Rod makes some interesting observations and suggestions for Microsoft.  While there is less chance of me being CEO at Microsoft than there is of Helen Clarke being PM one more time (might live to regret those words...) here's what I would do.

1) Forget office.   It's not going anywhere.  With the new Office Xml and ODF file formats there is plenty of room for any coding monkey to whip up a compatible niche product. These apps will chip away till there's nothing left.  90% of Word is never used, web based mail does a better job than Outlook for day to day mail needs - or at least good enough, Excel - I guess a few people use it but does it do anything that any other spreadsheet app can't do - AND - people use regularly?  The Office dominance is mostly due to the Office dominance and unless they do something radical about the rediculous licensing cost then it will dissapear faster than an litre of $1.99 petrol.

2) Branding is nothing without good product.  I'm sure I'm more gullable thant most at the subconcious level but dont get me started!  I'd sack the whole Marketting department (and shoot Apple's, Google's and any other Marketting guy in sight).  Brainwashers all of them!  Hire a few talented artists and just state the facts, eg: 'Word - use it to do stuff - $99'.

3) Open Source if you have to, but it's far less relevant than good WELL DOCUMENTED, SIMPLE product.  I love SharePoint now but if I have to work that hard again for another enterprise product, I'll be changing careers (oh crap, another burnt bridge).

4) Forget the aquisitions.  Microsoft is stacked with exceptional talent already.  Free up the brains and let them loose on creating something new and extraordinary, like...

5) Create a new OS that throws out all the old bagage.  You dont need to start from scratch - we need something this century - but dump support for the old shit.  90% of the OS should be SaaS'ed.   And there has to be zero maintenance.  My TV, fridge, phone, oven and toilet work with very little maintenance.  Why should I have to spend so much time keeping my PC working??  And I dont want to have to upgrade every 3 years.  My cars are 15 years old and get me from A to B just as well as anything else.

6) Make products my mother could use.  As an industry we are all guilty of missing the small picture.  By all means, cater for the enterprise geeks but remember the noobs too.  Imagine if you had to go to night school to learn how to use a TV . Computers need to be made simpler.

7) Consistancy please! The box-of-choclates strategy may have worked for Forest Gump, but it fails misserably for software.  Users/developers dont like surprises.  It feels like the different teams at Microsoft are not aligned very well.  Need to mix things up a little more often.

8) Make licensing simpler.  If you need a computer to figure out the license cost then it's too complex.  Instead, set a realistic per user/server price for each market and let the regional offices do deals.

9) Don't become the next IBM!  Stay away from hardware and services.  Stick to what you know best - creating innovation and integrating it.

10) Linux is not a threat to the desktop so ignore it.  For the server, concentrate on making it easier and more fun for developers and administrators.  And when I say easy, I really mean SIMPLE.  For example, you should be able to explain every technology on a single white board in less than 10 minutes, well enough for an intermediate level techo to run with.  If you can do that well then Linux for the server will also die it's well deserved death.

11) Buy Apple and cancel the iPhone.  I dont have one so no-one else can either! 

12) Social networking sites are just a string of uselsss fad's.  They do nothing to improve the human race. Dont get sucked in!  Unless of course you do it with a decent mobile device... maybe something like an iPhone... but much better.


I did say up front I would never be CEO of Microsoft :)

The Team System and .Net User Group are having a combined session next week.

Ron Jacobs!!!

---

The Perfect Pattern Storm, where Test Driven development (TDD) meets User Experience (UX) and MVP
Christchurch 20/05/2008
Gather at 5:00 pm, starting at 5:30 pm

Presented by Ron Jacobs

As long time host  of ARCast.TV, Ron Jacobs has a front row seat to observe the constantly shifting architectural landscape. In this session we will consider what happens when the force of test driven development (TDD) collides with the demand for better UX.

Ron Jacobs is a Sr. Technical Evangelist in the Microsoft Platform Evangelism group based at the company headquarters in Redmond Washington. Ron's evangelism is focused on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Since 1999 Ron has been a product and program manager on various Microsoft products including the .Net Framework, Windows Communication Foundation and COM+. A top-rated conference speaker, author and podcaster, Ron brings over 20 years of industry experience to his role of helping Microsoft customers and partners to build architecturally sound and secure applications.

---

RSVP via the link on the .Net User Group Site.  Space is limited so get in early.  Note, this session is at Intergen rather than the usual venue.

Today I notice a blog thread initiated by a post from MVP Jeffrey Palermo on the merits of SharePoint as a development platform

Jeffrey lists a few facets of what makes a great development platform, most of which I agree with. 

