SharePoint

SharePoint Saturday DC 2010 Slides, Demo Scripts, and Pictures

Brian T. Jackett Conference/Tech Event, PowerShell, Presentation, SharePoint

Wow! This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Washington DC (SPSDC) which was quite an event to say the least.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This made my fifth SharePoint Saturday attended and fourth I’ve spoken at.  SPSDC was a bit different than most SharePoint Saturdays mostly due to the scale of it.  We had almost 950 attendees, over 80 speakers presenting close to 90 sessions, and dozens of sponsors.  A big thanks goes out to the organizers of this event.  They put in a lot of hard work and time to pull this event off and should be very proud of the end result.

For SPSDC I presented “The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint 2007”.  I want to thank all of the attendees of my session for coming and asking some great questions.  Below you can find the slides and demo scripts for this session.  I also took some photos throughout the day (not as many as usual since so much going on) so check them out.  If you have any follow up questions feel free to drop me a line in the comments or the contact link at the top of the site.

Slides and Scripts

Click here for the demo scripts and slides posted on my SkyDrive.

 

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: One thing I forgot to mention in my presentation.  In order to run code against the SharePoint API you need to load the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll assembly first.  Run the below command on the PowerShell console line to complete that:

 

[void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(“Microsoft.SharePoint”)

 

Photos

Facebook album

-or-

My album on Windows Live site (higher res shots).

-Frog Out

Be Careful When Referencing SPList.Items

Brian T. Jackett General .Net, SharePoint

BeCarefulSafe

Be very careful how you reference your SPListItem objects through the SharePoint API.  I’ll say it again.  Be very careful how you reference your SPListItem objects through the SharePoint API.  Ok, now that you get the point that this will be a “learn from my mistakes and don’t do unsmart things like I did” post, let’s dig into what it was that I did poorly.

Scenario

For the past year I’ve been building custom .Net applications that are hosted through SharePoint.  These application involve a number of SharePoint lists, external databases, custom web parts, and other SharePoint elements to provide functionality.  About two weeks ago I received a message from one of our end users that a custom application was performing slowly.  Specifically performance was slow when users were performing actions that interacted with the primary SharePoint list storing data for that app.

The Problem

I took a copy of the production site into a dev environment to investigate the code that was executing.  After attaching the debugger and running through the code I quickly found pieces of code referencing SPListItem objects (like below) that were performing very poorly:

SPListItem myItem = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists["List Name"].Items.GetItemById(value);

// do updates on SPListItem retrieved

As it turns out the SPList I was referencing was fairly large at ~1000 items and weighing in over 150 MB.  You see the problem with my above code is that I retrieved the SPListItem by first (unnecessarily) going through the Items member of the list.  As I understand it, when doing so the executing code will attempt to resolve that entity and pull it from the database and into RAM (all 150 MB.)  This causes the equivalent of a 50 car pile up in terms of performance with a single update taking more than 15 seconds.

The Solution

The solution is actually quite simple and I wish I had realized this during development.  Instead of going through the Items member it is possible to call GetItemById(…) directly on the SPList as in the example below:

SPListItem myItem = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists["List Name"].GetItemById(value);

// do updates on SPListItem retrieved

After making this simple change performance skyrocketed and updates were back to less than a second.

Conclusion

When given the option between two solutions, usually the simplest is the best solution.  In my scenario I was adding extra complexity going through the API the long way around to get to the objects I needed and it ended up hurting performance greatly.  Luckily we were able to find and resolve the performance issue in a relatively short amount of time.  Like I said at the beginning of the post, learn from my mistakes and hope it helps you.

-Frog Out

Image linked from http://www.freespirit.com/files/IMAGE/COVER/LARGE/BeCarefulSafe.jpg

SharePoint Saturday Charlotte 2010 Recap, Slides and Photos

Brian T. Jackett Conference/Tech Event, PowerShell, Presentation, SharePoint

NorthCarolina     This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Charlotte (SPSCLT) in Charlotte, North Carolina.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This made my fourth SharePoint Saturday attended and third I’ve spoken at.  The event was very well organized, attended, and a pleasure to be a part of along with many other great speakers.

