freebase is “a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone”. Everyone are allowed to edit and add data and topics, categorized into domains, types and instances. Read more about it on the Freebase FAQ. Freebase is like a more structured Wikipedia.

I found an update to the Microsoft XPS Essentials Pack on Microsoft Download Center today. It does not look like an update but on Vista you will get an Windows Update (.msu) package and when I run it it says that it does not apply to my machine. The download link points to the same link that the Essentials Pack was available on before, but it has a new published date (6/19/2007).

NiXPS v1.0 has been released and is now available as a 30 day trial or for purchase. It’s available for the Windows and Mac OS/X platform. NiXPS is an XML Paper Specification, XPS, tool which can be used for inspection and manipulation XPS documents. The main features are extraction of pages, fonts and images from the document, merging of documents and find and replace. The other major feature is an inspection tool for examining the XPS document structure and XML as well as editing the XML.

Yet another It sucks post! Yesterday I installed the Apple Safari browser on my Windows Vista machine. I thought that it would be nice to use the fastest web browser in the universe to do some application/site compatibility testing without having to have a Mac OS/X system. Yes it is a beta, so I won’t complain about all the bugs and rendering problems (it might of course be the sites I’m testing but in some cases I don’t think so) - I will instead complain on the ugly look and appearance of it.

Windows Home Server, WHS, is a great addition to the Windows Server family, a product that I have wanted to have for a really long time. It will really help me connect my machines at home and provide great features to the connected home and make me share my digital media easier between Media Centers, laptops etc. I have hoped that I could turn my current Media Center, a quite powerful machine, into a Home Server later this year once it is time to build my own new Media Center.

My favorite Windows Explorer replacement has finally been released in it’s 7th version. Total Commander, which much remainds of the classic old Norton Commander, is a fast and intuitive file and folder manager by Christian Ghisler. It performs much faster than Explorer and has nice built-in features such as packing (ZIP, RAR…), FTP support, multi-renaming, quick-access to common directories… you name it! Version 7 contains a number of new features and fixes, read more about them in my previous post on the subject or on the Total Commander home page.

I previously blogged about the lack of Office 2007 file format support in Windows Mobile 6. Today Jason Langridge revealed that you will not longer need any third party application for this - but instead Microsoft will provide an update to Microsoft Office Mobile 2007 with support for the new Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx). A free update will be available for Windows Mobile 6 and 5 devices and all new shipped devices will have it in the ROM, all starting in Q3 of 2007.

The Windows Media Center Components Database is now live! MCE components is a site which targets Windows Media Center self-builders with help to choose components and to see how the components work together. To help build the database you can add your own system and grade it to help others out. There are currently about 100 systems entered into the database and it will keep growing, as long as you help out.

Microsoft has released a CTP for Microsoft SDK for Open XML Formats, which can be downloaded here. The SDK contains a strongly typed library, built on top of System.IO.Packaging namespace, for creating documents based on the Open XML Format. Great, now we don’t have to use the System.Xml.XmlWriter to create Office 2007 documents. Here is a sample on how to write out the number of characters in a Word 2007 document:

You probably already have read all about the new beta of Windows Live Writer. I thought I should write some lines about some of the new really nice features. Linking WLW contains an improved linking interface. You can easily link to your previous posts or to a link in the Link Glossary, using the Link to button_,_ which allows you to write down (remember) a number of links that you often use in your blog posts.

NVIDIA has relaunched it’s driver section and now includes a tool that you can use to scan your machine for the correct NVIDIA graphics driver. To find the correct driver head over to the NVIDIA Driver Downloads section, and either choose to automatically find your driver or make a manual search. The manual search works fine and I find the correct driver directly for my GeForce 6600: The automatic uses an ActiveX control to scan your machine and locates your NVIDIA graphics driver.

I start every morning on the commuter train checking out the Technology news on Tailrank, using my HTC TyTN (at http://tech.mobile.tailrank.com/) , to see what has happened in the world of technology during the night. Most of the cool stuff happens when it is night in Sweden… But now the technology news has been down for days, it has happened in the past that it has been down for a day or so, but now I have not been able to read the news on Tailrank since monday.

The MSDN site is currently changing how it looks and works, go check it out. Apart from the actual change of colors and layout the new tabbed interface is the biggest user interface change. Navigation is far much better with this and with the breadcrumbs. The search is the most improved feature, now with auto-complete and more indexed content. The MSDN library tree seems to be much faster, really nice for users (like me) who uses the online help instead of the full DVD install of MSDN library (I always forget to update it when a new DVD arrives).

To this site: www.wictorwilen.se! This site and blog has been up an running for a year now and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I’m really looking forward to the next one! The number of subscribers is constantly climbing and the highlight for me has been the msfeedicon application and the Dissecting XPS series. You, the readers and web searchers, have these top five articles: Add Office 2007 icons to SharePoint 2003 Windows Live Writer 1.

Delay has done it - a Silverlight “proof-of-concept” XPS viewer! Head over to his post and try it out, this might be the start of the cross-platform XPS viewer that we all long for…

Chris Lanier, Media Center MVP, just blogged about a new website which collects information on the components of Media Center PC’s, called Media Center Components. The aim of the website is to collect information on which Media Center components that play nice together. Take your time to fill out the form and help building a nice database for Media Center PC’s.

This part of the Dissecting XPS series will focus on some XML Paper Specification tools that are available as of today. The success of XPS, vs PDF and others, are really depending on the number of supported devices, operating systems and tools. Right now the XPS support is limitied in applications outside the Microsoft Windows sphere, but there are plans for other operating systems. (Maybe Silverlight will boost this with the CoreCLR).

DataViz have released a new version of DocumentsToGo for Windows Mobile with support for viewing Office 2007 files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx etc). This is great, I have not used DocumentsToGo since my Sony-Ericsson p910i days but instead relied on the Office Mobile suite embedded in Windows Moblie 5. The current version only supports viewing of Office 2007 documents as of today, but if you purchase the application you will get free upgrades and the coming versions will support creation and editing of Office 2007 documents.

This part of the Dissecting XPS series will introduce the XPS parts of the Microsoft.NET 3.0 framework and where you should look to get started creating XML Paper Specification documents. Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF The XPS classes is a part of the Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF, and is found under the System.Windows.Xps namespace. The Open Packaging Convention classes, used to manipulate the packages is found under the System.IO.Packaging namespace. To get you started with creating XPS documents with the .

msfeedicon version 2.4 is now available for download. This version does not contain any new functionality only some corrected bugs from version 2.3. Windows XP users are highly recommended to install this new version. Read more and download it at msfeedicon home page.

SoloSEO Review: SoloSEO, is an easy web application containing a set of tools to manage your search engine optimization, SEO. I decided to give it a try to measure how my site is seen by the search engines and how well it performed. When starting with SoloSEO you will get a dashboard containing a checklist with tasks which you should complete to gain full benefit of the service. The tasks helps you getting started with the tools and let’s you get aquainted with the application.

I initially had some trouble installing Microsoft Silverlight on Windows Vista. It all installed perfectly without any warnings (not during setup nor in the Windows logs), but I could not get the Silverlight 1.0 beta applications to run. I guess that it had something to do with having installed WPF/E betas installed. To get it to work this is what I did… 1: Start a command prompt using elvated privilegies

Silverlight (formerly known as WPF/E) is heavily discussed right now, and I really like what I see.. I’m not going to dig in deep here instead I recommend you to read Scott Hanselman’s post on the .NET Ecosystem which I find great. He has put it all into context and thats when I get really excited…