Or is it as I believe the biggest pain in the backside for SharePoint developers to pick up someone else’s SharePoint project to make changes to the site definition pages only to discover they were hacked together in the interface saved as an STP and included in your project.

This is now the case for me on two of my inherited projects, I hate them.  Now I know that if you create standard site templates with an onet etc, once created, there are elements of the definition that are now content and would have be be manipulated via the API to change them (or interface). But consider if you have a problem and are searching in a HUGE project for where your specific list might be or other such content, can you find in in Studio by searching ? No you can’t cos it’s all cabbed up in a file.

So my advice to anyone even considering using STP’s, think again are you doing it cos it’s quick and your a contractor soon to leave the company anyway so what the hell, or are you a developer who might have to make changes and maintain your project.  Seriously think twice, is this the best way to develop this solution, is there some advantage to an STP over a site def ? think before you start hacking away.

Now those of you used to writing .NET but maybe not SharePoint will be used to having AssemblyVersion attributes set in the AssemblyInfo.cs files.

This is something I took into my last SharePoint application for wss3.  Now in SharePoint 2003 I got used to not setting the version number but it slipped my mind for WSS 3.0.

My particular problem was I had some ItemAdding/Updating List events.  These were configured to fire in one of my Assemblies. My build server would automatically increment version numbers in AssemblyInfo.cs and in all associated .xml files in the features, very clever I thought at the time.  Now I needed to update this assembly and modify some code in these events.

I made those changes and installed it and all of a sudden none of the events were firing at all.

This is because when a list is created the EventReceiver details of the feature are not read from the XML file but are stored against the List in the content database.  This makes some sense as if you update the list template then you can update the EventReceivers as well and have different versions of a list definition with different handlers.

In my experience it’s more likely that you will want to modify all the existing lists and template as your probably implementing a fix, especially if using SharePoint as an app platform.

So how to fix my now rogue ItemReceivers.  I could do some fancy coding in Feature activations etc, but I really don’t want to go there and have code left lying about for what will essentially be a one time fix.

To the rescue PowerShell.  Luckily for me we use PowerShell so I  can create a post update installation script that runs just this once.

Here is the gist of it.

###############################################################
# Validate args
###############################################################
    if ($args.Length -ne 1 -or $args[0] -eq "-?")
    {
        Write-Host "Usage: .\FixIt.ps1 <SiteUrl>";
        return;
    }
    $SiteUrl = $args[0];
    cls

###############################################################
#Get Base Objects
###############################################################

    [void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")
    $site = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite $SiteUrl
    $web = $site.RootWeb
    $lists=$web.Lists

###############################################################
#Change List Event Receivers
###############################################################

$list=$lists["BrokenList"]

#I happen to know there are only 4 Receivers really I should use the count
#One of them is named wrong as well hence the 3 cases
#(in the real version I fixed that too)
#You need to count backwards as it deletes and re-inserts so a foreach wont #work.

for ($i=3;$i -ge 0;$i–)
{
    $er=$list.EventReceivers[$i]
    switch($er.Name)
    {
        "BinaryJam BrokenList Receiver ItemUpdating"
        { 
            $er.Assembly="BinaryJam.MySharePointApp, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=1111111111111111"
            $er.Update()
        }
        "BinaryJam BrokenList Receiver ItemAdded"
        {
            $er.Assembly="BinaryJam.MySharePointApp, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=1111111111111111"
            $er.Update()
        }
        "BinaryJam BrokenList Receiver ItemAdding"
        {
            $er.Assembly="BinaryJam.MySharePointApp, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=1111111111111111"
            $er.Update()
        }
    }
}

$list.Update()

So I have an upgrade for this, its a new dll and feature files.  I use a build server that can automatically update the AssemblyVersion and automatically edit the dwp aspx ascx files etc to set the version number of the build, its very slick.

Forgetting one thing.  SharePoint has never liked Version numbers. So I applied the update and my webpart fails with safe control errors. 

I forgot when you add the webparts it copies the dwp complete with version number into the content database and I just uninstalled that DLL. DOH! 

After figuring this out with the help of Captain Literal.Net, I stopped my build auto updating the versions and grepping the files etc.  It still marks the file version number to help the support guys but not the AssemblyInfo DLL versions now.

According to the Cap’n its not just the webpart dwp’s but lots of other features (small F)  that don’t like changes to AssemblyVersions, in fact there is code in SharePoint that deliberately IGNORES policy files.

So there you have it, again Versioning is a bit dodge in Scarepoint. Choose when to do it and know what the effects will be.  And don’t forget to take those *’s  (stars) out of the AssemblyVersion attributes and FIX it to 1.0.0.0.

However you can change the Feature.XML file and change the Feature versions this doesn’t have any effect that we have noticed.

Im thinking of throwing together a feature that reads all installed features (hidden or not) and displays the details like title, description and version.

