Jan Tielens' Bloggings

If you haven't checked out the recently released Enterprise Library, you should do it very soon. :-) This week I'm teaching a course about building Enterprise Applications, so it's a good opportunity to evangelize the Enterprise Library among my students.

Anyway, on a couple of my development VPC images, I noticed some events appearing in the Event Log (see below). Maybe I should have spent some more time reading the docs, but the solution is to run the InstallServices.bat which is located in X:\Program Files\Microsoft Enterprise Library\src. It's a pity that this bat file uses VS.NET to do it's magic, somebody got a nice solution for the servers that aren't running VS.NET?

• Failed to create instances of performance counter 'Total Command Executions' - The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly.
• Failed to create instances of performance counter 'Average Command Execution Time' - The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly.
• Failed to create instances of performance counter '# of Commands Executed/Sec' - The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly.
• Failed to create instances of performance counter 'Distributor: # of Logs Distributed/Sec' - The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly.

UPDATE: Check out Rob Gibbens' comments on this post, thanks Rob!

<snip>
Regarding the install services script, we only require devenv because we need to find the location of installutil, which we do by running vsvars32. If you don't have devenv you can modify the InstallServices.bat file with a path to installutil, or just call installutil directly over each assembly.
</snip>

Found answer at http://weblogs.asp.net/tomholl/archive/2005/02/14/372512.aspx

Do you want to learn something about ASP.NET 2.0? For free? Microsoft Belux is hosting the ASP.NET 2.0 On Tour event in Brussels. For more details and registration vist the MSDN Belux event page.

ASP.NET 2.0 on tour: The ASP.NET experts are visiting you. Take this unique chance and participate in a one day event on the latest version of Microsoft's powerful web technology. Get to know its promising new features and profit from the exclusive know-how of specialists.

Renowned instructors with longtime experience in Microsoft technologies will provide you with in-depth information on ASP.NET 2.0. The event is divided into different presentations on the following topics:

• Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 for Web Development
• Visual Studio Team System 2005 for Web Development or IIS 7.0 futures (depending on singular event)
• Migration Session
• Other selected products and interesting features

This evening we installed the U2U RSS Feeds for Microsoft SharePoint 2003 on our SharePoint server. Too bad I didn't carry my camera; just imagine Patrick in a 1m by 1m "server room", sitting on the ground with a keyboard on his knees, shouting bad things to the server... :-) The good news is that the installation went like a charm! So now you can access the content of our SharePoint Resource Center by using RSS:

• U2U SharePoint News
  http://www.u2u.info/U2U.SharePoint.RSSFeeds.Server/GetFeed.aspx?id=93e481c8-b060-42ee-9dd2-4c405320f606
• U2U SharePoint Resource Center (items from all lists)
  http://www.u2u.info/U2U.SharePoint.RSSFeeds.Server/GetFeed.aspx?id=ce16f2b8-6486-48b1-8867-d21fcc152139

Today is an exciting day! This morning we released the U2U RSS Feeds for Microsoft SharePoint 2003 tool and now Microsoft Belux published an article about building web parts (the smart way of course) written by Patrick and myself. On top of that today is Nele's birthday, happy birthday Nele!

Summary:

Building web parts is one of the main extensibility points when you work within a Windows SharePoint Services environment. The development steps of building SharePoint web parts is well-documented in books, in the Windows SharePoint Services SDK and in a whole set of articles, tutorials and walkthroughs available from the SharePoint community or from Microsoft directly itself. One of the major disadvantages of following the traditional web part development steps is that building web parts this way requires extensive coding with respect to the UI you want to provide within the web part. At the time of writing, there is no designer available for developers to create the body of a web part in a very WYSIWYG manner.

This article describes another approach to building SharePoint web parts. The approach consists of making use of ASP.NET user controls to make up the body of the SharePoint web part. The technique leads to a dramatic increase in the productivity of anybody creating web parts. The article ‘Building Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services - Part II : Web Parts and User Controls’ published here on the Belux MSDN site last year describes the basic steps. The idea of using ASP.NET user controls in web part development received a lot of adoption in the SharePoint community and has evolved in a generic framework called the SmartPart. In this article we will highlight what the SmartPart is and how to use it when involved in SharePoint web part development.

Full article here!

Maybe you’ve noticed that the last couple of weeks I haven’t blogged a lot. Behind the scenes  the U2U SharePoint Team was working hard on finishing the first release of a very exiting new tool: U2U RSS Feeds for Microsoft SharePoint 2003! The people that have visited that Belgian Developer & IT-Pro Days two weeks ago, already got a sneak preview. But now it’s ready to be shown to the rest of the blogosphere!

If you can’t wait, go check it out at http://www.u2u.net/software.aspx . If you want to see how it looks like, watch this short video, starring me! :-) Any questions, remarks, issues, features request, … can be posted on our brand new SharePoint Resource Center.

So, what is it? The tool has only one goal: expose information in SharePoint as RSS Feeds. Nothing new you  may think, there are several other solutions for this, so what’s the buzz? I think our approach is unique in quite a few domains:

• Aggregation of items stored in multiple lists on multiple sites
  You can create an RSS feed that contains information coming from more than one lists (or document libraries), that are potentially on different sites.
• Customizable layout of RSS items
  For each list that you aggregate in an RSS Feed you can specify how the items in the RSS feed should look like. You can do that by using some sort of formulas, referring to fields coming from the SharePoint lists.
• Non-intrusive installation
  The installation of the RSS Feeds tool doesn’t change a thing about your SharePoint installation, the IT-Pro guys will be happy! The tool is completely separated from the SharePoint sites and doesn’t require you to add metadata or web parts to SharePoint.
• SharePoint Authorization
  Are you afraid of exposing sensitive data? Well you don’t have to, our tool uses the SharePoint security model, so if a user doesn’t have access to the SharePoint list he or she can’t retrieve information from the RSS feed. Anonymous access to RSS feeds is also supported (if your SharePoint site is available for anonymous users of course).
• GUI Administration
  The administration of the tool (creating feeds, item layouts, …) is completely done by using a nice graphical user interface.

Thanks to everyone who has made some comments about our Hardcore SharePoint sessions (both on- and offline). It's great to hear from you guys and girls! Patrick has posted some more information about when/how we will release all the stuff we showed. Quite some people have some questions about the SharePoint Application Blocks (what are they, where can we find them, ...), mostly about the Content Application Block for SharePoint. Well, maybe you can compare the Content Application Block with ObjectSpaces for SharePoint, the only difference is that the CAB is here right now. :-) (just kiddin'). I completely agree with Patrick on this one, it should be made available as a free download. We'll keep you posted...

Btw, I've posted a couple of my pictures on my MSN Space.

Pfeew, our Hardcore SharePoint sessions on the Belgian DevDays are done. I've got some pretty good feedback from a couple of people already so I'm pretty pleased with that!

Also congratulations (once again) to Patrick: it was real fun being on stage with my SharePoint-pal!

Today was the first day of the Belgian Developer and IT-Pro Days in Brussels. Bill Gates kicked of the event with his keynote. Later on the day Patrick did a session about the Information Bridge Framework, showing off the new IBF 1.5 bits (an early version), which he received only last night. I talked to Patrick's wife and she told me he spent the complete night on getting everything to work and preparing the demos. So congratulations to Patrick, you did a great you pal! I hope you have some juice left for our Hardcore SharePoint session tomorrow!