I’ve been running around trying to find my place in the community not quite situated yet. This past Monday I attended a community social event where all the community leaders in the area got together and discussed upcoming plans for the year. It was a lot of fun and surprisingly interesting. I thought there would be a lot more people in attendance of this event. I always assumed this area had so many more people. That I would be this tiny itty bitty fish in a very large pond. It didn’t really feel that way at all. I guess for one it’s because I was one of two SharePoint people in attendance. Also, there were only about 5 other girls. I thought there would be more girls, but 5 or 6 girls is about 5 or 6 more girls than the Kansas City area ever had in attendance at one of these events. The coolest thing in the world that hey discussed was women in tech events. They want to do something for young girls. I really hope we can get something together, because I’ve wanted to get more young girls involved in technology in high school and college (maybe even younger). I want them to know that this is a field where everyone can thrive. Just because there are more guys does not mean there isn’t room for girls by showing them how the rest of us are doing in the technology community. That was not the only thing discussed there is another event I am helping someone out with in the works for the area. I am going to heavily immerse myself in helping that person plan this event. It’s funny I leave one area to start doing almost the same thing in another area. Anyway, check back on my blog and I’ll be posting more details in the upcoming months. Also, I will probably post some progress as it occurs. Right now I’ve decided I’m attending NY Silverlight, NY SPUG, NY Dev SPUG (when it starts), Princeton SPUG, and Central Jersey .Net. These are all pending topics and if I still have train money to attend all the events. It gets incredibly expensive, but I really enjoy attending these events. I see something really cool with Silverlight or SharePoint and something just clicks. Plus on the friend front it’s not huge, but I’m trying to force myself socially to gain a few of these in the area. I miss all the cool people I knew in Kansas City. Right now I still haven’t found anyone local I could just hang out with easily. I miss all my old friends. Everything is so spread out and different. Time will present me more opportunities. Things just don’t happen overnight.
This week and the following weeks I will be working through a ton of recursive functions to move a rather hefty page library into a Site Collection and subwebs. I figure while I am having some “fun” you guys will profit will a few of my scripts. For any of you out there who are interested in how to create a publishing page in a library here is a little sample code on how to copy items from the page content area and create a new page then replace a welcome page. Here is a small sample:
PublishingSite PubSite = new PublishingSite(NewSite); //pass in an SPSite Object
PageLayoutCollection SiteLayouts = PubSite.GetPageLayouts(false);
PageLayout MyLayout = SiteLayous[“urlforlayout”];
PublishingWeb PubWeb = PublishingWeb.GetPublishingWeb(Web); //pass in an SPWeb Object
PublishingPageCollection Pages = PubWeb.GetPublishingPages();
PublishingPage MyPage = PubWeb.GetPublishingPages().Add(ChildItem["Name"].ToString(), MyLayout);
MyPage.ListItem["Page Content"] = ChildItem["Page Content"];
MyPage.ListItem.Update();
MyPage.Update();
MyPage.CheckIn("New Page Creation");
PubWeb.DefaultPage = Web.GetFile(MyPage.Url);
PubWeb.Update();
So basically if you look at the top you get the Publishing Site and then you get the Publishing Web. What you want to do next is get one of the layout pages. You could instead of hard-coding in a URL step through a foreach loop and search for the specific layout that you want. What you want to do next is create a new page and then give it the name of the old item, so it will create the item with the same page name and you want to pass in the layout page from the previous step. Next you want to get the Page Content from the Content Area in the “Page Content” field and then update the page. Remember you need to check the item in before you set the welcome page or you will receive a fun little error message. Then you can set the Publishing Web’s default page (welcome page) to your page and update the Publishing Web. I learned the hard way by not updating the Publishing Web the first few times. You also need to remember that you should turn on the flag for Web.AllowUnsafeUpdates otherwise you will not be able to create a page or update anything at all in code. After you are done turn this flag off as a good practice. Remember to dispose all SPWeb and SPSite object if necessary or wrap using statements around everything. I hope you enjoy!
