Leon Zandman’s Blog

The next version of SharePoint, aka SharePoint 2009 or Office Server 14, is scheduled for release sometime during the second half of 2009. Various blogs have already listed some of the presumed new features, like these:

• 64-bit only
• Silverlight UI / Web Parts
• Better support for dealing with large lists (must-have!)
• Groove integration

Recently I heard of a new feature that I hadn’t seen on any of these lists: SharePoint 2009’s default web interface will be using the (in)famous Ribbon interface. I was told this information comes from a SharePoint Product Manager at Microsoft, so it should be reliable.

Now I don’t really know what to think about this. I still have a love-hate relationship with the Ribbon ever since Microsoft released it with Office 2007. For basic Office usage it works very well, but for some tasks it find myself scrolling between Ribbon tabs like a madman.

On the other hand, SharePoint 2007’s UI isn’t that good either. The menus are all over the place and rather complicated, especially for first time users. Use of a Ribbon could improve on this. And considering the fact that SharePoint (i.e. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) belongs to the Office family, it makes perfect sense to give it an Office-like interface. This would definitely enhance the integrated experience.

Now that I think about it, Microsoft’s Office website has been using a Ribbon-like interface for some time now and I must admit it looks nice. Maybe that’s the exact same Ribbon that’s going to end up in SharePoint 2009? Who knows… Maybe they’ll even implement it using Silverlight, so it will respond to my mouse’s scroll wheel, so I can continue that scrolling between Ribbon tabs like a madman

Update: I’ve received several e-mails from people claiming they already have the Office 14 alpha bits and they all confirm SharePoint 2009 / Office Server 14 is using the Ribbon for its menu’s.

I just heard the shocking news that Patrick Tisseghem, co-founder, managing director of U2U and Microsoft SharePoint MVP, has passed away last week. This is a great loss for the SharePoint community. The U2U website has this to say:

It is with deepest regret that we have to announce the death of Patrick Tisseghem, co-founder of U2U. Patrick suddenly passed away on Wednesday 3 September 2008 around 18 hours in Gothenburg Sweden due to a heart failure. Our sympathy and thoughts go out to his wife Linda, their daughters Anahi and Laura, and to his family. We are all deeply saddened by this tragic loss. We remember him as caring father as well as a driven and warm hearted colleague and friend. We miss you Patrick.

The last time I spoke to Patrick was a few months ago at the Dutch Microsoft DevDays 2008 in Amsterdam. After one of his sessions he helped me out with some SharePoint custom security trimmer problems I had.

I think he was a great guy and I always liked attending his presentations. Especially the funny, sarcastic, remarks used to make about SharePoint. My deepest condolences to his wife and daughters. Goodbye and thank you, Patrick!

Today my colleague Harmjan Greving pointed me to the Portal Navigation Properties Feature. I had never encountered this one before and as it turns out it is surprisingly undocumented by Microsoft.

So what does it do? Well, it’s a feature that comes with MOSS 2007 (unfortunately it isn’t included with WSS 3.0) that enables you to define per-site navigation settings in a declarative way. Until now I always used to write custom API code for this, that I executed from a feature receiver or a custom site provisioning provider.

The Portal Navigation Properties Feature itself is actually very simple. It contains no elements, but is only used to trigger the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.NavigationFeatureHandler feature receiver, which does the real work, based on properties you specify. It is typically used from within a site definition file (ONET.XML), like this:

...

<WebFeatures>

    <Feature ID="541F5F57-C847-4e16-B59A-B31E90E6F9EA">

        <!-- Portal Navigation Properties Feature -->

        <Properties xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

            <Property Key="InheritGlobalNavigation" Value="True"/>

            <Property Key="InheritCurrentNavigation" Value="True"/>

            <Property Key="IncludeSubSites" Value="True" />

            <Property Key="IncludePages" Value="False" />

            <Property Key="OrderingMethod" Value="Automatic"/>

            <Property Key="AutomaticSortingMathod" Value="CreatedDate"/>

        </Properties>

    </Feature>

</WebFeatures>

...

Using Reflector I found out the following properties can be used with this feature:

¹ Please note the awful spelling error in “AutomaticSortingMathod”. Ofcourse this should have been “AutomaticSortingMethod”, but apparently someone at Microsoft forgot to run the spell checker over his/her code

If you’re querying SharePoint content using a CAML query from code it’s a good habit to always populate the SPQuery instance’s ViewFields property. Otherwise the returned SPListItem instances might not contain any data for certain fields and throw an exception when you try to access those fields.

