SharePoint 2010 with IIS URL Rewrite 2.0

Or, how do you remove /Pages/ from SharePoint URL.

Almost all the hard work is done by Waldek Mastykarz (@waldekm)
http://blog.mastykarz.nl/friendly-urls-sharepoint-site-4-steps-iis7-url-rewrite-module/

These are just my extra notes for SharePoint 2010, I'm going to assume you are reading Waldek's article with this blog as a supplement.

How to install IIS URL Rewrite

The easiest way is via the MS Web Platform Installer

On a good connection you are good to go within 30 seconds - faster if you already have MS Web Platform Installer on the server.

Installed, IIS URL Rewrite 2.0 lives here

IIS URL Rewrite 2.0

I seriously think there's a bug with IIS Url Rewrite 2.0's Regex

Waldek's regex pattern for step 3 is perfect:

^(.*/)?Pages/([^/]+)\.aspx$

and so is step 4:

^(.*/)?Pages/default.aspx$

BUG: IIS URL Rewrite matches badly - see screenshot:

Regex will try to maximize to match as many characters as it can. But this simply does not explain why group 1 match includes Pages/ - Why was Pages/ included in the match? This doesn't make any sense.

You can test the pattern with any other regex library, including .NET (via PowerShell), and you still won't get the stupid buggy match that is IIS URL Rewrite's regex…

(Sorry I'm annoyed that this caused a lot of problem for something that shouldn't have existed...)

$pattern = [regex] "^(.*/)?Pages/default.aspx$"

$result = $pattern.match("Publishing/Pages/default.aspx")

$result.Groups[1]

Success : True

Captures : {Publishing/}

Index : 0

Length : 11

Value : Publishing/

Anyway, to fix this we need to tweak the pattern

^(.*?/)?Pages/([^/]+)\.aspx$

^(.*?/)?Pages/default.aspx$

This will finally force IIS URL Rewrite to work properly.

the extra ? tells regex to try to match as little as it can, while still making a match.

Final result – the order is important – see Waldek’s article

TRICKS: Debugging URL Rewrite by enabling trace

When things don't work - this is your only hope. Read trace logs.

Fortunately it's not very hard to read, I mean we read SharePoint logs and survived. It's just tedious to read logs in general.

Open the log in Internet Explorer - which picks up the XSL and gives you a nicer looking UI. Head over to the compact view tab, and look for URL_REWRITE_START

HORRIBLE PITFALL: URL Rewrite Cache

I've noticed that when you reshuffle a rule (or add a condition to a rule), it doesn't force the cache to bugger off. So you thought you tweaked the rule but it doesn't seem to have any effect. The trace log will tell you that it actually is ignoring your rule reshuffle because it is listening to the "Url Rewrite Cache".

This is OK, until you have a bad URL cached, then suddenly it's annoying. IIS Reset doesn't cut it.  My tip that I ended up with is to toggle a rule's disable/enable state to trigger the URL Rewrite cache to refresh.

SharePoint Authenticated

WARNING: I've had SharePoint on various unknown occasions suddenly raise a login dialogue. I can't reproduce this on demand, but it happens frequent enough that I think it's no accident. It also sometimes goes away when I hit F5 refresh and Windows Authentication just works and I don't see any login prompt at all.

The experience reminded me highly of the days in 2007 where sometimes SharePoint will mysteriously ask you to sign in when you are supposedly browsing the site anonymous.

Please test thoroughly.

SharePoint Anonymous

For a public anonymous website, this works absolutely great - no authentication to worry about either.

I didn't do much testing with the postbacks and the ribbon. They do work, but I think I'll need a lot more testing to work out if everything is still OK.

My gut feeling is that SharePoint 2010 relies a lot more on AJAX-based client side calls without a full page postback. While the URL rewrite would have affected the postback somewhat, AJAX calls would be largely immune to this problem.

Summary

Definitely try this out on your SharePoint site and I think you'll be surprised how well it worked (once you get it to work). Thanks Waldek for sharing!

Sydney SharePoint User Group 20 July 2010

Presented an updated version of my Silverlight and SharePoint solutions talk in the Sydney user group tonight.  I don't think I timed the presentation well and lost way too much time in the beginning in XAML - which made everything seemed harder, and getting to the fun part much later.

• Will improve - won't type XAML again, will highlight what's interesting but avoid fiddling live.

Honestly lots of room to improve but I think it was still interesting to a lot of people.  If you were there tonight and feels otherwise please let me know!

