It’s so easy to do a “Hello World” Web part project now. These days, my Hello World projects typically involve opening up a database table and displaying records in a table. I was able to do this with minimal coding and got it up and running—a full blown Web part—in under 15 minutes!

I created a sample project that opens up the AdventureWorks database and displays employee records in a table:

Sample Visual Web Part Project using Adventure Works Database

The Web-part looks like the following when used inside SharePoint:

AdventureWorks Employees Web Part So far, I like it!Here are my first impressions:SharePoint project templates come out-of-the-box install of VS 2010. After installing VS 2010, the SharePoint project templates are ready for use. No need to do installations of VS-extensions.SharePoint Project Templates in Visual Studio 2010

• The Visual Web Part project cannot be deployed as a “sandboxed solution”. It has to be deployed as a farm solution.
• Project-debugging became a lot easier even with a full-blow farm-deployment. Press F5 in the VS 2010 IDE and Visual Studio will build, package, deploy, and activate your feature, and launch the debug-browser all in one click! When you’re done debugging, terminate Internet Explorer, Visual Studio will deactivate and retract the solution out of SharePoint.
• IIS-reset (for the target Web app) even for full-blown deployments when debugging is fast!
• Remember in VSeWSS 1.3 where you had to Google first how to specify the group the Web part appears in because it wasn’t so obvious? Well, it got easier in VS 2010! Now, the Elements.xml file has a place-holder for the Web-part group. All you have to do, is change it from “Custom” to whatever value you want it to be. It’s so visible now you can’t miss it.

Web-Part Group Place-Holder in Elements.xml File

• You can now add Web User Controls (ASCX files) into the project! As a matter of fact, the project template adds one ASCX file for you. This just made Web Part development a HECK of a lot easier! This is HUGE! Back in VS 2008 developing SharePoint 2007 Web parts, there were no designers available. If developers wanted to use ASCX files, they had to create regular ASP.NET Web apps, design the ASCX files there, write the code-behind, compile the project so the code-behind logic gets packaged with the ASCX files, deploy the ASCX files to UserControls folder within the SharePoint virtual Web app folder, deploy and enable Smart Part, add a Smart Part Web part to the SharePoint pages, then finally, hook-up the Smart Part to the ASCX files. Whew!!! Talk about LOTS of steps! In VS 2010, you don’t need Smart Part or that lengthy way to integrate ASCX file in SharePoint anymore. The challenge of “imagining” what your Web part will look like as you write your C# code is no more. The designer is built in to the Visual Web Part project. Leverage your ASP.NET skills to the max.
• Despite all the improvements, Web part development veterans should recognize familiar concepts and project files such as Elements.xml, .webpart file, strong-named key file, packages and features. 

I have many ASP.NET developer friends who didn’t want to get into SharePoint development because:

• The Web part project wasn’t easy in SharePoint 2007. No designers, hard to design a visual element.
• ASP.NET developers got accustomed to easy debugging of their projects by simply pressing F5 key or the play button on the IDE toolbar. In 2007, ASP.NET developers thought deploying the app and then attaching to the w3wp.exe process (multiple manual steps, not one) was too cumbersome.
• It took forever to even debug the code because the SharePoint Web app always recycled on deployments.

If you are an ASP.NET developer contemplating if you should try SharePoint development, I highly recommend you try it NOW! SharePoint 2010 development feels like traditional ASP.NET development more than ever!

When you run the PSCONFIGUI, since you already configured the SharePoint config database, will start-off at the following step of the Configuration Wizard. Notice that my database-server and database-name have already been pre-populated. Click Next.

SP Configuration Wizard - DB Selection

You get to specify additional information such as Authentication provider (choose NTLM, especially if you do not have domain controller  in your network). You can also choose the port number where Central Admin will run.

SharePoint Configuration Wizard -Completing

Click Next until it runs the actual  configuration of the Central Admin:

SP Configuration Wizard -Configuring

Once the Wizard is finished, run your Central Admin. If things were installed and configured correctly, you should be able to launch Central Admin:

1st Time in Central Admin 2010

New-SPConfigurationDatabase: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version 3.5.0.0. The Power Shell looks like the following when you’re running New-SPConfigurationDatabase to configure your SP database for the first time:

Could not load Microsoft.IdentityModel

The fix: Install Microsoft Identity Framework to address this problem.

