Approved Page Layouts not showing in PublishingWeb

June 11, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Had a "great" morning this morning involving releasing to our SharePoint 2007 Production environment which has been in place for nearly 18 months now - 6 server farm. Our UAT environment was built by myself last month which "matches" Production as closely as possible in terms servers etc. but it's been hard because the documentation of how Production built is incomplete. So more...

 

Solution Development for SharePoint 2007 Part 8

June 9, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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OK, so there's plenty of hype at the moment for ASP.NET developers to "leverage the platform"...being SharePoint and a really flash (I mean silverlight) interface for them to click around on with the title "Do Less. Get More. Develop on SharePoint". This made me cringe after the last couple of weeks I've had on my current project and also with respect to these posts I've been more...

 

Solution Development for SharePoint 2007 Part 7

June 7, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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"Event Receivers and Page Creation" In the last week or so I've been doing a lot of work with creating pages with content on it automatically based on event receivers firing when items are created on Lists. To follow on with the TV show Schedule scenario when a new schedule is created, I want to create a page in the Pages Library on the Site itself and add a Content By Query Web Part s more...
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Solution Development for SharePoint 2007 Part 6

June 7, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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So far I've shown you guys how to deploy web parts and add them to pages with all of the related files. What I haven't shown you is how to deploy these things in a UAT or Production environment where STSDEV in Visual Studio won't be available. So how should it be done? Well there are a few approaches, but by far the newest and coolest way is to use Powershell because it gives you all the advanta more...
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Solution Development in SharePoint 2007 Part 5

June 7, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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So the next part in my series will basically show you how to deploy a Content By Query Web Part (CQWP) and also it's associated elements. The screenshot below shows the structure of my project file now. The Solution package can be downloaded here.   Deploying the Content By Query Web Part As I mentioned in my previous article, there are various ways of deploying the web part but I feel more...

 

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007 Part 4

June 6, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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  Adding extra assemblies to your Solution Just had to post about this because it's been driving me crazy. I've got various Solutions now that have been built using STSDEV 1.3 in Visual Studio 2008. There are common classes I've been using and was scratching my head to get the dll to deploy with the solution and was hacking it by installing it directly into the GAC! Now I've worked it out an more...

 

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007 Part 3

June 4, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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As promised I've uploaded the 3rd webcast to show how Chapter 3 is implemented. I've also posted the sample code below for you guys to pick and chose as you please. Click here to watch the webcast (NEW 32MB swf - 40mins) . The .zip of the solution can be downloaded here (1.4Mb) too. Thanks to Paul Culmsee for hosting these for me! Site Collection Feature.xml <?xml version="1.0" more...

 

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007 Part 2

June 3, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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"Previously on 'Prison Break'...I mean 'Solution Packages for Developers'" My blog got quite a few extra visitors over the last couple of days since writing about SharePoint Development and "doing things the right way". A few people have been giving me "gentle" and "subtle" hints to start a series and based on the success of Paul Culmsee's various part more...

 

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007

May 26, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was scouring over my feed reader this morning and came across this post on the MSDN forums asking:"Any one please give me a step by step implementation of deploying a SharePoint application...(Modifying the SharePoint website content and deploying it to the SharePoint server)?" Now, all platforms are tricky when it comes to development and deploying. I've worked with Interwoven, B more...

 

Leveraging the Platform

May 21, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I attended the Perth SharePoint User Group today and we were lucky enough to have Andrew Coates (Microsoft Developer Evangelist) presenting. Before I begin, I'd just like to say what an amazing presenter Andrew is and that hopefully one day people will say those things about me when I'm out Evangelising. Andrew was presenting something that had been presented at the SharePoint Forum in Sydney more...

 

Empower Users to manage Workflow (Part 1)

May 18, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've repeatedly stated that there are certain areas of the SharePoint 2007 stack that are not true Enterprise level features. Workflow is one of them and various other bloggers and reports have stated this, my research links are a testimony to this. I believe Microsoft have confused the SharePoint community by giving two options with SharePoint Designer (SPD) Workflows and Visual Studio (VS) more...

 

How to prevent derailing SharePoint

May 7, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've read Paul Culmsee's articles with great interest on Project Failure and will be helping him continue his series in the next few days on Development Failures. Joel Olsen, SharePoint God, also has found keen interest in it and has written some of his own experiences with it. It's interesting to see Joel write externally from Microsoft and it really does show a more open, less reserved appr more...

