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 […]

Finally.  FINALLY.  F-I-N-A-L-L-Y!  For years I’ve been telling everyone who would listen about the negative consequences of performing looping operations in the object model (OM) against large data sets.  Our internal testing proved this to be the case.  Our customer’s experiences validated our own results.  And just plain common sense said this was a B-A-D […]

Sean just posted a new version of our web part user control wrapper with full Ajax support for download.  This will allow you to host User Controls within an update panel for AJAX-like functionaility with SharePoint.  Get it here.  Instructions for deploying the web part are also in the blog post in case you haven’t done […]

Here’s a tip that’s really simple but I had a number of people ask me about it at TechEd so I thought I’d post it here.  Apparently it’s a common requirement to display user information, such as name, login name, or email address on various master and layout pages throughout a site.  Although the Welcome/Login […]

Anonymous security in SharePoint 2007 is more of an art than an exact science, it seems.  Although drastically improved from 2003, there are still some gaps in the security model which need to be plugged (and some that need to be opened) for public-facing SharePoint sites.  One of the most glaring examples is the List […]

One of the most common requirements we have these days is to display RSS feeds on WSS/MOSS sites inside of a web part.  Most users want the ability to see just a list of article links, sorted by date, from multiple feed sources – a collection of technology blogs or all the official SharePoint blogs, […]