(Note: Applicable even in SharePoint 2010 RTM)

If you try and access the WCF data services using http://SP2010SERVERNAME/_vti_bin/listdata.svc you get the following error message

You need to install an update for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Download from Microsoft here. I found an IISRESET was not enough to get this to work. A full reboot cleared the fault.

I am very excited to announce that the next SUGUK meeting in Scotland has now been scheduled at Microsoft, Waverly Gate, Edinburgh.

Agenda

Session 1 – 4:30 – 5:30
Virtualising and Monitoring SharePoint 2010 using Hyper-v R2

With the launch of System Center Service Manager 2010, along with Opalis, Microsoft has added to its already-comprehensive line-up of management technologies within the System Center Suite, enabling organisations to centrally configure, monitor, protect, virtualise, and more, but how does this apply to key workloads like Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint?  Well, this session will reveal all – we’ll take a look at virtualising, monitoring, and protecting workloads like SharePoint and SQL, and explain how you can incorporate these technologies into your environments to streamline IT Operations and more.

Matt McSpirit is a Partner Technology Advisor, an MCSE, MCTS, and a VMware VCP, and has worked at Microsoft UK since January 2006. Matt’s role aims to ensure Microsoft Partners understand the ‘Art of the Possible’ when it comes to Microsoft technologies, and how to build solutions around the platform. Matt’s role has taken him across products, from Client to Server, through to Virtualisation & Management. Matt has delivered a number of high-profile events, including IT Forum in Barcelona, the Partner and Customer UK Launches of Windows Server 2008, and the UK Virtualisation Launch

Session 2 – 6:00 – 7:00

Microsoft Project Server 2010 on SharePoint 2010

Find out about Microsoft’s project management solution, built on the SharePoint 2010 platform. We’ll look at how Project Server 2010 can be used to solve demand management, resource management and work management problems, making use of SharePoint’s sites and workflow capabilities.

Tara Hellier works for Microsoft as a Partner Technology Advisor, focusing on business productivity solutions including SharePoint, Office and Project. Her role is to enable and support partners involved with deploying these solutions. Follow her blog at http://blogs.technet.com/tara

Session 3 – 7:30 – 8:30

Business Connectivity Services – What is it and what does it do for you?

Within this session we will begin by introducing the challenge of accessing line of business data through SharePoint 2010. We will briefly discuss The Business Data Catalog (BDC) before fully covering the Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and all of the new functionality.
Covered in this session will be the services of BCS including External Lists, Web Parts, Search, User Profiles, External Data Column and the Object Model. A detailed walkthrough of connecting to line of business systems using Microsoft tools such as SharePoint Designer 2010 along with a summary of why you may decide to connect to your Line of Business Data using Visual Studio Professional 2010 instead of SharePoint Designer.

Brett Lonsdale is the author of the SharePoint Developers Guide to the Business Data Catalog 2007, and contributing author to Developers Guide to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, and the Administrators Companion 2007 & 2010. Brett is co owner of Lightning Tools limited www.lightningtools.com and co host of the SharePoint Pod Show www.sharepointpodshow.com.

SharePint  8:30 onwards

The invite obviously extends to SharePint at the pub afterwards for a more informal discussions on SharePoint over a beer or two.

Obligatory half-time pizza and refreshments.

Venue: Microsoft Offices, Waverly Gate, 2-4 Waterloo Place, Edinburgh, EH1 3EG
Directions : How to find Microsoft Waverlygate In Edinburgh

REGISTER HERE

To register free for this event please follow this link REGISTER HERE

Link to SUGUK.ORG

To download Jess Meat’s workflow presentation click here

Bit like the Oscars here but thank also to Domino Pizza for their tower of Pizzas which almost broke my back getting them up to the 5th floor @ Microsoft.

The next session is currently planned again at Microsoft’s Waverley gate office in Edinburgh for late August 2010. Watch my blog and also SUGUK for detail to follow shortly.

It was great to see such a positive turn out and I look forward to seeing you all again in August, make sure you spread the work and get an even bigger turn out next time. If you would like to share your experience either working with SharePoint or using SharePoint please let me know. I’d love to get more local speakers – give me a shout.

Chris Forbes covering the welcome messages

Jess Meats gets things started covering Info Path, Workflow and Visio Services in SP2010

Spencer dives deep into the SharePoint 2010 Service Architecture

 

Thanks again to all who made it along and hope to see you again next time

I am very excited to announce that the next SUGUK meeting in Scotland is scheduled for May 5^th at Microsoft, Waverly Gate, Edinburgh.