 

SharePoint and Service Desks - Organisational Responsibilities

May 5, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I attended a great Information Management morning in Perth last week and bumped into a fair few clients that I had engaged with in my previous Pre Sales role working for a Solution Integrator before moving to the dark side working internally in a SharePoint team. One of the guys asked me a question around "What do we need the SI to actually quote on to get SharePoint up and running?" more...

 

SharePoint 2007 SSP User Profile Import Connections Limitations

April 23, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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The organisation I am working for at the moment has an Active Directory set up of Users and Contacts. Running a ldifde query to output all Users and Contacts (below) provides me a list of 936 items. ldifde -f usersindomain.csv -r "(&(objectCategory=Person)(|(objectClass=User)(objectClass=Contact)))" If I use this query within the Import Connection in the SSP in Central Admini more...

 

The description for Event ID ( 27745 ) in Source ( Windows SharePoint Services 3 ) cannot be found

April 22, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Got a beauty of an error on our Production farm every few seconds: Event Type:        Error Event Source:        Windows SharePoint Services 3 Event Category:        General Event ID:        27745 Date:                23/04/2008 Time:                9:23:24 AM User:                N/A Computer:        CENTRALADMINSERVER Description: The description for Event ID ( 27745 ) more...

 

Errors when deploying Software Updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007

April 17, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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These errors are mentioned on the Deploy Software Updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007 right down the bottom. The Error Finding Cause Look in the linked log and search for 'ERR' matching case. 04/16/2008 16:37:17 6 ERR Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products and Technologies. Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products and Technologies. Further information regarding this failure can b more...

 

Server X does not have any search query servers associated with it to serve queries

April 17, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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more...

 

Shared Services Provider: The operation completed successfully...but didn't

April 15, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was configuring a User Profiles and Properties Import Connection today and kicked off a Full Crawl. As you can see from the above screen it states 'The operation completed successfully'...but it did not obviously crawl my entire domain as there are only 4 user profiles. I viewed the Import logs and found this error 'The profile import default access account is set to use the default more...

 

Shared Services Provider: Access Denied

April 15, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I had an interesting error yesterday regarding access to the 'User profiles and properties' page in the Shared Services Administration stating the generic "Access Denied" SharePoint site access denied. Now my first approach was to look who was the Site Collection Administrator, which was ... yes you guessed it me! And I can access the front page of the Shared Services Provider Pa more...

 

InfoPath Error on Resubmission

April 10, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been using the UDCX files for my Data Connections in my InfoPath form and for the Form Submit Action it came up with an error if I resubmitted the form: A value in the form may be used to specify the file name. If you know the value in the form that specifies the file name, revise it and try again. Otherwise, contact the author of the form template. At first I didn't know where to start more...

 

Solution Deployment stuck on "Deploying"

April 10, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I found a post on the MSDN forums because I have the same problem and it recommended the SP1 upgrade to fix the Day Light Savings issue which we have here in Perth Australia. The Day Light Savings actually finished last week before we could get all our ducks in line to test the SP1 patch on our Test Servers and I really couldn't wait for our SharePoint SP1 rollout to happen and needed a solutio more...

 

The Pain of Deploying InfoPath Programmatically

April 9, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been doing a lot of work around Governance of SharePoint within our organisation and have been hitting brick walls with regards to InfoPath. Especially with regards to Environmental differences when using Forms with Data Sources. I've found lots of articles pushing Data Connection Libraries with .udcx files which is fine to a point but this is the best one. With this being the best explan more...

 

SharePoint Australian Records Management

March 24, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was doing some research into InfoPath Forms Server and came across references to UniqueWorld's InfoView and SharePoint Forms product. Following the link took me to a message stating: Unique World Software (UWS) is changing our focus and will shortly be release exciting news about the work we’ve been doing bringing a VERS compliant ‘add-on’ to the Records Management capabilities of Microsoft more...

 

Programmatically deploying an InfoPath Form Library

March 24, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was finding it hard to find a specific answer on how to write a Solution Package with a Feature that would create a InfoPath Form Library with the associated template working when you click the New button. This approach allows for the most "hands-off" governed approach. Having to publish the form manually from the InfoPath client seemed overkill and error prone. In taking this approa more...
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STSADM Import: FatalError: Could not find WebTemplate

March 24, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Being new to the environment I'm currently in, I wanted to move some of the Sites into a development VM. I used stsadm -o export to backup the files and then wanted to run stsadm -o import to restore them into my VM environment. I came across this error: [3/12/2008 7:25:11 AM]: Start Time: 3/12/2008 7:25:11 AM.[3/12/2008 7:25:11 AM]: Progress: Initializing Import.[3/12/2008 7:25:12 AM]: FatalErr more...
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SharePoint stsadm -o import FatalError resolution

