Steven Van de Craen's Blog

InfoPath Forms Services 2010: glitch with repeating dynamic hyperlinks

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:15:33 GMT

Yesterday I noticed a strange issue, very hard to reproduce due to quite some nested sections, filtered repeating sections and other circumstances. So while I can’t reproduce the issue in a clean form (because it would take too much time to reproduce our working form situation) I’ll just write on th... (More)

Windows 8

Steven Van de Craen — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 10:16:00 GMT

A few days ago I tweeted about having moved to Windows 8 Consumer Preview as main Operating System. So far still really happy with it. My previous OS was Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V for virtualizing my SharePoint development environments. I had tweaked Windows Server as much as possible t... (More)

Advanced Computed Field - updated with XSL

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 08:28:00 GMT

Yesterday I updated the download and source code for the Advanced Computed Field at the Ventigrate Public Code Repository with an XSL stylesheet. This was needed to fix an issue with the field not rendering values when filtered through a Web Part Connection. The Advanced Computed Field relies on ... (More)

SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2012

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:31:57 GMT

Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals on 28th April for the second Belgian ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event. SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of Sh... (More)

Delete All Items Ribbon Button

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:38:12 GMT

A SharePoint 2010 Sandboxed Solution that adds a Ribbon Button that recycles all items in a Document Library with a single mouse click. I' have created this miniproject more as an academic exercise in creating a Ribbon Button than for real business value. It can come in handy for development enviro... (More)

SharePoint 2010: Taxonomy issue and Event Receivers

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:59:48 GMT

Issue Today I was troubleshooting a customer farm where Managed Metadata would remain empty in SharePoint, even though it was filled in correctly in the document’s Document Information Panel. Digging through the internal XML structures of the DOCX and also the Content Type Schema and Field XML, I ... (More)

SharePoint 2010 SOAP Service Error (The top XML element 'string'...)

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:09:30 GMT

Today we were experimenting with SharePoint 2010 CSOM (Client Side Object Model) and we noticed strange errors such as HTTP ERROR 417 were returned. When browsing to Lists.asmx and Sites.asmx we got the following error: The top XML element 'string' from namespace 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/sha... (More)

SharePoint Server 2010 and PDF Indexing

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:22:25 GMT

Posting this for personal reference: SharePoint 2010 - Configuring Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf] @=hex(7):7b,00,45,00,38,00,3... (More)

SharePoint 2007: Anonymous Version History

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 07:20:33 GMT

You can configure the permission level of anonymous users to allow for viewing versions of documents and items, but no matter what you do, they get prompted for credentials. The Version History page has the property “AllowAnonymousAccess” set to false. It is a virtual property in the Microsoft.Shar... (More)

SharePoint 2010: Office Web Apps and iframes

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 06:24:03 GMT

Recently a colleague wanted to display a with Excel Services rendered workbook inside a cross-domain iframe: Excel Services: http://intranet/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?id=%2FShared%20Documents%2FBook1%2Exlsx&DefaultItemOpen=1 Other domain web site with iframe: http://lux But because Excel... (More)

SharePoint 2010 User Profile Page: Add as colleague–Link Fixup

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:43:34 GMT

Here’s a small fix for which I didn’t have time to investigate more properly: Issue The User Profile Page of another user shows a link “Add as colleague” when that user isn’t already a colleague: It seems however that the link behind “Add as colleague” directs to the Default AAM URL rather than... (More)

The sandbox is too busy to handle the request

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:32:24 GMT

SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online (Office 365) allow for custom development in the form of Sandbox Solutions. Your code is restricted to a subset of the SharePoint API but allows you do most regular operations inside a Site Collection. Problem Here’s a scenario that fails every time and everyw... (More)

SharePoint - Default Library Content Type is Folder

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:01:55 GMT

Ever enabled Content Types on a library, removed the default “Document” Content Type and then added your own document Content Type ? If you do it in that order it will set “Folder” as the Content Type for uploaded files. There’s no apparent way in the user interface to change the default Content Ty... (More)

New APIs in SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:57:46 GMT

New APIs in SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Funny enough a colleague pointed out to me he couldn’t find the UserProfile.ModifyProfilePicture method. Neither could I (running Service Pack 1 + June 11 CU). Can you ? Perhaps it was removed in the June 2011 Cumulative Update ? UPDATE (18 ... (More)

Central Administration Time Zone incorrect

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:04:16 GMT

If you happen to change the Windows Time Zone settings AFTER Central Administration has been provisioned, you will see that the time zone/date format is not updated in the administration pages: Luckily, the fix is quite easy. You can just update the Regional Settings of the Central Administration... (More)

BIWUG October 2011

Steven Van de Craen — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 12:42:54 GMT

BIWUG is announcing another session about SharePoint on Thursday October 27th 2011 in the Microsoft Belgium offices. Agenda 18:00-19:00 Welcome with snacks 19:00-19:15 Introduction 19:15-20:15 SharePoint Governance (Speaker Patrick Sledz): Stop thinking about features features features when tal... (More)

External User Management

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:31:47 GMT

This project is further maintained at the Ventigrate Codeplex Repository (http://ventigrate.codeplex.com). Please go there to get the latest news or for any questions regarding this topic. Page was cross-posted to this blog on 09/30/2011. External User Management The External User Management... (More)

SharePoint and InfoPath Promoted Fields

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:28:30 GMT

A short blog on how the Promoted Fields seem to behave for InfoPath forms stored in SharePoint. They are created as fields (Date, Text, …) and have the XPath property configured to the field in InfoPath (example: /my:myFields/my:field1) When the form is stored in the library, the value of the XPat... (More)

Follow Up - Programmatically approving a workflow

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 09:10:27 GMT

In my previous post “SharePoint 2010: Programmatically Approving/Rejecting Workflow” I mentioned the possibility of an issue when programmatically altering a workflow task. I have been testing it on several SharePoint 2010 farms with different parameters (different patch level, etc). UPDATED July 2... (More)

SharePoint 2010: Programmatically Approving/Rejecting Workflow

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 22:41:00 GMT

Interacting with a workflow in SharePoint is relatively straight-forward if you understand the underlying process. I’ve done multiple projects in both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 with some level of workflow interaction: starting a workflow, approving or rejecting a workflow task, or reass... (More)

ACF 2010: Announcing the Advanced Computed Field for SharePoint 2010

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 26 May 2011 16:07:47 GMT

Finally available: the SharePoint 2010 version of the Advanced Computed Field. Don’t know what it is ? Check this out: http://ventigrate.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Advanced%20Computed%20Field (the Advanced Computed Field rendering a highlighted/italic item title)

