When you install the Visual Studio Extensions for WSS, you are prompted to select a web site or create a new web site, and select an application pool to be used for the new site.  This site will be used for deploying your SharePoint artifacts into SharePoint.

However, if you are doing this on a Windows 2008 server, which is running IIS 7, there is an additional features that will need to be activated.  Otherwise, you will an encounter the following error:

Go to your Features in the Server Manager, click on “Add Features”

Expand the .NET 3.0 Framework  Features and under the “WCF Activation”, select the “HTTP Activation” and click “Next” to install the feature.

So if you are trying to install the 10 SharePoint free themes, you will need to enable the WCF Activation in order to deploy them.

Cheers

PinPoint is a SharePoint Administration tool which you can download for free.

Example of features:

<Quote>

• Locate most active sites
• Identify documents and pages that have most activity
• Find largest sites and largest items in SharePoint

</Quote>

You can download here

** Do note that I am not advocating or promoting the product, nor in anyway I am affiliated to Axceler.

Quite often we will be writing custom XSL to customize the display of a Content Query Web Part (CQWP) and at times we would want to get the current page URL where the CQWP web part lives.  For example, providing a link to a custom page to display your item as shown below, where the “Details” link is pointing to a custom page.

However, you would like to be able to get back to the origin page where the link is clicked.  You could achieve this by doing the following in your custom XSL:

Step 1:  Add the following namespace to your custom XSL:

xmlns:ddwrt=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime

Step 2:  Add a parameter name “PageUrl” right after XSL Stylesheet declaration:

<xsl:param name=”PageUrl” />

Step 3:  Add a query string to the link:

Step 4:  Add a link or button on your custom page and the following OnClick event:

As you probably have read regarding the SharePoint SP2 bug which reverts your license to the trial license which would expire after 180 days, and causes your existing license to expire in 180 days after the upgrade.  You could have fixes the problem by re-entering your license key into the system.

Microsoft has released a fix for this, this could be applied before or after the SP2 upgrade.

The 32-bit version can be downloaded here.

The 64-bit version is here.

For more information, you can read the kb article here:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971620

Chris O'Brien has compiled a detailed checklist on optimizing SharePoint sites, it is a great reference if you are tweaking performance on site.

Click here to read his article.

If you have downloaded and installed the Service Pack, please take note that Service Pack 2 will reset your product license key and product expiration date as though you are running on a trial license, which will expire in 180 days.  Though the expiration date will not affect the functionality of SharePoint until the expiration date.

For more information on this, check out the post by the SharePoint Team at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx

It is that time of the year again, where the different user groups come together and brings you a full day of technical sessions.  This year, SharePointPROs.SG has prepared a full track of SharePoint contents.  And this year, we are lucky to have Randy William, a SharePoint MVP, who is in town, to present.

Here are the details of the SharePoint sessions on that day:

10:00 – 11:15   A Close Look at the SharePoint Engine (Randy William (MVP), SyntergyOnline)

11:30 – 12:45   Basic Developer Knowledge Every Admin Must Know (Randy William (MVP), SyntergyOnline)

13-45 – 15:00   Supercharge Office Collaboration on MOSS (Tan Lip Joo, K2)

15:15 – 16:30   Inside MOSS 2007 Security & Permissions (Razi in Rais, MVP)

For more details, please visit http://ctu.geeksengaged.com

To register for the event, register here.

The SharePoint Team has just released the preliminary requirements for SharePoint 2010.  And yes it will be 64 bit only as you probably have heard before.  However, there are other requirements as well now.  Most prominently is that it will require:

• Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2 x64
• SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2005 x64
• Require Internet Explorer 7 and above for content authoring

So if you are planning to deploy a new SharePoint environment now, you should plan for these requirements now for future upgrades to the next version and it will definitely reduce future upgrade acitivites.  More details on the preliminary requirements could be found at the SharePoint Team Blog :

 http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing-sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx

Service Pack 2 for Office System 2007 and Office Server 2007 has been released on April 28th.

For more details on what is in the Service Pack 2 could be found here:

• Description of WSS 3.0 SP2
• Description of MOSS 2007 SP2
• Description of SharePoint Designer 2007 SP2

More information could also be found at Updates Resource Center for SharePoint Products & Technologies

There is no media for the SP2, below are the links to download the binaries:

• WSS 3.0 SP2
• MOSS 2007 SP2
• SharePoint Designer 2007 SP2

There is a new release of the SharePoint SDK, version 1.5 which contains the following updates:

• A new of version of the Business Data Catalog Definition Editor
• A few new search samples with regards to Federated Search:
  • Custom federated search web part with a credentials UI
  • Federated search SQL Server Connector
  • Federated search HTML to RSS Connector
  • Federated search Virtual Earth Map connector

The new SDK can be downloaded at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6d94e307-67d9-41ac-b2d6-0074d6286fa9&displaylang=en