March 10, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was trying to import a Site Collection from one environment to another. I fired of the import command from a backup file created from stsadm -o export command. Then I created a new web application and a new  Blank Site Collection. I then ran the stsadm -o import command but received this error: "FatalError: The specified user [username] could not be found" There wasn't much on this, r more...
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SharePoint Debugging: No symbols loaded

March 10, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been reading a lot of posts on how to get debugging going when attaching to the w3wp.exe process. Disable 'Enable Just My Code' in Visual StudioThis blog post started me off in the correct direction by setting the Tools | Options | Debugging setting correctly. Modify the web.config Furthermore, it prompted me to change the web.config value from debug="false" to debug="true&q more...
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Working with SharePoint 2007 logs

February 27, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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The SharePoint 2007 logs are by default found in the 12 Hive: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS\ I found this article here on throttling MOSS logs to pick and chose what you want. The interface in the Central Administration is not the best in terms of drop downs...would have been a lot easier if it was just all check boxes and power options to select all more...
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SharePoint 2007 ContentTypeID's

February 27, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Had some "great fun" with SharePoint over the last few days, basically when I copied some code on creating a Content Type to test in my environment. I noticed that the Content Type wasn't available on a Form Library and looked at the Parent Content Type in the user interface and noticed it was Item and someone told me it needed to be Form. I couldn't see a property to set what the Paren more...
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Content Query Webpart fun!

February 21, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been poking around an existing web part and have been having real troubles in pulling fields from a SharePoint List. I found this article extremely useful and basically found that this XSLT snippet saved me hours of debbugging:<xsl:for-each select="@*"> P:<xsl:value-of select="name()" /> </xsl:for-each> This basically outputs all the fields being par more...
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Solution stuck on 'Deploying' status

February 19, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Have spent some time looking around trying to work out how to change a Solution that is in 'Deploying' status to anything else. You can only Retract a solution when it is deployed. I found an article here which mentions the stsadm command 'canceldeployment' where you have to pass in a timer job guid. Anyway, another post showed me how to find this guid with the stsadm command 'execadmsvcjobs'. Al more...
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Access Denied to Master Pages and everyone using Site Administrator Account!

February 19, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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We have a fairly big team of developers working on a MOSS 2007 implementation. I'm always dubious of everyone using the Site Administrator account in any environment, be it Dev, Test or Prod, to make changes to Master Pages. If something goes wrong, we can't go and ask the person that made the change as multiple people would use the account. I found a thread online which walks you through givi more...
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The project type is not supported by this installation

February 19, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've just come on board at a new mining organisation in Perth, WA called CITIC Pacific Mining as the Senior SharePoint Consultant. As with all new client sites, when you rock up it's interesting to see how different everything is. Especially as this project started over 18 months ago when MOSS 2007 was extremely new and documentation and the community was no where near its saturation now. I ca more...
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I have moved

January 29, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've finally moved off of webhost4life.com to a Aussie born and bread server thanks to GoGlobal.com.au. more...
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Microsoft's Search Server 2008...very cunning plan

November 8, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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This was announced at the DevConnections event last night in Las Vegas. Basically they've rolled out the MOSS search in a free Express version and a Enterprise version. Check out the blog announcement and the product page. Entry market This will drive businesses to install WSS 3.0 with the new Search Server 2008. It can map to many content sources and also create various Search Scopes. The inte more...
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SharePointPedia, great for community, but not groundbreaking

November 6, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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There's a lot of noise out in the SharePoint space around SharePointPedia which is something that Lawrence Lui has been championing within Microsoft. There is screencasts here and here. Personalization I've created my profile and have added some content to various tagged areas. Be interesting to see if I get recommended ;-) The My Tags feature is very clever in terms of showing you the tags you'v more...
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SharePoint hotfixes

November 6, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I subscribed to the OzMoss.com listserve, reluctantly at first because I am so used to RSS feeds for managing my content and not my inbox. So far I've found it very useful, especially as GMail groups the emails together as the thread builds which makes it easier to manage. The RSS feed available for the listserve does not do any grouping of threads which can make it hard to follow especially if more...
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SalesForce.com - Force Platform

November 5, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Rather than me go into it too much, this video covers what SalesForce are doing in the SaaS space with a new Platform called Force. The blog also covers this is some detail and the press release covers it also. They've really thought it through in terms of scalability, security and performance. It's something managed by them, my biggest question is what Enterprise companies will pick this up or w more...
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Google OpenSocial storm brewing

