I'm doing a presentation tonight for SUGUK on Silverlight in sharePoint and wanted to demo some of the Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint.

Naturally I hit a few issues along the way so I thought I'd pass a few tips on.

A major requirement is to have .Net 3.5 and AJAX running on your SharePoint site. If you configure AJAX by hand as I did check this MSDN article for configuring AJAX but use 3.5.0.0 as the version number.

I configured AJAX by hand but there is also a CodePlex feature that can install AJAX on all your WFE.

It will also help to have Visual Studio 2008 and the Silverlight SDk installed on your dev box.

The first issue is that none of the XAP's as shipped will work on my machine. You'll get an error like this

checking the XAP files shows the shipped one has this as the first line of the manifest.

<Deployment xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007/deployment" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" EntryPointAssembly="SL.XAML.Navigation" EntryPointType="SL.XAML.Navigation.App">

but if I recompile the source I get

<Deployment xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007/deployment" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" EntryPointAssembly="SL.XAML.Navigation" EntryPointType="SL.XAML.Navigation.App" RuntimeVersion="2.0.30226.2">

The missing RuntimeVersion seems the key here, looks like the U2U folks were running a slightly different build of chiron the XAP compiler and certainly the Silverlight 2 runtime on my machine wont run a XAP without it.

So the fix is to recompile the Silverlight Applications and redeploy the XAP to the ClientBin directory in your IIS website directory.

Second and more bizarre is the Navigation Sample. If you try to run it you get an error about being unable to load the Assembly.

The problem here is that the PublicKey for the SL.Controls.Navigation.Dll is wrong in the MasterPage.

The MasterPage has 4aec304184eb9a69 when the DLL has bb99f30c0098259c.

The Fix is to change the MasterPage Register TagPrefix line to bb99f30c0098259c. You can use SharePoint Designer or uninstall the feature change it and then reinstall, reactivate.

This will happen when you dev with an internal snk file which has your company private keys in it and then decide you've got to change it before you ship. I've done exactly the same thing myself, it really helps to test it on a single machine outside your company first.

And IT LIVES

Zach Rosenfield has a nice post on calling WebServices from PowerShell. The steps are pretty simple: generate a proxy cs file, compile it into a DLL and then load that DLL up into Powershell AppDomain.

Well I've been doing some work with quite a few of the WebServices and I wanted to compile all the proxys into a single DLL.

Use Zach's post to setup the PowerShell environment variables needed to call the Visual Studio SDK utilities wsdl.exe and csc.exe

Heres the script to compile all the available SharePoint Webservice's into one DLL.

It simply enumerates all the ASMX files in the ISAPI directory and passes each item in that list to WSDL.exe which generates the proxy cs files.

You need to change the URL in this script to point to a valid SharePoint site and make sure there are no other .cs files in the directory before running this script.

$asmxlist= dir "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\ISAPI" *.asmx | select name

$asmxlist | foreach-object {
write-host "Generating SharePoint Proxy Library for $($_.name)" -foregroundcolor green 

$outputfilename="FlexnetConsult.SharePoint.$($_.name).cs"
$namespace=[IO.Path]::GetFileNameWithoutExtension($_.name)

wsdl "http://portal.contoso.com/matters/sites/_vti_bin/$($_.name)" /o:$outputfilename /namespace:$namespace

}

write-host "Compiling SharePoint Proxy Library" -foregroundcolor green 
csc /t:library /out:FlexnetConsult.SharePoint.WebServices.dll *.cs 

So the output should be something like this

Now three of the WebServices generate an error SlideShow.asmx. FormserverProxy.asmx and contentareatoolboxservice.asmx but as I'm unlikely to use them I'm not going to worry about those.

So now we have a DLL called FlexnetConsult.SharePoint.WebServices.dll in our directory that we can use to call the (almost) any SharePoint Web Service.

I've attached the compiled dll and script.

In my next post I'll use the DLL to do something I've wanted to do for ages and that's list, add and delete Web Parts on a page using PowerShell.

Now your probably shouting, hey why not just call the object model and GetLimitedWebPartManager, yep but that doesn't work as without a web.config and possibly a HttpContext all you get back are Error WebParts as the WebPart safecontrollist cannot be accessed.

There is an issue outstanding in WSS that is causing a few of the people who download our free Flash Web Parts grief. 

The issue shows up when anonymous users hit a web page with our Web Parts on it and they get authentication prompts.

I've gone into detail into how we get SharePoint data into flash here. We call owssvr.dll via HTTP get, pass it some parameters and get the xml data back. Great, this has been around and working since 2001. Unfortunately in WSS 3 (and MOSS) an authentication request is sent back for anonymous users even if all the settings are configured correctly. SP1 doesn't fix this either.

The issue has been open with PSS since late last year with no progress. Another conversation this week assured me this be actioned..still waiting.

Its a dismal situation and I apologise to anybody who has wasted time on trying to get our Web Parts to work.

I'm trying not to think about the resources been expended on Office 14 when issues like this remain outstanding.

While preparing for the presentation on Silverlight and SharePoint next week I've just discovered that the current Beta 1 of SilverLight 2 is unable to call SharePoint's native webservices.

The technical reason is that the WSDL SharePoint generates includes an asd:any declaration which is translated by the proxy generator as requiring the XmlElement class but Silverlight does not support this class. So you're not able to call GetList or GetListItems in Lists.asmx for instance.

I've posted on the Silverlight forums about this but the reply I got from Yavor Georgiev (Program Manager - Connected Services) was not clear as to whether this is a planned feature for SL 2.

There are a few ways around this which I'll go into in the presentation but none are very pleasant prospects.

