SharePoint Manager 2010 Release

My good friend and colleague Anders Dissing that has taken over the SharePoint Manager project has now released a SharePoint Manager 2010 version on codeplex!

Anders blog on: SharePoint Manager 2010 Release

Download here!

SharePoint 2010 and WSPBuilder

A lot of people at the SPC2009 conference asked me about the future of WSPBuilder. Facts are that SharePoint 2010 is under way and the new SharePoint tools for Visual Studio 2010 are going to replace VSeWSS.

Here some conclusions from the SPC2009 conference.

1. SharePoint tools for Visual Studio 2010 will only support SharePoint 2010.
   
2. SharePoint tools will only support Visual Studio 2010.
   
3. Currently there will be NO new tools for SharePoint 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 (except for the version of VSeWSS 1.3)
   

This means that all the current solutions out there for SharePoint 2007 will still need to depend on a 3^rd party tool to get the job done.

Regarding WSPBuilder, a new version will be release to support the new possibilities in the WSP package for SharePoint 2010. The new version will still provide support for SharePoint 2007 packages, so bug fixes and added functionality will also be available for old 2007 projects. I plan for that WSPBuilder Extensions will support 3 versions of Visual Studio 2005 / 2008 / 2010 in one MSI packaged.

So WSPBuilder will still be around for a couple more years to support SharePoint 2007. Only time will tell if it will be popular for SharePoint 2010.

TOZIT SharePoint Discussion Forum solution for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007

Tobias Zimmergren has just released this awesome SharePoint Discussion Forum for SharePoint. Check it out!

SharePoint Saturday Presentation in Copenhagen

From my presentation of Building WSP Packages Efficiently (schedule), the PowerPoint presentation and Visual Studio Project can be found below.

Presentation.zip

/keutmann

WSPBuilder Extensions ver. 1.0.6 - (WSPBuilder Version: 0.9.9.0728)

Some new updates have been made for WSPBuilder...

• A Reference folder under GAC and 80/Bin is now supported for large dlls that do not need reflection for SafeControls and Permissions.
• New menu function "Recycle the Windows SharePoint Services Timer" implemented on WSPBuilder Extensions.
• Refactoring of "Copy to GAC" in order to improve the functionality.
• Bug fixed! "Unable to get solution id from manifest: Unable to extract manifest.xml ..." error for x64 systems.
• CabLib.dll updated to new version 10.5.
• Its now possible to include the Cablib.dll into the WSP package.
  

The “Reference” folder

One of the new features of WSPBuilder, is the possiblility to add assemblies to the wsp package without getting them reflected upon. This means that there will not be created any safecontrols tags or permission policies for the assemblies. This will improve wsp build speed greatly for very large assemblies. So when you have some 3^rd party assemblies that you would like to include into your wsp package, just add the 3^rd party assemblies to a “Reference” folder under the GAC folder or 80\bin folder.

Project folder

..\MyProject ....\12 ....\GAC ......\Reference ........SomeVeryLarge.DLL ......MyOwnSmall.DLL ....\.

As showing in the folder structure above, the SomeVeryLarge.DLL is located under the Reference folder and will therefore be included into the wsp package (and manifest.xml) but not reflected upon. This will greatly reduce the time needed to build the wsp package. However if there are UI controls in the SomeVeryLarge.DLL that will be used, you are forced to add it directly under GAC or 80\bin so the SafeControls tags can be created and added to the web.config otherwise you will get a security error. The MyOwnSmall.DLL is located directly under the GAC folder and therefore is reflected upon as normal.

Warning: There will not be created any security policies for the DLL’s in the “80\bin\Reference” folder, so you will need to manually change the policy settings in the SharePoint configuration files to allow the reference assemblies to be used from the 80\bin folder. When using the “GAC\Reference” folder, the assembly will be deployed to the Global Assembly Cache and therefore automatically be fully trusted.

Recycle the Windows SharePoint Services Timer

A new function in the WSPBuilder Visual Studio context menu have been added. This will recycle the Windows SharePoint Services Timer. (OWSTimer service). This function is intented to be used when developing SPTimerJobs, so you quicly can redeploy to GAC and recycle the Timer service from Visual Studio when testing.

