Matt Morse: Posts

What kind of training?

Matt Morse — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:25:52 GMT

Body: Yesterday I was packing for my trip to Orlando for TechEd this week and my two-year-old son was watching me. "Where are you going, Daddy?" "I'm going on a trip for some training," I reply. "Is it potty training?" I sure hope not -- though this is my first...

Observations from TechEd Developers

Matt Morse — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:50:51 GMT

Body: We're halfway through TechEd 2008 for developers in Orlando, and I've seen enough to make a few random observations: Silverlight is going to be big. I'm likely the last person to know the tremendous differences between Silverlight 1 and the upcoming Silverlight 2. I've dabbled in the past...

Best Vista error message ever

Matt Morse — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 17:25:49 GMT

Body: I got this error message this morning after closing LiveMeeting running on Vista. I think it speaks for itself. Classic. Published: 3/1/2007 11:27 AM Quarter: 2007 Q1

SharePoint Conference 2011– Day 1 Recap

Matt Morse — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:28:26 GMT

Body: Yesterday concluded day one of the 2011 Microsoft SharePoint Conference. While the 2009 SharePoint Conference unveiled SharePoint 2010 - and we learned today that the 2012 conference will reveal the next version - this year’s conference focuses on how businesses are using SharePoint, best...

IE6 Crashing Intermittently on WSS3 Sites

Matt Morse — Wed, 30 May 2007 06:50:44 GMT

Body: I ran into a fun problem recently that ended up being related to conflicting versions of OFfice. The symptom was that Internet Explorer (version 6.0; I didn't test with 7) would intermittently crash when viewing WSS sites. There didn't seem to be a reason behind what activity was being...

Creating a MOSS State Machine Workflow (Part 2 of 4: Creating InfoPath Forms)

Matt Morse — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 19:08:33 GMT

Body: “InfoPath is my friend. InfoPath is my friend. InfoPath is my friend.” I had to chant that to myself a few times before I started to believe it. Coming from a custom development background, my initial inclination with a web form is to simply bang out a quick ASPX page. But I’m starting to...

XSL to convert DataSet to HTML table

Matt Morse — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:07:45 GMT

Body: I was recently creating a web part for a WSS installation that needed to connect to a backend data store, run a query based on the user's context in SharePoint, then display the results in the UI. It was an interesting situation, as I didn't have any developer access to the backend data...

Querying WSS Lookup Columns with CAML

Matt Morse — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 10:25:22 GMT

Body: I spent way too long yesterday trying to get a CAML query that would allow me to query on a lookup field and figured I'd share. <rant> First, one thing I find very annoying about SharePoint is that if you have an invalid query, the call to the GetItems() method returns all rows. What??...

Getting files attached to an instance of SPListItem

Matt Morse — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 21:57:38 GMT

Body: I was doing something with file attachments on custom lists in SharePoint recently, and the solution to iterating through the attachments and retrieving the binary file information wasn't readily obvious to me. For example, adding new attachments is done with the Add method on the...

Update to Creating a MOSS State Machine Workflow Part 2: Initiation and Association Form Trap

Matt Morse — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 01:51:22 GMT

Body: In my last post on creating a MOSS State Machine, I walked through the process of creating InfoPath forms for use in a MOSS workflow. In the process of working on the next post -- the one where the InfoPath forms provide information to the workflow code -- I got tripped up by something...

Creating a MOSS State Machine Workflow (Part 3 of 4: Workflow Development)

Matt Morse — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 02:23:51 GMT

Body: In the first two posts in this series (here, here, and there's an important addendum here), I discussed some of the initial analysis and InfoPath form creation that go into creating a SharePoint state-machine workflow. With those items done, it’s time to crack open Visual Studio and complete...

User Experience: SharePoint as a File Share Replacement?

Matt Morse — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 03:14:21 GMT

Body: One of the topics that routinely comes up with many of the clients I work with is the capability to move information currently stored on company file shares to SharePoint. (NOTE: The focus of this post is on user experience, but there are other factors to consider. Joel Oleson has a what...

SharePoint PeoplePicker Behavior with ADAM Users

Matt Morse — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:05:05 GMT

Body: In my post regarding the use of ADAM as a user repository for SharePoint, I gave some basic instructions on the configuration necessary to get SharePoint's PeoplePicker to be able to enumerate users from ADAM. This post contains a little more detail about the specifics of the behavior that...

Thoughts on MOSS and Microwaves

Matt Morse — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:15:16 GMT

Body: Jeff Atwood's blog entry last week on control simplicity made me think of SharePoint. For one thing, one of the common complaints I hear from clients about their SharePoint sites is that they're too "texty:" you hit a page and are greeted by 17 list views and you simply want to...