Troubleshooting issues with DispForm, EditForm and NewForm

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 18:17:17 GMT

Each SharePoint List can be altered with a custom DispForm.aspx, EditForm.aspx and NewForm.aspx to display, edit or create list items and metadata. This post is about restoring them to a working point. Botched Forms So one of these forms are edited to a loss state or deleted altogether. If this is... (More)

InfoPath Forms Server 2010 Parameterized Submit issue

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 13:16:23 GMT

I’m currently testing our InfoPath Web Forms for an upcoming migration to InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint 2010 and have come up with a reproducible issue. Issue InfoPath Web Forms cannot use values from other Data Sources as parameters in a Submit Data Connection. When the form is submitted a warning... (More)

SharePoint URL Changes and InfoPath Forms

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 10:28:18 GMT

InfoPath Form Template URL We have a solution that makes extensive use of online and offline InfoPath forms in a MOSS 2007 environment. An upgrade to SharePoint 2010 is due in a few months, including a redesign of Managed Paths and Site Collection ‘hierarchy’ having a direct effect on the URL of ou... (More)

SharePoint: SPWeb.Properties versus SPWeb.AllProperties

Steven Van de Craen — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 07:41:18 GMT

Property Bag SPWeb exposes two ways of interacting with the property bag: SPWeb.Properties exposes a Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPPropertyBag SPWeb.AllProperties exposes a System.Collections.Hashtable The former is considered legacy, also it stores the Key value as lowercase, while t... (More)

SharePoint 2010: Content Type Syndication experiments

Steven Van de Craen — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 12:40:47 GMT

In my post yesterday I raised the question about Content Type syndication using the Content Type Hub mechanism, and how this would work together with Lookup Fields, since they don’t support crossing Site Collection boundaries. Another question is in regard to the “challenges” of using OOXML (docx, ... (More)

Custom Lookup Field Types: migration from 2007 to 2010

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:23:31 GMT

Custom Field Types are a rather advanced topic, but very powerful as well. They allow for real integration of custom components inside standard List and Library rendering. (See my other posts on Custom Field Types) There are some things you can run into. Especially if you have custom Lookup Field T... (More)

Fixing multiple credential prompts for Office in combination with SharePoint

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 10:39:28 GMT

I had seen and tried most of this already, but didn’t know the Network Location bit: Multiple Authentication (login) Prompts - Office Products with SharePoint http://mhenthorn.blogspot.com/2011/02/multiple-authentication-login-prompts.html

SharePoint Policy For Web Application: Account operates as System

Steven Van de Craen — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 10:58:02 GMT

Both in SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 policies can be defined where you grant or deny permissions to specific users on Web Application level. This overrules any permissions the user may or may not have on a Site Collection, Site, List or Item level. For example: the Search Crawl Account (Co... (More)

SharePoint 2010: Increase debugging time by configuring Health Monitoring

Steven Van de Craen — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 17:51:43 GMT

If you’re developing for SharePoint 2010 the Application Pool has a setting called Ping Maximum Response Time with a default value of 90 seconds. In effect, this means that debugging your Web Part, Page, etc. in SharePoint 2010 will only work for 90 seconds and then you get this: You can increase... (More)

SharePoint Content Productivity Hub 2010 - updated

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 17:31:43 GMT

Recently updated: the Productivity Hub The Productivity Hub is a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 site collection that offers training materials for end-users. The Hub is a SharePoint Server site collection that serves as a learning community and is fully customizable. It provides a central p... (More)

SharePoint 2007 and the mysterious ever required field

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 17:47:59 GMT

Today is trouble solving day at a customer. One of the issues was a SharePoint Library on their Intranet having a required field, even though Require that this column contains information was set to “No”. So I opened up SharePoint Manager 2007 to inspect the SchemaXml: <Field Name="Atta... (More)

Windows 2008 R2 unable to connect to locally shared folder

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 15:22:44 GMT

So today I ran into an issue on my working environment that I couldn’t access any shared folders, even if the share was a local folder and I had all available permissions. My colleague Davy Coolsaet found this thread describing the issue. I verified in Device Manager and I did indeed have hundreds... (More)

Reinstalling Office Web Applications for an Upgrade (a day of agony)

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 10:51:21 GMT

Yesterday was my first working day of the new year and it didn’t start very well. I decided to upgrade one of our internal servers from SharePoint Foundation 2010 to SharePoint Server 2010, in order to have InfoPath Forms Server and the like… This should be a breeze if you follow this article on MS... (More)

Windows Live Writer Twitter Plug-in with OAuth

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 09:29:55 GMT

Since the introduction of OAuth in Twitter the Twitter Plug-in for Windows Live Writer to tweet new blog posts stopped working. A while back an update was released that works with the new authentication scheme. (This post is really for testing if it works correctly :))

Slide Library Thumbnail Size

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 13:10:32 GMT

Today I was looking into a way to increase the Thumbnail size of slides in a Slide Library (MOSS 2007, SharePoint Server 2010). The SPPictureLibrary has a ThumbnailSize property which you can set, but this is not available for a slide library. So I tried reflection on an SPList to update the relat... (More)

SharePoint: Slide Library and Folders

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:54:35 GMT

The Slide Library is available in MOSS 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010 and allows to upload several slides from a PowerPoint Presentation as separate slides. Then it is really easy to compose a new presentation based on slides you select from the library. Working with folders in Slide Libraries is ... (More)

Claims to Windows Token Service

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:48:50 GMT

In SharePoint 2010 the Claims To Windows Token Service (c2wts) is a very nice addition that allows for conversion of claims credentials to windows tokens. The service is required to run as the LocalSystem account. If you –like me- have accidentally switched it to a specific user there’s no way in t... (More)

Plug for my colleagues

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 22:00:52 GMT

Another colleague of mine has started his blog on http://www.moss2007.be. And don’t be fooled by the host name, it’s for posts on SharePoint 2010 as well !! Find them here and add them to your feed readers :) Tom Van Rousselt: http://www.moss2007.be/blogs/tomvr Sebastian Bouckaert: http://www.mos... (More)

SharePoint 2010: User cannot be found after using stsadm migrateuser

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:18:00 GMT

I’m wrapping up a SharePoint 2007 to 2010 migration with custom development including programmatically copying files and folders, custom Event Receivers, Web Parts, etc. Since the new setup uses a new AD domain, user accounts were mapped to new accounts and migrated using stsadm –o migrateuser. ... (More)

SharePoint 2010 exams behind me

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:50:52 GMT

I decided to have a go on the SharePoint 2010 exams with little or no preparation and see how it’d go. The first three went smoothly. I have to admin I struggled somewhat with the PRO Administrator exam today, but cleared it nevertheless. Exam 70-573: TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application D... (More)

