Tips to Set up Visual Studio 2012 to work with SharePoint 2013

If you are getting started with App, Office 2013 add-in, or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 development, you will notice that there is no option in Visual Studio 2012 after you first install it as in screen shot #1. It was little confused for me to get Visual Studio 2012 for the first 2013 project and here are some tips for any new SharePoint Server 2013 developers.

1. First install “Office Developers Tools for Visual Studio 2012”.  The easiest way is to follow the link.

When you get to the point to accept the license, you might notice that it's disabled and even after you view the license. The trick is to  view the license terms first and then click "Run" from the window.

If you have not installed "Microsoft Web Developer Tools", you would need to do it as the instructions. Follow the instruction and you will have “Office Developers Tools for Visual Studio 2012” installed. You should have all project templates for App, Office 2013 add-in, or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013available.

2. If you run into the following error -  “An error occurred whilst trying to load some required components, Please ensure the following prerequisite components are installed.”,  Please follow instructions provided by Tim Quinlan to resolve it.

3. Configure right .Net version for SharePoint projects. If the code will be deployed to SharePoint 2013, you should select .Net 4.0. If the code can be running out side SharePoint 2013 server, you could leverage 4.5 version. To simplify the development process and deployment build process, we might recommend to use 4.0 version for all our current SharePoint 2013 projects.

4. When you select C# for the first time to bring up Visual Studio 2012, you might want to change the documentation level to bring many online help to the tool. 

Please note there are still some SharePoint 2010 project templates inside the Visual studio 2012 and you need to be very careful to use .Net 3.5 if you really need to develop 2010 solutions.

5. Run the Visual Studio 2012 as administrator, otherwise, you will not be able to validate any site URL even the login account has full permission. This may save you lots of time!

6. If you could not create the new projects in Visual studio 2012 with the following error, you would need to install Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012. 

 

Have fun on SharePoint 2013 development!

Major SharePoint 2013 upgrade issues and workarounds

After looking at SharePoint 2013 upgrade path, it’s clear that in-place upgrade is never recommended since you might also need to use new Window 2012 server and SQL 2012 server. The recommended migration procedure and I would see the only procedure is database-attach upgrade approach.

Here is standard upgrade procedure from Microsoft “When you use the database-attach upgrade approach to upgrade from SharePoint 2010 Products to SharePoint 2013, you upgrade the content databases and several service application databases. You do not upgrade the configuration database for your farm.” With this approach, there are many issues after the upgrade and I’ve listed some of the major ones in this blog.  Some of the issues we have workarounds but others we do not have solution.

1. The first issue is email enabled lists will no longer receive emails. The upgrade procedure indicated “do not upgrade the configuration database for your farm” and the email enabled list configuration is inside configuration database. We have encountered this issue in 2007 to 2010 upgrade and there are many ways to resolve this.

The easiest solution as I published earlier is to copy EmailEnabledLists from 2010 configuration database to 2013 configuration database.

2. The second issue you might have is the “In Progress” workflow tasks created from Out of the Box workflows cannot be completed. This should be same issue published before after installing Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2010 or upgrade from 2007 to SharePoint 2010. 

Every workflow task has a reference to its workflow definition. When there is an in-flight workflow and its tasks, the Workflow definition file of the original Out of the Box workflows is replaced with new ones if we upgrade the farm or Site Collection. This makes the tasks of the previous version of Out of the Box workflows lose the reference to their workflow definition and get into locked state when a task assigned attempts to update (complete like “Approve” or “Reject”). Eventually workflow instances ofthe previous version of Out of the Box workflows cannot be completed. 

Workaround is to complete all “In Progress” workflows before the upgrade or “terminate this workflow now” menu in workflow status page shown below, which will also remove all the locked tasks related to that workflow.

3. The third issue is the major and critical one that all managed metadata data columns un-editable and terms are not available even you associate the new MMS with the migrated database. The issue applies to not only global terms but also local terms. This is expected since we have this issue on 2010 when we migrate content from one farm to another.

Solution is to use toll we developed with Microsoft to fix managed metadata data as we discussed before. We might need to recompile the code against 2013.

4. The forth issue is SharePoint Web Analytics system will no longer be available or upgradable to SharePoint 2013 since web analytical service will be replaced by new 2013 search service. The previous analytics reports will not be imported into new version and there is no procedure from Microsoft how we migrate existing web analytical reports.

Solution is unknown and I’m following up with Microsoft on this.

5. The fifth issue is around removed templates and features. One example is the Group Work site template is no longer available as a site option. The issue is whether existing sites created from Group Work site template will be able to upgrade to 2013. We had issue fab40 sites are able to beupgraded to 2010 from 2007.

Solution is unknown and I’m following up with Microsoft on this.

There are many other issues you may encounter for 2013 upgrade and we will share our findings.

What architecture changes in SharePoint 15 (2013) and what you to prepare as a architect?

