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.

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

Jan Tielens released a very nice solution to allow you to easily integrate Javascript and jQuery in your SharePoint sites without having to go through several configurations steps. It allows you to just upload your javascript files to a document library and they will be available in your SharePoint pages. Check it out here.

Imagine the following scenario. In your site collections visitors need to be able to create 1 type of sites. When they create that type of site (with a custom template) they need to become the administrator of that site, as well as the people maintaining the site collection.

How do we do that in SharePoint? We create a site while running with Elevated Privileges, let it inherit the rights of the Site Collection. Once the site is created, we break the inheritance and add specific user rights for that user.

First of all we will be creating a function that accepts a few strings that we need to create the site.

The parentSiteUrl is the url in which we will be creating the site, the requested siteUrlRequested is the url we will be creating the site in, the siteTitle is the title we will be giving to the site, and the siteTemplateName is the name of the Custom Template we will be using.

Ok, let’s write the code to create our site in our parentsite. In the GetCustomWebTemplates functions we will be getting the custom web template list corresponding the language of the site. In that list we take the template as specified in the parameter of our function (siteTemplateName). As we can’t be sure that the user has checked if a site url already exists we increase a counter till we find a free siteUrl (this is not mandatory, you can also raise an error on the Exists boolean).

With this code our site will be created by making use of the custom template. We are running with Elevated Privileges as the user does not have any permissions to create a subsite. In the using statement of myWeb we will be adding the security changes.

With BreakRoleInheritance we break the inheritance of the rules. We do this to be able to add the user to the security of that specific site. We are breaking the security afterwards because we want to make sure that the existing security on the site is copied as well. With the EnsureUser statement we make sure the user exists in that site. The SPRoleDefinition isn’t necessary, but I’m using it to make sure that my code runs on multilingual systems. You could use:

but in a multilingual environment that RoleDefinition isn’t called Contributor. That’s why I will first create a SPRoleDefinition object to make sure that whatever Contributor is called will return the correct name in my SPRoleAssignment. I add the roledefinition to the assignment and then I add the user/role link to the site. Once you have implemented all this your code should look like this:

Calling the function can be done like this (Web is the SPContext.Current.Web object).

As from time to time I buy a new disk to store my old VM’s on at the first copy I get an error message when I try to copy hard disk of my vm to my external disk. That’s due to the fact that those disks are mainly formatted as FAT32 (which can handle 4 GB). As I wanted to put a vhd on my work backup disk I got the same message, and I did not want to delete the backups I already took I looked for a command to change it without having to format the drive, and I found it

convert <drive> /fs:ntfs works. You should execute it in a command window that you are running as an administrator.

The following code shows you how to get the last item of an ID in a list. Warning, this code gets you the last item from that list meaning that if you use this code to get the last item you added, it will go wrong if someone adds an item between you adding it and executing this query. In that case I advise you to get a unique identifier that you add to each item and get the item by that id.

Your client does not support opening this list with Windows Explorer is an error I see popping up a lot of times. What can you do to fix it?

If you are using IE6:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325355/

If you are using IE7 OR IE8
Vista, Windows Server 2003, XP : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=17C36612-632E-4C04-9382-987622ED1D64&displaylang=en

A while ago I had to get additional properties from Active Directory. It was important that the information was live (I could not consider the information that got imported by the User Profile Import to be 100% up-to-date. To get this done I wrote this little piece of code (don’t forget to reference System.DirectoryServices):

private ResultPropertyCollection GetUserProperties(string userAccount)

    {

        DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry();

        entry.Path = "LDAP://CUSTOMER";

        entry.AuthenticationType = AuthenticationTypes.Secure;

        //DirectorySearcher _searcher = new DirectorySearcher(entry);

 

        String account = userAccount.Replace(@"CUSTOMER\", "");

        try

        {

            using(HostingEnvironment.Impersonate())

            {

                        DirectorySearcher search = new DirectorySearcher(entry);

                        search.Filter = "(SAMAccountName=" + account + ")";

                        search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("department");

