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1/26/2010

Picture Libraries with Blackband.master or blueband.master

I came across an issue in one of my branded master pages recently. The problem was that with my system.master page turned on, the thumbnail view in the picture library would not display in the nice grid view, instead the thumbnails all displayed in a single column.

Here's a little more information. This particular client wanted a fixed width design. Per my typical pattern, when I need a custom, fixed width, master page, I made a copy of one of the out-of-the-box versions, namely BlackBand.master, and its supporting style sheets. I began customizing from there.

I was pretty far along in my customization before I found the picture library problem. The problem had to be in one of classes I was overriding in my style sheet right? After all, this html is written out inside a web part. Wrong – A quick swap of the OOB style sheet for mine yielded a very ugly page containing the same issue.

Expletive!

OK, problem is obviously in my master page somehow. I resolve to begin swapping chunks of my master page into blackband.master until I find the breaking point. So I set the master page of my dev site to blackband.master and… Wow, that was easy, it's broken already in the OOB stuff.

Expletive!

Is it the file system on the VM I'm using?? No: default.master – working, blackband.master – broken, default.master-working, blueband.master – broken.

Default.master

Blackband.master

So what's different between these two master pages? A lot, but you won't need to dig very deep, because right at the top, you'll notice that the two fixed width master pages declare their doctype: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

While the default.aspx does not declare a doctype.

If you're reading my crappy blog, you've undoubtedly come across Heather Solomon's doctype blog entry in the past.

My solution was to change the doctype tag in my master page to render in quirks mode:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD html 4.01 Transitional//EN">

Blackband.master with quirks mode doctype.

It fixed my picture library issue and, thankfully, did not cause too many other styling issues.

My client has a nice, homogeneous environment that is IE based. I have a feeling that this change could cause issues with other browsers.

BTW. SharePoint 2010 uses all strict, standards based rendering out of the box, so these issues shouldn't exist there anymore.

Now, knock 'em dead, killer.

Posted at 10:13 AM by Ryan Miller | Category: SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/12/2010

Lotus Notes Connector Service in SharePoint 2010

For you Lotus Notes companies out there…

I just ran through the SharePoint 2010 Enterprise beta installation and I see that it has an out of the box Lotus Notes Connector service. For search indexing I believe, but maybe it would work with BCS as well?

Trying to start it gives this message:

Please make sure you have completed the following steps before provisioning the connector.
Install and setup Lotus Notes client
Download the Lotus Notes C++ API Toolkit, extract it and copy the lcppn30.dll file to the \14.0\Bin folder and the Lotus Notes folder on the index server
Run Notessetup.exe on the index server using the same credentials that you will use to provision the Lotus Notes Connector

Posted at 11:36 AM by Ryan Miller | Category: SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/5/2010

My SP 2010 Setup

First off, everything about this setup is new.

New Laptop – I liked my old one, but it didn't support more than 4GB ram. My new one has 8GB. I'd would have liked to go to 16 or at least supported it, but it was about a 50% cost increase to a different model to do so. Takeaway – like the new laptop a lot. Wish it had a little better resolution.

New Primary OS – I put Windows 7 Ultimate, on the laptop. Previously I'd been using Vista Ultimate (which I liked and it worked well for me). Take away – It's good. I like it I guess. Not a big learning curve here when coming across from Vista. No software or hardware incompatibility so far so that's outstanding. I'm trying out Rocket Dock as well, but I'm undecided on the usefulness of it.

New Virtualization platform – VMWare workstation. I'd previously used Virtual PC, but lack of 64bit support pushed me to VMWare. Take away: I'm still getting used to it, but I'm happy with it. I was able to convert my old VPCs as well, so I'll have just one platform for all my development. The unattended guest OS installation was great, but the product key entry wouldn't work. This was probably because I was using the iso from MSDN and there is an extra installation step of picking which version you want (enterprise, standard, or web).

New Guest OS – Windows Server 2008 R2. I'm almost embarrassed to say that I was still using Windows Server 2003, but getting all the developer tools set up is a long, painstaking process and I wasn't about to change it up without good reason. Besides, my web server runs Win 2003 and I like my dev machine to match. Take Away: so far so good.

New SQL Server – SQL Server 2008. Previously 2005 to match my prod environment.

