2014 begins with a SharePoint Server MVP Award

Sometime in the early hours of the 2nd of January (I live in Australia time), I received a confirmation email from Microsoft that I've been awarded MVP for 2014. The award is for contribution in SharePoint Server technical communities.

I am extremely honoured to be counted with many long time MVP that are the faces in the community.

Thank You

There is a long list of people I need to thank:

Ivan Wilson - boss and long time SharePoint veteran in Sydney. Runs the Sydney SharePoint user group. Ex-5yr-MVP but just got too busy after our company started growing (a certain trouble-maker, me, joined the company). Dear leader, I'm glad to finally return an MVP Award to the shelf!

Jonathan - boss, appearing briefly in the user groups, but understood and supported Ivan and my adventures in the community. Lets me fly or travel to all the events. May be its because he likes flying as well.

My colleagues Justin, Jumpei and Bart for being my test audience for some really rough presentations. On the positive side, they have seen presentations that has never made it out of the office door - too geeky or just too crazy.

My lovely wife Lina who has to deal with my flying everywhere and now also handle two kids like a PRO. She knows this award made me really happy, but let me tell you: Behind every great man, is a wife who isn't impressed (and no, I'm not great - though she definitely remains not impressed).

Brian - from our first meeting in a Canberra pub where I try to sell an MVP the virtues of running reporting services integrated with SharePoint - not knowing who he was. It has been great to go to the numerous SharePoint Saturday events around Australia. There are too many shenanigans to list, and plenty of fun memories.

Elaine - the MCM that I know the most, and the MVP that I tried to follow. Friendly, relaxed knows everything. Seems to be everywhere, all the time. You realise as you attend the sessions that Elaine and other MVPs hold - there's so much experience and knowledge and they make it into a session that people can consume and learn from.

Adam Cogan - MS Regional Director and running the oldest user group in Sydney. Adam's SSW was the first user-group company that I worked in, and showed me the value of the communities that I've come to love. Even as I focus only on SharePoint and away from general .NET, I still get to see Adam in the communities rallying the crowd. I've always held Adam as a master magician. But I've realised that a magician is also a teacher, and Adam may be the best that I know.

Debbie Ireland - for running the SharePoint Conference in Australia and NZ. The premier event for SharePoint in the Oceanic Region and letting me present for the last few years!

So Young Lee - our MVP Lead, I missed a good opportunity to catch her in TechEd last year. So have only talked via email. Thank you for granting me the Award!

Mark Rhodes, Daniel Brown, Daniel McPherson, James Milne, Ishai, Sezai, so many other MVPs for being an inspiration to me, both with what you knew, and the efforts you put into the community. Thank you for being great examples, made it fun to be in the community and I look forward to more MVP in the future!

The Process

I don't believe there's a Rule about not talking about the MVP Award process. So here is how it works, as I understand it:

• The MVP Award is given by Microsoft for contributions to the community in the previous year.
• You need to be nominated - anyone could nominate, including self nomination, I personally think there's probably a filtering that happens. It may help if the MVP lead in your region knows at least your name, or if the nomination came from someone well known.
• Then you fill out a really complicated score card of all the events and activities that you have participated in the last year. There seems to be a few different versions, Excel or web application. The end result is to quantify your community reach.
• Finally, you are told which round your application is being considered, and you hold your breath on that day. Mine happens to be 1st of Jan.

I've been holding my breath the entire week.

Get Involved:

• Go to your user group. Present. Lots of users groups around Australia also accepts remote presentations.
• Present at the SharePoint Saturday events when they roll around your city. Or volunteer to visit another city!
• SharePoint Conference in Australia and NZ
• TechEd AU
• Write a blog. Keep it fresh. My blog documents a number of interesting techniques with InfoPath and has been referenced continuously from the Microsoft forums - even long since I lessened my involvement in that community. Engage with people commenting on your blog.
• Create a CodePlex or github project relating to SharePoint
• Participate in SharePoint on StackOverflow
• I'm told if you write a book or runs web series on SharePoint that would help.

Remember you'll need statistics from all these activities for the score cards.

Getting nominated:

• Get to know the people in the SharePoint community around you.

