Hey all

Just a quick post before I’m off to set up all the rooms and bags before the main event tomorrow (SharePoint Saturday 2013 Belgium).

Karine and me were a little bit too busy with our main jobs to continue working on the Caml Designer during this iteration, so Peter Karpinski asked if he could help out.. And help out he did.

Some list with updates that we did on this iteration:

• Improved support for Office 365
• Bug fixes
• CamlDesigner 2013 can now also be used to connect to SharePoint 2010.. so delete the CamlDesigner 2010
• Changed the connection screen a little bit, you can now select to what version of SharePoint you are connecting to

Of course when selecting SP2010 you can only use Client OM and web services… Server OM connection wasn’t possible.. but functionality why you will not see a difference.

Hope you like it  and maybe see you tomorrow at #SPSBE

Today is the day that SharePoint news will be injected in the MSDN BeLux tweet feed (at least for a week that is).

To quote Maarten Balliauw :

This is the official Twitter account for MSDN BeLux. It’s not hacked, I did not steal the password: they gave it to me!

I would like to thank Microsoft for this opportunity , let me know how I’m doing, hope you’ll like the tweets.

have a nice day

At the moment I’m sitting in the Gman garage in Antwerpen waiting on my car to be fixed. So excellent time to write some blog posts that I’ve been putting off for too long now.

Some time ago there was a problem at the client with a list of 10-20k items big. The discussion on how large a list is and should it be put in SP I’ll leave for another time, so the list was there and we had to solve it.

A simple query in an xsltlistviewwebpart would be the beginning of a big issue.

I’ve added some very interesting reads at the bottom of this article but all didn’t solve my issue.

Below was one of the first issues that we had.

If you Google this one, a lot will tell, just set the threshold of the web application higher.

well, first ask yourself, why is this limit 5000 items?

To minimize database contention, SQL Server uses row-level locking as a strategy to ensure accurate updates without adversely affecting users who are accessing other rows. However, if a read or write database operation, such as a query, causes more than 5,000 rows to be locked at the same time, then it is more efficient for SQL Server to escalate the lock to the entire table until the database operation is completed. When this lock escalation occurs, it prevents other users from accessing the table

This small part in a very large blog article on Technet explains why.

Meanwhile the threshold was already set at 55000 items on production = NOT GOOD

Sure it solved the issue for a while but it created others elsewhere.

So back to the drawing board, why do we have this issue. Why is a query generating this particular error.

I will spare you the details on looking into this issue and skip to the solution.

It was because not only these 10k-20k large list was big but also all the items in it had broken security. So we had item level security in place. This is why we had this issue.

A little re engineering later (using folders with broken security and putting the items in those folders solved it) and all was good to go. From 20k items we went to 35 folders with broken security and the query would run nicely now.

A fun fact: working with large lists it’s often suggested to use the content iterator. Well the content iterator in the back-end applies a row limit, recursive node and listitemcollectionposition. In doing so it queries in batches but uses SPQuery just as well.

So CAML isn’t dead yet hehehe

Sneak preview: Did you know that our Caml Designer 2013 now supports SP 2010 as well, so you can work with the newly (and cool) designed CamlDesigner 2013 on both SharePoint versions. (Release is planned for 27 April).

Some good reading:

I’ve divided this into a table because of the many SharePoint versions:

Hey everyone

So it’s been a very long time since I’ve written another blog post, sad part is, I just didn’t had the time.

I was very busy in preparing a SharePoint 2013 training (what’s new, Office Apps, Social and Azure workflow service) and a lot of time got into this. Finding everything out how it works, creating presentations (also re-using some content from SPC12) and working out demo’s. But I’m back bearing gifts .

Hey everyone

As I was sending an internal mail to the SharePoint group of my company, I was thinking that this information would be interesting for everyone.. so, sharing is caring

SharePoint 2013 is out for a couple of months now but not yet all the exams are available..

The beta development exams are available from April – June 2013 and you can find the path to become a SharePoint  2013 Developer here:

http://www.absolute-sharepoint.com/2013/02/three-new-facts-on-sharepoint-2013-mcsd.html

http://www.absolute-sharepoint.com/2012/12/sharepoint-2013-mcsd-developer.html

As you can see we need some HTML 5 & CCS 3 certification as well… and you can get the free voucher here (don’t know for how long the code is valid)

http://www.absolute-sharepoint.com/2012/11/microsoft-is-offering-free-voucher-for.html

What to do for IT pro exam?

http://blog.avtex.com/2012/10/24/sharepoint-2013-it-pro-certifications/

you need to pass MSCA – Windows Server 2012 (separate 3 exams as well)

some sources for training material :

http://www.absolute-sharepoint.com/2012/10/sharepoint-2013-certifications-training.html

http://jussionsharepoint.com/index.php/2012/09/14/the-definitive-guide-to-sharepoint-2013-certifications/

http://www.absolute-sharepoint.com/search/label/study

As you already can see, the most of the certification information comes from the blog of Vlad.. I strongly suggest to add this one to your blog reader feeds.

that’s all

have a nice day

So back in the day when I started working with SharePoint (it was a cold Monday morning ), it was around 2006 – 2007 and WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 was just out.

