Category Archives: SharePoint

SPTechCon Boston: 10 Must-Do Extracurriculars

May 26, 2011 Richard

SPTechCon is looming, the SharePoint community is booming, and, here I’m zooming in on a few of the Hub’s not-to-be-missed activites. Because everyone needs a at least a little r&r between sessions. And because my hometown is a pretty swell city—it’s very walkable, aesthetically and gustatorially pleasing, and, yes, crammed with people who sound like extras from The Departed (you can usually identify them by their ever-present liter of Dunkin’ and their well-worn Sox sweatshirts). I’ve divided them by time of day, and kept most of them in or close to the Back Bay, but remember: for all its blessings, Boston is also a city cursed with subways that stop running at 1am, bars that close at 2am and sky-high cab fares.

Morning:

1) The Banks of the River Charles

a. Neighborhood(s): all over

b. Why: Runners (and walkers and city planners), welcome to paradise. Boston offers many fantastic runs, the most obvious, and picturesque place to run is along the Charles River, which separates Bostonians from Cantabridgians and offers a uninterrupted views of both cities’ skylines. You can hop on and off from almost anywhere, but, if you’re a breakfast sandwich afficianado, you should end at the Boston Common, and proceed to no. 2:

2) Mike and Patty’s

a. Neighborhood: Bay Village

b. Why: This wee slice of a breakfast/luncheonette makes the city’s best sandwiches. This is according to more renowned palates than mine, but you can’t go wrong with the fried green tomato BLT, the bacon and egg fancy (fried egg, cheddar, avocado, caramelized onion), the grilled banana and nutella sandwich and the breakfast torta. Weekends, the line snakes up the cobblestoned street, but on a weekday, you should be fine. Continue reading SPTechCon Boston: 10 Must-Do Extracurriculars →

SharePoint, Women In Tech

Stories from the WIT Trenches: Sadie Van Buren

May 23, 2011 Richard

[This is the first in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Back in April I wrote a bit about my own history, and about the problems, systemic and idiosyncratic, plaguing women who chose a career in most sectors of the tech world. Writing it was surprisingly cathartic, and the response to it was powerful enough to make me want to push it further. Every woman in tech overcame at the very least statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. I’m so thrilled that we get to kick off with Sadie Van Buren, whom many of you already know as a dynamic voice in the SharePoint community, and as the author of the ingenious SharePoint Maturity Model. If reading Sadie’s story inspires any of you to tell yours, please feel free to email me.]

My name is Sadie Van Buren and I’m a Senior Software Engineer at Blue Metal Architects in Watertown, MA. I’m a Microsoft SharePoint consultant and have been working with that product since late 2002. Over the past nine years I’ve participated in about 50 implementations of the product and have acted as project manager, business analyst, developer, and solution architect.

1) Can you take us back to your “eureka!” moment—a particular instance or event that got you interested in technology?

I’m not sure there was a specific moment. One of my brothers gave me a new Commodore Vic-20 when I was a kid, and it may have been a disappointment to him that I mainly used it to play Q-bert. Continue reading Stories from the WIT Trenches: Sadie Van Buren →

Events, SharePoint

Around the World in 139 Days: Further SharePoint Vacations

May 18, 2011 Richard

[Oh yes, this view can be yours]

In honor of our own city’s upcoming, much anticipated Dux Raymond Sy/Jared Spataro-keynoted SPTechCon, and because the crop of international SharePoint fests just keeps mushrooming, I’ve put together another globetrot. Whether you’re hankering for swan boats and Sox games (.500? I’ll take it), hefeweizen and street art, waffles and, er, other Belgian things, or straight-up networking with the grand poo-bahs, this list will scratch that itch. The end of it puts us squarely into fall, which I can’t. Gahh. No. I refuse to think about it. Warm weather, where art thou?

What: SPTechCon Boston
Where: Boston, MA
When: June 3-5
Who: Dux Raymond Sy, Mark Miller, Paul Culmsee, Marc Anderson, Sadie Van Buren, Laura Rogers
Twitter: @SPTechCon

What: SharePoint Fest Chicago
Where: Chicago, IL
When: July 27
Who: Richard Riley, Ira Fuchs, Richard Harbridge, Jeff Willinger
Twitter: @sharepointfest Continue reading Around the World in 139 Days: Further SharePoint Vacations →

Mobile, SharePoint

Suspending Development of our BlackBerry client software for Microsoft SharePoint

May 11, 2011 wihl

On May 6, 2011, we suspended development of Pylon, a BlackBerry client for Microsoft SharePoint. This was a very difficult decision, as we started working on this product over three years ago and invested significant R&D, sales and marketing effort into it. Three issues factored into the decision:

Breadth of Features: Microsoft SharePoint is a large and multi-dimensional product. As we narrowed the feature set to appeal to a few customers, we grappled with how to scale to a broader base. Enterprise SharePoint customers frequently build solutions assuming that Internet Explorer will be the user interface. Bringing these custom solutions to multiple mobile environments would require significant engineering work from both SoftArtisans and the customer.
Microsoft’s SharePoint Protocol Patent Licensing, which imposes a significant royalty on a product like Pylon: By our reading, a client-only, software-only product like Pylon would require a minimum royalty payment of $5.80 per license, which is unfeasible in a typical app marketplace where products are either free or typically less than $20, not counting an app store’s 30% fees. Continue reading Suspending Development of our BlackBerry client software for Microsoft SharePoint →

SharePoint

How to create a web part containing ASP.NET AJAX-enabled user control in SharePoint 2010

April 27, 2011 yen

There are existing guides to creating a web part that hosts a user control and others on creating an ASP.NET AJAX-enabled web part. Here I’ll discuss how to create a web part that combines both features. With the user control, you can perform complex layout more easily using the visual designer. And of course, with ASP.NET AJAX you can eliminate full-page postbacks and provide users with a smoother browsing experience.

