Tech-ed 2005 in the Netherlands is taking placed from july 5th til 8th and has some interesting sessions about SharePoint 2003. I have listed the descriptions of each session and they can also be found on the website for tech-ed. One session is not yet described and i'm looking foward to see wat the contents will be.

One of the sessions "Best Practices for an implementation" is about ten key areas of planning needed when desiging your portal. It also discusses what todo when a SharePoint Portal is already deployed and how to make adjustments in the design.

Sessions so far:

Developing Site Definitions and Templates for Windows SharePoint Services>

Developing with SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Outlook and Exchange: Advanced Integration

Getting Back to Normal: SharePoint Backup and Disaster Recovery

Maximizing SAP with SharePoint and Other Microsoft Technologies

MS IT: SharePoint Products and Technologies: Performance and Capacity Planning Best Practices and Lessons Learned

SharePoint Portal Server 2003: Best Practices for an Implementation

Bil Simser wrote two articles about so called YAUSF (Yet Another Undocumented SharePoint Feature). One article is about a telephone pattern were he is still working on. And the second article describes a hidden DisplaySize property for defining the length of a text field.

Both involves changes in some xml files but are not documented by Microsoft. The risk will be there that in a next version of SharePoint this is obsolete or changed. Lets hope that the guys at Microsoft read these articles and hopefully decide to leave this in and start documenting :)

http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2005/05/28/409568.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2005/05/29/409642.aspx

 

For one of our customers a SharePoint portal is build containing monthly reports for their customers. For each customer a tree-like structure of sites and sub sites is created showing the report data in several ways. We created a WebPart which makes it relative easy for the customer to generate the tree-like structure of sites. A short and long name are entered for a new customer and generates the site and sub sites.

On the website of WSSDemo a post by Ian Morrish is found containing some info about a hands on training and tips & tricks. He has also installed the training on their server and made it available to us.

http://www.wssdemo.com/blog/Log/DisplayLog.aspx?ID=107

The training is found at:

http://www.wssdemo.com/Training/default.htm

Christopher Walker has posted a nice article about adding page numbers to a paged DataView in a WebPart. Based on a parameter indicating the row number to start rendering from a page number and optional text is added. This is accomplished by changing the XSLT of your DataView.

http://blogs.msdn.com/cjwalker/archive/2005/05/28/422826.aspx

Christopher Walker wrote a simple walk-through for building a form field to filter the contents of a DataView web part. As he said:

"The idea is to effectively create a simple "search" facility on a Data View web part, which is enabled by creating a Form Web Part with a single text field that provides this value as input to the Data View, the Data View is filtered based on the input value."

http://blogs.msdn.com/cjwalker/archive/2005/05/25/421980.aspx

Steen Molberg has his Blogparts finally ready for download. there is a contact-form present on his site for suggestions and / or feedback. Good work :)

http://www.molberg.dk/blogs/steen/default.aspx?BlogId=5

Its very cool when you debug T-SQL in Visual Studio .NET. Just step from your code into a stored procedure in the SQL Server database. I found some articles at Microsoft about T-SQL Debugging in Visual Studio .NET which could be helpfull to setup your environment.

Setting Up SQL Debugging
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsdebug/html/vxlrfsettingupsqldebugging.asp

Enabling SQL Debugging
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsdebug/html/vxlrfsettingupsqldebuggingenablingsqldebugging.asp

Troubleshooting tips for T-SQL Debugger in Visual Studio .NET
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817178&Product=sql

SQL Debugging: Unable to Start SQL Debug Session
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsdebug/html/vxtbstroubleshootingsqldebuggingsetu
perrormessageunabletostartsqldebugsession.asp

If you know any other articles about T-SQL Debugging please don't hesitate to give a comment on this post. I will put it into the list. :)

It is some time ago that Maurice Prather at BlueDogLimited has posted an article about debugging Web Parts. As he stated debugging Web Parts is not that difficult. In his article he starts with the basics describing the CallStack and customError nodes in the web.config file.

The second part is more advanced and explains why you don't have to set debug="true" and trust level to "Full".

A very important remark which i totally agree with in his article is:

"More importantly, if you’re trying to track down problems associated with code access security, setting the trust level to a higher state simply hides the very same problems you were attempting track down."

http://www.bluedoglimited.com/SharePointThoughts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=60

Yesterday i was playing with the CSS Float mechanism for HTML pages. It is not that difficult but you need to know how it works and what the consequences are. I found a tutorial on CSS Float on the internet which explains the floating principle clearly.

http://css.maxdesign.com.au/floatutorial/introduction.htm