New-SPConfigurationDatabase: The user does not exist or is not unique. You get to the point in the New-SPConfigurationDatabase command-let that asks you for the Farm Credentials. You didn’t fully qualify the username with the domain or computer name.

New-SPConfigurationDatabase - user does not exist

To fix this, simply make sure that the user account you are specifying for the Farm Credentials is fully-qualified with the domain-name or, if using local accounts, the computer name. Example: “macbookpro\gabe”.

New-SPConfigurationDatabase :  Unknown error (0×80005000) At line: 1 char:20. + New-SPConfigurationDatabase <<<< + CategoryInfo    : InvalidData

Unknown error when running New-SPConfigurationDatabase

This one frustrated the heck out of me. I configured my Macbook Pro already but I was installing SharePoint 2010 on another PC(has Intel Core i7 processor) in my office when I got this message. I thought the second pass-through would be easier. I already know I must follow every-step of the SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 Development Workstation Guide.  So, how can I possibly still mess it up?? You see, I’d get past the Passphrase question and it would process the command for a while and spit out the error message only at the very end. When I look at my SQL Server, the Config database is created but the “SharePoint Admin Content” database has not been created yet. I manually added the user-account to sysadmin group in SQL. I made the  Windows login Local Admin. I serviced-pack the SQL instance at least twice. Still the InvalidData error message like above. I uninstalled SharePoint 2010 and re-installed it. When I uninstalled the entire SharePoint 2010 (remember, I was aiming for the “Complete” installation option), I reinstalled the second time just using the “Stand-Alone” install. I was thinking, this sucks, having to use SQL Express because I’m going for Stand-Alone install. I finished the Stand-Alone installation. I go ahead and try to configure it and the psconfigui.exe (SP Product Configuration Wizard) and bam—STILL an error! But this time, the error message was more helpful—it told me that IIS 6 is not installed. I look at my installed Windows 7 features and sure enough, IIS 6 wasn’t installed yet! I was pretty sure I ran everything on the checklist and I couldn’t have missed anything. Obviously, I missed something, and this something was the required Windows Features that must be turned on. So I installed II 6 feature on my Windows 7 and the Stand-Alone configuration worked and I saw the Central Admin. If you get this Unknown error (0×80005000), check your installed Windows Features and make sure you have IIS 6 Management Console installed.

IIS 6 Management Consol turned-on

Okay, after going through the stand-alone install and was made to enable IIS6, I uninstalled SharePoint 2010, again! Why did I uninstall it? Because it was installed using Stand-Alone install which uses SQL Server Express.  This final time, I was determined to make the Complete installation (can add servers to farm) work. I installed the SharePoint 2010. I ran Power Shell and ran the New-SPConfigurationDatabase command-let and was able to create the configuration database. Yay!!!

SQL Server after successful New-SPConfigurationDatabase

My MacBook Pro 13 Windows (Ultimate) Experience Index looks like the following:

Not too shabby. Lowest score is the graphics (NVidia 930M) but shouldn’t be an issue with regards to SharePoint and development work in general. See that Memory and Primary hard disk scoring 5.9? That worried me. The hard drive speed is only 5400 RPM and that could be a bottleneck for database read/writes. I went ahead and installed SharePoint 2010 on the MacBook Pro/Windows 7 anyway.

Instead of rewriting the steps needed to install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 for a development rig, I will point you to existing resources out there. Too many write-ups regarding this topic already. So here they are, the ones that I’ve tried and tested:

• If you are going to read anything about installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7, this is the resource you want – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx
• Execute EVERY step outlined in that walkthrough. Don’t even try to shortcut or think that you can do it without reading any documentation. You may get past the installation but you will pull hair out when it’s time to configure your farm. So just do it, every step in that walkthrough! I will show some of the errors I encountered when I tried to “fast-track” the SharePoint installation.
• Here’s another good one – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=112. This one talks about how to configure the scalable farm (not the Stand-Alone setup that uses SQL Express) for development purposes while using local accounts (instead of domain accounts). SharePoint 2010 needs domain accounts to configure. If you are building a “SharePoint workstation”, it’s very common to use local accounts instead of domain accounts (maybe because getting in touch with the AD admins is not easy—just create local accounts yourself). See, my MacBook Pro is not joined to a domain. I have to use non-domain accounts. I wouldn’t have been able to configure my “SharePoint farm” to use a true SQL Server 2008 if not for this walkthrough. Remember, if you do a stand-alone install, the Web apps use the SQL Express for the databases—not really  my ideal configuration!!

