MOSS2007/WSS3 SP2 IS OUT

After some rehersals, the SP2 is finally out.

You can get it from the following links:

Wss		http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=79bada82-c13f-44c1-bdc1-d0447337051b
MOSS		http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b7816d90-5fc6-4347-89b0-a80deb27a082
Office client		http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b444bf18-79ea-46c6-8a81-9db49b4ab6e5&displaylang=en
Sharepoint designer		http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=88eff285-0b92-45ed-979b-65aa22304dd6

 
KB Article Links

Description of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 and of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Pack SP2
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953338
Description of 2007 Microsoft Office servers Service Pack 2 (SP2) and of 2007 Microsoft Office servers Language Pack Service Pack 2 (SP2)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953334

 

Related Resources

About Service Pack 2 for SharePoint Product and Technologies (marketing doc, talks about benefit)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=148551

Service Pack 2 Overview (TechNet article links, very useful)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=148374

Updates Resource Center for SharePoint Products and Technologies
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb735839.aspx

The full list of changes in SP2 (Excel 2007 format)
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 Changes
2007 Office Servers SP2 Changes

Full list of downloads for Office System 2007 SP2 (client & server).
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968170
 

Also check de STSADM new command: . preupgradecheck . Are you feeling lucky?

Article: Automate Web App Deployment with the SharePoint API

I came across an article from MSDN that is very straight to the point and shows you some nice approaches for application deployment in sharepoint.

The article with the above name can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507633.aspx.

MOSS 2007 SP2 is comming [Updated]

According to Computer World (http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9131598&intsrc=news_ts_head):

…
Microsoft Corp. has set April 28 as the release date for Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2)
…

Cheers.

[UPDATE 2009/04/16]

From Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Microsoft Office System due to ship April 28th post from The Office Service Pack team, here is teh list of contents of the SP2:

(…)

Changes that impact the server products

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server SP2 include fixes and enhancements designed to improve performance, availability, and stability in your server farms. SP2 provides the groundwork for future major releases of SharePoint Products and Technologies.

• An STSADM command line that scans your server farm to establish whether it is ready for upgrade to the next version of SharePoint and provides feedback and best practice recommendations on your current environment.
• SP2 offers support for a broader range of Web browsers.
• Substantial improvements to Forms-based authentication.

Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Server R2 will be supported on their release.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

• The performance and stability of content deployment and variations feature has been improved.
• A new tool has been added to the STSADM command-line utility that enables a SharePoint administrator to scan sites that use the variations feature for errors.

Excel Services

• SP2 makes it easier to configure Excel Web Access Web Parts on new sites.
• Several rendering, calculation, and security issues have been resolved.
• Some display issues have been addressed.
• Improved compatibility with Mozilla Firefox browsers.

Groove Server

• Improved  synchronization reliability.
• Groove Server 2007 Manager will install and run with SQL 2008.
• Groove’s LDAP connectivity and auto-activation functionality have been improved.
• Error reporting in the Groove Relay Server has improved significantly.
• Groove Relay Server has improved robustness.

Forms Server

• Memory requirements and the page load times for large browser-rendered forms have been reduced.
• Browser rendering of various controls, such as the ‘cannot be blank’ asterisk and the rich text field has been improved.

Project Server

• Better memory management in the queue service.
• Performance to certain database table indexes is improved.
• Resource plans, build team, cost resources, and the server scheduling engine have improved.

Search Server

• Improvements to the reliability and stability of very large corpus crawls.
• Backup-restore has been improved.
• A new command has been introduced to the stsadm.exe tool that lets a SharePoint Administrator to tune the Query processor multiplier parameter.
• Improved accuracy in searches involving numbers.

 

Sharepoint designer is now FREE!

Although a feered tool for a loto f sharepoint developers, IMHO it hás its use and gives you he chance to have a multi-disciplinary team integrated in the same development process. Anyway, if you like it/need it, you can now get I for free from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42.

My Favorite Visual Studio Addins

As promissed, I’ve selected some of my favourite extensions that I have in my toolbox. Check them out (by no specific order…):

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008: a set of useful extensions for the Visual Studio 2008 adding additional functionality to various areas of the IDE.

Test Automation FX: The Test Automation FX framework installs inside of Visual Studio (2005 & 2008) and supports full VS integration, with custom project templates and designers allowing you to build automated user interface tests in your favorite IDE.

