If you aren’t familiar with Colligo, it’s a desktop client application/outlook add-in/explorer file manager, that enables users to save documents or emails directly to SharePoint, and be prompted for metadata at the time of saving.

Colligo reads the content type of the target lists/libraries, and generates a default form very similar to what SharePoint does with the default EditForm.aspx ListForm web part. If you don’t like the default form, or need to customize the metadata entry experience (for example custom validation, pulling from external data sources, inter-dependent controls), you can develop a custom editor and show your own Windows Forms-based form to the user.

The default Colligo Editor form, shown here when adding a new Announcement.

How to Start

To start developing a custom editor, begin by installing Colligo Contributor, and obtaining your product and sdk keys from Colligo.

Create a new Visual Studio Class Library project, and add a reference to the Colligo dlls in the GAC.

Add the necessary using statements:

using Colligo;

using Colligo.Properties;

using Colligo.Util;

using Colligo.WML.MetaData;

Change your class to inherit from the ICustomEditor class:

namespace MyNamespace

{

    public class MyCustomEditor : ICustomEditor

    {

    }

}

Implement the Interface methods:

namespace MyNamespace

{

    public class MyCustomEditor : ICustomEditor

    {

        // SDK Key

        private const string SDK_KEY = "XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX";

        #region ICustomEditor Members

        public string GetSdkKey()

        {

            return SDK_KEY;

        }

        public EditorResult ShowEditor(IEditContext context)

        {

            // Show your form here

        }

        public ResolveConflictResult ShowResolveConflictDialog(IResolveConflictContext context)

        {

            return ResolveConflictResult.UseDefaultResolveDialog;

        }

        #endregion

    }

}

In the ShowEditor method, this is where you can create an instance of a Windows Form, and call the ShowDialog method on it. You can also pre-validate and avoid showing your form for situations that are not appropriate.

public EditorResult ShowEditor(IEditContext context)

{

    // Check if this is something we care about

    if (!context.List.IsDocumentLibrary)

    {

        return EditorResult.UseDefaultEditor;

    }

    if (!string.Equals(context.List.Name, "Private Documents", StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase) &&

        !string.Equals(context.List.Name, "Public Documents", StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase))

    {

        return EditorResult.UseDefaultEditor;

    }

    // Only show for Create/Edit (use the default Colligo form for Viewing)

    if (context.EditorMode == EditorMode.Create || context.EditorMode == EditorMode.Edit)

    {

        using (myCustomWindowsForm myForm = new myCustomWindowsForm(context))

        {

            DialogResult createResult = DialogResult.None;

            createResult = myForm.ShowDialog(context.Parent);

            switch (createResult)

            {

                case DialogResult.Cancel:

                    return EditorResult.Cancel;

                case DialogResult.OK:

                    return EditorResult.OK;

                case DialogResult.No:

                    return EditorResult.UseDefaultEditor;

            }

        }

    }

    else

    {

        // View - Show the default editor

        return EditorResult.UseDefaultEditor;

    }

    // Fall through

    return EditorResult.OK;

}

Notice I am passing in the IEditContext instance into my form’s constructor. The IEditContext object has all the goodies in it, and will give you access to the list, the web, the content types, list item metadata, etc.).

What to Consider

Some basic things to consider are:

• Which scenarios will your editor cover? View, Create, Edit?
• Is this only for documents, or list items, or both?
• Will you support content types? A list/library can be configured with multiple content types, which you will need to create a UI for selecting/changing if you decide to support that.
• How will you handle multiple files? Will you enable setting different data for each item, or will you force all items to use the same entered metadata? Think carefully about the “Name” field for documents in document libraries. You want to make sure that the same name is not used for multiple documents.
• Will you allow changing folders (for document libraries with folders enabled)? If so, you’ll need to build this UI.

