• source = “show items in this site and all subsites”
• list type = “document library”
• additional filters: show items where Rating (0-5) is greater than 0
• under presentation choose an item limit (10 in my case) and sort items by Rating (0-5) in descending order

    <xsl:template name="TitleAndRatings" match="Row[@Style='TitleAndRatings']" mode="itemstyle">
        <xsl:variable name="SafeLinkUrl">
            <xsl:call-template name="OuterTemplate.GetSafeLink">
                <xsl:with-param name="UrlColumnName" select="'LinkUrl'"/>
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:variable name="DisplayTitle">
            <xsl:call-template name="OuterTemplate.GetTitle">
                <xsl:with-param name="Title" select="@Title"/>
                <xsl:with-param name="UrlColumnName" select="'LinkUrl'"/>
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:variable>
      <div class="item link-item">
        <xsl:call-template name="OuterTemplate.CallPresenceStatusIconTemplate"/>
        <div style="float:right">
        <xsl:if test="@Ratings &gt;= 4.75">
		<span>
			<a class="ms-currentRating"><img class="ms-rating_5" src="/_layouts/Images/Ratings.png" alt="Current average rating is 5 stars." /></a>
		</span>        		
        </xsl:if>
        <xsl:if test="@Ratings &gt;= 4.25 and @Ratings &lt; 4.75">
		<span>
			<a class="ms-currentRating"><img class="ms-rating_4_5" src="/_layouts/Images/Ratings.png" alt="Current average rating is 4.5 stars." /></a>
		</span>        		
        </xsl:if>
        <xsl:if test="@Ratings &gt;= 3.75 and @Ratings &lt; 4.25">
		<span>
			<a class="ms-currentRating"><img class="ms-rating_4" src="/_layouts/Images/Ratings.png" alt="Current average rating is 4 stars." /></a>
		</span>        		
        </xsl:if>
        <xsl:if test="@Ratings &gt;= 3.25 and @Ratings &lt; 3.75">
		<span>
			<a class="ms-currentRating"><img class="ms-rating_3_5" src="/_layouts/Images/Ratings.png" alt="Current average rating is 3.5 stars." /></a>
		</span>        		
        </xsl:if>
        <xsl:if test="@Ratings &gt;= 2.75 and @Ratings &lt; 3.25">
		<span>
			<a class="ms-currentRating"><img class="ms-rating_3" src="/_layouts/Images/Ratings.png" alt="Current average rating is 3 stars." /></a>
		</span>        		
        </xsl:if>
        <xsl:if test="@Ratings &gt;= 2.25 and @Ratings &lt; 2.75">
		<span>
			<a class="ms-currentRating"><img class="ms-rating_2_5" src="/_layouts/Images/Ratings.png" alt="Current average rating is 2.5 stars." /></a>
		</span>        		
        </xsl:if>
        <xsl:if test="@Ratings &gt;= 1.75 and @Ratings &lt; 2.25">
		<span>
			<a class="ms-currentRating"><img class="ms-rating_2" src="/_layouts/Images/Ratings.png" alt="Current average rating is 2 stars." /></a>
		</span>        		
        </xsl:if>
        <xsl:if test="@Ratings &gt;= 1.25 and @Ratings &lt; 1.75">
		<span>
			<a class="ms-currentRating"><img class="ms-rating_1_5" src="/_layouts/Images/Ratings.png" alt="Current average rating is 1.5 stars." /></a>
		</span>        		
        </xsl:if>
        <xsl:if test="@Ratings &lt; 1.25">
		<span>
			<a class="ms-currentRating"><img class="ms-rating_1" src="/_layouts/Images/Ratings.png" alt="Current average rating is 1 star." /></a>
		</span>        		
        </xsl:if>
        </div>
        <xsl:if test="string-length(@DocumentIconImageUrl) != 0">
           <div class="image-area-left">
               <img class="image" src="{@DocumentIconImageUrl}" title="" />
           </div>
       </xsl:if>
        <a href="{$SafeLinkUrl}" title="{@LinkToolTip}">
          <xsl:if test="$ItemsHaveStreams = 'True'">
            <xsl:attribute name="onclick">
              <xsl:value-of select="@OnClickForWebRendering"/>
            </xsl:attribute>
          </xsl:if>
          <xsl:if test="$ItemsHaveStreams != 'True' and @OpenInNewWindow = 'True'">
            <xsl:attribute name="onclick">
              <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="$OnClickTargetAttribute"/>
            </xsl:attribute>
          </xsl:if>
          <xsl:value-of select="$DisplayTitle"/> 
        </a>
      </div>
    </xsl:template>