SPUtility.SendEmail function truncates the body of the email.   I’m having this problem and so is someone else (here).

Not much more to add here, if anyone knows why or knows of a setting, love to here it

(please don’t post a workaround solution using .Net objects we can all figure that one out for ourselves thanks.)

Word of the day.

Damn.

CAML.NET.Intellisense

It is an expanded wss.xsd file containing a lot of descriptions and possible default values. When coding in Visual Studio using this will alter the schema defs and give you uber intellisense on your schema files.

If you already use wss.xsd in Visual Studio you will need to remove your reference.

Now if you forgot how you did that then the usual way I found of configuring it was to goto

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas

(or equivalent for your platform)

An to create a file called wsscatalog.xml, you may have called it something else but it contains xml like this

   1: <SchemaCatalog xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/xsd/catalog">

   2:   <Schema href="%CommonProgramFiles%/Microsoft Shared/web server extensions/12/TEMPLATE/XML/wss.xsd"

   3:           targetNamespace="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/" />

   4: </SchemaCatalog>

So go and remove that before installing this version as it won’t remove it for you and Studio can fight over things if you don’t or just not work at all as was my case.

I have had need to do this recently.  I needed a List View that highlighted expired items or tickets in my list.  It needed to make them go red.

Now you might think that’s easy enough create a calculated field that does date maths on the date you have in the list item and the current date that gives basically 1 or 0 for expired or not.  Well you’d be wrong.  You see you can’t use [Today] or anything like it in a calculated field the list wants fixed not dynamic values in it and will not allow Dynamic values, think about it, it would seriously effect performance.

Rather than create a DataViewWebPart based on my list view and edit that to death, it did not give me exactly what I required, even with editing, and the time to do it would be longer for me to achieve.  I decided to embed Javascript code into my ListView.

Starting with a function definition that takes parameters and then spits out one TD tag or another based on the date difference, I placed this in the <ViewHeader> section of my custom view.

The next bit was the bit I was struggling with as because I was new to this I was calling my function in the <ViewBody> section where I replaced the normal output of a TD tag with this.

<HTML><![CDATA[<script type='text/javascript'>]]></HTML>
<HTML><![CDATA[MakeItRed("]]></HTML>
<Field Name=”ExpectedCompletionDate” StripWS=”TRUE”/>
<HTML><![CDATA[","]]></HTML>
<Field Name=”SLA” StripWS=”TRUE”  />
<HTML><![CDATA[");]]></HTML>
<HTML><![CDATA[</script>]]></HTML>

Well this kind works, but the problem is that the <FIELD> tag output the HTML required to make it look good in a list.  Now in my case the date had <NOBR> tags around it, and the SLA is a lookup so has a bit <A> link around it. 

Now if a Service pack comes along and changes the render for the <FIELD> tags, my code is then scuppered, the regex I employed to strip out the data could become a nonsense.  But I could not find any attribute of the Field Tag to spit out the Data value not the render text.

The reason behind this is simple, its related to RTFM!  The is an element of the List View schema called <Column> it is responsible for outputting values unformatted.  It also has additional attributes the <FIELD> does not to allow formatting of data like a date format.

My code now reads like this

<HTML><![CDATA[<script type='text/javascript'>]]></HTML>
<HTML><![CDATA[MakeItRed("]]></HTML>
<Column Name=”ExpectedCompletionDate” StripWS=”TRUE” Format=”ISO8601″/>
<HTML><![CDATA[","]]></HTML>
<Column Name=”SLA” StripWS=”TRUE”  />
<HTML><![CDATA[");]]></HTML>
<HTML><![CDATA[</script>]]></HTML>

Notice the user of the Format=”ISO8601″ attribute of the date column.

Now my list view can display items that have expired in an alternate colour. 

One downside is that the Column for the Lookup field shows the ID only, which in a Listview might be restrictive and the <Column2> tag does not display the text as it would do for a URL field. Luckily for me my lookup list is unchangeable security blocks modifications.

So it’s really worth opening the WSS3 SDK and navigate to

General Reference->Reference->Collaborative Application Markup Language Core Schemas

and take a look at all the schemas you may have to edit before you try and crowbar something in that already exits.

Are you using Powershell when developing your WSS application ?

Cos if your not your missing a trick.

When I build a SharePoint App that comes complete with data, for example you have a list definition and in the Elements file it pre-populates all your Admin Users and their details.  Thing is if you using multiple deployment platforms for testing etc, Dev,Uat, Live for example then those values may not be the same on all platforms.

So do you have 3 different builds ?  Thus you have not tested your live build when it comes to deploy it ?

Then this is when Powershell is really handy.  Because of the great .NET integration you can just access the Object model in Powershell and modify all the data you created.

Here is an example script I use, it trashes and recreates a site collection and then manipulates the list data from the original (live ready) values to dev ones.

