Category: Technology

Australian SharePoint conference 2010 – day 2(3 min read)

Content Deployment Bootcamp (Mark Rhodes)

Reasonable mix of slides and demos. Several of the slides had an interesting grab of quotes from the community on the new SP2010 content deployment -- most of them positive (or at least optimistic).

There was a brief mention of the problems with content deployment in MOSS2007 (particulary with variations), with the comment that despite initial issues MOSS2007 deployment actually got better with the various service packs and cumulative updates.

The demo was nothing special (it's relatively easy to get simple content deployment working in a demo/lab environment -- it was always real world deployment, with WAN issues, etc, that had problems).

SharePoint 2010 web part development (Ishai Sagi, Brian Farnhill)

The presentation was mostly demos (there were slides, but they weren't used much) -- which actually worked quite well. The two presenters worked well together and packed in a heap of demos -- an AJAX web part built from scratch, a Silverlight web part, how to upgrade web parts from 2007 including a demo of existing WSP's just working versus ones that need recompiling (or updating), plus a demo of the new developer dashboard and how you can use it to troubleshoot web part perfomance issues.

It was a lot of demo's they packed in and fairly informative. A good session overall.

Information Management with SharePoint 2010 (Rai Umar, Gayan Peiris)

A business-focussed session with a good overview of the information management aspects of SP 2010.

SP 2010 has expanded many of the record management features to be applicable anywhere you want in the system (not just a single record center). Another key component is the managed metadata service with hierarchical taxonomies.

There was a good slide with the positioning of different elements (MySites, digital asset management, etc) fit on a scale of managed taxonomies to open folksonomies and scope from team to enterprise-wise.

SharePoint 2010 Development - Business Connectivity Services (Adam Cogan)

The session title was not a good description of the content -- Adam went off on quite a tangent and a significant portion was spend on Facebook integration (I think this is just Adam doing his own thing -- something I have seen before).

Anyway, after a brief demo of BCS connecting to Adventure Works as a power user (including pulling the result into Outlook), the majority of the session was about integrating SharePoint + Facebook.

Admittedly one of the options for integrating with Facebook was via BCS, which may have been the point of the demo (not sure). In terms of other options given there was pulling from Facebook (via JS or API) or pushing to Facebook (via Workflow or Event Receiver).

It was suggested that the push model (e.g. Workflow) may actually be best for organisations that want to own their own data, plus push to multiple locations (SharePoint, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc), although the BCS option was the one demoed.

For the BCS option, the Facebook Development Kit (from Codeplex) was used to show how easy it is to integrate SharePoint + Facebook.

In Depth Architecture and Design Planning

Slides only presentation covering a wide range of architecture and planning. Started with an refreshing on MOSS 2007 capacity planning, then moved into SP 2010 considerations.

A brief mention of upgrade options, with in-place upgrade not recommended in most cases. (The database mount aka database attach approach was recommended as best practice; there are also many situations where in-place is not even directly possible, e.g. where hardware migration is needed.)

There was a discussion of disaster recovery solutions, mostly focussing on database mirroring. SP 2010 is failover aware, but using a SQL alias for your database is still a good idea for databases such as the config database.

Australian SharePoint conference 2010 – day 1(3 min read)

Keynote (Arpan Shah)
 
Some of the slides were re-used from other presentations (e.g. Services Ready content), but a reasonable overview. One thing particularly interested was some statistics that were provided: 17,000 SharePoint customers, 4,000 SharePoint partners, and 500,000 SharePoint developers.
 
The developer stats seem a bit iffy, but the customers/partner information is interesting -- if you do the maths it works out at 4 customers per partner, which gives an idea of the level of competition in this space.
 
Manipulating the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon (Todd Bleeker)
 
Todd is a very enthusiastic presenter, and provided plenty of side tips and suggests that are obviously based on experience, e.g. "Start with an Empty SharePoint project rather than with a specific item, so that you can give the item a nice name when you add it", or "The first thing I do is move the key.snk into the Properties folder because I never touch it and want to clear the screen real estate".
 
The presentation had a good mix of slides and demos, and continued with the tips, e.g. "Deploy .js files into a library so you can apply security management -- such as making them accessible to anonymous users.". He then went on with issues how the blank site template doesn't have a Site Assets (or Site Pages) library, so you need to also ensure they exist.
 
