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]

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]

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]

A while back I ran into this issue: I had two web parts in the same project but I wanted them to share settings. As my experience as an ASP.Net developer was pointing me to use the web.config file, instead I thought SharePoint must have something similar to this without me having to mess with the web.config file. After searching and posting on MSDN, I did finally find a solution that uses the properties of SharePoint Sites and Webs. Below is a sample code that stores the Employee Prof... [More]