I had created a new site collection using the blank site template using Powershell as such:

New-SPSite -url "http://mynew2010site.domain.co.nz" -OwnerAlias "DOMAIN\sp2010_admin" -Name "My New 2010 Site" -Template "STS#1"

I then created a custom site content type and wanted to add an Enterprise Keywords column to it (read about the differences between managed terms and enterprise keywords).

I came across this blog post which outlined enabling enterprise keywords on a document library or list by going to library (or list) settings, and clicking the “Enterprise Metadata and Keywords setting” options under Permissions and Management.

I didn’t have this option available to me!

Troubleshooting:

I figured I must have to turn on a feature to enable this. I activated the Metadata Navigation and Filtering feature as well as the SharePoint Server Enterprise Site features but still didn’t have the option available.

I sent out a tweet, and even joined in on a chat session that was starting with a bunch of MVPs. No one seemed to know the answer.

I Googled and found some people posting the same issue that I had, however no one had come up with an answer. I did find this thread on the Microsoft Technet Forums though which proved invaluable. I wasn’t attemping the same task as the poster, but I tried to do what he was doing anyway to see if I would get a similar error. I did.

Attempting to create a site column of type “Managed Metadata” first gave me a message saying “The required feature is not enabled for this column type”. Despite this message I attempted to save the column and then recieved this error: “The Taxonomy feature (Feature ID “73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C”) has not been activated”.

Solution:

So off to my trusty SharePoint 2010 Management Shell I go, and using the Enable-SPFeature cmdlet, I was able to activate the feature and voila! I now had that magic little link in my library settings.

Enable-SPFeature -id "73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C" -url http://mynew2010site.domain.co.nz

This appears to only be an issue when creating a site collection using the blank template, and on libraries at the root site of this site collection.

Thanks a bunch to Paul Swider and Brian Farnhill for their input via the Twitterverse.

Volume licensing customers with Software assurance customers will get it first (me me me!) starting April 27th.

Lots of work to do now….

Read the Microsoft SharePoint team blog for all the info:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2010/04/16/sharepoint-2010-reaches-rtm.aspx. You should also subscribe to this blog’s feed if you’re interested in SharePoint. It is a constant source of valuable information.

Thanks @nztechtweet, @davidpae and @marcelalberts for the heads up on this news.

Turns out doing it manually may have been faster.

First I realized that my crappy old phone actually had Bluetooth and so does the iPhone. This old Sanyo 6600 was able to pair with the iPhone but the iPhone was not capable of receiving the contacts. Turns out the only thing the iPhone Bluetooth is good for is connecting to headset/handfree/ headphone devices and sending/receiving files from other iPhones or iPod touches (using an app like Mover).

iTunes however had a contacts sync function with Microsoft Outlook so I sent all my contacts to my laptop using Bluetooth, they transferred over pretty quickly, in .vcf format. I then had to drag these all into Outlook and save them one by one which was a bit if a pain.

The real pain though, was trying to get iTunes to sync with Outlook.

I just could not get this to work. Contacts already in my iPhone were synced to Outlook with no problem, however it would not add any new contacts to the iPhone. Hours of troubleshooting and forum trawling later I gave up on Outlook. I exported all the contacts as a .csv file and imported them into Windows Mail. I then set iTunes to sync Windows contacts instead of Outlook contacts and voilà! It worked. What a nightmare though!

