Geoff Varosky's Blog

It was a pleasure to be back in New York City, speaking at my second SharePoint Saturday event there. This event was entirely devoted to SharePoint 2010, and here were a lot of eager attendees, hungry for information on the new version.

Information on the event can be found here: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ny

Michael Lotter did a bang-up job putting this event together, as he always does. A big thanks to him, and everyone who was able to lend him a hand in putting this event together. More thanks to all of the attendees of the event (especially those of you who came to my session!). And of course, a big thanks to the sponsors, who fund these events and make them possible.

I was also in town participating in the SharePoint 2010 Developer Ignite training which took place from Monday to Wednesday. Ignite training is put on by Microsoft to ramp up their partners with new releases. This worked out great, as it gave me a day off to do some touristy stuff around the city, which I have never done, even though I had visited there many times. So, I did the “Top of the Rock” Rockefeller Center observation deck thing, and even did the NBC Studios tour. The SNL set is much smaller in person! And a good friend even drive me through Times Square at night. So, 3 major touristy things under my belt. I am quite pleased!

Ok, so you didn’t come here to listen to what I did outside of SharePoint, you came here for my slide deck from the event. Thanks for dropping by at least! Below you will find my slides embedded via SlideShare. Please, if you would, leave me a few comments below if you were able to make it to the session, and let me know what you thought. We ran a little over on time, which worked out well, because my session was right before lunch, so we could bleed over a bit, and there was still enough pizza to go around.

If you have any questions on any of the materials – please, fire away in the comments section below.

In addition to the session – since all we did was write just a little code, I won’t bore you with my “Hello, World!” Visual Web Part code. However, I will show you my snippets which I used throughout my session, to save all of you from watching me spell-check myself.

Also, more information on SharePoint Server 2010 can be seen on my blog under the categories of SharePoint 2010 Beta 2, SharePoint Designer 2010, and SharePoint 2010.

PowerShell commands to enable the Developer Dashboard

   1: [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService.DeveloperDashboardSettings.DisplayLevel='OnDemand';

   2: [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService.DeveloperDashboardSettings.Update();

PowerShell command to get a listing of the URL, Author, and Title of a Web

   1: Get-SPweb -site http://whatsnewin2010.dev.grace-hunt.com | ft Url, Title, Author

PowerShell command to get the Title of all of the lists within a Web

   1: Get-SPweb -site http://whatsnewin2010.dev.grace-hunt.com | foreach { $_.Lists | ft $_.Url, Title }

PowerShell command to get the listing of all of the Resource settings for the User Code service (Sandbox Solutions)

   1: [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPUserCodeService]::Local.ResourceMeasures

PowerShell commands to enable the User Code service to run on a Domain Controller (local image development for Sandbox Solutions)

   1: $acl = Get-Acl HKLM:\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\ComputerName

   2: $person = [System.Security.Principal.NTAccount]"Users"

   3: $access = [System.Security.AccessControl.RegistryRights]::FullControl

   4: $inheritance = [System.Security.AccessControl.InheritanceFlags]"ContainerInherit, ObjectInherit"

   5: $propagation = [System.Security.AccessControl.PropagationFlags]::None

   6: $type = [System.Security.AccessControl.AccessControlType]::Allow

   7: $rule = New-Object System.Security.AccessControl.RegistryAccessRule($person, $access, $inheritance, $propagation, $type)

   8: $acl.AddAccessRule($rule)

   9: Set-Acl HKLM:\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\ComputerName $acl

PowerShell commands to view the Property Bag of a Web

   1: $web = get-spweb -site http://whatsnewin2010.dev.grace-hunt.com

   2: $web.AllProperties | ft

I will be speaking at the Western Massachusetts Microsoft Technology Users Group on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010.

I will be speaking on Creating Custom Actions within SharePoint.

Session Abstract

Custom Actions control features in SharePoint such as the Edit Control Block, the Site Actions menu, toolbars, and the links within the Site Settings page. Learn how to leverage Custom Actions to extend the SharePoint User Interface. This session will describe the basics of Custom Actions, a demonstration to build one or more and apply them to a site in SharePoint, as well as provide resources for additional information.

Event Details

Start Time: 6PM EST
End Time: 8PM EST
Location: MassMutual Learning & Conference Center at 350 Memorial Drive, Chicopee, MA

For more details, please visit: http://www.mstech.org/Events/tabid/109/ctl/Details/Mid/544/ItemID/245/Default.aspx

More information on the Western Mass Microsoft Technology Users Group

The Western Mass Microsoft Technology Users Group brings together people interested in Microsoft technologies.  We are C# and VB.NET programmers, Sharepoint gurus, ASP.NET developers, commercial component developers, IT staffers, enterprise database programmers, entrepreneurs and novices.