Here’s the first error message I encountered:

I was so excited to install SharePoint 2010 after I got my MAPS subscription that I just double-clicked the setup.exe. The above message is what I got! You have to edit the \Files\Setup\config,xml of the SharePoint 2010 install directory and add the following:

<Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True"/>

This was mentioned in Step 2: Install the Prerequisites for SharePoint 2010 of the MSDN walkthrough. Fast-forward to the end of the SharePoint 2010 installation/configuration. In Central Admin, you should see this:

Again, don’t skip any steps—follow each and every one!

In follow-up blog-posts, I’ll show the other errors I received while attempting to install/configure the SharePoint farm and how to address them.

Update 6/11/2010:  Here’s the screenshot of the Windows Task Manager of the Macbook Pro when running SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2008, IIS Management Console, Internet Explorer, and Visual Studio 2010 (debugging/attaching to processes).

Windows 7 Task Manager in Macbook Pro

There are still some Coldfusion developers in this organization but these Coldfusion apps are being phased out and eventually  will be converted to ASP.NET and/or SharePoint. These Coldfusion developers do not have a background on ASP.NET programming model, which is really different, closer to VB6 model if you look at it that it is closer to “classic ASP” model. “Classic ASP”, Coldfusion, and PHP are in the same category in my book—they are server-side scripting. ASP.NET and  SharePoint on the other hand are more object-oriented.

One of the Coldfusion developers asked me which topics on ASP.NET and SharePoint should they learn and in what order. They are excited to develop SharePoint stuff such as Web parts and workflows but need some guidance on where to start.

Here’s the list of high-level skills/topics I pointed out one should in order to develop SharePoint solutions:

• ASP.NET model
  • ASP.NET User Controls
  • Intrinsic Objects (HttpContext, Application, Request, Response, Server, etc.)
  • ASP.NET Page life-cycle
  • C#
  • ASP.NET Web App configuration files
  • .NET Namespaces
• Object-Oriented/Component Programming
  • Properties and Methods
  • Events
  • Delegates
  • Inheritance
  • Implementation (interfaces and abstracts)
• SharePoint Features Development
  • Visual Studio SharePoint Project Extensions/Templates
  • SharePoint Object Model
  • Deploying Features using STSADM

From time to time, I will meet SharePoint professionals in networking events or when interviewing job applicants at a customer site and I will ask what their SharePoint experience is like. “Oh I am a SharePoint Developer“. Then I find out that the extent of their development experience revolves around master-page and page-layout design, style/CSS customizations, and graphical/logo design. Basically, branding tasks. And then there is the “SharePoint Administrator“. “Oh, I am the site collection administrator and manage user-permissions, site-collection features, and sometimes recycle items for end-users from the Recycling Bin.”

I think people are calling themselves SharePoint Developer more than they should. In my opinion, a SharePoint developer is someone who can develop Web parts, workflows, user-controls, Web controls, ASPX pages, client-side scripting, and complete SharePoint solutions. In addition, they also understand deployment options such as creating solution packages. If your experience around SharePoint is limited to CSS, branding, and design stuff, you’re a designer, buddy; not a developer, but a designer.

Now, let’s talk about the “SharePoint Administrator”. Yes, to a point, the site-collection administrator is an administrator. But to me, and again, this is just my opinion, farm admins are the real SharePoint administrators. To call yourself a SharePoint administrator, especially on job interviews, you better know your SharePoint deployment scenarios, Central Admin, SharePoint disaster/recovery procedures, IIS, SQL Server, Windows Server OS, and the beloved “stsadm” command.

Sometimes I will encounter resumes where the job applicant puts “SharePoint Developer” or “SharePoint Administrator” in their work history but nothing in the roles and responsibilities indicate the degree of technical expertise required to be called a “real SharePoint Developer” or a “real SharePoint Administrator”! 

The point I’m trying to make is please, please, please–do not inflate your work experience, especially when applying for jobs. You might fool the recruiters but you’re not going to fool the technical leads. Please be honest in your resumes because people will catch you if you think the inflated titles will make you a better candidate for a job.

