Randy Drisgill (The Mossman)

Slides and code from my branding presentation at SPTechCon

2009-06-23T11:46:00.001-04:00

John Ross and I presented “Demystifying SharePoint Branding” as a half day presentation for SPTechCon Boston 2009 yesterday. We had a great turnout and hopefully everyone got a good introduction to the SharePoint branding process. The slides and the code samples are available here:

Branding Demystified Slides – SPTechCon Boston 2009

Branding Demystified Code Samples – SPTechCon Boston 2009

Edit in Datasheet causes IE to crash – Problem Solved

2009-06-03T00:22:00.001-04:00

Ran into a very strange “perfect storm” type of error in SharePoint tonight. When a custom master page is applied, editing a list in Datasheet View causes IE to just hang. The thread goes bananas and you have to fight with Task Manager to kill the process. I’m not sure I completely understand WHY this problem occurs, but I do have a pretty good idea how to fix it.

Turns out you won’t see the problem unless some very specific scenarios are in place. If the custom master page has a DocType declared (which they all should) AND the parent HTML objects that contain PlaceHolderMain have ANY bottom padding applied OR there are any elements below the PlaceHolderMain inside of the same parent object (like a footer or Table cells) then for whatever reason the JavaScript that runs the Datasheet View gets confused and jumps into an infinite loop.

If you run into this problem, you have basically two options:

You can methodically remove all bottom padding or objects below the PlaceHolderMain -OR-
Add some overriding JavaScript to the master page that will correct the offending function.

I spent a LONG time studying this problem before this link helped me figure out what is going on:

http://tomblog.insomniacminds.com/2008/07/23/sharepoint-branding-issues-edit-in-datasheet-view/

I think getting rid of all the bottom padding and lower objects is a better solution, but I could imagine there could be instances where its not possible. In those cases, here is the JavaScript that can fix the problem. Make sure to place it after core.js in your master page:

<script type="text/javascript">

function GCComputeSizing(GCObject)
{
if (TestGCObject(GCObject))
{
var fBIDI=(document.documentElement.currentStyle.direction=="rtl");
var lGCWindowWidth=document.documentElement.scrollWidth;
var lGCWindowHeight=(document.documentElement.scrollHeight>document.documentElement.clientHeight) ? document.documentElement.clientHeight : document.documentElement.scrollHeight;

var lGCObjectOffsetLeft=0;
var lGCObjectOffsetTop=0;
if (fBIDI)
   {
   lGCObjectOffsetLeft=-180;
   lGCObjectOffsetTop=120;
   }
else
   {
   lGCObjectOffsetLeft=32;
   lGCObjectOffsetTop=-2;
   }
var lGCObjectWalker=GCObject.parentElement;
while (lGCObjectWalker !=document.body)
{
   lGCObjectOffsetLeft+=lGCObjectWalker.offsetLeft;
   lGCObjectOffsetTop+=lGCObjectWalker.offsetTop;
   lGCObjectWalker=lGCObjectWalker.offsetParent;
   if (fBIDI)
    if (lGCObjectWalker.offsetLeft > 0)
     break;
}
lGCObjectOffsetLeft+=GCObject.parentElement.offsetLeft;
lGCObjectOffsetTop+=GCObject.parentElement.offsetTop;
glGCObjectHeight=lGCWindowHeight - lGCObjectOffsetTop;
if (glGCObjectHeight > lGCWindowHeight)
   glGCObjectHeight=lGCWindowHeight
if (glGCObjectHeight < cGCMinimumHeight)f
   glGCObjectHeight=cGCMinimumHeight;
if (fBIDI)
   {
   glGCObjectWidth=lGCWindowWidth+lGCObjectOffsetLeft;
   }
else
   glGCObjectWidth=lGCWindowWidth - lGCObjectOffsetLeft;
if (glGCObjectWidth > lGCWindowWidth)
    glGCObjectWidth=lGCWindowWidth;
if (glGCObjectWidth < cGCMinimumWidth)
   glGCObjectWidth=cGCMinimumWidth;
}
}

</script>

What’s New in the OOTB Master Pages for SP2 of SharePoint

2009-04-29T18:07:00.001-04:00

If you live under a rock you may have missed all the news lately about the release of Service Pack 2 for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) and Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) (more info on SP2 here).

