Recently there has been a great deal of attention devoted to SharePoint Site Definitions in the blogosphere. A month ago I posted an article to the ISPA web site regarding the pros and cons of SharePoint Designer versus Custom Site Definitions. Just a few days ago, Joel Oleson wrote a blog entry lamenting the use […]

I often get asked about the pros and cons of using SharePoint Designer versus custom site definitions for branding purposes. There seems to be a great deal of confusion surrounding this topic so I’ll offer my two cent’s worth in hopes that it clears the air and helps you, the SharePoint developer or administrator, make […]

At the DFW SharePoint Community meeting this week we had a lively discussion about SharePoint web services and how difficult they are to debug. This actually has nothing to do with SharePoint per se – all methods that return nothing but strings are hard to debug – but it is a common pain point so […]

I author all of my blog posts in Word 2007. Why? Well, first, I’m in Word all the time anyway and it’s a familiar environment; second, the blog template allows me to work offline and compose my posts for uploading later; and finally, because the formatting (especially of code blocks) is much closer to what […]

As a consequence of having a fairly high profile in the SharePoint Development community, I get a lot of inquiries from .NET developers, Java programmers, and even some legacy non-OO types, requesting guidance on how to get started in SharePoint development. I wish the answer was as easy as "Go buy this book and you’ll […]

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 […]