Amar Galla’s Weblog

Recently someone asked me if any of the SharePoint 2010 books are out yet. I know there are quite a few books which are scheduled to release this spring / summer however not sure if there are any books currently available in the market. Will update once I find some good book recommendations for SharePoint 2010.

Recently I have started developing a few products for the SharePoint 2010 space. It has been quite a satisfying experience. Hopefully if everything is on schedule, you should be seeing first glimpses of some of our products this summer. We have been working quite hard in getting some unique and interesting concepts in the market. Hopefully it will help make your SharePoint 2010 experience even more enjoyable.

Not sure how many of you have started working seriously with SharePoint 2010. I am pretty impressed with it, and am looking to do more and more work with it in the coming days. Going to try migrating a few test 2007 portals to 2010 and hopefully, the migration story will be a smooth success even for sites with complex customisations.

I have been playing with the API for a while and have migrated a few of the webparts we are working on for 2010. It was quite a smooth process. We are spending more and more time developing some exciting products for 2010, so looking forward to releasing the beta versions in a few months. Stay tuned.

Just came across a nice site to introduce SharePoint to .NET developers. A nice resource area for existing .NET developers who want to get up to speed with SharePoint.

Just heard it over at Spence Harbar’s blog that from January 13th 2009, no support will be provided for SharePoint systems which are not SP1 patched. If you have not already applied SP1, don’t delay and be caught out with an unsupported system.

See: Microsoft Support Lifecycle for their products

Some of my old readers would have noticed that I’ve stopped blogging for quite a while now. Thing in my personal life, kept me busy and off blogging.

However, I am very much here, and dying to start blogging again. While I was in hibernation, the world has moved ahead leaps and bounds. MOSS is getting more and more popularity, and I am seeing people get excited about SharePoint more than I have ever seen before. I have been working with MOSS for a little while now, and it is HUGE. So while I begin another journey to learn, hack and understand the nitty gritty’s of MOSS, I will try my best to keep discussing my findings with you. Had been busy with an architecture project in MOSS and currently working with a MOSS OpenXML based project. Have learnt a lot of things, but MOSS does amaze me daily.

For this so called first post, I will just list out some interesting pieces from fellow bloggers which I have been reading lately.

Andrew Connell posted a nice article on getting Silverlight working in SharePoint.

Spencer Harbar has posted a nice article on Internet Sites Licensing with SharePoint.

The Microsoft SharePoint Team has a nice article discussing the architecture for Building a News Workbench.

Paul Andrew has a short and effective task list on getting started with SharePoint development. Very practical advice here.

Doug Mahugh has some fantastic resources for those interested in getting started with Open XML. One of the best compilations I have seen.

And last but not least, Todd Baginski has a nice article on programmatically customising Site Navigation in WSS and MOSS.

I just heard that the Office Servers including SharePoint 2007 are available for download at MSDN now. Not sure if this is old news or not, but a heads up to anyone who has not been keeping track. Go to MSDN and download SharePoint 2007 now

If you are trying to programmatically add items to a sharepoint list, using the web services, you might encounter this error while analysing the return value. I was adding entries to the site directory and on adding an entry, you get a XML result set back. Something similar to what is presented below: ( I have omitted bits which are not relevant )

<Results xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/”>
<Result ID=”2,New”>
<ErrorCode>0×00000000 <ID />
<z:row ows_ID=”20″ … xmlns:z=”#RowsetSchema” />
</Result>
</Results>

Now, the problem is when you try to parse this, you will encounter the error “Prefix ‘z’ is not defined”. This happens because at this stage, the XML parser does not have any idea what the z in the z:row stands for. The solution I used, was to create a NamespaceManager and add the namespace of z to it manually. The following code will parse the resultset we have.


SiteDirectoryWS.Lists sd = new SiteDirectoryWS.Lists;

…
// form the xml to add an entry in the Sites list.

XmlNode returnNode = sd.UpdateListItems(“Sites”, insertListElement);

XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument;
xmlDoc.LoadXml(returnNode.OuterXml);

XmlNamespaceManager nsmgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(xmlDoc.NameTable);
nsmgr.AddNamespace(“z”, “#RowsetSchema”);
nsmgr.AddNamespace(“rs”, “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:rowset”);

XmlNode elem = returnNode.SelectSingleNode(“.//z:row”, nsmgr);

If (elem != null)
retID = elem.Attributes(“ows_ID”).Value;