One of the challenges that consulting organizations (like ourselves) deal with on a daily basis is insuring that effective mechanisms exists to communicate with clients throughout the lifecycle of a project. In the old days (like, say, eons ago in the mid-nineties) weekly status meetings and conference calls would suffice but in today’s environment of […]

Andrew Connell, MOSS MVP and SharePoint WCM Expert Extraordinaire, has released a useful new utility for all you designers and developers who create SharePoint solution packages on a regular basis. This tool is an add-in to Visual Studio (both 2005 and 2008) that allows you to create a complete 12 hive replica, manifest, and DDF […]

I have often had the need to add a sequential counter to a list in lieu of the built-in list ID field. Why? Well, to begin with, the ID field isn’t very user friendly. Let’s say you have a list with 1000 items in it, and your view breaks those items down into chunks of […]

Building on the earlier work done by Steve Peschka, Waldek Mastykarz has written a post regarding the use of the Content by Query Web Part versus custom data aggregation methods.  His results show completely different metrics for the PortalSiteMaprovider than Steve’s, which is a bit surprising (and contrary to some of our own, less empirical, […]

With the release of Sonar, developers now have the ability to analyze the performance characteristics of custom-built web parts. The next obvious step is to optimize that web part code to make it as efficient and performant as possible. Here are my top five tips for improving web part performance (feel free to add your […]

A few weeks ago I whipped up a quick display web part for Silverlight projects and posted it for download.  I was in a hurry just to get something done and thought I’d share it for everyone who might need it but, alas, I failed to completely test it.  When I enabled anonymous access for […]

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no Silverlight guru – all those sliding images and reflecting chrome are a bit fancy for my simple country-boy tastes.  But I was floored when one of our graphic artists brought me a few samples of some new marketing materials and showed me how he did it.  […]

There seems to be an alarming trend developing within the greater Microsoft community of building a firewall between those of us who write code for a living and those of us who do not. First, Microsoft decides to split TechEd US into two weeks, ala the TechEd Europe model, with the first week being geared […]

A number of people have asked me to do a post similar to this one regarding custom site definitions for WSS.  The process is very similar, if not a bit easier, to that for Meeting Workspaces but a few people got lost in the specifics so here’s a detailed walkthrough on creating custom WSS site […]

Spence Harbar has a great new entry in the SharePoint Application Platform debate that’s been raging here, here, here, here and here.    Spence’s first point says it all:   "WSS v3 provides a really quite ridiculously large collection of core application framework services or infrastructure plumbing, all for free and all to an extremely […]