Honesty people!

1. Rename the wsp file to a .cab file
2. Open up the .cab file (used to be wsp) in WinZIP or something that can open a CAB file.
3. You can either: a)  extract all files in the cab file and open up the extracted manifest.xml; or b) look for manifest.xml in WinZIP and just extract that one single file.
4. Open up manifest.xml in notepad, Internet Explorer, or your preferred XML file viewer.

That’s it!

Several of my upcoming posts will be on how to create solution packages. Stay tuned!

Most objects in ASP.NET Framework are allocated/deallocated in memory automatically. However, there are objects that inherit from the IDisposable. You have to explicitly dispose objects that implement the IDisposable interface or you will run the risk of memory leaks. Some examples of ASP.NET objects that implement IDisposable include Connection, Command, Adapater, and Reader objects (in the System.Data namespace). You can perform any of the following to dispose these objects properly:

SQLConnection connection = new SQLConnection(connectionString);

//use the connection object here

connection.Dispose();

Or, you can using the using statement:

using(SQLConnection connection = new SQLConnection(connectionString))

{

                //use connection object here

} // don't have to call Dispose(); the using statement will dispose connection correctly

When working with SharePoint API (SharePoint .NET libraries and not the SharePoint Web services), it is important to know when and when not to dispose SharePoint objects. If you do not dispose objects in SharePoint, your server will run the risk of memory leaks which can lead to performance issues. If you dispose objects that you’re not supposed to call Dispose() on, you might inadvertently kill the SharePoint application! For example, the following code will definitely kill the SharePoint Web application:

SPContext.Current.Web.Dispose(); // expect calls to your help-desk with this line in your code!

If you are the custodian of the SharePoint farm, you might want to use the SP Dispose Checker Tool to ensure that the custom .NET assemblies being installed on your farm will not cause memory leaks.

For complete guidance on when and how to dispose SharePoint objects, you can read the SP Dispose Team blog.

The article couldn’t have explained it better about the strategic importance of SharePoint. People think SharePoint is all about Web 2.0, collaboration, content management, etc. SharePoint is that but it’s NOT ALL that. You see, it’s all about protecting and promoting the Microsoft Office product line. Years ago, Open Office came along and gave people a free alternative to having software to create documents, spreadsheets, presentation slides, and email client. Microsoft Office cost money while Open Office was free–based purely on price-point, Open Office seemed like a no brainer. Then early versions of SharePoint came along; I thought the first versions were utter crap. Better “content management” systems came along, some of them open-source such that they were attractive to organizations with small budgets. Open source Web 2.0 such as Media Wiki and WordPress also came along. Fine products if I may say so myself. Meanwhile, Microsoft was busy improving Office, SharePoint, and the .NET Frameworks. This coming version of SharePoint integrates all of that together. Keyword is interoperability. The Office products (Word, Excel, Access, Outlook) integrate with SharePoint and .NET and .NET runs inside Office (macros and code-behinds) and in SharePoint (Web parts, features). Then there is the SharePoint Enterprise Search–if the organization was putting most if not all of their artifacts in SharePoint, people within the organization can find information regardless of whether the information resides in a Web site, a  Word document, a database, a blog, a wiki, etc.
 
Now, imagine getting Open Office as your productivity tool, Media Wiki as your wiki tool, and WordPress as your blogging tool, and then get some open-source search engine. Cost is zero dollars for software licenses so far. Add an open-source email client and mail server. The cost is still zero up to this point. Now integrate all that disparate technologies and maintain it over long term. Can you even integrate all that stuff at all? Say, they managed to integrate Open Office and WordPress and the integration breaks later on, who is responsible for the fix? In other words, who will provide support? Open Office developers? Or should that be the WordPress developers’ responsibility? Or is it the shop maintaining the integration (after all, they do have the source code)?
 
It will be very difficult to make all that open-source or “cheaper” alternatives inter-operate with each other. At the end of the day, SharePoint and Office is a one-stop-shop for everything–document creation and editing, sharing, calendars, tasking, blogging, knowledge management, forms, businss data, dash boards, and search.
 