Microsoft announced the release of the public beta for SharePoint 2013 on July 16. There are many new features introduced with some architecture changes. A recent survey of attendees to BZ Media’s SPTechCon conference revealed that, of 166 respondents, 70.5% said they do not plan to adopt the next version of SharePoint for more than a year, while 20.5% said they will adopt within a year of general availability, and 9% responded they will adopt as soon as the software is generally available.

The summary from Microsoft on SharePoint 2013 is SharePoint Server 15 enhances the workload experiences by enabling new compelling scenarios that engage and work with the user. If you are the architect for your current SharePoint 2010 team, you should be aware of the change so you could be prepared to make the decision.

In general, SharePoint 15 (2013) model has stayed same as 2010 version. However, numerous platform level improvements and capabilities listed.

• Shredded Storage – Only update the changed content to storage
• SQL improvement – Support SQL 2012
• Cache Service – Distributed cache across servers to improve performance
• Request Management – Redirect request to individual server for large farm
• Themes – Better user interface
• Sharing – Improve content sharing and access control

The detailed major changed are summarized in the following categories. I will not copy all the content and please refer to Microsoft SharePoint 2013 resource center for details. The detailed video and presentation will help you to understand the details. Some summary also provided by some people.

1. Service application changes

• Office Web Apps is no longer as service application
• Web Analytics is no longer as service application, it’s part of search
• Other enhanced service applications

2. Enterprise Content Management

• Site –level retention policies
• Discover Center
• eDiscover capabilities
• Team folders to integrate with exchange

 3. Web Content Management

• Support the tools and workflow designers use
• Variations & Content Translation
• Search Engine Optimization
• Cross Site Publishing
• Video & Embedding
• Image renditions
• Clean Urls
• Metadata navigation

4. Social

• Microblogging – share and follow
• Activity Feeds – view activities related to content
• Communities
• Discussions
• Blogs 

5. Search

• Personalized search results based on search history
• Rich contextual reviews

6. Business Intelligence Enhancements

7. Mobile

8. Remove API Enhancements

When we looked at the architecture changes and major changes to us might be the office web apps and web analytics changes. There will be some design you should consider now before you run into the dead end. Here are the description, reason for change, and what you need to be prepared as architect for the two changes.

Description for change #1: Office Web Apps is no longer as service application. It is a separate application and recommended to be installed as separate farm.

Reason for change: Leverage Office Web Apps to integrate with SharePoint, exchange, Lync, and other third party application. The new architecture recommended is displayed in the screen shot.

 

What need to be prepared: Here are things you need to do as architect on SharePoint 2010.

If you have not deployed the Office Web Apps on SharePoint 2010 farm, serious consider NOT deploy this application unless this is absolutely needed by the business side. The critical issue for Office Web Apps installation on SharePoint 2010 is you could not un-deploy it unless to remove the server from the farm and rejoin as we discuss with Microsoft! The un-deploy will remove the servers from the farm and will take large amount time to rejoin all servers back with clean environment. Please see my previous blog for detail on the risks.

If you have Office Web Apps on SharePoint 2010 farm, you might consider removing it from the farm before the upgrade! This might be the simplest way since I’ve not heard any upgrade process.

Description for change #2: Web Analytics in SharePoint Server 2010 has been discontinued and is not available in SharePoint 2013 Preview. Analytics processing for SharePoint 2013 Preview is now a component of the Search service. Details in Microsoft site.

Reason for change: A new analytics system was required for SharePoint 2013 Preview that included improvements in scalability and performance, and that had an infrastructure that encompasses SharePoint Online. The Analytics Processing Component in SharePoint 2013 Preview runs analytics jobs to analyze content in the search index and user actions that are performed on SharePoint sites.

SharePoint 2013 Preview still logs every click in SharePoint sites and still provides a count of hits for every document. User data is made anonymous early in the logging process and the Analytics Processing Component is scalable to the service.

This analytics data is used in SharePoint 2013 Preview to provide new item-to-item recommendation features, to show view counts that are embedded in SharePoint 2013 Preview and Search Server user interface, to provide a report of the top items in a site and list, and to influence the relevancy algorithm of search.

What happens to Web Analytics after upgrade: The Web Analytics Service is not upgraded to the Analytics Processing Component in SharePoint 2013 Preview. When you upgrade to SharePoint 2013 Preview, the databases that contain the data from Web Analytics in SharePoint Server 2010 are not removed. These databases are not used by or maintained by the Analytics Processing Component in SharePoint 2013 Preview. This means that documents on sites in SharePoint Server 2010 that are upgraded will show a hit count of 0.

When you upgrade to SharePoint 2013 Preview, do not attach and upgrade the databases that contain the data from Web Analytics in SharePoint Server 2010. We recommend that you turn off Web Analytics in the SharePoint Server 2010 environment before you copy the content databases that you want to upgrade to SharePoint 2013 Preview.

