Recently I have been focusing on creating some Silverlight charts using the ‘Silverlight Toolkit’ from Codeplex (see the link in the instructions below).

Once I had created my first chart I wondered how to get it to display in SharePoint. It seems there are a number of options for displaying a Silverlight application (xap) in a SharePoint web part.

I found lots of blog posts that described separate bits of configuring I needed to do to get Silverlight working happily in SharePoint. I’ve decided to create a getting started list of what you need to do to get Silverlight installed and how to display your xap file with the built in ‘Content Editor Web Part’. I have linked to other blog posts where necessary.

Configuration

1. Download and install the Silverlight 3 runtime from silverlight.net -

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3/

2. Download and install the Silverlight 3 SDK and tools for Visual Studio from the silverlight site - 

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/

3. <Optional> Download and install the Silverlight Toolkit (If you want to use some of these cool and free Silverlight controls) -

http://silverlight.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=30514

4. If you are running Windows Server 2008 you can skip this step as the MIME types should have been automatically added to IIS7 for you. For server 2003 users you will need to add the Silverlight MIME types to IIS6, follow the instructions here -

http://blogs.technet.com/jorke/archive/2007/09/11/silverlight-mime-types-in-iis6.aspx

5. This step involves configuring the web.config files for the SharePoint sites that you wish to run your Silverlight applications in. Follow the instructions on this blog post -

http://blogs.msdn.com/steve_fox/archive/2009/03/11/amending-the-web-config-file-to-support-silverlight-development-on-sharepoint.aspx

6. Ensure that the assembly System.Web.Silverlight is in the global assembly cache. If not then you can find it at the following location -

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v3.0\Libraries\Server

7. Configuration complete! – now read on to the deployment section

Deployment

To get your silverlight xap displaying on a SharePoint page follow the steps below. In terms of where to store your .xap file there are a number of places for you to choose. Some people recommend storing it in a folder called ‘ClientBin’ in the IIS virtual directory of the SharePoint web application but I was not able to get this working. I opted for the simplest method which was to store the file in a document library.

1. Upload your Silverlight xap file to a document library

2. Switch to edit mode for your SharePoint page and add a Content Editor Web Part

3. Insert the following HTML code - 

<!–<div width=”600px” height=”100px” id=”silverlightControlHost”>
<object data=”data:application/x-silverlight”, type=”application/x-silverlight-2″ width=”450″ height=”450″>
<param name=”source” value=”http://yoursite/sites/charting/XAPs/SimpleSilverlightChart.xap”/>
<param name=”onerror” value=”onSilverlightError” />
<param name=”background” value=”white” />
<a href=”http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=108182″ style=”text-decoration: none;”>
<img src=”http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=108101″ alt=”Get Microsoft Silverlight” style=”border-style: none”/>
</a>
</object>
<iframe style=’visibility:hidden;height:0;width:0;border:0px’></iframe>
</div> –>

Remember to remove the comments from the above code and replace the param value=”” with the url to your document library and xap file.

4. Click apply and save the changes to your content editor web part

5. If all went well you should be seeing your Silverlight application displaying correctly!

Note: You may need to play around with the width and height of both the <div> and <object> tags to size them correctly for your Silverlight application.

Good Luck!

If you haven’t heard of them ‘Accelerators’ are a new feature in IE8 which are designed to make your browsing tasks quicker and easier.

Accelerators allow you to perform an action by simply highlighting text on a webpage or just right clicking on a page and selecting your chosen accelerator.