This helps for your nomination. I personally don't know who nominated me. I wasn't sure whether to ask anyone or just wait. I decided to wait and someone did nominate. I have a few guesses but honestly I have no idea.

Keep a positive, can-do attitude with SharePoint

Finally, we work with SharePoint day in and out. We know it's got lots of quirks. I personally believe it's not good to dwell on the bad but focus on what you can do about it. It's all too easy to jump on the wagon complaining about what SharePoint does. It is far better value and more useful to the community when we explain why SharePoint does what it does, and what we can do to tell it to do something else that we wanted.

Happy New Year!  It's been awesome so far.

SPSSYD 2013 and special thanks to Brian Farnhill

I wanted to thank Brian Farnhill for organizing SharePoint Saturday (SPS) events in Australia faithfully for the last few years.  SharePoint Saturday Sydney 2013 was the last one where he is the official organizer, chief, keynoter, label-printer, sponsor-chaser, etc. etc.

The event had a lot of highlights for me:

• A lot of people showed up early and was ready at the keynote. 
• Coffee Cart showed up on time in the morning
• The Clifton venue (they moved since last year) was amazing - I really liked the layout of the sofa and the meal table-benches were great for conversation
• Lunch was hopefully just enough - I think right at the end we might have just ran out of sandwiches
• Adam got rick rolled'
• Ross' session had a memory moment (I heard second hand)
• My session had a major projector fail (more on this later)

Presentation - Typescript PowerPoint and demo project

• ts.demo.zip
• TypeScript-SPS-melb.pptx

Explanation - What happened to the projector / your laptop?!

I was using a USB-3 display link adapter for the last month.  But I didn't realize it would behave very badly with the HDMI-VGA dongle for the projector at the event.  A quick fumbling got the display to work.  But it was black and white but I was going to run out of time so I just ran with it.

I'm glad you guys had laughs at my expense.  It made me feel a little bit less miserable.

Love you guys.

InfoPath - binding Linked Picture Display Text for dynamic tooltips

InfoPath is an ideal tool for XML forms.  Whenever you have forms, invariably, you have little helper icons to suggest text to your users regarding how to fill out a form.

In InfoPath, the Picture control allows you to have alt text.  But this is hard coded and you can't easily change this without modifying your form template.  If you are using the icons in a repeating section, there is also no way to make them different, and display different tooltip based on different rows in the sections.

That's all about to change.  :-)

The Linked Picture Schema

I was experimenting with a different control in InfoPath: the Linked Picture control.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd959291.aspx

<img hideFocus="1" class="xdLinkedPicture" xd:boundProp="src" xd:binding="my:field1" 
xd:boundPropSecondary="displaytext" xd:binding_secondary="my:field1/@my:field2" 
tabStop="true" tabIndex="0" xd:xctname="LinkedImage" xd:CtrlId="CTRL2">
    <xsl:attribute name="src">
        <xsl:value-of select="my:field1"/>
    </xsl:attribute>
    <xsl:attribute name="displaytext">
        <xsl:value-of select="my:field1/@my:field2"/>
    </xsl:attribute>
    <xsl:attribute name="alt">
        <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="string-length(my:field1) &gt; 0">
                <xsl:value-of select="my:field1/@my:field2"/>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:otherwise>Click here to insert a picture</xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:attribute>
</img>

My highlights in the above XML:  the Linked Picture control, at the schema level, supports two level binding - both the image's SRC attribute as well as the DISPLAYTEXT attribute.  Which is then translated to the alt attribute in the XSLT.

Very interesting.

Hmm...  It has always been there!  Since 2010.  Why didn't anyone tell me this

I thought I might need to resort to XSLT hacking in order to get this to work, but I decided to look at the Ribbon controls for the Linked Picture control in InfoPath.  Behold!

There are two sections of binding on the Control Tools ribbon for a Linked Picture control.  The left one, controlling the main binding, is for the SRC.  The right is actually for the Display Text!

Prepare a file to bind to

The XML file you can bind to:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<html>
    <img-info>http://server/Style Library/Images/info.png</img-info>
    <tooltip1>These guys are cool!</tooltip1>
</html>

Add this as a secondary data source, and bind the two properties to fields on this XML file.

