July, 2012

We delivered two presentations at TechEd in June; thanks to everyone who attended in person. The recordings and presentations are available online: What's New in Windows Workflow Foundation 4.5 Building, Running, and Managing Workflows on Windows Azure Hope you find these useful. Leave us your comments below. Blog Post by: Jurgen Willis

Developers often say that there is a steep learning curve with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4).  I won’t deny that… instead, allow me to share three simple rules that will help you to get over that curve sooner and to make them easy to remember, they all begin with “U” which is appropriate because they do all begin with you. Use Tracking Unit Tests Use Timeouts Download Sample Code Use Tracking Tracking is the single best way to understand what your workflow is doing.  There is just one...

Don’t forget to regularly check the updates portal One of the annoying bug that this CU fixes is the following: When you delete a subsite by using the Delete this site option in Site Settings, the subsite is moved to the site collection Recycle Bin. However, when you delete a subsite in a site collection [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

It is well known that adding a user to a local group (like a setup or farm admin to the local Administrators group) in a domain controller machine cannot be done through the UI; you can still do it via the command line : run the command line as an administrator type add localgroup Administrators [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

Serge, when you reinstall SharePoint 2010 after having uninstalled every other SharePoint/Office server component and you get the following message: Make sure, that all updates to SharePoint/Office Server components have been removed as well like an update of Office Web App :     However, this…doesn’t work, so you have to rely on this tool [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

  Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 part 5 Starter files and solutions files can be found here. In his exercise we will create a web part that retrieves the prerequisite courses of a specific course. The course code will be a property exposed in a custom toolpart. Add the following folders (Controls [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

  Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 part 5 Starter files and solutions files can be found here. In this lab we will define content types and create views by code. We will have to create a list of students, but before doing that we must define what a student is; a student [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 part 5 Starter files and solutions files can be found here.   In this lab we will work with Application pages   In this lab, we will update the CourseSiteFeature Project by updating the createcoursesite.aspx and admincoursesitecreators.aspx page. With Visual Studio 2010, open the CourseSiteFeature in the [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

  Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 part 5 Starter files and solutions files can be found here. In this Lab, we will focus on Site Definitions. Create a Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint project called CourseSiteDef. Add an homepage by adding the (starter) file Defaut.aspx into your project, but since the file will [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

  Prerequisites for this labs :   working knowledge of SharePoint 2010 (end users) the SharePoint Object Model Asp.Net Visual Studio 2010   Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 part 5   Starter files and solutions files can be found here.   In this lab we will Create features that will be reused [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

aspConf is a free, virtual conference dedicated to ASP.NET. It's the sequel to the popular mvcConf conference - expanded to two full days of great content on the entire ASP.NET platform. Best of all you can watch it live online for free. There is an amazing lineup of talks planned for the event this week - over 60 presentations from speakers, including a who's who of ASP.NET community speakers, lots of ASP.NET product team members, and keynotes from both Scott Hanselman and myself. You can...

Dropping the stealth cloak a little, it’s time for some personal news about what I’ve been up to for the last year and a bit. And the answer is? Testing what we are calling in our docs “Workflow 1.0 Beta” (name may change) which is Microsoft’s new Workflow hosting product. Here’s a few quick facts about this piece of software. What is this? “Workflow 1.0 Beta” is a separate piece of software being released alongside the Office 2013 Beta, but also a requirement for enabling some of Office’s Sharepoint...

  It looks like everybody in the planet is aware that Office 2013 and SharePoint 2010 Preview are available this week and can be downloaded here and here . I had the opportunity to watch the live announcement from the Microsoft France Offices this week. You will find plenty of posts describing many features of [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

The Entity Framework has advanced significantly over the last few years. A little over a year ago we released EF 4.1 , which introduced the new DbContext API and EF “Code First” support.  Earlier this year we delivered EF 4.3 , which provides Code First Migration support that enables developers to easily evolve database schema in a code optimized way.  And we are now in the final stages of wrapping up the EF 5 release , which adds enum support, spatial data types, table-valued function...

I had a little bit of time on my hand and wanted to whip up a quick sample using PowerShell for a Hadoop job. This uses the Hadoop streaming capability, which essentially allows for mappers and reducers to be written as arbitrary executables that operate on standard input and output. The .ps1 scripts are pretty simple, these operate over a set of airline data that looks like this: 0,EV,18,0,MIA,2011-12-18T00:00:00,12,TPA,1227859,2011 0,EV,17,0,MIA,2011-12-17T00:00:00,12,TPA,1227860,2011 6,EV,17,4...

MOSS 2007 & WSS Code (packaged in .wsp files) is supposed to run in full trust mode on the server SharePoint 2010 & SharePoint Foundation 2010 code (packaged in .wsp files) can run on the server in full trust mode, on the server in partial trust mode (sandbox , uploaded by a site collection administrator), [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

1.The User Interface is more or less the same : the ribbon still plays an important role and Central Admin is pretty similar. However we can leverage the metro UI. 2.The architecture is very similar to SharePoint 2010 : farm, web app, site collections, sites, services apps, jobs,…; many improvements, but basically the same architecture. [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

One of our long-time MVPs, Rick Garibay, and one of our DPE evangelists, Hammad Rajjoub, have just released their new book, Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook . If you’re building your WF4 workflows as WCF SOAP services and running in WorkflowServiceHost, then IIS is a natural place to host these workflows. If you’re hosting in IIS, then you should certainly take a look at the IIS extensions provided by Windows Server AppFabric. With this book, Rick and Hammad have created a...

Last week’s Beta release of Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint introduced several great enhancements, including a bunch of developer improvements.  Developers can now extend SharePoint by creating web apps using ASP.NET (both ASP.NET Web Forms and now ASP.NET MVC), as well as extend SharePoint by authoring custom workflows using the new Workflow Framework in .NET 4.5. Even better, the web and workflow apps that developers create to extend SharePoint can now be hosted on Windows Azure. ...

Question Can I use a LINQ Query such as the following in a Workflow? private static void ShowQueryWithCode(IEnumerable< string > names) { Console.WriteLine( "Linq Query in Code - show names that start with 'R'" ); // Assuming there are no null entries in the names collection var query = from name in names where name.StartsWith( "R" ) select name; // This is the same thing as // var query = names.Where(name => name.StartsWith("R")); foreach (var name...