There's probably still time to get this feature in v2. The best thing is to let MS know this is an important issue by adding support on the thread. Also worth keeping an eye on the Silverlight Web Services blog.

I'm really stoked to be presenting at the UK SharePoint user group meeting in Basingstoke on the 27 March about Silverlight and SharePoint.

This presentation will explain what Silverlight is, what the benefits are over standard web development and how Silverlight can be hosted in and integrate with SharePoint.
With few slides and plenty of demos I'll walkthrough the creation of a Silverlight 2.0 video browser application that uses data from SharePoint and then deploy it to SharePoint. I'll also show how a commercial Silverlight 2.0 product for SharePoint is put together.

The other presentations are

Architecting a Highly Available MOSS Farm - by Lewis Baldwin, ICS,  Head of Infrastructure and Support

Governance: Protecting your SharePoint Investment by Symon Garfield, ICS,  SharePoint Practice Lead

The good folks at ICS solutions are hosting us at their offices in Basingstoke (http://www.icssolutions.co.uk/pages/howtofindus.aspx).

Just post a reply with your full name on this thread http://suguk.org/forums/thread/8918.aspx (registration required)

Picture this, you're a IT bod working for Thomson Financial, you've got I don't know how many sites subscribing to your global financial news feed, you need to check that your latest update is working, so you key a test message in the system, hmm that's funny nothing coming out on the test feed reader.

Try a second one, and a third and you just keep on going...

Now you did check its the test system you were logged in to?

Its even harder to ignore on some other sites...looks like they might have lost ignore 1 and ignore 2 though, maybe they meant these to go around the world

The Silverlight 2 Beta 1 downloads have been released!

via Micheal Sync

• Silverlight 2 (beta1) runtime (download)
• Microsoft® Silverlight™ 2 Software Development Kit Beta 1 (download)
• Source Code and Unit Tests for Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Controls (download)
• Microsoft® Silverlight™ 2 Software Development Kit Beta 1 Documentation (download)
• Silverlight 2 (beta1) MSDN (view online)
• Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 (download)

Additional Tools ~

• Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview (download)

Now you have a chance to run the samples that have been posted at the Silverlight 'blueprints' for SharePoint website at a couple of days ago that nobody could run without the runtime above. They say Software+Services blueprints, I say a bunch of code samples.

Its pretty easy to add list items to SharePoint with Powershell so here's a quick sample

[void][System.reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint") 

# Add an new item to the announcements list

$site    =     new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://teams.contoso.com")                                                        

$web     =    $site.rootweb                                                                                                

$list    =    $web.Lists["Announcements"]                                                                              

$newitem=    $list.items.Add()                                                                                                  

$newitem["Title"]=    "New CFO Appointed";                                                                                          

$newitem["Body"]=    "Our new CFO is Harry Varden, money still not recovered from previous appointee, legal action is ongoing";                                                                                          

$newitem["Expires"]=     [DateTime]::Now.AddDays(5)

$newitem.update() 

$web.Dispose()

$site.Dispose()                                                                                                      

This could easily be turned into a function

Here I've referenced the field names by text but I could have used SharePoint's built-in list of field Id's using the SPBuiltInFieldId class.

In that case the fields are referenced by using the syntax [Microsoft.SharePoint.SPBuiltInFieldId]::Title

To get a list of fields in the class you can use this PowerShell command

[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPBuiltInFieldId] | get-member -static | select name | more

get-member is a handy class that reflects over a given object and returns the list of properties, fields and methods.

Deleting a list item with PowerShell is pretty easy also

If you know or can find out the ID of the list item use the GetItemById method of the list itself

[void][System.reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint") 

# Delete an item from the announcements list by Item ID

$site    =     new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://teams.contoso.com")                                                        
$web     =    $site.rootweb                                                                                                

$list    =    $web.Lists["Announcements"]                                                                              

$deaditem=    $list.GetItemById(2)
$deaditem.Delete()

$web.Dispose()
$site.Dispose()                                                                                                      

# Delete an item from the announcements list by using a CAML query

[void][System.reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint") 


$site    =     new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://teams.contoso.com")                                                        
$web     =    $site.rootweb                                                                                                
$list    =    $web.Lists["Announcements"]                                                                              

$DeleteBeforeDate = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility]::CreateISO8601DateTimeFromSystemDateTime([DateTime]::Now.AddDays(-1))

$caml='
   <Where>
      <Lt>
         <FieldRef Name="Expires" />
         <Value Type="DateTime">{0}</Value>
      </Lt>
   </Where>
' -f $DeleteBeforeDate


$query=new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPQuery
$query.Query=$caml

$col=$list.GetItems($query)

# Pipe results to a loop and delete each element
$col |  % { $_.Delete() }

$web.Dispose()
$site.Dispose()                                                                                                      

Be very careful with this as a badly formed CAML query will return ALL the items in a list thus deleting all items in the list, use a line like $col | select Title instead of the delete to double check the results before you run the function. Using the invaluable CAML Builder utility from U2U for these queries is a good idea, just remember to remove the <Query> tags from the result.

The third way is to use some of Powershell's powerful string matching feature. This article gives a simple overview of the like and match commands in Powershell

Using like or match we could compare any field in a list and delete on that basis.

For instance lets say we need to delete all Announcements that had CEO in the title. This sample does that

[void][System.reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint") 

# Delete announcements that match a string pattern

$site    =     new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://teams.contoso.com")                                                        
$web     =    $site.rootweb                                                                                                

$list    =    $web.Lists["Announcements"]                                                                              

$list.get_items() | where { $_.Title -like '*CEO*' } | % { $_.Delete() }
                                                                                              

$web.Dispose()
$site.Dispose()      

Note the get_items() syntax as PowerShell has a problem with Items as a property so we have to use the assessor directly.