Manually modifing the Manifest.xml

I had some request about being able to modify the manifest.xml and DDF file before building the wsp package. But the idea of WSPBuilder is that this should not be necessary. You should be able to do everything you need by use of the folder structure and wspbuilder.config file. But maybe I have missed something, so I would to hear from you if you have any case where you need to modify the manifest.xml file. Please e-mail me on carsten@keutmann.dk

/keutmann

Beginning SharePoint Development (Bonus part #3 WSPBuilder overview)

Bjørn Furuknap has done a great video on how to get starting with WSPBuilder Extensions. In the demo he shows how to replace the Cablib.dll file with a 32 bit version. This is because of a bug in the installer installing the wrong version. However now it has been fixed and it's no longer necessary to replace the file.. New version here WSPBuilder.

Bjørn Furuknap WSPBuilder demo...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljKnLllZbxU

/Cheers

Disable Loopback Checking on Windows Server 2003

I updated my Windows Server 2003 running on a VMware image with the lasted April 2009 updates from Microsoft this morning. The result was that none of my SharePoint sites worked afterwards. The solution for me and one of my colleagues turns out to be this old known issue
http://wcornwill.wordpress.com/2006/06/06/mapping-host-headers-causes-looping-windows-authentication/
and
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/george/archive/2009/04/16/error-401-connecting-to-local-iis-website-after-3-credential-prompts.aspx

I would only recommend to disable the Loopback checking for developing environments.

Disable Loopback Checking

1. open regedit
   
2. Find HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
   
3. Create a new DWORD value called DisableLoopbackCheck and give it a value of 1
   
4. Restart the computer
   

Developers 10 Commandments for preventing errors

Over the years of programming, I have gone from a simple spaghetti developer to an object oriented, method mineralized, property loving, defensive coding and structure focused (spaghetti) developer. So what is the difference? When I think about it, my code may look like a spaghetti program today, for the untrained eye that is, because of object inheritance, events, properties and so forth. But it's much better organized than it was just 20 years ago. The big advantage is that it is much easier to spot and avoid errors than in the good old spaghetti programming days. But I still need to avoid programmatic and logic errors, therefore I follow these 10 basic commandments in writing code.

1. Assumptions are the mother of all errors.
   
2. The most lacy developer do things right the first time.
   
3. If something can go wrong, then it will at some point do.
   
4. Never implement bad exception handling. Like the Ostrich-algorithm, where you put your head in the ground and pretend that nothing has happened.
   
5. Know your events or you program will fail.
   
6. Errors usually appears where you least expect them to.
   
7. Users come from the dark side and they got errors with them.
   
8. Unit test... unit what?
   
9. Keep it simple! However this does not apply for the female developers, they are able to multi task!
   
10. Always include a dead-man switch in a While loop, if it potentially can loop forever.
    

You will find some of the commandments more relevant than others but they all still holds an important message.

Defensive programming (link)

When using a defensive programming strategy and following the commandments I tend to think what can go wrong in my code and how to prevent it from doing so or simply handling it. This turns into rock solid applications that help me sleep better at night. The effort required is actually less than that of the ordinary "spaghetti code", because you don't spend the time constantly debugging your code in the end when the users keeps coming back with new errors that they have found.

Three strikes and you're program is out.

In the beginning when a user first starts to use a program, they have the stomach for three errors before they tend to give up on it and look for another solution. Therefore it's very important that the users are not presented with the errors directly in the face every time something goes wrong. Fallback gracefully when an error occurs is very important so the users don't feel abandoned.

Detailed description of the commandments.

1. Assumptions are the mother of all errors.
   Picked up from the movie Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995), where one of the bad henchmen (Penn) believes that he has killed Casey Ryback (played by Steven Seagal), but it's just an assumption and therefore Ryback is able to continue haunting the bad guys and finally finishing them off (think of yourself as one of the bad guys :-) The same thing applies to code - when you assume something will work, it will for sure come back to haunt you. (Nobody wants a Ryback running around and destroying their program). Every error in a program is there because the developer assumed that it was fine there was no possible scenario for an error. Don't make assumptions – know for sure and handle any possible outcome!
   
