Tim Heurer pointed out to us that there are free virtual labs and webcasts available for during your lunch hours. You can find them at www.lunchwithmicrosoft.com.

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2005/06/29/2335.aspx

My collegea Mart wrote an article about the last modified date of a WSS site. The SPSite class has a property called LastItemModifiedDate returning the last date of modified content. If the method GetSubwebsForCurrentUser is used this property does not contain a value when used for the root web. The following definition of both members is found in the MSDN library:

 

LastItemModifiedDate
property of the SPList class gets the date and time that an item, field, or property of the list was last modified.

LastContentModifiedDate
property of the SPSite class gets in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) the date and time when the content of the site was last changed.

 

Mart and Tariq give us a solution for this problem by getting the SPVirtualServerCollection of the SPGlobalAdmin and then looping through the Sites collection per SPVirtualServer. The property LastContentModifiedData is filled in. :)

Thanks guys! I'm gonna need this in one of my next projects

http://blogs.tamtam.nl/mart/SharePointTipLastItemModifiedDateAndLastContentModifiedDate.aspx

The support for additional languages under WSS is larger then for SPS. It is possible to install additional languages next to the selected language at installation. When creating WSS sites the user can choose from the installed languages. See following article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555106

This is a link to an add-on package for WSS giving allowing the users to create WSS sites in other languages then the default language at installation.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e7eec77d-4365-4b66-8e8d-9d079c509679&DisplayLang=en

Tom van de Kerkhof has written a very cool WebPart which makes it possible to change your active directory password through a WebPart. It uses the SmartPart written by Jan Tielens. More information about SmartPart can be found at www.smartpart.info.

You can download the WebPart at his blog. :) My compliments!!

http://www.blogs.jpworks.be/Tom/PermaLink.aspx?guid=983ea9cf-3b9b-416e-8a49-d1152c7af60c

One of my collegea likes to have pop quizes about C# programming snippets. One of the questions he gave us yesterday was the following. If you have two classes class A and class B implementing the same interface and class A is derived from class B and you would cast an instance of class A to the interface which method is called. The one of class A or class B. It is actually very simple...

Jan Tielens has posted a nice article about adding WebParts to a WebPartPage programmatically in SharePoint. In his article he discusses two scenarios to accomplish this.

• First scenario is getting the is creating a new WebPart (in his case a ListViewWebPart) and adding it to the SPWebPartCollection.
• Second scenario is building a XML string containing the information about the WebPart and use the SPWebPartCollection to add this string.

http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2005/06/22/414283.aspx

At the blog #region /* mads's thoughts */ an important article is found called "COM objects need tight leash". It gives an example of increasing memory usage when working with the SharePoint object model and th Office interop components.

In that case it seems that the Garbage Collector was cleaning up the managed references which were wrappers around COM objects and these COM objects were not cleaned up.

I have had a similair problem in the past writing wrapper classes in C# around C++ unmanaged code. The unmanaged code was not cleaned up by the garbage collector ofcourse and you had to do that yourself.

http://weblogs.asp.net/mnissen/archive/2005/06/22/414247.aspx

It never hurts to mention this again. Be very carefull when calling the Dispose or Close method on SPSite or SPWeb objects. If the object is a shared resource it will give you a nasty "access violation error". For example never do the following:

SPSite site = SPControl.GetContextSite (this.Context);
// Code to perform a task
site.Dispose ();  -> WRONG

SharePoint will dispose the object if needed so never call the Dispose method in this case. If you create your own SPSite or SPWeb objects you can use the Dispose or the Close method for these objects. In case you're referencing the object never ever call the Dispose or Close method.

See the article referred to below:

http://www.kbalertz.com/kb_901259.aspx

If you want to integrate WSS into SPS there is an article at Stramit's SharePoint Blog containing serveral links explaining how to do this. the links found in the article are also in this post. 

• KB 824877 : How To Integrate an Existing Windows SharePoint Services Installation with SharePoint Portal Server 2003
• Integrate an Existing Windows SharePoint Services Installation with SharePoint Portal Server
• Connect the Windows SharePoint Services Site to the Portal Site
• Add a Link for the Windows SharePoint Services Site to the Sites Directory in the Portal

A valuable posting :)

http://blog.spsclerics.com/archive/2005/06/21/2311.aspx

Some other bloggers already mentioned it that Scott Handelsman has updated a tool list. This list called "Scott Hanselman's 2005 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List" contains an impressive list of tools containing something for everybody.

You have to take a look at the following:

Lutz's Reflector and it's AddIns - The tool that changed the world and the way we learn about .NET. Download it, select and interesting method and hit the space bar. Take the time to install the Add-Ins and check out the amazing static analysis you can do with things like the Diff and Graph.

TestDriven.NET (was NUnitAddIn) - The perfect integration of Unit Testing with Visual Studio.NET. Right click and "Run Test." The output window says "Build" then switches to "Test." The best part, though, is "Test With...Debugger" as a right click that automatically starts up an external process runner, loads and starts your test. Compatible with NUnit, MBUnit and Team System.

Eric J Smith's CodeSmith - Oh, yes, it's much more than just a Strongly Typed Collection Generator. It's a complete code-generation engine with an ASP.NET-like syntax. Very extendable, very powerful, very affordable. And all is right with the world. I've used it to generate THOUSANDS of lines of code. There's a learning curve, but the benefits are immense. It's worth the download just for the Strongly Typed Collection code from Chris Nahr. 

ASP.NET Development Helper - Nikhil, a dev lead on ASP.NET 2.0, created this wonderfully elegant developer helper that plugs into IE and gives you lots of insight into what's happening in ASP.NET while you develop. Want a FireFox version? Sure.

And many more :)

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2005UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolList.aspx