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Have you seen the AJAX libraries API from google? They can be found here: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/

What are they?

Basically its a content distribution network (CDN) for the most popular JavaScript libraries such as JQuery. It provides the officially released libraries in a gzipped form, served from a global CDN, so that your end users hit a server near them.

I feel like I’ve been living under a rock to have just discovered this service. It looks pretty easy to implement.

A couple of random tips for using lists inside of SharePoint:

• Make use of the RSS features of Lists – Each document library publishes an RSS feed which really provides the user with a wealth of options, there is no site collection limits on how that feed is consumed, so it’s possible to use in their MySites etc. If you have Kerberos setup correctly it is possible that other systems can make use of the feed. RSS is a good option to supplement the alerts that a list can send, often users won’t want their email cluttered with alerts.
• Alerts – Granularity is the key to successful alerts, a user can be alerted when a specific view of a list changes. This can make the alert more useful to the end user, we don’t want to spam them.
• Folder Level Permissions beware – The ability to create folder-level and document level security permissions can really cause some headaches for new users and administrators. The feature is really powerful, but can also create complex problems that can be hard to solve. There has been lots of discussion around the need for folders in a document library, I think there is value to be gained from them personally.
• Picture Libraries – It should be noted that the picture libraries have limited support for thumbnail view, it’s not a major limitation but it’s likely to come up in discussions / training with new users.

I came across an interesting scenario the other day where I needed to select some html elements with JQuery that had a class name like:

   1: <input type="radio" class="star star_id_45 star_group_5" />

I wanted to be able to select the elements that contained the class ‘star_id_45’, which as you can see is in the middle of the class string.

The answer was the following code:

   1: $("input[class*='star_id_45']")

Notice the use of the asterix (*), that was the key to getting the selector to work properly.

I ran across an interesting bug with the JQuery thickbox, I pointed it to a URL which was an ASP.NET ashx handler that generates thumbnail images, the result in the browser was this garbled response:

Using Firebug we see that it expects the result to be text/html

Looking at the code it is obvious what the problem is:

   1: var urlString = /\.jpg$|\.jpeg$|\.png$|\.gif$|\.bmp$/;

   2: var urlType = baseURL.toLowerCase().match(urlString);

   3:  

   4: if (urlType == '.jpg' || urlType == '.jpeg' || urlType == '.png' || urlType == '.gif' || urlType == '.bmp') {//code to show images

The code looks at the extension of what it is calling, if it finds any of the common image types, it will send a different request type, so adding the .ashx extension will fix the issue:

   1: var urlString = /\.jpg$|\.jpeg$|\.png$|\.ashx$|\.gif$|\.bmp$/;

   2: var urlType = baseURL.toLowerCase().match(urlString);

   3:  

   4: if (urlType == '.jpg' || urlType == '.jpeg' || urlType == '.ashx' || urlType == '.png' || urlType == '.gif' || urlType == '.bmp') {//code to show images

I’ve just simply added the .ashx as a file extension that should be treated as an image type, this fixed the issue.

I was asked recently if the BDC search results (when indexed by the search) can be controlled by an access list. The answer is that yes, the Security trimmer is the SharePoint feature to accomplish this. In fact any search result can be trimmed, so if you wanted to index some website that used custom permissions (i.e. a content access account that has full rights to a website) but you didn’t want to show that information to say public users of your site, this same security trimmer functionally can be used.

The important things to note are:

• The security trimmer is attached to a crawl rule
• The security trimmer is a class that implements the ISecurityTrimmer interface, the registration process defines the full assembly name, as such it must be loaded into the GAC.
• After the security trimmer is registered, you will need to recreate the content source and perform a full crawl
• Performance might be an issue, since every search result will be access checked, if your looking for insight on how to approach this refer to this MSDN article

At Tech-Ed Barcelona, the new SharePoint related features of Visual Studio 2010 were presented in the keynote:

Taken from Paul Andrew’s Blog

I’ve highlighted the features that I think are exciting, it’s good to see that more tooling support is coming.

I was having a bit of a play around with CRM 4 and build an application definition file that provides the entities: Account, Contact and Product.

So you can use the BDC web parts to display the contacts in the account like:

You can download the Application Definition File here.

Last night I started having a bit of a play with the Azure blob storage system. The first thing to do is install the SDK and get the development storage and development fabric setup.

The SDK gives you the ability to go File –> New –> Cloud Project, I selected the web role for my demo (the other options include a stand alone worker, or combined web and worker roles).

