Matt Morse: Posts

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...

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...

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 10:18:35 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...

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

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...

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...

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"...