• Easy to install
• Easy to configure
• Integrates well with simple tools
• Easily extended to make simple tools
• Easy to debug
• Easy to create test automation
• All configuration stores easily in source control
• (Others He forgot)

I'm the first to moan and rant about the pain of SharePoint but this is mostly based on ignorance and impatience.  I'm learning fast and am starting to appreciate the benefits of using SharePoint as a development platform.

But back to the original question:  Is SharePoint a Great Development Platform? Using Jeffry's list above lets see.

Easy to install :  There's only a few options in the installer and once you understand what each means and why you would chose each option, then yes, I think it's very easy to install.

Easy to configure : For out of the box operation of WSS or MOSS it's not too bad.  If you want some enterprise features then there is quite a bit of configuration to wade through.  So, maybe yes, maybe no - it depends.

Integrates well with simple tools : Not totally sure what Jeffrey means here but I think he's talking about development tools.  On that basis, you would have to say yes.  Visual Studio 2005 and the SharePoint extensions make it very easy to create and deploy features.  Visual Studio 2008 support is coming for VSeWSS but it does a better job with SharePoint sites already.  There is also a huge number of tools and samples for SharePoint from the community and vendors.

Easily extended to make simple tools : Not sure this really applies to SharePoint. It can certainly be extended - very easily in fact - but for simple tools?  Simple is not a word I associate with SharePoint.

Easy to debug :  Definitely yes - from within Visual Studio.  However, diagnostically it can be tricky so I'd say that's a maybe.

Easy to create test automation : It's no harder than any other server platform.  We have created unit tests for MS CRM - if you can test that you can test anything! 

All configuration stores easily in source control : Source control of web.config is a pain for most web sites, more so with SharePoint. If your doing SharePoint development properly then you may have less configuration that normal web sites.

Other Stuff : SharePoint provides so much base functionality out of the box.  Any pain you experience must be weighed against the benefits and time savings that are delivered by this.

 

To fail SharePoint for development on the basis that you have to use a server OS ??  Sorry, but this is ridiculous.  I can't imagine any serious developer using XP or Vista as a development OS.  Why? 

• It's not what you are delivering applications to - certainly with SharePoint. 100% of the solutions I have delivered in the last 3 years have been for Windows 2003 Server and one of the server products running on it (SQL 2k, SQL 05, WSS etc).
• You can only easily run 1 web site at a time - yes yes, you can fiddle that but it's a PITA
• You can't run any of the server software you need to code against.

Of course, if you only create single user desktop widgets then you can probably use XP or Vista quite happily.

SharePoint is a large complex beast.  It's not another .Net API or some little platform you can learn in 20 minutes.  It's designed to solve complex human problems and manage data in many different formats.  I can't say for sure if it's a great development platform or not, but I KNOW for a FACT that Microsoft are working very, very hard to make it so.

 

I often spend a lot of time trying to find stock images and fluff for sites. Luckily our office has a talented chap who normally does all this stuff before we need it.  However, occassionally he's not around or I need something at home.

I just found this site:  http://www.ajaxload.info.  You can use this to generate a stack of spinny progress indicated thingies.  Very useful!

 

A few people have been doing some great things in the community and it's fantastic to see them get recognition.

Congradulations to :

JD Trask (ASP.Net)

Ivan Towlson (Windows Client - WPF) (having an MVP award will soon be a pre-req to getting a job at Mindscape! :)

Zachary Smith (Sharepoint)

 

Somehow I also managed to scrape in for another year.

Keep these dates free if you can afford it:

  May 20 in Sydney
  May 22 in Melbourne

Booking open from 7 April ish.

More details soon.

Thanks to Chris Johnson I now know how to create a feature staple with VSeWSS.

If you don't know what a staple is then Chris has a good description on his blog.  You should read this first for more background but my simple explanation of a feature staple follows.

Feature staples are a way of attaching customisations to existing features and hence site definitions.  This is acheived by creating a feature that associates itself with another feature.  You can also add Feature Receiver code (which is like an event handler for feature activation) that lets you do all sorts of goodness that you can't do with CAML.

Feature stapling is the reccommened way of customising SharePoint.  Site definitions may appear to be a good way to go, but dont.  Andrew Connell explains why.

To create a staple you actually need to create two features:  the feature that you want activated and a feature to do the stapling. 

Update:  I just found a much better description of the process here.

VSeWSS 1.1 does not yet support feature stapling via an item template, but you can still do this via a neat trick that the VSeWSS team provided.  Here's the steps.