Asynchronous Event Receivers and HttpContext

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:49:51 GMT

A lesser known trick to make use of the HttpContext in asynchronous Event Receivers in SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010 is to define a constructor on the Event Receiver class that assigns the HttpContext to an internal or private member variable. Next you can access it from the method overrides fo... (More)

Office Web Apps - creating new documents

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 09:24:00 GMT

The Office Web Apps allow users without Microsoft Office installed to display or work on Word, Excel or PowerPoint files from the browser. It is a separate installation to your SharePoint Farm and controllable by two Site Collection Features: When active it will render Office 2007/2010 file fo... (More)

SharePoint 2010 and Remote Blob Storage for better file versioning

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:37:53 GMT

A feature of using the Remote Blob Storage with SharePoint 2010 (FILESTREAM provider in SQL Server 2008) is that document versions do not always create a new full copy of the original file, as it would in a non-RBS environment. This is a huge improvement since 5 versions of a 10 MB file where only ... (More)

SharePoint 2010: June 2010 Cumulative Update

Steven Van de Craen — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 12:23:06 GMT

Spreading the news… The first Cumulative Update (called “June 2010 CU”) for SharePoint 2010 was made available a few days ago: SharePoint Foundation 2010 KB 2028568 – Download SharePoint Server 2010 KB 983319 – Download KB 983497 – Download KB 2182938 – Downlo... (More)

Blog upgraded to CKS:EBE 3.0

Steven Van de Craen — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 12:40:00 GMT

The smart people behind the Community Kit for SharePoint have released 3.0 of the Enhanced Blog Edition. Check out the improvements it brings: http://cks.codeplex.com/releases/view/28520 Cheers !

SharePoint 2010 Development: Replaceable Tokens

Steven Van de Craen — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 11:19:00 GMT

Quick reference: (Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee231545.aspx) Name Description $SharePoint.Project.FileName$ The name of the containing project file, such as, "NewProj.csproj". $SharePoint.Project.FileNameWithoutExtension$ The name of the containin... (More)

Wiki Page Home Page

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:15:00 GMT

In SharePoint Server 2010 you have the option to create an Enterprise Wiki, but what if you have SharePoint Foundation 2010 or Search Server 2010 and you want to create a Wiki site ? You’ll notice that there’s no Wiki Site Template available like in SharePoint 2007 but nowadays you can activate Wi... (More)

Blog availability

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:26:02 GMT

There have been a lot of issues recently on the availability of my blog. This is because we’re currently cleaning out the server room with old servers and virtualizing them. In that process some of the IP addresses got mixed around and of course the ISA rules were not updated yet. Apologies for tha... (More)

Change language of the Spell Check in MOSS 2007

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:46:00 GMT

Want a quick way to change the language of the Spell Check for publishing pages in MOSS 2007 ? Place this script in your masterpage to set the language parameter before the call to the SpellCheck Web Service is made… <script type="text/javascript"> L_Language_Text = 100c; <... (More)

BIWUG | SPSaturday: wrap up

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 12 May 2010 08:49:00 GMT

Last Saturday (8 May 2010) the first SharePoint Saturday event in Belgium took place. It was a day full of SharePoint 2010 aimed specifically at developers. As promised here’s the slide deck and demo files I used. Slide deck Demo1: creating a sandboxed web part Demo2: display sandbox resour... (More)

Office 2010 Protected View and SharePoint

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 10 May 2010 10:00:00 GMT

If you’re having trouble with opening from or saving to SharePoint from Word, Excel or PowerPoint 2010 it might be that the Protected View settings are interfering in the process. You might see this when you’re running a SharePoint and Office on the same machine, like in a demo or development envi... (More)

SharePoint Saturday coming near you on May 8th !

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 09:22:00 GMT

BIWUG is organizing the first SharePoint Saturday in Belgium ever. It’s held in Hof Ter Elst, Edegem on the 8th of May 2010. Topics include Visual Studio 2010 Tools, LINQ to SharePoint, Client Object Model, Sandbox solutions, Managed Metadata and WCF and REST in SharePoint. I’ll be there pres... (More)

SharePoint Search Scopes: Approximate Item Count is incorrect

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:28:00 GMT

The Scope Item Count gives an approximate number of items matching the scope. However at one of my customers it showed only six items for their entire file share !? There were no Crawl Rules and the Crawl Logs showed tens of thousands of successfully crawled items so what could be wrong ? I pl... (More)

Blog is back in the air

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:11:00 GMT

It took about a week to resolve the DNS issue but now this site is back online to provide you with the occasional posting on SharePoint, .NET, Silverlight and alike. Regards, Steven

How does SharePoint know the Content Type of an InfoPath form saved to a document library ?

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:13:00 GMT

When you have multiple Form Content Types with each their respective form templates assigned to the same Form Library by some magic it will automatically save a new form in the correct Content Type. How it does this ? The new form’s XML contains an InfoPath processing instruction with a “href” ... (More)

Add pages to meeting workspaces programmatically

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:13:00 GMT

You can add pages to meeting workspaces through the User Interface (browser) and then you get the options to manage them. It is also possible to add pages through code, but there’s one catch you need to be aware of and that is the InstanceId of the meeting. This ID is used in meeting workspaces to... (More)

Office 2007 document templates and Content Types in SharePoint – lessons learned

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:09:00 GMT

A while ago I stumbled upon a serious design limitation regarding Content Types and centralized document templates. What then followed was a series of testing, phone calls with Microsoft, finding alternative solutions and deep dive into Office Open XML. Request from the customer “We want to use MO... (More)

Programmatically change the Toolbar on a List View Web Part

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:31:00 GMT

A refresher The ListViewWebPart is used for displaying contents of a List or Document Library on both the default View pages (such as AllItems.aspx, etc) and also on other pages in the same web. When a List View Web Part is added to a page (say the home page of that web) a hidden view (SPView) i... (More)

Deserialize + serialize an InfoPath Form loses the processing instructions

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:16:00 GMT

Using xsd.exe you can generate a Class from your form schema (xsd) and then deserialize a form to an instance of that class. This makes it a lot easier to interact with its data. The code for serialization and deserialization might look like this: public static T Deserialize<T>(Stream s)... (More)

SharePoint Search indexes some files with fldXXXX_XXXX file names

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:00:00 GMT

Today I visited a customer to solve an issue that I had run into a while ago in my post regarding ZIP file indexing with IFilters. The customer was indexing Office 2003 documents on a file share (.doc, .xls, .rtf, …) and had the issue of the Filename property having the strange value of fld and so... (More)

