DoesUserHavePermissions ?

I just finished writing a web part that I wanted to put on the home page of the Colorado SharePoint Users Group site (http://www.cospug.com). The web parts primary function is to allow people with the appropriate permission to use it to enter a Tweet into a special list that I made that will send tweets to Twitter. I wanted to use the permissions of the list to control if the user saw the web part or not. I found the 'DoesUserHavePermissions' and thought this would be a slam dunk, but when I used it, I found that if the user didn't have the appropriate permissions, it would throw up an 'Access Denied' page instead of returning a Boolean value of 'False'. After some thinking, I decided to use the 'RunWithElevatedPrivileges' and run this code inside a privileged delegate. This was the missing element. Works like a charm now.

Adding Assembies To SharePoint 2010 .WSP

I decided to commit most of my day today writing a series of web parts for SharePoint 2010 that would update Twitter in a variety of ways. The first web part I created did a direct update. The second one I did, wrote to a list and the list updated Twitter. I like the idea of the list update because now the Colorado SharePoint Users Group site (www.cospug.com) can now use workflows to update this list from our events calendar and announcements.

When I went to deploy the project on the server, I noticed that my TwitterAPI .dll was not included in the package. All of my SharePoint 2007 development used the WSP Builder utility that allowed you to create the package any way you wanted by using the 12 hive folder structure.

In 2010, using Visual Studio 2010, we don’t have that luxury. While most of the things I did today were fairly intuitive through the interface, packaging up the .dll files the way I wanted to took me a little longer that I had planned. I tried modifying the various manifest files that are in the project, but each of these are auto generated when you build the solution.

While I was meddling around, I started poking around the ‘Package’ folder and found that under the advanced options, I would add ‘Additional Assemblies’. Once I did that, the package was exactly the way I wanted it and I had a successful deployment.
I think I would still prefer the way WSPBuilder works, but I can’t complain much. My overall efforts in 2010 are far less than anything in 2007. Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 make it fun to develop!!!

Colorado SharePoint Users Group - Northern Colorado

I will be presenting at the next users group meeing up in Northern Colorado on January 6, 2010. We will be taking a look at caching options in SharePoint 2010. Here is a description of the session:

SharePoint 2010 is bigger, faster, better; but along with all of the new capabilities of SharePoint comes a greater responsibility. In this session, Shannon will present how caching can improve your SharePoint 2010 implementation. In this session we will cover: output caching, caching profiles, VaryByCustom options, object caching and disk-based caching for BLOBs. Understanding your options will enable you to fine tune your environment so that it can be the fastest it can be.

This session will be recorded and available the first week of January 2010. You can either catch it live or watch in on-demand. For more information, see http://www.cospug.com/Sessions.

Colorado SharePoint User's Group (COSPUG)

The Colorado SharePoint community has a new site and a new focus. As you will be able to notice, we built our SharePoint community site on SharePoint Foundation. While we knew there may be some challenges and only a fraction of the cool new features that make the SharePoint 2010 suite so amazing, we thought we would really put SPF to a true public test. Everything has come together much greater that we would have hoped. This doesn’t mean that the process was without minor glitches here and there, but the overall experience was awesome. Currently, we have an anonymous site that lists many of our meetings here in Colorado. We have also posted some of the slide decks and pictures from our recent SharePoint Saturday held on December 12, 2009.

On December 17, we hosted our first Colorado SharePoint Users Group (COSPUG) and hosted the event online via live meeting. We were able to record that meeting and have brought it to you through our COSPUG Sessions link. We are currently planning many meetings across the state and have plans to get those presentations available to the people in our area that couldn’t visit us live.

Currently we have meetings planned for Colorado Springs, Denver, and the Loveland area. We are hoping to build up SharePoint socials and meetings in every area of Colorado and bring those events to our Colorado Community either through LiveMeeting or our new SharePoint Community Site through recorded sessions.

Our new project would not be possible without the help of some really great sponsors. If you have the opportunity to check out our new site at www.cospug.com, please visit our sponsor page to see who is truly impacting the Colorado SharePoint community.

http://www.cospug.com

Free Dinner with Joel Oleson: Denver, CO

Come out and meet Joel Oleson on Dec. 8th, 2009. Joel is one of the best that SharePoint has to offer. Quest will be buying you dinner, all you need to do is show up!!!

The Tavern , Tech Center. We will have the "game room" from 5:30 - 8:00 with billards and bowling. Address is as follows:

5336 DTC Blvd. ~ Greenwood Village, CO 80111

Joel Oleson in Denver ...

Joel Oleson will be in Denver on December 8th, 2009. We will be having a SharePoint lunch. Stayed tuned for more details.

SharePoint Saturday

Hopefully by now most of you have found the 2010 Beta bits on-line. Denver is hosting it's first SharePoint Saturday and to one up everyone, we are going skiing on Sunday. Planet Technologies has rented us a bus and the party is on!!!

We have some awesome sponsors this year. I will tell you all about them next week!!

Registration for our SharePoint Saturday and SharePoint Sunday Ski Trip is now open.

Space is limited for these events.

SharePoint Saturday

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032434871&Culture=en-US

Get On The Bus: Vail

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032434880&culture=en-US

For more information, follow #SPSDenver on Twitter or me at @noidentity29. Gary can be found at @glapointe.