Joseph Fluckiger's Blog

What are my favorite features of Windows Server 2008? Install experience is way faster. You don't even enter a name for the machine until after the install is complete. This is huge since virtualization is so big and installing Windows Server is happening more and more. This will save the IT industry hundreds of thousands of cumulative man hours. Windows Server 2008 is built for performance, not beauty. This is what I don't like about Vista. It is pretty but terribly slow. I hate when Vista's wastes my time. Windows Server 2008 is focused on performance. Perhaps I'll install Windows Server 2008 on my laptop.. Event Viewer is much improved. Interface is written by a non-developer and it is helpful. This is so nice that each tab and button is much more clearly described exactly what the feature does and what will happen when I hit the OK button. This will make me much less nervous about making changes on a production server. The interface is Humane. ...

I've been trying to figure out for a while how to turn on intellisense in visual studio for feature.xml files. Here is the trick, thanks to this post . Inside the TEMPLATE directory there is a directory named XML that contains several XML schemas, including one named wss.xsd. If you associate this schema file with feature files such as feature.xml and elements.xml, Visual Studio will provide IntelliSense, which makes it much easier to author a custom feature. You may also copy these XSD files into C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas\.

In production environments, my clients often want to put as little as possible on the C: drive. This is a very good idea for performance reasons. Unfortunately, I confirmed today that you can’t install all the MOSS files on a drive other than the C drive. During install, WSS/MOSS asks you where you want to install MOSS. Even when you specify a drive other than C during the install most of the files end up on C:. For example I chose the “I:” drive for the install path, but all my “12 hive” files still showed up on the C drive.   Here is my 12 hive on C: even though I installed MOSS on the I: drive.   The one folder that does obey my wishes is the “Microsoft Office Servers” folder. Which is 381 megs and as you can see is on the I: drive.   So it does save you 381 megs that would have gone on the C drive, but you can’t prevent most of the MOSS install files from ending up on the C: drive.

  We've all used Reflector to open up a .NET assembly and look at the code. But did you ever think of doing this to the core SharePoint assemblies? I had never thought of it until last week at Sleepless in Dallas, Nadeem Mitha of Infusion suggested it. It is quite instructive, and reveals a couple very important nuances that if you don't understand can make your code very slow.  For example, looking at the SPList.Items property you can see that this property simply calls the GetItems() method to retrieve all items for that list. So here is the kicker, any time you call the Items property it is retrieving all the items in the SharePoint list, even if you just call the Items[0] , SharePoint retrieves all the items in a list and then peels off the first one and gives it to you, very inefficient . Other classes to look at are  GetItemByUniqueId ( Guid uniqueId). You can see that behind the scenes, Microsoft is creating a CAML query and retrieving items. Why Microsoft i...

Sleepless in Dallas is over and what a whirlwind weekend! My brain is still swimming from all the SharePoint knowledge jammed in over the past two days. At 11pm Sat night they gave us our overnight assignment. It was to create something to include in the CKS (Community Kit for SharePoint). For my team’s project we worked on adding functionality to SUSHI, which is the SharePoint utility that I’ve been working on for almost a year now and have made available to the SharePoint community for free on CodePlex http://www.codeplex.com/sushi . Unfortunately for me, the rules of the contest say that you can’t use what you’ve already built, so the only item that was entered into the contest was a couple small features that we added to SUSHI that night. However, they wanted to present special recognition for SUSHI and gave me the Community award for having created a utility for the SharePoint community. So far, the CodePlex sushi page has gotten 6,000 page views, and over...

Hey great news, I found that I am a final candidate fro Sleepless in Dallas ! Sweetness! The event is billed as the ultimate SharePoint developer's conference and put on by Infusion Development. Post by Chris Koenig on the event. Andrea from Infusion who interviewed me said that my application caught her attention because I mentioned that I had won the grand prize in a programming contest in the 8th grade, that she thought that the most successful programmers were people who had programmed all their lives and who were passionate about programming.   For the record, the programming contest involved using Apple IIe Basic to create an animated face that could express various emotions: happy, sad, angry, etc. This was part of the Odessy of the Mind contest and the challenge was to incorporate a robot that expressed emotion into a skit. So we perched our monitor on a cart and dressed it up with clothes. Our robot was a brilliant actor, let me tell you what! :) It was the cheesiest ...

The latest version of SharePoint SUSHI has been released! SharePoint SUSHI version 2.18   This version includes the new treeview SharePoint browser. This makes it easier to find a site on your local farm by browsing, rather than having to type it in. Click the "select a site" link button to use this new feature.