Configure Word 2007 Content Controls with empty Placeholder Text

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:03:00 GMT

Word 2007 uses Content Controls to display document fields inside the document (eg. the header). These document fields can be standard fields but also your SharePoint Fields. By default when the value of a Content Control is empty it will display the Placeholder Text between square brackets as foll... (More)

Thumbnails in SharePoint

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:58:00 GMT

Recently stumbled upon this old article: Microsoft Office Thumbnails in SharePoint.Has anyone actually done anything like this ?

jQuery and screen manipulation flickering

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:43:00 GMT

We’re doing quite some jQuery improvements to our SharePoint developments such as inserting navigation for document libraries, reordering elements, hiding menu actions, etc. and one of the big issues is that the jQuery action occurs “on document ready” and the end user might see the manipulation hap... (More)

Conditional Formatting using the Advanced Computed Field

Steven Van de Craen — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:31:00 GMT

I got a question on how to use the Advanced Computed Field for conditional formatting and when I finished writing up the response I figured I might as well share it with the community, being you all :) Here’s the config I used: <FieldRefs> <FieldRef Name="TestField" /> &... (More)

WebPartPages Edit Mode doesn’t trigger an update

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:14:00 GMT

Funny thing last week when I wrote a “Page Information Web Part” (something that showed something like ‘This page was last modified by X on Y’) and it didn’t update at all when Web Parts were added, modified or deleted. I can see why it wouldn’t but I still think this is a flaw because there’s no w... (More)

Rooms and Equipment Reservations: Consistency Check Web Part

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:54:00 GMT

Still one of my most popular posts ever is the extension I wrote on the Rooms and Equipment Reservations template for SharePoint 2007 which allows you to manage reservations for meeting resources. The idea behind RER is simple, but the architecture Microsoft chose (and unfortunately me too) is flaw... (More)

Ellipsis on list item body using jQuery

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:35:00 GMT

A common question to receive is on list items with a long body (eg. Announcements) and then show only X characters and optionally a ‘read more’ link. Many ways to solve this but I went for the following: a Custom Field Type that renders the short text with ellipsis using jQuery. This is another e... (More)

Wildcard Search for MOSS 2007

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:43:00 GMT

Wildcard search is a much discussed topic in SharePoint Land and generally I reuse my custom XML Web Part to solve the issue; build the query, issue the query, read the result XML and transform using XSL. Downside to this solution is the lack of paging and other functionality (Search Alerts, ... (More)

Centralizing Document Templates in a library: Document Information Panel shows incorrect properties

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:56:00 GMT

Every once in a while I get the request to manage all document templates centrally in a Document Library. This can easily be done by configuring your Content Types to ‘link’ to the document template by location and then applying those Content Types to lists on several locations. However th... (More)

Content Types cannot be created declaratively on a child web

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:23:00 GMT

One can easily create a Content Type on a child web through the SharePoint interface. One can easily create a Content Type on a child web through the SharePoint Object Model. One cannot create a Content Type on a child web through a Feature declaratively (you could create it through code... (More)

SharePoint 2007 SP2 fixed activation issue

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:12:00 GMT

The download for SharePoint 2007 SP2 has been updated to no longer change your environment to trial mode. More on this here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/06/25/service-pack-2-update.aspx

Alerts: Someone changes an item that appears in the following view

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:33:00 GMT

Recently I was asked how to receive notifications when specific metadata for an item changed. I recalled this was somehow possible with the out of the box Alerts and then configure them to send a notification when something to the View changed. “This feature is not available when I create an a... (More)

IE8 on Win7 RC: issues with OWA 2007

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:48:00 GMT

I would have preferred if Win7 RTM came sooner so that I could avoid migrating from Beta to RC and then from RC to RTM but no point to keep on whining about it :) So I decided to install the 64 bit issue of Windows 7 Release Candidate. I love how smooth those Win7 installs are. Very little interac... (More)

Event Receiver Definition: Data and Filter

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:05:00 GMT

I recently declared an Event Receiver through a SharePoint Feature: Event Registrations Some of the samples online had surprising elements such as <Data /> and <Filter />. I have never seen them used before and didn’t know their purpose. Perhaps they are not to be messed with ? Perh... (More)

Content and Structure Reports troubleshooting

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:30:00 GMT

If you have MOSS 2007 than you get the Site Manager for advanced management and with it the “Content and Structure Reports” (http://<server>/Reports List). You can easily display the results of a report through the Site Actions menu. You can also add custom reports since the underlying te... (More)

Event Receivers on Content Types

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:06:00 GMT

I'm currently doing quite some research on Event Receivers (ERs) on Content Types (CTs) and activating those CTs on a document library in SharePoint 2007 (WSS 3.0 to be exact, but same applies for MOSS 2007 and MSS(X) 2008). The setup is a single document library with the out of the box Docume... (More)

SharePoint 2007: Update system properties (Created, Created By, Modified, Modified By)

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:09:00 GMT

The system metadata can be changed to any value desired using the object model. I did notice a bug that the "Created By” (aka Author) field wouldn’t update unless also the “Modified By” (aka Editor) field was set (either to a new or it’s current value). SPListItem item = ...; item[“Created... (More)

MVP Renewal 2009

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:12:00 GMT

I’m so happy I get to be a SharePoint MVP for another year ! The email arrived only two hours ago and I really wasn’t convinced of my renewal but nevertheless it is a fact. Also congrats to all the other guys and gals thathave gotten their renewal !! Steven

Advanced Computed Field

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:34:00 GMT

Introduction This project originally started as ‘TitleLinkField’ because I needed a way to display the Title field as a hyperlink to the document in a document library, but it ended up being more than just that so I chose a more generic name for it. I had some experience with Custom Field Types ... (More)

Crawling custom document properties on a file share

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:06:00 GMT

A file share with Word and Excel documents (.doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx) having custom document properties is indexed via MOSS 2007 or MSS 2008. When the crawl has finished the custom properties are listed in 'Crawled properties' but the details view mentions "There are zero documents in the... (More)

SharePoint 2007: December Update

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 12:16:00 GMT

This update really combines all previous updates so installation order is simplified. WSS SP1 (+ for all language packs) MOSS SP1 (+for all language packs) WSS December Update: x86 - x64 (separate downloads !) MOSS December Update: x86 - x64 (separate downloads !) More info about that here:... (More)

Item-level permissions: 'Only their own'

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:36:00 GMT

The title of this blog post is referring to this screen in the List Settings: It interests me because it allows you to control ownership of the item is only available to Lists but not to Document Libraries doesn't use unique permissions but some other mechanism One thing it mentions i... (More)

