The fine folks at Microsoft have seen fit to award me MVP for SharePoint Server for another year. I am again honored and humbled to be included in the fine group of exceptional folks who are the Microsoft SharePoint MVPs. 2011 is going to be a big year for Aptillon, AbleBlue, and me personally. I have a lot of speaking engagements already booked for this year. They are:

• 2011 Technology Expo – St. Edwards University PEC, Austin, TX – 1.6.2011
• SharePoint Summit 2011 – Toronto, Canada – 1.31.2011-2.2.2011
• SharePoint Best Practices Conference – La Jolla, CA – 3.7.2011-3.9.2011
• SharePoint Connections – Orlando, FL – 3.27.2011-3.30.2011
• SharePoint Best Practices Conference, UK – London, England – 4.11.2011-4.13.2011

Of course I’ll also continue to support the Central Texas SharePoint User Group here in Austin.

Yes, You Can Unit Test SharePoint Code And Here is How

RSVP:

December 8th Meeting Description:

One of the challenges of developing custom applications on the SharePoint platform is unit testing the solution. Mocking frameworks allow you to mock sealed classes in SharePoint that you would otherwise have to create stubs for. This allows you to easily isolate the code under test. In this session, Kyle Kelin will walk through the basics of mocking and then dive into examples of testing SharePoint code using a mocking framework, including:

I have owned an iPhone 3G for a couple years. One week ago I picked up my new Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7 (WP7). My initial impressions were a bit mixed because of my experience with AT&T. The single biggest issue I have with the phone is how lame AT&T is (of course this is the same complaint that I have with my old iPhone). The biggest issues I had with my iPhone was the lack of “business” capability. By that I mean “How I do Business”. One simple example is the ability to simply flag an e-mail for later follow-up. I use my phone for e-mail triage and the lack of this simple feature version after version baffles me. (Notice I did not mention cut and paste, that came along later, because I did not find that feature “necessary”.)

I had a great time at SharePoint Saturday Dallas. I love the SPS events because I get to meet a whole new group of passionate folks who are interested enough in learning that they give up a whole Saturday to hear me and other folks talk about the product. As promised here are the links to my two session decks.

Developing Social Applications with SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 Search Overview

I was working with some folks that wanted to limit the SharePoint 2010 People Picker to only pull users from a single group. There is an stsadm command to achieve this, though the TechNet example is not very realistic. (Title=David?? Really?!?!)

Creating the expression took me back to an old blog post from my friend Wayne: http://mindsharpblogs.com/wayne/archive/2005/06/15/497.html He goes into great detail about how to use LDIFDE to test your expressions.

In our case we had an AD Group “Humane Resources” that ​was in an OU called “SharePoint Users” in the domain “doghousetoys.com”. This translates to:

I am building a script for one of my demos and just created the User Profile SubTypes and Organizational Profile SubTypes with PowerShell like this:

#Get the Server Context
$context = Get-SPServiceContext -Site http://me
  
#Add User Profile Sub-Types 
#Get the Profile Subtype Manager
$psm = [Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileSubtypeManager]::Get($context);
  
#create a user profile subtype
$psm.CreateSubtype("SearchTeam","Search Team", [Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileType]::User);
$psm.CreateSubtype("AccountExecutive", "Account Executive", [Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileType]::User);
  
#create an organization profile subtype
$psm.CreateSubtype("Official", "Official Organization", [Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileType]::Organization);
$psm.CreateSubtype("Fun", "Fun Organization", [Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileType]::Organization);
$psm.CreateSubtype("Professional", "Professional Organization", [Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ProfileType]::Organization);

Creating Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2010, InfoPath and Visio

October 13th Meeting Description:

Forms and workflows are important for automating business processes, and companies usually rely on programmers to create these using code. Not anymore!

Presenter Asif Rehmani will explain how you can create powerful data driven form composite solutions on your SharePoint sites with InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010. With InfoPath you can pull data from databases and lists, and create forms with data validation and conditional formatting. SharePoint Designer’s workflows let you design powerful multi-step workflows centered around the form collected data, building upon the out-of-the-box reusable workflows and even imported workflow designs from Visio!

My friend Hilton Giesenow from The MOSS Show posted Part 2 of his interview of me talking about Search and Social stuff in SharePoint 2010. You can listen to the interview online or download it for later.

Episode 27: Enterprise Social (and Search) in SharePoint 2010

You know the phrase “Great minds think alike.” It’s funny how a bunch of independent minded folks can have an independent idea that is right in line with each other. This is the case with my great friends Todd Baginski, Darrin Bishop, Dan Holme, Gary Lapointe, David Mann, and Maurice Prather. Together we are the founding members of Aptillon. You can read more about it here: Announcing Aptillon.

I have been working on my new web site and needed to upgrade my menu control from the Visual Studio 2008 project format to Visual Studio 2010 format. In doing so I created the proper SharePoint Items (SPIs) for my project to build into a WSP. One issue I ran into is there is nothing in my solution that would cause Visual Studio to automatically create a Safe Controls entry. It was correctly creating the manifest and GACing the DLL, but it failed to see that my control was anything more than an assembly. My assembly is a menu control, but there is no “visual” component. This means that my assembly would build and deploy, but when I tried to reference it from a page it would fail because it was not marked as safe.