CodePlex is Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site.

SharePoint Content Deployment Wizard by Chris O’Brien

This is a great tool for quickly deploying SharePoint content from one environment to another. Here are some salient feature of this tool:

• Ability to “cherry-pick” content to deploy using a tree view - this is from entire site collection down to individual lists, folders, list items (including files)
• Dependencies of selected content (e.g. referenced CSS files, master pages) are automatically included in the export - check ‘Exclude dependencies of selected objects’ to disable this.
• All required content types, columns etc. are automatically included in the export.
• In contrast to STSADM export, it is possible to retain GUIDs during deployment. This is required for scenarios where the destination should be a mirror-image of the source, such as staging/production environments for the same site
• Open Source and free.

Read the detailed review of this tool

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/SPDeploymentWizard

Chris Obrien’s Blog
http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2007/12/introducing-sharepoint-content.html

SharePoint SmartTemplates for Visual Studio

The SmartTemplates for SharePoint project delivers a collection of Visual Studio templates which allow developers to create a range of SharePoint customizations in a painless and professional fashion.

SmartTemplate comes in 2 flavors:

Web Part Project Template:
It allows developers to create quickly a project which contains the base infrastructure to write the web part code, generate a SharePoint Solution file (WSP) for easy deployment and generate a setup package for a wizard driven installation.

SmartPart Web Part Project
Allows developers to create quickly a project which contains the base infrastructure to write a web user control (ASCX), wrap the user control in a SmartPart instance, generate a SharePoint Solution file (WSP) for easy deployment and generate a setup package for a wizard driven installation.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/smarttemplates

SharePoint 2007 Features

SharePoint 2007 Features add new functionality to a SharePoint 2007 farm, site collection, or site. It install bunch of custom Features to address deficiencies in SharePoint 2007 or add new capabilities.

Some of the popular feature are Debugger Feature, Log Viewer, Print List, Toolbar Manager etc.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/features

SPIEFolder

Allows you to either Import a file system folder (And all files and subfolders) into a SharePoint Document Library, and also export a SharePoint Document Library to the file system for WSS 2.0/SPS2003 or WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007.

This tool completely replicates the document libraries folder hierarchy to the file system when exporting, and replicates the folder hierarchy from the file system to the document library when importing.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/SPIEFolder

SPSiteManager

The purpose of the SharePoint Site Manager (SPSiteManager) is to assist customers with performing SharePoint Site Collection maintenance activities for SharePoint Products and Technologies (which includes Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003). This sample source can be compiled to produce a tool that will allow you to analyze your farm looking for problems, repartition/level sites across content databases, perform batch backups, restores, and deletes of site collections, and perform Site maintenance and cleanup for SharePoint Portal Server.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/SPSiteManager

SPPurgeList

Allows you to purge the contents from any list or document library on WSS 2.0/SPS2003 or WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007.

If you need to retain a list/document library itself (Maintaining its original GUID) without completely deleting the entire list/document library and re-creating, this tool can help.
You could certainly use Web Folders (WebDAV) to clear the contents, but users stand the chance of accidentally deleting the contents of the forms folder which is not desirable. As well, you could script and automate the task using this tool if you desired.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/sppurgelist

SPLSBackup

The purpose of SPLSBackup is to mimic STSADM site collection level backup/restore but with options for setting/unsetting the sites lock state during the operation, therefore eliminating the need to manually visit the SharePoint Central Admin pages before and after.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/splsbackup

SharePoint Access Checker Web Part

Quickly check what objects within a SharePoint site hierarchy a user has access to.

The Access Checker Web Part is a Windows SharePoint Services Web Part, for use within Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, that displays a tree view showing permissions on objects for a user scoped to a Site hierarchy. It also has a second mode which will show the permission inheritance of objects within a Site hierarchy.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/AccessChecker

WSPBuilder

The WSPbuilder is a console application that creates SharePoint Solutions files based on a folder structure. WSPBuilder will automatically traverse a “12″ folder structure and creates a SharePoint solution manifest.xml and the wsp file based on the files it finds.

Therefore you do not need the knowledge of how to create a solution manifest.xml and wsp file any more.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder

SharePoint Used Space Information

SharePoint Used Space Information is a console application which allows to retrieve information about space used (bytes) by all sites and sub-sites for a specific site collection into .csv files.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/SPUsedSpaceInfo

If you have used any of these tools, please drop a comment and share your views.

- What is the purpose of my life?
- What do I really want to do with it?

As always, I don’t have answers to any of these questions. I don’t know the purpose of my life or what I want to do with it. What I do know is that I haven’t done enough with my life, not nearly enough.

I am not an opponent of long term goals but to keep realistic I like to set goals for foreseeable future. Here is a list of twelve things I want to do before I celebrate the New Year in 2012.

Some of the things in the list seems challenging while few others looks impossible today. I’m putting the list up on my blog and will post about my progress on a quarterly basis. In the worst case, I’ll give up on the list in a few weeks. Even if don’t, I’ll probably be able to do less than ten things on the list by 2012. But, I will give my best shot to achieve all of them.

So, finally, without further ado, in no particular order, here are twelve things I want to do by 2012:

• Take my web startup to Red Herring 100 Asia.
• Achieve the Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) award.
• Buy a house in Seattle.
• Travel to least 12 countries I haven’t visited before.
• Cruise trip to Alaska with 2 weeks stay.
• Take a month off to drive cross country from Seattle to Boston.
• Take a hot-air balloon ride.
• Watch at least top 100 movies from the IMDB Top 250 Movies list.
• Learn French and start a new blog in French language.
• Put up an exhibition of my photography.
• Coffee with Bill Gates.
• Yet to decide
  

Do wish me luck!

Microsoft today released an alpha version of Oxite, an open source CMS (Content Management System) that developers can use to build sophisticated blogs or large web sites.

Microsoft Oxite offers almost everything you need in a good blogging platform - anonymous or authenticated commenting, comment moderation, gravatar support, RSS feeds, pingbacks, trackbacks, SEO optimized clean URLs, multiple blogs, group blogging and support for custom pages.
At first glance Oxite appears to compete with established blogging products including those from Six Apart.

Oxite vs WordPress and Blogger

1. Oxite is is not targeted at the end user or less-technical Web users wanting to set up a blog, instead it is designed for developers who need to create CMS applications using the Microsoft Platform.
2. You need Windows hosting to run Oxite since it is based on the Microsoft technology stack - ASP.NET MVC and SQL Server. WordPress’ runs on less costly Linux based PHP and MySQL hosting.

Like WordPress and Blogger, Oxite does support the MetaWebLog API so it should be easy for end users to publish content via Windows Live Writer and other existing blog clients.

Oxite on Codeplex

http://www.codeplex.com/oxite

Video from Oxite Developers

Video from Oxite dev team sharing how they built Oxite and the salient features of the product.