Recently, I ran into an interesting issue.  I thought I’ll post this as I guess most SharePoint Developers could possibly run into it. I used to have my MOSS 2007 development environment on one domain (let’s say mydomain1.com).  I then joined my development environment to another domain (let...

With SharePoint 2007 "Survey" list template, I recently created a quizzing application. The thing with survey list is that it stack ranks the questions taking into account how many of the respondents favored each options within that question. But for a quizzing application, we need to be able to stack...

SecureString is the type that's used for passwords in SharePoint 2007. You might find its use when you are automating some "higher level" administration operation (like creating a web application for example). How do you use it is shown below: 1: private static SecureString ConvertString( string...

There are good number of articles that explains the different caching option Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides and ways to leverage them to achieve better site performance. However, there are scenarios where you might want to implement output caching on your site/page, but have some controls...

Being able to perform wildcard search is probably an area that's missing in out of the box search in SharePoint. Here's a small web part sample you can use to perform wildcard search in MOSS 2007 (and it can be engineered backward to fit into SharePoint Portal Server 2003 as well). The code in it...

I recently handled a case where the customer sees a "Failed to verify user permissions" error when accessing the DspSts.asmx web service in SharePoint 2007. Below is the code similar to what they were using to invoke the Query method of DspSts.asmx web service. It's also very similar to the same provided...

SharePoint's navigation APIs have a property exposed that allows us to set query string properties for a URL. Sadly, but not surprisingly, this only works when root site collection has publishing feature enabled. Reason is simple... One a WSS only OR on a site where publishing feature is not enabled...

The "Organization Hierarchy" is a cool little thing that let's SharePoint users to remember who their colleagues are and more importantly who their manager is. If you are wondering about customizing it, honestly, it's quite a bit of a work if you want to do that via features or using OM for the...

If you have been working with FBA for a while, you might have noticed that the user name displayed in the Welcome control shows the account name of the FBA user. This is because of the field the welcome control is mapped to. As shown here, the welcome control simply points to the name property...

This was an interesting issue.  The problem a customer reported was that when they wanted to add a user to a SharePoint Group, the "Add users to a SharePoint group" drop-down was disabled.  On investigation, it was found the customer was creating a web application and a site collection...

Well, did you add a link like "file://C:/folder1/folder2"? In one customer's environment this was the exact issue. A user added some file system link like the above and ended up with the following symptoms: 1. The user couldn't add the "My Links" web part to his/her MySite. Whenever he/she tries,...

Recently, I was involved in a support request where I had to find out what SPBasePermissions are assigned behind permission level in SharePoint using SharePoint OM code. First some basics about permission level and base permissions. If you are in your SharePoint site, click Site Actions > Site...

This might be a cake-walk for most of you, but I got delayed a bit to get MSCMS 2001 contents indexed using MOSS 2007. Basically what I saw after I setup a content source and started a full crawl was the below warning: The specified address was excluded from the index. The crawl rules may have to...

The small search control that is rendered in the default SharePoint pages is a delegate control rendered through master page. You can find it defined in the master page as follows: < asp : ContentPlaceHolder id ="PlaceHolderSearchArea" runat ="server"> < SharePoint : DelegateControl runat...

Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing is the assembly that we need to use to get pages created and published. A sample is provided below: using ( SPSite site = new SPSite ( "http://moss" )) { using ( SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb()) { PublishingSite pSite = new PublishingSite (site); SPContentType ctype...

Strangely enough! We'll not see this issue with an OOTB search. It is seen only when we use search APIs or web service and perform a custom search. Apparently, when we use Microsoft.Office.Server.Search, the content database also gets indexed and this content database should be assigned to the particular...

This error is often encountered when SharePoint OM is used to update site/web/list objects from within a web context. Some thing so basic as the code below could fail: using ( SPSite site = new SPSite ( "http://moss" )) { using ( SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb()) { SPList list = web.Lists[ "List1" ...

This is an interesting issue I came across recently and it was nice to know things that I thought would be hardly a matter to be considered. Well, the gist of the issue is very simple. When using default providers (AspNetSqlMembershipProvider & AspNetSqlRoleProvider) to try to setup FBA, at the...

There’s always a question about updating properties in a list in SharePoint. Specifically, properties like “Modified By”, “Modified” etc., WSS 3.0 provides greater flexibility for enabling developers to do this with ease. Usually, this scenario would be required when users with “Read” rights need to...

When you use the “GetWebTemplate” web method provided through webs.asmx web service, you’ll notice that the custom list templates you might have created is not available in the collection returned. This is because the OM call that happens behind-the-wires, calls the SPWeb.ListTemplates collection object...

Here’s the scenario: A tool that’s designed to add log messages from an application to a SharePoint list. The log messages are themselves “strings”, which when put in a text file may vary anywhere between 1kb to 10mb in size. At a single time, this logging process can run for anywhere between 20-30 minutes...

Recently, I worked a tricky and interesting case where a customer wanted to “silently” put a file in user’s computer. My buddy, Sowmyan bet me by blogging about it here . A job superbly done!! Watch out for enabling Initialize and script ActiveX controls not marked as safe as that could potentially be...

Most aviated and now available!! Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is now available for download. From a top-level glance, there’s no New to Version stuff added and it provides all that the previous version 1.1 provided, but specifically for Visual Studio 2008. This...

.NET 3.0 and higher is already supported with MOSS 2007. Essentially, .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 are additional components to .NET 2.0 framework. They provide features like Windows Communication Foundation , Workflows and LINQ (if you are a beginner, also see 101 LINQ Samples ). MOSS – is still running on...

Many things are easy to do in SharePoint. Considerable stuffs are tricky. And a few – difficult/impossible. One such tricky stuff is customizing navigation (both quick launch and top navigation). Recently, I had an internal request regarding customizing quick launch navigation nodes. There are...