News
April 22, 2009
Velocity: Solving a Spider-Man/Human Torch dilemma
In this article we’ll explore a Spider-Man/Human Torch dilemma that revolves around MOSS performance and memory management.
April 23, 2009
Red alert: configuring Report Server in SharePoint Integrated Mode ain't funny all the time
We're writing this because we're planning to never ever ever, when configuring Report Server in SharePoint integrated mode, get stuck on the following error message:
“The report server cannot access settings in the SharePoint configuration database. Most likely, the Windows SharePoint Services object model is not installed or the Report Server Web service and Windows service accounts do not have access to SharePoint database, To configure service account access, use SharePoint Central Administration”
February 28, 2009
Clap and yell: Warm up SharePoint
It is rumoured that, in the early days of his career, a famous Texan movie star with big muscles used to perform in a sleazy circus to make some money. He used to perform a number of weird acts such as drinking large amounts of beer in front of an audience. The one act we thought was most curious of all was called “Clap and yell”. During this performance he used to climb to a considerable height and then jumped on a trampoline whilst doing what the title of the act promised: clapping and yelling during his fall. This blog post is much like that, in the respect that it delivers exactly what the title promises.
February 19, 2009
Exploring the Data View Web Part
Companies typically use a multitude of repository types to store and manage their data. A company may use SQL Server to store relational data; the Windows file system for storing semi-structured data and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) files to hold hierarchical data. The need to aggregate and manage data in a central location is a very common requirement within portal environments. To cater to this need, you could build custom Web Parts using Visual Studio.NET to incorporate various data sources. Instead, for a range of scenarios, you will want to try to use the Data View Web Part first. The Data View Web Part is an advanced tool that allows you to create solutions for viewing and managing data in a fraction of the time it would take you to build a similar solution in Visual Studio.NET. The Data View Web Part lets you view and manage data coming from different data sources, like Web services, SharePoint lists and server-side scripts.
February 19, 2009
The Custom configuration feature - Update
Check out the new update of the Custom Configuration feature!
December 8, 2008
The Custom configuration feature
When it comes to storing application configuration settings there are lots of options available to you. Currently, we favour storing app config settings in SharePoint itself and allow administrators to control those settings via the user interface at various levels.
October 20, 2008
Pop quiz: what happens when indexing large files?
A standard MOSS installation only indexes documents up to 16Mbs. If you exceed this, the crawl logs will show a warning message (not an error message) that such a document has reached the maximum download limit (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287231). You can change this default by setting a registry value (set HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Global\GatheringManager\MaxDownloadSize, add this key if it’s missing) to the max number of Mbs (in decimals) that you want to index.
September 15, 2008
Create an Autocomplete Custom Field Type with Ajax for ASP.NET
There’s been a lot of discussion about the question if MOSS 2007 should support Ajax for ASP.NET or not. We’ve heard a lot of people say that it’s nice to have, but that there are other issues that should have gotten more priority. Other people are unimpressed with Ajax for ASP.NET altogether, because they say: "This possibilities have been around for ages, I could have done that since the days of XML data islands!" And yet other people don’t like entire the concept of Ajax, claiming it doesn’t solve customer problems that are really crucial. Be that as it may, MOSS service pack 1 officially happens to support Ajax for ASP.NET and we love it and we use it. Our personal favourite is the Autocomplete behaviour and in this article we’ll show how to build a custom field type (CFT) that uses it.
August 29, 2008
Hierarchical object store vs Property bag
We find, when building MOSS solutions, that we generally have a need for configuration information stores at four different levels: Web application level, Site collection level, Site level or List level.
There are lots of options when it comes to choosing configuration information stores, but at the web application level SharePoint offers two choices that are quite natural: the
August 4, 2008
Working with noise words - update
In August 2007 we wrote an article about working with noise words. In that article, we included a little script that displays Shared Service Provider GUIDs.
July 29, 2008
The Feature Gooney
the Feature Gooney facilitates working with SharePoint 2007 features. The current version of the Feature Gooney is a WPF application that doesn't do much yet, but what is does at this point is COOL (at least, that's what we think)! The Feature Gooney offers a couple of tabs offering different functionality.
July 29, 2008
Building a System.Transactions resource manager for SharePoint
When building a system that supports relations between list items, you’ll soon find out that you need a transaction, quite a well-known concept, especially in the database world. Since MOSS doesn’t support list item transactions, you need to build such a mechanism yourself. We think the best way to do this is to build a System.Transactions resource manager for SharePoint, which is coincidentally the topic of this article. To be very precise, we’ll show how to build a resource manager that’s able to support transactions for list item metadata.
June 10, 2008
Working with large files
One of our customers had issues working with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and large files. They received time-out errors as well as general errors when working with large files (in this case, files that are larger than 25 MB). A small percentage of the files they work with are really large; they are close to 150MB in size.
May 15, 2008
Creating an association and initiation form in a workflow using VS.NET 2008
Creating SharePoint workflows in Visual Studio has become significantly easier in Visual Studio.NET 2008. However, creating InfoPath forms and using them within custom workflows is still a bit tricky. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through it and point out some of the gotchas. While we’re doing this, we’ll also discuss some of the tips and tricks involved with working with the Delay activity.
January 4, 2008
Mapping SharePoint 2007 content types to SharePoint 2003 list template types
This blog post contains an overview of the possible mappings between SharePoint 2007 content types and SharePoint 2003 list template types.
SharePoint
