Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Next week (18th and 19th of January, 2010) the Microsoft SharePoint Connections 2010 will be held in Amsterdam RAI (The Netherlands). There is a great lineup of speakers and sessions over there, so I'm sure it will be a very interesting event! I will be presenting three sessions, one on Monday and two on Tuesday:

• Client-Side Technologies in SharePoint 2010
• Silverlight and SharePoint 2010: Better Together
• Advanced Web Part Development in SharePoint 2010

I'm also very proud to mention that U2U will be sponsering the SharePINT community event on Monday evening. As a Belgian company we are of course buying you guys some real Belgian beer (Leffe)! So make sure to visit the expo area of the conference after the last session on Monday and feel free to say hi. :-)

I'm very happy to announce that this morning our daugher Lis was born. She and her mother are recovering from the C-section but they are doing well. For more news (in Dutch), feel free to check out our family blog: http://kids.neleenjan.net.

Next week (December, 17th) the Belgian Information Worker User Group (BIWUG, http://www.biwug.be) is organizing an evening full of SharePoint 2010 development topics. I'm talking about the Client Object Models at 19:30, but make sure to check out the full agenda:

The meeting is hosted by Ordina at their offices in Mechelen. More details and free registration can be found on the BIWUG site.

Recently I ran into the following issue when I tried to deploy a SharePoint 2010 Project in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. In the output window the following message was displayed and the deployment failed:

Error occurred in deployment step ‘Retract Solution’: The local SharePoint server is not accessible. Check that the server is running and connected to the SharePoint farm.

It turned out (thank you Event Viewer!) that the account that triggers the Deploy action in Visual Studio 2010 (typically the account you used to login in Windows) needs to have permissions in both the Configuration database and the Content database.

Finally the public betas of SharePoint 2010 (both SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server), Office 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visio 2010 are available on MSDN Subscriptions, so start your download engines right now! :-)

If you don't see the download, you can use this direct link (make sure you are signed in to the Download Center before you click the link).

During the last couple of weeks, we at U2U have been very busy building course material for our upcoming SharePoint 2010 courses. We expect that lots of experienced SharePoint developers, power users and administrators are very eager to get up to speed with the new version of SharePoint as soon as possible. That’s why the first course that we’ve build is titled Upgrade to SharePoint 2010. This course will focus on all the exciting new stuff in SharePoint 2010, so people with SharePoint experience will get all the relevant info as quickly as possible. Because an administrator is probably not interested in developer stuff, we’ve chosen to split the course into three different parts:

• Part 1: Tools and Technologies (2 days)
  The focus of the first part of this course is on everything what’s new in SharePoint 2010 from a power user perspective. That means: everything you can configure in SharePoint 2010 without writing custom code. We’ll start with an overview of the new SharePoint 2010 platform, after that all the important new features will be discussed separately. Although this part will not involve building code customizations, it’s important for technical people (developers, architects, IT-Pro’s …) as well to know about these important new and enhanced features.
  Part 2: The Development Platform (2 days)
  SharePoint 2007 already was a very extensible platform: as a developer you could enhance and extend the out-of-the-box functionality using some powerful techniques. Unfortunately developing for SharePoint 2007 often required to developer to spend lots of time writing XML, using command line utilities,… This part of the course will focus on the new development tools in Visual Studio 2010 which will make the life of SharePoint developers a lot easier, and the new developer opportunities in SharePoint 2010.
• Part 3: Administration and Configuration (1 day)
  Also for IT-Pro’s and System Administrators SharePoint 2010 has lots of new functionality. In this final part of the course, we’ll focus on how SharePoint 2010 can make the life of administrators significant easier. 

If you are a developer or architect I’d recommend you to follow all three parts of the course (yes even the administration and configuration part). If you are a power user, end user, manager or business decision maker (thus not a very technical person), I’d recommend you to attend the first part of our course. Finally if you are an IT-Pro or system administration, part 1 and 3 are relevant for you. You can read the full course description at the U2U site, and check out the schedule (the course is already scheduled in Brussels, Belgium in December and January, but we can deliver on-site courses as well).

In the near future U2U will expand its SharePoint 2010 training offerings to facilitate the needs of everybody who wants to get in the SharePoint 2010 game, even if you don’t have experience with the previous versions of SharePoint. So make sure you visit the U2U site once in a while to see if there is anything new. Alternatively you can subscribe to our newsletter over there, or you can follow us on Twitter as well (@u2u) or visit our Facebook page (and become a fan!).

People that are attending TechEd Europe in Berlin next week, make sure to visit the U2U booth to check out our new course material, and to receive a free SharePoint 2010 t-shirt (just mention that Jan sent you :-) ). If you have any questions and I’m not at the booth, feel free to ask for me. Or you can attend my BoF Session about SharePoint, Silverlight and jQuery on Thursday.

I’ve got the pleasure to be able to present a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session at TechEd Europe next week: BOF14 Microsoft SharePoint, jQuery and Microsoft Silverlight: Better Together. If you are interested in these technologies please join the discussion on Thursday, 12:20 in Theater 6 – Pink.

