Mohamed Zaki's Blog [Sharepoint MVP]

Very nice site for sharepoint developers, you can find references for many Virtual machines, articles, samples ... etc.

 

url: www.microsoft.com/click/sharepointdeveloper

 

 

 

Via Sharepoint team blog

What's in VSeWSS?

Version 1.2 of the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services contains the following tools to aid developers in building SharePoint applications:

Visual Studio 2008 Project Templates

• Web Part
• Team Site Definition
• Blank Site Definition
• List Definition
• Empty SharePoint Project

Visual Studio 2008 Item Templates (items that can be added into an existing project)

• Web Part
• Custom Field
• List Definition (with optional Event Receiver)
• Content Type (with optional Event Receiver
• Module
• List Instance
• List Event Handler
• Template

SharePoint Solution Generator

This stand-alone program generates a Site Definition project from an existing SharePoint site. The program enables developers to use the browser and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer to customize the content of their sites before creating code by using Visual Studio.

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers

• Q: Does VSeWSS 1.2 support Visual Studio 2008?
  A: Yes.

• Q: Does VSeWSS 1.2 support Visual Stuido 2005?
  A: No,  you must use Version 1.1 with Visual Studio 2005.

• Q: What additional features are in Version 1.2?
  A: For Version 1.2 we focussed on Visual Studio 2008 support only.

• Q: Does VSeWSS support Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
  A: Yes, VSeWSS supports both Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server.

• Q: Does VSeWSS support Windows XP or "remote debugging"?
  A: No, VSeWSS only works against local SharePoint installations.

Microsoft announced a new webcast series on Sharepoint, these webcasts are really usefull especially for anybody wants to start developing on sharepoint.

 

 

Date	Webcast Topic	Registration Link
May 20	Web Parts	Register today!
May 21	Data Lists	Register today!
May 27	Silverlight and SharePoint	Register today!
May 28	Using Event Handlers	Register today!
Jun 3	Page Branding	Register today!
Jun 4	Workflow	Register today!
Jun 10	Web Services	Register today!
Jun 11	Page Navigation	Register today!
Jun 17	User Management	Register today!
Jun 18	Custom Content Types	Register today!

Via Sharepoint team blog

It's with great excitement that I get to be the first to announce the initial release of the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit! Since shipping SharePoint back in November of 2006 we've been listening to your feedback and requests for more tools to help you run our product. We've been listening and our team is deeply committed to supporting you and our in market products. One of our approaches to better support you is to provide a regular release of additional tools in the new SharePoint Administration Toolkit. This tool pack is oriented towards helping SharePoint administrators with complex or demanding tasks—and we will have updated releases several times each year.  Each release of this kit will include new or improved functionality to make managing SharePoint easier and less time consuming.  The tools on the top of our list are aimed at the issues that you, our customers, have brought up through Products Support—but this effort won't stop there!  If there's something you need to keep your SharePoint deployments running on a daily basis, I want to hear about it!  Use the comments below to give us ideas or any other feedback.

Now, shifting focus on to this version of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit—this first release contains two very useful tools which are both supported on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The first tool, called "Batch Site Manager", adds new functionality through Central Administration.  From the new "Move, Lock, and Delete Site Collections" page on Applications Management you can schedule bulk operations against site collections in the farm—including moving site collections between content databases! This is my favorite feature as it is completely new functionality for SharePoint and definitely helps manage deployments simply from the UI rather than requiring administrators to write or use scripts.  The development of this feature was quite involved, and is a topic which I intend to blog about in full in the near future.  For now, here's a screenshot of the "Batch Site Manager" tool:
 
*Note: when using the Batch Site Manager, be sure to refresh the site collection list using the "click here" aggregation link before every scheduled operation!

The second tool is actually a new command in STSADM called "updatealert". This command will refresh all alert URLs in a specific site collection, which is extremely important should you change the URL of a web application or after an upgrade. Alerts in SharePoint store the URL which the users used to create them—which is needed so that users of different "zones" get the proper URL in their email—but if the URL changes you can now use "STSADM –o UpdateAlert" to let SharePoint fix these alerts (don't know what a "zone" is? Start here on MSDN). Due to the multiple zones that can exist in a web application, the UpdateAlert command needs to be provided with both the new URL of the site collection to be fixed and the old URL–this operation must be run once per zone, but will update all the subwebs in the given site collection automatically.

The full detailed whitepaper about this release of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit is available on MSDN. There are some restrictions regarding the Batch Site Manager tool, so be sure to read the whitepaper!

 

The download links for the SharePoint Administration Toolkit

x64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F8EEA8F0-FA30-4C10-ABC9-217EEACEC9CE&displaylang=en

x86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=263CD480-F6EB-4FA3-9F2E-2D47618505F2&displaylang=en

Hay guys, lately i was so busy preparing my session at EDC (Egypt Developers Conference 2008) , about what ? of course sharepoint :) ; the session this year titled "Sharepoint development quick tips" it's main goal is to highlight the best practices developers should follow to deliver a scalable a high performance solutions based on MOSS 2007 and actually not only developers but also for site administrators; in the session we covered the following topics:

 

 

 

1- Sharepoint Disposable Objects

2- Optimizing WCM performance

     a. Reducing Pages payload

     b. IIS Compression for Sharepoint Sites

     c. Sharepoint Caching

 

3- overview of Sharepoint Capacity planning tools

 

i'll upload the slides and samples soon today isa.

 

Thank you everybody attended and i was really pleased to see you there, hope you found the session interesting.