On Holiday - Missionvale

Problem:  Yesterday I went to Missionvale in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Missionvale is a charity registered in South Africa.  What a brilliant charity!  It's a micro charity so you can really see how every cent is spent which I like.  They work with a lot of HIV affected people.  Pretty dire situation these people are in, I really wish i could do more.

Initial Hypothesis:  Like all charities worldwide, Missionvale are struggling for funding.  This really is an amazing place.  I don't think a lot of South African's realise places like this exist.  I will gladly pass on any details if anyone would like to volunteer or make a donation.  They have some building projects over the next few months so if you are coming to SA, get in contact and help out or just come see the charity.  The children have little in terms of earthly goods but are happy playing.  My daughter played with them and it's great to see London hasn't influenced her ability to have fun with the children at Missionvale.

Resolution: My resolution is to help this charity more in the future.  Funding is a major concern especially as money for food is not really a focus in the world at the moment.  However, nutrition is key to helping Anti Retro Viral (ARV) drugs work.  There is a school at Missionvale that is being expanded where they feed and educate about 150 children.  I don't think anyone would argue with a feeding/nutrition program to help children learn.  These guys do so much I will definitely be donating more money in future and helping with events in the UK. 

Here are some of the children we saw.

What this has to do with SharePoint?  Well almost nothing except a lot of people read my blog, if you would like to find a charity, consider volunteering or making a donation this is a brilliant charity that is accountable (and audited by PWC).

More info:
http://www.missionvale.com/
http://www.missionvale.com.au/
http://www.missionvaleireland.org/

IW User Group - JBG ToolFest

Yesterday I present Community Kit for SharePoint - Developer tools (CKSDev) as a tool for SharePoint 2010 developers to improve productivity at Microsoft in Johannesburg to the IW user group. 

CKSDEV is a great tool built by people in the SharePoint community and lives on codeplex.  I highly recommend CKSDev if you use VS2010 - it gives you so much extra functionality from within VS as a SharePoint developer.

My Impression of IW User group Jbg - Brilliant, I was amazed by the whole toolfest idea and think it's a good idea for user groups to follow.  Michael O'Donavan, Veronique Palmer and Rob MacLean are doing a great job for the SharePoint community in SA.  Good idea, great venue, smallish turnout.  SharePoint is flying in SA and the community is good. 

About ToolFest Jbg - This is the second toolfest that has been held in Jbg, I have no doubt there will be more as I learnt tons.  Rob MacLean showed Light Switch using SP lists (In my head i always call it LightBox - no idea why) - it was impressive.  All the presenters showed me new tips and tricks.  I have some thoughts on some of the presentations below:

Installing SP2010 using SPAutoInstaller, I knew Brian Edwards presentation on Brian Lala's Powershell autospinstall was key, all i can say is I wish I had thought of presenting this but alas there are always so many topics and CKSDev I am a big supporter of.  This looked at installing SP2010 using Powershell.  Anyway, Brian is a fellow from Benoni (I did most of my schooling on the East rand).  Brian raised the key point of installing SharePoint correctly using multiple managed accounts. The wizard is fine if you are small and don't have resource but it's an extremely simplified start that I am not a big fan of.  Here is a post on installation options in SP2010 - AutoSPInstaller from Brian Lala is my preferred option, this is under the PowerShell installation option.    Managed Accounts I use for SP2010 installations.
Update: 22/06/2011 - Current versio of AutoSPInstaller is 2.5, additionallly the codeplex project is called AutoSPIntaller not SPAutoInstaller as previously named.

Wicus van den Berg did a good session on upgrading to SP2010 using PS and scripts he build with a nice XML config file.  Also I was unaware of the Powershell ISE option, I use PowerGui but Powershell ISE is built in a looks to do a very good job.  I voted for Wicus - his 1st script failed which made the presentation even better as he showed why it's important to perform the upgrade using Powershell and allowing us to watch the variables returned.

All the presenters gave me info from learning about zipping for document library's to raising my awareness of content types in the eyes of enterprise users.  Workflow and SPD were discussed.  And Rober MacLean had an absolutely blinder with Light Switch - it was brilliant.  His claim to be the greatest person he knows - it may be true!  The reason some sessions are better covered are I feel I am better qualified to discuss these topics but I took a lot from all the presenters and speaking to people at the event.

Veronique Palmer the only SharePoint MVP in SA lead a session "How mature is your SharePoint implementation?" And Veronique walked us through the SharePoint Maturity Model, so this was interesting but the conversation and input from people with actual experiences was the real gem.  I got smashed out the park by a guy from a engineering background when I suggested Workspace easily had sufficient space for all the required documents when going offline.  Well I was wrong and I loved the way he told me.  why - Engineering company's in Africa have a unique set of challenges to say the least, many files, remote locations and absolutely huge files with a requirement for literally thousands of docs.  I said "Who would ever work on more than 500 document offline", now I know this does happen.

Summary:  I loved presenting and people asked me great questions about CKSDev.  The community in Johannesburg is going well.  I have been to a lot of SharePoint user groups and I can honestly say this is the best evening event I have participated in. 

CKSDev My Favourite Features

Overview:  I love the codeplex project CKSDev.  This is the Community Kit for SharePoint 2010 - Developer Tools, it allows me to perform a lot of my tasks within Visual Studio 2010, it has a lot of templates I need and it has great local devlopment environment deployment tools.

