[via Spence]

Aw-yeah... Spence just posted a killer little series of articles documenting the process of setting up a triple-boot experience on a MacBook Pro. I've been living with a MBP for the last 6 months and love it. The only thing I'd like is to have a partition with Windows Server (2k8 preferred, but 2k3 works fine too) for SharePoint for when I'm teaching, presenting or generally planning to live in a server environment for an extended period of time. Why? Because I'd like to work right off the bare metal, using all 4GB of RAM and not having to be attached to some USB/Firewire drive.

Spence's series is EXACTLY what I need. Can't wait to wrap up some billable work so I can carve out a day to walk through the process and get setup. Only thing I'll need is a good reimaging solution for the Win2k8 partition.

» Triple Boot MacBook Pro: Running Mac OS X, Windows Vista x64 and Windows Server 2008 x64 on a MacBook Pro

Looking for some free SharePoint training? Tomorrow is your day! The SharePoint in Action (formerly SharePoint Pro Live) virtual conference is May 13, 2008 from 11 AM - 4 PM EDT (GMT -0500). I'll be presenting with a handful of other SharePoint professionals on various topics (all times EDT):

• 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM :: Unleash the Productivity: Microsoft Office Applications as SharePoint Clients by Dan Holme
• 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM :: Building Advanced Web Parts for SharePoint 3.0 the ASP.NET 2.0 Way by Andrew Connell
• 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM :: Enterprise Search with SharePoint Server by Melissa Fraser

Again, the price point can't be beat... this is a FREE conference!

» SharePoint In Action - free virtual conference May 13, 2008

Our next meeting is on Thursday, May 15, 2008. Here's the session title & abstract to help you get a better idea of what we'll be discussing:

Here's the important stuff:

• Date: Thursday, May 15th, 2008; 6p-8p
• Location: Bank of America, Building 500, 9000 Southside Blvd; 2nd Floor; Sea Oats room
• Meeting Location Map: http://floridaofficegeeks.org/JOG/Pages/Meeting%20Logistics.aspx
• RSVP Required: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=127732

* Jacksonville Office Geeks is also known as the JAXDUG Office Developer SIG.

WROX has published for purchase ($6.99 USD) a blox, a short paper (23ps) on the topic of Extending the MOSS Publishing HTML Editor Field Control that I wrote. I show you how to customize the OOTB editor including how to create a custom button. The new button in the editor that I show you how to create in this blox enables authors to add an XHTML Friends Network (XFN) link, a type of microformat as shown below:

» WROX::Extending the MOSS Publishing HTML Editor Field Control

If you've been under a rock like I have apparently over the last few months, you might not have noticed this little gem get published. In March MSDN published an article by a handful of Microsoft folks, one of which is very familiar to those of us old-skool MCMS junkies: Stefan.

First a bit of terminology. Most people are familiar with the fact that MOSS includes a capability called Content Deployment (CD). This facility is designed for organizations who author content in a staging environment and want to "publish" the changed content at scheduled intervals to another environment that typically is read-only & lives in a DMZ or at co-location facilities. This is ideal for content-centric sites like Publishing sites (aka: WCM sites). CD is founded on the content migration (CM) API that is in WSS 3.0 (some call it "PRIME"). The jist of the CM API is that you can export all/pieces of your site collection and import them somewhere else. This is what is used when you run export / import from STSADM (something very different from what backup / restore do).

Most of the documentation out there in the official & unofficial channels that covers the CM API and CD API is slim at best. The December 2007 refresh of the SharePoint SDKs has some updated info around this area. In March, another article (linked below) was posted on MSDN that talks about how to do more of the really complex stuff like reparenting and, retaining object identities, etc. This goes along very well with Stefan's 5-part blog series he did a while back here.