                        search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("mail");

                         search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("title");

                        search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("company");

                        SearchResult result = search.FindOne();

                       

                        if (result != null)

                        {

                            return result.Properties;

                        }

                        else

                        {

                            return null;

                        }

            }

        }

        catch (Exception ex)

        {

            lblResult.Text = ex.Message;

            return null;

        }

    }

Replace CUSTOMER with your DOMAIN.
I added one more function to easily get a property out of the collection:

private string GetFromUserProperties(ResultPropertyCollection _properties, string _prop)

    {

        try

        {

            if (_properties[_prop].Count > 0)

            {

                return _properties[_prop][0].ToString();

            }

            else

            {

                return "";

            }

        }catch(Exception ex){

            return "";

        }

    }

When you select a user in a People Picker it calls a postback. In the Onload event of your page handle the call of the following function

private void CheckAndFillInfo(SPWeb site)

    {

       

        if (spPELeidinggevende.ResolvedEntities.Count > 0)

        {

            PickerEntity _pe = (PickerEntity)spPELeidinggevende.ResolvedEntities[0];

            SPUser _spuser = site.EnsureUser(_pe.Key);

 

               

                ResultPropertyCollection _results = GetUserProperties(_spuser.LoginName);

                if (_results != null)

                {

                   

                    txtFunction.Text = GetFromUserProperties(_results, "title");

                }

        }

        else

        {

            txtFunction.Text = “”;

        }

    }

That should do the trick.

As I am rebuilding one of our projects to make it easier to deploy I had to put the workflow code in one separate project. As I thought this would be a piece of cake I didn’t expect Visual Studio to show me a bunch of errors when doing so. The one that kept appearing was "The service ‘System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Compiler.ITypeProvider’ must be installed for this operation to succeed. Ensure that this service is available". After looking it up I got a bunch of different guids that I could put in my project file, but none of them seemed to do the trick. Until I checked out a WPF workflow post that told me to use some other guids and they worked fine. So, how do we start.

First of all, we will be creating a project that is called MyCustomer.MySuperSolution. We will make it a WSP Project or a class library. We will add a new item, which will be a blank feature (WSPBuilder Item). Secondly, we will be creating another WSP Project or class Library and call it MyCustomer.MySuperSolution.Workflows. We will be adding a sequential workflow feature that project. Let’s call it EmailWorkflow. As this will create it’s own solution (and that is not what we want, we want 1 wsp for the whole project) we will be making some changes. First of all, rename the feature folder that is called EmailWorkflow to MyCustomer.MySuperSolution.EmailWorkflow. That way it will have a decent naming convention in the feature folder. Move that folder to the same location in your MyCustomer.MySuperSolution project. Then delete the complete 12 folder structure from your MyCustomer.MySuperSolution.Workflows project. You can also remove the solutionid.txt file as it is no longer needed. Do not remove the snk as your assembly needs to be strong named.

Two steps remain, which are making sure that when you recompile your workflow solution that it is added to the manifest.xml by wspbuilder when you select build wsp, and to remove the dreadful errors in your workflow project. To make sure the assembly is added, right-click on your project, properties, build, output path. Point the output path to the bin/debug folder of your MyCustomer.MySuperSolution project. It is a good idea to also do that for the release configuration as many times you forget to set that up while building for release (which is then the bin/Release folder). To remove the dreadful ITypeProvider errors you need to open your project with notepad. Change your ProjectTypeGuids to:

<ProjectTypeGuids>{14822709-B5A1-4724-98CA-57A101D1B079};{60dc8134-eba5-43b8-bcc9-bb4bc16c2548};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>

and add the following line near the end of the file (there is already one import statement)

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\Windows Workflow Foundation\v3.0\Workflow.Targets" />

If you want to target the WF of .Net Framework 3.5 just change 3.0 to 3.5

There is a very nice article on MSDN, published by Andrew Connell and Randy Drisgill explaining you how to customize SharePoint and give it a very sexy look. Definetely a must read.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee354191.aspx