   
2. The most lacy developer do things right the first time.
   If you want to save time and errors when creating a program, do things right the first time. Otherwise you just end up forgetting that you have skipped a step here, cut a corner there, so on and so forth. Yet again resulting in an error when you least except it.
   
   
3. If something can go wrong, it will at some point do.
   This is a universal rule (another variant). Don't try ignoring it. The only thing is to make sure that nothing can go wrong. However even the best developers cannot avoid all errors therefore contain the error so it will not affect the outside world and implement a graceful fallback error handling routine.
   
   
4. Never implement bad exception handling. Like the Ostrich-algorithm, where you put your head in the ground and pretend that nothing has happened.
   This is a common error handling that I have seen in various places, where the developer knows that something can go wrong, but is too lazy to implement a descent error handling logic. Thereby resulting in a possible unstable program. This happened to me once when another developer in my team made an empty try catch statement around a database call. When the call to the database failed - and it did happen from time to time - the code simply just continued like nothing had happened, resulting in that the database data became invalid. So I had to spend 2 full days debugging the entire code in order to find out why the program was unstable and not knowing where the error prune part was hiding.
   
   
5. Know your events or you program will fail.
   This is one of the most important things you can do when coding in object oriented languages. Know in what order things happen in. I have seen a lot of developers writing a lot of bad code in ASP.NET because they simply haven't allowed themselves the time to study how a Page lifecycle works.
   
   
6. Errors usually appears where you least expect them to.
   This is another law of the Universe. You might as well accept it!
   If you ever think a certain situation will never occur, you are properly wrong. I have heard this so many times "This will never happen… yada yada yada" – but trust me, it will! So always implement at least a minimal form of error handling.
   
   
7. Users come from the dark side and they got errors with them.
   No developer can foresee every possible outcome of a program and users have the tendency to pick out the situations that you had never have thought of. So always think of in general error handling, so you can say to yourself… "Whatever happens, I have covered it."
   
   
8. Unit test... unit what?
   This is an important thing to remember, especially when doing a lot of backend logic. There has been written a lot of topics on this subject and therefore I will not cover it here.
   
   
9. Keep it simple! However this does not apply for the female developers, they are able to multi task!
   Male developers tend to develop programs with their forehead. This puts a constraint on how many of lines of code that they can handle simultaneously. Males like giant things, but giant methods are a bad thing. It is easy to lose overview of what is going on in the method with too many lines of code and therefore the possibility for errors sneaking in is greater. Keep your methods at a minimum, even if they are just used once in a call from one other method.
   
   
10. Always include a dead-man switch in a While loop, if it potentially can loop forever.
    All developers in world has made this one at least once in their lifetime. Creating a While statement but forgets that they can potentially run forever and it stalls the process. So if there is even the slightest chance that a While statement can loop beyond its intention, introduce a dead-man switch. A simple counter that can only count to a certain amount before ending the while loop.

This more or less concludes my 10 commandments. Read it, learn from it and hopefully improve on it.

WSPBuilder documentation

I know that the documentation on using the WSPBuilder hasn't been fulfilling to say it nicely, but that's the way it is.

The good thing is that other people have been nice and done some work on this. This is what I have found so far (in random order), sorry if have forgot someone.

WSPBuilder - Walkthrough of the Visual Studio Add-in
http://www.zimmergren.net/archive/2009/04/08/wspbuilder-walkthrough-of-the-visual-studio-add-in.aspx

WSS: Development - Quick Start with WSPBuilder
http://rasor.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/wss-dev-quickstart/

WSS Dev: WSPBuilder Templates
http://rasor.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/wss-dev-quickstart/

WSS Dev: HowTo debug a WebPart
http://rasor.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/wss-howto-debug-a-webpart/

Change the WSPBuilder DeploymentTarget to WebApplication
http://blog.mastykarz.nl/change-wspbuilder-deploymenttarget-webapplication/

Intro to WSPBuilder
http://www.michaelbowersox.com/2009/01/18/intro-to-wspbuilder/

WSPBuilder Folder Structure
http://www.michaelbowersox.com/2009/01/28/wspbuilder-folder-structure/