SharePoint 2007 Event Receiver and Enterprise Library: TargetInvocationException

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:08:00 GMT

Today I got into some code reviewing of an Item Event Receiver using Enterprise Library for data access. The problem occurred when registering the Event Receiver for a SharePoint List using the object model (SPList.EventReceivers.Add) Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ... (More)

Add a new security group to an Audience

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:29:00 GMT

I had a new Active Directory security group created a few days ago but it still wasn't showing up in the Audience management pages when I tried to create a rule User member of AD group. After double checking my group settings I couldn't find anything out of the ordinary and my MOSS 2007 server had ... (More)

Minimal permissions for 'Save list as template'

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:41:00 GMT

Consider the following scenario: A MOSS 2007 Portal where everyone has read permissions but some 'content owners' have elevated permissions on libraries and lists and want to save a list as template (.stp). In this case they need to have elevated access to the List Template Catalog (http://sitec... (More)

SharePoint and jQuery coolness

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Yes I know, you already have it first hand from Jan's blog but still... How cool is that teaser ?

SharePoint: Sharing data over applications ?

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:37:00 GMT

Introduction If you want to integrate you ASP.NET Application or Web Service in SharePoint 2007 there are some ways to do it. If there's no requirement in making it contextual (*) then you can just drop it in the root folder of the SharePoint IIS site. (CustomerApp is a virtual directory, Custo... (More)

SharePoint 2007 and ZIP indexing

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:32:00 GMT

Introduction Here's a post about indexing ZIP archives in the same style as the one I did on PDF indexing. The search engine makes use of IFilters to be able to read the specific structure of a certain file type and retrieve information from it that it puts in an index. When you perform a search ... (More)

Infrastructure Update, August Update, October Update, Service Pack 2

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:43:00 GMT

update (December Update): The December Update was released recently and is a real cumulative update which simplifies installation quite a bit. Read more about it here: SharePoint 2007- December Update It's hard to keep up with the updates for SharePoint these days. Only ye... (More)

Forms Server: userName() function and Forms Based Authentication

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:15:00 GMT

So you have an InfoPath 2007 form that renders as a Web page and you use the userName() function to get the current user. This works fine when you're using Windows Authentication but stays empty when you're using Forms Based Authentication !! Also note that for Windows Authentication it doesn't r... (More)

Forms Server: XmlFormView and setting the InitialView on load

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:50:00 GMT

I have been struggling with this for too long and the result is still not quite satisfying but it'll have to do for now. I have a Web Control that renders an InfoPath form using the Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.Controls.XmlFormView control and want the form to open with a specific View rather... (More)

Failure decompressing data from a cabinet file

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:40:00 GMT

Introduction A SharePoint 2007 site with configured lists, content types, web parts, data, etc is saved into a template (.STP) for future creation of sites. However you receive the error "Failure decompressing data from a cabinet file". In one of our customer cases the culprit here wer... (More)

SPWebConfigModification without hardcoding the modifications

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:12:00 GMT

Description Not sure if this has been done or not but it seems unlogical to have the web.config modifications hard coded into the Feature Receiver, so I whipped up a quick mechanism to read it from an external config XML file. Feel free to use and improve as desired. The code uses LINQ to XML fo... (More)

Office Automation: extract embedded Word Documents

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:09:00 GMT

I'm normally not into Office Automation but today I needed to extract all embedded files from a Word Document. Those files were Word, Excel and PDF documents. Luckily the majority were Word documents, because the quick solution I whipped up only works for those types, not for Excel or PDF. Here's... (More)

Filtering a list based on a multivalue column and filter

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:48:00 GMT

Today I got into testing how to filter a list with a multivalued Choice (or Lookup) column based on a multivalued filter. The setup I'm using is to connect a Choice Filter Web Part with the List View Web Part. Once you have configured the Filter Web Part and connected it to the List View Web Pa... (More)

Backup and restore Site Collections between localized SharePoint installations

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:15:00 GMT

Question Pop quiz: I have a Dutch installation of SharePoint (WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007) that already contains a lot of data. I want to restore the main site collection on a different server with English installation of SharePoint. Can it be done ? Considerations Take into account that a localized v... (More)

SharePoint: TODAY + 1 hour formula ?

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:29:00 GMT

I clicked together an easy custom announcements list with Begin and End Date and wanted for each new item the following default values: Begin Date = TODAY End Date = TODAY + 1 hour Setting the Begin Date is easy but I scratched my head a few times for the End Date. I found the following inf... (More)

So what's new ?

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:42:00 GMT

I've been out of the game for somewhat a month now and it seems I've been missing quite a bit. I'm not going to make another annoucement about the Infrastructure Update (Oops... I think I just did) because it has already been widely blogged in the community. Can't wait to run it on some of our b... (More)

View Action Button

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:24:00 GMT

Introduction Don't you just miss the possibility to have buttons on a SharePoint List or Library View similar to an ASP.NET GridView ? You could add Edit or Delete functionality or even cooler things such as navigating to a LAYOUTS page rather than having to use the item context menu drop down: ... (More)

Browsable Hyperlink fields in SharePoint 2007

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:06:00 GMT

Description Here's a small solution for those of you lucky enough to have MOSS 2007. It will not work if you only have WSS 3.0 installed. This project will add a browse button to all Link fields in your SharePoint Lists by using the AssetUrlSelector control. For more information about this see: ... (More)

Working with the AssetUrlSelector

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:02:00 GMT

I'm doing some tests with the AssetUrlSelector control to improve user experience in a SharePoint 2007 environment. The AssetUrlSelector control gives your end users a nice interface for selecting a link or image URL from a site collection. You can read the MSDN documentation here: AssetUrlSel... (More)

STSADM -o export: FatalError: Failed to compare two elements in the array

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:49:00 GMT

Community Update It’s nice to see the community providing feedback on my tools and improving them. I strongly encourage this and here’s another example of this kind of interaction. Achim Ismaili has improved the FaultyFeatureTool and added it to codeplex: ht... (More)

Rooms and Equipment Reservations v2 (UNOFFICIAL)

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:25:00 GMT

Introduction Microsoft released the Fabulous 40 Application Templates for SharePoint 2007 a (long) while ago. One of them is Rooms and Equipment Reservations (link) where you can make bookings for conference rooms, material, etc and get a visual overview of all bookings. Issues If you really... (More)

Being a SharePoint MVP...

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:24:00 GMT

This post says it all: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/04/17/sharepoint-mvps-know-how-to-have-fun-and-give-constructive-product-feedback.aspx Hope to be there next MVP Summit :)

New MVP on the block

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:17:00 GMT

Yesterday I got notice about being awarded MVP for SharePoint Server ! At first I figured it to be an April Fool's joke but no such thing :) I'm really loving this !!!

