FitzBlog

ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts rock. We in SharePoint-land love them. We’re building “v3” on ASP.NET 2.0. But none of that matters right now if you have to deliver code for today’s SharePoint sites and portals. And this advice comes from...

This is one item I’ve been holding back for a while. FrontPage “12” will be a great SharePoint site designer on many, many fronts. Like the current version, using it to edit a page in a SharePoint site will cause the page to become unghosted...

The short answer: Heck, yeah! The long answer: For the love of God, don’t try it in production yet. SQL Server 2005 hasn’t shipped. But as we’ve been testing our beta code for WSS Service Pack 2, due out later this year, we’ve been testing it against...

WSRP, as I covered a few days ago, is an interoperability standard. It’s platform- and language-neutral. It’s all about requesting and transmitting chunks of HTML using SOAP. Today I’d like to weigh in on something usually uttered in...

I thought I’d start this next wave of postings with the subject I’ve avoided the longest — WSRP. This one will be a little long… What Is WSRP? The abbreviation stands for Web Services for Remote Portlets. There are plenty...

There’s a nice article on TheServerSide.NET entitled Integrating 3rd Party Single Sign On in Sharepoint Portal Server that explains how to write a custom (unsupported by Microsoft) forms authentication layer that sits in front of SPS and WSS. But...

If you’ve been at a talk delivered by me, Bryan Jeffries, or Richard Mareno entitled something like “Programming with Windows SharePoint Services’ Lists and Document Libraries”, you’ll have heard the following explanation...

We had a fun internal debate this week on a new tool developed in France. If you can read French, it’s documented here ; the download link for the executable (whose UI is in English) is here . The tool grabs deleted documents from the database and...

I’ve been at a lot of conferences in the past few months, and the question I was asked most often had to have been around what we support and don’t support when it comes to site and portal customizations, modifcations to site definitions,...

I just got out of Steven Sinofsky’s keynote session on Office “12” here at the PDC, and that means one thing. Actually, multiple, things, but the big thing is that I can stop being (as much of) a jerk about not saying anything about...

So we’re getting ready to unveil a little bit tomorrow and a lot on Wednesday regarding WSS “v3” and our Office “12” servers, but a couple of things have popped up that are very, very relevant to people that want to develop...

Gregory MacBeth provides a nice enumeration of the skills you need to be a “SharePoint developer”. It’s a good list. I endorse it. But examine it closely, and I hope you’ll come to the conclusion that the way to be successful when...

I did three presentations at last week's Book Publisher's Summit, talking to publishers and authors on topics that would be great for developer-focused books on SharePoint Products, namely (a) programming with lists and libraries, (b) site definitions...

I haven’t blogged for a while, but I’m hoping to make up for it — starting with this… I’ve told you before that, if you want to add full SharePoint document library support for your own document editor, you'll have to...

Next week I’m going to post something that explains the relative merits of efforts like IBuySpy Portal, DotNetNuke, etc., compared to Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server. We’re getting asked that question a lot. We also...

We get asked about what we're doing about AJAX quite a lot these days, especially about ASP.NET for AJAX (the technology formerly known as "Atlas"). We *love* AJAX. We actually use AJAX (albeit not ASP.NET for AJAX) all over the place in SharePoint sites...

Someone sent me a comment to one of last week’s postings lamented the trouble with indexing ASPX files , particularly because MS product support says that we don’t recommend searching them. This person’s company has a lot of content...

The fact that there’s an Office/SharePoint Development track at this year’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, CA from the 13th from the 16th of September is a big break for you, for us, for everyone. Bill Gates mentioned a few weeks ago...

So it’s 10am as I start this posting, which I’m typing while I bounce back and forth between Ryan Stocker’s talk on the Web content management services you’ll see in Office “12” and Rob Lefferts’ talk on our unified...

That post I made on Monday? Namely: “ FitzBlog : Web Part Interoperability -- Good News and Bad News ”? It’s out. It was U2U ’s news to break, and Mike Ammerlaan just helped them break it here at his PDC session on WSS “v3”...

The last four days here in Orlando have been a blur, and that’s not because of the humidity or the evening events. There’s a lot going on here. There are a lot of people here. There’s a lot of content here. And there are a lot of good...

My blog isn’t so much a running news log as it is an opinion column and platform for communicating practical advice. That having been said, I’ve been slacking off for too long. Well, take heart, as I’ve built up a backlog of things to...

To say “Web Parts are Microsoft’s ASP.NET technology for implementing portlets” would be correct, but grossly incomplete. One key facet of Web Part technology is that we do not intend for them to be for portals and portals alone. Our...

I get asked “how many Web Parts exist” all the time. The question drives me crazy. I understand why. Portal vendors cite the list of available portlets they have on hand as strategic selling points. They want to cite the equivalent number...

Want some help building and deploying site definitions, complete with resources like Web Parts, CSS files, etc.? Get thee to http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/sharepointdevkickstart , the latest in our never-ending effort to plug information gaps in the...