Recently I ran into a rather annoying issue and after lots of testing and research I think I found the reason. Here's the scenario: Windows SharePoint Services 3 site, internal access http://wss3, external https://share.domain.com:444. Central Admin Alternate Access Mapping had the default zone http://wss3 and the intranet sone https://share.domain.com:444. The site works great from inside and outside the network. Outlook 2010 installed on laptops. The Outlook users browse to http://wss3 i... [More]

A customer recently complained that when they printed lists the printout didn't include the quick launch, which is great, but it did include things like the bread crumbs and tool bar. It is quite simple to complete. I updated one of our product's core features to include this code, however it can be done in a few easy steps.  In the end, you want to get the following code into the site or onto a page The Code<style type="text/css">@media print{.ms-titlearea,.ms-listdescription,... [More]

Very very annoying error, I know. This is one of those errors that Microsoft decided not to provide a lot of detail. I just spent the better part of 2 hours searching the web trying to find a solution. I found a lot of differing fixes, but none seemingly applied to me. I finally sucked it up and applied each solution I found even though "I know that's not the issue." Silly me. I had this occuring on two servers at the same time, a customer server and my development server. The is... [More]

There are a few web parts out there that will automatically scroll through your lists. These are pretty and work well. They will slowly scroll through your lists like a news ticker. My issue with these is that my primary customers are police officers, and very rarely do they want to slowly read through a list. Most of my  police department customers' roll call lists have dozens of items, all active and all urgent (it being roll call and all). They didn't want t... [More]

I recently had to create some functionality for a customer to take a subsite, and duplicate it for backup purposes. I would normally walk them through the process using stsadm or use Save Site as Template but they wanted a simple method of doing it. I created them a on click solution. My code is below. We were going to move forward with the SPWeb SaveAsTemplate option but the site was too large. Even after increasing the template size SharePoint still errored. See KB Article 960969 for more det... [More]

Google recently published a new tool to help web designers and developers assess the real estate on their pages. It's a basic tool which overlays a standard graph over your pages showing you the percentage of visitors who have their browsers open to the specific size. Check it out at http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/. I played around with it a bit and found it a little too elementary. Any good web designer knows that you have to stay above the fold and shouldn't exceed certain widths. If you w... [More]

As a SharePoint developer, you may be creating a web part and for the sake of testing you throw it up on your site. Then you decide to rename your class or get a new public key token for your class or something like that. After doing so, your page might stop loading with the following error. You may not be a developer, you simply obtained a web part from another party and now it's not working and you get the following error. An error occurred during the processing of . Could not load file... [More]

A growing commonality we're seeing is allowing external visitor access to SharePoint, whether it's a police department rolling it out their community or an organization wanting to allow it's 80+ volunteers access. The most cost effective way to do this is to use forms authentication and SQL server to store the membership database. You can use the same Active Directory your site is running on now but then you need to license each user in your network. Using SQL server stores the user account... [More]

Unfortunately I know this first hand. We were working on a customer's SharePoint instance and had to uninstall a feature. So using stsadm we went to uninstall the feature and forgot to include the feature part of the command. So we ran stsadm -o uninstall........... and uninstall it did! It completely uninstalled SharePoint from the server with no prompt or warning! The only thing left was the configuration wizard and the IIS websites were stopped. I reran the configuration wizard and received ... [More]

In one of my customer's MOSS implementations we're using SharePoint's resident permission management to control who has access to what InfoPath forms. The issue we came across is that if a user has read-only access to a form and opens it, they can see the Update button. Clicking it does error and denies the change, and after the error the user gets the typical form closed message. We wanted to hide the button from the view of a user who has read-only permissions to deny the error all together... [More]

Sometimes if you're performing several stsadm commands (like adding, deploying, upgrading, and/or removing solutions) SharePoint get's some things stuck and it then proves to be a bear to get it out. For example, we upgraded a solution for a customer using stsadm and we were receiving an error stating we couldn't upgrade the solution. So we removed the solution completely and then tried adding it. We then received an error stating that the feature with this ID already exists. So we went ah... [More]

The content query web part is a beautiful web part, and it's a shame it's only available in MOSS. I would love to use it in WSS. Anyway, the web part will search the entire site collection, or specific sites as you specify, and return items for certain content types, or all, and/or meeting a filter criteria. As you can imagine, a very useful tool to roll up data and lists from sites all into a central page or dashboard. The issue with this web part is customizing it! There are a few predefined ... [More]

Using the SharePoint user controls InputFormSection and InputFormControl [More]

I recently upgraded my blog to BlogEngine.Net and since then the comments stopped working. Seeing as I'm more busy than Obama right now, I never really stopped to properly troubleshoot it. Recently I took up the challenge and thanks to someone else having the same issue, my blog is now fixed and users can add comments to my posts. So please, comment away! If you're looking for the solution for your own blog, see http://blogengine.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=59277.

There has been a few requests from our customers to setup certain pages to autorefresh after a certain amount of time. These pages are usually views of a list, or the home page. I found a rather simple script to throw on the page which will reload the page for you. Copy the script below and paste it into a Content Editor Web Part by clicking the Source Editor button. Optionally you could use SharePoint Designer and add it to the page directly. Change the 30 in setReloadTime at the end to the des... [More]