There are a number of ways/methods that may kick off the display of your form, and you need to consider each of these:

• User selects New > Item from within Colligo Contributor
• This is similar to the New > [Content Type] menu directly in SharePoint. You can expect that EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType will not be null.
• User selects Upload from within Colligo Contributor
• This is similar to Upload Document from within SharePoint. EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType may be null.
• User drags/drops a single file onto Colligo Contributor
• EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType may be null.
• User drags/drops multiple files onto Colligo Contributor
• EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType may be null.
• User performs a single File > Save As from within an application
• EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType may be null.
• User drags/drops multiple files onto the Colligo area in Windows Explorer
• EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType may be null.
• User selects Edit Properties from within Colligo Contributor
• Need to grab existing values and prepopulate your controls. EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType will not be null.

Some Gotchas

Following are some gotchas to be aware of:

Check for Null

Don’t make any assumptions about any of the items in the IEditContext object. ContentTypes may be null, Fields may not exist or be null, other relevant ILists in the Web may not be synchronized locally, and will be null, etc., etc., etc. Check everything for null first, and test everything that returns a collection/array for Count and Length > 0. If there are fields/lists/lookup column values that your form expects, check for the existence of these things right away, and exit if you don’t find them.

Parent Windows

If your form is called via the Save As dialog from an application (or via the FileManager), the ParentWindow handle may not be valid, so be careful with the ShowDialog(IWin32Window) overload, which threw a System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception for me. I had to wrap my ShowDialog(context.Parent) in a try>catch, and then try it without any parameters (ShowDialog() ).

Custom Field Types

If you are using any custom field types, be really careful to make sure and store the data in the proper format. My customer was using a couple of custom field types found on CodePlex, and one of them extended the Lookup field, and it took me a few traces with Fiddler to figure out that it wanted its values in lookup column format (“52;#ItemName”);

Site Lookup Columns

If you have any lookup columns that are defined in higher-level sites, and you are using those site columns in lists located in subsites, then Colligo will not be able to see the lookup values. In order to implement these scenarios, you will have to force your users to synchronize the higher level sites as well as the subsites.

I had one particular scenario where I couldn’t pre-filter the items in the collection with an SPQuery object (too complicated a query for CAML), so I needed a way to filter the SPListItemCollection afterwards using C#, before returning the XML.

The SPListItemCollection offers the .Delete() and .DeleteItemById() methods, however they will commit the deletion back to SharePoint. I wanted to simply remove some items from the in-memory collection, not delete the items from the server. There was no way that I could see to remove items from an SPListItemCollection in memory only.

I looked into sub-classing or extending the SPListItemCollection class, but there is no public constructor in the base class, and no way to get at the logic behind the .Xml property without nasty reflection.

I ultimately ended up resorting to using Linq to XML to delete the rows directly from the returned XML, and then adjusted the ItemCount accordingly.

Here’s the code:

// Get the list items from a list

SPListItemCollection items = myList.GetItems(mySPQuery);

// Get the xml of the list items

itemXml = surveyItems.Xml;

XNamespace z = "#RowsetSchema";

XDocument xdoc = XDocument.Parse(itemXml);

IEnumerable<XElement> rows = xdoc.Root.Descendants(z + "row");

List<XElement> rowsToDelete = new List<XElement>();

foreach (XElement row in rows)

{

    // Here is where you can test for a condition, and decide to remove a row

    if (row.Attribute("ows_Title").Value.Contains("Some string to filter on"))

    {

        rowsToDelete.Add(row);

    }

}

while (rowsToDelete.Count > 0)

{

    // Update the parent row count

    int rowCount = Convert.ToInt32(rowsToDelete[0].Parent.Attribute("ItemCount").Value);

    rowsToDelete[0].Parent.Attribute("ItemCount").Value = (rowCount - 1).ToString();

    rowsToDelete[0].Remove();

    rowsToDelete.RemoveAt(0);

}

// Get the newly filtered xml

itemXml = xdoc.ToString()

I’ve submitted my application for approval at HelloTxt, and hopefully it’ll be a quick approval process. I can’t release the version for testing yet, because it only works with my own user key right now until it gets reviewed and approved (sort of a chicken and egg thing if you ask me).

