SharePointers

After taking a look at Heather Solomon's awesome CSS Reference Chart for Sharepoint 2007 (with illustrations!), I though it would be a good idea to translate her hard work into a stubbed CSS document for use in my projects. Keep in mind that I haven't verified whether all of her styles actually do what they claim to do. I simply converted the table into a usable stylesheet. All you need to do is just fill in your custom style elements. You can download the the stylesheet here [.css] or here [.pdf].

I was working on a STSDev project which deployed a feature with a feature receiver. I had the feature working without the FeatureReceiver but as soon as I added the FeatureReceiver related attributes to my <Feature> element I got the following error: Failed to create feature receiver object from assembly "Org.Project.Solution, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c632353d405b3209", type "Org.Project.Solution.MyFeature.FeatureReceiver" for feature 6a9b2358-ea4e-486d-a4e4-4f813c52ce88: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: type at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic) at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFeatureDefinition.get_ReceiverObject() After much digging around I discovered that STSDEV's Solution config file refers to a namespace as well as the dll. My FeatureReceiver's namespace was not prefixed with the right namespace So just...

This is a very good resource to use when defining your features and trying to understand what scope each one should be at: http://weblogs.asp.net/soever/archive/2007/05/03/sharepoint-features-elements-scope-and-other-info.aspx

Both STSDEV and VSeWSS are very useful tools that, in their own way, give you more simplified elegant development. STSDEV is great in that it gives you a clean, class library project structure so that you have lots of control over your project. VSeWSS on the other hand is a customized solution template that allows you to automatically add in all the necessary files for common WSS elements (lists, content types, etc). I really like the ease of using VSeWSS, but I prefer the project structure of STSDEV. My solution is quite simple. Create your Solution with STSDEV (I usually start with a Empty C# solution with assembly) and then add in a VSeWSS project once you have the STSDEV generated solution open. I basically just use the VSeWSS project as a file generator and once the files are created, I copy them over to the STSDEV project and begin customization from there. The only thing you really have to remember is to copy the Attributes.cs file from the Properties folder in the VSeWS...

I was in the process of blogging about creating workflow features in STSDEV (1.2) when I realized that STSDEV 1.3 is now released! I'm going to redo my post using STSDEV 1.3 to see if it simplifies things.

I've been messing around with the WordPrint utility and when I reinstalled it I was getting a cryptic error: Runtime Error! Program: This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information. When you first start using WordPrint, copy the following files to your %Windows%\system32 directory : %Program Files%\Microsoft Office 2003 Developer Resources\Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 SDK\Tools\WordPrint\WordPrint.dll %Program Files%\Microsoft Office 2003 Developer Resources\Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 SDK\Tools\WordPrint\ImageDecode.dll %Program Files%\Microsoft Office 2003 Developer Resources\Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 SDK\Tools\html2xhtml.dll Then run the regsvr32 on each of these .dll's from the system32 directory.

This has nothing to do with SharePoint but I thought it was pretty cool. Here's how I got the Label Cloud working on blogger.

This next tutorial will show you how to create a page layout. I have to admit that the bulk of the content of this tutorial comes from a tutorial written here , however, there are a few errors in the example code provided and also STSDEV requires a few minor changes as well to get everything working. In addition, I'll try to elaborate on a few more things so that you get a better understanding. Now let's dig in. Introduction If you have no experience with page layouts (and Master Pages), I suggest you read the Page Layouts and Master Pages page on MSDN . In short, page layouts allow you to customize the layout and appearance of content and web parts of pages within a MOSS publishing site. These pages are stored in a special Master Page and Page Layouts document library. Pages that are based off these Page Layouts will be stored in a 'Pages' document library at the root of the site. The nice thing about using the publishing infrastructure is that it lets you sav...

I plan to write a start to finish tutorial on using STSDEV to create a simple page layout and feature receiver, but I don't have the time to do it right now and I wanted to share this tip: When you are creating a feature that contains a page layout and you want that page layout to be copied over to your server, ensure you include the .aspx page as an <ElementFile> element into your feature.xml file. If you are hand writing your own manifest, you don't have to do it, but if you want STSDEV to do it for you you'll need this element.

If you've gotten sufficiently comfortable generating solutions with STSDEV, you've probably found that debugging doesn't seem to work. The reason is because the DebugBuild configuration is the only configuration that includes Debug code. Here's how to set up your project so that you can debug the other builds: Go to your Project Properties, click the 'Build' tab and turn on 'Define DEBUG Constant' and 'Define TRACE Constant'. Then click on the 'Advanced' button at the bottom of the Build configuration screen and change the 'Debug Output' value to 'full'. This tip came from the STSDEV discussion forum .

One of our Server Admins was asking about IIS settings to optimize WSS/MOSS performance. This blog posting is a pretty good starting place, as it gives pretty good descriptions for the settings that MOSS installation/configuration doesn't take care of for you.