Developing SharePoint Solutions in Visual Studio
http://greggalipeau.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/developing-sharepoint-solutions-in-visual-studio/

TFS Build and WSPBuilder
http://alex-tfs.blogspot.com/2009/01/tfs-build-and-wspbuilder.html

How to get TFS to automate your WSP builds with WSPBuilder
http://pointstoshare.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns%21AEC42F315B4528B0%213290.entry

The WSPBuilser Manual
http://wspbuilder.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/33013#166101

My Blog.
http://keutmann.blogspot.com/2008/02/visual-studio-addin-and-templates-for.html

New! (2009/08/02)

Creating a code-only webpart and deploying as a feature
http://www.sharepointsean.com/articles/Pages/CreatingaCode-Onlywebpartanddeployingasafeature.aspx

Please comment with more links if you know one.

WSPBuilder - Walkthrough of the Visual Studio Add-in

I know that there are not much documentation on how to use WSPBuilder in the install package, but my good friend Tobias Zimmergren have written a great post on SharePoint development with WSPBuilder Extensions. Check it out. http://www.zimmergren.net/archive/2009/04/08/wspbuilder-walkthrough-of-the-visual-studio-add-in.aspx

WSPBuilder Extensions 1.0.5

This version of WSPBuilder Extensions 1.0.5 now fully supports development on an x64 bit systems and Windows Server 2008.

Installs correct CABLIB.DLL for x64 systems. (No need for manually installing)
"Copy to 12 hive" function now works on x64 systems.
Support for IIS7
Minor bug fix for "Recycle App Pools"
Supports VisualBasic Project/Item templates. (Thanks to Chip Sockwell)
wspbuilder.exe is included in this package.

Install notes.:
Be sure to uninstall the old version of WSPBuilder Extensions before installing the new version.

Happy SharePoint coding folks

/keutmann

Visual Basic Project/Item template support in WSPBuilder Extensions 1.0.4

Thanks to Chip Sockwell and his work on converting the C# templates to Visual Basic. You are now able to create Visual Basic projects with WSPBuilder templates in Visual Studio.

However if you are only using C#, you do not need to install the new version (1.0.4).

Get it here: WSPBuilder.com

Cheers!
/keutmann

SharePoint Manager 2007 ver 0.9.9.0205

I have done some work on SPM2007 and implemented a new language Swedish. (Thanks to Andreas Kviby for the translation)

Ver: 0.9.9.0205-------------------
- Warning on deletion has now been implemented.
- Icons for nodes updated.
- Dutch and Swedish languages implemented.
- Groups and Roles on the Site is now browsable.

Get it on codeplex.

Have fun :)

SharePoint MVP

Oh .. by the way.. I have become a SharePoint MVP.

Cheers!

Get SharePoint To Validate

My good friend Anders Dissing has released this awesome project on codeplex.
This project is all about making SharePoint/MOSS XHTML compliant.

· Get SharePoint 2007 to validate according to W3C XHTML 1.0 Strict.
· Google-optimize SharePoint to gain the best search ranking.
· Enhanced accessibility.
· Makes it possible for SharePoint to follow the American regulation 508 and the Danish regulation based on WCAG AA.
· Better control over the HTML output of SharePoint, to ease the frontend development process.

Project site:
http://www.codeplex.com/GSPTV

Demo site:
http://getsharepointtovalidate.com/

SharePoint Manager 2007 ver. 0.9.8.1002

New version of SPM2007 has been released on codeplex.

Ver: 0.9.8.1002
-------------------

• Feature collection now uses try catch on invalid features.
• Title used to show names of JobDefinitions.
• SPEventReceiverDefinition implemented. EventReceivers are now browsable.

/Happy SharePoint object model browsing :o)

WSPBuilder (with local config file support)

Thanks to Tom Clarkson for adding this feature to WSPBuilder, its now able to load a wspbuilder.exe.config file from a local project. This enables project specific arguments to WSPBuilder when building from Visual Studio.
WSPBuilder will first look for the general config file, then the local project and last the command line arguments.