In the meantime, I thought I’d post a quick screen shot of the new tab and highlight some features:

After entering your API key, xPollinate will pull in your Tags, and all of your defined services (networks). You can either choose a tag to post to (which will select only those networks in the tag), or you can choose All Networks and then individually select the networks to post to.

Notice that the account name of each service is posted next to the service name. This is because HelloTxt support multiple accounts with the same service (i.e. more than one twitter account).

Just like Ping.FM, you can choose to post either as a status/microblog update using a template, or post as a blog entry.

I’m excited to get this release out, and hope the application gets accepted soon.

Session #1:

Windows Azure Platform:

Another Demo, sample app, of basic CRUD web app.

CRUD is standard ASP.NET SqlDataSource control with SQL commands, that works with SQL Express but runs in the cloud

Demo’d using Trace.Write which writes out to the development console logger and can also write to the Azure Storage logging subsystem

Migrated to SQL Azure by just changing the connection string

Storage (BLOBs, Tables, and Queues)

NEW – Add ability to mount Azure storage as NTFS drive

Coming soon – Ability to manage VMs with admin privileges

Create snapshots of your VMs

When up-scaling, Azure will deploy your app on top of your custom VM image

SQL Azure:

Only pay for what you use

Do not worry about disaster recovery

Change a connection string an have effortless switch to SQL Azure

Sync framework to sync SQL DBs in the cloud with on-premise data

Service Bus:

Securely connect apps (on-premise with cloud)

Tunneling technology

Services bus is a middle man for communication between

Access Control:

Provides outsourcing of claims-based RESTful services

Integrates with ADFS v2

Windows Azure Improvements since last year:

SQL Azure Improvements since last year:

1. Not just RESTful consumption of services anymore
2. Works with standard TDS based tools (SQL management studio)

Microsoft has a vision of "Three screens and a Cloud".

The screens include:

1. Mobile devices
2. Desktop computers
3. Internet connected TVs

   They can all be united by data and services in the cloud.

Public Data in the Cloud (Codename "Dallas").

Repository for public data sets that can be consumed in any number of ways (and easily by Azure)

Accessed through Microsoft PinPoint

Sign up for a CTP key

Some data includes NASA mars photos, GIS data, AP News articles

PinPoint:

Centralized marketplace for partner providers, Azure ISVs and implementers, and gateway to "Dallas" public Data.

"System Center" will plugin to Azure to monitor your Azure instances, check to meet SLAs, and enable you to scale up the Azure instances directly.

2010 will include ability to have the Azure cloud be able to establish a network connection to on-premise resources (i.e. self hosted SQL Server)

WordPress is moving to Windows Azure

Assembly plugin = System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadFrom(pluginFileName);

object pluginClass = Activator.CreateInstance(plugin.GetType("Plugin.PluginClass"));

This kind of architecture is pretty standard, and is one of the few ways to accomplish this plugin model in .NET (other than some cutting-edge things like MEF). It works for the most part, but has some obvious limitations, such as:

• Once a DLL is loaded in this manner, it cannot be unloaded from memory (unless you mess around with AppDomains for each plugin)
• If your plugins want to talk to one another, they pretty much have to go through a lot of plumbing code in the main app

Where it really starts to have problems is when your plugin DLL needs to reference other DLLs used by the main application, or other plugin DLLs, and you find yourself in .NET Plugin DLL Hell.

Here is the crux of the problem:

When you add a reference to a DLL via Visual Studio, the framework will always try to load an exact matching version of that assembly, and will fail if it can’t find it. So, good luck if that DLL you depend on ever gets upgraded to a new version.