You would think being a bit of a geek I would already have a fancy gadget like this but I don’t. While I love new technology and all, I am also a bit of a tight-arse hence even though I yearned for an iPhone for a long time, I didn’t want to fork out the $$ for it. Now I realise though, it is definitely worth the big bucks. It is just spectacular. It is fast, intuitive and everything else a smartphone should be. Now I can tweet, blog, Facebook and surf the net from (almost) anywhere.

I haven’t had a heap of time to try out many apps but here’s a couple that have already become favourites:

Flightcontrol: just guiding some planes onto a landing strip sounds kinda boring but this is one of the best games I’ve ever played! Warning: highly addictive.

Tweeite 2: I first installed twitterific since it was free and it was OK, but it didn’t really inspire me to tweet much. Tweetie 2 came highly recommended (via @mc_stacey) so I spent the $4 and installed it today. This is an absolutely fantastic app that is very intuitive and seems to be designed exactly around the way people use Twitter. Wins it has over twitterific are the ease of tracking @reply conversations back and forth, the translate feature, the ‘in reply to’ and ‘from inserttwittetappnamehere’ links, viewing tweets integrated with twitpic/yfrog/etc pics and the individual profile viewing is much better. The geotag feature looks quite cool and the ‘post to tweetie’ safari bookmarklet will no doubt come in handy.

TVNZ app: this app is nice because it’s free and is also very easy to use. In my opinion, it also gives more accurate NZ weather information than the Yahoo weather function that comes with the iPhone. This app gives you lots of news headlines which you can view by category and it also has a TV schedule (including TV3) and a podcasts area.

WordPress: I had initial problems setting this up (it kept telling me I had the wrong password but then it just started working) but despite this it seems to be a nice wee app that I am using to write this very post. You can manage posts, pages and comments with the easy to use interface. You can add pictures to your posts, however it doesn’t look like you can do other advanced editing like adding hyperlinks or bulleted lists. It will no doubt become very useful for short posts on the fly though. Now there is no reason to have such a long time in between blog entries!

Here are the resources I read through (I obviously didn’t read one of them well enough, you’ll understand later) to get set for installing SP Server 2010 beta and Office Web Apps beta in this standalone environment. These references contain download links and product keys too should you need them.

http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/11/16/installation-notice-for-sharepoint-2010-public-beta.aspx 

http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/10/25/sharepoint-2010-pre-requisites-download-links.aspx

http://sharepointgeorge.com/2009/installing-sharepoint-2010-beta-windows-2008-r2-server/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee695756(office.14).aspx (Deploying Office Web Apps)

After installing all prerequisites for SharePoint 2010 (including SQL 2008 SP1, CU2 and CU3) I set out to install SharePoint 2010. Now, if you read through the TechNet resource on deploying Office Web Apps, you’ll see that there is a wee bit of Powershelly stuff you’ll need to do to activate and start the Office Web App services and to create the service apps and proxies. This needs to be done only if you run the SharePoint post-setup configuration wizard as part of your SharePoint 2010 installation. I was keen to avoid this, hence here are the steps I followed to get everything up and running:

1. Ran prerequisite installer from SharePoint 2010 setup to ensure I hadn’t missed any prereqs
2. Ran SharePoint Server 2010 OfficeServer.exe setup (using complete installation option to be able to use full blown SQL 2008)
3. REMOVED TICK from “Run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard now” box. (Do not run the config wizard at this time unless you want to manually active Office Web Apps using Powershell)
4. Ran Office Web Apps WcServer.exe setup
5. Once the setup is finished, the “Run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard now” box should be ticked. Click close to start the wizard and run through
6. Ran Farm configuration wizard from Central Administration

All done! Well, kind of. I happily went and created my first site collection, uploaded a Word document and tried to open it up to test Office Web Apps. Word Web App launched and appeared to be OK, but after several minutes of SharePoint “processing” my document I got an error that read: “Word Web App cannot open this document because the server is still processing the document. Please try again later.”

