PDC 2007 postponed

I was really looking forward to attend this year's PDC. But late on Thursday May 24 2007, Microsoft announced the cancellation of this year's conference.

For those who haven't heard about it, PDC (Professional Developer Conference) is a conference solely for developers. Its function is to present the latest on development tools and technologies coming out from Microsoft in the future.

However, since many of the new tools and platform technologies already exist among developers as betas and CTPs (Windows Server 2008, SQL Server "Katmai", Visual Studio "Orcas" and SilverLight), Microsoft chose to postpone the event until further notice.

Instead of waiting for it to be rescheduled and since it is a bit late to register and attend Tech Ed 2007, here's some alternative conferences for you to attend this fall:

• VSLive! in New York – September 16-19, 2007
• VSLive! in Las Vegas – October 16-19, 2007
• DevConnections in Las Vegas – November 5-8, 2007
• TechEd Developer in Barcelona, Spain – November 5-9, 2007

For more information, check the official PDC 2007 web page, and this article at ZDNet.

Using tokens in your site definitions

When working with site definitions, or onet.xml, as the feature also has been called from time to time, you can now use different tokens to refer to the site collection you're working in or the site you are creating itself.

For instance, if you are to refer to a file on your root web, say a picture in an image library, you can insert the url for image as Url="~sitecollection/myimagelibrary/myimage.jpg".

You can also refer to the site you are creating with the site definition. If you want to refer to a newly created image library in your new site, you would write Url="~site/myimagelibrary/myimage.jpg".

So, the two new tokens are "~sitecollection" and "~site". These are also referred to when setting custom master pages. For more information, see this article on MSDN.

For my case, I wanted to place a web part on my new site when it is created. This web part was going to have 3 links, all pointing to new lists or document libraries created when the site was created. So, for each of the links, I entered the url using the token "~site", like this:

Url="~site/lists/mylist"

This url will most likely correspond to the actual url you have given your list or document library, i.e. if your list further up in the onet.xml file is created like this:

<List FeatureId="00BFEA71-2062-426C-90BF-714C59600103" Type="103" Title="My Cool Links" Url="Lists/MyCoolLinks" />


you would insert a link to this like this: Url="~site/Lists/MyCoolLinks".

Upcoming books about MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0

So far, there hasn't been published a lot of books about MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0. Although the software was released in November 2006, the release on the reading material has been a slow process.

The following links provide a good overview of upcoming books from some of the publishers and book stores:

• SharePoint 2007 books at Wrox
• SharePoint 2007 books at Amazon
• Upcoming titles at MS Press

In addition, check out these excellent blog posts at the MS SharePoint Team Blog about SharePoint Training.

I'm on the air!

Finally, I've managed to find the time and energy to create my own blog. This is my views on how to do things in SharePoint and MOSS, and what challenges and solutions I bump into. I hope you find some interest in my writings in here.

I'm fairly new to the SharePoint world, but find it very interesting and challenging to work with.

Currently I'm working on a migration project, and as many of you already know, this is not any easy task. But I learn new things every day, and look forward getting it done. We are migrating from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which both my employer and our customer is looking forward to get up and running. We have a lot of plans! Go MOSS!