Since SharePoint 2003 was out I’ve had people asking about WSRP and how SharePoint supports it.  There’s always been a fairly long discussion around what WSRP actually is, and where things lined up between that standard and the SharePoint model of doing things.

Well as of today, you have less of a long discussion and more of a location to go to.  The WSRP Toolkit is up and live at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WSRPToolkit and you can go take a look at what’s been documented, provided, and available for helping you with doing your cross platform Portal content rendering.  If you take a look in there, you’ll see even see a WSRP Producer.

Tags: SharePoint

One of things I get asked a lot about is how to do Life Cycle management with SharePoint Development – mainly because SharePoint makes it so easy to forget about the line between content and code.

So what do you do when you’re working on your custom feature or solution?  Take a look at the post – http://blogs.msdn.com/vesku/archive/2008/07/29/continuous-integration-in-moss-development-using-tfs.aspx – that Vesa Juvonen has up.  He’s got some great information on doing continuous integration with your SharePoint code – it just might be exactly what you need.

Tags: SharePoint

I just learned from Bil Simser that Patrick Tisseghem passed away on Wednesday.  When I first got into blogging, Patrick was one of those that was leading the way with figuring out what SharePoint was and could do.  I still have great pleasure in handing out/recommending his books.  I managed to meet him very briefly at PDC 2003, and was incredibly impressed by his ability, experience, and approachability.

Tags: SharePoint

You may have already seen the Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint but you may not have seen that you can now find the project on CodePlex, and that there is a new update which includes information on Silverlight 2 Beta 2 as well as well as some great samples such as custom navigation, slider controls, media player information,and such.  You can find the project (and contribute to it as well if you like) at http://www.codeplex.com/SL4SP.

Tags: SharePoint

That’s because it’s SharePoint, working with the Community Kit’s EBE. 

http://blogs.amd.com/Pages/default.aspx

Not bad at all!

Tags: SharePoint

I’m lagging here a bit, but I did want to point over to the release a couple of weeks ago of the VS2K8 version of the SharePoint 2007 Extensions.  I’d already noted the documentation which was released with the VS2K5 version, but you can find the actual 2K8 version at

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7bf65b28-06e2-4e87-9bad-086e32185e68&displaylang=en

Tags: SharePoint

As you may notice, I fixed my archives column being… Less than left justified.   If you’re running the EBE, note that all you have to do is go into the Monthcount.xsl for the theme of your choice, and then add a wrapper around the row template (ie <a title=…).  Not too bad, but do remember that you have to do it on a per Theme basis – I’m using the Intensive theme by default, but I’ve got a couple I’m customizing based off of this them, so I had to ensure that I did the modification for each one.

Tags: SharePoint

Just had a question about getting this error when working with a Data View in SharePoint 2007.  The person was doing everything right to do CRUD on a SQL table, but was getting the above error on update.  The mechanism itself is very appealing when working with data – and SharePoint does a great job, but you do have to pay attention to your data sources.  It turns out that SharePoint can really help you with SQL forms, but it isn’t perfect.  From the Office Developer documentation -

“However, if your data source is an SQL data source such as an SQL database or a SharePoint list or library, the field types may be specified in the data source itself. In such a case, if you use the form to enter text in a field that requires numbers and then click Save, an error message appears in the browser explaining that the data source control failed to execute the update command. This means that you are entering values in the form that the data source field cannot accept. If you receive such an error message, click Back in the browser, and then either click Cancel on the form to discard your changes, or enter values in the form fields that the data source can accept.”

As you can see – you should be careful about which SQL data sources you work with – there needs to be some thought as to what you’re going to surface because the user has to deal with the data source type checking.  Also be aware of non-nullable columns as that can be a challenge as well.  For more details on how it works, there’s a good overview at:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA101191141033.aspx

Tags: SharePoint

I’ve gotten a couple of questions about batch conversion to the XML version of Office Document formats – it’s included in the Office Migration Planning Manager tool – you can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=13580cd7-a8bc-40ef-8281-dd2c325a5a81&DisplayLang=en

(Sorry for the quick post, but I’ve had a lot of questions around this and wanted to get it out as soon as I got the info.)

Tags: SharePoint

Newsgator has just released their Social sites for SharePoint – Great job guys!

Tags: SharePoint