Another interesting happening from the awesome world of SharePoint errors and (i dare say) bugs is this weird error you can sometimes get when you try to open a page in the SharePoint Designer, particularly a WebPart page, even the Default.aspx. Starting from the beginning, I should remind you how SharePoint web part pages work. The fact of the matter is that while you can edit them and their code in SharePoint Designer, adding/closing/deleting web parts from within the browser interface also modifies the page’s code. Continue reading…

Many times you will need to manipulate data within a list in your custom SharePoint page or web part. Out of these times, you might also need to edit the data in that list like in, for example, a user profile edit page or a contact edit page. Some might say that this is a piece of cake, just assign the required value to the SPListItem and be on your way. Alas, this is not the case, since if you only do this you might realize that the data you need hasn’t been updated in the database. Though it cannot be called a major inconvenience with the SharePoint object model, it is a bit disorienting and might be a bit of a hassle until you get the actual hang of it. Continue reading…

I am posting this tutorial because it seems there are very few articles on the net that actually present you with a practical way of retrieving SharePoint user information in C#, for example to display in a WebPart. Most of these articles describe the method of programatically achieving this for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), but in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) this bit is more tricky. Mainly because WSS keep only limited user info and also because it uses a hidden list to store that information. Continue reading…

I’m going to start my dev journal by expressing my frustrations at Microsoft SharePoint and all that it stands for. Usually, I am a man that likes to create his own solutions from the ground up simply because it’s better that way. There are several reasons for that, among which the possibility of knowing the classes you work with, creating your own workflow, setting your own standard of functionality. These would be only the major advantages of working with your own code. In the following article I will assess some of the things I like and many more things I dislike about Microsoft’s SharePoint solution. By “SharePoint” I am going to refer to the more crippled edition that is Windows SharePoint Services, available as a free download from Microsoft’s website and installable on any computer running Windows Server 2003 or 2008.

Now, why have I picked up SharePoint in the first place? Well, sometimes you don’t get to play by your own rules and a client requests that a specific tool be used in the development of his solution and, since the customer is (almost) always right I set up in my trek amidst the tangled jungle of what is possibly the best and worst thing to happen to ASP.NET-based solutions lately. I’ve only worked with the thing for 3 weeks now, so I’m still learning the ropes so I’ll beg your pardon if I speak out of my league. On the surface, SharePoint looks like a real time and money saver, since it offers a lot of functionality straight out-of-the-box. It handles your security, it handles all those nasty things like organizing your users, permissions, groups, websites, content so you don’t have to. Basically you could build a simple Team Site for your small business right from the start, without the hassle of writing code, worrying about exceptions, databases, connections, classes and other outerworldly stuff like that. Continue reading…