Among the listed updates is this note: “The 2007 Office Suite SP2 has been tested and is supported for Internet Explorer 8”.

I figured I would fire up a VM and compare the OOTB master pages (both source and output) between the pre and post SP2. Here are the results:

default.master – Source unchanged
blueband.master – Source gains: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7"> which will help force IE8 to render the page in IE7 mode. Note, if you manually force IE8 to render in IE8 mode the navigation still has issues displaying. For more info, see my previous post about IE8 and SharePoint.

default.master & blueband.master rendered page – They both gain an inline style for the Global Links section:

<div style="white-space:nowrap;">...</div>

The addition of the meta tag and the style are both good things to have as I usually end up adding both to my master pages. The later helps with the vertical alignment of the Global Links in Firefox. I stole a screenshot of what this style fixes from Heather because I’m too lazy to make one myself:

That’s pretty much all I see on changed on the most basic of tests. I’m sure there is a lot more changed under the covers and on other pages (my test only included default.aspx). Let me know if you find some more.

Using the XML Web Part to show your Twitter feed in SharePoint

2009-04-17T17:52:00.001-04:00

I have put together a quick and dirty example of using the XML Web Part to display and style your Twitter RSS feed in a SharePoint page. 100% of the work is done in XSLT, all you have to do is:

Add an XML Web Part to your page:

Then for the XML Link add the RSS feed for your Twitter updates, the link for this can be found on the bottom right of your Twitter home page:

Just right click on the RSS feed and copy and paste the the URL into the XSL Link field of the XML Web Part. (mine is http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/15901109.rss)

Next, click the XSL Editor button and paste in the following XSLT code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet
     version="1.0"
     xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
     <xsl:output method="html" />
     <xsl:template match="rss/channel">
        <style type="text/css">
            .twit_tweet a {
                font-size: 13px;
                color: #111111;
                width: 400px;
            }
            .twit_date {
                font-size: 12px;
                color: #333333;
                font-style: italic;
            }
            .twit_holder {
                padding-bottom: 15px;
                width: 500px;
            }
        </style>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="item" />
     </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="item">
        <div class="twit_holder">
            <div class="twit_tweet"><a target="_blank" href="{link}"><xsl:value-of select="description" disable-output-escaping="yes"/></a></div>
            <div class="twit_date"><xsl:value-of select="substring-before(pubDate,' +0000')" /></div>
        </div>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

After you click OK and Apply your changes you should see your tweets styled in the XML Web Part:

You can adjust the CSS in the XSLT to change the way the tweets look. Also, if this blows up your site, don’t say I didn’t warn you. I haven’t really tested it in production. Have fun!

What you should do when Microsoft pushes the Automatic Update to IE8

2009-04-13T15:13:00.001-04:00

Microsoft has finally announced that they will be pushing automatic updates to IE8 for PC’s that are currently running IE6 or IE7 (more info here). This is great news, as I had a very long winded post already typed out (but not published) entitled “IE6 Needs to Die (or why IE8 makes me sad)”. I won’t go into great detail about the post now that I see Microsoft is being proactive with trying to upgrade older Internet Explorers.

I do have a helpful graphic for people that will be seeing the new Update to IE8 welcome screen. If you have any doubts about what to do on this screen follow my expertly crafted graphic instructions:

I know some folks are on intranets that have requirements for older versions of Internet Explorer, but I implore you to consider clicking the button. Here is some info from my unpublished rant:

“Now that IE8 has been released, something official needs to happen with IE6. It needs to reach its end of life… Microsoft should stop supporting it and encourage folks to upgrade. Why do I feel this way? Well, with IE8 and the latest Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome browsers, we as designers can finally strive for true table-less / w3c compliant design with good confidence that almost any modern browser will handle things pretty darn close to the same as its siblings. This is great… EXCEPT when you start to consider the various browser market shares. There are several different sites that provide these statistics and they don’t all agree on actual numbers, but most agree that IE6’s market share is still 18% – 20%! To put this in perspective, Firefox (2 + 3) is about only about 22% – 25%. This means that we as designers still cannot ignore IE6. This would be practically equivalent to ignoring Firefox, and no one would argue this. The amount of effort that goes into supporting non standards compliant browsers like IE6 factored across the globe I bet is quite significant.”

