SharePoint is maturing

What's a product without a dedicated magazine? And in this day and age, it should really be a nice on-line one don't you think? And what about a globally oriented association so that we can all join and share experiences?

This week this has all been established, after long planning and preparation the ISPA is finally launched and at the same time an on-line magazine dedicated to SharePoint has gone live! Great news for the global SharePoint community.

If you want to know more about ISPA, read this detailed post by Bob Fox about the ambitious aims for this organisation.

As board member of MOSSIG I am proud and excited to be involved in this project and I hope I can keep contributing and help grow this initiative.

SharePoint Developers can switch to VS 2008 now

The WSS team has released version 1.2 of the Visual Studio Extensions and it works with both WSS and MOSS. If you want to read all about it go to the team blog here. If you just want to download, here it is.

This version is for Visual Studio 2008 only, it contains Project Templates, Item templates and a solution generator that allows you to generate a Visual Studio solution based on an existing site template.
They have also written a great user guide which can be downloaded as a .chm file (this is still the 1.1 version for 2005).

The other good news on the dev front for SharePoint is that there is a new site, all in silverlight pointing to heaps of resources and samples: http://www.mssharepointdeveloper.com worth the look just for the Silverlight experience ;-).

Cheers to the SharePoint team!

Never noticed this, content types on folders

You may know that I'm keen on Content Types, I really like this feature of SharePoint. Someone in a newsgroup pointed me to this blogpost by Ton Stegeman , I can't believe I never noticed that you can actually set what content types are showing up in the new button 'at the folder level'.

Makes you wonder how many other gems are hidden in SharePoint.

Good stuff ! Thanks for pointing that out Ton!

Free Office System seminar in Melbourne

Friday the 2nd of May: Office System Forum 2008

Amongst the speakers:

• Mike Fitzmaurice, Microsoft
  Enterprise Technology Strategist and former Technical Product manager for WSS/MOSS
  
• Brian Cook, CEO of OBS
  
• William Cornwill, Microsoft - SharePoint Technology Solutions Professional ( http://blogs.msdn.com/williamcornwill )
  
• Karim Erradi, Readify - Senior Software Engineer ( http://aerradi.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/ )
  
• Tim Wragg, Professional Advantage - Board member of Mossig
  and others
  
  The Office System Forum is a unique chance to discuss and be informed on the present and future of the Office System as a platform in small and large companies.
  Industry experts from Microsoft and the Melbourne IT community will be presenting and available during breaks and networking sessions. As an Office users, IT-Pro or Developer this is an event you can’t afford to miss out on.

Attendance is free but due to space constraints strictly limited to 75 seats, so hurry up and register at http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/MOSSIG/OOSF2008/default.aspx

Mossig is proud to organise this event with the cooperation of the La Trobe Microsoft Centre at La Trobe Uni R&D Park.

Look what I found in my inbox this morning

"Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way to say thank you for promoting the spirit of community and improving people’s lives and the industry’s success every day. We appreciate your extraordinary efforts in SharePoint Server technical communities during the past year."

Thanks for the support guys!

It works on my machine (and a test environment) ... part 2 of VSTO deployment

I just wanted to post this because when I did a search I got only 1 hit ! Luckely it contained the solution.

Here's the story of me trying to deploy a VSTO 2008 Word template to a laptop with Office 2003;

I figured out, using the VSTO trouble shooter (see my previous post) what was going on on the machine, and on the actual target laptop everything checked out ok. But, still an error:

"File or assembly name Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime, or one of its dependencies, was not found." when loading the VSTO 2008 based word template in Office 2003.
Now what? I desperately googled the exact error (see above). It resulted in 1 hit, a post on a forum and 1 reply (the guy answered his own question! thanks Viking!). Turns out there was indeed a word.exe.config on that laptop, I'm still wondering how/why it got there. Removing the config-file solved my problem, the template now loads, I wonder what I've broken that required the config-file in the first place.

Here's the link to the post: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=453951&SiteID=1

I hope this will help someone else in the future....

VSTO Deployment for 2003

Last week I had some significant trouble creating an install for an Office 2003 template created in Visual Studio 2008 using VSTO 3.0 (but it works on my machine...) . Although there's a lot of docs on MSDN the information is not easy to figure out (guess there's just too much info...). Anyway today I noticed some new tools that were made available during the ODC 2008 and the trouble shooter in particular saved my day. So if you are into VSTO dev, go and get these tools!

Here's how MS describes them:

"A set of developer tools that provide additional functionality useful in Office-based development. These tools include Visual Studio add-ins as well as standalone Windows Forms and console applications. The VSTO Power Tools also include a set of re-usable class libraries to simplify Office development."

Andrew Whitechapel has blogged about this and explains in a bit more detail:

http://blogs.msdn.com/andreww/archive/2008/02/21/vsto-vsta-power-tools-v1-0.aspx

I hope these do end up as fully supported tools either seperate or as part of a Visual Studio service patch.