Spencer Harbour http://www.harbar.net/articles/About.aspx (MVP) will be discussing

Scaling SharePoint 2010 Topologies
Learn about the new SharePoint Service architecture, and how you architect Services for your organization. We will talk about various Canonical SharePoint deployment types (Internet Presence, Partner Collaboration via Extranets, distributed/consolidated data centers, medium sized organization etc.) and describe how you architect the Services logical topology. In addition to the logical topology, we will drill into how you scale-up/scale-out the physical topology to meet the scale expectations for your organization. Regardless of the nature and scale of your organization, SharePoint 2010 now offers a topology for you!

and Jess Meats http://blogs.technet.com/jessmeats/default.aspx from Microsoft shall be diving into the new workflow capabilities in SP2010 including the visual design capabilities within Visio 2010.

SharePint

The Time

Doors open at 5:30 and will begin promptly at 6:00, with the obligatory half-time pizza and refreshments.

The Venue

Posting on SUGUK.ORG : http://bit.ly/cuapXW

1. Right click the short cut to VS2010 and select  ‘Properties’

2. From the properties window select the ‘Advanced’ button

3. Check the ‘Run as administrator’ checkbox – Your done

Simpler way using Power Shell

Using the ‘External Tools’ option within visual studio you can create a quick link, so from your solution just click the ‘Get 4-Part Name’ link and out pops the 4-part assembly name in you’re output window.

Resulting output window…

How to add a new External Tool

Select ‘External Tools…’ from the Tools menu in Visual Studio

TITLE : Give the tool a title. You can use an ‘&’ character which will act as a short cut i.e. ALT+G.

COMMAND : powershell.exe

Arguments: -command "[System.Reflection.AssemblyName]::GetAssemblyName(\"$(TargetPath)\").FullName"

3. Make sure you check ‘use output window’ to post the result in the VS output window.

Simple but a great time saver

Noticed a problem when trying to install SharePoint 2010 release candidate on win 2008 running as a DC.

Problem:

The setup was not prompting you for the server type ‘Single Server’, ‘New Farm’. Instead the install would install SharePoint and SQL server express. The configuration wizard would then setup SharePoint as a single server.

Workaround:

Copy the setup.exe to a local directory on the server eg : c:\SPSETUP then open a command prompt ‘as administrator’ and run the following

c:\SPSETUP\setup.exe /extract c:\SPSETUP

Then from the SPSETUP folder run the install with the following command

setup.exe /config c:\spsetup\File\SetupFarm\config,xml

The install shall run as normal, but this time when the configuration wizard is run you should get the prompts to specify the appropriate configuration database server.

If you are running as a single server and using SQL Server Express then I also noticed this problem…

Also noticed that the config. wizard fails at step 5 due to it timing out. Thanks to some other postings I discovered this was due to the Sharepoint Server Search 14 and later on the SharePoint Foundation Search V4 service was being restarted by the configuration wizard. When the service is restarted it was using the ‘Local Service’ account. You can see this happening if you watch the services while the config. wizard is running. If before running the wizard you change these to run with appropriate domain accounts these should start up ok.

So what do you get out of the box?

You enable RSS within your site collection/site via site settings. You also need to enable RSS on the specific list or document library. You do this via the list settings.

When enabled users see a new link from the list ‘Actions’ menu…

This link calls the page listfeed.aspx which you can find in the LAYOUTS folder within the 12 HIVE. It’s worth taking a look at the code behind for this page which is contained within the Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.dll which you can find in the _app_bin folder of any SharePoint site (And not the GAC). Using Reflector take a look at the class ListFeed and you will get an idea on how the RSS feed work.

There are a couple of query string fields which can be passed to this page. list and View the list is expecting the source list GUID and the view is looking for a lists view GUID. The thing I found odd was that even if you are in the a specific list view if you click the view RSS feed link you still only get of the an RSS feed back which is the default view i.e. the query string ‘View’ is not used? You can manually put this in an it works? Perhaps I’m missing something here?

The render method of this class calls the WriteRssMethod of the corresponding SPlist. This method is overloaded as follows

Building your own RSS generator

Anyway my requirements had to cater for

1. Return content which maps to specific content type fields

2. Return content from a specified view within a list – I used the view to filter and sort the content although I could have easily just done this in using SPQuery

I created a SharePoint solution with a new application page which would be mapped to the LAYOUTS  folder within the 12 Hive

The application page, called rssFeed.aspx contains the following mark-up

<%

@ Assembly Name=”chrisforbesblogs.RSSTest, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=8e473a8929984006″ %>

<%

@ Page Language=”C#” Inherits=”chrisforbesblogs.RSSTest.rssFeed” %>

<%

@ OutputCache Duration=”300″ VaryByParam=”xsl;web;page;wp” VaryByCustom=”rights;feedresults”%>

In the same solution I created a class file called rssFeed.aspx.cs with the following inheritance from LayoutsPageBase

using System;using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Text;using Microsoft.SharePoint;using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;using System.Web.UI.WebControls;using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;using System.Xml;using System.Globalization;

namespace chrisforbesblogs.RSSTest{    public class rssFeed :LayoutsPageBase    {

Fields to store relevant objects

protected SPList spList;protected SPWeb spWeb;protected SPView spView;protected string viewName;protected string listName;

protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e){    base.OnLoad(e);

