Random Rants & Raves

One of the cool new features in SharePoint 2010 is the availability of the Office Ribbon. Using the simple XML syntax, it is quite easy to add your own Ribbon controls and tabs to existing lists, libraries, and even your own web parts. You can even add contextual ribbon tabs to web parts hosted in your own custom Application Pages.

Now it’s easy to get a “global” Ribbon by simply omitting the RegistrationId and RegistrationType attributes in the Elements.xml file. You’ll find ways of doing this in tons of blog posts all over. What is not so obvious, however, is the way to do add a Ribbon to a particular Application Page when the page does not host any Web part or user control. So here’s some help for you. I’ll also take a look at interacting with a modal dialog using the new framework in SharePoint from this ribbon.

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It’s been ages since I’ve updated this blog. So let’s start the year with some install tips for one of the most exciting products coming out this year from Microsoft – SharePoint 2010.

If’ you haven’t got it yet, head over and download the SharePoint 2010 beta. If you are planning to install it for testing on a Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 machine here are some small install tips for you that’ll take some small irritations away from installing the beta.

1. Download the Pre-Requisites for SharePoint 2010 beforehand and install them yourself. You can get a list of direct downloads for these at http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/10/25/sharepoint-2010-pre-requisites-download-links.aspx
2. Make sure you’ve promoted the machine to a Domain Controller
3. Once the install phase of the SharePoint setup is complete, do NOT start the SharePoint 2010 Product Configuration Wizard automatically. Instead, install the very important hotfix for .NET Framework 3.5SP1. Reboot after the install.
• In case you did start the config wizard, you’d most probably have gotten an error on Step 5 while installing services. Quit the wizard and install the hotfix above.
• Reboot the machine and open up RegEdit and search and delete all of the following (whichever you can find)
• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\WSS\Services\Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchWebServiceManagerService
• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\WSS\ServiceProxies\Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchWebServiceManagerServiceProxy
• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\WSS\Services\Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchService
• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\WSS\Services\Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Administration.SPSearchService
4. Complete the install using the configuration wizard and you should be up and running with SharePoint 2010 easily enough.

It is sometimes a pain to download multiple files from a SharePoint document library - especially when there are a lot of them. Many times the Explorer view doesn't work as it should and therefore dragging and dropping the folders you need are not possible. WebDAV may not be working so you can't get connected that way either. 

Which is where a nice, free solution comes into play. I've been a great proponent and user of the free WGET - the open source, command line web downloader. WGet for Windows is also available and simply extracting the files to a folder and adding it to the path allows you to start working with it. All you need to do to get the files off of a folder in a Document Library is give the following command:

wget -c -r -l1 --http-user=[username] --http-password=[password] --accept=aspx,docx,pptx,xlsx http://[Sharepoint URL]/[Document Library]/[Folder]

• r: For recursive
• l1: For downloading only upto 1 level
• http-user and http-password: The username and password to login to the Sharepoint site
• accept: The comma separated list of file extensions that will be downloaded. ASPX is required since all the pages in SharePoint are of this extension

When you do this, all the files in the folder you pointed to will be downloaded into the current directory. You will need to repeat this for each directory in the top level Document Library you wish to download. However, this is a much faster and easier way than downloading each file once at a time.

If you've ever used the Google "office" applications - Google Spreadsheet, Google Docs, etc., you'd have known that saving and using files over the Internet has it's advantages. However, the Google office has some stuff that you can't really do - and that is work with your documents offline and having richer edit capabilities. Imagine being stuck in a long flight without having the documents you need with you on your notebook or a time when you need to create a richer document - with maybe a fancy table of contents, cover page etc.

This is where MS Office really shines. You get extremely rich editing capabilities within it. To those who call Office "Bloatware" and say that 90% of the users use only 10% of the features that Word, Excel and PowerPoint have, all I have to say to them is this: if you ever reach that time when you want more than that standard 10% you use, you'll be extremely glad to find that Office already has it and can ease your burden of doing it considerably.

You can now get the best of both worlds by signing up into the Office Live Workspace for free. It allows you to store, view and edit documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) as well as share and collaborate with others. You can also create lists like Tasks, Contacts, and Events here and store them in specific workspaces. If you've never used SharePoint earlier, this is a good first step to seeing the stuff you can do.

The best part is that the site can get fully integrated with your Office product by simply installing the Office Live Add-in available on the site. (Note: If you're on Vista, you also need to install this update and reboot before using the add-in). Once ready, you can save and open files directly from the Live workspace from within the Office applications. This also gives you offline capability to allow you to work with the documents when not connected to the Internet and then syncing them back to the workspace when you are connected.

There are only two small downsides to this stuff:

1. If you've already worked with SharePoint (WSS or MOSS), you'll find that a lot of features are missing from this hosted version. This is however a good thing so as not to confuse or frighten most people who've never worked on SharePoint before.
2. There is no in-place editing of documents inside the Web browser like in the Google apps. I however prefer editing with all the rich capabilities of Office, but it might be a small deterrent to some.

I've been using and playing with the different betas and RCs of Windows Server 2008 all this while. In each of them, one of the nice things that I found was the out-of-the-box availability of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0. This allowed me to use and show off SharePoint quickly in a demo and stuff. The auto installation of required Windows, IIS, and database components was a great plus as well.

Today, I went ahead and installed Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition on a machine on my network. After setting up basic stuff on it (IIS7 with some additional options, etc.), I planned to make this a small intranet-like system for my dev team to be able to collaborate on. I went into the Roles window to add the SharePoint role and couldn't find it there. I tried looking in the Features window, but it wasn't there either. I then ran the command:

ServerManagerCMD -query | find "SharePoint"

from the command prompt to see if I could at least install it from there. But no luck. WSS seemed to have vanished from the install media. A little bit of searching however got me to this announcement that states that the RTM of Windows Server 2008 will not carry WSS3. You will need to download and install WSS3 Service Pack 1. (BTW, the announcement states that RC1 and above will not carry WSS. This is not true. I have a VPC still installed with RC1 that had WSS available and working fine).

Anyway, the download is about 104 MB. Once done I ran the SharePoint.exe that got downloaded. The first error I got was about the missing Windows Workflow Foundation.

So I went back to Server Manager and installed .NET Framework 3.0 from the Features section. Once this was done and I started the install again, it went through smoothly. I was surprised that the installer didn't use the Windows Internal Database feature that is part of Windows Server 2008. Instead it went and installed its own version of this database. After this came the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard - which took a little while to complete. Once this was complete, the site was ready. You could browse over to the home page after logging in (and adding the site to trusted site in IE).

My only thought on this whole thing was it sure is a pity that they removed WSS as a role in Windows 2008. It was an integrated install experience for setting up something important and it just felt much nicer than installing it by the usual download, check dependency errors, install routine.