SharePoint 2010 : White Page when clicking buttons on the ribbon.

If you are getting white pages when clicking on buttons on the Ribbons you should add your SharePoint 2010 site to your trusted sites. It has to do with certain javascript functions that cannot be called which gives that effect (happens mostly if you are testing it on a server)

Installing SharePoint 2010 – Beta (“Hidden” Prerequisites)

Edit : This is for Windows Server 2008 / you will not be able to install SharePoint 2010 on R2 until in a few days(see comments): http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/11/16/installation-notice-for-sharepoint-2010-public-beta.aspx

The installation of SharePoint 2010 on a new server did take me quite some time to complete. Apart from the prerequisites that are automatically downloaded there are a few other things that you need to download to make it work. This is on a fresh machine, as I’m sure that all your production machines are 100% up to date Start these downloads before you start your SharePoint install, as the requested hotfix downloads are rather slow.

First of all, after the prerequisites have been installed you get another error message talking about another required hotfix. You can find it on Microsoft Connect. Don’t take the x86 version as that one won’t work, SharePoint 2010 requires 64bit.

Hotfix for token authentication without transport security or message encryption
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=21953&wa=wsignin1.0

After that, SharePoint should be installing nicely, up until you run the configuration wizard where SharePoint complains about the version of SQL Server 2008. To get that sorted, download the following patches.

If you are unsure of what version of SQL you got, open a query window and add the following query:

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY(‘ProductVersion’)

SQL Server 2008 Required Patches

Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=66AB3DBB-BF3E-4F46-9559-CCC6A4F9DC19&displaylang=en
Cumulative Update Package 1 for SQL Server 2008 SP1
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969099
Request Hotfix Link: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=969099&kbln=en-us
Cumulative Update Package 2 for SQL Server 2008 SP1
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970315
Request Hotfix Link: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=970315&kbln=en-us

This should take you through the configuration wizard as well, after which you can checkout your BRAND NEW SHAREPOINT 2010 Admin Site

Enabling Virtualization on your Sony Vaio

This weekend I bought myself a Sony Vaio to be able to run SP2010 on a laptop as well (so that when I got some time during noon I can play around). After installing Windows Server 2008 R2 on it and enabling Hyper-V I got this nice message telling me that virtualization on a Sony Vaio is disabled. After checking online I found only links to obscure BIOS hacks to enable this, and a blog post of one of the big guys of Sony telling us that in the future it would be enabled. That blog post was 4 months ago but my stuff wasn’t working and brand new. Luckily, the Sony site has a BIOS update utility to enable this, but search engines didn’t turn up anything about it, therefor this post. Select the model of your VAIO, select downloads and then the BIOS Utility. Take into account that installing the BIOS update does not enable your hardware virtualization. You need to press F2 to get into your BIOS, enable hardware virtualization and you are ready to go. The machine rocks btw, and for a price of 1260 euro it’s pretty high on the value/quality part as far as I’m concerned as it has 6GB of memory.

HOWTO: Add a button to the ribbon in SharePoint 2010

This post is intended for BETA1. It will work on BETA2 as well, just remove the … for

After a few hours of messing around in XML, we (Jopx and I) figured out how to put a button on the Ribbon. First of all, how does it work? There is some XML (located in the 14 hive/templates/global/xml) in a file called CMDGui.XML. This contains the entire Ribbon XML that is used to render the ribbon. To get that XML into a Ribbon, there are two javascript files that translate that data into a workeable ribbon (CUI.js and SP.Ribbon.js). What do we need to do to create our custom button? It’s quite simple, you just create some XML, push it to the SharePoint environment by making use of an empty element, add some stuff to the templates/xml folder and you’re set. That is once you figured it all out

First of all, create a new Empty SharePoint project in Visual Studio. (no screenshots after this as my laptop here can’t run SP2010)

