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

Standard Search Box

Custom delegate applied

The search box is rendered using a delegate control. If you look at the master page you will see the delegate …

<SharePoint:DelegateControl runat=”server” ControlId=” SmallSearchBox”>

You can alter the behaviour of a delegate control by specifying a delegate with a smaller sequence number. I created the following delegate control within a standard feature…

Feature…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

<

Control Id="SmallSearchInputBox" Sequence="10"

ControlClass="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.SearchBoxEx" ControlAssembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c">
<Property Name="GoImageUrl">/_layouts/images/CFB/go.gif</Property>
<Property Name="GoImageUrlRTL">/_layouts/images/CFB/.gif</Property>
<Property Name="GoImageActiveUrl">/_layouts/images/CFB/go.gif</Property>
<Property Name="GoImageActiveUrlRTL">/_layouts/images/CFB/go.gif</Property>
<Property Name="UseSiteDefaults">true</Property>
<Property Name="FrameType">None</Property>

<Property Name="ShowAdvancedSearch">false</Property>
<Property Name="QueryPromptString">Search…</Property>
<Property Name="DropDownMode">HideDD_useDefaultScope</Property>

</Control>

</Elements>

Note the Sequence=”10” attribute of the Control element. WSS out of the box refers to a sequence number of 100 and MOSS overrides this with a sequence number of 50. So as long as your sequence number is lower than this then your settings will be applied.

The four changes I was concerned was

1. Remove the ‘advanced search’ link which is handled by  the ‘ShowAdvancedSearch’ property,

2.Add some default text to the search box which is handcled by  the QueryPromptString property

3. Remove the scope drop down field. The DropDownMode property with the enumuration value of HideDD_userDefaultScope sorts that one out.

4. Finally I changed the image to my own go.gif image. I also deployed this within the same feature to a sub directory called CFB within the 12 hive images folder.

For a complete listing of the available properties please refer to the following link on MSDN.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.portal.webcontrols.searchboxex_members.aspx

A number of objects within the SharePoint object model implement the IDisposable interface. For the on-going performance of your SharePoint server you need to ensure you remember to correctly dispose of these objects within your code.  I guess this has always been important for any application you are building but its a bit more crucial in SharePoint as your building your solutions on a platform that isn’t just servicing your application but could be many.

So what’s the problem?

So what if you don’t dispose of your objects? Well your just using up memory that could have been released. So without recycling your application pool you run the risk of slowly degrading the performance of your SharePoint farm. In fact your application pools will automatically recycle when they hit a particular memory usage threshold, which could then result in slow page loads as pages are re-compiled by the JIT when requested.

How to spot the problem?

If your spotting your SharePoint server application pools recycling frequently or your servers performance degrades during heavy usage then this could be an indication that your custom\3rd party code\web parts are not correctly disposing their objects.

You can check the ULS logs at 12 hive \LOGS. Your looking for entries related to SPRequest. It might be complaining about the number of SPRequests objects exceeding a configurable threshold and so on. You can increase this threhold setting through the registry. But first, try and use this as an indicator that some of your code or indeed a 3rd partys code such as some web parts etc. are not correctly disposing the SPSite and SPWeb objects. So look at this first before cranking this level up.

If you do want to change the threshold then look for the following sub key in your registry using regedit…

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\HeapSettings
 
LocalSPRequestWarnCount = <set to the level you want>

How to dispose your objects

Ok so that the problem, and how to determine if your getting the problem covered.  So how do you ensure your code isn’t leaving your SPSite and SPWeb objects ‘indisposed’. Well, as mentioned previously, both of these objects implement the IDisposable interface so you can go ahead and call the .Dispose method when your done with the object. Good practice would be to put this in a try, catch finally block…

SPSite site = null;

try{   site = new SPSite("http://litwaredemo");

   Console.WriteLine("got a handle on the site {0} : {1}", 

   site.Title. site.Url);

}

catch(Exception ex)

{ 

  //Catch exceptions here

}

finally

{  

 if (site != null) site.Dispose();

}

using (SPSite site = new SPSite(http://litwaredemo)

{

    Console.WriteLine("got a handle on the site {0} : {1},

    site.Title, site.Url);

}

SPSite site = SPContext.Site;Console.WriteLine("got a handle on {0} : {1}",

site.Title, site.Url);

//Don’t dispose site, leave this to SPContext to worry about.

For more information you can subscribe to Microsoft’s new SharePoint workspace blog. I’ll let you discover the ‘snappy’ title they have given it : SharePoint Workspace Blog

One of my ‘must have’ tools is SharePoint Manager 2007. This tool is a SharePoint object model explorer and enables you to browser every site on your local farm and view every property. You can even change the properties via the tool which can be a great time saver. Every spent time creating quick and nasty console apps to make some changes to your SP configuration. I know I have!

I also find this a great tool to quickly audit a new SharePoint farm and get a quick glimpse of the sites, app pools etc in use.

But the problem with the out of the box look up field is that it displays the value in the list views and when reading an  item as a Hyperlink. So when the user click the link they get taken to the linked item, which in this case, is just an admin list with one field in it. So they kind of get lost!

This doesn’t improve usability of the application so I did some investigating and came up with the following solution. If anyone has any other ideas on how to achieve this I’d love to hear from you.

