Big Kudos to Matt Smith for organising the upcoming SharePoint developer tour in New Zealand by SharePoint developer whiz kid Gavin Barron ! Tour dates and venues Auckland: Wednesday, 23 July 2008 Time: Drinks + Snacks from 5:15PM, Talk from 5:30PM to 6:30PM Location: Level 7 Fronde House, 131 Queen Street Join and RSVP: http://www.sharepointusergroup.net.nz/Auckland/ Tauranga: Thursday, 24 July 2008 Time: Drinks + Snacks from 5:30PM, Talk from 6:00PM to 7:00PM Location: EnvisionIT, Level 5 Westpac Building, 2 Devonport Road, Tauranga Join and RSVP:  http://www.sharepointusergroup.net.nz/BayOfPlenty/ Christchurch: Monday, 28 July 2008 Time: Drinks + Snacks from 5:30PM, Talk from 6:00PM to 7:00PM Location: Canterbury Innovation Incubator (CII), 200 Armagh Street (opposite Centennial Leisure Centre) Join and RSVP:  http://www.sharep ...[Read More]

When using SharePoint for creating and maintaining content rich web sites the content deployment API provides a way of moving content from a source server to a destination server. For example if you have a team developing a content heavy Internet site or an Intranet site you are able to setup content deployment between servers. (Assuming you are using multiple servers in Dev > Stg > Prd). See my previous post about  Multiple development servers and managing code. First you need to understand that in a SharePoint deployment "content" can be hard to define. Say for example you are creating a dynamic rotating image gallery feature with an image and a description about the image and an URL link. In this scenario there are multiple roles involved in the design and build phases of this piece. These roled are developers, design ...[Read More]

Paul Andrew is a Senior Technical Product Manager for the SharePoint Developer Platform from Microsoft, Redmond and he will be in Wellington, New Zealand and we are happy to be able to get Paul speak to the local developer community as part of a combined .Net and SharePoint User Group event. This event will be held at the Xero offices. Details of the event follows. Title: Introducing SharePoint for .NET Developers in Visual Studio Speaker: Paul Andrew, Senior Technical Product Manager, SharePoint Developer Platform, Microsoft, Redmond, USA Date: Friday 27 June 2008 @ 5pm Venue: Xero Ltd, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay Paul has been helping the international community by evangelising how .NET developers can leverage the SharePoint platform from within Visual Studio. In this talk he will show and answer all your development related ques ...[Read More]

If you are deploying SharePoint you should take some time and read the following WSS/MOSS Content Deployment article series from Stefan. He covers the WSS/MOSS Content Migration API in depth and what you need to know when moving content between your server farms. Deep Dive into the SharePoint Content Deployment and Migration API - Part 1 > 6 (Highly recommend that you start with part 1 and read through to 6) If you are new to content deployment here is what's available via the API - export an entire site collection - export a specific site inside a site collection including or excluding content in subsites - export a list or document libraries or even of a folder inside a document library - export a single list items or documents from a document library - export dependent objects (like images referenced by a page) by following ...[Read More]

The wait is over for developers who now want to start developing for SharePoint on Visual Studio 2008. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2008 Extensions, Version 1.2 is now available for download. From Chris Johnson PM for Windows SharePoint Services What's in VSeWSS? Version 1.2 of the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services contains the following tools to aid developers in building SharePoint applications: Visual Studio 2008 Project Templates Web Part Team Site Definition Blank Site Definition List Definition Empty SharePoint Project Visual Studio 2008 Item Templates (items that can be added into an existing project) Web Part Custom Field List Definition (with optional Event Receiver) Content Type (with optional Event Receiver Module List Instance List Event ...[Read More]

If you are starting on a SharePoint development you will need to start thinking about how you will manage and provide a team based development environment for building and deploying solutions for SharePoint. Even in a scenario where you are about to deploy a medium SharePoint environment then you will need to address the following points in order to cater for a team based development approach. If you are a jack of all trades developer who does everything you can stop reading now. But in most cases organisations will have a number of developers working together to build and develop solutions to be deployed to SharePoint. Provide a Development, Staging (Pre-Prod) and Production environment as well as source control for your code etc Deploying your site customisations to each server Managing the release of non SharePoint site spec ...[Read More]

In the previous two posts in this series I showed some ideas and thoughts on how to approach your SharePoint Search deployment. This third post is a wrap up as well as some external resources including training videos previously published on the Search TechCenter site on TechNet. Read the previous two posts in this series. SharePoint Search Deployment Guidance (Part 1) SharePoint Search Deployment Guidance (Part 2) In my last post I mentioned about the Search indexing component in MOSS. This Search Architecture white paper available from Microsoft (MS Word) provides details on how the Indexing Architecture works. In summary the two core core components of a Search solution are as follows. Indexing Engine The indexing component is capable of crawling and indexing a variety of content sources. It uses protocol handlers to connect a ...[Read More]

Via [ Paul Andrew ] I'm pleased to announce the release of the User Guide, Samples and Walkthroughs for the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.1. The Visual Studio 2005 extensions for SharePoint were released back in Feb 2008 and an update for Visual Studio 2008 is planned for release in June 2008. Official description and questions can be directed on Paul's announcement about the Visual Studio extensions post. For Developers (ASP.net) who are looking at starting out on SharePoint there is also a MSDN web cast series that will be happening over the next few weeks.   Each MSDN Web Cast is an introduction for .NET Developers to SharePoint and the Topic. You need to register for the web cast by clicking the link and entering some details. Then you get emailed a link to sign on and participate in ...[Read More]