Tim Ferro

I received a copy of Chris McNulty’s SharePoint 2010 Consultant’s Handbook: A Practical Field Guide to Managed Metadata Services at SPTechCon 2011 Boston. Chris was sitting at his booth giving out autographed copies. I walked right up and asked for one. He signed it and we chatted for a few about where I was from and how he had friends or family there. I was grateful for the book but at the time I was focused heavily on the custom development side of SharePoint 2010 and didn’t fully understand just how useful Managed Metadata was. Fast forward 9 months later and now I am focused on SharePoint farm architecture and information architecture. I recalled that I had received this book and since I needed a better understanding of Managed Metadata Services (and since I just went to Chris’s Managed Metadata session at SPTechCon 2012 San Francisco), I figured it was a sign that I should read the book.

The book turned out to be exactly what I needed and a great read. It was short, informative, and had real world examples. From overview, to set up, to real world scenarios, this is the perfect book for getting into Managed Metadata Services in SharePoint 2010. The title tells you all you need to know about what this book is about. During his session at SPTechCon San Francisco, he debuted his new book SharePoint 2010 Consultant’s Handbook: A Practical Field Guide. Based on his first book, I am going to have to buy, read, and review this one too.

– Tim Ferro

Share This! by Deanna Zandt is a well written book with relevant examples but it does not really focus on its tagline of “How you will change the world with social networking”. It is a very nice overview of modern social media and shows how to utilize each for different purposes. It’s a quick read and I would recommend it to anyone over 30 that are new to social media; however, to my contemporaries and younger it is mostly common sense.

– Tim Ferro

The MCTS: SharePoint 2010 Application Developer exam (70-573) covers a wide range of skills. The following tips are sure to help with your studying and in your development environment. Please leave comments with your favorite tips and tricks.

SPMonitoredScope
“Monitors performance and resource use for a specified scoped block of code.” – MSDN

This feature is incredibly useful and outputs right to the developer dashboard!
Tobias Zimmergren’s blog post is a great simple explanation. - HERE

SP.UI.Notify.addNotification(strHtml, bSticky)
“Adds a notification to the page. By default, notifications appear for five seconds.” – MSDN

This is the way to add a SharePoint notification to the page. In 2010 it shows in the upper right corner for 5 seconds and then disappears. This is the default action however you can have the message stay until you remove it by changing the bSticky parameter to true. The Method returns the ID of the notification, which you will need to remove it later.

SPListItemVersionCollection.RecycleAll
“Recycles the version collection except for the current version. The RecycleAll method moves the version collection into the recycle bin of the Web site. To delete the version collection permanently, use the DeleteAll method.” – MSDN

Anita Boerboom has a great blog showing you how to use this. – HERE

– Tim Ferro

“Few books on software project management have been as influential and timeless as The Mythical Man-Month. With a blend of software engineering facts and thought-provoking opinions, Fred Brooks offers insight for anyone managing complex projects. These essays draw from his experience as project manager for the IBM System/360 computer family and then for OS/360, its massive software system. Now, 20 years after the initial publication of his book, Brooks has revisited his original ideas and added new thoughts and advice, both for readers already familiar with his work and for readers discovering it for the first time.” – Amazon description

I could not have described this better myself. This is the bible of software project management; your PMP is incomplete without reading this book. Some of this reads like a textbook but don’t let that keep you from finishing it. There are golden nuggets of information throughout this book and you will use that information your whole career. The graphs important to me involved development time estimation, frequency of bugs found over time, and of course the main graph of time to complete projects based on total developers. If you are involved at any level of the software development process, you must read this book.

– Tim Ferro

If you love Catch-22, Closing Time, and the writing style of Joseph Heller like I do, then you must complete your fanboy knowledge of Joseph Heller and the world of Yossarian by reading this book. I thoroughly enjoyed this book for the following reasons:

1. There are deleted scenes from Catch-22/Closing Time that add even more depth to the book and characters.
2. The background of how this phenomenon came to be and what happened after is really interesting.
3. The non-Catch-22 related short stories are great and are in the same Heller-esk writing style.

