Alexander Brütt

How SharePoint extensions can block your upgrade path

Alexander Brütt — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 07:26:16 +0000

SharePoint extensions are a risky factor when upgrading a SharePoint farm to a new version, e.g. From SharePoint 2007 to 2010. Every SharePoint extension has a potential to no longer function in the new version.

In my opinion a good upgrade strategy is this:

Uninstall all extensions from your existing farm
Upgrade the farm to the next version
Upgrade each solution and reinstall it

The point here is that some solutions might not be able to be upgraded because the vendor does no longer support it or your last SharePoint developer has left the company as the new SharePoint version was released. If this is the case, your site might no longer work with the new SharePoint version.

If your site breaks in the new SharePoint version depends on the kind of extension you use. A site will continue to work if you cannot upgrade a web part solution. But here are some kinds of solutions that cause content to be not accessible when the solution is not upgradable:

Custom field definitions
Custom site definitions
Custom list definitions

I recommend avoiding these kinds of solutions if possible and using site or web templates instead of definitions and using list templates instead of list definitions.

If you have any opinion on this please feel free to comment on this.

Create/Delete site collection with PowerShell

Alexander Brütt — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:40:49 +0000

Today I played some minutes around with Powershell for SharePoint 2010 and easily created a new site collection and also deleted it.

Create new site collection:

New-SPSite -url http://mymachine/sites/powershell -template STS#0 -OwnerAlias “mydomain\alexander.bruett“ -Name “Powershell Testsite”

Delete site collection:

Remove-SPSite -Identity http://hbv83025270/sites/powershell -Confirm:$False

If I were an IT-Pro, I’d love this

Ribbon Hero rocks

Alexander Brütt — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:21:08 +0000

Yesterday I stumbled about Ribbon Hero, a new addon from Microsoft Labs for Office 2007 and 2010. The idea is learning by playing and gaining achievments for using special features within Word, PowerPoint or Excel. The most funny part is the connection to facebook that lets you compare your score with your friends.

http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero

It’s not just funny, it’s also useful. The Ribbon Hero shows you very cool functions you haven’t used yet. Check it out, it’s fun. If you work in a company with lots of Office noobs, it’s a great way to educate them.

Good luck becoming a Ribbon hero

If you want to compare your score to mine, invite me on facebook.

SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 target Framework problems

Alexander Brütt — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:17:10 +0000

Today, I tried to add a reference to the assembly Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.dll and got this warning:

The primary reference "Microsoft.Office.Server.Search, Version=14.0.0.0,
Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c,
processorArchitecture=MSIL" could not be resolved because it has an
indirect dependency on the framework assembly
"System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" which could not be resolved in the
currently targeted framework. ".NETFramework,Version=v3.5". To resolve
this problem, either remove the reference
"Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c, processorArchitecture=MSIL" or
retarget your application to a framework version which contains
"System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35

Solution:

Create a .reg file and add this lines:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework\
v2.0.50727\AssemblyFoldersEx\Chart Controls]
@="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Chart Controls\\Assemblies"

Run this file and the entry will be added to the registry. Restart Visual Studio and the warning will be gone.

SharePoint List vs. Database and Excel

Alexander Brütt — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:08:25 +0000

Yesterday I had a discussion with my colleague about SharePoint lists. Some people use SharePoint to store documents and manage tasks. List data is often stored in Excel files within SharePoint like phone numbers or birthday lists.

We asked us: What would be the best place to store about five linked lists with a few hundred items. We didn’t come up with a final decision because of personal opinions so I tried to find some facts I can make my decision on.

SharePoint List Benefits

When you create a SharePoint List you get a couple of features a Database for example does not deliver:

User interface that allows you to edit, filter, sort, group the data
Ability to search
Security management on list level and item level
Integration with other lists and libraries
Recycle bin
Multiple users can edit data simultaneously
Rich text support
SharePoint alerts
RSS
Select data from other systems using BDC lookup columns

SharePoint List Limitations

Electronical processing of data

Automatic processing and modifying data within SharePoint lists using Event Receiver, Workflows oder Web Services is much more difficult and slower that using Excel or Databases.

Accessing the data from an external system

SharePoint lists cannot be accessed from systems outside of SharePoint very easily. You will have to fight security and the web services of SharePoint. If this is the case a dedicated database might be the best option even if you have to create a user interface for the data management. With SharePoint 2010 it looks like this will become veery easy without coding.

Complex relations between tables

Relations between SharePoint lists is something I try to avoid if there is some potential that things might grow.

Conclusion

I still am not sure where to store 5 linked lists with a few hundred items. But I do see lots of reasons to use SharePoint lists.

I will add more facts while the discussion goes on. If you have any suggestions, feel free to add your comments.