By clicking this button, you are in fact helping propel the interwebs towards a more standards based browser / platform neutral utopia. Do your part for human kind, Al Gore would be proud of you. </End of Rant>

Upcoming SharePoint911 Training

2009-03-24T16:18:00.001-04:00

Just a quick note to point out some upcoming training in Cincinnati, OH. On July 2nd, SharePoint911 will be offering a SharePoint Planning and Governance class as well as a Business Users Guide to SharePoint Server 2007.

SharePoint911 Training

Problems with IE8 Standards Mode, SharePoint menus, and DocTypes

2009-03-20T15:16:00.002-04:00

With the official release of Internet Explorer 8, many people are starting to test their custom SharePoint branding in the new browser. IE8 is an interesting animal in that it decides its rendering engine based on certain criteria in your code (in SharePoint’s case, the master page):

If IE8 sees a valid DocType declared it will attempt to render a site in IE8 Standards Mode.
If IE8 does not see a DocType it will attempt to render a site in quirks mode (otherwise known as pre IE7 rendering mode).

One nice thing about IE8 is that it includes Developer Tools (click Tools > Developer Tools) which will actually show you which rendering mode is currently being used (the last tab at the top of the Developer Tools window). You can also use this tab to test the other rendering modes, selecting them and observing the result in the refreshed window.

Now, on to the topic of SharePoint master pages. Some Microsoft out of the box master pages (like default.master and the horizon master pages) do not have a DocType declared and will render in quirks mode by default in IE8 (which is how they should be rendered because the master page html is coded that way). Some other Microsoft out of the box master pages (like BlueBand.master) DO have DocTypes declared. For these master pages (and for ones like default.master if you were to add a DocType to them,) IE8 will automatically attempt to render them in IE8 Standards Mode. This is bad because from all of my initial testing, the out of the box SharePoint menu’s can not show dynamic menu items (otherwise known as fly-outs) in IE8 Standards Mode. They appear as just white boxes without a link to click on.

To correct this problem the IE8 team has given us two meta tags:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

The first will force a page to render in IE7 mode no matter what, and the second forces a page to render as IE7 would have rendered it historically. The difference being the EmulateIE7 meta tag will force the browser to look for a DocType before rendering in IE7 mode and if it does not find one it will render in Quirks Mode. This is the correct behavior for how IE7 used to render pages and I believe the correct one that should be added to all custom current version SharePoint master pages.

So in closing, if your custom master page (or even your BlueBand based master page) is going to support IE8, you should seriously consider adding this meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

Be sure to check-in a major version / publish and approve the master page after you add the tag. Also, you may have to restart your IE8 before the change will be picked up (mine cached the old version of the page and for a while I thought the meta tag wasn’t working).

Update 4:

There is a Hotfix though that should fix the problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=962351

UPDATE 3: Many people have been keen to tell me that SharePoint SP2 supposedly fixes this problem. The only thing I can see being done in SP2 is that now all of the out of the box master pages have the above meta tag added. You are still left to your own devices for your custom master pages.

UPDATE 2: I should also point out that you can solve this problem at the web server level if you don’t want to modify your master page. Note: I prefer the master page method since it is more absolute, no chance for accidental changes (but I know some folks that can’t edit their master pages). There is information and links for doing this at the bottom of this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/06/10/introducing-ie-emulateie7.aspx

UPDATE 1: Eric Lawrence (creator of the awesome Fiddler application) points out that intranet sites are rendered in IE8 by default in compatibility mode so the meta tag technically isn’t required in these environments. Note: according to IE team’s blog an intranet site is determined based on its local URL, not by IP address. So if users browse your intranet site via IP address or external URL they will see the site NOT in compatibility mode by default.

Microsoft released 10 new SharePoint themes (Updated with Screenshots and WSP)

2009-03-19T18:21:00.001-04:00

These new themes are pretty darn good, I especially like “Construction”, “Contoso”, and “OARP”. I could see them being changed up and used for a lot of company intranets. I do wish they would have packaged them as a WSP or something rather than just give us a solution file and have us make one ourselves.

