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