International SharePoint Professionals Association

Posted on July 16, 2008
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The International SharePoint Professionals Association, also known as ‘ISPA’, is an independent, not-for-profit, community-driven organization dedicated to support SharePoint professionals and groups all around the world. The primary mission of ISPA is to promote the global adoption of SharePoint Technologies by providing support and guidance to the SharePoint community as a whole – by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals, groups, resources, education and information. ISPA is led and supported by volunteers across the world, and will focus on bringing the entire SharePoint community closer together.

ISPA’s first offering to the community is support to user groups around the world through free WSS v3 web sites for any group that becomes ISPA-affiliated. In addition, one of the goals of ISPA is to facilitate an exchange of ideas between user group leaders that helps increase the likelihood of their group’s success. Therefore, ISPA is providing leaders of user groups with access to collaborative spaces where they can interact with other user group leaders, sharing ideas, resources, best practices, guidance, and most importantly – support for one another.

ISPA has also established Regional Evangelists – existing community leaders who have previously exhibited a strong commitment to the promotion of the SharePoint community, and who have pledged to carry the ISPA message throughout their particular region. These evangelists are key local contacts who are available to work with local SharePoint professionals and user groups throughout their region to help promote the community and SharePoint. If you are interested in starting a user group, have an existing one, or need guidance – the ISPA Regional Evangelists are great resources who are available immediately to assist you.

Finally, as everyone knows, no community is complete without a web site, and ISPA is proud to announce the launch of its official site, http://www.sharepointpros.org. While the web site is still in the early stages of development, plans for multilingual support and exciting functionality that will assist anyone involved with SharePoint are on the horizon.

Here is a list of Regional Evangelists. I and Eli Robillard are covering Canada. The site is in work-in-progress mode and I’ve promised Bob Fox to give him a hand on improving it (so far I have done nothing on the site;)). If you have any questions , please feel free to contact me.

Comments in CAS permission set

Posted on July 5, 2008
Filed Under SharePoint | 2 Comments

In case you want to add informative comments to your CAS permission set node in your manifest.xml - for example something like the red line below:

<CodeAccessSecurity>
<PolicyItem>
<PermissionSet class=”NamedPermissionSet” version=”1″ Description=”Permission set for MyControls.”>
<!–Do not try to be cool by adding comments inside your PermissionSet node, okay?–>
<IPermission class=”System.Data.SqlClient.SqlClientPermission, System.Data, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089″ version=”1″ Unrestricted=”true”/>
</PermissionSet>
</PolicyItem>
</CodeAccessSecurity>

When you wrap your code into a package and deploy it , here is what you get in the CAS configuration file (stored in ….\12\config\) without any of your IPermission nodes applied:

<CodeAccessSecurity>
<PolicyItem>
<PermissionSet class=”NamedPermissionSet” version=”1″ Description=”Permission set for MyControls.”>
<!–Do not try to be cool by adding comments inside your PermissionSet node, okay?–>
</PermissionSet>
</PolicyItem>
</CodeAccessSecurity>

And here is what ULS log shows :

CAS Deployment :
Added CAS Permission Set. Xml :
<PermissionSet class=”NamedPermissionSet” version=”1″ Description=”Permission set for MyControls.” Name=”mypackage.wsp-8b8f6f28-7235-42c9-93a6-8fa57e962ddb-1″>
<!–Do not try to be cool by adding comments inside your PermissionSet node, okay?–>
</PermissionSet>

It seems that deployment APIs ignore applying IPermission nodes when there is a comment line in the beginning of PermissionSet. In short, comments in CAS permission set node is NOT welcome!

com[single digit] is a reserved word

Posted on July 1, 2008
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In either WSS or MOSS, If you name a site prefixed with the word “com” following a single digit - for example com1,com2…com9 , SharePoint UI won’t throw a validation error, but upon browsing to the site , you will get the following nasty errors. Okay , why do I need to call a site prefixed with “com”? In our CRM product , we have this notion called “Communities”, self-standing collab sites which are derived from within CRM UI. While testing site provisioning code and the underlying site definition and for simplicity , we named the site “com1″ and observed this behavior.
Action: Create a site collection or subsite and give it this title and url : com1 or com2 or com3………or com0.
Template: Whatever
Errors:”An unexpected error has occurred” [Screenshot]
Or
“The resource cannot be found” [Screenshot]
Or
A blank page is shown as default.aspx

While trying com10 , we got “The page has encountered a critical error” once [Screenshot] , but after doing IISRESET we never got that error message again. It was just a hiccup

All the other sites named with com[Double digits] (com01~com09) seem to be working just fine.

It turned out that Com1 through com9 are kind of reserved words , referring to the serial ports. You can’t create a file in the file system called com1 either.
(Thanks to Todd Klindt for pointing me at this one)

MVP for another year!

Posted on July 1, 2008
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I have been head-down, full speed ahead with wrapping up my current projects and opening up a new branch for Development Horizon in US. Unfortunately, until I become Canadian Citizen (which God knows when!!) , traveling to states is just out of question so I had to come up with another solution and team up with people who can serve our customers with myself being remotely guide them through. In all honesty, this is a though way of doing business and I have gone through a lot, but for me it just seems that there is no other option! Good grief, All this has kept me away from my blog for almost a month, but I am back to my little cyber corner again!

BTW, I was just notified that Microsoft rewarded me again with the MVP award with the main competency in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 . This makes it the third time I have ever had the honor to be part of this dynamic and smart community, twice in SharePoint and once in SQL Server Reporting Services back in 2005.

I’d also like to announce that this year, Greater Toronto Area has another SharePoint MVP around, Bill Brockbank. Bill is one of the most active members of our SharePoint community and speaks at various user groups and industry events.Happy to have you joining the Canucks MVP family, Bill! Go Canada, go!

Hello Sweden!

Posted on May 23, 2008
Filed Under General, SharePoint | 2 Comments

I am excited to announce that I am speaking at the SEF 2008 in Stockholm (Sweden) September,8th 2008. I’ve never been to Sweden before , so this is a great opportunity to not only get to know the Swedish SharePoint community, but also pay a visit to this peaceful country which has always been on my must-to-go countries list.

I am presenting two sessions on the following topic on the first day of the conference in two back-to-back time slots starting from 9:30 AM to 12:00 AM. For those of you who are planning to attend my sessions, all I can say is that , I will have a tone of technical stuff (Not a single PowerPoint slide) to fill your brain with and to get you excited about the power of SharePoint open-source community!

Deep dive into the SharePoint Community Kit (CKS):IEE project
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides an excellent platform to build upon, which is exactly what the developer community did when a variety of individuals worked together to build the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS). The Community Kit for SharePoint contains many different projects that enhance and extend the built-in functionality of SharePoint. In this developer session, we will explore the CKS, specifically looking at the Internet/Extranet Edition (IEE), ins and outs. We will look at how the use of this community project will provide you the foundation to quickly deploy commonly requested features without having to wait for the next version of SharePoint. You will also see how great the SharePoint community is with these amazing additions with easy to deploy solutions built and supported by the Microsoft open-source community!

Can’t wait to see you there!

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