Specifying ViewFields involves creating a string of CAML FieldRef elements. For instance if we want our query to return items that contain data for the Title, Created and ID field we use this:

   1: <FieldRef Name='Title'/><FieldRef Name='Created'/><FieldRef Name='ID'/>

As you can see there’s some overhead of boilerplate markup involved. I’ve written a small piece of code that I always use to make my life a little easier. Today I happened to post this code in a reply I wrote on the MSDN forums and also decided to submit it as Community Content to the official SPQuery docs on MSDN. Then I thought I might as well share it with you here. So here it is:

   1: public static string BuildViewFieldsXml(params string[] fieldNames)

   2: {

   3:     const string TEMPLATE = @"<FieldRef Name='{0:S}'/>";

   4:     StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

   5:     foreach (string fieldName in fieldNames)

   6:     {

   7:         sb.AppendFormat(TEMPLATE, fieldName);

   8:     }

   9:     return sb.ToString();

  10: }

  11:  

  12: // Use it like this:

  13: SPQuery query = new SPQuery();

  14: query.ViewFields = BuildViewFieldsXml("Title", "Created", "ID");

  15:  

  16: // Note that you can specify a variable amount of string parameters, i.e.

  17: query.ViewFields = BuildViewFieldsXml("Title", "Created", "ID", "Author", "Gender");

Yeah, you’re right. This piece of code isn’t exactly rocket science. But you might appreciate it anyway

I’m planning on doing some posts about frustrating things I have encountered (and still do!) during my SharePoint development efforts. Here’s the first one:

Last year while working on a MOSS 2007 project for one of our customers I stumbled on what I thought was a bug in SharePoint 2007. I had created a custom list that was filled with Electronic Program Guide (EPG) information for the streaming video media that that site contained. I then created a Webpart that used ASP.Net AJAX to continually show the actual EPG information below the video stream.

In order to obtain the EPG items I used a CAML query to query the EPG list. The list was simply a custom list containing amongst others a column of type DateTime that was called "ProgramEnd". As the name suggests it contained the time the program ended. I then used the following code to create a query that was supposed to obtain the currently broadcasted item and all future items.

   1: const string EPG_QUERY_TEMPLATE = @"

   2: <Where>

   3:  <Geq>

   4:   <FieldRef Name='ProgramEnd' />

   5:   <Value Type='DateTime'>{0}</Value>

   6:  </Geq>

   7: </Where>"; 

   8:  

   9: SPQuery query = new SPQuery();

  10: query.Query = String.Format(EPG_QUERY_TEMPLATE,

  11:     SPUtility.CreateISO8601DateTimeFromSystemDateTime(DateTime.Now)); 

  12: // ...

To my surprise this query always returned too many items. Further investigation showed that time part of the query seemed to be ignored completely, so it returned the items as if no time was specified! So instead of getting the current item and all future items it returned all items broadcasted for that day.

After wasting a lot of time debugging, using the U2U Caml Query Builder and looking for an answer / solution on the internet I gave up and wrote a quick hack around it, which fortunately wasn’t very difficult. It would just run the query and run the results through some additional code that checked the ProgramEnd DateTime field and filter out the wrong items, like this:

   1: SPListItemCollection results = ...; // The results from the query mentioned above

   2: // Trim the results to only include the current and future items

   3: List<SPListItem> trimmedItems = new List<SPListItem>();

   4: foreach (SPListItem result in results)

   5: {

   6:     DateTime programEnd = (DateTime)result["ProgramEnd"];

   7:     if (programEnd >= DateTime.Now)

   8:         trimmedItems.Add(result);

   9: } 

Fortunately this worked just fine and the customer was happy. I was not…

Today while surfing the Net I stumbled on this entry in the MSDN forums, from which I learned it wasn’t a bug, but that you need to included the "IncludeTimeValue" attribute to the CAML query, like this:

   1: <Where>

   2:  <Eq>

   3:   <FieldRef Name='programEnd' />

   4:   <Value Type='DateTime' IncludeTimeValue='TRUE'>

   5:    2008-07-30T12:00:00Z

   6:   </Value>

   7:  </Eq>

   8: </Where> 

If only I had known it was this simple… What bothers me is that this little, but very important attribute seems to be totally undocumented. I couldn’t find any information about it in the WSS / SharePoint SDKs.

Ofcourse once I knew what to look for I found some other blogs and forums mentioning this issue. It turns out the UCSharp blog had already blogged about this way back in October 2007, only a few months after I searched for it. Even Karine Bosch, U2U’s "CAML Girl" and author of the famous U2U CAML Query Builder, says she only recently found out about this. Fortunately she has included support for the "IncludeTimeValue" attribute in her latest version of the U2U Caml Query Builder, which I know a lot of SharePoint developers use to construct and test their CAML queries.

I also noticed that someone called puneetspeed has added some Community Content to the online SharePoint SDK’s SPQuery docs explaining this issue. So hopefully Microsoft will add information about the "IncludeTimeValue" attribute to the official SDK text in the near future.