Below are my top 5 IE8 accelerators:

1. ‘Google Reader Accelerator’

Simply right click on the RSS feed page and click the accelerator to subscribe to it with your Google reader account.

http://www.ieaddons.com/en/details/bookmarks/Subscribe_with_Google_Reader/

2. ‘WordPress Accelerator’

Select any text on a webpage and select the accelerator to start a new blog post containing the selected text.

http://www.wordpress.com

(Login to your dashboard and you should find it available for download)

3. ‘Twitter Accelerator’

Select some text on a page and select the twitter accelerator to send the text as a tweet from your twitter account.

http://openbrolly.com/2008/08/31/ie8-accelerator-for-twitter/

4. ‘Google Maps Accelerator’

Select any bit of text (Postcode, Address etc) and select the google maps accelerator to open the location in google maps.

http://ie.microsoft.com/activities/en-en/Default.aspx

5. ‘Google Mail Accelerator’

Select some text and select the google mail accelerator to create a new email message containing the selected text.

http://ie.microsoft.com/activities/en-en/Default.aspx

Hope you find these accelerators helpful and as useful as I do!

I ran into this error today when attempting to show a web part on a SharePoint site that utilises the .NET 3.5 Chart Controls from MS (See link at the bottom of the post).

When the page opened it bombed out with the above error, some research found the following question on stackoverflow –

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/302820/net-3-5-chart-controls-exception-error-executing-child-request-for-chartimg-axd

To fix this error you need to add the following entry into the <HttpHandlers> section of the web.config file:

<add path="ChartImg.axd" verb="GET,HEAD,POST" type="System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler, System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" validate="false" />

When I refreshed the page, I received another error – this time it was:

Invalid temp directory in chart handler configuration

If you too get this error then you need to make sure you have the following line in the <appSettings> section of the web.config:

<add key="ChartImageHandler" value="storage=file;timeout=20;dir=c:\TempImageFiles\;" />

Also make sure that the above directory ‘TempImageFiles’ exists on the C: drive or you can change this to any other directory that you like.

Hope this helps!

Download link for MS Chart Controls:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=130F7986-BF49-4FE5-9CA8-910AE6EA442C&displaylang=en

In case you haven’t seen this link floating around the web or on twitter yet then here it is:

http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx

Simply head over the site and register, you will then be notified as soon as the public beta of SharePoint 2010 becomes available in November

I was writing some code yesterday to loop through the list items in a SharePoint list and then loop through each version of the SPListItem’s underlying file.

Here is the code I was using -

using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://theserver/"))
           {
               using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
               {
                   SPList list = web.Lists["The List"];
                   SPView view = list.Views[new Guid("D9E7BDDC-4C77-4386-BA0E-A786D58EE199")];

                   SPListItemCollection itemCol = list.GetItems(view);

                   foreach (SPListItem item in itemCol)
                   {
                       foreach (SPFileVersion version in item.File.Versions)
                       {
                           string url = version.Url;
                       }

                   }
               }
           }

When the code hit the ‘item.File.Versions’ collection it threw a System.Argument.Exception. This really stumped me and I couldn’t figure out at all while the collection was throwing this exception.

After a lot of researching I found this blog post –

http://www.mtelligent.com/journal/2007/10/17/the-insanity-of-getting-versions-of-a-multilinetext-box-set-.html

In this post, David talks about getting the same exception when he is trying to access the list item’s file versions. If you scroll down and look at the comments you you will see that this only seems to be a problem if you are getting the SPListItem as the result of an SPQuery (in my case the spquery is actually an SPView).

This is most likely because getting the item using an SPQuery returns the list item with a minimum amount of data, therefore the versions are not accessible.

The solution here is to create another instance of the SPListItem by using the GetItemById() method which will return all the properties for the list item. This way the SPListItem.File.Versions collection will be accessible and we can iterate through it.

See the correct code –

using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://theserver/"))
           {
               using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
               {
                   SPList list = web.Lists["The List"];
                   SPView view = list.Views[new Guid("D9E7BDDC-4C77-4386-BA0E-A786D58EE199")];

                   SPListItemCollection itemCol = list.GetItems(view);

                   foreach (SPListItem item in itemCol)
                   {

//Get a reference to the item again by the ID

SPListItem theItem = list.GetItemById(item.ID);

//The versions collection should now be populated (if versions are available) and no exception should be thrown

                       foreach (SPFileVersion version in theItem.File.Versions)
                       {
                           string url = version.Url;
                       }

                   }
               }
           }

Hope this helps someone!