SharePoint Performance Checklist

Alexander Brütt — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:34:55 +0000

I’ve made lots of performance tunings during the last weeks and figured out that this can be a weird, long and complex task. On the one hand there are many built-in mechanism that can be configured and on the other hand there are lots of things you shound pay attention to when you develop your own web parts.

I’ve assmebled a little checklist you can walk through. I do not cover everything in detail but I’ve linked a couple of online posts and articles where you can start reading if you need more information on specific tasks.

	Limit global Navigation & Permission breaks If you have a collaboration site collection with individual permissions on each website or at list level then your navigation controls can slow down your sharepoint performance. SharePoint has to check your permissions for each item listed in the navigation controls what can be very time consuming. Because the global navigation is placed on every web site this impacts your whole site collection. So if you have lots of permission breaks either limit the items displayed by the navigation controls and eleminate the default navigation treeview or implement your custom navigation provider using caching mechanisms and activate object caching.
	Activate Blob Cache The blob cache can be used to reduce the round trips between the WFE and the database server. If activated, all images stored within the site collection are cached on the hard disk of the WFE server. The blob cache can only be configured within the web.config of each web application. Another big point of the blob cache ist the max-age attribute. It tells the browser not to request that image again for a given period of time. So you can use this attribute to reduce the requests between the browser and the WFE. In the web.config file search for the section and set it to the following example: <BlobCache location="C:\blobCache" path="\.(gif\|jpg\|png\|css\|js)$" maxSize="10" max-age="86400" enabled="true"/> Now the cache is enabled and the files with the defined extensions are stored on WFE hard disk and the browser will not rerequest them for about 24 hours. Selvagan posted a great article about the blob cache. Tip: Store the cached files on a different hard disk as the web server to maximize the I/O throughput. If you want to clear the blob cache on all WFE servers at once you need this codeplex solution.
	Activate Output Cache Output caching enables SharePoint to cache HTML markup of Web Parts or complete web pages. This makes sense most if you have a publishing page with anonymous access enabled. If you enable output caching on a site with authenticated users the output is cached for each user individually. This can become a memory issue. Read more in the output caching secion of this MSDN article.
	Activate Object Cache SharePoint can cache objects like navigation elements and Cross-list query results. This should be activated on every SharePoint site. Microsoft has posted an article on how to activate and configure the object cache.
	Indexing of columns If you have large list views that are ordered or filtered you should place an index on those list columns where you set the filter on. An index can also increase the performance if you have a lookup field with many items in the lookup list. Have a look at this Microsoft article on managing lists and libraries with many items and read the Microsoft White Paper: Working with large lists in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Andreas Grabner wrote an article on how list column indexing works under the hood.
	Be careful using the Content Query Web Part If you use the Content Query Web Part to collect data from large lists or from your whole site collection you have to be knowing what’s happening in detail. You can increase CQWP performance using object cache and implementing your own CQWP. Ranjan Banerji wrote a great article on content query web part performance.
	Use Warmup Timer Job If you restart your server for maintenance or reset your IIS during a solution deployment all your web applications are shut down. Now, when the first user requests your website it takes up to a couple of minutes until the web application is reloaded and caches are filled. It would be nice if theres someone who takes a browser and calls every website before the first user does. Joel Oleson wrote a post about a script that acts like that “someone” and triggers all websites of your site. Andrew Connell write a post on how to implement the script as a timer job. You can download the timer job from msdn.
	Watch your crawler A misconfigured crawler can push your server cpu usage to 100% from dusk till dawn. This can happen very quickly if you have an intranet website with lots of members creating new content and uploading tons of documents. Then the crawl duration is growing very quickly. For example if you scheduled your crawler to run every 30 minutes and the crawl duration is longer than 30 minutes your server is crawling all the day. So you should check the crawl log periodically. If your crawl duration becomes too long you have to reconfigure your crawl schedule and crawl your content only once every two hours. If your search index may not be out of date for more than 30 minuts you have to add more search server to the farm. Patrick Thisseghem wrote a great book about the SharePoint search and indexing engine: Inside the Index and Search Engines: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
	Use tools to measure site request performance Use tools like Fiddler, YSlow and Firebug to find out whats going on between the browser and your SharePoint server. Find out if there are long waiting times, too many server requests or ineffective java scripts slowing down your website. Use these tools to check if blob caching works. SharePoint works best if used with Microsoft Internet Explorer but I love the Firefox plugins YSlow and Firebug because they are very easy to use, detailed and give lots of hints if your performance is bad.
	Measure your Web Part performance Every custom web part can slow down your SharePoint website. The SharePoint API often performes not as expected and this can impact your Web Part performance. Use the Stopwatch class in your web part to measure critical code parts and write the results into the web part. Implement a Web Part property to switch on/off the stopwatch results. There are developers out there saying perfomance measures should be part of productive code and rather be made using unit tests or console applications. Those developers are basically right but might have never been to the wild west of SharePoint. A Web Part lives within a SharePoint site and no unit test or console application can simulate that so you have to use your productive web part to make performance tests.