» MSDN: Selective Content Migration in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Man, what a week. Just like previous MVP Global Summit's, it is an intense week that's mentally exhausting. Last year the SharePoint MVPs started a new tradition of playing paintball on the first day of the summit so now it's also physically exhausting... but so much fun! There's a great picture of the whole group on the SharePoint Team Blog here. Collectively we fired off some 80,000+ rounds of paintballs! Now THAT is some serious fun! Some memories from this year's paintball:

• As I ran down the side of the field to take a very good position on the other team, I saw Ben Robb hiding behind a barrier just as I ran by. We were no less than 5' apart from each other but he was reloading so I peppered him from close range... and it must have hurt. Even broke the skin (see image to the right)! I made it to the barrier, but slid into it knocking the support down causing it to collapse on me, trapping me in the mud. I lay there trying to get loose hearing paintballs explode around me on the barrier. Nice cover, but man it hurt!
• Matt McDermott and I were ready to charge a position held by Kit Kai with Joel Oleson & Todd Bleeker... but Joel and Todd didn't follow leaving Kit Kai to destroy both Matt and I.
• Gary Lapointe strolls up behind me and says "hey Andrew" allowing me to get 1/2 way turned around before popping me at point blank range in the back.
• I made sure Corne was clear I thought he was #1 all day :)
• Speedball... we played a few games at the end... and that was some serious fun. The final face-off was between Corne & myself with Andrew Woodward. Everyone was yelling at Woodward and I to charge Corne or at least unload on him... but we couldn't. He had 1 shot and I had 4 shots left. We finally elected to do the final stand and did a staggered attack. Unfortunately our 5 shots didn't land on Corne and he outlasted us.

The content and sessions were fantastic. Unfortunately we can't share the details as they are all done under a strict NDA, but all I can say is that I really enjoyed the rich & spirited dialog we had with the different people on the SharePoint team.

The week was brought to a close on Wednesday night with a fantastic dinner. Here we took a group picture which you can see, again, at the SharePoint Team blog here.

I can't say how lucky and privileged I am to be part of such a fantastic group of individuals: SharePoint MVPs. We get grief from other MVPs and people from our regions because we are such a tight group. This is one event I'll never miss. Looking forward to next March!

I've uploaded all my pictures to a special set on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewconnell/sets/72157604610417326/

Two more Visual How To's are up on MSDN based off two popular articles on my blog.

The first one is based off the process I like to use where developers can leverage something such as MSBuild to automatically create WSP files every time the project is built (original blog article here):

• MSDN Visual How To: Automating Solution Package Creation for Windows SharePoint Services by Using MSBuild
  Learn how to use MSBuild to automatically generate solution package files for Windows SharePoint Services.
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc441431.aspx

The second one is based off the painful process in setting up your site to leverage multiple authentication providers (ie: Windows Authentication & FBA) to access the same site collection (original blog post here):

• MSDN Visual How To: Configuring Multiple Authentication Mechanisms with Alternate Access Mappings in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
  Learn how to configure a site collection with two entry points that use different authentication mechanisms in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc441429.aspx

A while back I blogged a few posts about creating custom timer jobs (here, here, here and here) and last week I pointed to a new MSDN Visual How To that shows how to do the same thing. There is also now a much more in-depth article I wrote that is now on MSDN that contains a lot of additional information about creating, deploying and debugging custom timer jobs.

» MSDN: Creating Custom Timer Jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

There are a few cool extra nuggets in this article that I want to point out.

• The scenario I walk you through is not terribly "production" common, but rather something people like me need when teaching or presenting on SharePoint. We all know that many things in SharePoint requires application pool recycles. The part that's a pain is the warm-up time for the application pool (not a SharePoint issue, it's just an aspect of ASP.NET's JIT compilation of the pages). Microsoft first came out with something called the warmup scripts that are great in demos, but they are command line driven & you still have to manually recycle the app pool from the IIS manager or . My pal Spence has a killer utility that sits in the system tray which makes it very easy to recycle the app pool & warm up provided URLs: Application Pool Manager. What the timer job does is enable you to configure scheduled requests to specific site collections as shown in the article. It doesn't replace Spence's utility... I still use that. But it keeps your SharePoint site from "falling asleep." So, you can use this for your own SharePoint sites!
• The job needed some way to store configuration information. There are plenty of ways to do this, but I elected to use the hierarchical object store that Maurice blogged about a while ago. There aren't many examples for this so here's another one for you.

