SPVSX (SharePoint Visual Studio Extensions) Alpha Released

One of my teammates, Matt Smith, has been working hard alongside Wes Hackett, Glyn Clough and Martin Hatch on what looks to be a very interesting tool to help us developers.

The tool extends the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint development features further providing the following key points:-

• Deployment
• Quick Deploy (similar to Copy to 12/GAC in old-school WSPBuilder and VSeWSS 1.3)
• Quick Deploy Custom Deployment Steps and Configurations
• Project and Solution-level Quick Deploy (without changing deployment configuration)
• Copy to SharePoint Root at File and SharePoint Item (SPI)-level (right-click in Solution Explorer)
• Auto Copy to SharePoint Root when saving a file (e.g. auto deploy a change to an ASCX)
• Auto Copy to GAC/BIN when building a project
• Restart IIS
• Recycle app pools
• Attach to IIS worker processes (for quicker debugging!)

Matt has more details on his blog.

 

To download the extensions take go to the SPVSX Visual Studio Plugin Gallery and provide feedback/comments/requests on the SPVSX Codeplex site.

Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Extensions Project

So Matt Smith, Wes Hackett and Martin Hatch from Content and Code are getting together to start doing Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint extensions for the SharePoint community.

They have some good ideas but need more, take a look and if there are any features which you would like that would aid your deployment then post a message in the suggestions section of the project site.

Reporting Services and speeding up reports with Images

Recently I have been working on some reporting services report interfaces and do hope to blog about this in more detail later.

Until then though I would like to share some pain points that I have had particularly when using images within Reporting Services.

Two issues come to mind:-

• slow rendering
• columns containing images not being sized correctly.

Slow Rendering
So one of the issues that I had is slow rendering of the reports. To explain the scenario a particular column uses images to display the status of the column. The images are changed via an functional express based on a status id field. For a certain status the client did not want to see an image, to achieve this, the image was set to "" to indicate no image.

However, as more images were used the rendering of this column became really slow. To solve this, I created an image called 'blank' that was a 1x1 pixel PNG image which is embedded in the report. Instead of using "", I would use "blank". This seems to speed things up, in fact doing some testing, the report now loads up after a refresh of IIS app pools and the Reporting Services report in 24 seconds opposed to 85 seconds!


Columns Not Sized Correctly
When the report was rendered columns that had images would sometimes not size correcly leaving a big space after the image. Sometimes the column would fix itself and other times not, it took me a long time to get a solution and this is what I had to.
First ensure that the image properties->size is set to original. Also add padding of Top=1 and Left=1.

This combination seemed to fix the issue.

Hope that helps.

SharePoint Overflow

Whilst listening to the latest installments of the SharePoint Pod Show, Nick Swan mentioned a new site that they have started called SharePoint Overflow, borrowing some key ideas from Stack Overflow they have created a really simple and neat site which allows you to post and answer questions.

As you answer questions you gain more reputation and this allows you to do more on the site. As some of you maybe aware I am a bit of a Playstation, gaming nut and I love the idea that you can score points.

There seem to be all the top SharePoint dogs there so you are sure to get your questions answered quickly and learn a few things as well. I learnt a new way to handle the SPWebConfigurationModificiation object thanks to Andrew Woodward and The Kid

One thing that I havent seen before is the OpenId authentication piece. OpenId is similar to Microsoft's passport along users to login via a single sign on username/password. Therefore  I can log in via my blogger/Google account.

Although Microsoft have been trying to do this for a while this does seem like a nice alternative and I am guessing it was selected because it gave the broadest choice.

Anyway sign up and take a look.
Nice work chaps!

http://www.sharepointoverflow.com

Pages is not a valid document library

Had an problem at a client's site where when you created a new layout page using the New->Welcome Page content type an error would display saying that "Pages is not a valid document library".

Looking into the issue further, Layout pages within the library could be accessed properly and using Manage Site and Content you could copy files into the library.

One thing that I did notice is that the Modify Navigation link from Site Actions->Site Settings was greyed out.

First thing was to check the web's Publishing Feature, the Standard feature was enabled but this had no effect.

The solution was to deactivate and then reactivate the web's publishing feature.

The client has recently applied June 2009 cumulative update to the server farm the previous day, wondering if this caused the problem.

Thank you to Myryama for a helping hand! in finding a solution.

Simon

Passed WSS Configuration Exam 70-631

Well finally I have taken my first Microsoft Exam since doing my NT4 MCSE. Managed to pass the WSS Configuration 70-631 exam.

Found the MCTS WSS Configuration Exam Study Guide from Sybex very useful, highly recommend. Though if you have been using WSS / MOSS for a while then the exam is not going to tax you too much.

Next the WSS Application Dev exam, now this is supposed to be much harder, so think I better study a lot more. I'll post up any useful reading that I find.

Cheers
Simon

Get started developing in SharePoint 2010

Microsoft have released a set of Hands-On Labs where you can go through the process of developing with SharePoint 2010.

Oh and you'll need Visual Studio 2010

Looks like another late night!




Simon