Recently I was tasked to create a console application to get all the attachments from a list and copy them to a file share. Everyone has code out there, but I noticed not one single place had the correct formatting for everything.
First off there is gotcha. You cannot copy SPAttachmentCollection from the List Item and step through the list of strings. You need to pull in the Item.Attachments.UrlPrefix and throw it into an SPFolder Item like below:
SPFolder Folder = Web.GetFolder(Item.Attachments.UrlPrefix);
If you try and pull out the File.OpenBinary(); without using this specific method for some reason you cannot grab the full SPFile. It is malformed.
So here is what it could look like if you wanted to get the attachments and copy them to the file share:
foreach(SPListItem Item in List.Items)
{
if(Item.Attachments.Count !=0)
{
SPFolder Folder = Web.GetFolder(Item.Attachments.UrlPrefix);
foreach(SPFile File in Folder)
{
byte[] CopyFile = File.OpenBinary(); //this fails if you pull in SPFile directly
//Your fstream code to copy file, remember to close your fstream when done
}
}
}
I hope that this helps someone else in the long run. Good luck. Catch you all later.
Hey guys so if you want to download my databinding demos and hello world demos here you go: http://cid-8e2654c5f01e6069.skydrive.live.com/home.aspx. My slide deck from Virginia Beach alongside my 2007 demos are also posted up on my Sky Drive. The WCF Demos should work. You must remember though that if you are using a cross domain webservice that you need a policy file at the root of your IIS Directory. In the upcoming months as time permits I will post more demos. I’m sorry for the recent neglect and will try to keep a little more current. I just won a Silverlight 3 Book at the local .Net User Group and Silverlight 4 looks like it can also be fun. Lots to experiment with and so little time. I bet by the time I learn 4, then they will release 5. It’s crazy how fast we get the new versions of Silverlight. Anyway, enjoy the demos and I hope to see you all at event some day.
I have a couple posts coming to this respect, but I had the displeasure of working with Apache, SVN, and Perl these past few weeks. First off I tried learning Perl when I was 16 years old and it never took. I couldn’t understand it. I still don’t understand half of what it does and why you would use it over any other scripting language. The most I ever used it prior to these past few weeks was AOL .eml forms back in the day (http://members.aol.com/jadedixon yeah I know I’m not proud of my 17 year old self). I feel like I’ve been sitting pretty in my C# and ASP .Net world. This project was like a refresher of what I could be doing right now had I never been introduced to the .Net and SharePoint world.
So first off I had do all these insane configurations. You complain that SharePoint takes forever to configure correctly…DONOT ever complain to me about SharePoint. Apache and Subversion are 10x more painful to install. I swear when I installed these two technologies I had no idea what I was doing. What is even better is that I had to statically set the IP for Apache, so that it would not conflict with IIS. IIS is basically the Apache of the Microsoft world so the two just don’t like each other. I also had to set the port number for Apache to some obscure port that was not 80 obviously the port conflicts due to IIS monopolizing it. Oh yeah and did I mention the guide is not straight forward so you have to go into Event Viewer and the Apache and SVN error log files and basically google each error message. Eventually I got past all that insanity after about 2 days of configuration and I had a base environment.
Now at this point you wonder how do I get Perl to work. For me I need to create an Authentication script for SVN that ties into a .Net Webservice that will tie into a Membership Provider. As I said before I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know a lick of Perl. So I started by researching how to use Perl with Apache and how to hit a webservice using Perl. I came across a couple of items that could help me throughout the process. First off you want to install Active Perl, which is Perl for windows. You have to put it in the usr/bin folder on your main drive. Then what you want to do is remove all the IP address static junk you added, but remember to save it for later so you can add it back. Type in “PPM” in run and you will get a list of all the mods available for Perl. I noticed that mod_perl is a must have for Apache and Perl scripting. It makes things run faster and has a whole library that you can access tailored specifically for working with Apache. You need to right click on every prerequisite. I also found a great webservice module called SOAP::Lite that helped me pull the data from the webservice later on. Remember to right click on this module and then when you think you downloaded all the modules no you did not. You have to tell it to run all the actions. This will actually download the modules. If you left on your static ips you cannot download these items because you cannot hit the internet. So now you think your done right?
