Jan Tielens' Bloggings

SharePoint is a great technology to display Business Intelligence (BI) data in an easy, customizable way. For example Robert Scoble uses it to display the KPI's related to his blog. More information at The Dashboard Spy.

I haven't experienced this problem myself, but there seem to be some people get this exception when they use Son of SmartPart to load ASP.NET 2.0 user controls in combination with the Web Deployment Projects add-in. Steve Hartzog blogged about the solution for this problem: add the WebResource.axd to the excluded paths in SharePoint Central Administration. If you want to know how and why, check one of my previous posts. If you just want to get it fixed, below is the summary. I'm going to include this step in the Installation Guide of the Son of SmartPart, once again thanks Steve for bringing this to my attention!

On your SharePoint server, open up the SharePoint Central Administration site from the Administrative Tools start menu group and click the “Configure virtual server settings” link. On the next page you will see a list of all your virtual servers, click on the one that you would like to configure (you have to repeat the steps for each virtual server). Next, click the “Define managed paths” link. In the “Add a New Path” section, fill out WebResource.axd as the name of the path, for the type select “Exclude path”. Finally click the OK button. Now you can use WebResource in SharePoint sites!

Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2e85132b-7370-4137-a19a-15752ea83952&displaylang=en

This is the March 2006 Community Technology Preview of Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office "v3", planned for the next version of Microsoft Visual Studio ("Orcas").

Note: This CTP requires you to have the Beta 1 Technical Refresh of Microsoft Office 2007. Only customers currently registered with the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 1 program (including the Office Developer Conference 2006 attendees) are able to install this CTP. If you are not one of them, there will be another release of this CTP coming later this spring that will be available for installation by the general public.

The primary goal of this CTP is to give Microsoft Office 2007 beta 1 technical refresh developers an early glimpse at some of the key new features and feature directions in the area of Office programmability. The upcoming release of Microsoft Office 2007 introduces a number of new technologies intended to further establish Microsoft Office as a powerful and flexible solution development platform.

The next version of Visual Studio Tools for Office is designed to help developers take better advantage of those new capabilities in Office 2007, as well as to provide additional infrastructure to ensure .NET solutions in Office run more reliably, efficiently and securely.

The highlights of this CTP include:

• Support for the new Office Open XML file formats in Microsoft Office 2007
• Support for the new UI ( “ribbon”) extensibility model in Microsoft Office 2007
• Add-In projects for Microsoft Access 2007, Microsoft Excel 2007, Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007, Microsoft InfoPath 2007, Microsoft Outlook 2007, Microsoft PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft Project 2007, Microsoft Publisher 2007, Microsoft Visio 2007, and Microsoft Word 2007
• Support for the new application-level customizable taskpane

[Via Martin] Do you want to increase the performance of your SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Server farm up to 59%? Just switch from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005! More information and test details over here: SQL Server Performance Test Results.

The results were captured by measuring the average Requests Per Second (RPS) for each farm size and SQL Server version. The following table presents the performance impact of using SQL Server 2000 versus SQL Server 2005.

The SharePoint team blog keeps posting cool stuff: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites. There will be two web parts to roll up information:

• SharePoint Sites (name may change in RTM), can be put on your personal site and rolls up all the documents created, modified, checked-out to you as well as tasks assigned to you in every site that you are a Member of.
• Sites Rollup (name may change in RTM), A second web part called Sites Rollup (name may change for RTM) can be used on any SharePoint site (Team site, Document workspace, etc.).

The catch is that these web parts seem to be part of "Office SharePoint Server 2007", so they may be not available in WSS "v3".

As the usage of SharePoint increases, there is a profileration of SharePoint sites. This makes it harder and harder to keep track of where your documents are located and also to see a unified view of your "stuff". In Office SharePoint Server 2007, we are introducing a couple of new web parts that address this problem. (full post)

It’s a world premiere: the first U2U SharePoint 2007 t-shirts are here (see pic below)! And the good news is: you can get one for yourself too! Just visit the U2U booth at the Belgian Developer and IT-Pro Days tomorrow and mention that a) you love SharePoint and b) Jan sent you. For the people that are attending the Developer Days in the Netherlands: you can get one too (I’ll be there on Wednesday). Just put a link to this post on your blog and meet me after my session. If there are any left after that, I’ll hand them out to whomever comes first (FIFO).

If you want to meet at one of those events, here's a list of my sessions:

• Introduction to the Programmable Customization Model for the 2007 Office System User Experience
  March 7, 2006 - 13:00 - 14:15, Developer & IT-Pro Days, Gent
  I'll be Hans Verbeeck's demo monkey for this session about the UI of the 2007 Office System clients and how you can customize it.
• Windows SharePoint Services v3
  March 7, 2006 - 14:30 - 15:45, Developer & IT-Pro Days, Gent
  If you're intrested in the new version of SharePoint, make sure you attend this session. It's packed with demo's of all the new features.
• Windows SharePoint Services v3
  March 8, 2006 - 14:45 - 16:00, DevDays 2006, Amsterdam
  Basically the same session as the previous one, but in Dutch. :-)

Oh I love to read this kind of stuff. :-) Check out Steve Hartzog's rave about the SmartPart (see his complete post for the 'nightmares' part):

But then I came across SmartPart (for ASP.NET 1.1) and Son of SmartPart (for ASP.NET 2.0). Within days I was able to create a ASP.NET 1.1 UserControl with database access (using basic ADO.NET) - whereas building the same part as an ASP.NET ServerControl would have taken 1.5-2 weeks!! Rapid prototyping at its best BABY!

And that's just the beginning! Now that we have a WSS2.0 site on ASP.NET 2.0, all dev's have VS2005 installed, and we know have a VSS 2005 box setup - I'm going to play with ADO.NET 2.0 and the new Enterprise Library for ASP.NET 2.0 (January 2006). With the new database reflection builtin to the new EL's DatabaseFactory (for strongly typed DataSets and stored procedure / parameters) and the new connectionStrings section of the 2.0 web.config's - I'm going to be in hog heaven. Oooh, I can't wait!