As you can see by my reasons for recommending this book, there are really 3 main types of chapters in this book. There are a number of unpublished or previously published short stories by Heller that are entertaining and well written in their own right. Second there are chapters that add to the worlds of Catch-22 and Closing Time. Finally there are chapters that give back-story of Joseph Heller, his life, and how that found its way in to his writings and what happened because of the overwhelming success of Catch-22.

I picked this book up from the library, read it, and returned it quickly without writing a full review. This is not as in-depth as I would like but it needed to be written. Check this book out of your local library ASAP!

– Tim Ferro

Feature1.EventReceiver.cs
EventReceiver1.cs

Feature1.EventReceiver.cs
EventReceiver1.cs

So you want to use an out of the box (OOB) SharePoint pie chart to tell you how many list items have a certain status (or other column choice)? Trying to add that web part to a page and setting its target list as the list you want will not work. Many 3rd party tools exist to deal with this exact limitation of the OOB charting web part. The good news is that in SharePoint 2010 there is an easy way to get this data graphed with the OOB pie chart using a little known trick. For this example I will show you how to set up a Task list where you want to show the Status field count values in a pie chart.

Step 1, create a custom list called StatusLookUp and add an item for each status you want to have. The items in the list will be used as statuses in the “Status” column via a lookup column.

Step 2, create the list you want to use to track your tasks, for this example I am calling it ProjectStatus. If you already have a list this will work as well, you will need to migrate your status column data though. After you have your list setup, create a column called StatusLookup. It will be a Lookup column type and you will use the StatusLookUp list as your input. After creating this column you will need to migrate your current Status column data to this column if you already have a list, if not create a few test items and set their status using this column. This will be a small burden to migrate the statuses of each item but well worth it. I recommend doing it programatically via .Net as a console app or ASPX page. The code for that will simply loop through your list and set the new column data as the current column data with the exception that you will need to format that data to fit into a lookup field type.

This is my basic list with 4 projects that I am tracking and what the status is of each. Note that the StatusLookup field is a lookup of the StatusLookUp list and not the OOB Status field.

Step 3, create a new Lookup column in your StatusLookup list. Call the column Count and reference the column that you just created in your ProjectStatus list. Be sure the column contains “(Count Related)” in the name. Now that you have created your new Status field in your list and migrated the data over, go back to your original StatusLookup list and create a new column that is a lookup of the column that you just created as a lookup to this list. It sounds like a crazy loop but when you do this it returns a count of the number of occurrences instead of the same data.

Step 4, add the chart web part to the page and connect it to your Status Lookup list. Set the Count as your Y axis and the Title as your X axis. Finally, customize your chart to be a pie graph and set your data to display as you wish. Viola! Since this post is about the data and not really about the pie chart I skimmed this part but trust me, you can totally just add the web part and walk through the setup wizard and get the data you need.

Hope this helps, enjoy.

– Tim Ferro

I decided to read this book because it sounded interesting, political, and topical; and it definitely was. This eye-opening book details the unbelievable history of aid and Africa. Until you read this, you have no idea how bad it really is. To top it off, Dambisa Moyo meticulously shows how aid is actually causing African nations to regress and subsequently allowing China to slowly permeate the continent.

This is a fascinating read and I recommend this book, however be aware that it is very detailed and can seem almost academic at times.

– Tim Ferro

If Catch-22 is your all time favorite book like me, then you must stop everything and read Closing Time immediately. This is one of the best sequels ever written and it took me by surprise right from the start.

We last saw Yossarian running out the door during the war, but this book waits decades to catch back up with our favorite character. Now in his 70s, Yossarian has lived an interesting life but still maintains his penchant for hospital nurses. His world these days is vastly different from the first book but it is filled with numerous characters, old and new. Milo and the Chaplain have had interesting lives as well as have ancillary characters from the first book, and the book is an eclectic mix of all their stories.

Towards the end, the book becomes harder to follow and characters begin passing away but once you finish it and reflect, you are left with a wonderful book and story. I could not recommend this book higher if you have already read Catch-22.

– Tim Ferro