Articles filed in category 'SharePoint'

One of the biggest issues in getting started with SharePoint development are the 2091097 steps you need to go through, and the heavy duty machine you need to invest in, to create a development environment for a SharePoint and Office developer. This is not unlike the fact that creating and running a production SharePoint farm can be extremely time-consuming.

I talk with a number of SharePoint customers and developers. Interestingly, some of the experiences are common no matter where you go. What is even more interesting is that every time I mention the same solution, their eyes light up!In this article, I am going to talk about five things from an architect or management point of view that you wish you knew before you started your SharePoint project. In part two of this article I will follow up with five things, targeted spe...cifically for the SharePoint developer.See More

Apps are the biggest change in SharePoint 2013. Over the past many years, SharePoint developers have been trying to figure out how to make applications work securely with each other, without users dealing with excessive passwords. Ideally, enterprises should have the confidence that installed software isn’t doing more than what they think it is doing. All this is being solved with SharePoint Apps.

In my previous article, (“ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part Infrastructure”, Nov/Dec 2006, CoDe Magazine) I talked about the ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part framework. I made the case for the emergence of Web Part or widget-like solutions, and explained the support for Web Parts in the ASP.NET 2.0 framework. However, I stopped short with a teaser into connecting these Web Parts with each other and where this story fits in with SharePoint 2007.

I give up! I can’t really explain how the cloud works unless I cover the topic of authentication in the cloud first. If I didn’t tackle this topic first, I could only explain boring unauthenticated applications. The issue is, for all practical purposes the authentication fit for the cloud is claims based. There is no worldwide active directory you can rely on. There is no single aspnetdb.mdf database. What’s more, there are many kinds of authentications already - Faceboo...k, Twitter, Google, OpenID, Windows Live ID, etc. See More

Everyone is excited about the cloud! Well, at least that is the theory. Microsoft introduced Azure such a long time ago - how many of us are really using it? SharePoint BPOS is around, but we still run servers in our backyard! So, why now? And why are things different this time around?

The future at Microsoft is cloudy, with an increasingly bleak chance of on-premises. It’s interesting to see how Microsoft is aggressively transitioning into a device and services company, and that on-premises applications are getting step-child treatment lately. Almost all of the innovation lately happens on or for the cloud, and if we are lucky, we get morsels of treats in our on-premises doggie bag. I’m not complaining, merely observing. A move to the cloud makes a lot of sense.

Excel services is yet another important pillar in Microsoft’s business intelligence offering. Business users really like Excel because it is easy to use and they can add complex formulas to Excel to express their logic.They can do so without involving the IT guy. The problem with this scenario, however, is that it becomes very difficult to share some Excel sheets with their coworkers. Usually users prefer to send workbooks via email, but sometimes the workbooks are too l...arge for email, sometimes they have backend data connections, and sometimes workbooks send via email cause version confusion hell.See More

Sahil pours his vast SharePoint prowess into building apps that put languages on equal footings with one another.

If there is one topic that has generated more debate than anything else, it is the scalability of lists in SharePoint. You can find as many opinions as there are people. Because I’m one of those people, allow me to express my opinions on this as well.

In this first installment of his new series, Sahil begins writing an end-to-end mobile infrastructure using some familiar tools.

Sahil continues his interesting series by writing a fronted to the Mobile app he wrote the backend for in the November/December 2014 issue.

Aside from the obvious summary here, Sahil goes into details about why you should also be happy about these three SharePoint 2010 features. In his words, these features give a SharePoint architect so much more flexibility in implementing and delivering SharePoint projects that they will invariably prove to be extremely valuable.SharePoint 2007 has been a very successful product for many reasons. Perhaps it is the good applicability of .NET to SharePoint. Maybe it is the ...fact that SharePoint gives you so much beyond plain vanilla ASP.NET, that it gets both techies and business users excited.Having been available for about three years now, there has been time for developers to discover a few rough edges to the product as well.See More

Just when it seems like Office 365 is everywhere, you’ll learn something that makes you glad it’s so ubiquitous. Sahil begins a new series with an interesting look at Office 365’s WebHooks.