New Visual Studio – Visual Studio 2010

New MS Office – Office 2010 Beta

New SharePoint Designer – SharePoint Designer 2010 Beta

New SharePoint – Weeeellll, as you can imagine, working out all these new pieces has taken some time. I'm ½ way there with a successful install of SharePoint Foundation. I'll probabably try the full blown version later this week. Here's my track record so far:

Attempt 1:

Install SQL Server
Install SQL SP1
Install Visual Studio 2010
Install Office 2010 -> office install hangs won't reinstall, won't uninstall.
Revert, try again.

Attempt 2:

Install Office 2010
Install SP Designer 2010
Install SQL Server
Install SQL SP1
Install Visual Studio 2010
Create Clone (one for SF, one for SP 2010)
Install SharePoint Foundation
Run SP Config wizard – error, password doesn't meet complexity requirements
Reset passwords
Run SP Config wizard – error account is local, cannot be used in wizard for small farm install.
Research how to use local account by using powershell command.
Run command to set up farm under local account. New error now. Unsure cause of error and implications of local account.
Decide to install AD services (though wary of running SP on a domain controller).
My Local accounts converted to domain accounts.
I lost connectivity to my SQL Server and was unable to restore it.

Attempt 3:

Installed AD Services
Installed SQL Server
Installed SQL SP1
Installed Office 2010
Installed SharePoint 2010
Installed Visual Studio 2010
Go to work, forget external drive with VMs on it – so much for multitasking
Clone VM
Install SharePoint Foundation
Run configuration wizard – error, need cumulative update for SQL Server (I was expecting this from the reading I've done). The error points you right to the kb article to request the hotfix.
Install Cumulative Update
Run Configuration Wizard
SUCCESS! IE opens to a new wizard for configuring the farm.
Snapshot VM
I opted to use the walk through method this first time through and it completed smoothly

So there you go, third time's the charm. (ignoring, of course, the multiple attempts at the initial guest OS installation)

1/12/2010 Addendum:

I just ran through the SharePoint 2010 Server setup and it went through the first time without issue.

I did get one error that said the user profile service application could not be provisioned because of an unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport'. I'll probably tackle that later, but for now, everything I need running is working.

Posted at 11:26 AM by Ryan Miller | Category: SharePoint | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/18/2009

What I’m Ranting About: My Advice to Microsoft

Microsoft needs to do 2 things better:

Get a better PR/Marketing engine in place.
Better cross division collaboration.

Ted R Brown/C...	I guess I like Bing but that 3D map ad that comes up every time I open maps is stupid. At least give me the option to turn that off!! Typical MS and their stupid advertising team.	12:21:57 PM
Ryan L Miller/C...	i hadn't seen that.	12:23:04 PM
Ted R Brown/C...	Open Bing Maps and you will.	12:23:28 PM
Ryan L Miller/C...	MS needs a better PR division though	12:23:32 PM
Ted R Brown/C...	That whole ramp up to Windows 7 was an embarrassment.	12:23:50 PM
Ryan L Miller/C...	they do a lot of really cool stuff, but don't promote it well	12:23:53 PM
Ted R Brown/C...	Release Parties? C'mon.	12:24:14 PM
◄	Who ever came up with that should be looking for a new job.	12:24:32 PM
Ryan L Miller/C...	and they need a larger group that helps tie all this stuff together	12:24:48 PM
◄	like they just put out that xbox 360 update that puts lastfm on your xbox	12:25:15 PM
◄	very cool, but where is the zune tie in?	12:25:28 PM
Ted R Brown/C...	Do you think they do that intentionally so as not to have the MS brand bring down their cooler products?	12:25:55 PM
Ryan L Miller/C...	and where's the mobile app?	12:26:02 PM
Ted R Brown/C...	What mobile app?	12:26:11 PM
Ryan L Miller/C...	exactly	12:26:17 PM
Ted R Brown/C...	No, I mean what would it do?	12:26:28 PM
Ryan L Miller/C...	pandora has a mobile app. that works about anywhere. when they launched lastfm on the 360, they should have put out the mobile app for win mobile and blackberry (lastfm already has iphone support)	12:27:09 PM
Ted R Brown/C...	Maybe they see the writing on the wall...blackberry is dead.	12:28:08 PM
Ryan L Miller/C...	could be. but there are a lot of them out there now	12:29:00 PM
◄	and no winmobile app either	12:29:12 PM
Ted R Brown/C...	Actually I just heard this morning that Research In Motion has one of its best quarters on record last quarter. Not to shabby when you consider its competitors.	12:29:59 PM

Posted at 12:40 PM by Ryan Miller | Category: What I'm... | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/8/2009

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.