   // System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();

    if (!Page.IsPostBack)    {

        try        {

           viewName = (base.Request.QueryString.GetValues("View")[0]);                             listName = (base.Request.QueryString.GetValues("List")[0]);

           spWeb = SPControl.GetContextWeb(this.Context);           spList = spWeb.Lists[listName];

           if (spList == null) throw new Exception("list not found");           spView = spList.Views[viewName];           if (spView == null) throw new Exception("View Not Found");

        }        catch (Exception ex)        {

            throw new SPException(ex.Message);        }

    }}

Then in the render method return the relevant xml using some SharePoint API to get the required records and a string builder to construct the XML. You can also create the xml file using System.XML.XMLDocument but I find this way easier to read the XML as I write it.

protected override void  Render(System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer){     base.Render(writer);

     if (spList != null)     {

         base.Response.AppendHeader("ETag"             , spList.CurrentChangeToken.ToString());         base.Response.AppendHeader("Last-Modified"             , spList.LastItemModifiedDate.ToString("r"             , CultureInfo.InvariantCulture));         base.Response.ContentType = "text/xml";

         if (spView != null)         {             base.Response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;

             string channelTitle = "The RSS Channel title";             string channelDescription = "The RSS Description";

             string channelLink = "http://www.chrisforbesblogs.net";             string language = "en-us";             int timeToLive = 60;             string copyright = "Copyright 2009 - "                  + DateTime.Now.Year + " ChrisForbesBlogs.net";

             StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();             sb.Append(                 "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>\r\n");             sb.Append("<rss version=\"2.0\">\r\n");             sb.Append("<channel>\r\n");

             sb.AppendFormat("<title>{0}</title>\r\n"                 , channelTitle);             sb.AppendFormat("<link>{0}</link>\r\n"                 , channelLink);             sb.AppendFormat("<description>{0}</description>\r\n"                 , channelDescription);             sb.AppendFormat("<language>{0}</language>\r\n"                 , language);             sb.AppendFormat("<ttl>{0}</ttl>\r\n", timeToLive);             sb.AppendFormat("<copyright>{0}</copyright>\r\n"                 , copyright);

             string spTitle = "";             string spDescription = "";             string spDate = "";             string spAuthor = "Chris Forbes";

             sb.AppendFormat(                "<lastBuildDate>{0}</lastBuildDate>\r\n"                 , DateTime.Now.Date.ToShortDateString());

             SPListItemCollection items = spList.GetItems(spView);             foreach (SPListItem item in items)             {                 //Make sure you are pulling back valid                 //SharePoint fields which are listed in the view                 if (item["Title"] != null)                     spTitle = item["Title"].ToString();

                 if (item["Description"] != null)                     spTitle = item["Description"].ToString();

                 if (item["PageDate"] != null)                     spTitle = item["PageDate"].ToString();

                 sb.AppendFormat("<item>\r\n");                 sb.AppendFormat("<title>{0}</title>", spTitle);                 sb.AppendFormat("<link><![CDATA[{0}]]></link>\r\n"                     , item.Url);                 sb.AppendFormat(                     "<description><![CDATA[{0}]]></description>\r\n"                     , spDescription);                 sb.AppendFormat("<author>{0}</author>\r\n"                    , spAuthor);                 sb.AppendFormat("<pubDate>{0}</pubDate>\r\n"                    , spDate);                 sb.AppendFormat("</item>\r\n");

             }

             sb.AppendFormat("</channel>\r\n");             sb.AppendFormat("</rss>\r\n");

             base.Response.Write(sb.ToString());         }

     }}

I wrapped the returned field values in <![CDATA[]]> to ensure any illegal characters are ignored by the XML.

As I mentioned earlier you could easily extend this code to use SPQuery instead of relying on an existing view. You could also access a number of lists and aggregate the content into a single feed.

If your publishing this to an anonymous access site then you will have to add some additional methods to prevent an authentication challenge. If you look back the out of the box class file you can see some additional methods which handle this.

protected override bool AllowAnonymousAccess

{

get

{

return true;

}

}

protected override bool RequireDefaultLayoutsRights

{

get

{

return false;

}

}

protected override SPBasePermissions RightsRequired

{

get

{

return (SPBasePermissions.EmptyMask | SPBasePermissions.Open);

}

}

Anyway hope the above is of some help to you, happy coding

Click for larger image

You receive the following error…

The Managed Metadata Service or Connection is currently not available. The Application Pool or Managed Metadata Web Service may not have been started, Contact your Administrator.

Click for larger image

So, obviously I checked the Managed Metadata Service and this was indeed started. So after much troubleshooting and several term store recreations I double checked the SharePoint 2010 Installation guides and spotted that there is now a required WCF hot fix.

After installing this the problem is resolved

You can get the hot fix ‘KB976462 – SharePoint Shared Services Roll-ip’ at

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB976462/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3571