• Rename your project to MyCoolButton
• Add an empty Element.
• In that element, paste the following xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <CustomAction Id="MeSoCool" Location="CommandUI.Ribbon.Documents.New.Controls._children">
    <CommandUIExtension>
      <CommandUIDefinitions>
        <CommandUIDefinition Location="CommandUI.Ribbon.Documents.New.Controls._children">
          <Button Id="Ribbon.Documents.New.Controls.MyCoolButton"
                  Image16by16="/_layouts/images/edit.gif"
                  Image32by32="/_layouts/images/placeholder32x32.png"
                  Description="MyDescription"
                  Command="MyCoolButton"
                  LabelText="Banzai"
                  Sequence="60"
                  TemplateAlias="o1" />
        </CommandUIDefinition>
      </CommandUIDefinitions>
    </CommandUIExtension>
  </CustomAction>
</Elements>

What does all this XML mean?

First of all we will be adding a CustomAction, and the most important attribute there is the Location. This location attribute will define where the button is going to appear. Notice that the same attribute is also defined in the CustomUIDefinition which is the location where it will need to be defined in Beta2. So in Beta1 apply the Location to the CustomAction, in Beta2 only apply the location to the CommandUIDefinition. Notice the _children in the end, you need to add it to be able to add buttons to that Control collection.

Where does this location come from? In the CMDGui.XML file that location is defined in a group. This group is part of a group collection called Ribbon.Documents.Groups which is part of the Tab called Ribbon.Documents.  This tab is the ribbon we will see when we are working with documents. Important to notice is the Template the group is using. If the Template used is Ribbon.Templates.Flexible2 you can add buttons to that group. If it isn’t a flexible template (like Ribbon.Templates.ThreeRowsSixAlignedControls2) then you can’t add buttons as those are fixed templates. As an example I added the xml for the Ribbon.Documents.New group.

<Group
            Id="Ribbon.Documents.New"
            Sequence="10"
            Command="DocumentNewGroup"
            Description=""
            Title="$Resources:core,cui_GrpNew;"
            Image32by32Popup="/_layouts/images/placeholder32x32.png"
            Template="Ribbon.Templates.Flexible2"
          >

 

Ok, on to the next item in our XML, the CommandUIExtensions. They contain the CommandUIDefinitions who are defining the element that you are showing (a Button in our case). The name of the second element escapes me and I can’t check SP2010 at the moment, but the other element within the CommandUIExtensions defines the action of the button (what happens if you click on it) Our little post is only focused on making it appear. Now back to our Button Control.

<Button Id="Ribbon.Documents.New.Controls.MyCoolButton" 
             Image16by16="/_layouts/images/edit.gif"

             Image32by32="/_layouts/images/placeholder32×32.png"

             Description="MyDescription"

             Command="MyCoolButton"

             LabelText="Banzai"

             Sequence="60"

            TemplateAlias="o1" />

The Id needs to start with Ribbon.Documents.New.Controls. After that you can put whatever you want. The image attributes are used and the images are shown depending on what is defined in the GroupTemplates. What does that mean? In the GroupTemplates (also defined in the CMDGui.xml) it is defined how a button in the ribbon should behave when the page gets resized. Should it hide itself, should it change it’s template (for instance instead of 3 large buttons next to eachother 3 small buttons above eachother)That way we can control how our Ribbon is behaving when the page gets resized. Description is quite easy to understand what it does, Command links to the command that you can define afterwards (you can deploy without having implemented the command), the LabelText is used in the template and shown on the ribbon, the Sequence defines where the button needs to be places and the TemplateAlias links to the template that you are using for that button.

Ok, now that we have that XML we just need to do one more thing:

Add a SharePoint mapped folder to your project and link it to the templates/xml folder. It should automatically create a MyCoolButton folder under the XML folder, but if it doesn’t make sure you do. Add an xml file to it callee MyCoolButton.xml. In that file we will define our link to the javascript files.

<script OnDemandKey="ribbon">
  <File></File>
  <File>SP.Ribbon.js</File>
</script>

Now we are set to go. Rightclick your project, select deploy. Go to a document library, on the ribbon select Documents and you should see a new button next to the New Folder button. (More images will follow as soon as I get home, but we were so excited when it finally worked that I at least had to put it online, but I’m sure Joris will do the same very soon )

Should I have missed something, let me know, but this should do the trick for you