Identifing the BizTalk 2006 Version

by community-syndication | Sep 5, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

A quick one today – If you need to identify the BizTalk version once installed, take a look at the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\BizTalk Server\3.0\Product Edition

Silberlight 1.0 Released to the Web

by community-syndication | Sep 5, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Well the two Scott’s have blogged it… Scott Barnes and Scott Guthrie that is… the next thing to do is read the press release and read what Miguel has to say.

Now we just need to wait a few more hours for the expression site to drop the Expression Encoder 1.0 release and for the MS silverlight pages to be updated to talk about the new sites including the Silverlight mini site being created by IdentityMine for the upcoming Emmy Awards oh yes and let us not forget the 80’s glory of WWF WWE (remember the bushwackers!?) if it wasn’t for twitter we would never have gotten the backstage view of that one!

I LOVE the subtle Video Brush in the WWE player above the TV and the diva shorts aren’t too bad either… so terribly unPC.

Enjoy

Using the Current Page URL in the UrlAction of a SharePoint Feature

by community-syndication | Sep 5, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

With the introduction of the feature framework in SharePoint 2007, developers have some great opportunities to customize and enhance nearly everything in SharePoint. One of the things that’s quite easy to do with the help of a feature, is to add and/or replace functionality in the web user interface of SharePoint site. This was typically very hard to do (in a nice way) for the previous version of SharePoint (remember having to edit a javascript file to add a menu item in the ECB?).

Let’s take the following example of a feature’s manifest file:

<Elements xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/”>
    <CustomAction
        Id=”{6FCB0F81-2105-4d9f-96BF-C48A19B8E439}”
        Title=”My Link”
        Location=”Microsoft.SharePoint.StandardMenu”
        GroupId=”SettingsMenu”>
        <UrlAction Url=”_layouts/mypage.aspx”/>
    </CustomAction>
</Elements>

When activated, the feature will add a menu item to the Settings menu of any SharePoint list or document library. The menu item will have the title My Link, when clicked the user will navigate to the page mypage.aspx in the _layouts folder (the typical place to deploy your custom application pages).

img 1

If you build some functionality in the mypage.aspx, in many scenarios this page will need to know from which list the link originated. This can be done by using URL tokens in the UrlAction element:

<UrlAction Url=”_layouts/mypage.aspx?listid={ListId}“/>

The {ListId} URL token will be automatically replaced with the ID of the list, in which the menu item is shown. In the mypage.aspx, you can retrieve the value of the listid parameter by making use of the QueryString. Once you’ve got the ID, the object model can be used to get a reference to the SPList instance of that list. According to the documentation on MSDN, the following URL tokens can be used:

• ~site – Web site (SPWeb) relative link.
• ~sitecollection – site collection (SPSite) relative link.
• In addition, you can use the following tokens within a URL:
• {ItemId} – Integer ID that represents the item within a list.
• {ItemUrl} – URL of the item being acted upon. Only work for documents in libraries. [Not functional in Beta 2]
• {ListId} – GUID that represents the list.
• {SiteUrl} – URL of the Web site (SPWeb).
• {RecurrenceId} – Recurrence index. This token is not supported for use in the context menus of list items.

Unfortunately there is no token that will give you the URL of the page on which the feature’s link is being displayed. In many cases you want to have that URL to be able to redirect, after you’ve shown your custom functionality, to the originating page. SharePoint itself uses this technique a lot: in many URL’s you’ll find the Source parameter:

http://wss.u2ucourse.com/Lists/Links/NewForm.aspx?Source=http%3A%2F%2Fwss%2Eu2ucourse%2Ecom%2Fdefault%2Easpx

The URL above points to the NewForm.aspx for the a Links list. Normally when the user fill’s out this form and clicks OK, this page redirects to the default view of the list. Because this link has the Source parameter, when the user clicks OK (or cancel), the page will redirect to the default.aspx instead. You can add the Source parameter to a lot of pages in SharePoint, giving you full control over the redirecting.