SharePoint is like a Swiss Army knife–it has different things packaged into one. If each of the features of SharePoint is a tool within the Swiss Army knife, then one can say that technologies trying to compete with SharePoint are individual tools and they’re not together. Should an office always buy and implement the Swiss Army knife? No. If  it just needs a screw driver and nothing else, the bottle opener and the rest of the stuff is frivolous, So, that office is better off just “buying a screw driver”. To use SharePoint just for blogging is overkill. To use SharePoint just so there is a place to upload documents to is overkill. To use SharePoint just as a content management system is not getting your money’s worth. You get the point. If you just need blogging, just get WordPress. If you just need wikis, get MediaWiki. And so forth.
 
The article also points out that Google is the only closest thing to provide the “one-stop-shop” alternative to SharePoint. I’m not very familiar with this coming Google Wave just yet. All I know is that it’s going to be “cloud-based”. If it’s going to be an outsourced cloud, such that Google hosts the data and apps, a lot of big companies will shun from it. Amazon S3 is already out there yet you can’t use that cloud technology for everything; Amazon S3 fails to comply with financial standards/requirements (example: Amazon will tell you do not store credit card transactions in their platform). Sensitive corporate or national security stuff going to an outsourced cloud? Forget it; it ain’t gonna happen. Check this picture though–Google might allow companies to implement a private cloud:
 
http://www.waveprotocol.org/Home/federation_diagram.png?attredirects=0
 
We really don’t know what the cost will be to implement the Google way when it’s ready. We’ll find out soon enough. By the time Google or anybody can provide all that is provided by SharePoint, Microsoft would have sold many licenses at that point that they can give this product away for free. Oh, another way to say it is by the time Google or anybody else has figured it out, Office will be so entrenched everywhere that Microsoft can give away freebies.
 
Heck, if one looks at it, it seems Microsoft is already giving people a cheap alternative. Enterprise SharePoint (MOSS) is expensive, right? Well, you can get a zero-dollar-cost solution and still be in SharePoint. Here’s what you do:

• Get SQL Server 2005 Express for free
• Get WSS 3.0 from microsoft.com for free (if OS is Small Business Server 2008, WSS 3.0 is already there, for free)
• Get Search Server 2008 Server from microsoft.com for free
• Go to codeplex.com and get BlogEngine.NET for free to get enhanced blogging. Did I say it’s free?
• Download Community Kit from codeplex.com for free and get an enhanced wiki engine.. Again, free.

The nice thing is that all of these will integrate together. The integration of all of the listed above comes close to MOSS but still missing a few features such as Publishing feature, Excel Services, InfoPath Forms Server, and Business Data Catalog. But all of that for free! Search used to be part of Enterprise MOSS. I couldn’t believe it when Microsoft started giving that stuff way for free! I can see Microsoft giving away more free stuff in the future there really is no point to going to an open-source alternative. Open-source developer Gary Edwards is worried. And rightly so.

It was full day of sessions, networking, and bagels and pizza and coffee. It started with a General Session: The State of SharePoint session by Joel Oleson, NS Rana, Thomas Vander Wal, and Errin O’ Connor. From that point on, people branched to End User, Developer, Administration, or Special Interest sessions.

I’m primarily a solutions developer. A friend of mine who I bumped into at the conference asked me “so, are you headed over to the Developer sessions?” Initially, yes—my first session for the day was a developer session. But I mixed it up for the rest of the day since there were so many interesting topics and I like diversifying what I learn.

Here are the sessions that I attended this last Saturday:

• Building and deploying custom SharePoint Application pages (layouts) with Visual Studio 2008 by Michael Lotter
• Social Computing and Blogging with SharePoint by Dan Lewis
• Visually Developing Custom Web Parts by Becky Isserman
• SharePoint Admin Fundamentals by Joel Oleson
• Implementing a SharePoint Pilot: An IT Manager’s Perspective by Jonathan Distler
• Using the SharePoint Platform to Build Vertical Business Applications by Paul Galvin
• SmartCard Authentication: Considerations, Options and Pitfalls by Dan Usher and Joel Ward

I really enjoyed the SharePoint Saturday. I highly recommend that fellow tech professionals go to these events—they’re informational and you get the chance to network with other professionals (and gurus) in the industry. For me, the best thing I got out of SharePoint Saturday are product ideas that I may develop for Zenpo Software Innovations, LLC, my company.

I will follow up by writing individual entries for each session I attended.