Store the XML on SharePoint server

I suggest storing this file on the SharePoint server.  And then configure InfoPath to obtain the XML from the source server.  This way, each time you open the Form, it will read the most up-to-date version.

Content is now dynamic

This means you can update the image src or title attribute in the XML file dynamically.

You can also update the image without having to redeploy the form.

If you want to change an icon in your form - now they are all stored within SharePoint.  If you want to change the display text, change it in the XML file in SharePoint.  No template re-deployment required.

Your business analyst wants to tweak the words used in the tooltip?  Get him to update the XML file directly in SharePoint.  As long as he doesn't break the XML encoding it's very simple.  No need to update InfoPath.

Image is dynamic.  Form template just got smaller

A bonus of this technique is that the image isn't stored inside the template file.  So your template is now smaller.

Two independent bindings

The two binding are independent, and don't have to come from the same node in a XML source.

This means, you can have a repeating section showing tooltip icons.  Each image's SRC is bound to the same image URL.  But each tooltip can be bound to a repeating field in the repeating section. 

Example

Tooltip working - now works by binding:

• In this case here, the Picture is bound to the URL from the static XML file.
• The tooltip text is bound to the database field returned from the service call.

Works in both Web Forms and InfoPath client forms

Works in InfoPath client as well as web forms*

* Web Forms has an issue where sometimes Javascript will overlay on top of your Linked Picture, preventing the tooltip from showing up.  You'll need to add a small bit of Javascript to cancel this when the Linked Picture control is read-only.

Using VSNET 2013 and write TypeScript directly to any SharePoint via WebDAV

Disclaimer:  This is not the recommended workflow.  As a developer you should use VS.NET 2013 and build SharePoint projects.  You can then use TypeScript in your solution.

This is just a REALLY nice way to be super productive while working on Javascript in SharePoint.  Additionally, it works with Office 365, SharePoint 2007, 2010, 2013.  Does not require you to have a SharePoint development environment with Visual Studio .NET installed.

What do you need:

• A windows machine, with Visual Studio .NET 2013 (TypeScript is better with VSNET 2013)
• You don't need SharePoint installed in this machine.  You also don't need to have the VS.NET SharePoint extensions installed.
• You need TypeScript though, grab it from: http://www.typescriptlang.org/#Download

Change your VS.NET settings:

We will be opening TypeScript and Javascript files directly from SharePoint via WebDAV.  These files are not part of a VSNET project.  So we need to flick on an option within VS.NET to automatically compile TypeScript files which are not part of a project

Open... TypeScript!

So now you can open TypeScript directly from File > Open

Figure: VS.NET Open File Dialog

And as you work in VS.NET and save the TypeScript file, the Javascript is generated and populated next to the TypeScript file on SharePoint.

Figure: SharePoint TypeScript and Javascript files kept in sync by VS.NET

Similarly, you can create new TypeScript files in VS.NET and save it to SharePoint.

Your master page references the Javascript file.  So you can go back to the pages that is using the new function and just F5 to refresh it and see the new results.

Why is this cool?

• You can use VS.NET 2013 on your client machine, and use the latest version of TypeScript regardless of what SharePoint server you are talking to.  You aren't restricted by SharePoint 2010 and needing VS.NET 2010, or using VS.NET 2008 with SharePoint 2007.  You don't need SharePoint installed locally and you don't need to have the SharePoint extensions installed for VS.NET 2013.  As a consultant this is a life saver - I can now use TypeScript on old 2010/2007 environments.
• You get the productivity of being able to save (in VS.NET), refresh (in browser) and immediately see changes in your Javascript.  You don't have to package / deploy / update-spsolution etc
• You get all the benefits of TypeScript, including reference paths (as long as you put the definition files in SharePoint too, in a relative location).
• When you are ready to package and deploy, take the TypeScript file out and put it into a proper SharePoint solution.

InfoPath - missing data connection files

Sometimes, your InfoPath doesn't show you all the data connection files available in your SharePoint data connections library:

In this screenshot, it is only showing 3. 
There is no way to navigate to see more.

Fix. 

Change the Item Limit in the default view for the Data Connection library in SharePoint.

Change that number.  The default is usually 30.  I had previously changed it down to 3 to take the earlier screenshot.  Let's bump it back to 300.

Now you can see all the data connections again.