OK. So tried an Excel document – that opened fine. Unsurprisingly really because Excel has it’s own web services which have been around since MOSS 2007. Then tried a Powerpoint document and I got a different error, something along the lines of “network connection interrupted” which didn’t make any sense. At first I thought it might have been a resourcing issue, so I turned off a couple of VMs and allocated some more RAM to this one, same problem though.

So after SEVERAL hours of looking through event logs, Googling, looking in every dark corner of Central Administration, testing and retesting, I decided to re-read through the deployment instructions. In Jie Li’s article (3rd link in the above list), under step 11 we have the following note:

If you are trying to use Office Web Applications on DC (Office Web Application need to be installed seperately, like a language pack or an update. Please also note that Office Web Application cannot be installed on Windows 7), then the following commands need to be run to make the services work. Please note that in different languages, Service Application names could be localized. You can find them out by Get-SPServiceApplication, and then change the names in the script as necessary.

$e = Get-SPServiceApplication | where {$_.TypeName.Equals("Word Viewing Service Application")}
$e.WordServerIsSandboxed = $false
$e.WordServerIsSandboxed

#(Please use the below script for PowerPointServiceApplication - You need to enter "Y" for the answer of each cmd)
Get-SPPowerPointServiceApplication | Set-SPPowerPointServiceApplication -EnableSandboxedViewing $false
Get-SPPowerPointServiceApplication | Set-SPPowerPointServiceApplication -EnableSandboxedEditing $false

In the server’s c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config
Add the line below in the end of the dynamicTypes.
<add mimeType=”application/zip” enabled=”false” />

IISRESET

I had initially not seen this as I was using the TechNet article as my reference for installing Office Web Apps. So, because my server is also a domain controller I ran the Powershell commands and just like magic, Office Web Apps worked. Albeit a little slowly at first (possibly because I only have 3 GB RAM allocated to this server – don’t laugh) but after installing Silverlight it is nice and quick.

Issue resolved, I can now continue to play with SP2010.

UPDATE: Yes, it was a huge disappointment. People around the world had their eyes glued to NASA TV, anticipation building as mission control were counting down – “1 minute to centaur impact!” – hoping for at least some kind of visible plume. What we got was this:

Yeap, a bit fat lot of nothing.

So in light of this, below are my picks for the best explosions of all time.

Best TV explosion

Mythbusters

The team on the Discovery Channel show Mythbusters relish in blowing stuff up, and they are damn good at it. In episode 117 they tested various methods that could supposedly lead to homemade diamonds. Obviously they all failed (otherwise we’d all be doing it!) so they resorted to using 5,000 pounds (2,300 kg) of explosives to see if an explosion of this magnitude would instantly convert carbon into nice shiny diamonds. It did work, albeit creating only “industrial grade” diamonds. Sorry to say guys, but even if 5000 pounds of explosives could create a top quality stone, it’s still going to be cheaper to buy her that huge diamond engagement ring from the jewellery store.

Watch the videos here: Mythbusters \”Homemade diamonds\” explosion

Best natural explosion

Tunguska event

Take the above explosion, multiply it by a million and you have the magnitude of the impact of the Tunguska event. There are several different hypotheses as to what exactly caused this event, but the most widely held belief is that it was caused by a large meteoroid or comet entering the Earth’s atmosphere above Siberia, and exploding, causing a massive, but indirect, impact. The result was an enormous shockwave that felled trees, killed animals and knocked people off their feet hundreds of miles away. In the few days after the impact, skies in Europe and Asia were said to be glowing – likely due to the formation of Noctilucent clouds high in the atmosphere, composed of ice particles left over from the explosion. According to this reference, “The Guinness Book of World Records (1966 edition) states that due to the rotation of the Earth, if the collision had occurred 4 hours 47 minutes later, it would have completely destroyed the city of St. Petersburg”. Close call.

Scorched and flattened trees as a result of the Tunguska event

Best movie explosion

Live Free or Die Hard

I am massively biased here because I am a HUGE fan of the Die Hard movies. I love the scene where John McClane uses a car to blow up a helicopter because, “I was out of bullets”. The creativity here, combined with the excellent one liner (although from memory I don’t think he actually uses this line in the movie, it is just in the trailer) and the fact that it’s John McClane means it wins my vote for best movie explosion.

