Becky's Blog

I blinked for a second and my computer died.  I was using Itunes and an hour later I come in and my computer is blinking orange.  It turns off after many hours of tech support from dell and various friends that my power supply and possibly my motherboard are dead.  Dell is going to replace both and have a tech personally come out sometime within the next week.  I literally felt as though a family member was dying when this all happened.  I am just glad that my hard drive was not harmed (or at least it is thought to not be an issue).  I was going to install VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005 and backup all my music this weekend.  The upside is my old Inspiron 600m allows me to stay updated with my feeds and e-mail addiction.  I am also glad that my Dell warrantee is still intact. 

I have been doing a ton of training for end users and I am going to be working on a lot of Webexes in the upcoming months.  I will post some information on best practices and maybe point you guys toward some step by step documentation. 

I am trying to modify the custom activity that I discussed in my last post that checks if a user is a member of a Sharepoint Group, so that instead it checks the AD Group.  I am looking for a great resource on directory services and the search feature, so that I can search for the user in the group.  I am also curious if I am going to need to implement some type of impersonation, so that the workflow has access to check the AD Group User Makeup.  Any information would be appreciated.  When I am done I will post the code, so that people can use it in future. 

I found this link today on Codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/SPDActivities.  If you notice there is a workflow condition that allows for the checking of a Sharepoint Group…I guess I am not going to write a custom action or custom workflow, since someone already wrote something and it was sitting right in front of my face.  I also noticed another nice function that will start another workflow, rather than auto starting two workflows together.  I'm considering e-mailing the author and offering my services to help him update these features in the future.  I would love to get my hands dirty after reading half of Workflow in the 2007 Microsoft Office System.

I tried to get this to work at least 5 times: http://www.developerfood.com/calendar-expand-all-and-collapse-all/microsoft-public-sharepoint-general/73b02461-c913-4bc4-8d86-2586695aa6fc/article.aspx.  This worked great in my VPC the first time, but I couldn't get it to take on my main Sharepoint Site.  First off, if you can't get it to work don't give up.  Keep going on and eventually it will work.  Especially, if you remember to delete the copy of the default.ascx or at least move your copy to another folder (no matter what the name is).  On about the 5th iisreset I finally got it to work after deleting this file.

I get a bizarre error in the calendar's monthly view.  There are about 5 entries in one field and one in a couple other fields in a specific week.  It won't show the single entries that are on different times as the other 5 entries at first and when you hit "expand all" it does not show the entries unless I delete one entry.  I tried something from this forum post: http://www.developerfood.com/calendar-expand-all-and-collapse-all/microsoft-public-sharepoint-general/73b02461-c913-4bc4-8d86-2586695aa6fc/article.aspx and unfortunately it did not work for me.  Does anyone know how I can fix this error on all calendars without deleting any entries? 

I started out in the past few weeks toying with some Sharepoint Designer and built-in Sharepoint 2007 workflows.  I was only very slightly impressed with these tools.  I found errors in some of the custom creation actions in Sharepoint Designer and some limitations that I did not like (i.e. the inability to check a group and perform a task).  My next step is to read this book: Workflow in the 2007 Microsoft Office System by David Mann.  In about a week or so I should be done with the entire book and have some type of custom workflow as a consolation prize.  It all depends on my workload this week and my project priority.  This also means I may be writing a bit about WF in the future too on blog entries.

Also, I am going to post the slides when I find myself a good hosting service.  If anyone has any suggestions please let me know.  I may go back to 1and1.com and re-register my old domain name. 

I added a facebook badge to my profile, so if people are interested they can add me as a friend.  Just remember to add a little note that tells me why exactly I should add you.  If I don't know you and you are a Sharepoint Developer I will most likely add you.

Stalker Disclaimer: Once I have met my stalker quota for this year I will have to close down additions…Very sorry, but there are only so many times that I can wake up with someone creepily staring at me in the morning;)

Have a good weekend everyone:)

Also, if you are a WSS or Sharepoint MVP and have a blog that aggregates to sharepointfeeds.com, then most likely I will approve you without any note:)

 So I have been trying to learn Windows Workflow Foundation as it pertains to Sharepoint.  I downloaded all the toolkits and templates and what not for Sharepoint 2007.  I started working on this Tutorial that Robert Bogue has in Real World Sharepoint 2007.  I am at the point I want to figure out how to deploy the solution, so I think on a whim let's check my Sharepoint instance.  It takes about 5 minutes to load and tells me the that it can not find the configuration database.  I try to check the services to see if SQL is running and it checks out.  I looked into all the Sharepoint Services and they checked out.  I even checked the event log, but all it really said was what I knew that the Configuration Database could not connect and no longer existed.  I ran the Sharepoint Product and Technologies Configuration Wizard and it dies around part 6, because there is no Configuration Database.  At this point I decided let's see the Windows Workflow Foundation Templates broke this VPC, so I start with my clean vpc that I keep as a backup.  I installed the Windows Workflow Foundation Templates, the Office Sharepoint Server SDK, and the Sharepoint Visual Studio 2005 Templates.  So far it is working 100% without any issues.  There is a possibility my workflow broke the VPC, however I never deployed the solution.  I may play around with it some more later, but this is pretty baffling considering the new VPC is fine.

I have been a member of Facebook since July or August of 2005 when UMKC was finally added to the mix.  This facebook profile has nothing to do with anything professionally.  Basically all my friends and family are on this list, so I would never link it professionally to anyone.  I am curious is it worth it to create another facebook account just for professional use, such as posting blogs.  I noticed that Joel Oleson has this great article on linking your blog to Facebook here: http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/10/31/promoting-your-blog-with-facebook.aspx.  There are also a great deal of posts on Michael Gannotti's Blog about Facebook and Social Networking.  I see twitter on just about everyone's blog.  I also did some random searches and noticed people like Andrew Connell, Joel Oleson, and Michael Gannotti have facebook profiles.  Please voice your thoughts on the benefits of social networking.  I would really love to hear how social networking has affected your professional life.