Feedback I've received:

1. Demo at least "worked" even though really slow going in the beginning
   • Will improve, in fact given 1hr I don't think I'll type out the XAML again in the future - this will give me far more time to spend in the code, as well as getting to the fun part a lot quicker
2. Need more time spend to show end-user Silverlight debugging (no modification to the server required)
   • Which I think would be a lot better use of the time
3. Need more time to show some nice integration examples
   • Such as my Silverlight Camera which definitely raised eyebrows.
   • And if I can ever get my Silverlight PivotViewer to a decent, presentable state…
   • But basically, people need to see the features that Silverlight and SharePoint brings to the table separately, and why they are suddenly super awesome together.  Have an idea to draw a chart that'll blow everyone away - wait for it on SharePoint Saturday.
4. Something went wrong at the one-hour mark, where my IE decided to go offline, which made further demo really difficult.  My suspicion is that Fiddler2 died somehow and IE thinks everything has gone funny and offline. 
   • Might have fixed itself by restarting IE.
5. Definitely need more question time, and end with more links

Lots of links for news:

A bunch of links I promised Brad Saide, to add to the SharePoint news for the past month:

Productivity Hub 2010
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4AAA9862-E420-4331-8BC3-469D7BAE0FF1&displaylang=en

SPF2010 Update via @dougleung http://sharepointsix.blogspot.com/2010/07/sharepoint-2010-sharepoint-2010-just.html 
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2032588

Windows Update broke WSS3 (with Windows Internal Database)
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2010/06/22/installing-kb938444.aspx 
Lesson - don't use automatic windows update on your production SharePoint farm

Silverlight - code behind back to MVVM

Philosophical difference between code-behind and the ViewModel

Because VS.NET is firstly a visual tool, it tries very hard to give developers an easy starting point where you can create your layout and easily add code to various events.

The problem this creates, is that the end result code in the events is a mixture of two type of code:

• Data access, relating to service calls, maintaining in memory state of the object.
• Updates to the UI.

The former is what we’re trying to test, whereas the UI is always difficult to test, especially if compounded with animation or frequent changes to the UI.

Why do we need to do this?

• Code-behind is part of the View, application logic doesn't belong here
• Prolonged mixing of application logic WITH UI login in the code-behind leads to spaghetti code, the main issue is maintenance cost
• Unable to easily separate and test functionality

Refactor and take control - bring Code Behind back into MVVM

I tackle this problem in stages, without stages the problem is too big and you may not be able to stop halfway.

Stage 1 - creating a ViewModel

A ViewModel is a model for a view.  So in your ViewModel you should have any information that is necessary for the UI (view) to render properly.  Remember to implement INotifyPropertyChanged

public class MainViewModel : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
}

Add the ViewModel to your View - this can be done in the XAML

 <UserControl.Resources>
    <ViewModel:MainViewModel x:Key="MainViewModelInstance"/>
  </UserControl.Resources>

You can reference the ViewModel in your code behind this way:

var resourceMainViewModel = this.Resources["MainViewModelInstance"];
_mainViewModel = resourceMainViewModel as MainViewModel;

Stage 2 - moving application state variables to ViewModel

A typical sign of a lot of code-behind is when we have a lot of member variables in the View.

1. A majority of them can be moved directly into the ViewModel.
2. Provide property get/set on the ViewModel and re-wire the Code-behind logic to use the ViewModel for now.

Exercise some judgement here - not all variables should go to the ViewModel, references to UI elements for example, should remain in the code-behind (view).

Stage 3 - moving application methods to ViewModel, hooking UI events

Once you've moved your variables to the ViewModel - then you can start looking at moving the methods to the ViewModel.

The trickiest part here, if you have started with code-behind, is that there will be methods that have a mixture of application logic along with UI update calls.

An easy, intermediate way to handle these UI calls is to have the VM raise an event at the specific time, and have the View bind to those events and make the UI updates.

Change any UI update code to UI binding syntax - this should be the normal for most VM entity or collections.

Stage 4 - you can start creating Silverlight Unit Tests

By stage 3 - you should have more and more application logic moved back to the ViewModel.  Add a Silverlight Unit Testing project and start instantiating the ViewModel and test the collections and entities can be populated correctly.

From this point onwards because you have the unit tests available you can start to do a lot more refactoring with the methods without worrying that you'll be breaking stuff. 

