Peter's World

Windows SharePoint Services Document: Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Under the Hood

2007-07-27T03:14:45.336-07:00

As per my previous post, there were things MS managed to do , but form the products was not immediately evident how it was done. This white paper gives an insight into a world of best practices.

Windows SharePoint Services Document: Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Under the Hood

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Windows SharePoint Services Document: Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Under the Hood

2007-07-27T03:11:18.164-07:00

As per my previous post, there were things MS managed to do , but form the products was not immediately evident how it was done. This white paper gives an insight into a world of best practices.

Windows SharePoint Services Document: Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Under the Hood

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Development Tools and Techniques for Working with Code in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

2007-07-26T03:02:03.461-07:00

Currently a Program Manager on assignment at MCS Reading we created a solution using Web Parts on Windows SharePoint Services v3. The assumption is that the platform would provide us with a good starting point. However it was easier said than done and we had to get a good process in place before we took on the mighty SharePoint OM. The guys on the team showed what they were made of and we had some good lessons. A few of these are blogged by Edward Wilde other are made available by Microsoft:

Development Tools and Techniques for Working with Code in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, by Patrick Tisseghem, is now published on MSDN.

Part 1 : Learn the skills you need to develop for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, about the differences from traditional ASP.NET development, about the required development environment, and the steps to build a Windows SharePoint Services solution with Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Part 2 : Explore Windows SharePoint Services solutions, solution architecture, and techniques for creating, deploying, maintaining, and upgrading Windows SharePoint Services solutions.

This will make life that little bit more pleasant.

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Technorati Stuff

2007-07-24T09:06:07.539-07:00

Technorati Profile

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Windows SharePoint Services Database Mirroring MOSS

2007-07-06T01:51:41.825-07:00

Ever wondered what the Microsoft formal documentation says about mirroring. They have recently made an internal version of the documentation public.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=83725&clcid=0x409

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Smart Tags Communicating with the Custom Task Pane using Windows Communications Foundation (WCF)

2007-03-20T03:40:47.849-07:00

Recently able to create some funky functionality using Managed Smart Tags (ISmartTagAction, ISmartTagAction2, ISmartTagRecognizer, ISmartTagRecognizer2) to provide communication to a Custom Task Pane that would in turn execute a search based on the context of the word.

Really basic message, simply the term to be searched and the provider to search on. Sounds simple enough to do and most likely a struct would do the trick. Not to be...

A simple line of code brought all my dreams down to nothing AppDomain.CurrentDomain.Id this indicated that the Smart Tags and the Custom Task Pane got loaded by word into different AppDomains, not nice when you want to make ‘em send messages across...

Decided to look into various options including the new IPC namespace in Framework 2.0 , but during my search I came across the idea of named pipes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_pipe) pretty tough to do, if only to send a message within the same process. However it gave me the opportunity to read a book on WCF and expand my knowledge slightly and it was surprisingly simple.

After deciding what I needed to communicate a set out to create a Data Contract that would communicate the data over my named pipes connection between the two AppDomains

[DataContract()]

public class SearchMessage

{

public SearchMessage(string term, string provider)

{

SearchTerm = term;

SearchProvider = provider;

}

public SearchMessage() { }

[DataMember()]

public string SearchTerm;

[DataMember()]

public string SearchProvider;

}

When using the [DataContract()]to declare the custom type fit for transport(Serializable) remember that the members needs to opt in rather than out as in standard Serialization, meaning that if you do not mark it as [DataMember()]it will not be visible to the receiver.

The other option is to use [MessageContract()] attribute that provides more granular control over the SOAP envelope and extends the attributes to include [MessageBody()]and [MessageHeader()] allowing control over the location of the data member. For the purpose of my sample [DataContract()] is sufficient.