The following screen shots illustrate the solution you can see the lookup field is now display without the hyperlink to the corresponding lookup list, this is also the case when the list item is displayed in read mode.

Field being displayed without the hyperlink.

After looking at the FLYTYPES.XML file found in the …12\TEMPLATE\XML directory of SharePoint I located the ‘Lookup’ field definition…

<Field Name="TypeName">Lookup</Field>

If you look at it’s RenderTemplate and in particular the ‘DisplayPattern’ you will see this is where the anchor tag is added.

So, my solution was to create your own custom field  which has a parent type of Lookup and then define your own RenderPattern without any anchor tags.

You can do this by using the visual studio extensions for SharePoint. After creating a new solution add a new Field Control

Then in the field definition I defined the following field….

<FieldType>
  <Field Name="TypeName">LookupNoLinkField</Field>
  <Field Name="TypeDisplayName">LookupNoLinkField</Field>
  <Field Name="TypeShortDescription">Lookup (No Link)</Field>
  <Field Name="ParentType">Lookup</Field>
  <Field Name="UserCreatable">FALSE</Field>
  <Field Name="FieldTypeClass">7710ed2c-00e2-40e8-92dc-ea8ee5197138</Field>
  <Field Name="FieldEditorUserControl">/_controltemplates/LookupFieldEditor.ascx</Field>
  <Field Name="SQLType">int</Field>
  <Field Name="Sortable">TRUE</Field>
  <Field Name="Filterable">TRUE</Field>
  <Field Name="ShowInListCreate">TRUE</Field>
  <RenderPattern Name="DisplayPattern">
    <LookupColumn HTMLEncode="TRUE" />
  </RenderPattern>
</FieldType>

Ok so because nothing in life is easy, there is a nice Gotcha! If either through the UI or through the API design to change this field now to allow multiv values then what actually happens is the field type is change to LookupMulti. So back comes your anchor tags. So you need to do the same thing but this time base you new custom field to parent the LookupMulti type.

<FieldType>

  <Field Name="TypeName">LookupNoLinkMultiField</Field>

  <Field Name="TypeDisplayName">LookupNoLinkMultiField</Field>

  <Field Name="TypeShortDescription">Lookup-Multi (No Link)</Field>

  <Field Name="ParentType">LookupMulti</Field>

  <Field Name="UserCreatable">FALSE</Field>

  <Field Name="FieldTypeClass">63aa539e-d34e-4858-bb93-c659103713f1</Field>

  <Field Name="FieldEditorUserControl">/_controltemplates/LookupFieldEditor.ascx</Field>

  <Field Name="SQLType">int</Field>

  <Field Name="Sortable">TRUE</Field>

  <Field Name="Filterable">TRUE</Field>

  <RenderPattern Name="DisplayPattern">

    <LookupColumn HTMLEncode="TRUE" />

  </RenderPattern>

</FieldType>

With the solution I was building I was changing the field type to allow multi values…

true;

this resulted in the field reverting to the standard lookup field types. So how do you change this to be your customer lookup field.

Well to begin with I looked at the method SPField.Type which takes an enumeration value SPFieldType. So here was my problem, what do you put here when is a custom field??

I solved this by altering the SchemaXml property of the field.

"LookupMulti", "LookupNoLinkMultiField")

This ensures your custom field is used and not the standard field. Let me know if you have any other solutions for this.

To begin with you need to disable the friendly, or custom, error messages which has been enabled in SharePoint.  You need to modify the web.config file. Here are the attributes to change…

<configuration>
  <SharePoint>
    <SafeMode CallStack="true" />
  </SharePoint>

  <system.web>
    <customErrors mode="Off" />
    <compilation debug="true"
  </system.web>

Local Debugging

Remember to change this back when your finished debugging. Occasionally some intentional expectations are thrown to provide information back to the user.  Such as ‘Can’t delete this site as it contains sub sites.’ If you don’t put custom errors back on the user will get an un-friendly stack trace instead.

If, in your development environment you are running SharePoint locally, on the same machine that visual studio has been installed then debugging is fairly easy…

Lets say you have just installed a Feature which has some feature activation code and you wont to step through your code when the feature is activated, before deploying the feature just add a break point at the start of your activation method.

System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();

Remote debugging

Once you have deployed the feature you will have either deployed the supporting DLL to the GAC (Global Assembly Cache) or in the SharePoints’ site corresponding BIN directory.  If you have the Visual Studio solution running then you wont need to copy any PCB supporting debug files. Just attach to the IIS worker process from Visual Studio and your break point will fire when you activate the feature.

If you need to debug your code from a remote server you need to install the Visual Studio remote debugger on the server. Its a little tricky as you need to get your local firewall configured to let  you through, which had me stumped for some time. If its just for a quick debug you could disable your firewall, may save you some headaches, but remember to put it back on again. Check the documentation for setting this up on msdn http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bt727f1t.aspx

Happy debugging.

I intend to make a point of blog’in anything I feel would be useful and perhaps would have to google myself. Hopefully you will find some use to my contribution to the .NET and SharePoint community. I’d love to hear from you and would encourage you to comment on any posts you feel are useful.