As you might have seen on the SharePoint Team Blog we released the Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint v1.3 . This is really designed to address a number of pressing needs our users have with v1.2. Namely: - x64 support - Command line build support There...

Here are the code samples I demonstrated in my PDC Session last week as promised. You can watch the recorded session here: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB13/   (Silverlight streaming Video & slides + demo side by side) Please read the “Contoso Sample Setup.rtf” file for setup instructions...

Big title for a big user guide! :)  This is a great step forward for people starting out with SharePoint development, or for people looking at starting with the VS extensions for SharePoint. Anyone looking to build things like Webparts, Site templates, List temlates, Event handlers etc... should...

Something I take great interest in and spend a bunch of time thinking about are SharePoint Developers. I was one before I moved up here to Redmond and joined the SharePoint product team. Of course that means I hold a dear place in my heart for all you pro developers out there who are stuggling with the...

Microsoft Partners never fail to amaze me with some of the coolest product add-ons out there. Today I came across this one from Dark Blue Duck ... Scanning Enabler. Allows you to scan directly into a WSS/SPS document library. Very nice, simple but effective. http://www.darkblueduck.com/Products/ScanningEnablerWSS...

This is a great new site definitions white paper by Patrick Tisseghem. This is the first thing people should read if they are looking at building a custom site definition. Creating Site Definitions for Windows SharePoint Services

I recently had to make some changes/additions to a customers custom site definitions. As everyone should know, the way to go about this is to "hide" your V1 site definitions by using the Hidden="TRUE" attribute in the WebTemp.xml file, take a copy of your V1 definitions and modify those. As part of this...

A customer sent me a link to a page they found about using the Today field in calculated sharepoint fields. I don't know how you would fear with our support people ... but here is the note from Pete Blair on the workaround: It is possible to use "Today" in a function as a reference to today’s date...

One of the most frequent questions I get from customers is around a recycle bin for SharePoint. This is not functionality that you get Out of the Box (OOB). OOB you need to go back to a backup to retrieve a deleted document (this is being sorted out in the next version by the way). There have been...

WinApp Technlogy has a nice little free addon called the " Outlook Power Tool for SharePoint " that allows you to right click and email doucment(s) to people. I have implemented this a number of times for customers ... but it is nice to see this little addon for anyone to use: http://www.winapptechnology...

A while back Fitz announced the availablity of the Site Definition KickStart project for developers working on sharepoint site definitions. This includes a sample site definition and nant and nunit bits for deployment and testing of your site definition. Up to this point i had not been developing...

Finally it seems i am allowed to blog about this. I have had a customer on the Alpha of this for a while and it is a web part that i think many many many people are crying out for. The Telerik r.a.d editor web part for SharePoint provides the rich text editing controls in a web part that users...

One web part that i think is missing in the out of the box parts is one that allows you to show the sub-sites of a site. There are a couple out there already ... but i had the need to only show sub-sites that the user had access to. Anyway ... here is the code: [DefaultProperty("Text"), ToolboxData...

I am working on a project right now that has about 4 standalone WSS farms and a central SPS portal farm. The WSS farms are geographically spread out. I wanted to provide users the ability to create a new site on any farm as easy as they can using the “Create site” link in the SPS “Sites” list....

There are many times when you need to so somethign to a WSS site just after it has been created ... and before the users have get their sticky little hands on it. Some of these might include setting up site groups, provisioning users into groups etc... A nice way to do this is to use the ExecuteURL...

Often SPS/WSS admins want to "force" a subscription to a doucment library or list etc... for a particular user. Usually so they dont have to go and do it themselves. This can be handy for site owners of say a team site who want all users to be notified when a new event gets added to the team event...

In W2K3 R2 there are a number of updates to WSS. They fix some of the biggest deployment issues customers currently face: Support for IP-bound virtual servers Support for advanced extranet configurations Kerberos enabled by default Windows SharePoint Services running on ASP.NET 2.0 (Whidbey...

So... since MS has purchased Groove I thought i should check it all out. WOW. I had only read about it in the past ... but have to say that it is really amazing technology. Workspace sharing in a peer-to-peer manner (kinda)... really tight integration with the OS ... sharing a folder via groove. ...

Ever wanted to do this? ... Me too! Unfortunately there is not a nice way to do this... however if you are able to modify the code there is a way to string a few of them together. Take the first document library event handler, inherit from the second. Add your code to do what ever you need to. Call your...

I have a number of customer who have asked me this, so i thought i would blog it in case anyone else wanted to know. If you want to create top level sites in the root of one of your WSS Virtual Servers E.g. /TopLevelSite1">http://<servername>/TopLevelSite1 , /TopLevelSite2">http://<servername>...