We come together to learn, meet people, ask questions and create solutions.  Our meetings always feature a speaker, interesting conversation, swag giveaways, free pizza and plenty of time to network and socialize.  Now, we have this online community which we hope will facilitate collaboration between meetings and serve as a growing knowledge store and history of the group.

We regularly have between 20 - 35 members who come to our meetings with a wide range of interests and abilities.  We usually have 1 or 2 meetings per month.  We host developer oriented meetings on the first Tuesday of the month from 6pm - 8pm, and we host IT PRO oriented meetings on the third Tuesday of the month.  Actual times can be found on our EVENTS page.  Meetings are held at MassMutual Learning & Conference Center at 350 Memorial Drive, Chicopee, MA.  Click here for a map.

Please join us!  We are always interested in new people and new ideas.  The first step is to Register so you will receive meeting notices and be able to participate in this online community.  If you have questions prior to joining our group, please email Dan Caron.

Also, we are always seeking speakers to present relevant topics to our group.  If you are interested, please email Dan Caron.

I hope to see some of you there!

The third meeting of the Global SharePoint Users Group will commence on Tuesday evening, February 2nd, from 7PM – 8PM EST.

This meeting, Paul Schaeflein will be talking on PowerShell for SharePoint 2010.

Session Abstract: “PowerShell is the new administrative environment and scripting language for Microsoft's server products. It provides tremendous benefits to developers as well. This session will show how to leverage PowerShell to understand the SharePoint API; how to use PowerShell to manage development and QA environments and how to create helpful (and efficient) scripts for general use.“

For more information on the event, go to http://www.gspug.org

To register for this event, please go here: http://gspugfeb2010.eventbrite.com/

This is a virtual online users group that meets via Live Meeting, so you don’t even have to go anywhere, or, skip any work – there is no reason for you not to attend!

I am pleased to announce that registration is now open for SharePoint Saturday Boston! Register today to reserve your spot. Registration is on a first-come, first-serve basis.

What's SharePoint Saturday Boston?

SharePoint Saturday Boston is a free community‐focused SharePoint event dedicated to educating and engaging members of the local technical community. SharePoint Saturday draws upon the expertise of local SharePoint IT professionals, developers and solutions architects who come together to share their real world experiences, lessons learned, best practices, and general knowledge with other like‐minded individuals.

When is SharePoint Saturday Boston?

Saturday, February 27th, 2010
8:45AM - 6:00PM

Where will SharePoint Saturday Boston be held?

SharePoint Saturday Boston will be held at the Microsoft Waltham office at 201 Jones Rd., Sixth Floor, Waltham, MA 02451

Who is organizing this event?

Talbott Crowell, Pradeepa Siva, Michael Lotter, Chris Bowen, Geoff Varosky

How do I register?

Registration is limited and based on first come first serve basis.  http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=145192

I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter recently regarding BLOB (Binary Large OBject) storage in SQL. In fact, people have been talking about it many years. Thankfully, there are quotas which can be enforced, however, you still need to store BLOBs (photos, images, videos, documents – basically any attachments or files uploaded into SharePoint are BLOBs) in SharePoint, and SQL disk space can be, and is expensive.

Now, there are a lot of companies, some who are partners with Grace-Hunt, which make use of functionality within the SharePoint API to store files out of band from SQL, maintaining these BLOBs just as if they were in SQL. One of those companies, StoragePoint. They have a free tool, called BLOBulator, which is definitely geared towards their product, however, it is a great tool to peer into your SharePoint environment, and see how much space you actually can save by using an out of band BLOB storage solution such as theirs.

This is not a marketing effort – however, more of a reference point for myself to remember this tool, and share it with others who may have some use for it.

Almost daily, I am discovering new things with SharePoint 2010. Today, I was working away on my presentation for SharePoint Saturday NYC coming up in a few days, putting on the finishing touches, and, I came across this gem in SharePoint Designer 2010.

When you have a site open in SharePoint Designer 2010, in the ribbon, all the way over to the right, you’ll see a button for Site Options

Click it, go ahead, it’s not going to bite.

Now, the first tab you are opened to in this new window is labeled Parameters. What it should be labeled as however, is Property Bag. as that is exactly what it is.