0.9.8.0822 is a memory eating monster

Get the new version 0.9.8.0827 from codeplex

The previous version of WSPBuilder 0.9.8.0822 was a memory eating monster, now the memory foot print has been greatly reduced to a more acceptable level.

The reason for this was that Mono.Cecil uses a lot of memory to load the assemblies. Therefore when loading reference assemblies and base class assemblies like System.Web the memory consumption exploded. Now every assembly gets unloaded right after it has been used.

The history of WSPBuilder

WSPBuilder (June 2007)
In the beginning of 2007 I was tired of writing the wsp manifest.xml file and defining the DDF file by hand. I really needed a tool to auto generate this. I tried one of the first tools on the internet that someone had made (I have forgotten where),however it was written in VBscript and only implemented some very basic functionality. But it made me discover that the structure of the wsp file is simply a reflection of what goes into the 12 hive. Therefore it was clear to me that the next step was to simply make it a full blown C# project. Still I needed to be sure to cover all of the possibilities that wsp schema had to offer. Luckily Microsoft provides a xml schema definition for the manifest.xml file. This made it possible to auto generate a C# class library that would serialize into a manifest.xml file. Then the only thing that I had to do now was to fill in the code and serialize the objects. But I was not home yet, I needed something to create the CAB file (WSP). I was able to choose from the makecab.exe application provided by Microsoft or use the CabLib.dll project created by Elmue. In the spirit of GPL and for full control of the Cab file creation I went for the Elmue project.

Deployment (August 2007)
Here the power of the GPL license really comes into effect. Chris Doty created the deployment part of WSPBuilder and submitted it to me. First it was made as a independent console application WSPDeployer.exe and later on it was merged into the WSPBuilder application.

WSPBuilder Extensions (January 2008)
Tom Clarkson really did a big contribution here. He basically created the WSPBuilder Extensions project with Visual Studio project and item templates and an Visual Studio Addin with a MSI install program with it. After some minor modification the first version of WSPBuilder Extensions was born. In the following versions the Extensions has been improved and the Visual Studio Addin has been rewritten to a more professional look and the functionality extended.

Mono.Cecil (may 2008)
The WSPBuilder was having some issues with reflection on assemblies in order to be able to create the SafeControls tags in the manifest file. If an assembly was located in the Global Assembly Cache, the .NET framework would always pick up this assembly and not the newly build assembly from the project, therefore resulting in a possible incorrect manifest file. Also assembly references was a big problem for many users of WSPBuilder. This was because the users had the tendency to put reference assemblies other places on their system and because of this the .NET framework was not able to find them. With the Mono.Cecil project written by Jb Evain, WSPBuilder is now able to load the assemblies even that a copy existed in GAC and reflect on them without having to load all of the referenced assemblies.

Community
I want to thank all the people that have helped to improve the WSPBuilder product by using, testing and reporting bugs. Microsoft for providing the codeplex.com site that enables you to use team foundation source control with your Visual Studio Environment and also for hosting the WSPBuilder project.

Conclusion
Even that WSPBuilder has not reached its full first version yet, it’s nearly completed. There are still some bugs to be fixed and documentation to be made, but overall it should implement every possible scenario that you are able to make with the Windows SharePoint Package (WSP).

WSPBuilder.exe version 0.9.8.0822 x86

New version of WSPBuilder has been released on codeplex.

This time some major issues with SecurityAttibutes reflection has been solved and also reflection on assemblies to created the relevant SafeControl tags has been implemented. Now the WSPBuilder with the Mono.Cecil project, is better able to create a correct manifest.xml than it was with the normal .NET assembly reflection. The only downfall is that WSPBuilder is a little bit slower than before, but it should not be notable. Also the Assembly Element tags has been moved to the top of the manifest.xml file in order to ensure that assemblies is deployed first, this seems to solve a problem in rare occasions.

Change list:

• Assembly element tags in the manifest.xml is placed in the top of the manifest.xml file.
• Resolvement of assemblies is now supported with Mono.Cecil in order to create relevant SafeControl tags. Use the -DLLRefencePath argument to resolve referenced assemblies.
• Bug fixed where the 80\WPResources was not included-.
• Bug fixed where the security attributes was not reflected correctly.

Take care :o)