This web part is a very simple but handy part to show coming birthdays of people. You only use standard controls from SharePoint and you do not have to program anything. It also shows how to use some functions which are not directly available in calculated fields but can be used with a simple trick. so far as I know this trick be used for any other function which is not available for calculated fields. The following describes the steps to create this web part...

One of the most common requests is how to add an icon for PDF documents and have PDF documents indexed in SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

This article decribes how to enable the Session State in SharePoint...

This is an example of connecting two consumer webparts to a provider webpart through a site template. One of the consumer webparts is a “ScoreCard Standard View” and the second one is an own defined webpart showing a remark about the period. The provider webpart is a derived class from “ScoreCard Dimension Slicer”.

Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator is installed as an add-on for SharePoint on a Windows 2003 server. Adding webparts to SharePoint is very easy todo, but when you try to derive from these webparts or even want to use classes from the assembly you may find it difficult to get the assembly referenced.

Follow the steps described below:

1) use a command prompt (dos box) to copy the assembly from the folder
c:\windows\assembly\gac\msscorecardwebparts\<version number> to another folder. This can not be done using the windows explorer because copying from the GAC is not allowed from there.

2) Add the following key to the registry so Visual Studio.NET will show the assembly in the “Add reference” dialog.

registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\AssemblyFolders

Create the key “ScoreCards” with the default value set to the folder in which the copied assembly can be found.

3) Restart Visual Studio.NET

4) Goto the “Add reference” dialog and you can reference the assembly. The assembly will be automatically taken from the GAC.

It is always a lot of work and sometimes it gives you a lot of problems installing web parts in a safe way. Searching through the internet via Google i found the following link to a nice tool which easily installs web parts in the bin folder or GAC, creates dwp files and even changes the web.config for you.

http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/downloads/components/detail.asp?a=431

Thanks to the author Alan Smithee.