Once just a bucket for developers to play with, the property bag is now exposed in SharePoint Designer 2010. Which is awesome. Now, properties which you were storing there for your own use, can be extended out to Site Administrators, and Power Users to make use of! Awesome, yes. Also, dangerous. If you have applications which rely on the Property Bag, you have now been warned. Others can access, change, view, and delete the data within the property bag.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming…

Stefan Goßner, a senior escalation engineer for SharePoint and MCMS, recently posted about this, and I needed to share this with my readers as well. His article is below, and it is a good read. If you are on SP1 for WSS and MOSS, you will need to have SP2 installed by April 28th, 2010, to maintain support from Microsoft. More information can be found in Stefan’s blog post here: http://blogs.technet.com/stefan_gossner/archive/2010/01/07/is-your-sharepoint-2007-farm-already-on-service-pack-2-if-not-read-this.aspx

With all of the new and improved features in SharePoint 2010, one which we cannot overlook, is how access for SharePoint Designer is handled. After SharePoint Designer 2007 went from a paid program to a freely available download, there was a lot of buzz around the community and the blogosphere about governance related to SharePoint Designer 2010. Woody Windischman, who "wrote the book” on SharePoint Designer, has some great information on this over at this blog, The Sanity Point. His article around governance can be found here: http://www.thesanitypoint.com/archive/2009/04/03/on-babies-bathwater-and-sharepoint-designer.aspx

Robert Bogue [SharePoint MVP], also had a good post on the topic, which can be found here: http://www.thorprojects.com/blog/archive/2008/02/12/sharepoint-designer-and-governance.aspx

With SharePoint 2010, there are no obscure methods or actions required to limit SharePoint Designer access, they’ve moved it into the Site Collection Administration!

To view/modify these settings, go up to your site collection level, and look under the Site Collection Administration custom action group on the Site Settings page, and click on the SharePoint Designer Settings link towards the bottom.

From here, you can enable or disable SharePoint designer access to the entire site collection. And you can even go as far as enabled detaching pages from the site definition (unghosting pages), enable or disabling access to modify master and layout pages, and the ability to manage the site hierarchy.

A short but sweet post, but just another one of the new great features available in SharePoint 2010 (as of Beta 2).

Thanks to everyone who attended the Global SharePoint Users Group last night. It was a privilege to be the second presenter ever for this users group, and I had a great audience, who asked some great questions.

Thanks also go out to the organizers of the event, Dux Raymond Sy and Eric Harlan. Both have done a fantastic job at putting together this virtual users group.

And last, but certainly not least, a big thanks go out to AvePoint for donating and raffling off a netbook!

As promised during my session, here are the code samples and the slide deck from last nights meeting. You can find my code samples below the slide deck, along with additional references. Please leave any feedback you have, or questions, in the comments of this post. Since we do not receive any evaluation forms, any feedback is greatly appreciated!

• Demo #1 - Creating a Simple Custom Action

  • Screencast: http://www.screencast.com/t/YjlhZTU0

  • SPS.SiteActionsSolutionManagement

    • This was the link to the Solution Management page within SharePoint Central Administration off of the Site Actions menu. This is hard-linked however to my local system, to: http://litwareserver:9999, you will need to modify this within the solution, and rebuild the WSP to use for your CA URL and port.

    • Download: SPS.SiteActionsSolutionManagement.zip

• GSPUG.SiteSettingsRecycleBin 

  • This was the second deployment I quickly ran through, which added a Site Recycle Bin link to the Site Actions page under the Site Administration Custom Action Group

  • Download: GSPUG.SiteSettingsRecycleBin.zip

• GSPUG.SiteActionsRecycleBin

  • This is the solution that I walked through during the first demonstration. This will add links to both the current site recycle bin, as well as the site collection recycle bin to the Site Actions menu.

  • Download: GSPUG.SiteActionsRecycleBins.zip

Wes Hackett, Matt Smith, Martin Hatch, and Glyn Clough have written some great SharePoint 2010 extensions for Visual Studio 2010. Currently in it’s alpha stage, it is already looking impressive. From the project page on Codeplex, it boasts the following features, including templates for custom actions, as well as custom action browsers (coming in the beta version).

Alpha Release includes:
Visual Studio 2010 includes new SharePoint tools to aid development against the SharePoint platform. SPVSX aims to provide further enhancements to these tools including:

• New item templates
  • Custom Action (basic)
  • Hide Custom Action (basic)
  • Custom Action Group (basic)
  • Delegate Control (basic)

• Deployment
  • Restart IIS
  • Recycle app pools
  • Copy to SharePoint root
  • Auto GAC
  • Auto copy to root
  • Attach to worker process

• Server Explorer extensions
  • Web part gallery listing
  • Import Content Type into current project (stub - full feature to come in beta)
  • Display Custom Action Groups (stub - full feature to come in beta)
  • Display Custom Actions (stub - full feature to come in beta)
  • Display Hide Custom Actions (stub - full feature to come in beta)

Visit the project page below to download and install. They can also be found in the Visual Studio Gallery.

http://spvsx.codeplex.com/

And, they have even given a sneak peak as to what is coming in the Beta version of the project: http://weshackett.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!41B731D6A8FE484A!380.entry

I am excited to see all of these great projects popping up for SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 already, long before the RTM version hits later this year.

Great work guys, keep it up.