“Run your business, not your mail server.” I am not sure where I read that, but it makes so much sense! Every organization is moving to the cloud, and some just haven’t started their journey yet. One of the fastest and most compelling online cloud based offerings is Office 365. Available in various SKUs, you can get SharePoint, Lync, Exchange, and Office professional as cloud-based offerings. The subscriptions are as low as $2 per user per month to $20 something per user... per month. Also, with SharePoint 2013, if you buy Office 365 subscriptions for your users, you don’t need to buy CALs (Client Access Licenses) for on-premises use.See More

SharePoint 2007 was a developer platform! But it took a developer with the patience of Job and the intelligence of MIT to deal with the bad development tools that we used to work with in SharePoint 2007. The picture in SharePoint 2010 is a lot better!

Managing security is very important, and SharePoint provides several ways to manage password accounts. Sahil gives us the story.

The title of this article is a misnomer, but I still picked this title because it is indeed the problem we are trying to solve. The problem is session state, especially in-process session state, is just evil. It makes your application less predictable, less reliable, less scalable, and locks you out of possibilities such as Windows Azure.

As I am flying back home over the Atlantic, I can’t help but think how much better SharePoint has become after the introduction of .NET 3.5. I have repeatedly insisted that one of the reasons behind SharePoint 2007’s huge success is the application of ASP.NET 2.0 concepts to SharePoint.In this article, I am going to talk about the specific improvements .NET 3.5 has brought to the SharePoint 2007 platform, and how that has made my development life so much better. I will t...alk of three exemplary examples, and in subsequent articles, I will splice each one of these topics in further depth.See More

I am a self confessed command line junkie. Sure I see value in GUIs, and GUIs are great to get accustomed to a tool, but once I start crawling, I like to walk, run, and then fly. And when I fly, a GUI’s sluggishness in getting tasks done becomes seriously annoying.

SharePoint is a very powerful platform. It gives you a very easy-to-setup place to put your data in.And you know what happens when you have a tool like SharePoint? People use it! And then when people have been putting in data, they want to retrieve it, in all sorts of weird ways. Putting in data is only half the story, and I’d argue the easier part. It is fetching the data in a meaningful and targeted manner that separates the wheat from chaff.

SharePoint, while good for many things, is probably better at some than others. One thing companies use SharePoint a lot for is Document Management.

Silverlight 2 just went RTM. This product is unique because for the first time in the Microsoft world, you have .NET running cross platform, in a secure way, without all the deployment hassles. It has the ability to bring rich UI, right within the browser-much like Flash, but with more capabilities and a .NET heart.So, what does this mean to you-the SharePoint developer? Well, as I elucidated in my previous article, developing rich UIs in SharePoint 2007 isn’t exactly my... idea of a good time! In fact, it is a bit like a 3-year old playing drums on your head all night long while his 7-year old sister is sticking chewing gum in your hair as you are trying to sleep because you have an early morning 7 AM meeting tomorrow in a recessionary economy.Take heart! The thin .NET 3.5 development model makes it all easier.See More

Whenever you create a new SharePoint website, one of the questions SharePoint asks you is to select an authentication mechanism. Should it be NTLM or should it be Kerberos?The first time I installed SharePoint, I picked Kerberos, because it sounded like a tropical fruit, only to be prompted that this will need more work! Given that I’m the laziest person you know, I changed my selection to NTLM, and went with the less naggy version instead!

In my previous article, I talked about 10 things you wish you knew before you started your SharePoint project.The first five things were focused more towards the architecture and management of the project. In this article, I will follow up with five things targeted specifically for the SharePoint developer.

The cloud means many things. It means Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Bing and - oh yes - Windows Azure! Windows Azure, as you know, is Microsoft’s cloud operating system. It consists of many parts, but at a high level you can say it includes Compute (web and worker roles, plus storage), SQL Azure and AppFabric. AppFabric, in turn, consists of AppFabric Access Control, ServiceBus, and Cache. This article concerns ServiceBus, and its integration with SharePoint 2010 and Office 365.

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is a set of out-of-the-box features, services and tools that enhance SharePoint by streamlining the creation of solutions with deep integration of external data and services into SharePoint!SharePoint 2007 had a similar technology called BDC. But BDC was much more primitive compared to BCS.

This article is excerpted from Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Building Solutions for SharePoint 2010 by Sahil Malik, published by APress, copyright 2010 and is printed with the publisher’s permission.