You can usually control this with a standalone application, because when you upgrade the app, you upgrade all the dependencies at the same time. In a plugin model, you can’t control when other dependencies are upgraded, and so your plugin will simply fail to load when this happens.

There is no way in the .NET framework to tell it to use a particular version of a DLL or any newer version it finds.

Here’s a scenario to demonstrate this:

• You have a WinForms application, that loads plugin DLLs when the app starts.
• The main application uses a third-party control library.
• You write a plugin that also needs the controls, so you add a reference to the version that the main app uses.
• At some point, someone working on the main app upgrades it to use a newer controls DLL, recompiles the app, and distributes it along with the newer controls DLL.
• Since no work was actually done on your plugin, no one has recompiled it against the newer controls DLL.
• When the upgraded application starts and loads your plugin, your plugin goes BOOM!

Another scenario:

• Your plugin references another plugin
• The other plugin gets upgraded without your plugin getting recompiled
• Your plugin now goes BOOM!

When I say “BOOM!”, I mean you’ll probably see something like this from the Fusion log:

"System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly ‘YourDependentAssemblyNameHere’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.” 

I am having a similar problem with my Windows LiveWriter plugin, xPollinate. Every time Microsoft releases a new version of LiveWriter, all of its DLLs that I reference have new version numbers, and so my plugin will fail to load unless I recompile my plugin against the latest versions of the DLLs.

Well, so what are our options to deal with this?

• You can simply not add any references in your plugin project via Visual Studio, and just use reflection for everything (yuck). This is probably a little easier now with the dynamic keyword in C#, but not much.
• You can try to get the main application to put in assembly binding redirects in its config file for any common DLLs that might be referenced by plugins.

That’s all I can see at this point. Here’s to hoping a future version of the framework will make this easier for us.

This is just a maintenance release to make the plugin work with Windows LiveWriter version 14.0.8089.726.

I am currently working on supporting categories for the next release, so stay tuned.

I’m implementing the AKS for a customer, and I’m having a hard time understanding how this product actually made it to a public release. It feels like a product that is half finished, that was used as a springboard to creating a commercial product, while leaving the original free version to the wayside. If you are considering working with this, you might want to read about the frustrations I encountered below:

Installation experience – Where are those .bat files?

When you download the AKS, you’ll get a zip file, which contains a folder and a single EXE installer.

Running the installer will perform the following tasks:

1. Installs control adapters and reference files into an AKS folder in your Program Files directory.
2. Copies a feature and master pages/css styles to the /12/Templates/Features folder in your SharePoint installation (if you are running 32 bit).
3. Creates a Start Menu icon group for AKS tasks and links.

After running through the installer, a quick look at the “Welcome to the Accessibility Kit…” PDF informs you that you need to install and activate the feature:

The AKS Feature
The AKS Feature is not the AKS Kit but a part of the Kit that works as a feature in MOSS. The AKS
Feature installs the Example Master pages and the Modified CSS. You must install this by
selecting Install AKS Feature from the Start Menu:  Start | All Programs | AKS by HiSoftware |
AKS Feature install.  Once the feature is installed, you will still need to activate it within your
SharePoint application through: Site Settings | Site Collection Features. Please note if you are
on a 64 Bit server please follow the 64 Bit instructions.

I looked all over for those “64 bit instructions”, but there was nothing. There was a “64bit Feature Install” icon in the Start Menu, but no text anywhere instructing me to click on it.

I figured out that to install the feature, you need to click on either the 64bit Feature Install icon or the AKS Feature Install icon in the Start menu (note that the shortcuts are only created for the current user, and there is no way to tell the installer to install for everyone). If you run these shortcuts from the Start menu, the command window will flash, execute, and then immediately disappear, before you can check if it finished successfully or not. On a 64 bit server, you’ll see a flash of xcopy commands that copy styles and master pages into the /12 folders.