Aggregating MySite Blogs

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:58:00 GMT

Introduction I was recently tasked with writing a handler to display the combined RSS feed of all MySite blogs on a SharePoint Intranet. The handler takes into account the current user permissions (no rights to see the blog or post means you don't see it in the feed). Deployment Add the Shar... (More)

Synchronous and asynchronous Event Handlers

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:16:00 GMT

In SharePoint 2007 it is possible to handle events that occur on list items. These types of events come in two flavours: synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous: happens 'before' the actual event, you have the HttpContext and you can show an error message in the browser and cancel the event ... (More)

CKS:EBE 2.0 Final Release

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:14:00 GMT

CKS:EBE 2.0 has been released since a few days ! Check it out here: http://www.codeplex.com/CKS/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=5134

TechDays 2008 wrap up

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Today was the last days of TechDays 2008 and it was nice to see all those familiar faces again. The group of people you meet at such events just increases every year; I wonder how it would be like in 20 or 30 years from now... I didn't sit through many SharePoint sessions but decided to go broade... (More)

Feature Activation Dependency + Hidden = Automagic

Steven Van de Craen — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 18:56:00 GMT

In SharePoint 2007 you can make features dependent on each other so that FeatureB can only be activated if FeatureA is. If this isn't the case it will prompt you with a message to activate FeatureA first: Now, when you mark FeatureA as HIDDEN the Feature Dependency will automagically active it... (More)

SharePoint Errors: 6482, 7888, 6398 and 7076

Steven Van de Craen — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 18:56:00 GMT

Problem I was receiving multiple complaints from clients with the above errors in the machine's Event Log: Unhandled Exception: System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt. Besides the errors it was no ... (More)

FieldRefs node in new Content Type XML

Steven Van de Craen — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 18:54:00 GMT

If you declare your Site Columns and Content Types in XML to deploy them as a Site Collection feature, you must make sure to ALWAYS include the <FieldRefs> node. If you leave it out then your Content Type will not have any of the inherited fields of the parent Content Type !!! <Content... (More)

TechDays 2008

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Thought I'd promote the upcoming TechDays 2008 event (previously the Developer & IT Pro Days) in Ghent. Three days packed with loads of presentations about upcoming technologies and releases. Find out about the program, speakers and more on the following site: http://www.microsoft.com/belux... (More)

SPTreeView: Selected node CSS bug

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 10:14:00 GMT

I may have found a bug in the SPTreeView control. When you select a node the CSS class declared in the SelectedNodeStyle isn't applied to the node. Other than that it seems to behave correctly. Sample markup (in a LAYOUTS page) <wssuc:InputFormControl runat="server" LabelText=&q... (More)

USB in XP: Cannot add this hardware

Steven Van de Craen — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 10:05:00 GMT

I had an issue for some time now where I could not add new USB Plug & Play devices (memory sticks, hard drives, camera's, etc). Devices that were added before the problem occurred still functioned properly, just the new ones wouldn't install. I tried: Changing stuff in the registry (values... (More)

Programmatically start workflow

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:51:00 GMT

Programmatically starting a workflow requires the following code: Guid wfBaseId = new Guid("{6BE0ED92-BB12-4F8F-9687-E12DC927E4AD}"); SPSite site = ...; SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb(); SPList list = web.Lists["listname"]; SPListItem item = list.Items[0]; SPWorkflowAssociation ... (More)

Presence Indicator not working on client

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:58:00 GMT

If the Online Presence Indicator is not working properly on some clients it could be that the IE plugin is corrupted. Client has Office 2003 Try reinstalling the Office Web Components. Client has Office 2007 Try the following: Close all IE windows Rename the file C:\Program Files\Micros... (More)

Search: FullTextQuery RowLimit

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:05:00 GMT

When you query the SharePoint Search Service the number of rows returned defaults to 100 but can be increased as required. Note that when you specify a value above the maximum RowLimit the query will only return the default value of 100 items ! ServerContext ctx = ServerContext.Defaul... (More)

Blog updated with CKS:EBE

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 20:42:00 GMT

In case you noticed my RSS feed acting weird; I was updating the CKS:EBE version (currently version 2.0 Beta 2) on my blog. One of the downsides when running alfa/beta software I guess. But it's never been an issue so far. I have so far really enjoyed working on this community project. The latest... (More)

BuilderTextBox: Text Property Builder in a custom ToolPane/EditorPart

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 14:49:00 GMT

Introduction By default text properties in the Web Part Property pane can be filled in using a Property Builder as shown below: This only applies to the default SharePoint ToolPanes (or EditorParts as they're called in the new terminology). If you develop a custom ToolPane or EditorPart with ... (More)

Excel Services Trusted Locations and Alternate Access Mappings

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:10:00 GMT

Yesterday I discovered that Excel Services' Trusted Locations don't use the Alternate Access Mappings collection from MOSS 2007 to grant or deny access to a workbook inside a SharePoint Document Library. I did a search on the Web and apparently it is already a known issue: Excel Services will ... (More)

Cancelling a SharePoint Workflow

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:35:00 GMT

Terminating the workflow will set its status to Canceled and will delete all tasks created by the workflow. Via browser interface Via code // Cancel SPWorkflowManager.CancelWorkflow(workflowProperties.Workflow); Applies To Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (+ Service Pack 1) Microsoft Off... (More)

.NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0 Service Pack 1

Steven Van de Craen — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:23:00 GMT

I just noticed that Service Pack 1 for .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0 has been released. I missed it completely due to the large number of announcements regarding Office 2007 Service Pack 1. .NET FX 2.0 SP1 redist x86 .NET FX 2.0 SP1 redist x64 .NET FX 3.0 SP1 redist x86 .NET FX 3.0 SP1 redist... (More)

Web Part Gallery: Change Web Part metadata tool

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:27:00 GMT

Using the Web Part Gallery you can easily add new Web Parts to a Site Collection and it will even generate the .webpart or .dwp XML file for you. Just drop the assembly in the BIN or GAC, add a correct <SafeControl> node in the web.config and you should see your Web Part(s) in the New dialog... (More)

SPList: Some things worth mentioning

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:09:00 GMT

There are some things you need to know as a SharePoint developer... Creating a list When you create a list using the browser you get to specify the name for the list. Basically this means both the url part as the title. Not all characters are allowed in a URL so SharePoint will just filter them... (More)

Site Columns in CAML: No option to modify values ?

