Steve's TS2 Insider

Q: (from Barrett)

I participate weekly in Suzanne Lavine’s Friday Partner Live presentations.  You were the presenter last week.  We are a long time Microsoft Registered partner.  We want to get started with SharePoint Services, to better help us management our own customer/prospect relationships, to better sell WSS, and to help us work with another Partner who is very strong in the WSS arena.

My VB programmer, who also works with SQL, Dan, is heading our effort.  Any help you can give him would be very much appreciated.  We would like to know more about programming in the WSS environment.  We have, ourselves, an SBS 2003 server, though we install SBS 2008.  We need to install WSS 3.0 on our SBS 2003 server.  We have received the ComponentOne SharePoint Web parts link from Microsoft.  Are there any known issues installing WSS 3.0 on an SBS 2003 server?  What should be cautious about?

A: (from Grant)

Here is the info from Microsoft.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0daafc81-efff-4f5b-a28a-8265f1e99f5b&displaylang=en

A: (from Steve)

YES – there are definitely a few issues with installing WSS 3.0 on SBS 2003. In light of the attached link from Grant, here are three suggestions:

• Install WSS 3.0 under SBS 2003 on your production network so your team can gain experience integrating WSS into your daily workflow – it will help you provide advice and real world examples for your customers.
• Setup a virtual machine with Virtual PC running Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, or SBS 2008 and install WSS 3.0 there. That will give you a test environment that you can use for development. More importantly, learn about creating differential disks under VPC so you can have a base image that Dan installs his test applications against. You can then rewind the image back to the base to perform clean tests – way useful for any form of development.
• Find some tutorial resources for developing web parts. I just did a quick Bing search (bing.com) and these were the top two links:

ASP.NET Web Parts Controls

ASP.NET Web Parts controls are an integrated set of controls for creating Web sites that enable end users to modify the content, appearance, and behavior of Web pages directly in a browser. The topics in this section provide information on what Web Parts are, how they work, and how to use them to create user-customizable ASP.NET Web pages.

Beginning SharePoint Web Part Development

Beginning SharePoint Web Part Development (Page 1 of 5 )
This is the first article in a series focusing on WSS 3.0 development using Visual Studio 2008. This article is for beginners who are quite new to SharePoint web part development and want to learn about configuring WSS 3.0, developing web parts using Visual Studio 2008, deploying and ...

I hope that gets you started!