Download them from Microsoft

UPDATE: Daniel Brown made a WSP for easy installation

Here is a screenshot of all of new themes at once and then each one individually full sized. Click for larger versions:

Fixing the Enable Quick Launch menu setting in custom master pages

2009-03-18T18:44:00.001-04:00

One thing that I have never fully understood was why the Enable Quick Launch menu item doesn't actually disable the quick launch menu in any master pages other than the default.master (To find this menu click Site Actions > Site Settings > Modify All Site Settings > Tree View). Yesterday, my buddy Nik Molnar helped me track it down through some creative sleuthing on his part. Turns out the key is this tag from default.master:

<Sharepoint:SPNavigationManager id="QuickLaunchNavigationManager" runat="server" QuickLaunchControlId="QuickLaunchMenu" ContainedControl="QuickLaunch" EnableViewState="false"><Sharepoint:SPNavigationManager>

Microsoft's BlueBand.master omits this tag, as well as many of the minimal publishing master pages that are available from the community. Without this tag surrounding the quick launch code, SharePoint cannot hide it via that Site Settings menu item. To add one, simply surround your <SharePoint:AspMenu> with the completed <Sharepoint:SPNavigationManager> tag.

I’m in an “I’m a PC” video

2009-03-05T18:31:00.001-05:00

Check out the “I’m a PC and I’m an MVP” video on the Microsoft Videos site. I’m the tiny pixel on the far right. If you listen carefully you may hear a familiar voice yelling louder than all the others (via microphone). Any guesses who it is?

I’m a PC Video

New article “Creating a Custom SharePoint Theme” is up on the TPG member download area

2009-03-05T18:02:00.002-05:00

The article covers the ins and outs of actually creating your own theme in SharePoint. To get access to the article you will need to create a member account, but the process is fairly painless. Here is the intro paragraph:

When it comes to branding in SharePoint, few things are as important as the effective use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This is because CSS is the primary mechanism that Microsoft gives us to override their out of the box look and feel. One excellent way to use CSS to style SharePoint is to use a theme. SharePoint themes take advantage of the CSS concept of “cascading”. The basic idea is that styles that are loaded last on a page typically override styles of the same specificity that were loaded earlier on the page. SharePoint themes are mostly made up of CSS that is overriding already defined out-of-the-box SharePoint branding. That familiar light blue and white UI can be changed to look radically different just by creating a custom SharePoint theme and applying it to a site.

Creating a Custom SharePoint Theme

Microsoft’s Live Writer is pretty hot

2009-02-21T15:31:00.001-05:00

See my previous post where I tested posting to Google’s Blogger service. I think its actually easier to blog from Live Writer to Blogger than to use Google’s own web interface, which is both sad (for Google who is usually top notch) and awesome (for Microsoft for supporting several blogging services).

Microsoft Live Writer Posting to Google Blogger Test

2009-02-21T15:26:00.001-05:00

This post is mainly a test to see how easy it is to post to blogger from Microsoft’s Live Writer. Mainly I want to see if the post looks normal, so please disregard if you see this post.

Code Test:

<asp:Content ContentPlaceholderID="PlaceHolderPageTitleInTitleArea" runat="server">
<SharePointWebControls:TextField runat="server" id="TitleField" FieldName="Title"/>
</asp:Content>

<property name="XslLink" type="string" null="true" />
<property name="UseCopyUtil" type="bool">False</property>
<property name="Title" type="string">News</property>
<property name="ContentTypeName" type="string" />
<property name="ChromeState" type="chromestate">Normal</property>
<property name="ItemStyle" type="string">RMU_News</property>
<property name="NoDefaultStyle" type="string" />
<property name="ViewFieldsOverride" type="string" />
<property name="GroupByFieldType" type="string" />
<property name="AllowZoneChange" type="bool">True</property>
<property name="AllowClose" type="bool">True</property>

Photo Test:

URL Test:

SharePointFeeds

Table:

Test1	Col 2	Col 3
Test2

Bulleted List:

One
Two
Three

If all this turns out well, I will be VERY impressed with what the Live Writer team is doing.