At SharePoint Saturday Charlotte I had the opportunity to give two presentations.  First was “The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint 2007” and second was a new one “Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell.”  I want to thank everyone who attended either of my sessions and for all of the feedback given.  Below you will find links to my slides, demo scripts, and pictures taken throughout the event.  If anyone has any questions from the slides or scripts feel free to drop me a line.

 

Pictures

SharePoint Saturday Charlotte Apr ’10 Pictures on Facebook (recommend these with comments and tagging)

 

 

Slides, Scripts, and Rating Links

SharePoint Saturday Charlotte Apr ’10 Slides and Demo Scripts

SpeakerRate: The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint 2007

SpeakerRate: Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell

 

Conclusion

Big thanks out to Brian Gough (@bkgough), Dan Lewis (@sharepointcomic) and all of the other organizers of this event.  Also a big thanks out to the other speakers and sponsors (too many to list) who made the event possible.  Lastly thanks to my Sogeti coworker Kelly Jones (@kellydjones) for picking me up from the airport and a ride back to Columbus.  I hope everyone that attended got something out of the event and will continue to grow the SharePoint community.  I’m on a break from conferences for a few weeks and then have 3 more back to back weekends in May, blog posts announcing those coming later.  Enjoy the slides, scripts, and pictures.

 

-Frog Out

SPSiteDataQuery Returns Only One List Type At A Time

Brian T. Jackett General .Net, SharePoint

    The SPSiteDataQuery class in SharePoint 2007 is very powerful, but it has a few limitations.  One of these limitations that I ran into this morning (and caused hours of frustration) is that you can only return results from one list type at a time.  For example, if you are trying to query items from an out of the box custom list (list type = 100) and document library (list type = 101) you will only get items from the custom list (SPSiteDataQuery defaults to list type = 100.)  In my situation I was attempting to query multiple lists (created from custom list templates 10001 and 10002) each with their own content types.

Solution

    Since I am only able to return results from one list type at a time, I was forced to run my query twice with each time setting the ServerTemplate (translates to ListTemplateId if you are defining custom list templates) before executing the query.  Below is a snippet of the code to accomplish this.

SPSiteDataQuery spDataQuery = new SPSiteDataQuery();

spDataQuery.Lists = "<Lists ServerTemplate='10001' />";

// ... set rest of properties for spDataQuery

 

var results = SPContext.Current.Web.GetSiteData(spDataQuery).AsEnumerable();

 

// only change to SPSiteDataQuery is Lists property for ServerTemplate attribute

spDataQuery.Lists = "<Lists ServerTemplate='10002' />";

 

// re-execute query and concatenate results to existing entity

results = results.Concat(SPContext.Current.Web.GetSiteData(spDataQuery).AsEnumerable());

 

Conclusion

    Overall this isn’t an elegant solution, but it’s a workaround for a limitation with the SPSiteDataQuery.  I am now able to return data from multiple lists spread across various list templates.  I’d like to thank those who commented on this MSDN page that finally pointed out the limitation to me.  Also a thanks out to Mark Rackley for “name dropping” me in his latest article (which I humbly insist I don’t belong in such company)  as well as encouraging me to write up a quick post on this issue above despite my busy schedule.  Hopefully this post saves some of you from the frustrations I experienced this morning using the SPSiteDataQuery.  Until next time, Happy SharePoint’ing all.

 

      -Frog Out

 

Links

MSDN Article for SPSiteDataQuery

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spsitedataquery.lists.aspx

SharePoint Saturday Michigan 2010 Recap, Slides, and Photos

Brian T. Jackett Conference/Tech Event, Presentation, SharePoint

michigan

This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This made my third SharePoint Saturday attended and second I’ve spoken at.  I believe today it was announced that about 210 people total attended the event.  I was very happy with the turnout, especially the ratio of male to female attendees.  Typically with computer related conferences the ratio leans towards more males attending, but both Peter Serzo (one of conference organizers) and I both commented to each other that at the end of the day it appeared to be close to 40% women in the crowd.  So here’s my recap of the weekend.

Arrival

Friday afternoon I drove up from Columbus, OH to Ann Arbor, MI and arrived around 4pm.  I was attempting to avoid the rush hour traffic and construction backups.  Turned out to be a good idea because other speakers coming up Friday got stuck on a highway which literally closed down in both directions due to a bad accident.  I was talking my friend Sean McDonough through the highway closing and this was the first time I had seen a solid black traffic line on Google Maps.  Most of us are familiar with Green, Yellow, and Red, but this line was black if that tells you how bad it got.