When a team at Microsoft first conceived of SharePoint, the product team decided that the content database was the best place to store file uploads in SharePoint. Before you pull out daggers, consider that there were many advantages to this choice. You can never have a virus corrupting the server in an upload that goes into the database. No filename issues. Transaction support. Easy backups, etc. Also, believe it or not, for a certain file size (smaller the better), data...bases can actually offer better performance than traditional file systems for storage. In addition, the product team decided to rely heavily on GUIDs and clustered indexes inside the content database - again, a choice with positives and negatives. See More

One of the challenges of working as an on-demand consultant is that I frequently get called into projects where the SharePoint installation is a bit sick, and it is in production.All the usual tricks have been tried, and the Infrastructure Ogre won't let me install Visual Studio on the production systems to truly be able to debug the problem. Yet another problem of being an on-demand consultant is that the clock starts ticking even before I've understood the problem desc...ription.One of the challenges of working as an on-demand consultant is that I frequently get called into projects where the SharePoint installation is a bit sick, and it is in production. All the usual tricks have been tried, and the Infrastructure Ogre won't let me install Visual Studio on the production systems to truly be able to debug the problem. Yet anotherSee More

MasterPages are SO much better in SharePoint 2010 that only in rare cases should you should make a page that isn’t based on one. Sahil explains why.

SharePoint 2007, in many ways, was a v1 release. It was the first time .NET was properly applied to SharePoint, and from SharePoint 2007 onwards the product has done very well. Partly because of the rich built in functionality that comes with SharePoint and party because of its extensible nature - things developers can do.

In my last CODE Magazine article, I professed my love for SharePoint 2013 style workflows. I must say, having been spurned by SharePoint 2010 style workflows, falling in love with a technology with the same name was not easy. In that article, I talked about how workflows can now finally scale and perform; I talked about how to setup workflows and how to use them in SharePoint designer. Microsoft introduced numerous enhancements in SharePoint designer 2013 surrounding wor...kflows, but in this article, I wish to switch gears a bit and talk about the Visual Studio side of thingsSee More

In these series of articles, I intend to take on common everyday problems that face organizations and solve them using SharePoint. If you already use SharePoint, you will probably raise an eyebrow and think “Neat!” at the end of the article. If you don’t use SharePoint yet, maybe this will tip you over the edge.

SharePoint guru Sahil shows us how to get the most from SharePoint installations by making sure that they run as fast and efficiently as possible.

If you’ve ever wondered why SharePoint is so slow and if there was anything you could do about it, you’ll want to read Sahil’s exploration of this common problem.

Sahil teaches you how to organize and automate your work using one of the new features in SharePoint: Extensions.

Hello, my name is Sahil, and I am a worsening SharePointoholic. SharePoint is built on ASP.NET 2.0 - pretty much like human beings are made up of carbon and water. There is a lot in SharePoint that isn’t in ASP.NET. Not only is SharePoint a complex ASP.NET 2.0 application, it also has numerous concepts for things such as profiles, role providers, authorization etc., that are different from ASP.NET.

rewarding experience of writing and speaking is taking a seemingly complex topic and making it more understandable and accessible. In this article, I’ll show how to create and use OLAP databases and cubes using SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 (SSAS 2008). The benefits of OLAP are significant, even monumental - but like most technologies, reaping the benefits means considerable research and effort into leveraging the tools. In the case of OLAP databases, developers nee...d to learn the differences between OLAP databases and relational databases, and how to use the tools that SSAS provides. In this article, I’ll walk through how to create an OLAP database and how to use the tools in Analysis Services to enhance the OLAP database. By the end, you’ll see why businesses and other organizations see the value of OLAP databases. I’ll also briefly cover some of the plans Microsoft has announced for the next generation of OLAP tools. See More

If we have been friends for a while, you must know my opinions about workflows in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007. I didn’t think they were very good, especially from a performance and scalability point of view. Frankly I think Microsoft should have called them “workslows.” Though, I don’t think it was the implementation in SharePoint that was the issue, it was fundamental issues with Workflow Foundation, compounded by the nature of SharePoint that acerbated the issu...es. Well, I am happy to say that Workflows in SharePoint 2013 are something I feel quite comfortable recommending to anyone, and I hope to make that case in this article.See More