Alonso Robles

I had the pleasure of delivering a presentation tonight at the monthly Los Angeles SharePoint User Group. The talk provided an introduction to the enterprise search query object model which is used by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and Microsoft Search Server 2008 (MSS) to provide search results to search queries. The guts of the 30 minute slide deck [PPTX | PDF] consisted of a quick overview of Microsoft’s enterprise search architecture, followed by quick comparison of the keyword syntax and the SQL-based syntaxused for querying the query engine, and ended with an overview of the KeywordQuery and FullTextSqlQuery classesand their commonly used properties. After the slides, I spun up a virtual machine and demonstrated the classes at work with some sample code [ZIP]. The talk ended with crediting Patrick Tisseghem and his book, Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, where I first started learning about search query object model.

If you missed the presentation, feel free to take a look at the materials:

• Introduction to the Search Query Object Model [PPTX]
• Introduction to the Search Query Object Model [PDF]
• Sample Code

Oh, and there is one more excellent resource that I forgot to include in the slide deck is the Enterprise Search Team Blog.

When developling for SharePoint, I find myself always turning on the call stack and disabiling the custom errors in my development environment. It really does help when trying to debug run-time problems. I know there a few posts out there that describe how to do this, but I figured I would repost it as a reference for myself (which you are welcome to use).

Just remember that I do this in my development environment only. I don’t recommend changing the web.config files in any other environment.

Enabling the Call Stack

Set the value CallStack attribute in the SafeMode element in the web.config file to true.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
 <configuration>
  ...
  <SharePoint>
   <SafeMode MaxControls="200"
             CallStack="true"
             DirectFileDependencies="10"
             TotalFileDependencies="50"
             AllowPageLevelTrace="false">
    ...
   </SafeMode>
   ...
 </SharePoint>
 ...
</configuration>

Disabling Custom Errors

Set the value of the mode attribute in the customErrors element to Off.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
 <configuration>
  ...
  <system.web>
   ...
   <customErrors mode="Off" />
   ...
  </system.web>
 ...
</configuration>

Enabiling Compilation Debugging

Set the value of the debug attriute in the compilation element to true.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
 <configuration>
  ...
  <system.web>
   ...
   <compilation debug="true">
    ...
   </compilation>
   ...
  </system.web>
 ...
</configuration>

 Putting it all together

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
 <configuration>
  ...
  <SharePoint>
   <SafeMode MaxControls="200"
             CallStack="true"
             DirectFileDependencies="10"
             TotalFileDependencies="50"
             AllowPageLevelTrace="false">
    ...
   </SafeMode>
   ...
 </SharePoint>
 <system.web>
   ...
   <customErrors mode="Off" />
   ...
   <compilation debug="true">
    ...
   </compilation>
   ...
  </system.web>
 ...
</configuration>

Two conferences were announced last week that I want to share with you:

PDC2008 [via Andrew Connell] - Regristration for the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 is now open and is scheduled to take place in Los Angeles on October 27-30 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

SharePoint Best Practices and Governance Conference [via Bill English] - The conference has been announced and will be taking place in Washington DC on September 15-17.

I would like to attend both of these, but I am not sure if I will be able to.

Elaine Hao, Program Manager of SharePoint Workflow @ Microsoft, put together a really nice series of blog posts on developing MOSS2007 workflows on the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog. At the end of the series, she attached a little mini whitepaper that covers everything she covered in her series. I found it extremely useful as I worked on some custom workflow for a client and decided to keep a copy of So You Want to Develop Custom SharePoint Workflows for myself.