Search Service

The following part of the puzzle is to provide a handling service for the data so that it could be put to use. For this we use simple interface driven development practice and we need the service to look like decorating it with the [ServiceContract(Namespace = "http://PeterVerster.co.uk/WCF")] attribute enabling us to declare methods (operations) using [OperationContract()]. The following code snippet depicts the interface:

[ServiceContract(Namespace = "http://PeterVerster.co.uk/WCF")]

public interface ISearchService

{

[OperationContract()]

void ExecuteSearch(SearchMessage searchMessage);

}

Next the simple part of implementting the interface:

[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true)]

public class SearchService : ISearchService

{

public static event SearcRequestRxEventHandler SearcRequestRxEvent ;

#region ISearchService Members

public void ExecuteSearch(SearchMessage searchMessage)

{

if (SearcRequestRxEvent != null)

SearcRequestRxEvent(this, new SearchRxEventArgs(searchMessage));

}

#endregion

}

A few notes on the attributes used, most imprtantly the InstanceContextMode.Single where we declare the service to have a single instance, in the case where this is an endpoint for multiple clients it could be useful to promote concurrency.

Notice that my implementation sparks an event used to notify listeners that we have received a message wrapped in a Custom Events Args Class SearchRxEventArgs.

Client

The client implementation does not need a whole lot of work, Basically where it is going EndpointAddress, what binding we are using , in this case NetNamedPipeBinding. Finally IChannelFactory providing it with a description of the service that can be expected when calling it from the client. In this case I provide it with the interface I created, and we derive a proxy from that to execute the operations (methods) against.

public sealed class SearchClient

{

private static readonly EndpointAddress m_address;

private static readonly NetNamedPipeBinding m_binding;

private static readonly IChannelFactory<ISearchService> m_channelFactory;

static SearchClient()

{

try

{

m_address = new EndpointAddress("net.pipe://localhost/Search/CTP");

m_binding = new NetNamedPipeBinding(NetNamedPipeSecurityMode.Transport);

m_channelFactory = new ChannelFactory<ISearchService>(m_binding);

}

catch

{

//TODO:Provide Implementation

}

public static void ExecuteSearch(string term, string provider)

{

ISearchService searchProxy = m_channelFactory.CreateChannel(m_address);

searchProxy.ExecuteSearch(new SearchMessage(term, provider));

}

Note that we treat the SearchMessage [DataContract()] like we would treat any custom type. In this case I have provided a constructor that can be used to inline the creation when receiving arguments in my ExecuteSearch method.

Host

The final steps in creating the communications application is to provide a host that would host the service we have defined. Similar to the client this is fairly easy:

public sealed class SearchHost

{

//TODO: Wrap these in static constructor to catch exceptions

private static readonly Uri baseAddress = new Uri("net.pipe://localhost/Search");

private static readonly Type serviceType = typeof(SearchService);

private static readonly NetNamedPipeBinding binding = new NetNamedPipeBinding(NetNamedPipeSecurityMode.Transport);

private static readonly ServiceHost host = new ServiceHost(serviceType, baseAddress);

static SearchHost()

{

host.Description.Endpoints.Clear();

host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(ISearchService), binding, "CTP");

host.Open();

}

Few obvious things noted are the service type, again we define the binding as NetNamedPipeBinding. Note that the address specified does not provide the full location of the service but rather for a collection of services, when adding the end point we specify “CTP” as the service end point using AddServiceEndpoint.

Implementation

Now we have all the pieces hanging together we can go ahead and fire it all up. On the smart tag side things look like this :

public void InvokeVerb2(int VerbID, string ApplicationName, object Target, ISmartTagProperties Properties, string Text, string Xml, int LocaleID)

{

try

{

SearchClient.ExecuteSearch(new SearchMessage(Text , VerbID.ToString()));

}

catch(Exception ex)

{

//TODO:Provide implementation

}

finally

{

System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ReleaseComObject(Target);

GC.Collect();

}

return;

}

On the Custom Task Pane side things look like this:

private void ThisAddIn_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

SearchService.SearcRequestRxEvent += new SearcRequestRxEventHandler(m_searchService_SearcRequestRxEvent);

}

void m_searchService_SearcRequestRxEvent(object o, SearchRxEventArgs e)

{

AddSearchPane(e.SearchRxMessage.SearchTerm);