November 5, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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The OpenSocial site went live on Thursday and I'm sure will cause quite a stir once the whole blogging community starts discussing this. I've already subscribed to the OpenSocial blog that has some good coverage of who was at the launch event last week. The video of the launch is a good introduction to it all. Features TechCrunch talks about it in some detail after attending the event. They sum u more...
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Links for 4/11/2007

November 4, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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  » OpenLink Virtuoso: Open-Source Edition: Main.OdsIndex / socialnetworking » Google launches open APIs for social networks: News - Software - ZDNet Australia / google opensocial socialnetworking » » Did Google bluff Microsoft into over paying for Facebook? | Storage Bits | ZDNet.com / socialnetworking OpenSocial Google facebook Microsoft » Open Social Web / socialnetworking google » W3C Semant more...
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Social Bookmarking tool - Diigo

November 4, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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  Ok, I've been a big user of del.icio.us for the last few months and found a great add-on service called Diigo that allows you to extend the detail stored in social bookmarking but has backwards compatibility with del.icio.us with new features such as note taking etc. It allows you to not only bookmark the site but also for it to remember any sticky notes you add to the page etc. which is awe more...
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Facebook Enterprise 2.0 community

November 4, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I'm a big believer in 'eating your own dog food' and I'm a heavy user of RSS feeds, forums and social networking sites to keep up with my areas of interest. I've just been reading a forum thread on 'Do Enterprises WANT social networking?', there are plenty of experts in the field putting their views across which is excellent. The thread is part of the 'Social Networking in the Enterprise' Facebo more...
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Using SharePoint 2007 to implement Enterprise Social Networking

November 4, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I presented to a group of our Alphawest client base on Friday in Perth at QV1 this morning. Thank you for everyone who attended, it was a great turn out and I got some valuable feedback. Some great questions were asked: Should we wait for Microsoft to enhance SharePoint 2007 In terms of whether it is worth backing Microsoft to enhance existing functionality in SharePoint 2007 or whether to go out more...
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OpenID bandwagon and SharePoint

November 4, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Based on discussions I've been reading in my social networking feeds I've decided to get on the OpenID bandwagon, mainly because I don't want someone else to steal my user name that I always use of 'jthake' ;-) It's my branding! There are heaps of sites already supporting OpenID which can be seen at the OpenID Directory. WikiTravel On my travels I found wikitravel.org and decided to check out my more...
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SIOC Project

November 4, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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The SIOC project is evolving very quickly and has submitted to w3c in February 2007. One great use is notitio.us which allows you to view del.icio.us links in a tree form. This tool is awesome for breaking down tag clouds from social bookmarks. What it did show is the typos in my tags and the need for me to go through and clean them up and amalgamate them as I've got better at tagging since st more...
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Enterprise Social book marking and SharePoint

October 11, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've just started reading Bill Ives blog which focuses on Portals and Knowledge Management. One article covers what IBM are doing in this space. I've been preparing for another presentation on Enterprise Social Networking and have been approaching it in a way of describing the consumer space and then how the Enterprise could leverage this. Bill mentions David Millen's demonstrations on Enterprise more...
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Links for 10/10/2007

October 11, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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jthake's del.icio.us Bookmarks: Wednesday, 10 October 2007 to Thursday, 11 October 2007Joel Oleson's SharePoint Land : Default Install Configuration tags: configuration deployment sharepoint Community Kit for SharePoint - View Release - World Clock and Weather tags: sharepoint webpart www.Syntergy.com, Inc. tags: DocumentManagement partners shaerpoint tools Records and Document Management P more...
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Records Management Overview

October 11, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I got notified by the RMMA New Zealand branch that they were presented an awesome slidedeck from Mark Orange. It covers the New Zealand Public Records Act, the Records Center capabilities and integration with Exchange and Outlook with SharePoint. Mark highlights some key points, of which the main is around the fact that most of the talk on Records Management is based on the American acts such as more...
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Web content management approval workflow walk thru

October 3, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've found a lot of value recently in seeing blog posts with a complete walk thru in them as SharePoint is so huge you just don't get to see all of this stuff without configuring each individual bit of functionality. So I thought I'd quickly run through the approval process in a Publishing Site relevant to Web Content Management. Once you've created your Page and saved it you can click on &quo more...
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WCM Content Editing Overview

October 3, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been putting together some presentations on WCM and the functionality that SharePoint provides. So below I've walked thru the key areas within the Publishing sites available in MOSS 2007. I've tried to highlight where it falls short on other WCM products in terms of functionality on the way through also. Above is a screen shot of a out of the box Publishing site. You can see the Page Tool more...
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RSS Viewer Web Part