From here I included the StorageClient project from the Azure SDK samples, this has a bunch of wrapper classes that are helpful.

Then I added some appSettings entries that contain URL’s for the development tools:

   1: <appSettings>

   2:   <add key = "AccountName" value="devstoreaccount1"/>

   3:   <add key = "AccountSharedKey" value="Eby8vdM02xNOcqFlqUwJPLlmEtlCDXJ1OUzFT50uSRZ6IFsuFq2UVErCz4I6tq/K1SZFPTOtr/KBHBeksoGMGw=="/>

   4:   <add key="BlobStorageEndpoint" value="http://127.0.0.1:10000/"/>

   5:   <add key="QueueStorageEndpoint" value="http://127.0.0.1:10001"/>

   6:   <add key="TableStorageEndpoint" value="http://127.0.0.1:10002"/>

   7: </appSettings>

The only thing that I was interested in was putting stuff into the blob storage, so I put together a simple asp.net page that contained an upload file control and a button.

I wired up the button event with the following code:

   1: protected void btnTest_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

   2: {

   3:     StorageAccountInfo blobAccount = StorageAccountInfo.GetDefaultBlobStorageAccountFromConfiguration();

   4:     

   5:     BlobStorage blobStorage = BlobStorage.Create(blobAccount);

   6:     blobStorage.RetryPolicy = RetryPolicies.RetryN(1, TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(100));

   7:     

   8:     BlobContainer container = blobStorage.GetBlobContainer(Guid.NewGuid().ToString());

   9:  

  10:     NameValueCollection containerMetadata = new NameValueCollection();

  11:     containerMetadata.Add("Name", "TestContainer");

  12:     container.CreateContainer(containerMetadata, ContainerAccessControl.Public);

  13:  

  14:     string blobName = Path.GetFileName(testFile.PostedFile.FileName);           

  15:     BlobProperties properties = new BlobProperties(blobName);

  16:     container.CreateBlob(properties, new BlobContents(testFile.PostedFile.InputStream), true);

  17: }

To prove that the uploaded file was inserted into the blob, I used the CloudDrive project that is also provided by the Azure SDK, this project provides some PowerShell magic to allow you to mount the blob storage as a drive (the drive is blob:) so in the command window I could do the following:

This just lists all the containers that have been created and then the blob’s that live inside those containers.

Now the interesting part is that we can use the browser to also view our blob:

The MSDN pages give us the details, but basically you browse to http://127.0.0.1/devstoreaccount/<container>/<blobname>

Of course you’ll only be able to browse like this unauthenticated if your container is publically viewable, these attributes were set above with the ContainerAccessControl.Public parameter on the CreateContainer method call.

If your about to go onto a new client’s site to install MOSS or WSS, these are some of the things that need to be considered:

• Base windows install – Hopefully this step will be done for you, as well as any clustering setup either via a load balancer or via NLB.
• Network Access to Servers – Will we have machines that are on the same network as the servers, I’ve been given machines in a test lab that was impossible to use without the VMWare infrastructure client, needless to say that environment didn’t last very long.
• Admin Rights – We need accounts with admin rights to actually install SharePoint
• Active Directory Setup – It’s always a good idea to understand how the organisation is using AD.
• Service Accounts – Make sure the IT department understand the importance of service accounts, hopefully have them pre-created before you get onsite.
• DNS – While you put the request in for the service accounts, double check that your DNS entries are all setup. Have a think about all the zones you intend to use (i.e. are you using web application policy to give admin users god like rights on the admin.portal site?)
• Database – Make sure your setup account has permissions to create databases, you’ll be surprised at how often the DBA’s forget this task.

Remember always to select the complete install, never the web front end only option, you always want the option to change the servers configuration (i.e. start the search server).

Paul Jenkins recently ran a competition around Live Mesh, I subscribed to his live mesh competition folder which is all he needed for entry, pretty hard hey …

I just got an email that I won a copy of Vista Ultimate … how cool. Thanks Paul!

MSDN has a new white paper:

Planning and Monitoring SQL Server Storage for Office SharePoint Server: Performance Recommendations and Best Practices

It covers topics such as:

• Database Autogrowth
• Storage settings for the recycle bin
• Using Quota templates
• List performance
• Physical Topology Guidance
• Disk and SAN interfaces
• Network Topology recommendations
• Physical Storage recommendations
• Separating database data files
• Monitoring, Maintaining, and Troubleshooting (which provides some great performance counters that can be used for monitoring)
• Disk and SQL recommended practices

In all it is a great resource. The direct download is here.