Creating a MOSS State Machine Workflow (Part 4 of 4: Workflow Deployment)

Matt Morse — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:54:29 GMT

Body: This post is the last in a four-part series on the development of a MOSS State Machine workflow and will quickly walk through the steps of deploying the workflow as a SharePoint feature. If you're starting here, the first three parts of the series can be found here: Concepts and...

Creating a Vista Gadget that Displays SharePoint Information using Silverlight

Matt Morse — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 05:11:08 GMT

Body: One of the perpetual thoughts tumbling in my head revolves around the SharePoint user experience (I had recent posts here and here on this topic). In my opinion, WSS3/MOSS represents an enormous step forward from WSS2/SPS in this area, but there are still significant opportunities for...

Get Ready to Camp!

Matt Morse — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:54:55 GMT

Body: MOSSCamp, that is. Next Friday, November 9, is a great opportunity for SharePoint developers around Chicago to get together and share our collective experiences using MOSS. (And did I mention that it's free?) You can see from the schedule that the content is very dev-centric. It'll be...

WSS, ADAM, and Building a Custom Authentication Provider

Matt Morse — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:33:55 GMT

Body: The post I wrote last year about using WSS 3.0 with ADAM for user authentication has drawn quite a bit of interest -- and also some confusion (and, uh, passion) about the licensing. Does it really require a license to MOSS or not? Hopefully this post will offer some clarity -- and also some...

Utility for Testing Mail Sending

Matt Morse — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:59:23 GMT

Body: Every now and then I find exactly what I'm looking for. The last couple of engagements that I've been involved in have had non-production SharePoint environments that do not allow SMTP relay out of that environment. So to test email notifications (e.g. alerts, messages sent by workflows,...

Blogging in SharePoint with Windows Live Writer

Matt Morse — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:30:40 GMT

Body: It's no secret now that Microsoft's Windows Live Writer is a blogging application that has integrated support for WSS 3.0 blogs (like mine here at PointBridge). I've written my last six or seven posts using this utility, and I'm thoroughly impressed with how the Live team nailed this app!...

Workflow Tip: Code to Task-Related Activity Instance

Matt Morse — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:16:18 GMT

Body: In his comments on my blog post regarding development of a SharePoint state machine workflow, Fred Morrison raises an excellent point which I think is worthy of some exposition. Here it is: In general, when developing task-related activities in SharePoint workflows, code to activity...

CompleteTask Activity Throws Exception

Matt Morse — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 13:27:05 GMT

Body: When developing a SharePoint workflow, if you don't set the TaskId property declaratively on the CompleteTask activity (e.g. if you're following this recommended approach to handling task-related activities), you might find yourself with the following friendly exception: ...

Microcontributions to the SharePoint Development Community

Matt Morse — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 05:00:33 GMT

Body: My personal shift from custom .NET development into SharePoint development happened a little over a year ago, and in that amount of time, it's been rewarding to see the SharePoint dev community blossoming. There are a number of fantastic blogs out there, and you only have to look as far as...

SQL Server Security Behavior in Windows Vista

Matt Morse — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:18:55 GMT

Body: I routinely use SQL Server Management Studio to write SQL queries, ogle details of the database schema, etc. Last week, I needed to change the permissions on a SQL login, and I got the following message: That confused me, as I was logging in to SQL using Windows authentication, and I am...

Generating CHM files from embedded comments in .NET

Matt Morse — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 17:38:10 GMT

Body: I was working on a task recently that required some documentation, and I looked for an old friend, NDoc, which I had used in the past -- but only with .NET 1.x projects, apparently. As it turns out, I'm a couple of months behind the times, and the primary developer is not going to pursue...

How Do You Describe What You Do?

Matt Morse — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 03:15:01 GMT

Body: I can't tell you how many times I've had the following conversation since I started developing on the SharePoint platform something over a year ago: Friend, Family, or Acquaintance: So Matt, what do you do? Me: I'm a computer consultant. Usually the conversation ends here, as most people...

Web Part Design: Make Life Easy for Your Users

Matt Morse — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:09:57 GMT

Body: One of the powerful features provided by SharePoint is the encapsulation of functionality into web parts and the ability for users to manage the configuration of those web parts. And one of the biggest pains for users of SharePoint is the perpetual configuration of web parts. Ah, the...

SharePoint Development Tools: What Do You Use?

Matt Morse — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 07:07:24 GMT

Body: I have a problem with the tools I use for SharePoint development. Since most (all?) of my SharePoint development happens in a virtualized environment, I often have trouble remembering all of the little utilities and features that I use to make the dev process easier. When I switch between...

SharePoint Content Type Definitions and FieldRef Elements

Matt Morse — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 07:30:57 GMT

Body: I've been working on a project recently with a number of content type definitions. As you may know, there are a number of different reasons to create a content type within SharePoint: in some of those cases you may have common properties for many content types, so it's possible to have many...