Source Code Outliner PowerToy: The Source Outliner PowerToy is a Visual Studio 2008 extension that provides a tree view of your source code’s types and members and lets you quickly navigate to them with filtering inside the editor.

Code Style Enforcer: Code Style Enforcer is a DXCore plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 / 2008 that checks the code against a configurable code standard and best practices.

Resource Refactoring Tool: Resource Refactoring Tool provides developers an easy way to extract hard coded strings from the code to resource files.

XSLT Profiler Addin: Just what the name implies – a XSLT profiler.

Debug Inspector: view the call stacks of multiple threads at the same time, plugs in to the internals of the CLR and automatically detects deadlocks.

WSPBuilder: a nice solution package generator.

GhostDoc: generates comments in your code. Not just ///. It has inference rules to discover where the objects come from and what they are supposed to do. Spooky!

SPDisposeCheck: validates your code against undisposed disposable sharepoint objects. You may also want to check out SpDisposeCheckEx, a wrapper to integrate the tool into VS.

DocProject: generate electronic documentation from your source code comments. Requires sand castle (

TeamReview: helps the review process aloowing you to create tasks associated to selected areas of the code.

I’ll keep you posted as I go along.

Anyway, I’m changing for VS2010, so some of these extensions will become outdated.

Sharepoint Artifact development guidelines

If you are starting to develop sharepoint artifacts, take a look at http://MSSharepointDeveloper.com. There is some useful information to get you going in the right direction.

Extend your Visual Studio

If you are developing for Sharepoint, chances are that you are using Visual Studio J. So do I. Having a couple of free time, I was looking for some addins to help me get rid of some boring or repetitive tasks. Take a look at codeplex (www.codeplex.com) and to http://www.visualstudiogallery.com. You will find some valuable addins for your daily routines. I’ll try to post my favorite ones soon.

Track Moss Hotfixes

Here is na intersting link to keep track of: http://mosshotfixes.com/. Find all the fixes released and what they are out for.

Thanks to Ricardo Henriques for this one!

Who’s afraid of the BIG BIG SPList?

During a Project intervention, I came accross something that just might sound very, very, VERY scary: big sharepoint lists.

There is a mystical number of 2000 ListItems, but this number is not correct. This number is a reference for ListItems per View and not per list. Well, in my scenario, my list was 65.000 ListItems and the client expects to have 150.000+ ListItems. Well, by first thought was “where the hell is the fire escape, let me out, let me out…”. Just kidding . CAML queries to this list were instant thus, no problems there. The problem was around a routine that had to process each and every one of the items, breaking security inheritance and setting a set of a new permission groups.

The routine was in place, but took about 2 seconds to process each ListItem.

Yep, that’s about 36 hours of processing time…!!

Some code refactoring, cleaning, optimization, a lot of adrenalin J and SP1 (don’t ask…), we got the process down to 16 records per second. That’s about 1 hour and 8 minutes.

Considering this process runs in a job and during the night, it allows us to estimate a secure processing time of less that 8 hours for the 150k lists.

So, the main idea is:

• Install SP1, rollups and the latest fixes (beware that some of them may add some glitches)
• Keep you code neat, simple and as atomic as possible
• Profile: profile your code, get execution metrics to you code
• Focus on the operations that are executed the most. Those must be PERFECT!
• String concatenation using “+” is a BIG NO NO. Use string.Format or StringBuilder instead

Besides that, treat big lists as exciting opportunities to refresh your knowledge on writing good quality code J.

bK00L & Have Fun (I know I DO! (sometimes…))

Search customization: the Path property

Search is a powerfull component of the sharepoint architecture. During the customization process, it is frequent to use manage properties to fine tune your results, in my scenario, even to the list level.
Managed properties are like dynamic column names that you can map to internal columns (collection of). After configured, you can use a managed property to filter content by adding it to the where clauses of your SQL statement. I’ll try to post a detailled information on how to create and use managed properties.

For the scope (sorry, couldn’t resist…) of this post, I would like to share something that kept me going for a couple of hours:

• there is a core managed property called “Path”
• this managed property normally contains the URL to the item (page, listitem, document depending on the type of the element)

The tricky part was to find out that if for some reason the item (in this case a document of an unkown extension to the crawller) is not indexed, the Path property contains a link not to the item/element itself, but to the DispForm.aspx that contains the metadata of the document.

Hope this saves you the time I lost…

Cheers.