BinaryJam

There are quite a few blog entries out there about sharepoint and applications hosted on the same machine.

There is a KB article on it too http://support.microsoft.com/?id=823265. You modify the managed paths.

Well true this works and apps can run side by side, in fact you can run applications inside sharepoint with the managed paths option. We did hit some problems in doing this.

1. All of a sudden Session stopped working, it told us hey turn it on. Well I can tell you it was turned on. Nevr got round to fixing this, if someone knows of the problem and of a fix post a comment.
2. Visual Studio became a bloody nightmare. Whilst it could create new apps apps opened from Sourcesafe had a blue fit.

So we tried to install Sharepoint and Apps on two seperate webs. We also utilised host-headers so both webs could use port 80. This does require the developers box to be Server 2003. If you have one monitor, then dont do it virutalise it and have seperate boxes. If you have two monitors you will lose productivity by not doing it, but be prepared to re-install sharepoint, beter still make a copy of everything to copy over the top of your customisations that have gone wrong, and they will go wrong.

Did it work. Did it “eck as like”. Visual Studio bitched about it again. Why ? becuase of the way Studio enumerates the webs to determine which is the Default Web (ie the one you dont want sharepoint on).

Even though our SPS or WSS install was on a http://scarepoint host-header, and we were opening localhost. Studio got it wrong.

We believe overcame this, (well I think we did, havent repeated this installation yet ).

After Sharepoint has been installed, create a NEW web, this will point at the default web. give it all the same settings as default web then delete default web (you may need to modify default web settings to set the new ones).

Now when you do things in studio, it enumerates the webs and takes the NEWEST web as its default. This is what APPEARS to happen not being the studio developers we dont know for sure.

Now it all works, no mananged paths, no session problems interface into sourcesafe nicely.

Thanks to my colleague Mark Sheppard for finding this one, I think he got fed up with my profanity so had to fix it quick.

Updates:

http://blog.binaryjam.com/simon/archive/2005/02/28/195.aspx

Not knowing much about CAML yet Im not sure how useful this will be but someone developed a library to generate CAML Queries for lists

http://dotnet.org.za/reyn/archive/2004/07/13/2738.aspx

See.

http://blogs.msdn.com/rido/archive/2005/02/24/379498.asp
Which references  http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php

Hardly new

I have been creating AJAX apps since IE4 with RDS and offscreen IFRAMES then with XMLHTTP.  My problem back in the day was cross-browser compatibilty, I didnt even consider doing it back then most of the AJAX things I did were extranet or intranet.

It bugs me that someone who recently started investigating this gives a bunch of credit to google for this technique, true well done for pushing it beyond what us early pioneers did but your still standing on others shoulders.

So I’d like to send my thanks to the person who inspired me to pioneer this technique all those years ago in my own applications. (And for those who have worked with me you never thought you’d hear this).

Thanks to Dino Espisito, author of probably the only book released at the time with mention to RDS which enabled me to exploit this now redundant technology to do AJAX.  Instant Scriptlets was a much overlooked book, that gave me insight in to all the nasty things I could do with RDS (and the piss-poor implemented “scriptlets”).

Thanks again Dino.

PS Thanks to MS for IE4 and the IE4SDK, what got me interested in Web in the firstplace to leave unix behind.

“To have the ‘ump”  (hump).  Is a  UK midlands colloquism that means annoyed, pissed of, in a general bad mood with someone or something.

To say “He’s got the ‘ump” means that the person who has the ump is in  a bad mood with you or is being deliberately vindictive for some reason unbeknown to you (usually unknown but not restricted to).

So I’ve got the ‘ump.  I spent ages learning server controls, and went on a sharepoint course for developing web parts.  Only to discover after lots on intensive research on sharepoint that most of the customisations I will need to do, in order to gain best advantage of sharepoints built-in capabilities, I need to use some god-awful hack of “language” called CAML.

Presently I hate sharepoint, some of it is great, but when you have to convert all your existing “webparts” from another portal technology to SPS and do massive customisations to style and layout to SPS/WSS.  I mean the kind of changes that will cease to work on installation of a service pack and the hours your going to spend regression testing you changes against the service packs.

I hate it because half of this product is ONE BIG USELESS HACK, I mean up to 146 seperate files to edit to modify the banner, are you taking the mick, MS.  Half the product well CSS’d the other hardcoded into the base aspx file.  I would happily love to kick the WSS developers backsides up and down Redmond and down to Tacoma for some of them.

Still by the end of this If all the predictions on how big Sharepoint is gonna be, I will be immensly employable.

In my own opinion of course, based on my small amount of exposure, please dont sue me.

Love the name for the problem they describe here, we all suffer the woe now and again

http://spaces.msn.com/members/mwadams/Blog/cns!1pAMOzaH98ZfHK1uhQS5Bd5g!111.entry

A handy list for poking about in

http://blogs.msdn.com/roberdan/archive/2005/01/21/357924.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odc_SP2003_ta/html/sharepoint_wsscodeaccesssecurity.asp

http://blogs.msdn.com/bowerm/articles/175691.aspx

Creating a Modal Dialog “Chooser” Tool Part

Google have released yet another great tool, I loved the toolbar, then the deskbar, but now this one tops it all

http://desktop.google.com/

Desktop google. It is busily indexing my desktop and my emails and its results are good.

I have been trying Lookout for a while, but this pounds it out of existance, sorry guys it too slow, the interface is clunky and slow.

Google caches all my stuff so I dont need to open an email thats been stored away on a slow exchange link or open a word document as it just extracts all the text. Ok there is probably a space consideration but I dont care I have gigs of space for this stuff.

The one thing I cant seem to get working is the Google integration, a promise of it displaying personal results in the google web searches, (it most likely intercepts the http request and brokers the result sets, I HOPE) I’ve been very specific with my searches here and it hasnt done it yet, but hey its beta and Im sure it will work better soon.

Who needs WinFS anymore with google about, so take it out of longhorn I say, I dont need it now.