I wanted to be sure that it installed, so I tried to find the location of the batch file so I could run it again in a command prompt and actually see the result. I right-clicked the shortcut and went to Properties to figure out the target location, and it was greyed out:

I looked for the bat file in the Program Files directory, but no luck. Yuck! A .bat file that I can’t see or easily get to?

I figured out that it installed, because I then saw the feature in my Site Collection Features page. I activated it, and then tried to take a look at the master pages and styles.

Control Adapters – Incorrect C#

The AKS comes with several control adapters that rewrite some of the out-of-box control html to make it more compliant. Some of the C# adapter files have mistakes in the C# code that make them not able to compile. For example, in the Web Part Zone Smart Adapter for WCAG2.0, there is an extra curly brace, and even a reference to a variable that is not even declared in the file anywhere:

   1: else

   2: {

   3:

   4:     } // <-- Extra brace?

   5:

   6:     //Output sOutputBuilder to be rendered

   7:     oOutput.Write(sOutputBuilder.ToString()); // <-- sOutputBuilder is never declared in this file!

   8: }

“Smart Adapters” (not too bright)

The AKS comes with several “Smart” control adapters (adapters that do not need a lot of configuration). The Web Part Zone Smart Adapter sounded like it had some promise, as it would convert a web part zone to use divs instead of tables.

However, when you install it, it has the side effect of not rendering any of your web part’s “Titles”. If you want to use the headers that come with the web parts, then this control will not work for you. It also prevented viewing web parts in Design mode, they would just disappear from the page.

Finally, it was hard to see the point of using the adapters at all, as all they appeared to do was add some labels to blogs, wikis, and search boxes. They will certainly not do anything at all if you use the CKS EBE or Wiki versions, or if you have customized/branded the search controls.

Master pages and styles do not exist!

Once you install the feature, a set of master pages and css styles will get installed to the master page and style library galleries for your site collection. I cracked open SharePoint designer, tried to open a master page, and got a nasty error message that the file did not exist and could not be opened.

In order to open the file, I had to run through the SharePoint UI, and “Publish” each master page and CSS style before I could access it via SharePoint designer. There was no mention of this anywhere in the documentation.

Relative font sizes? Good luck!

The AKS stylesheets attempt to change all SharePoint font size declarations into relative sizes in ems, rather than fixed pixel/point sizes. This might work fine for anonymous internet site pages, but if you will ever let your visitors view any of the system pages like list new/edit/upload pages or use out-of-box web parts, good luck tweaking styles for a month to get things right.

Woops, what about default.master?

The AKS installs alternate versions of the out-of-box publishing master pages, such as BlueBand.master, BlackBand.master, etc. I don’t know about you, but none of my customers have ever started from those master pages on internet sites, and all my intranet applications make heavy use of default.master. I was really disappointed to see that there was no alternate version of default.master.

HCCE – Nothing but trouble

The HiSoftware Code Compliance Kit (HCCE) is a SharePoint event handler that will look for a certain string of text in your SharePoint web pages, and replace it with different (possibly more accessible) text. You use a text file in which you specify pipe-delimited lines of text to find and replace (e.g. “Text to find|Text to replace with”). The HCCE has the following problems when implemented:

• There is only a debug build provided (no release version).
• There is no source code (you cannot recompile).
• There is no regex option for pattern matching. All strings must be matched and replaced exactly.
• The DLL looks for a hard-coded path to the configuration text file in C:\Program Files\HiSoftware… This doesn’t work on 64bit systems because the installer installs to Program Files (x86). Since you can’t recompile the DLL, your only option is to copy the text file to the Program Files directory.
• Once you implement the feature, your SharePoint Welcome menu will get rendered above the <html> tag, causing it to appear at the top of your screen and out of place. Several posts about this, and no response at all from HiSoftware.
• The install/uninstall .bat files do not work, and need to be adjusted for 64bit machines. Why no WSP?

