A good friend of mine, Pedro Serrano of CaveDigital, just started recently his own blog. Just have a look. His company specialises also in SharePoint and he has some nifty, cool things built.

I installed locally commerce server 2002 sp3 on Windows 2002 in a domain. When I try to connect to BizDesk as local or domain administrator, I got the following error:

"An error occurred while accessing the Business Desk. Contact your system administrator."

It seems that in IIS 6.0 Active Server Pages (ASP) was prohibited. Just go into "Internet Information Server Manager" and look under "Web server extensions". Change the "Active Server Pages" to Allowed.

I just started with Microsoft Commerce Server and my first problem was that after installation of the product, including the service packs and feature pack 1 my MSCS_Admin database was not found in SQL Server.

After googling i found out that this is easily resolved by doing the following:

• Create a database with the name MSCS_Admin
• Open the SQL Query Analyser in this new database
• Start the admin_schema.sql script found in the folder c:\Program Files\Microsoft Commerce Server 2002
• Make sure that the login credentials are correct by starting the Commerce Server Manager and right-click properties on the "Commerce Server Manager" node.

Microsoft has a toolbar introduced which is helpfull to web developers. They can check compatiblity with W3C standards for html and CSS. As stated on their website:

"The IE Developer Toolbar provides several features for deeply exploring and understanding Web pages.

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to 800x600 or a custom size.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages"

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en

I get a lot of questions of starting SharePoint developers that when setting up their development area and try to test their newly created WebParts they often get the error message "Not registered as safe on this website...".

This message can mean anything because it is a standard message from SharePoint. But in most cases the following will work. So here a simple but handy walkthrough when you are developing WebParts.

• Set your debug output folder of your WebPart Library development to the bin folder of your Portal
• Make sure that there is a <SafeControl .... /> tag placed in the web.config
• Use a tool like InstallAssemblies to generate your dwp files and add them to your Portal
• Set the trust level to "Full" in the web.config

Important!!
Keep in mind that taking these steps will give you full control of all API stuff in SharePoint. But a lot of it is under CAS (Code Access Security) which means that if you do not have sufficient rights the method or property will throw an exception.

So always test your WebParts in a test environment when they are for example signed and try to access it with a SharePoint user not having the same role as the Administrator does. (in most cases when you are developing you have Administrator rights)

Have you ever wondering who designed the look and feel of SharePoint? I have... sometimes i wonder why they did the look of SharePoint as it is today. One of the things i really don't like is that when you create a new site with a name and description the following look and feel is presented:

As you can see the description is below the line, means it takes up space of a table row where WebParts are normally displayed. The "Home" text has a ridiculous size in comparison with the title i just entered. So after some changes to the default.aspx file you get the following:

This is more like it :) So how did i do this? It is very easy. Just open the default.aspx file in an editor (or use Frontpage if you want), and look for the following:

<SharePoint:ProjectProperty Property="Description" runat="server"/>

This part will produce the description of the site. We are gonna move it to the position of the "Home" text. The home text can be found under the section <!-- Title -->. Just replace it and remove the description from its original place (don't forget to through away the <tr><td>....</td></tr>)

Now look for the following:

<SharePoint:ProjectProperty Property="Title" runat="server"/>

You will see that this is found in the same section <!-- Title --> just before the "Home"text. Notice the styles used in the <td> ... </td> elements for both parts.

The property title uses the style ms-titlearea, and the moved property description is using the ms-pagetitle. Now swap both styles.

This is everything we have todo. :)

I have sad news :(

This weekend one of my fish i got from Tam Tam past away. The black one, called Paul, to be precise. I gave him a worthly funeral. I even put a picture of another fish next to the bowl so the other one is not feeling alone...

Rest In Peace...

When you add one or more new templates to your SharePoint environment you normally have to call iisreset.exe to let SharePoint recognize the new templates. On a development machine its not so bad to do this, but on a live environment it also shuts down other sites and Portals. You could also do the following:

Make sure that your Portal has its own Application Pool and recycle the pool will have the same effect. Your new templates are now recognized.

In some cases you need to nest a CDATA inside another CDATA like when you use a ContentEditorWebPart in the ONET.XML by creating a template definition. A CDATA is used to let the parser skip the information found between the brackets in case you don't want that part to be parsed.

For example:

<AllUsersWebPart WebPartZoneID="Left" WebPartOrder="1">
   <![CDATA[
      <WebPart xmlns:xsd="" xmlns:xsi="" xmlns="">
        <Title>Title</Title>
        <Assembly>Microsoft.SharePoint, ...</Assembly>
        <TypeName>Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.ContentEditorWebPart</TypeName>
     
        <ContentLink xmlns="" />
        <Content xmlns=""> 
            <html><b>Hello there</b></html>    
        </Content>
      </WebPart>
   ]]>
</AllUsersWebPart>

This example will fail because it tries to parse the html inside the <Content> tag. So you could do the following:

<AllUsersWebPart WebPartZoneID="Left" WebPartOrder="1">
   <![CDATA[
      <WebPart xmlns:xsd="" xmlns:xsi="" xmlns="">
        <Title>Title</Title>
        <Assembly>Microsoft.SharePoint, ...</Assembly>
        <TypeName>Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.ContentEditorWebPart</TypeName> 
        <ContentLink xmlns="" />
        <Content xmlns=""> 
            <!CDATA[
               <html><b>Hello there</b></html>  
            ]]>  
        </Content>
      </WebPart>
   ]]>
</AllUsersWebPart>

Also this is not gonna work. The parser actually thinks that the part it should not parse stops at the first ]]> found. The solution is relative simple but in some cases it can be time consuming.

<AllUsersWebPart WebPartZoneID="Left" WebPartOrder="1">
   <![CDATA[
      <WebPart xmlns:xsd="" xmlns:xsi="" xmlns="">
        <Title>Title</Title>
        <Assembly>Microsoft.SharePoint, ...</Assembly>
        <TypeName>Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.ContentEditorWebPart</TypeName>
        <ContentLink xmlns="" />
        <Content xmlns=""> 
            &lt;html&gt;&lt;b&gt;Hello there&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/html&gt;  
        </Content>
      </WebPart>
   ]]>
</AllUsersWebPart>

By rewriting characters that cause the parser to think that it is xml will solve your problem. That means that the sign < will be &lt; and the sign > will be &gt;

The following sources are available on the internet:

http://www.peej.co.uk/articles/cdata

http://xml.silmaril.ie/authors/cdata/

http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2005/03/29/396135.aspx

http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/cdata.html

The SPWebCollection returned by the member SPWeb.Webs is a not sorted list of SPWeb objects. So i wrote a class which makes it possible to return a sorted list of SPWeb objects based on the property of a SPWeb. It is basically very simple and uses some standard .NET interfaces for enumerating and comparing.

SPSortedWebCollection col = new SPSortedWebCollection(currentWeb.Webs, "Number");

foreach(SPWeb child in col)
{
...
}