Where did my "Page Settings" go?

Matt Morse — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 05:43:11 GMT

Body: If you've spent some time working with MOSS 2007's publishing feature, you're probably aware that SharePoint has some special treatment around the "Pages" document library that gets created in each site for which publishing is enabled. For example, you can put ASPX pages in other...

Resource for Replicator Activity in SharePoint Workflow

Matt Morse — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:54:56 GMT

Body: I've been involved in a number of conversations about the replicator activity in SharePoint workflow and difficulty that people have in wiring it up. Fred Morrison left this post in the MSDN forums today that offers some great tips and specific pointers. Technorati Tags: sharepoint...

What's wrong with this code?

Matt Morse — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:43:38 GMT

Body: Let's play a little game I call "What's wrong with this code?" (I sometimes play the solitaire version the morning after I've done some late-night development...) Here's the quick scenario. I used Becky Bertram's blog post as a starting point and created a feature that was...

HOW-TO: Remove embedded HTML in CQWP roll-ups

Matt Morse — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:15:00 GMT

Body: On a recent project, we were rolling up discussion board posts, which include a RichHTML field. The design called for the contents of the most recent posts to be summarized on the site's landing page using a Content Query Web Part (CQWP). The RichHTML field in the post is a mixed blessing....

Handy utility for CSS editing

Matt Morse — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:04:49 GMT

Body: I've been doing some SharePoint UI customization work recently, and if you've ever done any of that, you know how much fun it is to work with some gigantic CSS files. I was talking to Dave last week and lamenting that the CSS specification doesn't include support for the specification of...

Exception when creating Publishing sites: "The last content type on a list cannot be deleted"

Matt Morse — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:34:48 GMT

Body: I ran into this exception on a project recently and was stumped. This error showed up whenever we attempted to create new sites using the MOSS publishing site definition, or using any other site definition that included the publishing features: After the exception was thrown, the site...

HOW-TO: Get MSDN library links to SharePoint classes when generating documentation using Sandcastle

Matt Morse — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:12:27 GMT

Body: I've blogged before about using Sandcastle to generate HTML help files from embedded comments in .NET -- and I still think it's a great approach. One of the great features is the ability to display the inheritance hierarchy for your classes and any base classes or interfaces that they...

Source control and STSDEV utility

Matt Morse — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:04:55 GMT

Body: I'm using STSDEV 2008 (a utility from Ted Pattison's group) on a current project to generate the Visual Studio projects for SharePoint deliverables. If you haven't used it before, I'd recommend checking it out: it offers a pretty nice integrated way to bundle your SharePoint projects into...

SharePoint solution deployment doesn't like read-only files

Matt Morse — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:56:23 GMT

Body: I recently ran into an issue with an error upgrading a standard SharePoint solution file. The deployment operation of the "upgradesolution" call kept returning the following exception: Some of the files failed to copy during deployment of the solution. [MACHINE NAME] : [WEB...

MOSS Camp 2008 coming on November 14

Matt Morse — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:34:48 GMT

Body: I'm working with George Durzi from Clarity to help coordinate this year's MOSS Camp event (here's George's post about it) in Chicago. We had a great crowd last year and are hoping for the same this time around. I'm personally excited because we're taking a little different approach on the...

CustomActionGroups are duplicated when defined in multiple features

Matt Morse — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 03:57:25 GMT

Body: I ran into some interesting behavior on a recent project related to CustomActionGroups. As you're probably familiar, the SharePoint CustomAction element makes it pretty simple to extend (or suppress) SharePoint's functionality. The CustomActionGroup element is related -- and simply allows...

What makes a SharePoint developer?

Matt Morse — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 05:07:32 GMT

Body: A couple of years ago, when I was first starting to work with SharePoint, I overheard a conversation in the hall at my company. Will was talking to a few other people and asked this question: "What's the difference between a developer who knows SharePoint and a SharePoint...

Strange CustomAction behavior in WebApplication-scoped features

Matt Morse — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:09:35 GMT

Body: Yesterday, I posted about some interesting behavior related to CustomActionGroups. This post is related to a similar issue, but in a specific situation. I was working on a project recently in which we created multiple custom timer jobs. These jobs had some user-configurable settings, so I...

MOSS Camp 2008 - That's a Wrap!

Matt Morse — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:13:39 GMT

Body: Today was our second annual MOSS Camp held at the Clarity offices in Chicago. As I mentioned in my previous post, our approach this year was to choose a simple business scenario and then spend the day in various sessions all focused on building and delivering a SharePoint solution. The code...

"Shetiquette"

Matt Morse — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:45:50 GMT

Body: I was working at a client recently and "shetiquette" was the term they used to refer to "SharePoint Etiquette" -- the behavior users exhibit in collaborating with each other in MOSS. Their examples of bad shetiquette include: Checking out documents and never checking...

