The Typemock Insider Blog: Announcing Isolator for Sharepoint : Unit testing for sharepoint made easier (and a free license!)

The Typemock Insider Blog: Announcing Isolator for Sharepoint : Unit testing for sharepoint made easier (and a free license!)

Announcing Isolator for Sharepoint : Unit testing for sharepoint made easier (and a free license!)

Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.

The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.

SharePoint and 64bit

The next version of MOSS, which I think will be called SharePoint 2010, will be 64bit ONLY.

Bamboo Solutions - SharePoint Analyzer

Bamboo do a lot of Web Parts and I mean a lot. I’ve used a couple of them and have been really impressed.

Bamboo Labs have just released their latest offering. It is not a web part but a desktop (or server) application called SharePoint Analyzer. It lets you get information about your SharePoint farm.

As it is in Beta it is FREE. I hope it stays free.

Check out http://community.bamboosolutions.com/media/p/7160.aspx for full details.

CAML IntelliSense for WSS 3.0 in Visual Studio 2005

Everyone one knows IntelliSense is great. But the worst thing about it is when you are in Visual Studio and you haven’t got it. If you are a SharePoint Developer using CAML (not necessarily by choice) then CAML IntelliSense is going to be useful. The following should enable CAML IntelliSense for WSS 3.0 in Visual Studio 2005.

In note pad enter the following text:



Save the file as CAML.XML in the following directory:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas\

You should now have CAML IntelliSense when you next load Visual Studio 2005.

Microsoft Certified Master and Certified Architect for SharePoint

Well as I predicted Microsoft have released additional certifications for SharePoint. These are Microsoft Certified Master and Certified Architect for SharePoint. I see them as being taken by those who are already MVPs or those like myself who don’t do enough SharePoint community work to get an MVP but want to prove they know what they are talking about.

Check out http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/master/register/default.mspx for more inforamtion.

SharePoint in the Cloud

It is not clear to me what SharePoint online is. It sounds like it is simply a hosted version of SharePoint. But is it the WSS or MOSS flavour? And don't we already have Microsoft Partners offering hosting SharePoint? Watch this space...

070-631 - TS: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Configuring

I've just passed my Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Configuring exam. I got 100%.

:-)

Office SP2

I had hoped that SP2 for SharePoint 2007 and Office 2007 would be out Q1 2008. There still is a chance that it will be but based on Microsoft's announcement here http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2008/10/22/announcing-service-pack-2-sp2-for-the-2007-microsoft-office-system.aspx it could slip to Q2 :-(

Also what is disappointing there seems to be few improvements/bug fixes to SharePoint. OR at least they are not giving much away.

Remember...

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology

Gartner have recently released their Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology (http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article4/article4.html). They say “This Magic Quadrant assesses vendors with capabilities that go beyond enterprise search to encompass a range of technologies”. So who comes out top? For a clue look at the image below:


As you should be able to see or maybe you guessed, Microsoft came up on to (mostly) apparently Autonomy have a more complete vision. I’m not in the Autonomy world I don’t know there products or services so I can’t say if they are better. However despite Microsoft having only an average marketing depart (so I have learnt) at least they do a good job as to communication what the Microsoft technology stack can give a business.

So what has this to do with SharePoint? Well it does the same thing as Information access technologies. It allows users via these technologies to access applications such as DM, WCM and RDMS. SharePoint is now at that version

Is the server hosting your SharePoint database running out of space?

If so have you checked your SharePoint log files? While installing SharePoint configuration and content databases are created in SQL Server. By default, these databases are created in Full Recovery Mode – better than none at all. So for each SharePoint database created, a data file and a full log file is also created!

But don’t forget that if backups are run without truncating the log files, your log files will quickly increase.

To find out the size of a database log file run the following Database Console Command (DBCC for short):

1. In Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SQL Server 2005 or 2008), open New Query
2. In New Query, type:
   DBCC SQLPERF (LOGSPACE)
   

This will give the log size for databases.

For more details on DBCC SQLPERF (LOGSPACE) see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189768.aspx

SharePoint 2010

There has been no official name or date given to the next version of SP but I think it will be called Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010 and that it will reach us by Q1 2010. I predict the beta will be out Q3 2009. It will be based on .Net 4.0 and only run on Windows 2008 with SQL Server 2008.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 Developer Evaluation VPC Image

From what I can see this VD was released 19/09/2008 however I have found that Microsoft Date Published dates are not always correct – unless I’m wrong surely not!

