SharePointNista

Do not enable builtin theme if you custom brand your site

2010-03-27T16:31:00.001-05:00

Our first iteration package was deployed last Friday, which mostly includes the branded piece for the public site. We scrambled until late evening to sort out some entangled loose ends. The goal is to provide a custom MasterPage, some custom ASP.NET webpartpages, a couple of content query web parts, and with some branded CSS files.

During our first pass, what threw me off was, the look and feel of masterpage. Even though it properly registered with all of css files, seems to get altered with some HEX values in it
I expected my CSS to render as follow:

<link href="/_layouts/1033/styles/Themable/MyStyle.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"></link>

Instead, I got

<link href="%E2%80%9D/_themes/%3Ci" rel="”stylesheet”" type="”text/css”"></link>[UniqueCounter#]/mystyle-<i>[u=UniqueHex#]</i>.css?ctag=<i>[UniqueCounter#]</i>”/>

I thought my package misses some of intended css file, but it wasn't the case. The culprit is actually the OOB enabled theme. SharePoint will place the enabled theme with some higher precedence then the custom stylesheets. After revert the site theme to the default setting (or None), everything render correctly.

Feature Activation – Scope – Dependency Management

2010-03-23T10:52:00.003-05:00

I recently run into a problem with deploy my solution. It complains about scope dependency:

Error occurred in deployment step 'Activate Features': Dependency feature 'Branding.CSSRegistration' (id: 8d91419f-7782-47ac-85fc-a23eeb3b44a1) for feature 'Portal.MasterPage' (id: 791a6ba1-1d18-43a6-ae2b-3c98dfaaa459) is not activated at this scope

My rabbit hole started with light reading to refresh my memory about Activation Dependencies and Scope, I also recommend this article by Rasor to get a solid foundation before trouble shooting this problem.
Both of my features are deployed at the same level, but as you can see in the package explore, it the CSSRegistration was pushed out after the MasterPage

Using the UP/Down buttons to move around the features order, I was able to resolve this issue.

Irony About Free SharePoint Event

2010-03-21T04:16:00.002-05:00

You know it’s a free event (doesn’t mean it has no value), when their SharePoint site throws an exception like this one

TwinCities SharePoint Saturday After Thoughts

2010-03-21T03:56:00.001-05:00

It's good to see a good turn-out this year at the TwinCities SharePoint Satuday. I hadn't been to prior years' event to get a good comparison. Overall, it's a good and hungry crowd for SharePoint knowledge. And literally, these folks need some nourishment, they camped in the build since 8:00a in the morning.

Audience of my session were more interactive, making it a joy to speak and share at the event. The slide for my talk can be downloaded here. I couldn't demo much during the presentation due to poor connection of the guest wireless network. The U is cutting down its budget, everything else is effected by it, including the bandwidth.

It'd be OK if the demo could be ran off the local box without having to rely on a internet connection. Mine was not the case. How can one demo a hyper-v environment from a shady Dell Latitude D600 that bought for less than $500 without internet? This is certainly embarrassing and something that needs get improved.

I am in the middle of the a major deployment, which make me a very tired Dad. Not only that, my company party is on the same day. Almost lost my voice by day end. I will respond to everyone's request and comments shortly.

Exception when adding a content query Web Part

2010-03-18T17:12:00.002-05:00

In my previous post, the line where AddWebart was called throws an inexplicable exception “Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation." The strange things is this exception only encounter the first time when the feature was deployed and activated.

It seems to me it only occurs the first time since it didn’t have enough time to load the list content, but after that, everything went fine. So just go ahead and wrap it with a try/catch block

try
{                        
LatestNewsCQWP webPart = (LatestNewsCQWP)manager.ImportWebPart(reader, out errorMessage);                        
manager.AddWebPart(webPart, "RightColumn", 1);
manager.SaveChanges(webPart);
}
catch {}

Add Custom Content Query Web Part Programmatically

2010-03-18T15:00:00.002-05:00

I’ve struggling to figure out how to add a CQWP to my custom default webpartpage in the previous post. This webpart pulls content from a list of type blog post and group items by category. The initial effort led me to following block of code. Add off course, it failed