#Powershell can call stsadm provided its rigged up correctly to know where the PATH is
stsadm -o deactivatefeature   -url http://moss.binaryjam.com/apps/JAM -name BinaryJam.JammyApplication
stsadm -o deletesite -url http://moss.binaryjam.com/apps/JAM
stsadm -o createsite -url “http://moss.binaryjam.com/apps/JAM” -title “JAM” -ownerlogin “home\simon” -owneremail comments@binaryjam.com -sitetemplate “sts#1″ 
stsadm -o activatefeature   -url “http://moss.binaryjam.com/apps/JAM” -name BinaryJam.JammyApplication

$site= new-object Microsoft.Sharepoint.SPSite(”http://moss.binaryjam.com/apps/JAM”)
$web=$site.RootWeb
$list = $web.Lists["MyMainList"]

#My Site has an SPGroup so add some users to it
$super = $web.Groups["My Super Users"];
$super.AddUser(”home\theWife”, “wife@nosuchmail.com”, “Wife, The”, “”);
$super.AddUser(”home\theCat”, “cat@nosuchmail.com”, “Cat, The”, “”);

#If there is an email then change it 
foreach ($item in $list.items )
{
    $needsUpdate = $false

      if ($item["UsersEmail"])
      {
          if ($item["UsersEmail"].ToString().Length -gt 0)
          {
              $item["UsersEmail"] = “adminmain@nosuchmail.com”
              $needsUpdate = $true
          }
      }
      if ($item["UsersName"])
      {
          if ($item["UsersName"].ToString().Length -gt 0)
          {
              $item["UsersName"] = “DevSystemUserName”
              $needsUpdate = $true
          }
      }

      if ($needsUpdate -eq $true)
      {
          $item.Update()
      }
  }

I have custom forms as the default ones don’t cut it, they don’t cut it cos of hierarchical dependencies in dropdown lists.  Now I don’t have the time to do lots of ajax or try to fight to get some ajax framework approved by, whoever, to use in my product.  So I’m using good old fashioned postbacks.

But postbacks on large forms are annoying and you need to return to the same scroll position.

Since .Net 2.0 there has been built in the MaintainScrollPositionOnPostBack directive for the @Page, something that’s as new to me as .net 2.0 (I was doing SAP for a bit for fun and a break remember ?) .

You can use this in your custom forms to.

Now I don’t know how much custom forms stuff you may have done, but I want CodeBehind in mine and struggled to get any code-behind, so I have custom forms that host another user control that I do have code-behind in.

In that Code I use the following

this.Page.Master.Page.MaintainScrollPositionOnPostBack = true;

Now if you have a custom master page then you can use that @Page directive instead, if your using the default on then you can use this instead.

Works a treat.

The idea behind it is that you make up a tune in your head then sing it into songsmith.  First you pick a music style and then a tempo and then sing away.  Once recorded  the software will analyse your song and the notes you sang,( hopefully you sang them in tune I don’t think it cleverly pitch shifts your voice, but I may be wrong ) and then it will create a musical accompaniment in the style you selected.

Now I know what your thinking but the MS web site states

"The samples you hear in Songsmith aren’t toy sounds… they’re a high-powered general MIDI set from Garritan, one of the biggest names in the industry"

With resources like this how can it fail ?

Now it’s not aimed at pros but to give anyone a chance to write a song, well my son is seven and is not a musician, yet, he hasn’t displayed any interest in that area, until recently, but even he hears that the stuff this thing produces is absolute pap.  It can’t even compose a good jingle, take a listen to the MS videos and cringe.

Where the genius of Songsmith lies, and this was totally unintentional I’m sure, was the sheer comedy value provided when you take songs you know and feed the vocals into Songsmith and have it re-write the original into the dreadful "early eighties, cheap casiotone" sounding affair it produces.

Youtube is starting to accumulate examples of Songsmith Massacres.  Radio heads Creep, britney’s Toxic, battery by metallica and loads more.  

So I wouldn’t bother getting Songsmith but go take a look on youtube and laugh your pants off on the utter tosh it produces.

Well done BBC for finally getting there with this series.

I’d love to tell you how good or bad it was but due to the marvelous media campaign I missed it, I stumbled across it half way through the episode where I managed to see all the characters and the new actors playing two of them. 

Like I say I missed it so I wonder how the new actors will fit, if at all, the characters we were introduced to.  I do have doubts about the ghost, far to attractive and very removed from the pilot character, who I absolutely loved.  Is this a real improvement to help the story or just eye candy to keep part of the male audience who struggle with plots engaged.  I don’t doubt the young ladies ability she seemed very good but its not the funny, kooky plain northern lass obsessed with making tea entrenched in routine to cope with her death and being tied to the house.

Anyone who did watch, what do you think ? Does it measure up to the pilot ?

Anyway, I can be thankful for iPlayer and will watch all of it tonight.