1. Create an Empty VSeWSS project:
   
   
   
2. Add a module for the feature you want stapled.  This this case I just used the default module that copies sample.txt.
3. Switch to WSP View and refresh.
4. Open the module feature.xml and change the scope to Site.
5. Open the Module.xml for the new module and change the Url to "MyModule" and add RootWebOnly="FALSE":
   
   
   
6. Deploy the solution and make sure that you get sample.txt in a new folder MyModule.
7. Now for the stapler.  In the solution explorer, create a new folder called Stapler.  Add a new XML filed to this called element.xml.  This will contain the feature associations:
   
   This element.xml contains 3 associations for the new Module.  The Id GUID is from Module1.  Get this value from the WSP View of Module1 feature.xml.  The TemplateName is found in 12\TEMPLATE\1033\XML\WEBTEMP.XML - STS is the name of the templte and #0, #1, #2 is the configuration.  So, this staple associates Module1 with Blank Site, Team Site and Document Workspace.
   
   Make sure the element Id is a new unique GUID.  WSP uses this.
   
   Note: there are issues with the blank site.  I can't find the reference to the explaination of this.. will update when I do.
   
8. Switch to WSP View and refresh.  You should see a new Feature appear for the staple called Untitiled1.  Rename the folders to the name of your stapler thus:
   
   
   You should also change the Title in the feature.xml.
   
9. Edit the feature.xml for the Stapler and set the Scope to Farm:  
    
10. Deploy and pray.
11. Test & checking.  The stapler feature will be deployed to the farm.  Check the Farm Features to make sure it's there. VSeWSS will also deploy the module to the default site so you need to create a new site to test that the staple works. 
12. Create a new Team site.  Use SharePoint designer to see if the MyModule folder is created.
13. Now that you have the stapler working you can create a feature receiver to perform any code based actions.  I haven't done this part yet.  I'll post again when I do.

Normally you will use this method to deploy a master page, aspx page, css etc.  If this is the case then you probably don't need to copy these files to every sub-site, just to the root site.  Set RootWebOnly to TRUE if you want.  Remember that if Module1 is copying files to a library then you need Type=GhostableInLibrary for each file that is copied.

 

I'm not very good at managing my daily tasks.  The only way I am half reasonable is to create todo lists.  This works for a day or until I lose the peice of paper I scribble the tasks on.

Luckily, there is a better way:  ActionThis!

Use ActionThis to help you and your team work together more effectively, using the power of the web combined with Microsoft Office.

Thousands of people worldwide use www.actionthis.com to manage the tasks small businesses, teams and their partners need to complete to succeed. Delegate tasks from Microsoft Outlook, connect with your team on the ActionThis task management website, track progress and take action with live reports delivered to your email inbox.  ActionThis is free to try, and simple to use. Less time following up, more tasks completed, your business is more productive. ActionThis was designed and developed by Intergen in New Zealand and will help you and your team get things done.

 

How ActionThis helps you get stuff done

·         Use Microsoft Outlook to create and assign tasks to yourself, your team, your partners

·         Organize and access these tasks from anywhere using Microsoft Outlook or the www.actionthis.com website

·         Keep track of progress, projects, and workload with reports emailed to your email inbox

·         Keep on top of overdue tasks with live alerts designed to help you take action quickly

·         Export and analyze your progress with Microsoft Excel

·         Telephone and email support is free

 

Try it for free. Sign up for a one month free trial at http://www.actionthis.com/product/trial.aspx and use this referral code: INT531.

I'm often asked 'How do I get to be a great programmer like you Pete?'.  Well not quite, I added the last bit, but Tokes provides a better answer than I ever could. 

I completely agree with Tokes, being a (Microsoft) developer is getter way harder. But it's not Microsoft's fault.  It's those pesky users.  I always said that being a developer would be a piece of cake if it wasn't for users!  They seem to want more and more every year and are less impressed by coded coolness.   In fact, I think there is a formula to calculate coolness:

  

(C is Coolness, loc is lines of code, si is systems integrated, To is time overrun)

Time seems to be suffering too.  As systems and requirements grow in complexity there seems to be some sort of temporal distortion reducing the amount of time available to a developer. I think Stephen Hawking discovered this when he ran out of budget for his black hole simulator (SimHole).

Developers must also share the blame for increasing complexity. We are always chasing the next best thing without much regard for using what we already have.  Microsoft's job is to create temptation - it's us developers that can't keep our hands out of the cookie jar.  Visual Basic 6 is still a great tool.  Visual Studio 2008 just looks prettier!

It's no wonder that fewer and fewer kids are taking up IT as a career. Although, with both parents in the industry my 3 kids seem to be heading in the right direction.  Maybe we as developers should procreate more?