LatestNewsCQWP webPart = (LatestNewsCQWP)GetWebPart(web, WebPartFileName);
using (webPart)
{
webPart.WebUrl = "/news";
webPart.ListUrl = "/news/Categories";
webPart.Title = WebPartTitle;
webPart.ServerTemplate =
webPart.GroupBy = "PostCategory";
webPart.ItemStyle = "CustomStyle";
webPart.ListName = "Post";
webPart.ItemXslLink = "/Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/CustomItemStyle.xsl";
webPart.CommonViewFields = "Title,Text;Body,RichHTML;Author,User;PostCategory,Lookup;NumComments,Lookup;PublishedDate,Date;LinkUrl,Text";

using (SPLimitedWebPartManager manager = web.GetLimitedWebPartManager(DefaultFileName, PersonalizationScope.Shared))
{
//if web part already exists then return
foreach (System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart oldWebPart in manager.WebParts)
{
if (oldWebPart is LatestNewsCQWP)
{
manager.DeleteWebPart(oldWebPart);
break;
}
}

manager.AddWebPart(webPart, "RightColumn", 1);
manager.SaveChanges(webPart);
}
}

The next attempt based off a suggestion by Michael Hoffer, and it got me to the right track.  The key here is to use the ImportWebPart method against an existing webpart from the site catalog

public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
{
using (SPSite site = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite)
{

// back up the original home page            
SPWeb web = site.RootWeb;

var defaultPage = web.Files[DefaultFileName];
var originalStream = defaultPage.OpenBinaryStream();
web.Files.Add(BackupFileName, originalStream, true);

// move the new default page to default.aspx
var newDefaultPage = web.Files["CustomDefault.aspx"];
var newFileStream = newDefaultPage.OpenBinaryStream();
defaultPage.SaveBinary(newFileStream);

//Add LatestNewsWebPart

using (SPLimitedWebPartManager manager = web.GetLimitedWebPartManager(DefaultFileName, PersonalizationScope.Shared))
{
//if web part already exists then return
foreach (System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart oldWebPart in manager.WebParts)
{
if (oldWebPart is LatestNewsCQWP)
{
manager.DeleteWebPart(oldWebPart);
break;
}
}
string errorMessage;
string url = web.Url + "/_catalogs/wp/" + WebPartFileName;
XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(new StringReader(web.GetFileAsString(url)));
LatestNewsCQWP webPart = (LatestNewsCQWP)manager.ImportWebPart(reader, out errorMessage);
manager.AddWebPart(webPart, "RightColumn", 1);
manager.SaveChanges(webPart);
}
web.Update();
}
}

Create Custom Default Page for SharePoint 2010 Team Site

2010-03-17T15:42:00.005-05:00

I was able to custom my default page after some hair pulling. The steps are illustrated below:

Step 1 -Make sure your IDE is attached to the right process, i.e, OWSTIMERV4.EXE

Step 2 - Update the elements manifest to tell where to find the custom file, and where it needs to deploy to.

xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

Module>

Elements>

Step 3 - Set up post build commands

Step 4 - Create Event Receiver

public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

{

// back up the original home page

SPSite site = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite;

SPWeb web = site.RootWeb;

var defaultPage = web.Files[DefaultFileName];

var originalStream = defaultPage.OpenBinaryStream();

web.Files.Add(BackupFileName, originalStream, true);

// move the new default page to default.aspx

var newDefaultPage = web.Files["CustomDefault.aspx"];

var newFileStream = newDefaultPage.OpenBinaryStream();

defaultPage.SaveBinary(newFileStream);

}

public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

{

// restore the back up

SPSite site = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite;

SPWeb web = site.RootWeb;

var originalDefaultPage = web.Files[BackupFileName];

var originalStream = originalDefaultPage.OpenBinaryStream();

SPFile defaultPage = web.Files["default.aspx"];

defaultPage.SaveBinary(originalStream);

originalDefaultPage.DeleteAllPersonalizationsAllUsers();

originalDefaultPage.Delete();

}

Hello World

2010-03-17T10:41:00.001-05:00

Welcome to my very first blog. This site is dedicated to my SharePoint development experiences – all the pain and heartache. Come on board and explore with me all the rabbit holes of this journey. Once in a while, I will make a detour to talk about how I "feel" about this whole process. So unless you are "emotionally healthy", this site might not be very helpful J

There are many hurdles since the product is still in Beta, and I believe Microsoft won't be able to fix all the bugs way after it goes live. Please share your comments and discoveries with me as you come along.

At this time, we are developing an ECM site on top of MOSS 2010 Beta using VS 2010 RC1 in a Hyper-V environment. Our codes and automated builds are "managed" by Team Foundation Server 2010. I will present a talk about a similar scenario to a group of developers at my alumni - University of Minnesota this coming Saturday March 20^th, 2010.