No you’re not even close, because you now need to go into the Apache configuration files and add some lines of text to tell Apache to recognize mod_perl. You also need to download a .so file and put it in the Apache directories. If you download the wrong one and reference it or mess up your configuration files when you try and start the Apache 2 service it will not budge and send you an obscure error message. If you get some crazy error message you need to go into the logs directory and open the error text file. If you are lucky you might get a nice clean error message that means something. If not well good luck you are going to be shooting in the dark for a few days.
So now I finally got everything setup and I had to figure out the syntax. This part was tricky because there are not a ton of blog posts an forums or documentation on this open source stuff. Everyone was calling there stuff wrong and from what I understand hitting a .Net webservice can be buggy at times with Perl. So at this point I downloaded a Perl Editor called Perl Express and started shooting in the dark. I wrote the entire module and I added it to the configuration files as the Authentication Handler for SVN. I got all kinds of crazy errors that I stepped through with the error logs. Each one more obscure than the last message. It felt like I was shooting at something with a blind fold. Finally I got to a point where I thought everything worked, however it was not popping up a username and password dialog box. So finally after hitting another 800 websites and trying different things it popped up the username and password. I received no more error messages and I thought the script was working.
I was so dead wrong, because the parameters had the username and password, however they were not passing them into the webservice. I spent an entire week trying to figure out what was going on reading forums and blog posts. No one had any documentation. Last night I finally thing hey what about the namespace in my webservice. Some people say you can use tempuri and other people just don’t use it at all. I decided to change my namespace to the uri plus the folder up to the asmx file. Finally everything works, so namespace apparently cannot be the default or Soap::Lite will not pass in the parameters. If you do a debug and a trace it will print the XML out correctly and everything will act fine until you want to pass in parameters. It was cool when everything worked, but I hate the open source world. The documentation is horrendous. At least Microsoft gives us MSDN and the people posting blogs are at least somewhat better. Plus I missed my debugger. I was using Fiddler and Apache error log files. At least with .Net I can attach a debugger and step through code. Maybe there is a way to do it in Perl, but I just don’t see it being easy. It just felt like too much work for something so simple.
If you are reading this blog post please take this with you that you could be working with Perl or Python or even PHP rather than .Net. It could be 10x worse. If you are working with SharePoint and complaining I will yell at you if you even begin to tell me how horrible the developer experience is right now. It could be so much worse guys. Don’t complain. You have it good. We could be working with punch cards or open source. Our salaries could be so much worse. Appreciate what you have, because it could go away in a heart beat.
It was one year ago that SharePoint Saturday kicked off in Virginia Beach. Michael Lotter, Susan Lennon, and Kevin Israel thanks for creating one of the most successful events around the world. What started out as one or two events has multiplied into over a dozen events and then some. Thank you so much (especially Michael and Susan) for all that you have given to the rest of us. I wouldn't know most of you guys out there without them. It's been an awesome year. Keep up the good work.
