Materials: 2013 Heartland Region SharePoint Conference

Thanks to everyone that came out to the Heartland Region SharePoint Conference. I had a great time and the feedback was tremendous.

Those of you that sat for my second session know that it was focused on how to effectively use JavaScript in the enterprise. Since the conference, I’ve come across a very promising library called Durandal http://durandaljs.com/ If you’re using JavaScript to build apps, I strongly recommend you take a look at this framework. 

You can find the slides and demo code in my SkyDrive folder here: http://sdrv.ms/YA1A8O

   

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To WordPress or Not to WordPress…

I’ve been thinking about moving this blog over to the WordPress platform.

Alas, I am torn. On one hand, I am a SharePoint developer and I think there is a lot of value to be learned simply by existing in that ecosystem. Plus the WP platform is new to me so the conversion may be a bit more effort than I’m ready to bite off.

On the other hand, the SP blog engine just isn’t that mature. There are a ton of ready-made tools and plug ins available for wordpress blogs. Plus, I’d be spinning it up inside Microsoft Web Matrix (http://microsoft.com/web) and learning that new bit of tech is appealing.

Thoughts? I guess you can email them to me since this is a SharePoint blog and support for public comments is not there (rmiller (at) mylocalbroadband (dot) com

 

CodePlex Updates

Woo Hooo! CodePlex servers are being upgraded to TFS 2010. Should be very exciting. Here’s the email I just got from them:

CodePlex Project Contributors,

 

**The information in this e-mail applies to project coordinators and developers that are using TFS with the Team Explorer client. If you are using Mercurial or a Subversion client, then nothing will change for you**

 

During the upcoming weeks we will be migrating all of the CodePlex TFS projects onto our new TFS 2010 servers. This upgrade will allow us to support new TFS features and provide increased server performance and reliability. The move will happen on a server by server basis, so expect each TFS server (TFS01 to TFS10) to be down for a few hours as data is migrated. Updates on when each server will be offline and an estimate on when they will be back online will be posted on our system outage page: http://codeplex.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=System%20Outage%20Report.

 

As part of this migration, the URL of your TFS server will change and this will require you to update your projects source control bindings. After your project has moved, instructions on how to connect with Team Explorer to the new TFS server can be found on the source control tab of your project under “Source Control Setup”. For detailed instructions on updating your source control bindings see: http://codeplex.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Updating%20Your%20TFS%20Source%20Control%20Bindings. Additionally, if you connect to your project using Visual Studio Team Explorer 2005, you will need to install the 2005 forward compatibility pack: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=22215e4c-af6f-4e2f-96df-20e94d762689. If you connect using Team Explorer 2008, you will need to install the 2008 forward compatibility pack: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cf13ea45-d17b-4edc-8e6c-6c5b208ec54d.

 

Finally, the TFS 2010 upgrade process checks two build templates files into your project under BuildProcessTemplates. These templates can be removed safely as we currently do not support TF build.

 

Thanks,

The CodePlex Team

WSS Activities Released on Codeplex

In the spirit of Christmas, I’ve just released a new project on Codeplex. WSS Activities (http://wssactivities.codeplex.com) contains 17 new activities for your SharePoint Designer workflows.

The code itself has been ready for a while, but I’ve been holding off on the release until I got some documentation done. However, I just got the Codeplex warning (You have 10 days left to publish this project), and I’ve decided that if I wait for the documentation, the project may never get released. There is some documentation on the site and more to follow.

The activities fall into two major groups. :

Site Management Activities

These allow you to manipulate various aspects of a site as well as create new sites. I created a site provisioning workflow for a client and this was every activity I needed that wasn’t provided out of the box. Documentation for each of these, though the activities’ names are probably enough to get you started.

  • Create Site Collection
  • Create SubSite
  • Lookup Site Template ID
  • Set Site Title
  • Set Site Theme
  • Create Site Group
  • Setup Site Group
  • Set Available Templates
  • Activate a Feature
  • Set Site Masterpage
  • Set Portal Link
  • Set Site Property
  • Get Site Property

Item Management Activities

These activities allow you to manipulate specific items or documents within a site collection or across the site collection boundary. Of these, Copy, Delete, and Update are fairly straight forward. It’s “Publish Item and Link to Another Location” that requires some further explanation. This activity creates a remote copy of a source item and puts in place an event handler that keeps the remote copy up to date with the source version. Additional columns are added to the source list and destination list to track the linkage between the two.

  • Publish Item and Link to Another Location
  • Copy Item To Another Location
  • Delete Remote Item
  • Update Remote Copy

More Codeplex Updates


Web Config Manager


This has been moved to its own project at http://SPConfigManager.codeplex.com


WSS Picture Uploader


This windows forms application will allow you to upload batches of pictures to a SharePoint picture library. This is written to work against sites using forms based authentication.

This has been moved to its own project at http://WSSPictureUploader.codeplex.com


WSS File Uploader


A console application that allows you to upload files to a SharePoint document library. This is callable from the command line or via a batch or powershell scripts. It is written to be used with sites using forms based authentication.

This has been moved to its own project at http://WSSFileUploader.codeplex.com