Taking SharePoint offline with SharePoint Workspace
 
I don't know what I was expecting from this business track presentation, but it did deliver on some of the changes/improvements in SharePoint Workspace (previously Groove) and the limitations.
 
I think SharePoint workspaces are a good solution for the 'occassionally disconnected' worker, but you need to think how you organise your SharePoint to support it, e.g. having one site with a large document library (with folders, etc) doesn't synchronise well (you can't limit SPWS to only part of a list); you want to have individual collaboration sites per department, project, etc.
 
Developing with REST and LINQ in SharePoint 2010 (Todd Bleeker)
 
Another good presentation by Todd, which covered two extremes of accessing SharePoint data. Half the demo was on the JS Client Object Model, and the other half jumped right to the other end of the spectrum and show cases using LINQ on the server-side to access SharePoint data.
 
DataView web parts
 
This presentation was plagued by demo issues and suffered a bit. It was also oriented towards no-code solutions, so limited in scope. It did show how far you can get through only customising dataview webparts (XSLT, etc).
 
There was also a nod towards the new client-side object model and the potential for developing significant solutions without the need for any server code.
 
Building Line of Business Applications using ECM solutions
 
I found this presentation a bit bizarre. The presenters started off selling themselves and it initially felt like I was in a vendor session. Whilst other sessions may give away books, CDs, etc, these presenters decided to give away five dollar notes, which I found quite strange.
 
Another example of something that struck me as strange was presenting some statistics about the types of successful projects but drawing the wrong conclusion regarding how likely a project is to be successful based on its type (affirming the consequent fallacy -- "a lot of successful projects are type A" does not mean that "type A projects are likely to be successful" -- maybe there are simply more type A projects).
 
The bulk of the session was actually an okay case study about building a demo OH&S business process consisting of an Infopath form for incident reporting kicking off a workflow that then led to a case management workflow (where necessary). The case management workflow used the new document set functionality, where a special folder (call a document set) of items can be group together, applying metadata, workflows, records management, etc to the document set as a whole.
 
(As an aside, if you want to take advantage of SharePoint Workspaces then you need to think carefully about how you structure you documents -- do you really want all cases in a single document library.)
 

Reflections on SOA(2 min read)

One way I expand my professional knowledge is by reading "good" books on software engineering; those books that are either commonly referenced classics or highly recommended (see sidebar for short reviews of some recommended books).

I have recently been reading "Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, volume 1", by Buschmann, et al. (commonly referred to as POSA), which includes one of the early (1996) formalisations of the Layers pattern.

What does this have to do with SOA?

Well, the topic came up in a recent training course of what is SOA / what is a service. The training course level was such that only a basic description was appropriate, but what immediately jumped to my mind as important is that a Service Oriented Architecture usually consists of both coarse-grained business services, as well as fine-grained implementation services (often with a workflow component as a means to aggregate them).

Although a lot of knowledge can be learnt on the job, being passed on by other software engineers, it can sometimes be an eye-opener to actually go back and read the original description.

In this case, when defining an Service Oriented Architecture I would strongly suggest reviewing the Layers pattern and think about how your services might be structured in layers. Think about the different abstraction levels you have in your system, name the different layers and assign tasks to each of them. In particular, think about some of the issues from step 4 ("Specify the services"), and step 5:

"5. Refine the layering. Iterate over steps 1 to 4. It is usually not possible to define an abstraction criterion precisely before thinking about the implied layers and their services. Alternately, it is usually wrong to define components and services first and later impose a layered structure on them..."

One way I have seen service oriented architectures broken up is with different layers for Business Process Services, Business Function Services and Data Services, each with their own responsibility and features.

For example Data Services encapsulate business data entities specific to a slice of the business and are usually atomic, stateless, don't change often and are highly reusable, whereas Business Process Services are designed to encapsulate business process and workflow, are implemented through a stateful orchestration and will change more often.

There is a good diagram of how the different abstraction levels (Layers) of services can interact in "Understanding Service Oriented Architecture" in the inaugural January 2004 issue of the Microsoft Architecture Journal.

Work around for deployment of MOSS site with variations(4 min read)

One way to deploy MOSS (or SharePoint) sites is via stsadm export/import. There are, however, a few known problems, for example items hidden in navigation reappear and the first time you deploy your custom master pages are not applied. Fixes are possible; manually re-hide the items, and deploying a second (or more) time resolves the master page issue.