Here is a list I have compiled thus far and will probably post as things come up:
- SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach (January)
- Baltimore SharePoint User Group (January)
- SharePoint Saturday Boston (February)
- Raleigh SharePoint User Group (March)
- The Expert’s Conference (April)
- New York SharePoint User Group (May)
I am going to attend SharePoint Saturday New York and maybe help out a little. I will probably also attend the Northern NJ .Net User Group and Princeton SharePoint User Group and possibly the New York SharePoint User Group. It will be nice to attend events without running them for a change (not sure how long this will last). If anyone knows of any other good user groups in the Somerville, NJ region let me know. I might hit up Philly Office Geeks, but it’s about an hour and a half away from me so we’ll see what happens. It’s going to take a while to get used to the area. I don’t want to put more than two speaking engagements in one month also. I want to spread it all out over different weeks (maybe one beginning of the month and one end). I also need some time for exploring there is so much to visit like Vermont and Maine and Boston and New York City. It will be a lot of fun. Hopefully the development community out here is just as good as the one in Kansas City. I look forward to meeting a bunch of people in the upcoming months.
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So I did it. I moved, I ran a SharePoint Saturday, and I attended a wedding. I can’t say everything went smoothly in the process, but I will say it all worked out for the best. I started out my stressful adventure a couple months ago with packing and changing everything over to the new address. Here is my account as best as I can describe it to you guys…
I woke up on Friday, December 11th at about 6 am after sleeping on the floor with my boyfriend. The mover’s came at about 7 am to pack the pod. The night before I moved all the boxes to the living room, so that the mover’s could get everything packed up. I also packed all the extra items into our cars. When the movers came one box ended up dropping, but the contents as I found out were not destroyed. One box cracked from stress and we taped it together. In the end we had to shift some items in our vehicles and we lost the 4 chairs that Leah, Jason, and I sanded down and re-painted. It was really sad, but I at least got to keep the table. After this whole ordeal Johnny and I took a nap on the floor, which was horrible and then Brian Laird came to pick me up. It was time to see Jeff Julian and a few other guys for a going away lunch. We had lunch and Brian and I went to run a ton of errands, such as creating the welcome letter for the event and the online surveys. We ended up at the hotel around 6 or 7 and I saw Lee Brandt. We unpacked everything from Brian’s vehicle and the speaker dinner started for SharePoint Saturday. It was a really great dinner, but I really cannot remember half of it. I was exhausted. A little later we ended up hitting Kinko’s, Brian, Karthik, and I to print out a ton of material for the event. That night we stuffed all the folders as best we could (250 or so folders). They looked awesome, unfortunately we all got to bed around midnight. I left Johnny sleep late.
Saturday, December 12th started with Susan and Gary Lennon giving me a ride to the event. This day was a blur, but from what I can remember a couple crazy things happened. KnowledgeLake was police escorted to the wherehouse at the community college, so that they could find all there banners and such for there booth. A few sponsors showed up late, but everyone in the end got there stamps. From what I can understand everyone was happy with the venue. Next time the electronic stuff might work better if a kiosk was available. The wireless access guy was downstairs instead of upstairs so a few people got lost. All in all we ended the day at Talk of the Town having dinner together. At night we all played dreidel in Joy Earles room which was a ton of fun.
Sunday, December 13th was my last day in Kansas City for a while. We started our adventure at Jerusalem Cafe with Johnny, Eric Harlan, Joy Earles, and Cathy Dew. We got the Flaming Cheese and I got to eat the Vegetarian Platter for the last time. Then we went over to the Boulevard Brewery for a tour. I brought Cathy to the airport afterwards and headed to St. Louis. I saw my friend Jaimie that night.
Monday, December 14th was great, because I got to eat a Simon Kohn’s and Meskeram. It was the perfect send off for St. Louis. I bought a ton of beer at Schlafly for the guys in Jersey and some for Leah and Jason. We had our last night of drinking before I headed to the east coast.
Tuesday, December 15th was a day of driving. We got into Columbus around 6 or 7. I vaguely remember this day. It was pretty uneventful.
Wednesday, December 16th was pretty stressful. I got into Columbus, MD around 2 pm or so. I stopped at a McDonald’s by my aunt’s house. I decided it would be a good idea to call the apartment complex. They had no idea we were coming. This is when the pain started to set in. After hours of talking to these guys Johnny worked it out so we got a 2 bedroom. We did not get the 2 bedroom that we wanted, so we had to change a few things the next day was going to be hectic. We had to get up at 4 am.
