October 2005 Entries
If so, you'll find Ted Pattison's whitepaper very helpful in getting started
How Sharepoint Works
Also, you might want to check out his downloads section for useful examples
Downloads Area
[via MSDN, author Ted Pattison of PluralSight]
When I receive my monthly MSDN mag I usually skim the front left nav section to see who's contributed to that month's issue. Since I'm a VB programmer at-heart I tend to zero in on Basic Instincts then Web Q&A. Well, this month, one of my favorite speakers / geek-writers, Ted Pattison wrote an article on ...
Programming I/O with streams in Visual Basic.Net
Ted brings home the methodology and concepts of stream-based programming. It's very applicable for those of us who like to pull in information from the web or other external sources.
Check it out, I'm sure you...
Now Available to MSDN Subscribers: Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005The final versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 are now at manufacturing; MSDN subscribers can download these products immediately. Redistributable packages, including the .NET Framework, are also now publicly available.
[via MS Visual Basic Developer Center]
My.Blogs is a collection of sample code that will show you how you can easily provide programmatic access to weblogs in the applications you build. Full source code is provided along with Windows Forms, ASP.NET 2.0 and a Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Outlook Add-In.
I am currently working on a project that involves migrating / converting data from Lotus Notes into Sharepoint. The one requirement that seems to be a challenge is the client wants to “Preserve” the existing references / links to other documents.
If you have had any experience or know of others who have please let me know. I am gathering as much information on how to accomplish this in an expeditated manner.
You can either contact me or post comments for others benefit
Carl, Richard, and Geoff are continuing in their “boat” for their VS 2005 Road Trip! They eventually end up in San Francisco for the November 7th launch. Every day they plan on having a DNR show. During the Raleigh, North Carolina stop they discuss Sharepoint with a guy by the name of Jason. Jason even mentions SmartPart but goes blank when trying to remember who wrote it!
Road Trip Raleigh
Check out side stories from Carl's Blog
Track Carl & Richard via GPS
» It's Road Trip Time!
[via Nikhil Kothari]
The pain of dealing with controls within templates has always seemed unnecessary. I could always envision a “nicer” way to directly access them other than FindControl with all the casting with CTypes.
Nikhilk has wrote an article on Whidbey's incremental improvements with the notion of Single-Instance templates. The jest of the article points out the problem...
Why FindControl? At runtime, the page is basically a control tree, and each control needs to be identifiable uniquely for various reasons. Unfortunately the ID is not good enough, because templates may be repeated (as ItemTemplate is in DataList).
Within FindControl, it implements INamingContainer...
[via InfoPathDev.com]
If you need to learn some clever search functionality within InfoPath, the guys over at InfoPathDev have free samples on aisle 9 --- for your downloading pleasure.
Techniques Demonstrated:
Use XPath to search a data source, including Rich Text controls, for user-specified query string.
Store search results in secondary data source (allows for complex manipulation).
Manipulate a secondary data source via code.
Disable view switching via the menus.
String object extensions.
It's called Search, v1.0
[via Charles Petzold, yeah The Charles Petzold has a blog!]
A book on the Windows Presentation Foundatation (formerly known as Avalon) is intrinsically more complicated than other Windows programming tutorials. The reason? It has two APIs. WPF has a relatively normal object-oriented procedural API for coding with C#, VB, etc, but it also has a parallel XML-based API known as XAML, the Extensible Application Markup Language. The basic idea is that you do the program layout (pages, form design, dialog boxes) in XAML and then write event handlers in code.
Charles Petzold blog
I'm a huge U2 fan. I've enjoyed their tunes since my high school days - which, by the way, shows just how good a band they are - the Test of Time :-p When they released their “All That You Can't Leave Behind“ CD, I bought it the first day it came out. The CD had my undivided attention and stayed in my Car Stereo for months without change, kid you not. It remains one of my favorite of all time. I didn't think they could top it, then came “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb“ and it came close.
U2's frontman, Bono, is...
[via InfoPathDev]
Check out Greg Collins How-To article related to InfoPath Data Validation. I'm finding this Sharepoint / InfoPath marriage to be an alright setup. But there's much more to dig into.
You might have a button in your form—such as a submit button—that you want to prevent the user from being able to click until all required form fields are filled in. This can be done using conditional formatting. The complexity of the conditional formatting depends on your form.
