Jan Tielens' Bloggings

[Via Paul Andrew] Now here is a must have tool for every SharePoint developer that wants to make sure that his code isn’t causing any nasty memory leaks due to forgotten Dispose calls (typically on the SPSite and SPWeb instances)! The SPDisposeCheck utility can actually review a compiled assembly and tell you if there are any forgotten Dispose calls, so you can even check third party assemblies. But remember, it’s a tool: nothing beats a full code review, but it certainly speeds up the process.

Get the detail's on Paul’s blog: SPDisposeCheck is a tool to help SharePoint Developers follow memory management best practices when using the SharePoint API with IDisposable objects including SPSite and SPWeb. This tool is not supported by Microsoft and is recommended to be used on Developer workstations and not on production SharePoint Server installations.

Download from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SPDisposeCheck.

Tonight I’ve uploaded new versions of all the components of the SmartTools for SharePoint project on CodePlex. For those of you who don’t know the SmartTools project: it’s a collection of useful SharePoint extensions, including:

• What's New: a customizable web part that can display a list of recently added or changed items of a SharePoint site or site collection
• Autocomplete Text Field: a field that allows users to pick items from a list by making use of an AJAX autocomplete text box.
• Enhanced Site Actions: adds extra menu items the the default Site Actions menu, for easy access to commonly used functions
• Copy Paste: adds copy and paste functionality to Document Libraries
• jQuery: integrates the jQuery JavaScript library with SharePoint 2007
• TableRow Highlight: uses jQuery to highlight table rows when the mouse pointer is hovering above them
• Dock Navigation: adds an overlay to every page of a site to allow users to navigate to the Lists and Document Libraries of that site
• Charts: show animated Silverlight charts, based on data stored in SharePoint lists and document libraries

This release is created based on lots of suggestions and bug reports of it’s users, so thanks for being part of the community! And keep submitting feature requests, feedback and bug reports. Most of the work went into the newest component: the Silverlight Charts. The Charts are still in beta, and I’ve got some cool ideas to make them even better. But even this beta version offers some cool functionality, you can watch a small screencast here (make sure you switch to fullscreen). If you’d like to download the screencast in high resolution; you hit the download link at the bottom right of the video page on Vimeo.

[Announced on the SharePoint Team Blog] The SharePoint-year makes a good start with the CTP release of version 1.3 of the extensions with the longest name ever: the Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (or VSeWSS for short). Here's a short list of new features, for the details check out the SharePoint Team Blog. The final release is scheduled for "North American Spring of 2009". Get it here.

• Can be installed on x64 Server OS machines running SharePoint x64. Previously only x86 Server OS could be used.
• Separate build commands for package, deploy and retract are added
• Command line build, package and retract commands are included enabling continuous integration and build servers. Previously command line build of SharePoint projects was very difficult
• Refactoring support for renaming of Web Parts. Previously renaming a web part required changes in several files in the project
• WSP View improvements for consistency of deleting feature elements, merging features and adding event receivers to features
• Solution Generator can now generate solutions from publishing sites. Previously only regular sites could be generated
• Allowing partial trust BIN deployments of web parts. CAS configuration must still be provided by the developer.
• New project item template for SharePoint RootFiles items
• Deployment will now optionally remove conflicting existing features on the development server prior to redeployment. Previously any feature name conflicts would result in an error
• Ancillary assemblies such as for business logic can now be added to the SharePoint Solution WSP
• Hidden features related to Site Definition projects are now shown in WSP View. They are no longer hidden
• For advanced users a fast deploy is included to update only the compiled assembly on the SharePoint development installation
• The User Guide is now installed with the extensions instead of being a separate download