SharePoint CSS Reference Guide

Matt Morse — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 16:34:20 GMT

Body: Heather Solomon always has great SharePoint content on her blog, but her SharePoint CSS reference guide is a must-have for anyone who has spent hours clicking with the IE Developer Toolbar and surfing through CORE.css. Category: SharePoint Server Published: 2/20/2007 10:29 AM Quarter: 2007...

Audience membership based on a user profile property requires “Everyone” access

Matt Morse — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:37:01 GMT

Body: If you’ve done work with MOSS audiences, you’re probably aware that one of the ways that you can build an audience is to set up rules based on values found on each user’s profile. For example: In this case, I’ve set up a membership condition so that the “Favorite Ice Cream” custom user...

HOW-TO: Customize SharePoint’s Core Search Results Web Part

Matt Morse — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:43:33 GMT

Body: The purpose of this post is to share the process that I’ve begun to follow in my own work related to search customization and to provide an opportunity for you to share what’s worked for you, as well. The post assumes that you’re generally familiar with how search results are customized...

HOW-TO: Group search results by a property value in SharePoint

Matt Morse — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 22:38:14 GMT

Body: In my last post, I described the process that I follow when customizing search results in SharePoint using the Core Search Results web part that ships with MOSS. If you haven’t seen it yet, I suggest you start there for some context on the rest of this post. On a recent project, I ran...

To SPD or not to SPD, that is the question

Matt Morse — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:18:35 GMT

Body: On several of my recent projects, the question has come up about the appropriate use of SharePoint Designer 2007 (or SPD) within an organization’s SharePoint installation. The question is sometimes around its role and scope; other times, it’s point-blank: should we use SharePoint Designer?...

Custom timer job locking on multi-WFE farms

Matt Morse — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:43:23 GMT

Body: Creating custom timer jobs within SharePoint enables a SharePoint developer to add a scheduled component to a SharePoint application. (Looking to get started with timer jobs? Andrew Connell has a good write-up on MSDN.) On a recent project, I created a couple of custom timer jobs and ran...

Scope your configuration to match your feature

Matt Morse — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:25:14 GMT

Body: This is a quick post with a message that may seem obvious, but I’ve seen plenty of code that makes me think maybe it isn’t. So here’s my suggestion: store your application configuration such that it matches the scope of your SharePoint feature. To elaborate, I’ve mentioned before that...

The Almost-Forgotten Role: Business Search Administrator

Matt Morse — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:23:29 GMT

Body: Most organizations that use MOSS make use of SharePoint search in one form or another, but I’ve seen few that really get their dollar’s worth out of SharePoint’s search capability. The most common configuration that I’ve personally observed is the one that SharePoint configures...

CAS challenge with application pages: LayoutsPageBase class requires Full Trust

Matt Morse — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:45:00 GMT

Body: If you’ve been developing with SharePoint (or .NET web apps) for awhile, you’re likely aware that it’s generally a good practice to deploy custom code to the BIN directory of the web application and explicitly specify the least set of permissions required to execute the code contained in...

SharePoint 2010 – Random Tidbits, Part 1

Matt Morse — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:57:33 GMT

Body: I’m attending the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas where Microsoft has just taken the wraps off of SharePoint 2010. Since it’s a new product release and Microsoft has done a pretty good job of keeping the lid on the functionality in the new product until now, there’s a very...

Gotcha in creating custom themes in WSS3

Matt Morse — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:57:53 GMT

Body: I ran into a funny issue in creating a custom theme for WSS. After following the steps to create and deploy a custom theme, I was getting an error message in SharePoint when I tried to apply the theme to any site. The error was: Cannot open "[THEME NAME]": no such file or...

Item-level permissions on document libraries and issue lists in WSS 3.0

Matt Morse — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:21:10 GMT

Body: One of the cool new features of WSS 3.0 is item-level permissions, and a variation of that capability is carried forward in the "only their own" security setting. In most WSS lists, it's possible to set the list security so that users have access to "only their own"...

Creating a MOSS State Machine Workflow (Part 1 of 4: Concepts and Planning)

Matt Morse — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:24:35 GMT

Body: Introduction I ran into a real challenge in creating my first state machine workflow for MOSS, so I thought I’d share a quick demo (OK, not that quick: it is a workflow, after all) and hopefully save you some time. This will actually be a short series of posts covering the following...

How to use WSS v3 with ADAM for user authentication

Matt Morse — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:10:48 GMT

Body: UPDATE 11/20/2007 If you're looking for options to authenticate against ADAM and you don't have a MOSS license, see this post on that topic. Introduction Note: If all you care about is the technical detail of how to set it up, skip this section. :-) One of the powerful new features of...