The walkthrough includes a SoftArtisans.Tutorial.AjaxWebPart for SharePoint 2010 (it can be made to work for SharePoint 2007 with little modification).

SharePoint and ASP.NET AJAX
With SharePoint 2007, the first step would be to configure SharePoint to use ASP.NET AJAX. Fortunately, SharePoint 2010 is already enabled for ASP.NET AJAX, so you can avoid performing error-prone surgery on Web.config.

Step 1: Creating the project

While there are SharePoint project templates, I prefer to use a basic project template for the maximum control and flexibility. It is also more instructive to delve into the nuts and bolts rather than have everything generated for you. Continue reading How to create a web part containing ASP.NET AJAX-enabled user control in SharePoint 2010 →

SharePoint

Considerations When Using View in CAML Search

April 11, 2011 yen

I recently worked on a web part which processes test scores for students. Test scores are stored in a list, organized by course and by user. The web part should retrieve the test scores for the logged in user, then the user’s score for each course. A previous implementation used a view, My Scores, which showed test scores for the logged in user by defining a filter, “Username is equal to [Me]”.

It occurred to me to retrieve a user’s test score for a course by performing a CAML search on the My Scores view. Typically, when searching a list using a CAML query, you can do something like this:

SPQuery query = new SPQuery();

query.Query = <query for course>;

results = list.GetItems(query);

There is an overloaded version of the SPQuery constructor that takes an SPView. Additionally, SPList.GetItems has an overloaded version that also takes an SPView. Given the availability of the SPView parameter, I was tempted to perform the CAML search on the My Scores view by doing the following: Continue reading Considerations When Using View in CAML Search →

Mobile, SharePoint, SQL Server

Using SQLite in BlackBerry Applications

March 29, 2011 jeremie

We recently decided to add some basic persistence to Pylon, our latest mobile application for accessing SharePoint. Nothing complicated, just logging levels, username and SharePoint URI.

We decided to use SQLite for persistence instead of the BlackBerry Persistent Store because of our previous experiences with the latter – where we encountered some stability issues such as the insidious 523 error which requires removing the battery to fix. We were also looking for an approach that would be more compatible when we port our application to iOS and Android.

The BlackBerry code samples for basic SQLite operations are straight-forward: http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/deliverables/8682/Code_samples_702046_11.jsp

However after basing our code on the samples we did run into a couple of issues.

SQLite not working on some phones – “Error: file system not ready”

The first issue we ran into was that the database simply didn’t work for certain phones. The confusing thing was that it wasn’t even consistent for phones of the same model.

It turns out the key was this line in the BlackBerry documentation:

“You can create database files in eMMC memory, on devices that support it, by specifying the corresponding file system path.”

Our application would use an SD Card if there was one, otherwise we would use device memory. If the device didn’t have an SD Card AND it didn’t have eMMC memory then we would get a “file system not ready” error when creating a database.

Phones that support SQLite DB in device memory (eMMC)

Torch
Storm 2

Phones that DON’T support SQLite DB in devicememory

Bold
Curve

Even with an SD Card, SQLite might not work if Media Card Support is turned off or if the phone is tethered to a computer and Mass Storage Mode is turned ON.

Intermittent Error – “Error: File system error (12)”

Another error we ran into was that sometimes opening the database soon after reading or writing to it would fail with the error “File system error (12)”. Just for testing I added code that would try to open the database a second time in case of failure after sleeping 100 milliseconds. This second attempt to open the database would always succeed.

Looking for “File system error (12)” online I found a few instances that were determined to be caused by bad queries or by failing to close the database or a SQL Statement. However the exact same query that worked most of the time was being called when the error would occur and after reviewing the code we determined that all databases and SQL statements were being correctly closed.

It turns out that we were following the BlackBerry examples a little too closely and opening/closing the database for every read/write operation. The overhead of this meant that the database wasn’t ready to be opened in time for the next operation.

We fixed the problem by only opening the database once the first time and then reusing that handle all subsequent times until we close the database on application exit.

Events, SharePoint

Around the World in 63 Days: a SharePoint Vacation

March 24, 2011 Richard

We’re officially three days into spring, but as any New Englander knows, “official” is code for “probably not going to happen,” or “snow falling on crocuses.” Which is what’s currently happening, by the way. There are two time-tested ways of dealing with late-onset SAD:

1)Drown it in liquid courage. Nowhere’s warmer than an Irish bar two hours after a Dropkick Murphys’ concert!

2)Nurse it under a palm tree.

Now, if you’re type 2, but a full-on vacation isn’t really in the cards, but you happen to work with SharePoint, you’re in luck.* These next few months are filled with top-notch SharePoint conferences in locales warm (Vegas), historic (London) and warm, historic and exotic (Lima). Here are 7 that caught my eye—if I’ve left any out, let me know in the comments! Continue reading Around the World in 63 Days: a SharePoint Vacation →

Step 1: Creating the project

SQLite not working on some phones – “Error: file system not ready”

Intermittent Error – “Error: File system error (12)”

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