Thursday, December 17th was a quick drive and we were at the apartment complex. I had to wait with Gambit in the car for a few hours. It was cold outside so I tried to keep the car heated as much as I could. When the lady showed up she said I needed a money order. My bank was not located in this area. The closest branch was somewhere in the midwest. I had to frantically drive around trying to get money. Finally after moving some money from one place to another and getting money out of this and that account I had the money order. We were able to pick up the keys and tour the apartment. After a few hours of waiting for the Pod to show up and the clock hitting almost noon I called up the company. There was a problem with the machinery, so they could not come until 1:30. Luckily I was able to catch the guys I work with who helped me out. When they arrived around 1:20 the ABF pod guy arrived after I chased the truck (literally ran after it). Everything was unpacked and then we went out to buy all the things we needed.
In the coming days insurance was changed, licenses were bought, and furniture was purchased. In a few weeks we might actually get settled in.
Friday, December 18th was hectic, because we were balancing the drive to Philly and getting stuff done. Luckily, we got to Philly, but it took us 3 hours because of pending snow and traffic. I saw some of my cousins and ate some awesome food. We got home and decided to stay in Saturday due to snow.
Saturday, December 19th was a ton of unpacking and staying inside. Unfortunately, we had no food and it was pretty bad outside. We got a lot unpacked and assembled. It was the first day it was beginning to feel like a real place to live.
Sunday, December 19th was the day of my cousin’s wedding. We made it to the hotel in record time. Pictures were taken and the festivities were had. I was confused with half of what went on because this was my very first Jewish wedding I can remember. It was cool to see all the little rituals. I don’t really know the guy all that well but I think my cousin will be happy. That night I brought my dad back with me to my apartment so that he could help us lift the tv. The tv was a little crooked but things ended up ok overall. I went back to Philly and got to hang out with my grandmother for a little bit.
Of all the days in that 2 week period I think it felt rushed and I couldn’t enjoy it as much as I should have enjoyed it. I loved all the stuff, but I would have loved to space it out a little more. I think next time (if I ever do it again) when I run a SharePoint Saturday I need to space it out away from any major events. I’m glad everything turned out ok, but I was insane to do all that stuff in the same 2 week period. I think I’m still recovering from all the events. I probably won’t fully recover for another 2 months.
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Every time around this year we have about 800 blog posts on how great or how horrible or what happened in the year or the decade. The decade is closing and I will say this that it was one of my favorites. I graduated from high school, college, and I started my first real job. I was active in LGBT rights clubs, Interfaith Clubs, .Net User Groups, SharePoint User Groups. I lead the planning of 2 successful SharePoint Saturday events.
I attended these events:
- MOSS Camp St. Louis (2008 and 2009)
- Tulsa School of Dev (2008)
- Tulsa Techfest
- SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach, KC (2x), NY, Boston, Charlotte, Ozarks, Tulsa, Chicago, DC (2x)
- SP Tech Con San Francisco
- Hartford Code Camp
- Raleigh Code Camp
- SharePoint Conference
I visited these user groups:
- Jacksonville Office Geeks
- KC Office Geeks
- KC .Net User Group
- Omaha .Net User Group
- Omaha SharePoint User Group
- St. Louis .Net User Group
- San Antonio SharePoint User Group
- Heartland Developer’s User Group SharePoint SIG
I guess what really sticks out for me over some of the other people out there is that I became an adult in this decade. I was 17 years old when the last decade ended with a pipe dream that I would one day get a college degree and leave St. Louis. The icing on the cake is that I left St. Louis. I live at least 900 miles away from home and about 1 hour and 20 minutes away from New York City. If there are actually college students or high school students reading this blog the best I can tell you is keep persisting. Keep going. You can do it. I did it. It doesn’t matter if you live in the tiniest town in the world. Just go out there take a risk take a chance and you’ll end up with what you want eventually. All I can say is be patient and don’t give up. Keep this in mind when you pass onto the next the decade. It might take you a whole 10 years maybe less maybe more, but you’ll get there. Happy new year everyone!
