Having just got home from Las Vegas, I'd like to relate some of the things I saw at the MS SharePoint 2012 conference. With over 10,000 attendees filling up the Mandalay Bay beach, I am amazed year after year of the growth. When I started working with SharePoint in 2001, who would have thought it turned into this. Bon Jovi rocking out at Mandalay Bay for the SharePoint conference.  Cloud everything     You probably couldn't go one sentence in any session without hearing cloud. What does this mean? You better get a strategy in place because it is coming fast. MS is "all in" on cloud according to Steve Ballmer. As a developer, or infrastructure professional things will change quickly. For developers it's going to be about RESTful web services, JSON, javascript, jquery, cloud app model, Azure services, OAuth, OData and Azure services. For infrastructure professionals, better start planning on either [...]

Topics for in-house SharePoint 2010 training Here are some ideas to cover during a company's cutover to SharePoint 2010. Many users will be confused by the ribbon so that's the main area of focus.  Main navigation, how to use the folder icon to navigate home from any page. How the ribbon works Browse, Page tabs (on Pages) Browse, Items, List tabs (on Lists) Browse, Documents, Library tabs (on Libraries) How the ribbon changes depending on what type of page you are on, page, list, or library How the checkboxes work to View item, edit item What do multiple checkboxes do if you select more than one? Try it out, navigate to a document library, try to view item and edit item through the ribbon Also show alternate way on the list by clicking Title or Edit icon Try it out, navigate to a list, try to view item and edit [...]

 This is an interesting error message. When trying to see the workflow history of a SharePoint 2010 custom workflow I get the following error message:  SharePoint 2010 Workflow history error: "The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold enforced by the administrator."   What was strange was that other workflow histories worked fine, so I went down the path of finding out where the limit was. My first stop was the "hidden" SharePoint history list. There is a good post on this here: http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=111  So I looked at my list by appending the /yoursite/lists/workflow%20history  I added a count column to one of the fields, and it said 12,500. I knew that wasn't right, so it must be a limit being returned somewhere. I needed to go deeper.  I loaded SharePoint 2010 manager from Codeplex onto the server and found that my top secret workflow history list [...]

They don't make it that easy for you to see all SharePoint 2010 color themes at once, so here they are. I've taken the screenshots of the different theme settings and each default color. I've left the font as the default Verdana. You can change the them at Site Actions-Site Settings-Site Theme under the Look and Feel section of SharePoint 2010. This will save 30 minutes of your life that you will never get back.  Default (No Theme)  Azure  Berry  Bittersweet  Cay  Classic  Construct    Convention    Felt    Graham    Grapello    Laminate    Mission  Modern Rose    Municipal  Pinnate  Ricasso  Summer  Vantage  Yoshi    

 In InfoPath 2010, got to Page Design, new View:  Copy the whole view from the Edit View, then paste into the new view and clean up any fields (for example take out descriptions). Save the view as "DisplayView" or another name. Set it as the default for viewing under Form Options:

In SharePoint 2010, you can turn off all alerts through Central Admin under Application Management, Web Applications, General Settings:    Another option is to write a little utility.  I wrote a little WinForms utility to delete all user alerts in a site collection. We needed this when we backposted a content database from Production down to QA. We didn't want to start firing alerts off the QA environment so you could either disable SMTP outgoing email or just wipe the alerts.  How to do it: Create a WinForms Application in Visual Studio, add a few fields, buttons, radios.  The Verify Alerts just checks your data without actually deleting it so you can see what you would have deleted.      using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; using Microsoft.SharePoint;  namespace DeleteUserAlerts { public partial class Form1 : Form { public Form1() [...]

I ran into this one when trying to customize a SharePoint 2010 form using the "Customize Form" button to add some custom colors on an InfoPath form for a SharePoint list. If you perform a visual upgrade in SharePoint 2010 everything works fine. However, if you do not do the visual upgrade, the page does not respect your color theme and reverts to the default "blue" theme. By pressing F12 in Internet Explorer, you can see what is going on: Notice how the core.css file is written out correctly and then overridden by the Obsidian color theme correctly. However, what is happening is that Infopath is adding another reference to core.css after the Obsidian color theme. Lines 7 and 8 of the "View Source" html show the correct order of CSS references with Obsidian after core.css However, InfoPath adds the following reference to core.css which overrides the Obsidian theme on [...]

 This MSDN article has a nice section on adding and removing event receivers.  However, after trying their code below to delete an event receiver, it will fail if you try to remove multiple event receivers. you will get this error: Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute.         public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)         {             SPSite sitecollection = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite;             SPWeb site = sitecollection.AllWebs["Docs"];             SPList list = site.Lists["MyList"];             foreach (SPEventReceiverDefinition rd in list.EventReceivers)             {                 if (rd.Name == "My Event Receiver")                     rd.Delete();             } To remedy this I specifically get the GUID's of each event receiver and then delete them declaratively..   public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)         {             SPSite sitecollection = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite;             SPWeb site = sitecollection.AllWebs["Site Name"];             SPList list = site.Lists ["List Name"];             Guid Event1_Added = Guid.Empty;             Guid Event1_Updated = Guid.Empty;             foreach (SPEventReceiverDefinition rd [...]

http://spm.codeplex.com/ Download the exe.  It provides a nice interface to drill down and show all the event receivers on a given list. A few notes on event receivers: In MOSS 2007, the Item Adding event has a null SPListItem, so use the properties.AfterProperties to get or set the fields before the item is added.  Also, the ItemID is null as the item has not been created yet. If using Item Added, you can access the list item through properties.ListItem. Use a Feature Receiver to deploy the event receiver.  This can be a class in the same project that installs on feature activate, and uninstalls on feature deactivate.    

Great article for fixing pre upgrade related issues: http://sharepointreporter.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/fix-pre-upgrade-check-errors/ One thing to add.  Use the query here to find the name of the pages that contain the offending webparts.  I thought deleting the page would make them go away, but I was wrong.  I had to recover the pages that I deleted from the recycle bin and then open them in web part maintenance view (appending "?contents=1" to the url and then delete the webparts from the page.   http://surfpointtech.com/2012/06/28/how-to-find-a-sharepoint-webpart-name-from-the-id-or-guid/  Here's the STSADM commands: STSADM -o preupgradecheck and this one to find the sites that the webparts live in: stsadm -o enumallwebs -includewebparts > i:tempwebparts.txt Better yet, use the SQL command above to get the actual page that the webpart lives in.