Any way the vhd here:

http://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?familyid=1BEEAC6F-2EA1-4769-9948-74A74BD604FA&displaylang=en

Is a time limited evaluation VHD containing WSS 3.0 SP1, Visual Studio 2008 and the VS 2008 extensions for VS WSS 3.0, v1.1, Yippee.

What is cooler is that it has Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 (build 2.0.30523.8) and the matching version of Visual Studio SilverLight tools.

Something tells me that we are going to see SilverLight based tools in SharePoint 2010,

patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance

An updated version of patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance has been posted to CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/spg.

I'm interested in the Content Type Upgrade Solution.

Create a Custom Task Pane to Consume SharePoint Server 2007 Query Services in Word 2007

In this visual how-to video, learn how you can access Enterprise Search results from client applications and Web applications outside the context of a SharePoint site.

http://wm.microsoft.com/ms/msdn/office/2007officevisualhowtos/wd2007consumingqueryservicesusingvstose.wmv

From: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb870301.aspx

COM exception error in Sharepoint with HRESULT: 0x80041051

I was recently working on an enviroment where we got a very unhelpful error. In turns out it is caused by ForeFront!!! So if you get a COM exception error in Sharepoint with HRESULT: 0x80041051 it is caused by Forefront thinking some pages have a virus.

Go to the SharePoint SQL Server and run the following query on each of the WSS_Content databases:

SELECT *
FROM Docs
WHERE (VirusStatus > 0) AND (VirusStatus IS NOT NULL)

If any rows are retuned then run the following query:

Update dbo.allDocs
Set VirusVendorID=NULL, VirusStatus=NULL, VirusInfo=NULL
where (VirusStatus > 0) AND (VirusStatus IS NOT NULL)

Repeat this process for each of the wss_content databases.

Pixel Mill

I’ve seen people struggle with customising SharePoint. Generally I recommend you only make minor changes. However some people what to completely brand their SharePoint Intranet.

If you want to rebrand SharePoint but with very little effort it seems like the guys at Pixel Mill have got a solution. Check out http://www.pixelmill.com

SharePoint Magazine

SharePoint now has it own magazine, albeit an online one. Check out the SharePoint Magazine here: http://sharepointmagazine.net/

International SharePoint Professionals Association

All those SharePoint Pros should sign up to the International SharePoint Professionals Association.

"The International SharePoint Professionals Association (“ISPA”) is the first independent, community-run, not-for-profit organization designed specifically for SharePoint Professionals. ISPA is a professional association dedicated to the promotion and global adoption of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. The Association provides support and guidance to the community by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals and groups, resources, education and information."

SharePoint Pod Show

A SharePoint podcast has been launched called SharePoint Pod Show. You can find details here: http://www.sharepointpodshow.com/

Help, SharePoint security is unmanageable!

One annoying thing about SharePoint, is security. Now don’t get me wrong there isn’t a problem with how secure SharePoint actually is, but with managing security.

Let’s say you have 10 sites and a user of a company who has been given, over a period of time, access to each site as a Contributor. His hard work at the company pays off and the user is promoted. How do you elevate the user’s Permission Level to Site Owner? That’s easy I hear you say, go to each site and set the permissions. But if you get a lot of these requests and you have a large number of users in a large number of sites it is going to become a big overhead.

Like with other parts of SharePoint there are tools and add-ons that can help.

One tool I have used is called Universal SharePoint Manager 2007 by iDevFactory (http://www.idevfactory.com/). Its current feature list includes:

• Environment (Farm) Reporting
• User Site Security Analyzer
• User List/Item Security Analyzer
• Permission Level Site Access
• Add User Site Security
• Remove User Site Security
• Clone User Site Security
• Account Property Synchronizer
• Dead Account Cleaner
• Site Level Reporting
• Sites Manager
• Site Security Auditor
• Site Collection Administrators
• Site Security Reset
• Site Permission Replicator
• List and Item Security Auditor
• List Security Reset
• List Permission Replicator
• Item Security Reset
• Item Permission Replicator

And the list grows. The tool is primarily a security tool but it’s features are growing fast. Well worth a look I say.