I’m looking forward to returning to New York City the week of August 30th to work with a client. While there I’ll be presenting at the local SharePoint User Group in Manhattan for their September meeting on Wednesday, 9/1/2010. Here’s the presentation I’ll be doing:

Incorporating Managed Metadata in Custom Solutions
Microsoft injected strong support for metadata, taxonomies and folksonomies in SharePoint 2010 with the addition of the Managed Metadata service application and Managed Metadata field type. While there is plenty of support for metadata across the platform out-of-the-box, Microsoft has included a very robust API in this latest release of SharePoint 2010 to create custom solutions. In this session we'll explore how we can create custom metadata based solutions for use in SharePoint 2010.

» NYC SharePoint User Group
» September SharePoint User Group: New York City :: Register Now

Over the last year I’ve demonstrated a few times how to upgrade a SharePoint 2007 WCM site to SharePoint 2010 at various conferences such as the SharePoint Conference in October 2009 and TechEd 2010. While there are plenty of ways to do this, I thought I’d document my demo for others to duplicate in their own environment.

You may be familiar with the Adventure Works Travel sample SharePoint 2007 Publishing site Microsoft released in 2009. That sample included a lots of content in a content database along with a slew of code in various solutions (*.wsp’s). First I simplified things by stripping down as much of the code dependencies and moved to making it as close to a content database only upgrade. I then used the database attach method of upgrading the site collection (not something I’d do in the real world, but it works here). Once that’s done the site collection works just find in SharePoint 2010.

Next the article demonstrates how to upgrade the site from the SharePoint 2007 UI to the SharePoint 2010 UI using the visual upgrade process. This includes creating a new custom master page and adding the ribbon to the new UI.

At this point there are a few things that break expectedly because of a conflict between the Adventure Works Travel custom UI and the new SharePoint 2010 UI. For instance, the multilingual user interface (MUI) controls aren’t registered in the custom master page and the breadcrumb control is now included in the ribbon which will cause an issue as there will now be two content placeholders with the same name.

The article demonstrates how to resolve these few issues in order to get the ribbon added to the page and upgrade Adventure Works Travel from SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management to SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management.

» Upgrading a Site Collection from SharePoint Server 2007 WCM to SharePoint Server 2010 WCM

Wrapped up my session today at SharePoint Saturday Denver this afternoon on Incorporating Managed Metadata in Custom Solutions. Thanks to everyone who showed up to my session right after lunch! I’ve posted my slides and demos on my company website.

» Critical Path Training - Presentation References

A few months ago I blogged that MSDN published the first chapter from our book, Inside Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Well now there’s even more content for you to grab! The first four chapters are now up on MSDN for you to read online!

• Chapter 1 – SharePoint 2010 Developer Roadmap
• Chapter 2 – SharePoint Foundation Development
• Chapter 3 – SharePoint Developer Tools in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Chapter 4 – Sandboxed Solutions

» MSDN: Inside SharePoint Server 2010
» Amazon: Inside SharePoint Server 2010

Looking at my calendar I see quite a few community speaking events coming up over the next 2-3 months across the US. I’m looking forward to visiting some new places and meeting SharePoint folks in these cities… and I’m sure we’ll see a SharePint in each… at least I hope!

Saturday, August 7 – SharePoint Saturday Denver (Denver, CO)

• Incorporating Managed Metadata in Custom Solutions
  Microsoft injected strong support for metadata, taxonomies and folksonomies in SharePoint 2010 with the addition of the Managed Metadata service application and Managed Metadata field type. While there is plenty of support for metadata across the platform out-of-the-box, Microsoft has included a very robust API in this latest release of SharePoint 2010 to create custom solutions. In this session we'll explore how we can create custom metadata based solutions for use in SharePoint 2010.
• SharePoint Saturday Denver

Saturday, August 28 – Jacksonville Code Camp (Jacksonville, FL)

• Incorporating Managed Metadata in Custom Solutions
  Microsoft injected strong support for metadata, taxonomies and folksonomies in SharePoint 2010 with the addition of the Managed Metadata service application and Managed Metadata field type. While there is plenty of support for metadata across the platform out-of-the-box, Microsoft has included a very robust API in this latest release of SharePoint 2010 to create custom solutions. In this session we'll explore how we can create custom metadata based solutions for use in SharePoint 2010.
• Jacksonville Code Camp