}

The standard implementation pattern for adding a CTP is the following:

public void AddSearchPane(string searchWord)

{

lock (m_customTaskPaneSearch)

{

if (!m_searchPaneExists)

{

m_customTaskPaneSearch = this.CustomTaskPanes.Add(m_searchControl, m_controlCaption);

m_customTaskPaneSearch.DockPosition = Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoCTPDockPosition.msoCTPDockPositionRight;

m_customTaskPaneSearch.Visible = true;

m_searchPaneExists = true;

}

if (m_searchControl is ITabSearch)

(m_searchControl as ITabSearch).Search(searchWord);

if (!m_customTaskPaneSearch.Visible)

m_customTaskPaneSearch.Visible = true;

}

Conclusion

Including some quick reading the sample was working within a couple of hours overcoming the boundaries of AddDomains. It might not be production ready, but it is sure easy doing this kind of thing with Windows Communication Foundation. Have a good one...

NamedPipes.zip (2.61 KB)

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Create a custom Windows Workflow Activity and make it available in SharePoint Designer

2007-03-09T00:50:14.288-08:00

Ever wondered how the whole Workflow flows in SharePoint ?

Below is an Article on how to create a custom workflopw and surface it in SaherPoint Designer.

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/tbaginski/archive/2007/03/08/HOW-TO_3A00_-Create-a-custom-Windows-Workflow-Activity-and-make-it-available-in-SharePoint-Designer.aspx

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Downloadable book: Deployment for Office SharePoint Server 2007

2007-03-02T06:52:33.901-08:00

This book provides information and guidelines to lead a team through the steps of deploying a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The audiences for this book are business application specialists, line-of-business specialists, information architects, IT generalists, program managers, and infrastructure specialists who are deploying a solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Click the following link to open a Microsoft Word .doc file that you download to your computer and print. This document contains the same information as the "Deployment for Office SharePoint Server 2007" section of this TechNet Web site. The size of this document is approximately 2.6 MB.

Deployment for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=79589&clcid=0x409)

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Virtual Lab Training for MOSS and WSS (SharePoint)

2007-03-01T07:24:39.48-08:00

I'm not the author of this list , but John West has done a great job putting it together.

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Free Offline content reader for SharePoint

2007-02-28T01:49:45.698-08:00

Colligo Reader enables you to easily download content from SharePoint sites to your laptop - so you can access the content offline, rather than having to copy files one by one through a browser. Colligo Reader is completely free for individual users and very simple to use. Reader is a client-only application - no server modifications are required. The install package is just 4.1MB in size, so it takes less than a minute to install (no license keys are required). Colligo Reader works will all shipping versions of SharePoint, including Windows^® SharePoint^® Services (WSS 3.0 & 2.0), Microsoft^® Office SharePoint^® Server (MOSS 2007), and SharePoint^® Portal Server (SPS 2003).

Find the complete article including download here

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Debug VB Script files in Visual Studio 2005 WScript.exe

2007-02-27T10:12:09.792-08:00

Took me a while to figure this one out, but certainly useful. When you execute the command below from the CMD window. Visual Studio presents you with the option to create a new instance or to DEBUG in a running instance.

Once you have selected the instance, the file is opended with the DEBUGGER at the first line of code. If this does not happen there are problems with your code, the output errors will be in the CMD window.

cscript //X "C:\Users\v-pevers\Desktop\ABB MAN\RegisterDictionary.vbs"

Have fun !

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Data Mining in Excel 2007 with Office 2007 Add-ins

2007-02-27T01:42:35.366-08:00

The SQL Server 2005 Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007 allow you to uncover hidden patterns and relationships in your data and then put them to work to enhance the quality of your analysis. To use the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Data Mining Add-Ins for Office 2007, you must be connected to a SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services database. However, you don’t need to have prior experience with any SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services components.

This is the extract from the http://www.sqlserverdatamining.com/DMCommunity/_DMAddinLaunch/default.aspx article where you can the whitepaper and a simple walk through.

I know I have found it useful.

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