Heather Solomon posted an article recently regarding the difficulties of customizing the Meeting Workspace templates.  I agree with Heather that there is really only one reliable way to do this with any level of automation –a custom Site Definition.  Not too terribly difficult but if you’ve never done it the process can be a bit daunting.  So here’s […]

I recently had a requirement to duplicate (at least in part) the publishing architecture of MOSS using WSS. Specifically, the user wanted to be able to deploy web part pages to a specific document library when a new site was provisioned and add web parts to those pages automatically. This allows the user to browse […]

In a follow on to his earlier post regarding SharePoint development, Andrew Connell has posted detailed instructions on how to create, configure and deploy ASPX pages using code-behind files in SharePoint 2007.  What I found most interesting in this article are the detailed solution package instructions and XML samples, both of which are sadly lacking […]

I’ve been working on updating our SharePoint Utilities with support for Site Columns and Content Types in SharePoint 2007.  Ideally, I would like the tool to have the ability to create site columns and content types on the fly it it sees them in the list structure and they don’t already exist on the site.  […]

This actually came up a while back during a training course on MOSS customization and branding but I was reminded of it while doing the mind-numbing work of manually creating site column and content type features for a client.  When you assign a GUID to a Feature it is up to you whether or not […]

A workflow I designed for a client was doing something very simple – enumerating the members of a publishing approval group and displaying the user names on the workflow initiation form (which happened to be an ASPX page) – when all of a sudden content authors could no longer initiate the workflow.  Each attempt was […]

PublishingWebControls in MOSS are a great feature, allowing editors to add all kinds of formatted content to publishing pages based on site definition content types.  Unlike web part zones in WSS, however, these controls don’t completely disappear from the page when no content has been added to them.  What gives with all that ugly white […]

This one had me beating my head against the wall for quite a while so I’m sharing it to save you the cost of a handful of Tylenol (or Paracetamol if you’re on the other side of the pond).   Each item in a SharePoint list has an associated SPAttachmentCollection array.  It would seem logical that […]

While working on a web part for a client’s MOSS public web site I discovered some strange behavior regarding GUID’s embedded in query string arguments.  My web part, a simple viewer that replaces the functionality of the old ‘txtlstvw’ page from SharePoint 2003, takes the GUID of a list and an item ID as query string […]

It doesn’t take long for anyone who does client-side coding in SharePoint to figure out that the trusty ol’ getElementById() method just ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Sure, it works fine in standard ASP.NET pages but in SharePoint all that pretty client-side code goes right out the window.  Just what is going on […]