Never User TeleFlora for Flower Delivery

2009-02-14T16:02:00.003-05:00

Its rare that I would use this blog as a place to complain about something, but the utter failure that is TeleFlora has brought me to post this in hopes that it will save someone else to pain of choosing this company to provide flowers for their special occasion. I chose them because they use local florists to deliver their flowers (unlike the other companies that FedEx flowers from around the world).

After ordering my wife's Valentine's day flowers from them for over $50 they not only failed to deliver (or contact any of us) on Friday at her work. But when I called to complain they rescheduled it for 10am Saturday. Its now 4pm and I just called to get a refund.

I mean if your only business model is to deliver flowers to people on a special day and charge extra for this convenience you'd think you would be able to execute on this one task or at least call to say there was a problem.

Worst company in the history of flower delivery. Never use them. Ultimate FAIL.

VisiFire Open Source Silverlight Charting in SharePoint

2009-02-09T11:41:00.013-05:00

I was doing some research on Silverlight charting solutions for SharePoint when I stumbled across VisiFire an open source self contained charting solution built with Silverlight. If you haven’t seen VisiFire before, it’s worth checking out, their gallery page shows a number of really slick animated charts that are dead simple to use with XML data (without writing any Silverlight code).

Also, I’m not sure what rock I was under when the SharePoint Designer team posted this blog entry on integrating the Data View Web Part with VisiFire using XSLT. Their example uses the 1.0 version of VisiFire, so I decided to do a little poking around to see if I could get the 2.0.9 Beta version (hopefully my XSLT will also work when the official 2.0 version is released). Here are instructions for getting it to work in SharePoint (influenced HEAVILY by the original post by the SharePoint Designer Team:

Download the 2.0.9 Beta version (or whatever the latest is) from here: http://visifire.com/download_silverlight_charts.php

Create a page in SharePoint that will hold a Data View Web Part

Create a simple list with a “Title” field (which is already created by default) and a “Value” field of type Number

Enter a few rows of fake data into the list

Unzip the VisiFire package that you downloaded and grab “Visifire2.js” and “SL.Visifire.Charts.xap” and add them to the same location as the page you just created in your SharePoint site

Add the Data View Web Part to you page. You can use SharePoint Designer for this, with a Web Part Zone selected, from the top menu click Data View > Insert Data View. From the Data Source Library in the right hand task pane select your list and click Show Data. Then select both the Title and Value fields and add them to the Data View.

Next, make sure you are in Code View and replace the first xsl:template:

<xsl:template match="/">

<xsl:call-template name="dvt_1"/>

</xsl:template>

With this XSLT:

<xsl:template match="/">



<script type="text/javascript" src="Visifire2.js"></script> 







<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[

<script type="text/javascript">

var xmlString =

' <vc:Chart xmlns:vc="clr-namespace:Visifire.Charts;assembly=SLVisifire.Charts"'

+ ' Width="500" Height="300" Theme="Theme2" BorderBrush="Gray" BorderThickness="0" Watermark="False" >'

+ ' <vc:Chart.Titles><vc:Title Text="Chart Title"/></vc:Chart.Titles>'

+ ' <vc:Chart.Series>'

+ ' <vc:DataSeries RenderAs="Pie" ShowInLegend="True" Bevel="True">'

+ ' <vc:DataSeries.DataPoints>'

]]></xsl:text>

<xsl:for-each select="/dsQueryResponse/Rows/Row">

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[ + ' <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="]]></xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="./@Title" />

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[" YValue="]]></xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="@Value" />

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[" LabelText="]]></xsl:text>

<xsl:value-of select="@Value" />

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[" Exploded="True]]></xsl:text>

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA["/>']]></xsl:text>

</xsl:for-each>

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">

<![CDATA[

+ ' </vc:DataSeries.DataPoints>'

+ ' </vc:DataSeries>'

+ ' </vc:Chart.Series>'

+ ' </vc:Chart>';

</script>

]]></xsl:text>





<div id="VisifireChart1">

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">

var vChart = new Visifire2("SL.Visifire.Charts.xap",500,300);

vChart.setDataXml(xmlString);

vChart.render("VisifireChart1");

</script> </div>

</xsl:template>

Save the file and refresh the page in a browser and you should see a pie chart come to life animated. If you make any mistakes the VisiFire widget is kind enough to give you a line number and position where it blew up, so that can be a help in tracking down typos in the notoriously picky XSLT. From here you can check out the other charts and other options via the VisiFire documentation which btw is really easy to read.