Saturday, September 1 – NYC SharePoint User Group (New York City, NY)

• Incorporating Managed Metadata in Custom Solutions
  Microsoft injected strong support for metadata, taxonomies and folksonomies in SharePoint 2010 with the addition of the Managed Metadata service application and Managed Metadata field type. While there is plenty of support for metadata across the platform out-of-the-box, Microsoft has included a very robust API in this latest release of SharePoint 2010 to create custom solutions. In this session we'll explore how we can create custom metadata based solutions for use in SharePoint 2010.
• NYC SharePoint User Group

Wednesday, September 15 – Chicago SharePoint User Group (Chicago, IL)

• Developing & Extending SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Content Management
  Microsoft made considerable investments in the Enterprise Content Management capabilities in SharePoint 2010. While SharePoint 2010 includes many OOTB features, Microsoft has provided many extensibility points for developers to create robust and custom solutions for ECM scenarios. This session you will demonstrate the out of the box capabilities and how to create document sets declaratively to promote reuse across multiple SharePoint environments. In addition you will see how to introduce custom business logic into the creation of document IDs and interacting with managed metadata programmatically.
• Chicago SharePoint User Group

Thursday, September 16 – Central Ohio SharePoint User Group (Columbus, OH)

• Incorporating Managed Metadata in Custom Solutions
  Microsoft injected strong support for metadata, taxonomies and folksonomies in SharePoint 2010 with the addition of the Managed Metadata service application and Managed Metadata field type. While there is plenty of support for metadata across the platform out-of-the-box, Microsoft has included a very robust API in this latest release of SharePoint 2010 to create custom solutions. In this session we'll explore how we can create custom metadata based solutions for use in SharePoint 2010.
• Central Ohio SharePoint Users Group

Saturday, October 9 – Houston Tech Fest (Houston, TX)

• Silverlight for the SharePoint Developer
  While it was possible to build Silverlight applications in SharePoint 2007, Microsoft has made it much easier in SharePoint 2010. Many SharePoint developers previously avoided Silverlight for various reasons. This session will help those developers get up to speed on what’s involved in becoming a Silverlight developer, the tools used in building Silverlight applications, introduce some popular Silverlight development patterns such as MVVM, show you how to use the SharePoint 2010 Client Object Model to interact with SharePoint 2010 sites and the various deployment options for your Silverlight applications.
• Houston Tech Fest

The new support for LINQ in SharePoint 2010 makes it much easier to read and write data to/from SharePoint lists. The way it works is that you run a utility SPMETAL.EXE to generate the entity model that is used as the context for the queries. Quite helpful but it only includes the fields (the data types in SharePoint like “single line of text”) that are out-of-the-box in SharePoint Foundation 2010 (SPF2010).

Other fields added by SharePoint Server 2010 (SPS2010), field types added by 3rd parties or custom field types you might create won’t show up in the entity model generated by SPMETAL.EXE. This can be challenging to work with some of the more common field types such as those included by SharePoint Server 2010.

This can be a but frustrating as the LINQ model you generated isn’t a match for your list when you are working with something like the Managed Metadata column. Thankfully there is a very easy way you can extend a SPMETAL.EXE generated entity model. 

Consider the following: I’ve created a custom contact list and added a metadata field named Location Tag to it using a Feature receiver the calls the following method:

Next, I generated the entity model by running SPMETAL.EXE against the list. At this point it does not include my custom field Location Tag. Next create a partial class that matches the name of the entity generated by SPMETAL.EXE. In my case this is ContactListWithAutomaticTagsContact and have it inherit from the same type as the entity model does (Contact).

To include the field in the entity the next step is to have the ContactListWithAutomaticTagsContact class implement the ICustomMapping interface. This includes three methods that map the data to the field & vice versa as well as resolve any conflicts:

With this you’ll now have full access to your custom field type, in this case the TaxonomyField, within LINQ queries:

I really wanted to hold a press conference on primetime ESPN for this, but unfortunately the LeBronocalypse blew their budget so a blog post will have to suffice… :)

We at Critical Path Training are thrilled to announce the addition of two fantastic and well known SharePoint MVPs to our list of SharePoint instructors!

Matt McDermott is a SharePoint MVP who’s presented at numerous major conferences such as SharePoint Connections, TechEd and the SharePoint Conference.