Conclusion

Poorly documented, sloppily put together, and full of holes and mistakes, I was very disappointed in the AKS. Coupled with a total lack of support and responsiveness to issues on their web site, I think it reflects poorly on HiSoftware as a company.

The manner in which properties and entity IDs are encoded into long query string values makes the urls appear to be injection attacks. On a particular client’s BDC application, the picker dialog used a url similar to the following:

http://domainname.org/_layouts/Picker.aspx?MultiSelect=False&CustomProperty=uU2hhcmVQb2ludC5Qb3J0YWwsIFZlcnNpb249MTIuMC4wLAF%2F%2FAQAAAAAAAA9QcmltYXJ5Q29sdW1uSWQQU3lzdGVtSW5zdGFuY2VAAA
AAAMAgAAAF9NaWNyb3NvZnQjAsIEN1bHR1cmU9bmV1dHJhbCwgUHVibG
ljS2V5VG9rZW49NzFlOWJjZTExMWU5NDI5YwUBAAAAPk1pYAEAAAD%2F%2F%23Jvc29mdC5TaGFyZVBvaW50LlBvcnRhbC5XZWJDb250cm9scy5JdGVtUGlja2
VyRXh0ZW5kZWREYXRhB
JZAhFbnRpdHlJZBNTZWNvbmRhcnlDb2×1bW
5zSWRzAAAABw8PDw8CAAAANw4AAAcOAAAIDgAACQMAAAAPAwAAAAAAA
AAPCwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
3D&EntitySeparator=%00&DialogTitle=Choose%20User&DialogImage=%2F_layouts%2Fimages%2Fbizpicker.gif&PickerDialogType=Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.ItemPickerDialog%2C%20Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal%2C%20Version%3D12.0.0.0%2C%20Culture%3Dneutral%2C%20PublicKeyToken%3D71e9bce111e9429c&DefaultSearch=

Using the HTTP GET for this kind of thing is a bad idea, and I hope that Microsoft fixes this in the future.

Enter ooma to the rescue.

Ooma is a Voice Over IP system that lets you stick it to the phone companies. For a one time fee of around $250, you get a device that let’s you have a phone line using your broadband internet connection. The sound quality is great, and you never have to pay any monthly fees (unlike MagicJack), and domestic long distance is free. You can even port over your existing phone number for a $39.99 fee.

I started the port away from Qwest about 3 weeks ago, and it is currently switching over right now.

Since I also have Internet service with Qwest, I was concerned that when the port occurred, my internet connection would also go down. However, Qwest has gotten much smarter about this, and will automatically convert your DSL service to a “standalone DSL”, and give your DSL service a new phone number that is only used for data.

Our old bill was $90 per month, and will be ~$50 now for the standalone DSL. Add in the $39.99 porting fee and cost of the unit ($215 from Amazon with their credit card), and it will take us around 7 months to break even (also counting the extra 3-4 weeks of keeping the land line during the porting process).

The only quirk I’ve found so far is a setting for an “ooma Connection Tone”. When a call is connected, a little jingle is played which informs both parties that the connection is on ooma, and not a standard land line. It’s mainly an advertising thing for ooma, but it has the odd side effect of screwing up voice mail. When someone’s voicemail message picks up on the other end, the jingle acts like hitting the “*” key, and sends you to their password prompt to get into their mailbox. I just turn that off, as it is unnecessary anyway.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

On Google, the first result was for a PHP data conversion project, hosted on a GeoCities web page (apparently not updated since 2004):

On Bing, the first result was my plugin’s CodePlex site. The PHP GeoCities site wasn’t even in the top 10.

Is this a case of bias? Is Google ranking sites about PHP higher than sites about Windows-based technology? Is Bing ranking Windows-based content higher? Or is this just a result of algorithms?

In any case, this is the first time I’ve preferred the results of a search engine other than Google.