» Disable a Button Until All Required Fields are Filled In
[via Bil Simser]
Fast on the heels of the WSS SP2 release, Microsoft now brings you SPS SP2. In case you're confused about the letters, this is Service Pack 2 for SharePoint Portal Server. Yup, now you can have SP2 goodness with both WSS and Portal Server (remember kids, they are two different things). First off, here's the link so start your downloads.
The following Knowledge Base articles provide information about the various fixes included in this service pack.
KB 887623 Description of Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 2
KB 906337 Issues that are fixed in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 by SharePoint...
Carl, Richard, and Geoff have embarked in their “boat” for their VS 2005 Road Trip! They eventually end up in San Francisco for the November 7th launch. Every day they plan on having a DNR show. Sounds like fun guys!
Check out side stories from Carl's Blog
Track Carl & Richard via GPS
» It's Road Trip Time!
via [InfoPathDev]
Check out Jim Cantwell's HOW TO article on passing parameters to InfoPath Forms. It has complete code examples and is very insightful.
There is sometimes the need to pass arguments to InfoPath when opening a form. You either want to switch to a specific view, or maybe want to turn on a diagnostic feature in your code. By leveraging the merge functionality of InfoPath, you can pass simple arguments or a complex set of data to your form.
Define A Parameters Schema
Enable Merge Functionality
Add OnMergeRequest/OnAfterImport Code
Test Your OnMergeRequest/OnAfterImport Code
Opening a Document and Passing Parameters From a Web Page
» Pass...
I heard it first from AC (he said the 15th) but now Channel 9 has published an October 14th date of release. Good deal if you're an MSDN subscriber - AC mentions Universal Subscribers, although the Channel 9 posting doesn't specify.
Congratulations to Heather Solomon for becoming a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) for Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) over the past weekend! She has put in a lot of time and effort - solving some of the mysterious WSS look and feel questions a lot of folks had. Microsoft's success has been in finding folks like Heather to compliment and add value to its products. They have sure hit the nail on the head with this award.
I needed to find a CD audio to MP3 ripper program for a friend of mine. I wanted it to be legit (free) so I went with an Open Source Project called CD-DA X-Tractor.
[via CD-DA X-Tractor]
CD-DA X-Tractor is a fantastic open source development project that includes a ripper and incorporates the latest LAME mp3 converter. Ability to encode to the OGG Vorbis format is also provided.The program uses AKrip, an open source ripper with great jitter correction that produces accurate WAV files and fast speeds. Ripping on my Plextor 16/10/40 took only 33 seconds. When output settings were changed to rip...
Thanks to AC for pointing me to this new feature in ASP.NET 2.0 - I can see this being used religously!
[via Scott Guthrie & Erik Porter]
Basically, if you place a file with this name in the root of a web application directory, ASP.NET 2.0 will shut-down the application, unload the application domain from the server, and stop processing any new incoming requests for that application. ASP.NET will also then respond to all requests for dynamic pages in the application by sending back the content of the app_offline.htm file (for example: you might want to have a “site under construction” or...
[via Scott Guthrie]
Scott has posted the PDC walkthrough code samples on his blog.
Here's what I got out of it after glancing over it:
The web service that was used was a standard ws - no Atlas specific decoration or meta-data needed
Client-side html is straight forward with no server-side code
Add a JSON proxy to the page - just two script references
ScriptLibrary/AtlasCore.js
LapService.asmx/js
Call methods on the remote service
Set up a call-back event handler that will be invoked when the response is returned
Work with data using same object model
Shows examples of the Atlas ListView Control
Implementing Drag and Drop
Implementing Virtual Earth
Showing it on a MAC - worked...
[via Mark Kruger]
Brian Jones: Office XML Formats, a program manager in Office. He's been working on the XML functionality and file formats in Office for about 5 years. His focus is on XML in Office and the Microsoft Office Open XML File Formats coming in Office 12.
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/09/29/475340.aspx
[via Mark Kruger]
Stephen Thomas has put together a video and sample walking through a simple Sequential Workflow using Beta 1 of WinWF (available for download from Microsoft). This video will take you step by step through creating your first sequential workflow in less than 15 minutes This workflow is hosted by .net using a Windows Form. It takes in an input value and returns a string of how long it took to process the order. The sample includes two windows form for calling the workflow.
Download the sample code: Sequential Workflow using WinWF Download the video: My First Sequential Workflow Video...
via [Andrew Connell]
AC reports from the Microsoft MVP Global Summit that Office 12 products will support saving documents as PDF natively... no more PDF Drivers! Now that's cool! I hope it sticks and doesn't get axed at the last moment.
Here's the spill...
Native "Save As PDF" support coming in O12