Feel free to comment if you are planning to attend, it’s nice to know who’ll be there! :-)

In 20 minutes a very important event is going to get started: the SharePoint Conference 2009! If you're not in Vegas (like me), get yourself in front of a computer with a big bag of chips, popcorn or whatever snack you prefer, and watch the keynote (featuring Steve Ballmer) live! I'm sure it will be a nice show and expect an avalanche of SharePoint 2010 information to be released shortly afterwards. Also make sure you keep an eye on Twitter, blogs, Facebook etc. to see the reactions of SharePoint fans all over the world. My buddies at EndUserSharePoint are going to cover the conference with lots of real time content, so these pages will be open on my pc as well. Have fun!

Summary: The SmartTools jQueryLoader enables the jQuery Javascript library in your SharePoint sites using an effortless and Assembly-Free deployment technique. Additionally the jQueryLoader will dynamically load custom Javascript files, deployed to a Document Library. Seeing is believing: watch this short screencast that shows the deployment and some sample scripts!

• Download the SmartTools jQueryLoader Installer from the Codeplex project
• Watch the short (8 minutes) screencast that shows the deployment and some sample scripts.

If you read my blog you probably know that using the jQuery Javascript library in SharePoint 2007 sites can enhance and extend the out-of-the-box user interface significantly. But up to now it was time consuming and a tedious job to enable jQuery in SharePoint sites, for example: adding a Content Editor Web Part to the page, open the properties, copy/paste a script using the Source dialog etc. Even worse: these steps needed to be done on every page where the desired jQuery functionality should become active.

These issues can be solved by using the new SmartTools jQueryLoader that I’m releasing today! The SmartTools jQueryloader basically is a Javascript file that dynamically loads additional custom Javascript files stored in a predefined Document Library. This Document Library has extra columns to specify when and in what order those Javascript files should be loaded. So making available a new js file (containing your next amazing extension) in your SharePoint sites will be as easy as uploading that file to the Document Library. The jQueryLoader will take care of loading your script accordingly.

The jQueryLoader script itself, and the jQuery library as well, need to be loaded of course in every page in your SharePoint sites. This is accomplished by making a small change to the Master Page that’s in use in your SharePoint sites. All these configuration steps, including the creation of the Document Library, changing the Master Page, adding the jQueryLoader etc, are executed with an automated installation page. The really cool thing about this installation page is that it’s a basic SharePoint Site Page that doesn’t contain any server side code; everything is accomplished using Javascript. That means that to make use of the jQueryLoader (and its installer), there is nothing that needs to be changed, configured or deployed on your servers! That’s what is called Assembly-Free by the way.

Here is an overview of the installation steps:

1. Navigate to any Document Library in a SharePoint site.
2. Upload the SmartToosls.jQueryLoader.Install.aspx file to that Document Library (this file can be deleted after the installation).
3. Open the uploaded page by just clicking on it.
4. Select the desired installation options by checking their checkboxes in the list. For a first-time installation you typically check at least the first four checkboxes (see below).
5. Click the Start Installation button and keep an eye on the Installation Log at the bottom of the page.
6. That’s it!

• Create js Document Library: will create a hidden Document Library called js. This Document Library will have four custom columns:
• Autoload (true/false): to specify if the jQueryLoader should dynamically load the file
• Sequence (number): to specify the order in which the files are loaded
• ApplyTo (text): a regular expression to specify on which pages the file should be loaded
• Group (text): an optional value to group different files together
• Create or update jquery.js: will upload the jQuery library to the js Document Library. 
• Create or update smarttools.jqueryloader.js: will upload the jQueryLoader script to the js Document Library.
• Update the default.master: will make a change to the default.master Master Page (or the one you select by changing the value in the textbox). This change adds three script tags in the head element of the HTML page.
• Update the default.master of a child site: (optional) will make a change to the Master Page of a child site (see previous option). Notice that this child site will make use of js Document Library of the current site.
• Add test Web Part (optional): will add a test Web Part to the default.aspx (Home) page of the site to verify if jQuery is active.
• Enhanced Tasks View, Task Notifications and AJAX Lists (all optional): will add various sample scripts to show of the power of jQuery in SharePoint see the demo screencast for more information.

The optional sample scripts are just there to give you an idea what can be accomplished using jQuery in SharePoint sites, and to show you how easy it is to deploy them. The real added value is of course your creativity to build custom scripts making SharePoint even better. Feel free to contact me when you’ve got a cool sample as well!

When I was installing a brand new demo environment using Microsoft's latest and greatest platforms (Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008) I ran into an annoying issue related to SharePoint. The slipstreamed installation (including SP2) went fine, but when I tried to create a new Collaboration Portal or Publishing Portal I got the error: "The Office SharePoint Server Standard Web application features feature must be activated at the web application level before this feature can be activated.".

After some searching I learned that MOSS SP2 was not correctly applied, re-installing MOSS SP2 solved the issue. Apparently this is a known issue which can be avoided by adding the Web Server Role before running the slipstreamed SharePoint installation.

Related posts:

• Error trying to activate Publishing Infrastructure (on Technet)
  
• Add Web Server role before installing SharePoint (blog post)