What to do if SharePoint throws “500 Internal Server Error”?

Alexander Brütt — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:30:23 +0000

Yesterday we added a new server to the SharePoint farm. When calling a site over that new server we got an 500 Internal Server Error. There was no entry in the EventLog and even no information in the server log files. We wer trying lots of things but nothing got better. So what could we do to get more information?

We changed the diagnostics logging level from Unexpected to Verbose:

(Central Administration > Operations > Diagnistic Logging)

Then we recalled the website and finally got an error in the log files:

"Cannot make a cache safe URL for "init.js", file not found.
Please verify that the file exists under the layouts directory."

The file is part of every language pack so in our case we did not install a language pack on the new server that is used by the site.

Although this is a simple option to get more error information it’s forgotten or overseen very often.

Alex

SharePoint Groups vs. Active Directory Groups

Alexander Brütt — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:20:38 +0000

I’ve discussed this topic quite often during the last months. After those discussions I figured out that its more a question when to use what kind of group rather than what kind is better than the other. In this post I just write down some advantages and disadvantages of the group types and let you choose what kind fits better for your needs.

SharePoint Group		Active Directory Group
	Members of this group can be added/removed from within SharePoint. The permission to add or remove users from the group can be delegated to SharePoint users.		Members of this group can be managed within Active Directory. Only Active Directory administrators have the permission to modify group memberships.
	Members of this group can be visible to users.		Members of this group are not visible to users.
	Cannot contain another SharePoint group as member.		Can contain another Active Directory Group.
	Must have a unique name on site collection level. The name is the unique identifier of the group.		Can cause serious problems in lage scale scenarios: A user might only be a member of 1024 Active Directory groups (recoursively). If this number is reached the user is no longer able to log on to Windows. Read the Microsoft documentation for more information.
	Can contain SharePoint users that do not exist in the Active Directory.

Create SPFieldLookup programatically

Alexander Brütt — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:21:19 +0000

There aren’t many posts describing how to add a SPFieldLookup column to a list programatically. Here’s how I do it:

I have a list named “MyList” and I have a list named “MyLookupList”. I want to create a lookup column within “MyList” looking up values from “MyLookupList”.

SPList myList = web.Lists["MyList"];
SPList myLookupList = web.Lists["MyLookupList"];
 
myList.Fields.AddLookup("Lookup", myLookupList.ID, false);
SPFieldLookup fieldLookup = myList.Fields["Lookup"] as SPFieldLookup;
// Display Title Column in lookup field 
// (this is shown by default but this way you can change it)
fieldLookup.LookupField = 
  myLookupList.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.Title].InternalName;
fieldLookup.Update();

Low budget SharePoint Services 3.0 Development Environment

Alexander Brütt — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:08:01 +0000

I tried to set up a development environment for SharePoint programming at home on my machine and found out that this isn’t a trivial task if you don’t want to use evaluation software and do not want to invest more than 1000 $.

The big cost factors are operating system and devlopment environment:

Windows Web Server 2008
Visual Studio 2008 Standard

First I evaluated Windows Home Server but this edition would format all drives during setup. Not a good choice if you want to use multiple Windows Systems on the same machine.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to build SharePoint extensions with Visual Studio Express. As long as many Visual Studio extensions do not work with VS Express I’d prefer Visual Studio Standard (or higher).

All else needed for SharePoint Services development is available for free:

SharePoint Service 3.0
Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint Services 1.2 or 1.3
Tools

Alexander Brütt

How SharePoint extensions can block your upgrade path

Create/Delete site collection with PowerShell

Ribbon Hero rocks

SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 target Framework problems

SharePoint List vs. Database and Excel

SharePoint List Benefits

SharePoint List Limitations

Electronical processing of data

Accessing the data from an external system

Complex relations between tables

Conclusion

SharePoint Performance Checklist

Limit global Navigation & Permission breaks

Activate Blob Cache

Activate Output Cache

Activate Object Cache

Indexing of columns

Be careful using the Content Query Web Part

Use Warmup Timer Job

Watch your crawler

Use tools to measure site request performance

Measure your Web Part performance

What to do if SharePoint throws “500 Internal Server Error”?

SharePoint Groups vs. Active Directory Groups

Create SPFieldLookup programatically

Low budget SharePoint Services 3.0 Development Environment