Speaker “Dinner”

Fast forward a few hours and it was time for the speaker “dinner.”  I put “dinner” in quotes because with this night alone SPSMI set a new bar for nicest and most extravagant speaker appreciation events for SharePoint Saturday.  By tapping into some very influential contacts, the conference organizers were able to provide a truck limo (yep you heard right) with refreshments, access to an underground suite at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and courtside tickets to see the Detroit Pistons play that night.  Being a Michigan native I have to say that I was absolutely floored by this experience and very thankful to our conference organizers Peter, Sebastian, and Jesse along with Trillium Teamologies.

Sessions

The actual conference started Saturday morning at 9am with the keynote by Rob Collie who is the Microsoft program manager for PowerPivot.  The day continued and I attended the following sessions:

  • Mike Watson (@mikewat) – “SharePoint 2010 Fight Night: Devs vs. Admins”
  • Karl Swedeberg (@kswedberg) – “A Walk on the Client Side with jQuery“
  • [my session] Brian Jackett (@briantjackett) – “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions”
  • Jeff Willinger (@jwillie) – “Social Computing and Collaboration Inside and Outside the 4 Walls”
  • Paul Schaeflein (@paulschaeflein) – “PowerShell for the SharePoint Developer”

My Presentation

I had a great time presenting my session on Deploying SharePoint 2007 Solutions, but it wasn’t without its fair share of technical issues.  As my session was right after lunch I came in to my room 10 mins early to set up my laptop, slides, and demos.  As a quick background note, a few months ago I got an upgraded laptop from my company Sogeti and have been dual booting it between XP (factory installed) and Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V.  As such I had prepared all of my demo virtual machines to run under Hyper-V.  About 3 minutes before my session was scheduled to start though it became apparent that I did not have the correct display drivers to connect Windows Server 2008 R2 to the projector…

As you can imagine this was a slight cause for concern as I was potentially going to be unable to give my presentation.  Luckily for me I usually prepare for such unforeseen issues and had my presentation and some spare VMs that would run on XP on my external hard drive.  Knowing this I rebooted my machine into XP and began my presentation without slides until about 5 mins into the session when everything was up and running on XP.  Despite this being the first time I gave this presentation I have to say it was one of my favorites I’ve given so far.  The audience was very engaged in the session and I received some great, positive feedback afterwards.  Thanks to all who attended my session, I appreciate it very much.

Link to Presentation Files

For those of you who attended my session and would like my slides or demo PowerShell scripts they can be found on my SkyDrive at the link below.  Also, if you have a few minutes and wouldn’t mind rating my session I have this session posted on SpeakerRate.  As speakers we always appreciate any and all feedback attendees offer, so thank you if you are able to provide any.

SkyDrive folder with session files

Rate my SharePoint 2007 Solutions session

Picture Albums

For everyone else, here are my pictures from the weekend.  The first link is to my FaceBook album which will have tagging (recommend this one.)  The second is to my Live album if you care for higher resolution images.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2154482&id=21905041&l=a3fb72ee8c

Conclusion

A big thank you goes out to all of the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees of SPSMI.  As I’ve said so many times, without each and every one of you these events wouldn’t be possible.  I thoroughly enjoyed this trip back to my home state and presenting a new session.  For those interested in my upcoming schedule I will be giving two sessions on PowerShell at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte in April, helping plan Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition in May, and I’m submitting sessions to Day of .Net Ann Arbor in May as well.  Beyond that I haven’t planned out any travels.  Thanks for reading my recap.  Look forward to more technical posts now that I have a short break in conferences.

-Frog Out

links: Michigan image

SharePoint Saturday Michigan Is Coming Up!

Brian T. Jackett Conference/Tech Event, Presentation, SharePoint

     Next Saturday March 13th Ann Arbor, MI will be hosting SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI).  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various regional and national speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This will be my third SharePoint Saturday and second one I’ve had the honor of presenting at.  My presentation is titled “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions“ (click here for the SpeakerRate link.)

    After taking a look at the speaker and session list I can tell you with great excitement that this event is packed with great speakers and topics.  Register here and come on out to SharePoint Saturday Michigan on March 13th.  If you’re attending feel free to track me down and say hi.  See you there.

 

      -Frog Out