Reports from Web Analytics for the top items in a site are carried forward. Reports that show browser traffic, top users of a site, and referring URL are not carried forward and are not used by the Analytics Processing Component in SharePoint 2013 Preview.

Administrative reports for the quota usage of site collections in the farm are not available in SharePoint 2013 Preview.

SharePoint 2013 Preview does not support the Web Analytics Web Part. After a farm is upgraded to SharePoint 2013 Preview, all instances of a Web Analytics Web Part will not function. The page that includes the Analytics Web Part will render and a message appears that informs the user that the Web Part is no longer supported.

 

What need to be prepared: You should generate a report what pages are using Web Analytics Web Part and remove them before the upgrade.You should design to utilize the new search application service and new BI functions to replace current Web Analytics functions.

SharePoint expert Chris McNulty from Quest will detail five specific actions to prepare for the future, including:

• Establish governance today
• Choose code-free customization
• Perform inventory and analysis
• Implement data externalization
• Consolidate content

There are many other architect and design you should implement now to be prepared for SharePoint 15 (2013).

What's new in SharePoint 15 (2013) and what you to prepare as a developer?

We are on good authority from multiple anonymous sources that the beta release of SharePoint 15 will drop next Monday July 16, 2012. It had been reported that Microsoft was looking for a summertime drop of the beta from the leaked road map, and it has hit the mark.

On July 11, 2012, Microsoft even has posted the details of a developer "FirstLook Clinic: What new in Sharepoint 15" course for SharePoint 15, which shows two types of hosted apps, the use of Agaves (HTML5 and JavaScript add-ons) to extend Office apps, and improvements in content management. The link was there for about two days and was removed on purpose by Microsoft now!

From the Microsoft developer “FirstLook Clinic: What new in Sharepoint 15” course, the executive summary of what we can learn are these features:

• SharePointmarketplace for Apps – New SPApp object on SPWeb level to to create an ecosystem for multitenant apps.
• Office Agaves, HTML add-ons for Office documents – Stronger integration with Office
• New enterprise services, including search from client-side object model - Enhanced enterprise services like managed metadata service 
• Workflow looping for Designer that is only available in Visual Stadio on 2010
• MinimaDownload Strategy
• OAuth2.0 Authentication
• Ability to integrate or platform for SharePoint education

From other resources including Microsoft class “10232A Design and Developing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Applications” I toked this week and Microsoft “SharePoint 2010: 15 Technical Preview - Announcements and Resources” and and API published in February 2012, we might also expect the following major changes.

• .Net4.0 integration with SharePoint
• Workflow function 4.0
• HTML 5 with open source JQuery instead of Microsoft proprietary Ajax scripts
• ViewState is only supported on the legacy model due to culprit for not having testing and other things available
• Visual Studio 2012  

Most of the changes mentioned here will change our design and development decision. So we will discuss some of them in details.

The biggest advantage in .Net 4.0 is the MVC module. I heard SharePoint 15 will implement .Net 4.0 MVC to separate the module, controller, and view. This way, we have biggest advantage to utilize the HTML 5 and open source JQuery as view layer while utilize server controller components. As a result, you should try to avoid Microsoft proprietary Ajax script and separate your logic into web service or utility class.

In Workflow function 4.0, State machine workflows are deprecated in workflows foundation 4.0 runtime – replaced with a flowchart approach. As a result, you should not implement any State machine workflows at this time. If you are using third party state machine workflow from Nintex, K2, or AgilePoint, you might contact vendor.

HTML 5 has made its way to become standard and SharePoint 15 will leverage it with open source JQuery instead of Microsoft proprietary Ajax.  Try to avoid any Microsoft proprietary Ajax scripts.
  
Microsoft is giving up Silverlight component in the future reelases. As a result, if you are using Silverlight webparts, consider to replace any Sliverlight components.

ViewState is only supported on the legacy model in SharePoint 15 since it could not be unit tested. As a result, plan to disable the View state and use different method.

There are many new features on Visual Studio 2012. Some of them are significant than others. Here are some of them I’m looking for.

• Publish SharePoint solutions to remote SharePoint sites
• Increase SharePoint performance by using profiling tools
• Create sandboxed visual web parts
• Use Microsoft Fakes framework for Unit testing

You should plan to use Visual Studio 2012 and set up your unit tetsing code now and untilize future unit testing framework on .Net 4 framework.

With Microsoft $1.2 Billion Yammer Buy on June 25, we could expect much social functions in future SharePoint and be prepared to utilize social functions whence there are available. Window 2012 server and Window 8 technology will also impact SharePoint 15 development.

Some suggestions from other people to prepare for SharePoint 15 are also valued. We'll closely monitor the SharePoint 15 progress and post what we found.

For your information, Microsoft has put together some great resources to get you started. They are all in one convenient location - the SharePoint Server 2013 Resource Page. For example, check out:

·	SharePoint Server 2013 Deployment Guide
·	Microsoft Office Web Apps Server Preview
·	SharePoint Team Blog