Stage 5 - calling application methods via Commands

Create a DelegateCommand class - unfortunately one isn't provided with Silverlight (I don't know why)

public class DelegateCommand : ICommand
{
    Func<object, bool> canExecute;
    Action<object> executeAction;
    bool _canExecuteCache;

    public DelegateCommand(Action<object> executeAction, Func<object, bool> canExecute)
    {
        this.executeAction = executeAction;
        this.canExecute = canExecute;
    }

    public DelegateCommand(Action<object> executeAction)
        : this(executeAction, null)
    {
    }
    #region ICommand Members

    public bool CanExecute(object parameter)
    {
        if (canExecute == null)
        {
            return true;
        }

        bool temp = canExecute(parameter);
        if (_canExecuteCache != temp)
        {
            _canExecuteCache = temp;
            if (CanExecuteChanged != null)
            {
                CanExecuteChanged(this, new EventArgs());
            }
        }
        return _canExecuteCache;
    }

    public event EventHandler CanExecuteChanged;

    public void Execute(object parameter)
    {
        executeAction(parameter);
    }

    #endregion
}

In the ViewModel - change the direct method call from the view into a property DelegateCommand, then in the View, change the Click event handler to Command property via Binding to the ViewModel.DelegateCommand

Stage 6 - break UI event hooks by binding storyboards via triggers

This is by far the most trickiest - depending on what sort of UI updates you had in the code-behind, it may be very tricky to convert them into storyboards.

Do your best, but don't go overboard on this one - I don't have a good all-round-fix for this one yet.

SharePoint ClientContext.List is missing?

The SharePoint Object Model has:

• SPContext Members
• SPContext.Current (static)
• SPContext.Site
• SPContext.Web
• SPContext.List

By comparison, the SharePoint Client Object Model only has:

• ClientContext Members
• ClientContext.Current (static)
• ClientContext.Site
• ClientContext.Web
• ClientContext.List (AWOL missing!)

Here's one trick I've started using - the current list exists on the page in javascript (ctx.listName)

So using Silverlight's Javascript bridge I'm able to test and pull that value back into Silverlight - without any looping through the ClientContext.Web.Lists.

string listName = string.Format("{0}", HtmlPage.Window.Eval("ctx.listName"));
// using string.Format to take care of null problems
// the ctx.listName looks like a guid

List list = _clientContext.Web.Lists.GetById(new Guid(listName));

So taking a step back, this would be the first time I wrote something that uses both client object model at once!

SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight 4.0 Webcam

Tonight's Silverlight play involves Silverlight 4 Web Cam API, and SharePoint 2010 Client Object Model.

SILVERLIGHT 4 WEBCAM API

Silverlight 4's WebCam API is relatively simple:

_captureVideoDevice = CaptureDeviceConfiguration.GetDefaultVideoCaptureDevice();
_captureSource = new CaptureSource();
VideoBrush brush = new VideoBrush();
brush.SetSource(_captureSource);

WebCameraCapture.Fill = brush; // fill rectangle "render" area

var device = _captureVideoDevice.FriendlyName; // check device name during debug
if (CaptureDeviceConfiguration.AllowedDeviceAccess || CaptureDeviceConfiguration.RequestDeviceAccess())
{
    _captureSource.Start();
}

The most interesting part is probably the RequestDeviceAccess call. This call must be initiated in an UI event (click) and will raise the following dialog

TAKING SNAPSHOTS

Once the camera is rolling, clicking the button takes a snapshot and saves it back to the document library.

WriteableBitmap bmp = new WriteableBitmap(WebCameraCapture, null);
MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
// didn't want to save as bitmap - convert to JPEG first
EncodeJpeg(bmp, stream);

var fileCreationInfo = new FileCreationInformation();
fileCreationInfo.Content = stream.ToArray();
fileCreationInfo.Url = string.Format("pic_{0}.jpg", DateTime.Now.Ticks);
var _documentLibrary = _clientContext.Web.Lists.GetByTitle("ListName");
var uploadFile = _documentLibrary.RootFolder.Files.Add(fileCreationInfo);
_clientContext.Load(uploadFile);
_clientContext.ExecuteQueryAsync(delegate{}, delegate{});

In this screenshot I've added the Silverlight web part on top of the asset library list.

WHAT ABOUT VIDEO?

This is where we'll probably get stuck. Silverlight 4 has API to access camera, and we're able to save bitmap data from the camera, but Silverlight 4 lacks the client side encoding libraries capable of saving the bitmap stream back into any meaningful format such as MPEG.

Until Microsoft provides one, or some 3rd party writes one, saving video back to SharePoint document library is going to get put on hold.

