spdiary's blog

SharePoint topics at Chicago User Groups

Unclaimed Blog — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:55:38 GMT

Todd Bleeker (who is alleged to be a cult figure in some circles) is speaking at two local events:

Building SharePoint Web Parts
Wednesday, April 18th
Chicago DotNet User Group (RSVP requested)
Microsoft Office in Downers Grove, IL

Ghosting, Master Pages, Themes, CSS, etc.
Thursday, April 19th
Chicago SharePoint User Group (RSVP required)
Microsoft Technology Center, 77 West Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

New SharePoint writer for Intranet Journal

Unclaimed Blog — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 19:59:21 GMT

Amanda Murphy has started writing SharePoint articles for Intranet Journal. The SharePoint series over there has slowed down since I got too busy to contribute. But with Amanda and Rob, I look forward to more great stuff!

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Customizing _layouts pages

Unclaimed Blog — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 09:01:52 GMT

Shane is rallying the troops on WSSv3 customization.

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

HOWTO: Setup Forms Authentication for WSSv3 in 7 Days

Unclaimed Blog — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 14:31:51 GMT

I started the process on Friday afternoon, so you may need to adjust each days activities...

Day 1 (afternoon)

Create Virtual Machine and Virtual Disk; Install Windows 2003 Server R2; Download 32 patches from Windows Update.

Day 2

Watch A.J beat the Cubs in the ninth-inning sandwich by the World Cup semi-finals.

Day 3

Mow lawn; Buy new garage door opener; Pay for installation (It is a hardware problem!); Other honey-do's.

Day 4

Work on a setup project for the SharePoint Forums WebPart.

Day 5

Independance Day parade, cook-out and fireworks.

Day 6

Download and install WSS and its prerequisites. Ian Morrish has them summarized on his demo site.

Day 7 (morning)

Configure Forms Authentication using tips from Nick Swan and code from the ASP.Net Quick Start. (In an interesting intersection of old and new, I used Notepad to create an ASP.Net 2.0 application!)

The SharePoint Team has done a fantastic job!

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

SharePointKicks

Unclaimed Blog — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 09:22:38 GMT

Bil Simser is bootstrapping a community publishing site. Kick it!

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Unable to validate data

Unclaimed Blog — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 23:16:37 GMT

Symptom:

When performing a search on a WSS page that has been customized, the standard WSS error page displays with the message "Unable to validate data"

Cause:

The search box is rendered via the <SharePoint:ViewSearchForm> tag. In the customized pages, this tag was inside the <form runat="server"> tag

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Best Practices: Using Disposable Windows SharePoint Services Objects

Unclaimed Blog — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 15:58:51 GMT

A new Technical Article is online discussing the cases in which Dispose() should be called. A must read for all SharePoint developers.

Best Practices: Using Disposable Windows SharePoint Services Objects

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

IE Update breaks some pages

Unclaimed Blog — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 09:59:49 GMT

One of the patches on June 13, 2006 is causing problems on some pages. A few pages to review to get up to speed and the work-around:

InfoWorld's article

KBase Article

MSDN Technical Article with the work-around

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Unclear on the concept

Unclaimed Blog — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 15:52:50 GMT

InfoWorld posted an article describing some of the things that cause visitors to leave. One of those things -- flashing ads that distract the reader.

On the page, I'm sure you can guess what I saw...

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

How to conditionally add web part to page?

Unclaimed Blog — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 13:11:29 GMT

How would you address this scenario:

I have a web part that displays information from a legacy system. The information is very important to that system's user community -- so much so that it deserves to be displayed on the home page (WSS, not SPS). However, the legacy system user community is about 25% of the organizations employees. This 25% is influential, and mostly technology averse.

If the information applied to 100% (or somthing close to it) of the employees, then I would update the Shared View. But I would rather not subject 75% to an empty web part. And forcing the 25% to manually add the web part to their Personal View is a nonstarter.

I encourage comments/questions on my blog site.

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Another peek into upcoming features

Unclaimed Blog — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 00:18:00 GMT

The SharePoint Team blog has another entry today: Configure it out

Read the post carefully and you can discover additional details about the next version. My favorite -- "simultaneous vanilla LDAP & Windows auth (on separate URL namespaces, both hosting the same base content)."

I knew that non-Active Directory authentication was coming, but this is huge! Employees authenticated via AD, external users authenticated in a different fashion. If the external connector license is reasonable, SharePoint deployments should grow dramatically. (As if they weren't already!)

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

WSS Themes

Unclaimed Blog — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 18:47:00 GMT

Some time ago, Infotech Canada release a theme pack for WSS. But, if you want a custom theme that looks exactly like you want, you should get in touch with Heather Solomon. First-class!

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

What is a "Site"?

Unclaimed Blog — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 08:44:00 GMT

Todd Bleeker has a great explanation of sites and other SharePoint nouns.

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Quick Launch WebPart

Unclaimed Blog — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 21:49:00 GMT

Bob Mixon is wrapping up a new WebPart to replace the default Quick Launch. The sample images look very nice!

(Bob hints at some upcoming WebParts as well. Read his new blog site for details.)

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Web-based Database designer

Unclaimed Blog — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:30:00 GMT

From Shane, a web-based visual database designer.

Posted on SharePoint Blogs