The article doesn't have the downloadable source or built project so you can grab them from here:

» SharePointWarmupJob.wsp (in a ZIP)
» SharePointWarmupJob.Source.zip

For developers getting into the world of SharePoint development, it can be daunting at first. I've always felt the best way to get around this was to simplify the product; make SharePoint easier to understand and not this big blue monster.

A big piece of this is understanding how the file system works in SharePoint sites. Armed with this knowledge, it makes it much easier to understand errors and issues you may run into with your custom components. To this effect, I have recently had an article published on MSDN that explains the concept of customized and uncustomized files which also covers the virtualized SharePoint file system:

» Understanding and Creating Customized and Uncustomized Files in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

You'll quickly see that working with ASPX files in SharePoint sites is not really all that different than vanilla ASP.NET sites. Yes, there are a few extra steps, but this also implies you are not limited in many of the things you are used to doing in traditional ASP.NET sites such as leveraging code-behind files for ASPX and Master Pages. For info on this, I have an MSDN Visual How To that demonstrates this process as well:

» MSDN Visual How To: Adding Code-Behind Files to Master Pages and Content Pages in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

To many people this won't be anything new. If you saw one of my talks at SharePoint Connections in Las Vegas last November, my sessions at the Office Developer Conference in San Jose in February or the SharePoint Conference in Seattle in March, you likely saw this little gem.

Like many other SharePoint developers I've adopted a similar approach to building SharePoint projects and solution (*.wsp) files. My process is not unlike many others where I mimic the SharePoint "12" folder structure in my Visual Studio projects (only the folders that I'm using). What got really annoying to me was the repetition of adding the same folders whenever I created a new project. I don't like using custom Visual Studio project templates because then anyone using my project will need to have my template installed. This was meaningless work that a machine could do for me.

In addition, when creating Window SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 solutions (*.wsp), SharePoint developers are forced to create a *.DDF file and manifest.xml file that makecab.exe and SharePoint will use in the packaging and deployment of the solution files. Some create these manually and others use home grown tools. None of the tools really caught on to me. I hated building these files as they were almost always following the same process. This was more meaningless work that a  machine could do for me.

So I set out work on this project...

I've created a Visual Studio tool window that would do some of this work for me. First and foremost, the primary objective was to help in the customization and content creation of structures needed in a Visual Studio project used for SharePoint development. Second, it was to eliminate the chance for typos and trivial errors. Third, to eliminate repetitive tasks and free me up to do the more complex stuff.

Today this tool window does essentially two things:

1. Allows the developer to pick the folders to add to the project from the SharePoint 12 folder structure
2. Automatically build the *.ddf and manifest.xml files based on the contents of the project

Here it is in action:

I primarily created this tool window for me and to save me time, but the more people that see me use it the more that want it. It is still very much in beta and it admittedly has some issues, but it is stable enough to use. If you're interested to learn more about it, check out the following page on my blog to see more screenshots, get more details as well as download and installation instructions. It's 100% free. :)

» AC's VS SharePoint Project Utility Tool Window for SharePoint Developers

I do want to give a big thanks to my fellow SharePoint MVP Eric Shupps for helping me test this tool to make sure it was good enough for anyone to use.

This won't be the last release. I have plenty of ideas I want to add into it as well as other stuff that it needs to make my life easier. If you have ideas or find issues, please feel free to follow the instructions on the above linked page to submit feature requests and bugs!

[Update 4/15/2008 2:30a] For those of you who are wondering how the feature.xml file's contents are being stubbed out by simply typing [fxml], that's part of another thing I did... it is not included in the tool window. For that you need CodeRush. You can get more info from the blog post here: http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2007/08/21/6095.aspx