The new blog already has an updated Code Camp and User Group page on it that display's more presentations but please keep in mind a lot of the presentations are the same.  I'll be uploading the code for the Extending STSADM session shortly.

Cheers,
Michael

I'm also very proud to say that Nas will be doing his first code camp session at Roanoke and I'm really excited about attending his session on configuring FBA for MOSS.  His session goes into details on how to do the FBA for regular SharePoint sites but also My Sites.  He and I have already talked a lot about the session details during are 24 hour road trip to the South Florida Code Camp.  I also think he will be talking about setting up a custom ASP.NET application for creating user accounts.  This should be another good session.  He has got me so revved up about FBA and I'm already thinking about creating some InfoPath 2007 browser based forms for creating FBA accounts and roles and maybe doing a joint session with him.

You can register and view the schedule for the Roanoke Code Camp at the below link.  Hope to see you there.

http://www.rvnug.org/codecamp.aspx

Cheers

For this code camp I'll be doing the same two sessions that I did for the South Florida Code Camp but the STSADM session will be a little bit longer because when I presented last time it was to short by 10 or 15 minutes.  I think I'm going to add a custom command that does something with InfoPath Form Services.  I'm pretty excited about adding the new example because it's going to give me a chance to work with the InfoPath Forms Services API.  The titles and descriptions of each session is listed below and if anybody wants more details please fill free to leave a comment or  send me a email through my blog.

Session 1 – Creating custom commands for STSADM Utility

The session walks through creating a Visual Studio 2008 C# Class Project for writing code to extend STSADM Utility and what needs to be done to deploy and have STSADM Utility recognize the new custom command.  Additional time will be spent on how the code is structured and what the debug parameter is used for.

Session 2 – InfoPath 2007 and Visual Studio 2008

The session walks through building a new InfoPath 2007 form, Web Service, .NET Class, Workflow and LDAP query with Visual Studio 2008.  The form will call web service on opening and retrieve the current user Active Directory information and State list from SQL 2005 database to populate an InfoPath form drop down list.   A simple workflow will be created and deployed with Visual Studio 2008 for sending an email.

If you're in driving distance please attend because to my understanding this code camp is going to be slammed full with great content and speakers just like all the other code camps I've attended.  You can register for the code camp at the http://www.codecamp.org/ website.

Cheers

Cheers

Ok, enough of my babbling and now to the details of the post.  A few weeks ago I needed to extend the STSADM utility to do a couple of things that it current doesn't have commands for or at least I couldn't find them.  When I built the initial project and deployed the assembly and started to test everything I ran into problems with the code (I wish I could write perfect code).  I struggled trying to get all the code working correctly without having the capability of debugging the code while it ran.  I could have done the old "Console.WriteLine" but I didn't want to go through this approach because I was tired and it would have been way too tedious for me.  This was really frustrating and I decided to figure out what needed to be done to make debugging an option.  I did a little searching but couldn't find anything that helped me (probably not using the correct search words).  When I started to really think about the whole scenario it reminded me about onetime I had to write a Windows Service and I ran into the same type of problem.  To solve that problem I added the "System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch" command to my code so I could debug my Windows Service.  So I figured what the heck and I added it to my code and everything complied without a problem.  I deployed the assembly and ran my custom STSADM command and then the Visual Studio Just-In-Time Debugger window popped up as expected.

Since I had already had the code project open I just highlighted that line and clicked the "Yes" button to debug my code.  If I didn't have the code project already open then I would click "New instance of Visual Studio 2005" and the code would automatically loaded into Visual Studio 2005.  Even if you don't have the code project on the server but have the "obj" folder and all its content then debugging is still possible (at least from my experience it is).  When the debugger is ready your code will have a green arrow next to it like the image below.

At this point I usually hit the F10 key and then everything changes to the correct colors and everything works as normal. 

When I got the debugging working with my code it was a lot simpler to see what was wrong with the code.  Then I started to test all the different options for my custom command and the debugger launching all the time started to drive me nuts.  I guess everything is not perfect but then it dawned on me what if I just add a debug option to the command string.  Something like "-debug" and if that's present then launch the debugger.  I thought it could work so I added the extra code to my project to make it happen and compiled everything and moved the assembly into the GAC again.

I went and tried my command again without the debug option and everything ran like normal and then for the big test I add the debug option and the debugger launched and everything worked just as I hoped.  Now I have complete control when the debugger will launch and I will no longer have the nuisance of the debugger launching every time. 

This was a great learning experience for me in many different ways but it really helped me open my eyes on making things more functional and user friendly by taking a little extra time to think about what could be done.