Posts go unanswered, the forum is no longer moderated and full of garbage. Authors can’t review or respond to issues about their own plugins. It has half-implemented technology (it tells me my plugin is “FREE”, but there is nothing that they currently charge for and they don’t have a shopping cart system in place). There is no mechanism to contact anyone for help (help and support links take you to the general Windows Live help pages).

I wouldn’t be too surprised if a year from now, some manager just pulls the plug on it and displays “The Gallery is now closed. You will be redirected to www.bing.com in 15 seconds.”.

psconfig -cmd -configdb -create -server DBSERVERNAME -database wss_admin_config -user WSSSERVER\AppPoolAccountName -password p@ssword -dbuser SQLDBUSERNAME -dbpassword p@ssword -admincontentdatabase wss_admin_content

Based on the post here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/fooshen/archive/2007/02/01/installing-moss-without-ad.aspx

With the announcement of the name for the next version of SharePoint on the OFFICIAL SharePoint team blog, I am waiting for the inevitable flood of pingbacks, trackbacks, and reposts about this in my RSS reader. This will be similar to the flood of reposts about “SharePoint Designer is now Free!” I got a week ago. Same goes for the endless stream of tweets and retweets.

Is it really necessary to repost items from the official SharePoint team blog? If you are interested in SharePoint, you should be following this blog already, no?

I think much of this is a direct result of the MVP system and its requirements. When considering candidates for MVP, the quantity of blog posts, page hits, and comments are a big factor. I’ve seen some bloggers with high-quality posts get passed on as MVPs due to low numbers in their web stats. Are some bloggers trying to up their post counts? Is anybody monitoring quality as well as quantity?

I just can’t help but feel that this race to MVP status is encouraging this. Same goes for the MSDN SharePoint forums, where people seem to be falling all over themselves to answer questions as quickly as possible, without providing quality answers or even understanding the questions.

failure trying to synch site [guid] for ContentDB [guid] WebApp [guid].  Exception message was A WSS internal name for profile property ‘ProfilePropertyWithReallyLongName’ could not be found..

Apparently SharePoint has a limit of 32 characters for Internal Field Names. This will also apply to Replicable User Profile Properties since they will get synced down to the WSS Content DB in the UserInfo list.

Overview

When we remodeled our kitchen a couple years ago, I envisioned a television or other media device wall mounted in a particular spot opposite our refrigerator. When I first saw the TouchSmart, I knew exactly what needed to go there.

During the remodel, I wired ethernet/phone/coaxial ports up the wall near the light switches in anticipation of this.

Note: Quick word of advice – mounting this thing is not for the faint of heart. If you have any hesitations about attempting this, I’d recommended enjoying your computer and its warranty on your desk . For the brave, read on…

Planning

Remember the old saying, “Measure twice, cut once”. Okay, some things to keep in mind:

1. You have to mount this into a stud. Don’t try to use drywall anchors, the unit is too heavy for that.
2. If your stud very far off-center from where you want to mount, you’ll need to consider a swivel mount instead of the one HP offers.
3. If your stud is slightly off center, you may be OK, as you can put the VESA hanging bolts off to the right or left a bit (I’ll show that later).
4. At first glance, the mounting bracket looks uneven, but don’t get concerned. The flange on the left is shorter than the one on the right. However, when you slide the bolts into the holes, they slide back to the left and everything is centered.
5. Lay everything out first and do some dry runs, seeing how everything will fit together.

Some things you’ll need:

1. Corded power drill with 5/32” drill bit
2. 7/16” socket and ratchet
3. 7/16” hex stainless steel lag bolts (2 1/2” long)
4. Level
5. Philips and Regular screwdrivers
6. Measuring tape
7. Short ladder
8. Stud finder

Attaching the Mounting Plate to the Wall

Using your stud finder, locate the stud and mark both sides at the approximate height where you want the center of the unit to be.

