The site definition vs. webtemplate vs custom code discussion is a very old and ever returning discussions. There are at least four different approaches: Creating full blown custom site definitions Creating custom empty or blank site definitions and provisioning those with (stapled) features and code Creating site templates Using custom code I think it is safe to say that the first option is a bit out of date. Creating full blown site definitions requires writing a lot of tedious XML in...

I had the honour of speaking at the SharePoint Evolution Conference this year. The original plan was to fly to London on Saturday afternoon and to present on “Using SharePoint search to develop custom solutions” on Wednesday. Because of the infamous volcanic ash cloud that Iceland so kindly send in our (or basically in every) direction things worked out a little bit differently. On the Saturday afternoon I took the train from Rotterdam Central Station to Brussels Midi and from Brussels Midi I took the Eurostar train to London St. Pancras. I must say that this wasn’t an...

Today I worked on configuring forms based authentication for SharePoint 2010. Using forms based authentication automatically means using claims based authentication in Sharepoint 2010. I tried using both an LDAP provider and a SQL provider. My initial goal was to get them both working in the same environment, but after a lot of hours of staring at XML in web.config files I gave up on that one. Instead I created separate environments for using LDAP and SQL providers. Because of this I will also write two separate blog posts. This one will explain how to set up forms based authentication...

Today I worked on configuring forms based authentication for SharePoint 2010. Using forms based authentication automatically means using claims based authentication in Sharepoint 2010. I tried using both an LDAP provider and a SQL provider. My initial goal was to get them both working in the same environment, but after a lot of hours of staring at XML in web.config files I gave up on that one. Instead I created separate environments for using LDAP and SQL providers. Because of this I will also write two separate blog posts. This one will explain how to set up...

Last Tuesday (April 13th) we had another DIWUG evening. This one was sponsored by and hosted at VX Company in Baarn. We started out with a nice dinner with fancy sandwiches and a great sateh. After that Immanuel Kranendonk introduced us to VX Company and announced a business card draw to win one of five “Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Building Solutions for SharePoint 2010” books. After that I had the honour of presenting the first session on “Using SharePoint search to develop custom solutions” myself. I talked about extending the out of the box web part by inheriting...

Lately I’ve been playing around with Visual Studio 2010 tools for SharePoint. I’ve been trying to come up with examples on how to use each of the available item templates. Today I created a Module. A module can be used to deploy files to your SharePoint environment and the scenario I came up with was to use a module to deploy a master page. I started out by creating an Empty SharePoint project. This can have any name you like and it can be both a farm and a sandboxed solution ...

If you are building a custom search solution based on SharePoint 2010 you might want to build your own custom query to query the SharePoint index. If you do you probably need to use the FullTextSqlQuery class, just like I am for my custom Birthday web part. While building that web part I ran into a couple of things that I might be able to spare others. First thing to note is that the FullTextSqlQuery is available in two different namespaces. There is Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Query.FullTextSqlQuery for SharePoint Foundation and there is Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Query.FullTextSqlQuery for SharePoint Server. Be aware of which version...

In SharePoint 2007 it was possible to save a site as a site template with a .stp extension. Saving a site as a template can be done from the site settings user interface. The .stp file is, like most SharePoint specific file extensions, a .cab file. The .stp file contains a link to the original site definition that the saved site depended on and the delta between that site definition and the saved site. In SharePoint 2010 we can still save sites as templates in much the same way. However, saving a site as a template won’t create a...

I know it’s been a while since the conference, but I still wanted to write a short wrap up. The conference was great. It was sold out, another sign of the fact that SharePoint is a booming business and people love to hear about what’s new in SharePoint 2010. The goal of the conference was to redeliver some of the content from the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas in October. Since this one only lasted two days it was impossible to cover all the content, but overall I think there was a lot of great content...

The Dutch Information Worker User Group (DIWUG) and the Software Development Network (SDN) produced a free SharePoint eMagazine with a lot of interesting articles on a wide variety of topics from an impressive group of international authors. The SharePoint 2010 Enterprise - Sjoerd van Lochem Customizing the SharePoint Ribbon - Marianne van Wanrooij Visual Studio extensions or a manually build solution? - Niels Loup Working With Data in SharePoint Designer 2010 - Laura Rogers Sandboxed Solutions in...