This had me stumped for a while earlier, I had created a Web Part project and wanted to include an image to be deployed to the TEMPLATE\IMAGES directory of the 12 hive.

Originally I added a module to the project but this would then copy the image to a folder in the actual site itself which I didn’t want.

The solution is to use a ‘Template’ –

Right click on the project in Visual Studio and select Add > New Item

Select a ‘Template’ and give it a name, this will add a folder in your solution called ‘Templates’ with a text file inside that has the name you gave above.

You can then add the 12 hive TEMPLATES folder structure under here and any files will be copied to the 12 hive when the wsp solution package is installed.

Hope this helps!

If you ever need to get the GUID of a built in SharePoint field such as ‘IssueStatus’ (from the standard ‘Issue Tracking’ list) for example then you can use the SPBuiltInFieldId class.

This class contains a number of GUID objects for each type of built in SharePoint field.

To use it simply use the following code:

Guid issueStatus = SPBuiltInFieldId.IssueStatus;

I found this very useful, hope it helps some of you!

Just spotted this on twitter, this blog post by Jeff Teper –

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010.aspx

is a must read for SharePoint 2010. It discloses a lot of the new features present in the new product with a few screenshots too.

I hope you all enjoyed the keynotes, I wasn’t able to go to SPC09 but the streaming of the keynotes worked well.

Enjoy

I had this error message today when trying to create a report center site. After looking through the SharePoint logs I found the following lines:

Feature receiver assembly ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c’, class ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingFeatureHandler’, method ‘FeatureActivated’ for feature ‘22a9ef51-737b-4ff2-9346-694633fe4416′ threw an exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The trial period for this product has expired.     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.CmsSecurityUtilities.EnsureEvaluationNotExpired()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingFeatureHandler.FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties receiverProperties)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeature.DoActivationCallout(Boolean fActivate, Boolean fForce) 

Feature Activation: Threw an exception, attempting to roll back.  Feature ‘Publishing’ (ID: ‘22a9ef51-737b-4ff2-9346-694633fe4416′).  Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The trial period for this product has expired.     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.CmsSecurityUtilities.EnsureEvaluationNotExpired()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingFeatureHandler.FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties receiverProperties)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeature.DoActivationCallout(Boolean fActivate, Boolean fForce)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeature.Activate(SPSite siteParent, SPWeb webParent, SPFeaturePropertyCollection props, Boolean fForce) 

After some googling around I find the following blog post – http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/02/05/activating-office-sharepoint-server-publishing-infrastructure-access-denied.aspx.

Changing the application pool account worked and the site was created, although I did have a ‘File not Found’ error first because I had forgotten to enable the ‘Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features‘ feature in the top level site collection.

Hope this helps!

After I had built my web part I clicked to debug and was presented with the following error:

To get past this error I used the following two blog posts:

http://blogs.msdn.com/steve_fox/archive/2009/03/18/vsewss-1-3-post-install-configuration.aspx

http://www.dotnetmafia.com/blogs/dotnettipoftheday/archive/2009/02/05/vsewss-1-3-ctp-feedback-and-feature-requests.aspx

It seems that the error is because the account running the application pool for VseWSS web application in IIS does not have the correct permissions. I was on a domain controller so simply gave the account domain admin permissions. This however did not fix the error and I ended up giving the account full control to the folder itself!

When I tried to deploy again I did not get the above error but now a different one (See screenshot below)! I cannot find any more details on this error and the folders specified in the error message do not even exist.  I think im going to go back to using WSPBuilder from now on as it seems the VseWSS extensions are still quite buggy.

If anyone has any more details on the above error and how to fix it then please let me know