Adding robots.txt to SharePoint

2009-01-26T15:47:00.004-05:00

Friend of mine asked me about this today and I had to look it up because its been a while since I have done anything with robots.txt. Turns out its not as easy as just adding the robots.txt file to the web server root. SharePoint likes to block access to the file, so you will need to add a managed path from Central Admin.

Here are the steps:

Open Central Admin and navigate to Application Management > Define Managed Paths
Select your specific web application from the drop down
Add a new path for /robots.txt
Switch the type to Explicit inclusion
Click OK
Run IISREST

This is all you need to do, but if you still get a permissions problem, right-click on robots.txt and give "Everyone" Read permissions to the file.

Two SharePoint design books from Wrox

2009-01-05T11:30:00.003-05:00

Just wanted to make a quick post to take care of two birds with one stone:

First, congrats to Woody Windischman and his co-authors for finishing their Wrox book Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. I haven't read it yet, but I'm sure its an excellent addition to any SharePointer's bookshelf.

Second, I wanted to point out that my book has a very similar name and is also published by Wrox, its title is Professional SharePoint 2007 Design. As you can see, Woody's book title is quite similar to mine. So whats different between the two and why did Wrox need both? I'm glad you asked. My book focuses on the actual design process for branding websites with SharePoint (which includes a chapter that discusses the product SharePoint Designer). Woody's book on the other hand focuses entirely on the ins and outs of the SharePoint Designer product.

So, which should you get if you are looking to do SharePoint design? I say get both ;) One will teach you how to use SharePoint Designer to its fullest while the other will help you understand the process of taking a design from a Photoshop comp to a functioning SharePoint master page or theme (as well as other topics).

Happy New Year - I'm now an MVP!

2009-01-02T17:12:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, after partying like a rock star for New Years (actually just played Rock Band with friends), I woke up late to get the email from Microsoft that I have been awarded MVP status for SharePoint Server for 2009! I'm sure everyone is sick of reading blog posts from people that are being renewed and folks like me getting it for the first time... but none the less I felt the need to give thanks to everyone that helped me get to this point.

Firstly, thanks to Shane Young and everyone at SharePoint911 for encouraging and supporting community involvement. Also, thanks to Andrew, Heather, and Ted (and probably a few others I have forgotten) for working with me on so many things throughout 2008. Lastly, thanks to my author team that helped out with the book Professional SharePoint 2007 Design.

I'm thinking 2009 will be a great year... hopefully yours is great as well!

Oxite open source CMS from Microsoft

2008-12-09T22:29:00.004-05:00

Interesting release from Microsoft's Channel 9 Team, Oxite is an open source, standards compliant blogging and CMS engine that leverages Microsoft technologies. I wonder if this is just an experiment, or some kind of view into a potential future for WSS?

CMSWire Article abotu Oxite

Oxite in action at Mix

I'm an Android

2008-12-08T18:29:00.002-05:00

While resisting the ever growing temptation to get an IPhone, I finally went and got a G1 Phone (Otherwise known as Google Android). Mainly I got it because I'm already on T-Mobile and didn't need to extend my contract to use it (bought off of eBay). Here are my initial impressions

Pro's

Hardware based keyboard is nicer than software keyboard
Open source means folks can code apps that can add all sorts of features (including interfacing with the telephone itself)
Android Market (their version of the App Store) is free right now and has a lot of nice apps on it
UI feels very nice, much like an IPhone, better thought out than Windows Mobile (which really could use a UI refresh after all these years)
Plugging it into my PC and adding and removing files (like MP3's) is a piece of cake
Was able to create a hello world app and add it to my phone without jumping through any app store hoops
Applications can run in the background and bubble up events to the phone as they occur