REFERENCE

The code for converting to JPEG I copied from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1139200/using-fjcore-to-encode-silverlight-writeablebitmap.

DOWNLOAD

The Silverlight Camera XAP binaries are in this XAP file 

The Silverlight Camera Sandbox Solution and read me file 

INSTALLATION

1. Upload the XAP file to a document library, copy the URL to this XAP file.
2. Create a document library to host all the pictures, open the web part zones on the view page and insert a Silverlight Web Part - use the URL to XAP from step 1.
3. Remember to refresh the page to see new pictures - the list doesn't refresh automatically.  You can switch on async properties in the web part editor for the pictures and it will update itself on a timer basis.

UPDATE

20 July - Added sandbox solution WSP and a simple read-me file

SharePoint 2010 - Update All List Items SharePoint Designer Workflow Action

Out of the box - SharePoint provides quite a few different Workflow Actions, but strangely missing was a Workflow action that can loop through and update all items within a list.

Figure: Update List Item (but only works with one item)

Further to my shock was that someone out there (cough Codeplex) hasn't written one yet. So last night I sat down and start to code.  There will be another article about coding and packaging a SharePoint Workflow Activity, but right now, I need to shove my baby out the door.

UPDATE LIST ITEMS v1.0 INSTALLATION

Everything in one WSP file: grab it here

The package includes 3 objects:

• WorkflowActivity.dll - goes in the GAC
• WorkflowActivity.ACTIONS - goes into <SharePointRoot>\TEMPLATE\1033\Workflow\WorkflowActivity.ACTIONS
• <authorizedType> entry needed in Web.Config - I've included a Web Application feature that will do this

To activate the web application feature

UPDATE LIST ITEMS v1.0 USERS GUIDE

In SharePoint Designer, select the "Update All List Items" action from the menu

Or just do the inline typing

There is only 1 dialog for this action - I cheated and reuse the dialog from Update Item Workflow Action

Unfortunately, because I cheated and use Microsoft's dialog - it won't let us finish without specifying a List Item - hence I use the sentence "Update all items in this list (ignore list item)" - sorry - hope that was clear.

OK and trigger the workflow

SUMMARY NOTES

1. In SharePoint, a workflow can not trigger itself. So even though I have the workflow set against this list - it is only run on the last item.
2. And because this is version 1 (v1.0) there's some really complex looking code for setting "People or Group" values. So I'm not sure if this works 100% in my implementation.
3. Obviously, if your list is extremely large you are on your own :-)
4. One other scenario this opens up is the facility to have a site workflow "trigger" a second workflow set on a particular list (remember - workflow can't trigger itself).

Silverlight - merging detached object back to the attached data context

This is a short post on something that we did in the days of Silverlight 2~3, before we have RIA services.

Consider two method signatures on the service:

1. public EntityPerson GetPerson(object key);
2. public void SavePerson(EntityPerson person);

Silverlight gets an EntityPerson object, exposes it via the ViewModel for databinding.  The user hits the save button, and the data is coming back through the wire.

It comes back to SavePerson, but the object is disconnected.

The way we've always done this is this way:

//Update or Insert person:
if (entityPerson.PersonID > 0) //update 
{
    EntityKey key = entities.CreateEntityKey("tblPerson", entityPerson);
    object originalItem;
    if (entities.TryGetObjectByKey(key, out originalItem))
    {
        // merge changes from the client back to the dataset
        entities.ApplyPropertyChanges(key.EntitySetName, entityPerson);
    }
}
else//insert new 
{
    entities.AddObject("tblPerson", entityPerson);
}

ApplyPropertyChanges works very well and takes a lot of the work out of our hands.  You can attach a very simple conflict detection if you have a Timestamp field, and by setting the ConcurrencyMode=Fixed.

Saving Changes and Managing Concurrency
How to: Manage Data Concurrency in the Object Context
Flexible Data Access With LINQ To SQL And The Entity Framework

I was recently involved in a short discussion on this topic, and was intrigued to go digging and get to the bottom of it all.  Hope these links help someone :-)

SharePoint 2010 - Configuring List Item Permissions with Workflow

The client had a pretty "simple" situation where:

1. We want to create a Request list where different people in the company can add requests, but assign it to a department.
2. Once created, only members in that department has access to this request item

PERMISSION GROUPS

You can use Active Directory groups here as well.  Here are my four security groups

DEPARTMENT LIST

I plan to use re-usable workflows later to configure the list item permissions.  So I need to create a few site columns, here's the first one DepartmentGroup.  This is basically a People or Groups field.

