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Starting on June 19, 2008 Manning Publishing is launching the ".NET Daily Drawing.”  This promotion will run until July 17,2008. Each day’s lucky winner can choose one free .NET ebook of their choice. On the last day of the drawing, Manning will award one lucky winner… the entire Manning .NET library! (That’s nearly a $3000 value…)

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Speaking at the Cleveland SharePoint User’s Group

I will be speaking at the Cleveland SharePoint User Group on Wednesday, May 28th.  The meeting will start at 4:00pm.  My topic will be "SharePoint Content and Infrastructure Deployment”.  Here’s a brief description of the talk:

  • SharePoint Content and Infrastructure Deployment
    Deploying a custom SharePoint Web site can be confusing due to the array of tools available.  This is complicated even more because some tools are only appropriate in certain circumstances.  In this session we will review the variety of tools available and demonstrate how to use some of the most important ones.

The group will meet at the Microsoft Office in Cleveland and this will be the kick-off meeting.  Address information for the office is below.

 Cleveland SharePoint User Group Kick Off

Wednesday, May 28th from 4pm – 6:30pm

Cleveland Microsoft Office at 6050 Oak Tree Blvd.

Independence, 44131

Adding Useful Visual Studio External Tools

We add a couple of External Tools to our Visual Studio 2005 environment when teaching SharePoint classes to simplify some two common tasks encountered when developing for SharePoint.  The first tool generates a unique Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) and places it in your clipboard so that you can paste it directly into Features or Solution manifests.  The other tool can retrieive the Public Key BLOB and Token from a signed dll so that you can use them in custom webpart or dwp files, safe control entries, or custom code access security policies.  Integrating these tools into the menu of Visual Studio makes using them much more convenient than the command line alternatives.

Recently a student asked for a step by step guide to adding these external tools so they can add them to their own development environment.  Rather than simply respond back to them by email I thought it would be worthwhile to document the steps here for others who might also be interested.

Implementing guidgen.exe

  1. Select External Tools from the Tools menu in Visual Studio 2005.
  2. Click Add to add a new external tool to the menu.  You will see the following dialog box.

    External Tools

  3. Fill in the following:
         C&reate GUID for Title
         C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\Tools\guidgen.exe for Command
         C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\Tools for Initial directory

  4. Click OK to save the new menu entry.
  5. Select Create GUID from the Tools menu and you will see the following dialog:

    Create GUID

  6. Be sure to select GUID Format #4, Click the New GUID button, and then the Copy button.  The GUID is now in your clipboard paste buffer. 
  7. Exit the tool and paste your GUID into Visual Studio.  (Note: be sure to remove the braces from the outside of the GUID since they aren’t needed.)

Implementing SN.exe

  1. Select External Tools from the Tools menu in Visual Studio 2005.
  2. Click Add to add a new external tool to the menu.  You will see the following dialog box.
  3. Fill in the following:
         &Get Token for Title
         C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\sn.exe for Command
         -Tp "$(TargetPath)" for Arguments
  4. Select the Use Output Window checkbox
  5. Click OK to save the new menu entry.
  6. Once you’ve built your project select Get Token from the Tools menu while one of your code files is open in the code editor and you will see something like the following in your Output Window:

    Output Window

  7. You can now highlight and copy either the Public key token or the Public key BLOB for use in your code.

Speaking at the Central Ohio SharePoint User Group in May

I will be speaking at the Central Ohio SharePoint User Group on Thursday, May 15th.  The meeting will be from 5:30-7:30pm.  My topic will be "SharePoint Content and Infrastructure Deployment”.  Here’s a brief description of the talk:

  • SharePoint Content and Infrastructure Deployment
    Deploying a custom SharePoint Web site can be confusing due to the array of tools available.  This is complicated even more because some tools are only appropriate in certain circumstances.  In this session we will review the variety of tools available and demonstrate how to use some of the most important ones.

The Central Ohio SharePoint User Group (COSPUG) is a Microsoft sponsored community group that comes together to explore SharePoint and the applications that work with SharePoint.  The user group is targeted towards end users, administrators, implementers, developers, and anyone who likes to learn about emerging technology. 

They meet the third Thursday of every month at the Microsoft Office in Columbus, Ohio.  Everyone who attends the user group meeting, no matter what their level of SharePoint experience is, will likely leave having learned something new.

Update 05/16/2008 ===================================================================

Here are the slides I used for my presentation.  You can also get them from the COSPUG site.  I will also probably be presenting the same talk at the new Cleveland SharePoint User’s Group on May 28th at the Microsoft Offices.  Watch this BLOG for more details.

SharePoint Connections Spring 2008

Ben Curry and I will be presenting a Post Con session on April 24, 2008 at the SharePoint Connections Conference.  The session will be entitled.  HPS301: Web Content Management (Bring Your Own Laptop).  You can read the abstract describing the session below.

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to leverage Office SharePoint Server 2007 to build “Content Driven” Web sites that are updated by the content owners while still maintaining a strong corporate branding. We’ll follow a recurring pattern of a short slide presentation followed by a longer “hands on” demo/lab. Attendees will be provided with handouts that contain click-by-click instructions that describe how to accomplish the lab. If you prefer not to have a computer in front of you, you’ll get just as much out of watching us demonstrate. All code snippets and materials needed to complete each lab will also be provided to the students. Attendees will complete the hands-on labs on their own laptops (or at home after class). The agenda for the day will include the following lessons.

  • Introduction to “Content Driven” Web Sites 
  • Maintaining Corporate Branding with a Customized Master Page
  • Controlling Content Input with a Custom Field Control
  • Managing Content Placement with a Custom Layout Page
  • Customizing SharePoint Navigation 
  • Optimizing Performance with Output Caching Profiles and the Object Cache
  • Automating Content Deployment

I Hope to see you there!