Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP

Abstract: In this session we will take a look at Sandbox solutions, understanding what they are, why they were introduced and why you would want to build one. Based on a real world project at 21apps we will look at why we chose to build one, how the limitations of the sandbox altered our design and how we mixed server side and client side frameworks to provide the solution. We will also take a look at what the future may be and how Sandboxed solutions could change the face of SharePoint forever!

Should I attend: This session will not be a deep dive into Sandboxed Solutions – this session is aimed at providing the audience with an understanding of where Sandboxed solutions fit, why they would want to use sandboxed solutions, why companies are targeting the sandbox and how this could change the way you work!

If you’re not a developer and want an understanding of what Sandboxed solutions are, this session is for you.

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Slide deck from my Automated UI Testing of SharePoint 2010 with Visual Studio 2010 presented at the Best Practices Conferences in Washington DC in August 2010.

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There are some great articles out about setting up SharePoint 2010 to work on Windows 7.

Spence has a few great tips as always.

MSDN has a good post which actually gets you up and running.

One things that I found after getting SharePoint installed was a lack of access to some of the services – namely Services on Server and Add New on Web Applications.
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I have the pleasure of being a speaker at Best Practices conference in Washington DC in August, 2010. Being a ‘best practices’ conference; speakers are given guidelines to work against to ensure their sessions fit in with the overall theme of the conference: Clarity. Direction. Confidence.

One of the challenges with best practices for a new platform is that a lot of these tend to be emergent at best, invalid at worst or just unknown. With this in mind my sessions at the conference are based on real world work that we have done at 21apps, sharing the lessons we have learnt and looking at the emerging practices that, at the time of writing, feel like they have some grounding in becoming or forming part of an accepted best practice.

The sessions I am presenting are both in the developer track; however they have a different target audience.

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Problem

We have set up the correct email SMTP server in Central Administration and everyone is receiving their email alerts correctly.  When we add new users to the site it always fails to send the email reporting an error has occurred.

Investigation

The error in the SharePoint ULS logs shows that the SMTP server connection failed. 

Cannot connect to SMTP host your.smtp.server

Analysis

For any SMTP testing you rely on Telnet by running the command

telnet your.smtp.server 25

This is likely to fail as well with a similar error,  which immediately leads you to the conclusion that the there is a problem with the SMTP server. 

However there is a niggling doubt – if the SMTP server is not working how do the alert emails get sent?
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To help promote the community aspect of SharePoint Retreat and share the knowledge and lessons learned beyond those that were lucky enough to attend we offer a prize for the best sharing of knowledge. This sharing could be in the form of a web cast, blog post, white paper or even presentation at a user group.

As this was the first SharePoint Retreat the prize is really pretty fantastic.

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN subscriptions valued at $11,899 each!*

The prize was donated, indirectly, by Microsoft, I was sent a number of copies to give away for being an MVP and taking part in testing Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

There were some great posts:

@WorTony : SharePoint Retreat

@Weshackett: Review of the day

@nigel_price: SPRetreat London

 But there was one that really stood out and provided some great code samples and “how to”s from the day 

… and the winner of the prize is

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Part 1 – SharePoint Retreat

Part 2 – What a day!

Part 3 – Going forward

The Problem

Cross sell component

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Requirements:

A client wants to be able to have a component on a page which can be used to drive traffic to other areas of their site.

The setting of the problem actually had a fairly big impact on the way the day went – we captured some some ideas in the feedback at the end of the day that I will cover in Part 3.
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Part 1 – SharePoint Retreat

Part 2 – What a day!

Part 3 – Going forward

Only a couple of months ago myself (@AndrewWoody) and James (@draken) were talking about ways we could help development practices in the SharePoint community. Being avid agile enthusiasts we take a close interest in other events and activities outside of the SharePoint world. One event really caught our attention, it focused on improving techniques, it had a simple format that could be tailored and was very much community focused.

In May we announced it, the worlds first SharePoint Retreat!

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Today I found a little problem when working with preconfigured server farm.  The farm had all the user profile services working and there were profiles with data – but no users were returned from search.

A quick look at the logs showed the error:

sps3://machinename  – Error in PortalCrawl Web Service

The problem was caused because the farm had been installed using the Farm Config Wizard  which had set things up to use the machine name for its default web application.  This web application was not being used and so had no site collections created.  The fix was to point the sps3:// url to a web application that did have a root site collection.

In my search for this solution I found some great posts that provide a lot of details about the issue and a combination of these will improve your knowledge of people search and also help you resolve the issue should you happen to have it.

Provides the solution that ultimately fixed my problem

http://trycatch.be/blogs/tom/archive/2007/05/15/people-crawl-error-in-portalcrawl-web-service.aspx

Provides information about a permission setting that was new to me

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/maximeb/archive/2009/10/27/error-in-portalcrawl-web-service-when-crawling-people-with-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Provides great info (albeit taken from the late great Patrick Tisseghem’s book (Inside the Index and Search Enginges:  Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007  )

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/maximeb/archive/2009/10/27/error-in-portalcrawl-web-service-when-crawling-people-with-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Having released 21SCRUM on the 21st June we have been busy putting together a few changes to make it easier to use.  The most important of these is the free trial edition that allows you to download and have a look at 21SCRUM.  The trial edition is fully featured and, along with the other editions, now includes a getting started guide to walk you through from installation to completing your first sprint.

We have discovered a lot during the development of 21SCRUM and will be sharing details of these lessons in future posts.  The most important of these lessons is that the SharePoint Sandbox really is a viable platform on which to build solutions.

Download your trial copy

The 21SCRUM Team