Signing off with a lolcat….

Samoa was an absolutely fabulous holiday destination. Thankfully we arrived back two days before the disastrous tsunami struck. The Samoan people are a positively wonderful, friendly and generous population and it is awful that such a thing has happened to them.

Help support their cause by donating to the Red Cross Tsunami relief fund.

http://www.givealittle.co.nz/cause/pacifictsunami

Below are a few photos of our holiday. Everyone should definitely visit this magnificent place in their lifetime – so much untouched beauty, perfect for everyone from adventure seekers to those who just want to lay on the beach and drink cocktails.

Rock paper scissors lizard Spock tee at ThinkGeek

Next, I came across a little gem on Floozy - Harvey’s “Treecycle” bags that are made out of recycled seatbelts. Gorgeous, eco-friendly and bound to be extremely tough, I *love* the Treecycle Hobo style. Harvey’s is husband and wife team Dana and Melanie, who started the business in their garage in California. Dana was raised in NZ and according to Floozy, learnt how to weave bags from his Polynesian grandmother. Turns out paying attention to granny has obviously paid off, with Harvey’s bags now being stocked at various boutiques and department stores around the world, and being seen adorning the skinny wrists of celebs such as Britney Spears and Jessica Alba (ref).

Harveys Treecycle Hobo bag

Beatles Rock Band!! I am a big Beatles fan and can’t wait to give the new game a ago, however unfortunately we are a little challenged in the gaming department currently with only the trustuy PS2 and Guitar Hero World Tour instruments. Need a PS3 to play this, and to be able to play previous Rock Band titles using the Guitar Hero instruments. May have to wait it out a little while longer yet (especially if I buy the Treecyle Hob bag first).

Beatles Rock Band

Tiltviewer

Brought to you by Airtight Interactive, Tiltviewer is a beautiful image gallery viewer built using Flash technology. It gives a fabulous 3D effect and lots of customisable options. It looks uber sleek and professional but takes very little technical ability to implement. You can use an XML file to define your images, or load images automatically from Flickr or Picasa. The gallery is interactive, with users being able to click to zoom in and out, and flip photos over to view image descriptions or other details. The installation and configuration instructions, as well as the FAQs and online forums make this product highly supported and therefore a breeze to implement and customise. To see how I have implemented it, visit the Adagio Wanganui image gallery. I’ve used an XML file to define the images and haven’t customised it too much because it is wonderfully functional out of the box. You’ll also find Simpleviewer, Autoviewer and Postcardviewer from Airtight, which are all very elegant gallery solutions as well. I’ve implemented Simpleviewer for some image galleries on Perfect Venue and really like it.

Smoothgallery

Smoothgallery, from Jondesign (Jonathan Schemoul) is a javascript image gallery or featured content slideshow (or whatever else you decide to implement it as), available as a free download and is also used as the basis for a WordPress plugin. I found this one a little harder to work with than the above Tiltviewer, but that is possibly because I was needing to customise it a bit more. It offers another very elegant solution, and is great for a featured content gallery as part of a home page. There are a few options you can feed it when initialising the gallery, and of course you can edit the heck out of the CSS, however I didn’t find it that intuitive to customise and resorted to the forums quite a bit. The biggest problem I had was getting it to start on a random image. After a lot of digging I found this post with the answer. Nonetheless, it is a great solution and I’m currently implementing it for a “featured venue” slideshow that will persist across a few pages on Perfect Venue.

Slimbox (2)

It seems that everyone is using lightbox on all sorts of websites these days and why not? It is a simple and lightweight viewer that almost anyone can install and use within minutes. For enlarging images on Perfect Venue I’ve used Slimbox 2, which is an even more lightweight version of Lightbox that uses the jQuery javascript library. I haven’t spent time customising this at all because it provided exactly what I needed straight out of the box.