So I set out on a quest to install a SharePoint 2010 VM with Bob Davis, one of our 101 instructors for SharePoint Saturday Kansas City and a Co-Leader of the KC Office Geeks. We started around 5 pm and ended around 11 pm. Everything that could possible go wrong went wrong in triplicate. Here is a list of things you need to know:
- Turn on Virtualization in your bios:
Bob did not have virtualization turned on in his bios, so the virtual machine I had stubbed out did not work. You need to make sure that Virtualization is checked in your bios before working with any type of virtual machine. I had no idea there was a bios setting, because under CPU in my computer it was automatically turned on. - Install some of the prerequisites it will not work without some of them, to be on the safe side I installed .Net 3.5 SP1 (which includes all the .Net Runtimes you need). I added roles for the Application Server and Web Server. These I would say at least would be a good base.
- Create a user account to install items that is not the administration account, SQL Server 2008 will not let you use the administration account to run the service no matter what, not to mention it is best practice to create another account to run SQL Server 2008. Remember to check the box to make sure that the password never expires. Otherwise, it could be a fun time using your virtual machine one day with the service account not working. I hear it’s a lot easier in 2010 this time around.
- Install SQL Server 2008, I installed a copy of SQL Server 2008 Standard, then I added SP1 and the SP1 CU2. When installing SQL Server 2008 remember to add your SQL Admin account you created above or it will prompt you with a friendly error message. Why can’t it just popup with something that will allow you to choose a user? You need to add this account in two places and one of those places involves the services related to SQL Server 2008.
- DO NOT Activate the Role for Powershell, the old version of Powershell is included in Server 2008. You want to install Powershell version 2 CTP3. I forgot to uncheck the box a few times when I chose the web and application server roles and removed this on two virtual machines. After realizing what was going on I installed the correct version.
- Install Hotfix #KB971831, if you install the hotfix now you won’t get a prompt after you run the Prerequisites wizard in 2010. I would just install it and get it over with at this point in time to save pain. Also, remember to follow the directions in this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/11/18/path-to-user-profile-synchronization-success-in-sharepoint-2010-beta.aspx. That way profile synchronization will work properly.
- Run the Pre-requisites Wizard, you now have enough prerequisites installed to run the wizard to where it will actually download the install some of the prerequisites without any hassle.
- Run the SharePoint 2010 Setup, you can now safely install SharePoint 2010 without any problems. If you want before you run this step you can create another domain admin account just for this installation and to run alongside best practices. Personally, when running through the installs I choose complete over standalone and enter in the SQL Server 2008 instance that I created above. You will wait a few minutes after you choose this installation type for some items to install. Then the configuration wizard will popup and you can enter your SharePoint admin account and your SQL instance information you should be good to go and the configuration wizard should run. At this point the 10 steps to get through configuration will run through after you click the next button. Once this finishes you will enter central administration and things should be good to go with configuration. You can choose all the services you want in the wizard and create your application and site collection. This stuff can be lumped into a huge sum or configured individually. We did the lump sum and it failed on profile synchronization. I will probably create another vm of my own tomorrow and go through the individual step by step service configuration.
So this is my little knock out guide to get SharePoint 2010 up to the point that Central Administration will show up. I’m sure I’ll have tons of little blog posts in the upcoming month related to more pain and more issues. If you have any questions or comments I will try to answer them when I can. I am doing 300 things right now and I’m sorry for the lack of posts. Moving, planning an event, and 200 other things prevent me from posting much lately. I warned you guys and I am really sorry. Hopefully once everything in the next 2 weeks is over there will be more posts and more awesome to come. I hope you guys had a Happy Thanksgiving and a good weekend.