Webparts weren’t commonly known than nor was SharePoint. But we all know that MOSS 2007 was the launch to greater things.

The difference between SP 2003 and 2007 was big, one of the things we needed to ask ourselves was , are we going to inherit from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebPart (recommended) or from the SP WebPart class..

Some differences between the ASP.NET and pure SP Webpart class:

• Cross page connections
• connections between webparts that are outside of a webpart zone
• Client-Side connections (Web Part Page Services Component)
• Data caching infrastructure that allows caching in the content database

Also creating a WSP package wasn’t that easy, if you didn’t use WSP builder of CKS than you needed to create your own package..

I think the procedure was (you can read all about it here) :

1. creating a dwp file for your webpart, with the correct nodes and information
2. Create a feature file
3. a manifest.xml file as well
4. create a DDF file so that you can cab (DDF = Diamond directive file, didn’t even know what it stands for until now)
5. create a cabinet file using the DDF file (command: makecab /f solution.ddf )

The deployment happened via stsadm  

Those were the times…

Also for MOSS 2007, project server came to the package as well as InfoPath Form services..

Next release of SharePoint was in 2010 and it expanded some more (Office web apps, FAST search server, …) . Webparts could still be created but you can now create also Silverlight packages and use these in SharePoint to make it more beautiful. Silverlight could also be used in MOSS 2007 but you had to write your own wrapper around it and Silverlight could only use the web services or use the OM via the wrapper. But also JQuery came to light (Jquery could also be installed for MOSS 2007, you can read about it part 1 and part 2 in the Blog of Jan Tielens ) but it wasn’t used that much in 2007 than in 2010 I believe.

In SP 2010 REST came into play and also CSOM and an OM especially for Silverlight. So we could already see the step towards client side code more and more. Sandbox helped in that regard as well. All this was created because Webparts are running solely on Server side. Meaning that it could impact the performance of the Web front end machines. So moving the logic client side would be a very logical step.

In SP 2013 we see that the CSOM had been expanded with extra functionality and APPS are doing more and more the work of replacing the sandbox solutions. Also more client side stuff can be used here as well. MVC, JavaScript, JQuery, Silverlight, Knockout, PHP, HTML… you name it, it can all be used in SP 2013 now (some of the technologies could be used in SP 2010 as well).

The reason why I’m writing this blog post is because I’ve highlighted this in a very small part in one of my previous blog posts and after some talks with Karine (Bosch) and some other people of the MEET team. We are all saying the same thing.

It’s no longer sufficient to write only C# code and all server side. Ok it’s the easiest because we’ve grown up with it almost and it’s what we know best. But a SharePoint developer should start to make his/her first reaction, “am I going to write this in a webpart or an app, what is the best technology for this, is it going to be multi lingual”? All these questions should be asked first before writing one line of code. The technologies that are available for us are too diverse.. and you can clearly see the move to client side code.

Some quotes

Einstein and SharePoint are two paths that never crossed – but applying his most famous quotes to SharePoint creates an amazingly rich and accurate framework of discussions that all SharePoint experts should learn from.

Here are some great examples:

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” – Albert Einstein

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein

“Information is not knowledge.” – Albert Einstein

That’s it.. have a great week..

The location for the Codeplex project is here.

After messing around a lot with the elements files to generate some pages I’ve created a small webpart that does all this stuff for you.

I’ve reused some code from this codeplex project and I’ve asked Stefan Stanev if I could re-use it. Also I’ve added some functionality.

The codeplex project of Stefan connects to SharePoint and if you go to the page via de program than you can right click and generate the elements.xml file.

Only the program doesn’t take into account connections between webparts. This and some other small adjustment I’ve added in my solution. So the elements file that you can generate via my webpart should be the most complete one representing the page.

I’ve shared the code with Stefan so that he can update his package, but I don’t know if he did this or not.

So the install is easy, it’s a WSP so install, deploy and put it on an webpart page (example called: admin.aspx).

How does it work?

hey everyone

A couple of months to almost a year ago I had to write some documentation and lookup a lot around sandbox solutions. More precise when you would go for sandbox and when to farm solutions.

So I’ve restyled the document a little bit and you can download it as of now…

If there are some things you don’t agree or is incorrect let me know so I can change it…

Since I’m not all for re-inventing the wheel most of the information is a collection of blogs that I’ve found, all the links are saved in references at the bottom of the document.

Download:

Sandbox isn’t changed much in SharePoint 2013 so the document can be used for SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013.

hope it helps someone

In Part 1 of the Design Manager blog post I’ve taken the Design Manager under the loop and talked about each step.

At the end of the blog post you could generate a Design Package… in this post we’ll take that design package under the loop and see what we can do with it, or what is included in this package. I will refer sometimes to the previous post..

If you have Visual Studio 2012 with update 1 but don’t have the SharePoint 2013 templates yet? You can download them here –> under tools –> “Download the tools” link.

First things first, open up Visual Studio 2012

Well it’s time for some new stuff..

I was looking into the possibility to just migrate some looks and master page from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013.

Well what I’ve found was a whole new world