The SharePoint Hive

We have a form which is used for requesting leave. We were asked to put a cancel button on it so that the requester could cancel their request if it has not been approved yet. This would need to cancel any attached workflows. The approval workflow is a standard SharePoint approval workflow.

The workflow is based around a task assigned to an approver in the workflow.

This task would be created by Start Approval Process in the workflow.

Unfortunately SharePoint does not provide a good solution for deleting this.

You could write an event handler but that’s hard to manage.

You could show users how to manually cancel workflows but that’s too complicated for some users.

You could create some whacky workflows that manage themselves but that’s too messy.

Our solution:

In the form create a status field. This field will have the following possible values: pending, cancelled, approved, rejected.

When a user cancels the leave request by clicking cancel in the form, we will update the status of the form to be cancelled. There will still be a task assigned to the approver that needs to be cancelled.

change the behaviour of the task

to check when the status field in the form changes to anything but pending.

Once it changes you can End Task Process to cancel the task.

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At this point in the journey we need to tell the VM where to find the files we want to index.
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To see the correct ApplicationBar icons in the DatePicker and TimePicker, you will need to create a folder in the root of your project called "Toolkit.Content" and put the icons in there. The toolkit provides the necessary icons, but you have to copy them from the PhoneToolkitSample project. They must be named "ApplicationBar.Cancel.png" and "ApplicationBar.Check.png" and the build action must be "Content"!

Source: WP7 DatePicker and TimePicker in depth | API and Customization

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As a developer of solutions for the SharePoint 2010 platform, you may on occasion find the need to determine the account identity of the SharePoint 2010 Timer Windows Service (SPTimerV4). The following method will return the service’s account name for you.

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private static string GetSPTimerJobAccountName()
{
   string retval = null;
   ServiceController[] controllers = ServiceController.GetServices();
   var cont = controllers.Where(c => c.ServiceName == "SPTimerV4");
   ServiceController svc = cont.FirstOrDefault();
   if (svc != null)
   {
       System.Management.SelectQuery query = new System.Management.SelectQuery(string.Format("select name, startname from Win32_Service where name = '{0}'", svc.ServiceName));
       using (System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher(query))
       {
           foreach (System.Management.ManagementObject service in searcher.Get())
           {
               retval = service["startname"] as string;
           }
       }
   }

   return retval;
}

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Need InfoPath training? We’ve got just what you’re looking for!

SharePoint Solutions offers quality hands-on classroom-based InfoPath training.

Learn the ins and outs of creating digital forms that your users won’t mind using.

Four days is all it takes to master digital form creation in InfoPath 2010, and to learn the basics of routing those forms through common business processes using SharePoint 2010 workflow, through our new course, InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 No-Code Workflow Deep Dive (Intermediate).

In this instructor-led 4-day “deep dive” course, you’ll learn:

• To understand forms as a primary driver of business processes
• To design digital forms that work – asking the right questions the right way
• To understand the varied audiences for your forms and the data they need
• A framework for determining what questions your form needs
• Form layout and design best practices
• What controls are available for InfoPath forms and how they work
• How to create data connections to receive data from external sources

and much, much more.

In addition, you’ll learn to use SharePoint Designer 2010 to create powerful SharePoint workflows to automate the routing of those InfoPath forms through common business processes. You’ll discover:

• The different types of workflows you can create and when to use them
• Item events which trigger workflow
• Steps, actions and conditions: the building blocks of workflow design
• Else-if conditional branching and (MS) Boolean logic
• How to test and debug your workflows

and so much more.

Familiarity with the basics of SharePoint 2010 is required, but no previous experience with InfoPath 2010 or SharePoint Designer 2010 is necessary.

Packed with information and hands-on experience!
Classes are filling up fast, so prompt registration is highly recommended.

Check scheduled dates and locations of upcoming classes.

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The developer dashboard is great for debugging web parts just by turning it on. There are also a few simple API calls you can use to add your own debugging information.

First turn it on

First make sure you have an elevated administrator prompt. You need to right click and say run as administrator to get this. There’s no error from STSADM if you aren’t elevated, it just wont perform the operation.

CD \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\BIN

STSADM –o setproperty –pn developer-dashboard –pv OnDemand

I remember it as developer dash dashboard so I get the –pn option right. The –pv option is case sensitive.

Once it’s turned on here are a few API calls you can use to output information.

Add a timed method scope in the left pane

This will add the text Some timed scope and it will list the number of milliseconds that the scoped code takes on the developer dashboard left pane.

using (SPMonitoredScope sc = new SPMonitoredScope(“Some timed scope”))
{
  // some code in here that you think may take time
}

Add a log, warning or assert message

This will add a message on the right side and at runtime you can click on the counter to see the detailed long message and a call stack. The call stack can add 2 or 3 Kb to your web page download so bear in mind this can significantly increase your time to page render if you have hundreds or thousands of these on a page and developer dashboard is turned on.