(Aside: I suspect the master page issue is a dependency problem -- during the deployment it tries to set the master page before it has been deployed, i.e. before it exists, and fails. The dependency is then resolved if you deploy again, as this time the master page does exist.)

However -- running the deployment (stsadm -o import) twice causes issues if you have variations (multilingual) enabled for your site. We found this out the hard way trying to deploy a large multilingual site into our test environment. When you try to access the site after the second deployment, you get the following nasty error (you need to turn off friendly errors and enable debugging, etc to troubleshoot):

Source Error:
Line 47:         private string GetRedirectTargetUrl()
Line 48:         {
Line 49:             ReadOnlyCollection<VariationLabel> spawnedLabels = Variations.Current.UserAccessibleLabels;
Line 50:             if (spawnedLabels.Count > 0)
Line 51:             {

Source File: c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\VariationsRootLanding.ascx    Line: 49

Stack Trace:
[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]
   Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Variations.InitializeUserAccessibleLabels() +199
   Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Variations.get_UserAccessibleLabels() +33
   ASP._controltemplates_variationsrootlanding_ascx.GetRedirectTargetUrl() +44
   ASP._controltemplates_variationsrootlanding_ascx.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +18
   System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +47
   System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +131
   System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1061

Even worse, some of the administration pages also break, for example trying to access /_Layouts/sitemanager.aspx results in the following error:

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.VariationsPublishingOperationValidator.EstablishLabels()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.VariationsPublishingOperationValidator.Examine()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.WebControls.SmtWebEcbMenu.<>c__DisplayClass5.<setupTypeSpecificMenu>b__0()

The site itself should work if you manually go direct to one of the individual language sites, e.g. /en (or whatever your variations are). You can also still access /_layouts/settings.aspx, and if you look at the variation labels setup you will see that all of the variations are appearing twice!

If you deploy a third time, say a new build from the development team, then you will find that all the variation labels are now appearing three times!

The problem has been communicated to Microsoft, and they are working on a hotfix, but in the meanwhile poking around in the SharePoint content database we came up with the following SQL workaround.

Note: This is not complete; you will need to execute each statement and update the GUIDs into the next. It's safer to check it as you go rather than just start deleting parts of your database.

-- Select the target content database
use xxxxxxxx
go

-- Get Id of top level web
select top 100 Id, *
from Webs
where ParentWebId is null

-- Get tp_ID of the 'Variation Labels' list for that web
select top 100 tp_ID, *
from AllLists
where tp_WebId = '[Id of top level web]'
and tp_Title = 'Variation Labels'

-- Check the data items in that list.
select top 100 *
from AllUserData
where tp_ListId = '[tp_ID of variation labels list]'

-- Remove the duplicate labels (created after first import)
select * -- delete
from AllUserData
where tp_ListId = '[tp_ID of variation labels list]'
and tp_Created > '[some date/time after first deployment]'

After you figure out the GUIDs, just run the delete after every time you do a deployment (presuming you haven't added any new items).

Addendum:

A while later we discovered also that there were similar problems with duplicate cache profiles and content reports. The extra items can be deleted, but the report filters still don't seem to work. The investigations are continuing, but at least we can deploy now.

To see the other duplications after import, use the following SQL:

-- The same applies to caching and reporting setup
select *
from AllUserData
where tp_ListId in
(
  select tp_ID
  from AllLists
  where tp_WebId = '[Id of top level web]'
  and (tp_Title = 'Cache Profiles'
       or tp_Title = 'Content and Structure Reports')
)


Dependency injection via System.ComponentModel(1 min read)

In reference to a recent post on Matthew's blog (http://mcosier.blogspot.com/2005/07/inversion-of-control-ioc-or-dependency.html).

(Graeme [Strange] suggested I catch up with the Readify blogs, so I've been reading recent posts.)

Note that the .NET Framework already includes a complete implementation of a dependency injection framework in the System.ComponentModel namespace.

It allows you to inject components which implement an interface into a service locator at runtime. Service consumers are then coded to search for the components they want via the public interface. All the plumbing handling service registration, etc, is handled in the .NET Framework.

The following post by Daniel Cazzulino has more information and gives some examples.

http://weblogs.asp.net/cazzu/archive/2004/05/10/129140.aspx#129156

Mitch Denny has also previously posted on this.

http://notgartner.com/posts/906.aspx