October 3, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was trying to construct a demo to show someone building up a My Site and sucking information from SharePoint List RSS feeds from various team sites. To my horror I got the error message "The RSS webpart does not support authenticated feeds." So does this mean that you can't consume RSS feeds from within it's own SharePoint environment or any authenticated source? There seems to be p more...
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SalesForce to enter ECM market

October 3, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Following up on the Google Apps approach to ECM, SalesForce has jumped on board for the ride also. They are going to go head to head with IBM, EMC and Open Text in Winter 2008 with a product called SalesForce Content. Also I was just reading over at ContentManagement365 that IBM are now in the Leaders Quadrant of the ECM Magic Quadrant. more...
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SharePoint Personalisation MySites

October 3, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I have been continuing my demonstration prep for a talk I'm doing later this month. I've decided to theme it on a well known UK TV Show called the Office. Everyone is familiar with the show and the organisation so it makes it easy to talk through scenarios. I have just done some quick notes on the useful web parts that I will be demonstration for everyone's reference. My Colleagues Web Part more...
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SharePoint ECM-Portal : S2

September 26, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Well, my French is a bit rusty but according to this post there is a new release of an ECM-Portal : S2 coming out in later 2007. This is further confirmed from Mary Jo Foley who seems to be well in the loop with all things Microsoft. Mary wrote a good post on what's coming in Office 14 here. The main feature here seems to be around MDM (Master data management) which she explains in her post, the more...
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SharePoint Licensing Changes

September 25, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Was asked another curly question about Licensing on Friday, and was reading this during my daily reading about Internet facing (MOSSIF) sites and requiring CALs for internal connections. Basically, you weren't allowed to deploy an Intranet and Extranet in the same SharePoint farm because of licensing. CodeJedi.net has posted a new article stating that the licensing has been reworked to allow a d more...
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SharePoint InfoPath

September 25, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been getting some curly questions around InfoPath of late due to our organisation already using various other products in this space. It's great to compare these feature for feature to get a better understanding of what they do and what things can be done in them. I found a good post with a video of InfoPath features. It basically describes hooking up a form to a SQL Database Table for query more...
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SharePoint for Web Content Management (WCM)

September 25, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was reading an article over at Provoke about SharePoint and WCM. The main discussion was around what knowledge you need to implement this and the post does a great job of breaking these things up. We have a designer at our work that understands CSS better than anyone I've met and he's currently working on a RedDot CMS implementation. I think he'll be able to switch products with no problems and more...
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SharePoint and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF)

September 25, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was reading an article on WWF vs. LiveLink Workflow and reminiscing with my time working with WWF in beta on a big .NET project here in Perth. We came across some stumbling blocks with the persistence layer, which has been rewritten for SharePoint so that it stores it within it's database natively. One of the key criticisms of LiveLink Workflow was that it is written in it's own language and no more...
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Sharepoint 2007 Document Libraries Capacity Planning

September 25, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I got thrown a real curve ball today at work from one of our Technical Solutions Architects. He was querying if they moved 200Gb worth of files from a file store into SharePoint how big would the SQL 2005 database be? I found a TechNet post that links off to various articles around capacity planning. This one seems to be most relevant to content storage. Database Management Bill Bauer has a great more...
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SharePoint for development revisited

September 25, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Well the discussions go further from the two big guns (Andrew Connell and Joel Olsen). The key takeaway was "not to reinvent the wheel". The SharePoint platform does a lot of things out of the box that traditionally you'd spend days writing, for example, CRUD data access layers and database schemas that can now be implemented using SharePoint Lists and the SharePoint API.  The other key more...
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HP SharePoint Sizing and Configuration tool

September 25, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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HP have released a new sizing and configuration tool for SharePoint. I've run through my initial thoughts on this. Their microsoft product page is here with further details. Business Profile Interestingly the quoted SMB as up to 1,000 users, Mid-market to 1,000 - 20,000 users (peak usage of 3:1) and Enterprise as anything bigger than that. User Requests Per Day The problem I see with the estim more...
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Using Incoming email with Exchange on one server

September 24, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Thanks to Tom Molenhouse for sending me an email after reading my article the other day (I love the SharePoint community). The below instructions were found via a cached Google page here: This script provides incoming email functionality when using WSS 3.0 on a Small Business Server, or on an Exchange Server. We offer no guarantees that this script will work for you, and we are unable to offer f more...
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SharePoint Records Management Virtual Lab

