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]

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]

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]

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]

If you haven't experienced it already, when you have an InfoPath form live on your server, and you make a change to the schema of the form and upload it over the existing copy, your old forms won't open. There is a work around we have applied with our customer which works well for us and I'll continue to explain it here.  If you are stuck right now, and you already uploaded a new form and lost access to your old forms: find the previous version. Whether from backup or source safe, roll back... [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]

One great feature of SharePoint and versioning is the ability to have versioned comments. This can allow a small discussion to occur on almost any item. It also allows someone to keep a running log of notes on certain items. I had the wonderful task of figuring out how to get this to work the same in InfoPath. Below is a function that will append the notes into a repeating group. On submit of the form, I call this function and it works great, everytime! public void AddAnalystNotes(){ try&... [More]