Cheers

So here it goes;

The last few weeks I have learned so many things when working with Josh Medero (Jason Medero brother).  Josh has been helping me out with my InfoPath 2007/InfoPath Forms Services project and he has accidently done a couple of things that I've never done or seen before but that's totally cool because it has helped me learn new things about InfoPath 2007 and InfoPath Forms Services.  As you probably already know this post is about another thing that I learned today.

If you're a developer and have ever worked with InfoPath 2007 forms then you've probably have added a button to the form and have accidentally clicked the "Edit Form Code" button and launched Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) and then closed it because you meant to click the "Rules" button.

When the VSTA window was closed I would have never have thought it would actually create anything and especially if nothing was saved.  For Josh it created an assembly for the form even though no code was added.  He never knew that an assembly was added to the form and I would have never known it but he was having other issues with his form and he sent it to me to open and preview. When I went to preview the form I got the following warning.

The reason that I got the warning was because I don't install VSTA on my laptop but VSTO instead.  After I say the warning message it started to get me wandering what was wrong.  First thing that I did was close InfoPath 2007 and then explored the XSN file and noticed it had a dll in it.  After I noticed this I opened the form backup and went into "Tools" -> "Form Options" and clicked "Programming" category.

The "Programming" category page shows that something was created and once I saw this I just clicked the "Remove Code" button to remove the unwanted assembly.  When I clicked the button the following pop-up came up and I clicked the "Yes" button to remove the code.

After I did these steps I no longer got the warning message when opening the form and Josh problems no longer existed either.  If you really don't plan to do coding in InfoPath with VSTA then I would suggest not to install VSTA that way this problem doesn't occur accidently.

Cheers

Cheers

All the information about the South Florida Code Camp can be found on the http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com/ website.  From what I heard while at Philly Code Camp from other speakers this code camp is suppose to be as big as or bigger than the Philly Code Camp one.  To see what sessions are currently on tap checkout the agenda page http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com/agenda.aspx.  The code camp is going to have 12 different tracks and that means tons of sessions.  The "SharePoint/ Office" track already has my "InfoPath 2007 and Visual Studio 2008" session and "Utilizing Visual Studio 2008 capabilities for better SharePoint Development Part 1 and Part 2" sessions on tap.  In my opinion this track is already shaping up to be a killer track.

I'm really excited about this code camp and I'm glad to have the chance to speak at it and I hope to meet some new SharePoint colleagues there to.  Well I'm about all posted out for the night.  Hope to see some of you there.

Cheers

When at the Philly Code Camp I got to meet a couple other great SharePoint speakers.  After my session I got to speak with Susan Lennon (http://wss.lennontechnologies.com/blog/default.aspx) who did a session on "Using SharePoint Designer to Build a Dashboard-type View of Lists" and got to sit in on the session by Tony Testa (http://www.tonytestasworld.com/) called "AJAX in SharePoint".  Susan and I didn't have a long time to talk but she seemed to be a great person with some interesting experience with SharePoint 2007.  I'm hoping to have another chance to talk with her while out at Office Developer Conference in February.  Dave Mann did his session after mine and it was a great session on you guessed it Workflow and SharePoint.

As promised my presentation and code solutions are up on my Code Camp and User Group page and I just sent them to Philly Code Camp organizers and should be posted on their site shortly.  If anybody has any questions about the code please fill free to email at ml@(nospam)bandrsolutions.com

Cheers

Usually when I'm starting out on a new project I've always found myself always using the "Visual Studio Development Server" for debugging but once I start publishing my sites to IIS then I usually switch to "IIS Web Server" but one of the biggest problems that I've had was not being able to switch back to "Visual Studio Development Server" mode and successfully publish my code to the desired IIS website.  Whenever I would switch back and try to publish my code to the IIS website I would get this error.

This error has haunted me for about 2 or 3 projects and I finally got tired of it and started to do some searching to find a fix but was unable to.  So I started messing around with the settings on the Web properties tab and noticed that the "Project Url" and "Override application root URL" textboxes were getting pre-populated and in most cases I was changing the values to point to the IIS website I published to.

Once I noticed that these values were not being cleared out when I would click on the "Use Visual Studio Development Server" radio button then I decided to clear them out manually and then try publishing again.  When I tried the publishing everything worked and the error went away.  So when you switch back and wan't to use the publish feature but you can't because of the error message, just make sure everything is cleared out and looks like this image below.

I'm sure everyone in the world knows this but since this was my first I figured I would blog it.  Hope everybody had a great weekend.

Cheers