So the issue is: we want to include the URL of the originating page in the UrlAction element of the feature’s CustomAction, but all we get are a bunch of ID’s and some URL’s that are not useful for this scenario. As usual peeking in the machine room of SharePoint itself can give you some good ideas to solve this issue. The SharePoint guys themselves sometimes use Javascript functions in the UrlAction, instead of ordinary hyperlinks. Thus with some clever use of Javascript, it’s quite easy to solve the problem:

<UrlAction Url=”javascript:window.location= ‘{SiteUrl}/_layouts/mypage.aspx?List={ListId}&amp;Source=’ + window.location”/>

The actual link is a Javascript function that will navigate to a specific URL. This URL is a concatenation of the URL of the page to display (including for example the ID of the list as a parameter in the QueryString), and the Source parameter which is dynamically set the current page’s URL. Et voila, the constructed link will point to your page, and the redirect will always point to the page you started from.

Extra: this tric can also be used to overcome a bug in SharePoint that causes a URL token of a CustomAction to be replaced only once. So if you have used the ListID token two times in a UrlAction element, only one of the token’s will be replaced with the actual ID of the list. The user “FlatEric” (what’s in a name?) explains this in the Community Content of the How to: Add Actions to the User Interface article on MSDN.

I found an ugly way to bypass this flaw:
<UrlAction Url=”javascript:function process(){var site='{SiteUrl}’;var item={ItemId};window.location.href=site+’/Lists/MyList/NewForm.aspx?ID=’+item+’&amp;Source=’+site+’/Lists/myOtherList/DispForm.aspx?ID=’+item;};process();”/>

The Book: Real World SharePoint 2007

by community-syndication | Sep 4, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Two weeks ago the book Real World SharePoint 2007: Indispensable Experiences From 16 MOSS and WSS MVPs became available, I had the honour to work with a bunch of really smart guys and girls to create this book. There are 16 chapters in this book, all written by a SharePoint MVP based on his/her personal experiences and expertise. My chapter dives into web part development, the basics of web part development are covered as well as advanced scenarios like connectable web parts and the SmartPart.

If you want to read an excerpt: a part of the web content management chapter by Andrew Connell is available at the WROX website.

Let’s get started again!

by community-syndication | Sep 4, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Wow, it has been a long time since my last post, five months to be precise! So it’s about time to get started again… my colleagues have been bugging me a lot lately.

I’ve you’re wondering what I’ve been doing in the past months: besides working and some holidays, I’ve been a ghostwriter for the blog of my little daughter (check out the photos of there if you want to see how much a baby can grow in five months).

10 bits of BTS Trivia that you *should* know….

by community-syndication | Sep 4, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I got an interesting piece of BizTalk trivia for you all from folks at Corp……..

The only thing I say is …… “What am I doing wrong” 🙂

Channel 9 video on EDI/AS2 features of BizTalk R2

by community-syndication | Sep 4, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

We just had a Channel 9 interview with Tony Bernard, Senior Program Manager, on EDI/AS2 features of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (which is launching this month).   Tony covers a lot of information not only on EDI/AS2 features of R2 but also on BizTalk in general.  This is a great video to watch.

Make sure to send us your feedback via Channel 9.  For questions and community support, visit the EDI/AS2 forum.

InfoQ interview on Microsoft’s SOA Strategy

by community-syndication | Sep 4, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

InfoQ just published their interview with Dino Chiesa, Director of .Net Marketing in our Connected Systems Division.  Dino talks about Microsoft’s SOA Strategy and how our investments in Windows Communication Foundation, ESB guidance, BizTalk Services and .Net framework 3.5 play key roles in helping our customers reach the benefits of SOA.

Regards,

Marjan Kalantar

Defining service contracts programmatically on .NET Framework 3.5

by community-syndication | Sep 4, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

As I referred on a previous post, one of the most attractive features in the upcoming .NET Framework 3.5 (Orcas) is the combination of Workflow Services and Durable Services to implement long running services combining Windows Communication Foundation…(read more)

Clustered SQL Server Installation – More Task Scheduler Challenges

by community-syndication | Sep 4, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

In a previous entry, I explained how Setup for a SQL Server failover cluster runs the installation on the second (and subsequent) node(s) to provide the ‘failover’ SQL Server instances; to install these instances, Setup creates a Scheduled Task on the second node (that points back the Setup program on the first node) and then […]