I had a custom field type in my MOSS solution that was a simple CODE type.  This was based on a Text type but all it did was to uppercase any value.

However, when I referenced a list that used this field type from InfoPath the column would not display in InfoPath.

I haven't figured out how to do this yet so I reverted back to a Text field for now.  I'm guessing there is an attribute I need to add the the module.xml or maybe in code? If you have a solution, I'd love to know :)

Not sure what it fixes - but it's gotta help!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=B57C805D-2821-4625-A6F1-80725267F887&displaylang=en

I truly wish you haven't been wasting as much time as I have this week with SharePoint anonymous access and a custom master page.

I have a site that uses a custom membership provider, forms authentication, anonymous access and a custom master page.  My problems were many but in the end the main one was getting anonymous access to the home page.  This would always give me an ugly 401 error.

After a good nights sleep and with a clear head, I finally realised that the problem was not with Pages/default.aspx but with it's masterpage which as not deployed correctly.  I had missed putting type="GhostableInLibrary" into the file node of the module:

  <Module Name="MasterPages" Url="_catalogs/masterpage" Path="" RootWebOnly="TRUE" >
    <File Path="mine.master" Url="mine.master" Type="GhostableInLibrary" IgnoreIfAlreadyExists="FALSE" />
  </Module>

It's the little things that can really screw you!

TGIF.

If you are having problems creating a State Machine workflow for SharePoint in VB (and I really dont know why you would want to use VB but... :) then you may see an error about missing files, Workflow1.layout and Workflow1.resx.  If this is the case then you need to copy these files from the C# Project Tempalte zip to the VB version.  Full details are in the following blog post comments- it's a long one so search for workflow1.layout to find it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/06/07/introduction-to-sharepoint-workflow.aspx

A blog-less colleage of mine, Bryce, just discovered redirects in IIS 6, which is something new for me also.  Bloody useful if you are moving site content around, moving servers or just want to make URL's more friendly.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/41c238b2-1188-488f-bf2d-464383b1bb08.mspx?mfr=true

This is particularly relevant for sites with really long and complex URL's, e.g.: SharePoint, in which case you should also read:  http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=48

To create a forms library definition with VSeWSS 1.1 is very easy.  You can similarly create a list definition based on a content type.  However, you cant automatically create a forms library with an attached content type.

This is how I did it.

1. Create your content type
2. Create a temporary list based on the content type
3. Create a form library list
4. Edit the forms lib schema.xml
1. Copy the content type fields from the temporary list schema to the <Fields> node.
2. Update the <List> node, adding:
   
   

3. BaseType="1"
   Direction="0"
   EnableContentTypes="TRUE"

4. In <ContentTypes> optionally remove the base Form content type reference if you only want to allow the specific content type:

   <ContentTypeRef ID="0x010101"> ... </ContentTypeRef>

5. Add a new <ContentTypeRef> that has the ID that matches the content type you created in step 1.

5. Delete the temporary list definition
6. Deploy and cheer!

 

Here's a small trick that confused me for a while this morning.  VSeWSS creates a setup.bat & .wsp file that will deploy a site definition into a specified server.  Running setup.bat from the command prompt appears to be the obvious way to do that.  You can also override the default web and site urls, e.g:

setup /weburl http://myserver /siteurl http://myserver

The default being localhost (or whatever you developed against).

However, this was failing for me becuase the specified web did not yet have a root site collection and some part of the site definition (web parts) were scoped to the site.

The solution is to create a blank site using stsadm thus:

stsadm -o createsite -url http://myserver -ownerlogin administrator -owneremail me@myemail.com

Then you can deploy the site defintion using setup.bat. When you browse to the new site you will be prompted with a list of possible site definitions.

Like all things SharePoint this is easy and obvious when you know...

 

No, not mine, but this one.  http://nickgrattan.wordpress.com.  There is lots of useful material here on many SharePoint topics.

Does anyone have a list of quality SharePoint blogs?  Maybe I'll start one here...

When deploying a solution to a site you can sometimes get errors that are not picked up during compilation.  For example, we created a Content Type that contained a field with an inccorrect BaseType of "Person" rather than "User".  This compiled just fine but fails on the first deploy.  It then failed to compile after deploying.

To fix this is easy enough - remember to update the content type xml as well as the generated schema.xml - but Visual Studio can get it's nickers in a knot and will not be able to deploy the corrected solution.

You need to manually remove the solution using the setup.bat that is created during deployment. Run setup.bat from the bin\debug or bin\release folder thus: 

    setup /u

Then IISReset.

If you try to redeploy with Visual Studio you may now get an error that talks about an "invariant language"  - sorry, I didn't save this error message when it happened.  You will need to restart Visual Studio to clear this error.