My stud was about 2 inches off center from my ideal spot for the unit, but after laying the mounting adapter out, I realized I could place the mounting bolts on the adapter off to the right or left instead of in the center, which would help bring it closer to where I wanted it. The pic below shows the six holes you can use. You can either use the four corners, or the group of four to the left or right.

Using a level, hold the mounting bracket up to the wall so the holes in the center align with the middle of the stud. Use a pencil to mark each hole on the wall.

Get on a ladder or chair and using the 5/32” drill bit and power drill, pre-drill the holes as straight as you can.

The mounting bracket came with Philips head screws. The directions show a person manually using a screwdriver with force to screw these in. This might be fine on newer homes with softer studs, but my house has 80 year old fir, and that stuff is hard as rock and doesn’t budge. When I tried to screw these in, it was too tight a fit. I re-drilled each hole to ream it out and widen the hole a bit. I tried again and stripped one screw, and a second one actually broke in half inside the wall, just from using the manual screwdriver.

Frustrated, I took a trip to McLendon’s Hardware, and purchased 5 stainless steel lag bolts with a hex head. These are much stronger than the chincy zinc ones they gave me, and won’t strip if you use a ratchet.

With the broken screw still in the wall, I had to move the holes down a little and re-drill. The lag bolts were much better and went in so much more easily.

Attaching the Mounting Adapter to the TouchSmart

The VESA mounting adapter from HP comes with some great instructions on how to add the adapter, remove the legs, etc. I just followed to the letter, and marveled at how well the whole computer was designed and engineered for this. Grab some towels or a blanket, and place your TouchSmart face down on them on a flat surface.

When it comes time to put the mounting bolts on the adapter, you use the shortest and smallest screws it comes with.

You can mount these in four holes either left-of-center, right-of-center, or four corners. I chose left-of-center to bring the unit closer to the center of the wall space, since my stud was off-center to begin with.

Finally, get someone to help you hold it, and mount it up.

Wiring

The power supply brick is absolutely huge, and needs to be considered. If you only have power at an outlet down near the floor, I’d recommend fishing some wire and putting an outlet on the wall behind the unit.

Luckily I have some light switches below the unit, so I can tap into the power from there and run a short cable up for a new outlet. I’ll post another picture of cable management when I’m done with that.

Reaction from my Wife

So after all this work, and finally getting this thing up with no major screwups, what was my wife’s reaction?

“I can’t reach it, you put it up too high.”

Oh brother…

Scenario:

1. You create a custom Visual Studio workflow and use the CreateTask activity.
2. You set your SPWorkflowTaskProperties.Description property to some HTML text.
3. In your Description HTML text, you have an html hyperlink <a> tag whose href=”” attribute contains an absolute hyperlink to a resource in the same SharePoint farm (i.e. a list item).
4. Example: “Please review <a href=”http://yourserver/site/lists/yourlist/dispform.aspx?ID=1”>contract #12345</a>”.

Goal:

Users will receive the task email, and be able to click on the absolute URL in the email body to navigate to the SharePoint resource.

Problem:

It appears that SharePoint parses this HTML and readjusts the hyperlink and makes it relative.

Example: “Please review <a href=”/lists/yourlist/dispform.aspx?ID=1”>contract #12345</a>”

This effectively breaks the hyperlink in the email client.

The only workaround was to get rid of the <a> tag and write out the hyperlink in full. For example:

“Please review contract #12345 (http://yourserver/site/lists/yourlist/dispform.aspx?ID=1)”.

In this manner, SharePoint did not adjust the hyperlink at all.

Rule of thumb, always specify a default value for each input parameter.

It took about twenty minutes to create the project, paste the shell XML from the application primer article, and register the application.

The Image control in WPF is slick because you can use a web url to a graphic file in the Source property. In WinForms I would have had to use the WebClient, get the image, save it somewhere, and load it into a picture box.

Now I need to add in a timer to refresh the image every so often, a button to manually refresh, the ability to see the North/South and full region maps, and add some visual spice.