Initial Hypothesis:  I estimate that I use 20% of the tools 80% of the time.  In this post I'm looking at what I use and like CKSDev to do for me.  The most important features for me revolve arround deployment.

Features: 
1) Deploy code quickly - I use to use WSPBuilder for MOSS, all the features and more are now part of CKSDev.  You can deploy code, reset IIS, deploy to the root hive, all faster than do a full deployment from VS.

2) Turn on the Developer Dashboard - OK I run Powershell to turn on my dashboard but it can be done easily using CKSDev.  Using Solution explorer navigate to the Site collection, right click and select "Developer Dashboard", I set mine to "On Demand".

3) Sandbox templates - Ok CKSDev use to include an SPI template for Sandboxed Visual Web Parts, this has been retired and I now use the "Power Tools for SharePoint 2010" (VSIX).  The full trust proxy SPI template is needed to log my Sandbox solution exceptions.
4) Other SPI templates - branding, master pages, Custom Actions, SPMetal... a lot of useful templates.
5) SharePoint Reference Tab - I dislike having to navigate to find the SharePoint dll's when adding references to my projects.  CKSDev add a new "SharePoint" references tab.

6) Discovery/Explorer - Using the solutions explorer when CKSDev is installed I get to see more artifacts from the Site Collection.

Summary:  I highly recommend using CKSDev, it speeds up development for SharePoint 2010 developers considerably.

Timesheet for SharePoint 2010 CodePlex project

Overview:  I have a lot of people looking for a timesheet solution for SharePoint 2010 as I have 4 posts on this blog about timesheets for SharePoint.  I get some great pointers and requests so I think it is time to make this a codeplex project.
Objective: To make a plug-in for SharePoint that will allow users to fill in timesheets.  I recon a sandbox solution is a good idea with SharePoint Online on the horizon in the next few months.  I want to provide 2 storage providers for the data: SQL Server and AZURE.
Wanted: As a starting poing I am going to add my code onto CodePlex in the next week and hopefully some folks want to build this as a community project.  If you are interested in helping out please drop me a line.  I need C# coders & front-end devs (someone to be in charge of the UI would be great), testers, documenters, ideas.  So if you want to join the project you can twitter me at @paulbeck1 and I'll add you to the codeplex project pre-launch.
http://twitter.com/#!/PaulBeck1

Part 1 - Design & data storage
Part 2 - Building the UI
Part 3 - Installation Steps
Part 4 - Final Part

Changing Password setting in AD using Group Policy

Problem: On my development machines i often don't want to have to change my password every 42 days or adhere to the default group policy setting for password when using AD.  I have multiple VM on multiple domains and changing passwords is a hassle.

Initial Hypothesis: Passwords are normally lost in one of three ways:
1) data breach
2) social engineering or phishing
3) malware
The following group policy helps open a machine in a dev environment but are obviously bad practice:
Change group policy to not change the default password after X days, disable password complexity, and remove password history.  Also allow users to change passwords immediately.  Use the Group Management Policy Editor on the AD machine.

Resolution:
Start > Run... > gpmc.msc
Navigate to the domain you wish to amend the group policy for (in my case it is demo.dev)
Right Click the default Group Policy as shown below and select "Edit"

Navigate Computer Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Account Policies > Password Policy.

Edit the Password Policy as you want it.
Save & Close the windows.
Run the windows command prompt (dos prompt): cmd>gpupdate

What Browsers do SharePoint People use

I was looking at the stats from this blog of browsers that visitors used in March 2011, below is a summary:

Browser	Percent
IE 8	41.23%
FireFox 3	17.59%
Chrome 10	11.58%
IE 9	7.96%
IE 7	7.27%
Chrome 9	5.76%

The most amazing stat was I had 1 visitor using IE4 at least that what their http header provided :)

Update 2 May 2011 - Browsers visting this blog breakdown for last week in April 2011.

SPMetal Jbg Presentation evening

Thank-you to everyone that came to the presentation and Singular who sponsored the event.  I enjoyed doing the 2 sessions and meeting some new SharePoint folk.

Slide decks:

Session 1 - PowerPoint SP2010 Data Access (includes the introduction to LINQ to SharePoint)
Session 2 - PowerPoint presentation on LINQ to SharePoint with the demo

I'll record the slides and if i can get the presentation to a reasonable size I'll add the downloads here - more info to follow.

Code Download:

VS2010 solution - This solution contains 3 projects with the code used for this presentation.

1. SPDemoLists - Pragmatically deploy the Customers and Order lists with a list lookup and populate the 2 lists with seed data.  Sandbox solution.
2. SPDemoUI - C# sandbox solution that contains a visual user control (web part) that allows a customer to be selected in a drop down and then display the related orders for that customer.  Additionally there is a button to delete the selected customer. 
3. SPDemonUnit - is an NUnit blank C# project setup ready to start adding unit tests.

SharePoint 2010 Johannesburg Knowledge Group Meeting Post
Event details: http://sp2010jbg.eventbrite.com/
Session summary's
Session 1
Presentation - Overview of data access in SharePoint. What are your options? Is SharePoint storage always the answer? What is LINQ to SharePoint? What is LINQ to SharePoint not good at? The 8 caveats to LINQ to SharePoint.
Session 2
Demonstrate LINQ to SharePoint 2010. Using Visual Studio creating a visual web part to perform CRUD operations on SharePoint lists.