I'm in lovely sunny Wellington this week working on some WSS samples using the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 1.1 (or more easily pronounced VissyWiss).  One of the samples requires the use of a Module Project Item.  There is surprisingly little documentation - official or otherwise - on what a module does and how to use it - at least, not that we can find.  So, here's my contribution - hopefully correct.

A Module Project Item is used to deploy files to any(?) part of your WSS installation.  You specify the source of the item to copy as a file path relative to the module, and the destination as a url path relative to the site root.  This all sounds very simple, but the problem is that there are 2 urls and 2 paths so there are several permitations possible and not all of them work!

When you add a Module Project Item to your project (Site def, Empty def etc) you will get an XML file called Module.xml in a folder.  Our one looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements Id="b43cb805-eebf-421a-83d3-c2a6cb8afa10" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <Module Name="module_training" Url="images">
    <File Url="WORD_icon.jpg" Path="module_training\WORD_icon.jpg" Type="Ghostable" />
  </Module>
</Elements>


Module Url: This is where the files will be copied to.  The url is relative to the site root.
File Path: Path to the file relative to the project in Visual Studio.
File Type: This can only be Ghostable or GhostableInLibrary.  You can only use GhostableInLibrary if the module Url is for a List, such as Shared Documents.

<Module> also has a Path attribute but we dont need it for this operation.

The module will create folders if they dont exist so in the above example we are copying an image to the root images folder, but this could easily be "customimages" and the folder will be created.

There's more to Modules but that is all I have for now.  I'll update when I know how to do Wildcards :)

Rod is a frequent poster on the subject of broadcast TV. I agree totally with his latest comments and suggestions, but I'd just like to add my little bit.

I dont have an AppleTV or an iPod or iTunes stuff but I do have a Media capable PC connected to a 42" LCD TV.  I dont use Media Center as a) I dont have TV tuners in the PC and b) there are no guides for TV programmes (yes you can hack it but Ive tried and got too frustrated) and c) Media Center just gets in the way when your downloading stuff - you still have to revert to Windows Explorer and a browser.

I also dont like the idea of paying for TV so I dont have Sky (plus all the repeat screenings and self promotion drive me nuts). 

However, I do pay for RapidShare which is were I get all my downloads from. Yes, this a moral disgrace and while I can't legally justify it, in my defence I would like to say that I mostly download TV shows that are (or one day might be :) free to air in New Zealand.  I also don't give away stuff I've downloaded - at least not too often, maybe 10%.

So, it occurs to me that if TV NZ, or whoever has the balls, wants to charge a reasonable amount for access to full legal ondemand TV then I'd probably sign up.  I might even consider tollerating a few advertisements - like 1 per half hour.  And they should also have a great selection of program - not the usual crap that passes as quality TV (CSI, Boston Legal, Lost etv (OMG dont get me started)).

Of course 'reasonable amount' is a very subjective term. For me this would have to be a lot less than Sky but could be more than RapidShare - say $15 or $20 a month.  I think this is very unlikely in over priced New Zealand so I'll continue to infringe copyright until broadcast TV dies and/or I run out of disk space or bandwidth.

Today I received a correction to a post I did on SharePoint last year.  My erroneous statement was causing a few queries to be sent to Microsoft.  For this I am truly sorry, but in my defense I did check my facts first - like all good reporters I blame my sources!

Anyway, that got me thinking about correcting blog posts.  I've seen debate about this in the past and my philosophy has always been:

• correct only factual errors but leave the original text intact
• never delete a blog post unless under court order
• be careful what you say BEFORE you post

My temper and inpatients often get me into trouble so there are a few blog posts here that I could remove or edit, yet, I wont.  Better to see me warts and all I think. 

What do you thnk?

Microsoft have just release v 1.1 of the Visual Studio Extensions for WSS - VSEWSS.  These work with Visual Studio 2005 and offer a few enhancements of the 1.0 release.  There will be another release mid year that will add support for VS08.

WSS dev is a huge hairy beast and it can be hard to get started - or even figuring out where to start. The best part about new release is the user guide that is provided with VSEWSS.  This is something that some clever chaps at Intergen have been working on.  I provided some very minimal input reviewing their work which is basically providing me with some free training in exchange for fixing a few typos!  The user guide will improve over the next few months as we add more sections so keep checking for updates.

Get it here:

VSeWSS 1.1

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3E1DCCCD-1CCA-433A-BB4D-97B96BF7AB63&displaylang=en

 

User Guide

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a8a4e775-074d-4451-be39-459921f79787&DisplayLang=en