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The Dean's Office

June 2007 - Posts

TechReady 5. I made my mark, time to make it again!

My Tech-Ed session on SharePoint Designer was a huge hit. Hundreds filled out their evaluations, and voted that session the best in the Office track! All while fighting a horrible server crash, too! I was thrilled to hear the result, and I wanted to thank everyone who attended for their review. If you attended and want to see a playback of what I did, sit tight -- the Tech-Ed DVDs will have a VIDEO of my session! You can walk through the whole thing!

I guess the guys on the SharePoint Designer team really enjoyed the session, too -- I've been asked to present this session at TechReady 5, an internal Microsoft-only conference held in Seattle in July. It's a bit like Tech-Ed for blue badges (MS employees), and from what I understand, they're expecting thousands to attend! I'm honored to be chosen to speak at this event, and I promise to do Joel Oleson proud. Smile That's right, Joel: There will be another wave. Oh, yes. There will be another wave!

If you're a softie and you're planning to go to TechReady 5, check out my SharePoint Designer session, OCF306. It'll be on the 24th at 2PM, and it'll be the room with the raucous laughter and the awesome SharePoint Designer demos on the big screen.

Thanks again to all who attended my SPD session at Tech-Ed. I had a blast, and I hope you did, too!

(and if you attended my birds-of-a-feather session on ADD, thanks for coming to that, too!)

Posted Jun 29 2007, 11:03 PM by Dustin Miller with 9 comment(s)

Filed under: sharepoint, techready, speaking, ad/hd, teched, sharepoint designer, add

Don't forget: Web Services/SOAP isn't the only path to XML from SharePoint

A technique we used extensively in STS still applies to WSS: How to get data from your SharePoint lists in XML format. It's actually quite simple, and you don't need to use web services to get it.

WSS supports a number of protocols to interact with the data. SOAP and WEBDAV immediately come to mind for most of you, but you may be forgetting the elusive URL Protocol (GET). Luckily for you, it's simple to use, and returns data in the MS-standard rowset stream format.

Rather than go into a bunch of detail, let's put ourselves to work, shall we? Follow along with these steps, and you'll be pleased with the results, I'm certain. Smile

Determine the GUID of a list whose data you need in XML.

Navigate to the allitems.aspx view of the list in question
Click the "Modify Settings and Columns" link on the left side
Copy the List's GUID (including curly braces) from the address bar

Construct the URL to retrieve the list's data in XML format (it's case sensitive, be careful!)
- The requested object is http://servername/sitename/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll
- The object will expect three parameters: Cmd, List and XMLDATA (case sensitive)
- Since we're displaying items (in XML format), the value of the Cmd parameter should be Display
- We want to grab the list whose GUID we determined in step one; the value of the List parameter is this GUID (including curly braces)
- Of course, we want XML data to be returned; the value of the XMLDATA parameter will be TRUE
- Putting this together, we get a URL that looks like this:
- http://server/site/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?Cmd=Display&List={E1D9FED5-2531-413F-8C0F-CAA5C6280E51}&XMLDATA=TRUE
Sit back and marvel at how easy it is to get a rowset out of SharePoint without using the Object Model or the Web Services. You can point a Data View web part to this URL and grab data from another SharePoint site without adding the whole site to your DV catalog listing.

You may find that it doesn't return EVERY field. That's right: It returns fields that are defined in the default "allitems" view of that particular list. If you want more fields, you have two choices:

Modify the allitems.aspx view to show more fields (easy)
Pass an additional URL parameter, View, with the GUID value of the view whose fields you want to return (a little more involved/tedious)

Did you like this tip? Comment!

Posted Jun 22 2007, 08:44 AM by Dustin Miller with 15 comment(s)

Filed under: xml, web services, supergeek tip, xmldata, url protocol, soap

I hate Murphy, but I love SharePoint Blogs users and bloggers!

How does it go again? "The worst thing will happen at the worst possible time." That's the most often-seen definition of Murphy's law, right?

Right.

So, imagine if you will. You've been selected as a speaker at TechEd in Orlando, Florida. You arrive on a Sunday, have a nice dinner and some drinks with friends you haven't seen in months (and may not see again until the next big conference), and unwind. The hotel? It's nice; it has its quirks, but it's Orlando and the hotel has lots of flowers around it and a nice fountain and ... you get the point. That first day, the tension is already melting. Good friends, good food, good drinks, good weather. You go to bed the first night, ready and rarin' to start your week at Tech Ed with a bang. The alarm is set for 7PM so you can shower and catch the keynote before hitting the expo floor for the morning's "swag tour".

Your phone, set to beep only if messages arrive from your spouse or from your server monitoring system, starts beeping before the sun even rises.

"Server down."

To quote Starbuck (and, well, pretty much every other lead character in Battlestar Galactica): "Frak me."

I don't know about you, but I hate waking up that way. I prefer to wake up before the alarm goes off, slowly roll out of bed, and crawl into the shower. I'm not a morning person at all.

I'll speed up the story now. No sense reliving the whole tragedy. Here's the fast-forward version: Server crashes, catastrophic RAID failure. Backups, tested monthly (and last tested three weeks ago) are useless. I rebuild the array and run some software that recovers files from their original stripes, and recover a surprising number of files. They're all pretty mangled, and most of them are useless. I don't really have the time or the focus to start new servers from scratch while I'm in Orlando. Not that the servers were in my house or anything (they weren't, of course, we're not some fly-by-night operation here), but a hotel room with a slow network connection is not the best place to do your best technical work.

Thursday afternoon comes, and I'm dangerously close to a breakdown. I've been knee-deep in server doo-doo for days. Todd and Matt (two of the greatest trainers in the world, I should add) dive into the muck with me and both of them say (alternately), "Dude, take a break, we'll help you clean this up." It's hard to let go, but I can see that I'm minutes away from a full-blown freak-out. I quietly put down the laptop lid, put on some shorts and sandals, and drive to Epcot to ride Mission Space four times. Then, off to the attendee party at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure.

Friday didn't seem as bad. It got better, too, because my wife and son arrived to spend a long weekend with me in Florida. We saw my mom and step-dad, went to a few tourist traps, and all-in-all had a great time.

When I get home, I have one full day before I need to leave again to teach a class. SharePoint Experts and SharePoint Bootcamp come back online during that time. Then, I spend my evenings and Father's Day weekend getting as much content back into SharePoint Blogs as possible (thanks again to Dan Larson and Glenn Barry from NewsGator for their help in recovering old content), and here we are.

I said that I hate Murphy, and I do: His laws suck out loud. But YOU guys are another story; the readers and bloggers here at SharePoint Blogs are part of the the greatest technology community on this planet. Every e-mail I've received has been supportive and appreciative. Every phone call and blog comment cheers me on. I can't thank you guys enough for your patience, your understanding, and your support! It's been a bumpy road, and we still have some ways to go, but the outpouring of support I've received by e-mail has given me the energy to keep going.

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