There are a number of options that you can use when you define your connection settings in your BDC ADF file:

The authentication methods are:

RevertToSelf

Simply uses the application pool account (reverts back to this account) to access the database.

   1: <Properties>

   2: <Property Name="AuthenticationMode" Type="System.String">RevertToSelf</Property>

   3: <Property Name="DatabaseAccessProvider" Type="System.String">SqlServer</Property>

   4: <Property Name="RdbConnection Data Source" Type="System.String">servername</Property>

   5: <Property Name="RdbConnection Initial Catalog" Type="System.String">databasename</Property>

   6: <Property Name="RdbConnection Integrated Security" Type="System.String">SSPI</Property>

   7: <Property Name="RdbConnection Pooling" Type="System.String">false</Property>

   8: </Properties>

PassThrough

Passes the credentials of the calling user, this will only work on a single server install or on a farm if Kerberos is enabled.

   1: <Properties>

   2: <Property Name="AuthenticationMode" Type="System.String">PassThrough</Property>

   3: <Property Name="DatabaseAccessProvider" Type="System.String">SqlServer</Property>

   4: <Property Name="RdbConnection Data Source" Type="System.String">servername</Property>

   5: <Property Name="RdbConnection Initial Catalog" Type="System.String">databasename</Property>

   6: <Property Name="RdbConnection Integrated Security" Type="System.String">SSPI</Property>

   7: <Property Name="RdbConnection Pooling" Type="System.String">false</Property>

   8: </Properties>

SQL Authentication

It is still possible to use SQL Server Authentication, the following example uses the RdbConnection properties for this:

   1: <Properties>

   2: <Property Name="AuthenticationMode" Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.ApplicationRegistry.SystemSpecific.Db.DbAuthenticationMode">

   3: RevertToSelf</Property>

   4: <Property Name="DatabaseAccessProvider" Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.ApplicationRegistry.SystemSpecific.Db.DbAccessProvider">

   5: SqlServer</Property>

   6: <Property Name="RdbConnection Data Source" Type="System.String">servername</Property>

   7: <Property Name="RdbConnection Initial Catalog" Type="System.String">databasename</Property> 

   8: <Property Name="RdbConnection Integrated Security" Type="System.String">false</Property>

   9: <Property Name="RdbConnection User ID" Type="System.String">username</Property>

  10: <Property Name="RdbConnection Password" Type="System.String">password</Property>

  11: </Properties>

  12:  

Single Sign On

If your using SSO, this is also supported:

   1: <Properties>

   2: <Property Name="AuthenticationMode" Type="System.String">RdbCredentials</Property>

   3: <Property Name="DatabaseAccessProvider" Type="System.String">SqlServer</Property>

   4: <Property Name="RdbConnection Data Source" Type="System.String">servername</Property>

   5: <Property Name="RdbConnection Initial Catalog" Type="System.String">databasename</Property>

   6: <Property Name="RdbConnection Integrated Security" Type="System.String">false</Property>

   7: <Property Name="RdbConnection Pooling" Type="System.String">true</Property>

   8: <Property Name="SsoApplicationId" Type="System.String">SSO Application you created</Property>

   9: <Property Name="SsoProviderImplementation" Type="System.String">Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.SingleSignon.SpsSsoProvider,
 Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.SingleSignon, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c</Property>

  10: </Properties>

The MSDN documentation can be found here.

Last night I sat down to watch some more PDC sessions, this time it was Anders Hejlsberg presenting The Future of C#.

Anders did a great job presenting, the highlights for me were:

• The general roadmap to v4 – Anders set the expectations around the v4.0 language (also see Eric Lippert’s blog)
• dynamic keyword – Makes COM interop easier, Nikhil has a nice post on what this will mean for JSON.
• optional and named parameters – Again designed to make COM interop easier, no more missing parameters.
• compiler as a service – This was by far and away the most interesting part, he showed off the dynamic compilation features of the complier in 4.0v next, coupled with a great demo showing a REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) program that accepts c# code.

I also watched the keynote presentation from Don Box and Chris Anderson where they showed off some of the Azure platform. As with all Don and Chris demo’s it was really entertaining. The key takeaway was that the Azure platform is based around web standards and that all the tools we currently have will work with Azure. Of course that’s not to say that we don’t need some abstraction from some new libraries (isn’t every problem in computer science solved by another layer of abstraction).