Maurice Prather is also a SharePoint MVP as well as one of the few certified & brilliant SharePoint Masters (MCM) in the world. Maurice’s has presented at numerous conferences such as the SharePoint Best Practices Conference and SharePoint Connections among others. In his former life he worked on the SharePoint product team at Microsoft during the development of SharePoint 2007.

Both Matt and Maurice are independent consultants just like our other instructors so if you’re looking for someone to assist you with a deployment or a custom SharePoint project, like the rest of our instructors, they are highly qualified candidates who we highly recommend. Matt and Maurice will be teaching our SharePoint 2007 and 2010 development and administrator courses.

On behalf of myself and my partner Ted Pattison, welcome Matt and Maurice! We’re honored to have you join the CPT family!

Recently the Patterns & Practices (P&P) group at Microsoft announced their completion and public availability of the SharePoint 2010 Guidance (SPG). The SPG provides technical details on key areas of SharePoint 2010 app development and contains a written guide (as a compiled CHM help file), reference implementations with source code and fully documented in the CHM as well as a library of reusable code. As they describe it:

Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010 contains guidance documentation, detailed examples, and a reusable class library. These resources are designed to help solution developers and architects make the right decisions and follow proven practices when designing and developing applications for Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010. The guidance focuses on the building blocks that every developer needs to understand to become an effective SharePoint developer or architect. The guide is provided as a Help (.chm) file and has four core areas: application foundations, execution models, data models, and client models. Eight reference implementations illustrate the core concepts covered in the guide. The reusable class library provides code to help developers build more manageable, flexible, and testable applications. Source code is provided for all reference implementations and for the reusable library. The reference implementations have automated setup scripts to configure the applications.

» P&P SharePoint 2010 Guidance Download Page

The SPG is filled with a lot of cool stuff. One bit of reusable code is the SharePoint Logger. This makes it much easier to write to the Windows Event Log as well as the SharePoint Unified Logging Service (ULS) logs. You’ll also find details on unit testing your application.

Another piece of the SPG provides guidance when doing different various data access techniques / tasks in SharePoint 2010. From working with data in lists to the different data access techniques to working with data that’s external to SharePoint, there is quite a bit of guidance on things you should be considering when working with data in SharePoint. This is just a tip of what you’ll find… you’ll also find models and guidance on building client applications as well.

While all this guidance is helpful, what I always find missing is a sample app to pick through. That’s where the SPG steps in. What you’ll find are these things called reference implementations (RI’s). Each RI addresses a different commonly experienced challenge from external lists, workflows, working with the sandbox and also working with full-trust proxies within the sandbox. Not only will you find executable code, but you’ll also find documentation that walks through each RI explaining it piece by piece.

Simply put, the SharePoint 2010 Guidance is a must read and a tool that should be in every SharePoint developer’s toolbox.

» P&P SPG: Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010

Ever created a Web Part using the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Development Tools for a SharePoint 2010 site? Say you accept the default name, WebPart1. It creates the SharePoint Project Item (SPI) in the Visual Studio project and adds all the necessary files you need like the code file, element manifest and Web Part definition. But then you decide you want to rename the darn thing… so you right-click the SPI in the project and rename it to something like MyWebPart. Making sure everything is cool, you verify the name of the Web Part class was updated, the Web Part definition & the element manifest is cool.

But when you deploy it and try to add it to a page, you get the dreaded “this control isn’t registered as safe” error. So what gives? Savvy SharePoint developers know this usually means they should go check the web.config and see if their Web Part is listed correctly, which they find it isn’t.

Why?

The SharePoint Development Tools have a special place where it lists the safe control entries it ads. If you pick the SPI in the Visual Studio project and then open the Properties tool window (hit [F4] if it isn’t there), you’ll see a collection of Safe Control entries. Make sure it’s correct there and you’ll be good to go.

MSDN recently posted the first chapter as an excerpt from a book that my Critical Path Training colleagues Ted Pattison, Scot Hiller & I have been working on: Inside SharePoint Server 2010. This book is the successor to Inside Windows SharePoint Services 3 and Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It will be available later this fall, but for now you can see the first chapter on MSDN! More chapters will appear on MSDN soon!

» MSDN: Inside SharePoint Server 2010
» Amazon: Inside SharePoint Server 2010