September 24, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Microsoft have posted up a virtual lab to showcase the Records Management capabilities. The lab basically took you through: creating a new records center creating some Document Libraries for Financial Reports, Contracts, and Product Development Files. All with some custom metadata, retention policies and audit policies. creating record routing for each Content Type. configuring Central Admini more...
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Telerik RAD Editor MOSS controls

September 24, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Well apart from the slight hiccup about not being able to see the .chm file due to IE7.0 security which is fixed by following this post. One thing it did highlight is that using .wsp packages makes installing new features to the SharePoint platform childs play! The control in Central Administration of which web applications you deploy the package too is very nice. I even retracted the solution to more...
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AIIM - SharePoint meets ECM

September 24, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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A Collaborative Platform I was reading posts on SharePoint Meets ECM sessions and was interested with the comments around "that MOSS is a very strong collaborative platform but isn’t yet a full-fledged alternative to existing ECM tools" which is true I guess. I mean, the Document Management and Web Content Management is very capable but if put up against OpenText DM or RedDot CMS they j more...
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SharePoint Extensibility

September 19, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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One thing I did drive home at the presentation last night was how extensible that SharePoint is. SharePoint is built on the .Net 2.0 Framework and heavily utilises the power of ASP.NET Framework also. Unlike other vendors, all of the core 6 areas (CMS wire ref - believe it or not I couldn't find one on the Microsoft SharePoint site) of SharePoint are built on this and use the same format API's an more...
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MOSS 2007 People Search

September 19, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was configuring the people search and found this article which explains it in great detail. Basically you need to go to SSP: User Profile and Properties : Configure Profile Import. Once you’ve set this up here you then click on Start full Import to pull them in. You can set a schedule here too to crawl it in at required rate, I'm not sure of the performance issues as yet if you do this frequen more...
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SharePoint and Exchange SMTP on one VM server

September 19, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Email enabling SharePoint Lists is a great feature to introduce into the Enterprise. If I had a dollar for everytime I emphasised the importance to centralise information I'd be a rich man. This would obviously help to replace storing it in personal silos such as personal inboxes, my documents and file shares. In doing so this means that the Enterprise has more control over back ups and archiving more...
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Google Apps vs. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

September 19, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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zdnet have posted an article around the new Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) which is going to the market with the help of Salesforce. It will be interesting to see how they play this out and how much it will cost. There is a big battle going on, even in this article with regards to how Microsoft and Google release these products and with what features. It interests me that Microsoft claim that more...
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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 with SharePoint presentation after thoughts

September 18, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I presented at the Perth SharePoint User Group tonight on Enterprise 2.0 and how Web 2.0 has influenced it and how the SharePoint Platform allows the Enterprise to actually implement it. There were a few good points raised which I'll cover very briefly and follow up more with at a later date: User Profiles - Organisational Hierarchy Web Part - "can it only be done on My Manager property in more...
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Microsoft and Facebook

September 17, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Was just reading a post on Ben McCormack's blog which mentioned the announcement that Microsoft have released a new Facebook toolkit. This did come as somewhat of a shock, I mean it's unlike any of the big vendors to play nicely with a competitor. I don't think they ever released a partnership with MySpace and that is based on a Microsoft Platform. They clearly don't see MSNSpaces as a competitor more...
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MOSS 2007 People Search

September 17, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Was configuring the people search and found this article which explains it in great detail.   In my demo VM I was trying to demonstrate the People Search and it wasn't returning results. This is because it hadn't crawled in my AD. With the VM being on only when I'm using it it'd never hit the overnight crawl schedule so I manually fire it off. Basically you need to go to SSP: User Profile and more...
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My Site Creation Timeouts and managing MOSS's mess

September 17, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I’ve been working in my demo VM again today and had an issue where the creation of a MySite was timing out. Interestingly it’s taken ages for it to create one (about 2 minutes)! I’ve allocated 3Gb RAM to the VM and it’s still taking too long to demo how ‘slick’ this feature is in a presentation. The MySite doesn't come up when I try and visit it so i've tried to delete it and go again. I used st more...
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SharePoint and Records Management

September 14, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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As I've mentioned in previous posts...SharePoint is a large product with lots of functionality across six main areas (Portal, ECM, Search, BI, Collaboration and Business Process and forms). As with all the big Vendors in the ECM space, most are strong in some areas and weak in others. SharePoint is by far the strongest in the Collaboration space, but is definately the weakest in Records Managemen more...
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Setting up MOSS My Sites for a Enterprise 2.0 presentation