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:41:00 GMT

One of our projects is being automated using solution files and Features. When the Site Collection Feature is activated it automatically creates Site Columns, Site Content Types and a Document Library using both of the aforementioned. Currently the entire process is via Object Model code. However... (More)

Web Part Properties and the Event Life Cycle

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:12:00 GMT

Something I noticed during Web Part development was that the Web Part Properties were not loaded at constructor call time. Makes sense since the control has to be instanciated before the properties can be loaded but I recently forgot and it had me troubled for a while. Q. So when are the Web Part... (More)

Search Server 2008: installation gimmick

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:15:00 GMT

I just installed the Release Candidate of Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express edition. Although the documentation mentioned a Basic and Advanced installation I didn't get that option. Another thing I noticed: SharePoint is everywhere :)

SharePoint: Immediate alert notifications stopped working

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:09:00 GMT

One of our MOSS servers was not sending out any alert notifications anymore. I'm not sure when it stopped working but recently users started complaining about it. When I subscribe to a new alert I still get the 'New alert' notification, but that's actually a different mechanism than the actual al... (More)

SharePoint Search: Basic Authentication issues

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:15:00 GMT

One of our MOSS 2007 servers has a single Web Application (no extended Web Apps) and is configured to use Basic Authentication. I have confirmed that my dedicated crawl account has sufficient permissions in the Policy for Web Application section of Central Administration > Application managemen... (More)

SOAP Exception: Maximum retry on the connection exceeded

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:12:00 GMT

Setup On of my current projects is a custom solution for Microsoft Dynamics NAV to communicate with SharePoint using a Web Service. In order to do this you need to install the SOAP Toolkit (on the server and any clients running the code) to build a SOAP Message in C/AL code. C/AL // Create SOAP... (More)

SharePoint 2007 and PDF indexing

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:16:00 GMT

Introduction By default the SharePoint 2007 Search indexed only the meta data of a PDF document. By installing and configuring a PDF IFilter the Search will also index the contents of the PDF document. This allows users to find documents based on text inside the document. This process is called f... (More)

Tech Ed 2007: Day 5

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:27:00 GMT

Time sure flies when you're having fun. It has been an exciting week with a lot of interesting sessions which I have blogged about the last couple of days. Following now will be a variety of workshops for my colleagues at home about the new things we picked up here. The flight back was at 5:30 PM... (More)

Tech Ed 2007: Day 4

Steven Van de Craen — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:38:00 GMT

My head feels as if had single-handedly emptied the Sal Cafe's wine cellar... But other than the after effects I'm currently experiencing I had a great time at the Tech Ed Country Drink for Belgians and Luxemburgers. Workflow in Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies 2007 This session... (More)

Tech Ed 2007: Day 3

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:18:00 GMT

Develop a Community Solution with VSTO 3.0, Office Open XML and WSS 3.0 Mario Szpuszta builds a restaurant rating web solution from scratch. Restaurant owners can submit their restaurant details in the form of a Word 2007 document containing Content Controls mapped to a custom XML part. A cus... (More)

MOSS 2007: Exception when handling a document renaming event

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 14:07:00 GMT

Situation I have written a small Event Handler to automatically copy the file name and version to custom text fields in order to be able to use them in Microsoft Word. ItemAdded ItemCheckedOut ItemUpdated Here's a small sample of the code I'm using: public override void ItemUpdated(SP... (More)

Tech Ed 2007: Day 2

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 23:50:00 GMT

I didn't get a lot of sleep last night because here in Spain they tend to have dinner really late in the evening. .NET Developers Advanced Introduction to SharePoint 2007 Ted Pattison delivered an excellent session for .NET developers explaining in detail some of the aspects and pitfalls when ... (More)

Tech Ed 2007: Day 1

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 23:49:00 GMT

The first day of Tech Ed 2007 started very early for my flight from Brussels to Barcelona followed by a brief check-in at the hotel. This was my first year of Tech Ed and it was amazing to see how massive this event really is. Keynote S. Somasegar provided the keynote with some interesting upc... (More)

Community Kit For SharePoint: Beta 2

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:18:00 GMT

If you're wondering why my RSS feed was acting funny today; my blog was updated to CKS:EBE 2.0 Beta 2. There were no issues installing this release but I still needed to update my theme files (master page, XSL) because of all the new stuff in Beta 2. I immediately fixed some minor bugs where r... (More)

Syndicated by FeedBurner

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:00:00 GMT

From now on I'm syndicated by FeedBurner: http://feeds.feedburner.com/vandest

InfoPath Forms Services problem with anonymous submitted forms using administrator-approved form templates

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:32:00 GMT

Introduction We have designed an InfoPath 2007 Form that can be filled in from the browser using InfoPath Forms Services (using MOSS 2007). The MOSS 2007 Enterprise environment has an NTLM authenticated Web Application (http://moss:80) and an anonymous extended Web Application (http://moss:82). A... (More)

Internet Explorer crash when opening a MS Office document on SharePoint

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:53:00 GMT

Issue You click on a Microsoft Office document inside a SharePoint Document Library and the browser crashes. Event Type: ErrorEvent Source: Application ErrorEvent Category: NoneEvent ID: 1000Date: 10/08/2007Time: 14:47:01 AMUser: N/AComputer: PC001Description:Faulting application iexplore.exe,... (More)

SPListItem.ReplaceLink Method

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:48:00 GMT

A post about the ReplaceLink method of a Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItem object. This method replaces all instances of a given absolute URL with a new absolute URL inside a SharePoint List Item. Remarks Only applies to URLs formatted as hyperlink (Rich Text Field) or inside Hyperlink Fields (so th... (More)

BIWUG: 25 September 2007

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:04:00 GMT

http://www.biwug.be 18:00 – 18:30 Registration and Welcome 18:30 – 20:15 Session 1: Guidelines and Best Practices for a Successful SharePoint Deployment within Your Organization Join this session if you are looking for answers to questions like ‘When is it appropriate to use SharePoint... (More)

Community Kit for SharePoint

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:27:00 GMT

In case you were wondering what I've been up to lately: I have joined the Community Kit for SharePoint team to work on the Enhanced Blog Edition (EBE). This amazing project really extends some of the basic SharePoint 2007 functionality such as Intranet/Extranet deployments, blogging, wiki's, ... (More)

SharePoint 2007: People Search Options shown by default (repost)

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:03:00 GMT

Instructions Go to the People Search Page in your SharePoint Portal and modify the page (eg. /SearchCenter/Pages/people.aspx) Add a Content Editor Web Part right below the People Search Box Web Part Add the following javascript to the CEWP: <script type="text/javascript">va... (More)