Con's

Not as slick as the IPhone
Not multi-touch
Camera is very slow and not very good quality (despite being 3mp)
Android Market is difficult to sort on various criteria
Hardware based keyboard is a blessing and a curse, in order to type anything I have to go to landscape mode and flip open the keyboard. Would be nice if someone could create a software keyboard to use from time to time.
Slightly bulkier than the IPhone
Headphone jack is USB not stereo mini
Video player seems to be lacking in formats that it can play

New Article: SharePoint Quick Branding

2008-12-01T07:00:00.001-05:00

I'm happy to report that an article I wrote for the SDTimes web edition was published recently. The topic of the article is a quick branding technique that uses the "Alternate CSS" capabilities of MOSS. This one isn't for you pro SharePoint designers out there... this is for the folks that want to add some nice branding to their MOSS site as quickly and simply as possible. By using the Alternate CSS and a wide image that includes your company logo, you can accomplish a lot of design with little effort.

SDTimes: Share Pointers: Quick Branding

SharePoint Name.dll ActiveX Fix has been Featurized

2008-11-27T14:32:00.003-05:00

My friend Larry Riemann and I have taken my Name.DLL ActiveX Fix and turned it into a deployable Feature / Solution called SPAXO. The nice thing about SPAXO is that it will apply the fix to all pages on your site no matter what master page is applied without you having to add the Javascript code to your master page manually. We accomplish this by using the .Net HTTPModule to inject the Javascript into the page stream automagically. At this point the code is a major Use At Your Own Risk. If you are feeling daring, head over to Codeplex and give it a shot.

CodePlex: SPAXO (SharePoint ActiveX Override)

Started using Twitter

2008-11-24T00:14:00.003-05:00

Twitter is an interesting beast, I initially rejected it... but as of a few months ago I started to give it an honest look. While I don't twitter my whole day away like some folks, I do seem to post at least once a day to it. I think its very good for posting topics that are too small or too personal for a typical blog. So, if you want to see my minor rants and personal stories, follow me at http://www.twitter.com/themossman and if you want to stay focused on UI and SharePoint topics of worth (or so I hope) keep reading here at http://blog.drisgill.com/.

New SharePoint tome - just in time for your holiday shopping

2008-11-09T17:19:00.002-05:00

I just saw on Amazon that Wrox is putting together a "Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Wrox Box" which contains four of their best selling SharePoint 2007 books. While I doubt many folks will be plunking down the $100 for the book, I am pleased that the contents of my book, "Professional SharePoint 2007 Design" will be included with the likes of some of the best in the biz like Andrew Connell, Heather Solomon, and Shane Young (among many others).

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-SharePoint-2007-Wrox-Box/dp/0470431946/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226210787&sr=8-3

New CodePlex Project: LyteBox for SharePoint

2008-10-28T01:30:00.007-04:00

I decided to spend the weekend making an easy to use web part for SharePoint that allows anyone to add the LyteBox Javascript photo gallery to either MOSS 2007 or WSS V3. If you haven’t seen LyteBox before you should check it out, it’s used on many websites these days to create a nice Web 2.0 style photo gallery. In a basic Lytebox implementation you have to manually call out each image in HTML, but with LyteBox for SharePoint the images are pulled in automatically from a SharePoint picture library. I have packaged the whole thing up in such a way that you can use the web part even in many hosted environments because it involves no custom code (no DLL’s or web.config changes need).

In my implementation there are two list templates, one that creates a document library with all of the LyteBox Javascript code and another that creates a picture gallery with some sample photos. Also, there is one Content Editor Web Part that gets placed on your page for loading the LyteBox Javascript, and a Data View Web Part that has been preconfigured with custom XSLT to load all of the photos from the picture library and activates them for LyteBox.

Here are some screenshots of it in action:

The project is currently labeled as 1.0 beta, because I assume there will be some issues.

Download the code from: CodePlex Page for LyteBox for SharePoint

Learn more about the original LyteBox code: http://www.dolem.com/lytebox/

Also, a hat tip to Pam Davis for her post that inspired this project: http://padavis.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/web-20-popup-using-lytebox-with-sharepoint/