September 14, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Managing Remote Desktop on Windows Server 2003   I have been working more on my demo VM and wanted to use Remote Desktop to demonstrate various users in various roles. By default Windows 2003 is pretty well locked down and I found this great article from Mitch Tulloch which explains what you have to do.   Terminal Services Licensing   I noticed that there is a limit of 2 connections by de more...
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Setting up My Calendar on MOSS2007

September 14, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I have been creating a demo VM to run some scenarios against and wanted to demonstrate the Outlook Web Access (OWA) Web Part capabilities. I installed MOSS 2007 and had it all running with POP3 and then installed Exchange 2003. I noticed that the OWA wasn’t working in the Exchange System Manager ‘Servers|<server name>|Protocols|HTTP|Exchange Virtual Server’ and instructed me to go to II more...
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Share your OPML

September 3, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been using GoogleReader since it first came out in beta and use it daily to keep up to date with various topics such as Sharepoint, .Net development, Enterprise 2.0 and the Latest Technology in general. As I discover new feeds I add them and tag them to a category. I usually find these by reading referenced posts on blogs I read and then adding the new feed. Share your OPML web site allo more...
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MOSS 2007 Records Management Review

August 31, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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A fellow Solution Architect I work with specialises in Records Management and is on the Professional Records Management Associations boards etc. here in Australia.   I have also been reading through Joel Olsen's Whitepaper on Compliance Features in the 2007 Microsoft Office System that was written back in November 2006.   What I am attempting to do is investigate how the likes of TRIM, Open more...
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Sharepoint Team Development & Continuous Integration

August 30, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Coming from a .Net development background I am used to and promote the Continuous Integration paradigm. The benefits are just worth the intial effort, especially so in team development projects. There are lots of benefits but the main one is the encourage users to develop solutions that work more than just "on their machine", so that when the build server builds the solution and deplo more...
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Enterprise 2.0: Social Networking and Sharepoint

August 30, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I am currently preparing for a presentation I will be running in October titled "Using Sharepoint 2007 to Facilitate Enterprise Level Social Networking”.   There is obviously quite a lot of content at the moment being posted in various sources on Web 2.0 for the Enterprise and the whole Enterprise Social Networking space.   From the various client meetings I've had recently around our Sh more...
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Get everyone involved and get them doing it everywhere!

August 29, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was just reading Kit Kai's blog post on "Can social networking technologies help?". A few interesting points were: - the emphasis on blogs and all roles getting involved e.g. Project Managers with particular issues which introduced scope creep and how they managed it. The idea being that people can search for these things and if they are blogged about generically enough they'll com more...
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Defining a Sharepoint group for a web part

August 20, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Once you've installed MOSS 2007 you'll notice there are heaps of web parts and making it easier for Portal Admins to find the web part to add can be made easier by "idiot-proof" naming and also grouping the web parts into sections. C-Dog has a great article on this which also covers how to automate what group a web part gets added to by using features and editing the .webpart manifest f more...
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Application Development in Sharepoint

July 19, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been looking at all the ways that you can actually create new functionality over than the base functionality of Sharepoint. Most of this is around actually displaying the content in a portal environment on a public facing web site in a way that external users are used to. Internal users of the portal will be comfortable with the Sharepoint look and feel and branding is not at the top of the more...
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Historic Steve Jobs Key Note

July 18, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I’d never seen this announcement. It was back in the day when Apple announced a partnership with Microsoft…it’s hilarious hearing the reactions from the Apple crowd:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxOp5mBY9IY Found by the rumours here:http://9to5mac.com/August-Aug-7-seventh-iMacs-Apple-Event-ipod-ipod-micro-nano-3450897543  which are about the new iMac, iPods etc.. more...
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APAC Sharepoint Conference

May 10, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I'm flying over to Sydney for the APAC Sharepoint Conference at the Hilton on 15th and 16th May. Will be my first trip to Sydney which is pretty poor form being as I've been living in Perth for over 4 years! I am really looking forward to meeting people who are also as passionate about Sharepoint as I am at the moment. It will be a great way to learn more about the product suite which I've mainly more...
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Naming standards

April 23, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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You can never have enough naming standards guides. I've been working on a project for the last nine months with about 15 other developers. We're coding in C# in VS2005 and the standards that were provided covered camel casing, pascal casing etc. But one thing that really bugs me is the use of Manager, Editor, Factory so randomly throughout. Also methods called CreateBlah(), InsertBlah() and AddBl more...
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WOW factor