SPCriticalTraceCounter.AddDataToScope(uCounter, “Your category”, traceLevel, “Detailed long message”);

The traceLevel interprets the following to strings in the output:

1 Critical
4 Exception (Watson)
6 Assert
8 Warning
10 Unexpected
15 Monitorable

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There are some exciting things happening around Microsoft cloud services. One of the services is Windows Azure marketplace DataMarket, a cloud service that helps end users who need data for business analysis and decision making. You can conveniently consume the data you subscribe to directly in such Microsoft Office applications as Microsoft Excel 2010 and Microsoft business intelligence tools as PowerPivot and SQL Server Reporting Services. Then you can share the reports and visualization you create in SharePoint. To learn more, see the DataMarket_Whitepaper.

There are some end-to-end scenarios where Office draws data from the cloud through DataMaket, then shares it in SharePoint Server 2010 through Excel Services and perhaps from there to a PerformancePoint Services dashboard. The following diagram is a specific scenario where data is drawn from the DataMarket, then saved to your desktop, then shared on SharePoint Server 2010 through Excel Services.

Note: Office365 is included in the image only to give the big picture, in that there are three major offerings and DataMarket is a result of what is offered in Windows Azure and SQL Azure.

This post highlights the DataMarket Add-In for Excel, which is a free application that allows discovering and importing data from Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket into Microsoft Office Excel. I also give a brief description of each cloud offering.

DataMarket Add-In for Excel (how it works)

The DataMarket Add-in for Excel (CTP1) gives you a simple experience allowing you to discover datasets published on the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket. You can browse and search for a rich set of datasets from content publishers within a tool you’re already familiar with, Excel. Here is how:

1. Download the add-in here, open the folder (or save to your machine), and double-click the Windows Installer Package.

Note: You may be asked to download Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile. The 4.0 framework installs the WCF Data Services, which is a component of the .NET Framework that enables you to create REST-based services and applications that use the Open Data Protocol (OData) to expose and consume data over the Web.

2. Open Excel and click the Data tab to see that the add-in was installed as extension to Excel. You should see a button named Import data from DataMarket in the Excel ribbon, as follows:

3. Click the Import data from DataMarket button. The sign-in dialog box opens:

This dialog box introduces the DataMarket and lets you:

• Browse the marketplace: Clicking this link opens a new browser window where you can browse the datasets exposed by the DataMarket.
• Sign up for DataMarket: Opens the browser with the sign-up page for the DataMarket. Signing up is free!
• Privacy statement: Opens the browser showing the privacy statement for this add-in.

The main purpose of this dialog box is to help you sign in to your list of subscribed datasets. To sign in, you need to provide an account key. An account key is your password to access all the datasets in the DataMarket and it can be found at https://datamarket.azure.com/account/keys. Because the account key is your password (tied to your DataMarket account), you need to sign up with the DataMarket to get access to it.

Copy the account key from the account key page (https://datamarket.azure.com/account/keys) and paste it into the Account key field. Additionally, you can specify whether the account key is being saved for further use by checking the Remember my account key check box.

If you have signed up, copy your account key and click Sign-In to load your subscribed datasets.

The following screeshot shows the three datasets I signed up for. Some datasets, such as STATS, charge a fee. Other datasets are free but may have limitations on the data you can view. For example, Zillow gives you 3,000 transaction per month for free. The other data providers offer a various number of transactions.

For next steps see:

Excel Services overview (SharePoint Server 2010)

Publish a workbook to Excel Services

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We completed and published the SharePoint VSeWSS Import tool. This tool is an add-in to Visual Studio 2010 and it adds a new SharePoint project template for importing a VSeWSS project.

VSeWSS or the Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services are the Microsoft tools for creating SharePoint 2007 projects on Visual Studio 2008. In Visual Studio 2010 we have built in tools for creating SharePoint 2010 projects. This import tool takes a VSeWSS project that is targetted at SharePoint 2007 and migrates it to Visual Studio 2010 where it is targetted at SharePoint 2010.

The import tool is distributed as source code so you will need to compile it before using it. There’s a batch file provided for this and you just need Visual Studio 2010 installed and to run the batch file.

The import tool works at the project level, not the solution level. So if you have a solution with multiple projects you will need to import them one by one and get them all going.

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Three new MSDN Virtual Labs are live running SharePoint Server 2010 and Visual Studio 2010. You can work on these labs and learn SharePoint 2010 development without having to install SharePoint 2010 or Visual Studio 2010 on your machine. All you need is a web browser that can support our remote desktop ActiveX control and you can run these labs on our servers.

MSDN Virtual Lab: Developing a Visual Web Part in Visual Studio 2010

After completing this lab, you will be better able to work with existing Web Parts and Linq and also you will be more familiar with connecting two web parts.

MSDN Virtual Lab: Developing a BCS External Content Type with Visual Studio 2010

After completing this lab, you will be better able to build a BCS External content type, create a Business Data Catalog Model project, configure the External Content Type for offline use, and open the list using Outlook.

MSDN Virtual Lab: Developing SharePoint 2010 user interface with Silverlight in Visual Studio 2010

After completing this lab, you will be better able to create a basic Silverlight application that displays a SharePoint list inside a datagrid and deploy the Silverlight application to SharePoint, and also create a Silverlight application that displays SharePoint list data in a graph using the Silverlight Graphing controls.

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Author: Tobias Zimmergren http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren Introduction If you are a SharePoint developer, you often need to dig into the logs in the 12-hive in order to find out why things are behaving the way they are. You and me both know that this can be a pa … (More)
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