VSeWSS 1.1 CTP released

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 14:05:00 GMT

Via Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog: What's New in VSeWSS 1.1? WSP View, aka "Solution Package editing" New Item Templates: "List Instance" project item "List Event Handler" project item "_layout file" project item F... (More)

SharePoint, Antivirus and Alert Notification

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 08:24:00 GMT

Problem You receive a notification about an alert being created for a SharePoint List but receive no actual alerts after that. Cause Alerts not being received can be caused by so many things but one of the possible causes is your antivirus software on the SharePoint Server. Our antivirus softw... (More)

SQL Server 2005: Importing from Excel error (repost)

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:55:00 GMT

Something weird that occured today: I had an Excel file that I needed to import into my SQL Server 2005 database. I followed the instructions but kept getting an error. Problem Error 0xc020901c: Data Flow Task: There was an error with output column "Agenda 2" (63) on output "Exce... (More)

UploadToContentTypeTool

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 08:46:00 GMT

Description By default when you upload multiple files they are stored as the default 'Document' Content Type. Since I had a lot of templates to upload (over and over again) I created this tool to ease the pain. It's a Windows application that can upload multiple files directly as a specified C... (More)

Ghosting and Site Templates (repost)

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:52:00 GMT

By default your SharePoint pages are ghosted, which means the layout template is stored on the web front end server's file system, while the content is stored in SQL Server. Once you make modifications to a page using SharePoint Designer 2007, the page becomes unghosted; both layout and content ... (More)

Unable to connect publishing custom string handler for output caching (repost)

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:46:00 GMT

Issue This had me troubling for quite a while and looking on the Internet didn't really give any real solutions (here and here). In my case the errors were caused by a custom Web Service that I added to SharePoint. When one of the Web Parts called the Web Service an event log entry was written:... (More)

Illegal characters in Site URL (repost)

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:43:00 GMT

General When creating sites through the SharePoint Object Model, the Web Services or the Web Interface you need to filter the illegal characters when specifying the Site Name (which is the part of the URL that references your site). Here's a list of common illegal characters: # % & * { } \ ... (More)

ASP.NET WebPart Life Cycle reminder (repost)

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:38:00 GMT

I'm currently programming some connectable Web Parts for MOSS 2007 and want to make this a small note to self: Web Part Life Cycle on page load OnInit OnLoad Connection Consuming CreateChildControls OnPreRender Render (RenderContents, etc) Web Part Life Cycle on button click OnInit ... (More)

Word 2007 Content Control mapping tool (repost)

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:36:00 GMT

Here's a really handy tool for mapping your custom XML to Content Controls inside the Word document. http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=dbe

SharePoint 2007 and SQL Server collation: Latin1_General_CI_AS_KS_WS (repost)

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:25:00 GMT

Make sure the SQL Server collation for your SharePoint 2007 databases is set to Latin1_General_CI_AS_KS_WS. Case insensitive Accent sensitive Kana sensitive Width sensitive This was implemented because this collation most resembles NTFS file name restrictions.

MSDN Belux article: Customizing the Content Query Web Part (repost)

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:16:00 GMT

My first article on MSDN Belux: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/community/columns/stevenvandecraen/contentquerywebpart.mspx It was written for MOSS 2007 Beta 2 but still very much applies to MOSS 2007 RTM.

ProfilePictureEventHandler

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:08:00 GMT

Description A SharePoint Library event handler to automatically link a picture to a MOSS 2007 User Profile. The file names must be of the following format: [accountName].[ext] ItemAdded The event handler extracts the account name from the new file The Profile Picture URL property of the cor... (More)

EventHandlerManager

Steven Van de Craen — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 10:40:00 GMT

Description A tool for registering/unregistering Event Handlers from a SharePoint List or Library. It uses an XML file to register event handlers. <definitions> <definition assembly="ProfilePictureEventHandler, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=4f658f603c9b5170&... (More)

Programmatically create site using custom site definition error

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:28:00 GMT

A while ago I blogged about creating a custom site definition for WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007. The problem I experienced today was with a WSS 3.0 installation and creating sites programmatically. Say I have copied the STS Site Definition and made some changes so only the 'blank' template remains. I add ... (More)

Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:27:00 GMT

They have been available for quite a while now: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=19f21e5e-b715-4f0c-b959-8c6dcbdc1057&displaylang=en I have just started experimenting with them and they do have some specific oddities: "Object reference not set to an instanc... (More)

Search Query and "Attempted to perform an unauthorized operation"

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:26:00 GMT

When I was trying some of the SharePoint 2007 (both MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0) Search Query tools available... MOSS Query Tool Search Query Web Service Test Tool ... I kept getting the following error: System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: Server was unable to process request. ---> ... (More)

SPWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates and try/catch

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:24:00 GMT

When doing some SharePoint manipulations using the Object Model you will likely have an instance of a SPWeb object. When you try to update an item or list located in the SPWeb instance or update the instance itself you will most likely set the AllowUnsafeUpdates property to true before calling the... (More)

MOSS 2007: Login failed for user 'DOMAIN\user' periodically (per minute)

Steven Van de Craen — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 11:36:00 GMT

Issue One of our SharePoint installations suffered a crash, so we recreated the farm and restored a content backup. The search indexes and user profiles were rebuilt/imported. Since the crash we noticed a lot of 'Login failed' messages in the SQL Server machine's event log. These events occurred... (More)

WSS 3.0 Event Handler: pre-event cancelling issues

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:37:00 GMT

I'm currently implementing an Event Handler for a Picture Library - a project I will blog about in the near future - and have learned the hard way about handling event handlers... The issue I am experiencing applies to WSS 3.0 (and MOSS 2007) and seems to be about the pre-event event types. The p... (More)

Office 2003 Web Parts and Office 2007 clients

Steven Van de Craen — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 09:13:00 GMT

The Office 2003 Web Parts can still be installed on WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. STSADM.EXE -o addwppack -filename "Microsoft.Office.DataParts.cab" -globalinstall For your clients to see the Web Parts correctly rendered they will need the Office 2003 client libraries and Internet Explor... (More)

FilteredViewWebPart

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:50:00 GMT

Description A default List View Web Part allows most types of columns to be filtered by a user. Unfortunately it is not possible to filter on eg. the name of a file in a document library. The FilteredViewWebPart allows to dynamically specify an additional filter before retrieving items from a Sh... (More)

GroupByItemLimitWebPart

Steven Van de Craen — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:45:00 GMT

Description A default Content Query Web Part has an item limit that just retrieves the first X items. For displaying it allows to group these items based on a property (Created Date, Author, Site, ...). The GroupByItemLimitWebPart allows to specify an item limit per group (when grouping is ena... (More)