March 19, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Well, I'm over the WOW factor of Vista and have just rolled back and installed Windows XP Pro. Vista was slow (even with 2Gb RAM), the graphics are irrelevant when you want to actually do work, IE7 froze a lot, Outlook 2007 froze a lot, a ROM upgrade to my O2 XDA Atom rooted my device so I had to roll back to XP to reinstall the ROM properly. So all in all! I really can't see why you'd want to mo more...
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ComboBox SelectedValue()

February 26, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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<NoteToSelf> I had some issues with SelectedValue() on a WinForms ComboBox when adding values dynamically to it and used this:public class ComboValues{        private string _key;         private string _value;         public string Value        {            get { return _value; }            set { _value = value; }        }              public string Key        {    more...
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JoinView for DataTables

February 15, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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We've been doing a lot of work with DataSets recently on this project and have had some issues on standards for creating new DataTables and TableAdapters. We have tried to enforce having DataTables with TableAdapters that directly reflect the base tables in a DataSet so that you can use the default Insert, Update, Delete, Select methods provided.Complex ProceduresOne problem occurs when you have more...
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Strongly Typed datasets command timeout

February 12, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I have been doing a lot of work recently with Strongly typed datasets and table adapters. We have found that the standard 40 seconds for some methods just wasn't enough...mainly due to big batch processes that call in large amounts of data in a view from various tables. I found a great article which has helped us out on this issue.It demonstrates how extensible the standard datasets are and I'm s more...
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Generic Lists

January 18, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I'm sure this is an obvious one, but this is a nice use of the new List with Generics:             List<DirectDebitsRequestPayment> payments = new List<DirectDebitsRequestPayment>();             DirectDebitsRequestPayment payment = new DirectDebitsRequestPayment();            payment.Amount = new decimal();            payment.FromAccountName = string.Empty;              p more...
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Asynchronous SQL stored procedure command execution in .NET 2.0

January 16, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was looking for a way to call a stored procedure asynchronously and Keyvan Nayyeri's article which does just that. This can come in handy where you do not want to increase the timeout of a stored procedure but have some serious processing going on in the database. I'm currently doing a lot of work on batch processes which are triggered when messages are dropped on queues and this should suit me more...
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Geek speak

January 11, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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LOL just got sent a Geek Viral email and actually laughed at it...does that make me a geek too?  Top 10 things likely to be overheard from a Klingon Programmer 10. Specifications are for the weak and timid! 9. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand! 8. Indentation?! - I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull! 7. What is this talk of 'release more...
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Finally the Apple iPhone comes out!

January 9, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Well, it's taken long enough to get here...but the iPhone is out!First impressions...the battery life is going to be terrible! With all those components onboard it's going to drain very quickly and normal consumers won't be used to charging everyday! I'm used to it with my O2 XDA Atom, but it's taken some time and is still inconvenient. People will think it is an advantage having one device but o more...
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Sharepoint 2007 cost

November 27, 2006 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Just found this article which shows that a 1000 user license approx. is about AUD$11,000 and is AUD$107,000 for Internet access which doesn't need CALs. Pretty competitive against Hummingbird DM/RedDot and Interwoven Worksite/Teamsite combinations. Be interesting to see how the market picks up in Perth on this stuff and how soon. This Microsoft page covers what you need to buy product set wise. more...
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VS2005: Rebuild selected project

November 26, 2006 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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You can add your own custom shortcut to build only the current project (and its dependencies). Go to Tools | Options and under Environment, click Keyboard. Type Build.RebuildSelection in the ‘Show commands containing:’ text box. Then type in your desired shortcut in the ‘Press shortcut keys:’ text box (mine was CTRL+B, CTRL+P). Finally, click the Assign button. Apparently the C# keyboard ma more...
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SQL Temp tables vs. Variable tables

November 21, 2006 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Cursors are the bane of performance life for me at the moment! I've been looking at rewriting some stored procedures with temp tables and found this article which clarifys things for me a bit more between variable tables and temp tables. more...
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Dependency Injection

November 7, 2006 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Big talk around this area which I have recently experienced first hand on the project I am on...this article has a great explanation of it. Most definately the way to develop code. more...
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ClickOnce deployment

November 5, 2006 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Being having some fun with ClickOnce deployment using Mage and some certificate signing. Found a good article by Brian Noye's discussing this. more...
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Release Management

November 5, 2006 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been looking into Release management and versioning assemblies in .Net 2.0.  Joshua shows a good way of using a nant script to do this automatically. Joe's blog explains how you can do this in one location using a SolutionInfo.cs file, but this is not automated on the actual version numbers. I am using CruiseControl currently, I somehow need to integrate the build label in cc.net into the as more...
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