I create a list for the department, thus:

REQUEST LIST

Here's the second site column.  This is a lookup column to the Department list.  I'm bringing over the ID field as an additional field.

Add a few records:

REMOVE LIST PERMISSIONS

Stop inheriting permissions from parent (site), and do a bit of house cleaning and remove the unnecessary groups.

LET'S WORK ON THAT WORKFLOW

The idea of the workflow is that:

1. Whenever an item is updated
2. Look up the group based on the selected Department (via the additional ID field)
3. Assign item-level security to the list item
4. Remove permissions to modify the item, and grant the department group permission to view and modify that request.

Create a re-usable workflow.  Target any content type.

We'll need the lookup site column, so associate that

The permissions steps need to be run as impersonated steps.  The impersonated steps can not be mixed with the normal steps (such as Step 1)

Remove (unused) Step 1, and add "Replace permission" action

Start with the second parameter which is the easier one.  Click on "this list" and select Current Item

Click on "these permissions" and we want Contribute and Read permissions

Click on "Choose" and set who we'll be granting Contribute/Read to

Select "Workflow Lookup for a User…" and click Add
We want to do a look up on the Department list.

The field we want is DepartmentGroup (our Person and Group site column).  Return the field as Login Name
Set the filter Field below to ID

Set the filter Value field to Current Item.Department:ID

(You can also use the DepartmentLookup field here, just return it as Integer)

Final result:

OK everything.  Remember to save and publish

Go back to SharePoint list

Configure the workflow and make sure it runs when a list item is created or modified

VERIFY RESULTS
Check the permission of our first request (before the workflow)

It is inheriting from list.  Nothing special.

Create a new request for our Network department - see the workflow has completed

Check its permissions

"NetworkHeroes" has been assigned "Contribute" and "Read" permissions to the list item - everyone else has been stripped out.
The List Item has also stopped inheriting permissions from the parent list.

SUMMARY

So the solution works and is relatively elegant.  Though the client mocks me and says it was so much more easier in Lotus Notes :-(

The following features in SharePoint 2010 makes this example a little bit cleaner than with SharePoint 2007:

• "Additional Fields"
• Impersonation Step
• Re-usable Workflows
• Replace Permissions Action

Windows Live Messenger wave 4 - redir.us freaks me out

Colleagues send me links via MSN to a web page, and I see

Immediately started freaking out - what is rdir.us?
Not many people have written about this - the best I've found is Rafael's post here:

Live Messenger and the “link harvesting black box in the sky”

Short story:

• rdir.us is Microsoft Internet SmartScreen Filter
• It looks safe, but there's no way to turn this off.
• If the URL was http://link.smartscreen.live.com/?l=http://digg.com it wouldn't have looked as scary.
• I really wish it didn't give me such a fright
• Oh http://rdir.us doesn't have any explanation page

Silverlight PivotViewer and SharePoint

Microsoft just released a new control PivotViewer for Silverlight. 

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/pivotviewer/

If you haven't seen this yet - go check out the video then come back, I'll wait here.

It's a web-based control to provide pivot functionality for datasets.  For fixed data - you can pre-generate the data set. For dynamic data, the collection could be generated dynamically and served.

So what would happen if you throw it at SharePoint, I ask?

The initial results are astounding!  Check these out:

Figure: Connecting it to listdata.svc OData service

At the root level it really is quite boring.

Figure: Connecting to a document library OData service

OK this is getting fun.  Facets!  Sort/Display/Zoom

Figure: Sorting the document library by Modified date

You probably can see I've uploaded a bunch of documents in the last hour :-)

The screenshots don't do this justice - when you filter down, change sort… the boxes fly all over the place it's as if I'm literally shaking SharePoint apart to zoom in on my data.

So it looks like I'll be extremely busy next couple of weekends and evenings:

• Generate collection data across site - this will let me filter the "Path" facet to select which list/document library I'm after
  • What does this mean for big sites?
• Add more visualizers, use Word/PPT thumbnails
• Create configurable background colours for different content types
• Add a contextual menu and hook it back through SharePoint actions
• And the Holy Grail - is it possible to make this work as a Sandbox Solution?
  • The current sample reference application requires IIS HttpHandlers to serve dynamic collection data consumed from OData. 
  • Sandbox solution problem may be tricky.

It's times like this I stood back and appreciate what Microsoft does.  You guys are awesome.  Different teams produce different software and they just magically work together.  Makes us look like heroes.

/Salute