John Koerner's Page

Creating a plugin architecture in a C# application is a fairly easy task. The video below will walk you through the process of setting up the plugin architecture and it will implement a simple plugin.



The source for the project can be downloaded Here.

The video below gives an overview of creating a ComboBox that does conditional formatting. The code uses regular expressions to determine if an item in a combobox should have special formatting. The code is nowhere near production ready, but it should give you an idea of how to do formatting of items in a combobox drop down list. See the full post if you want to copy the code.

I have added a SCORM compliant version of the Creating Content for the SharePoint Learning Kit video to the downloads page if you would like to have a copy of it in your own SharePoint site.

Here is a new video demonstrating how to create SCORM content for the SharePoint Learning Kit.



Resources:
SCORM Simple Content API
Jing Project
SharePoint Learning Kit

I found a nice little post from Heather Solomon on allowing SharePoint to have multiple levels of sub navigation. It works really well, but the navigation editor in MOSS does not let you nest sub-menus by default. I wrote a quick little C# app that allowed me to add navigation as needed. Here is the meat of the code.

SPNavigationNode oNewNode = new SPNavigationNode("My New Tab3","");
oWeb.Navigation.TopNavigationBar.AddAsLast(oNewNode);
oNewNode.Properties.Add("NodeType","Heading");
oNewNode.Update();

SPNavigationNode oChild1 = new SPNavigationNode("C1","/");
oNewNode.Children.AddAsFirst(oChild1);
oChild1.Properties.Add("NodeType","Heading");
oChild1.Update();

SPNavigationNode oChild2 = new SPNavigationNode("C2","/");
oChild1.Children.AddAsFirst(oChild2);

Note: I have only tested this on MOSS 2007 and it did some weird things to my tab highlighting that I haven't figured out yet.

If you have used the Visual Studio Extensions for Sharepoint to create more than one list, then you will probably be familiar with the problem of all custom List Definitions are given the name ListDefinition1. This causes problems when you activate the feature, because SharePoint already thinks ListDefinition1 exists.

To fix this problem, there are a few things that need to be changed in your project.

1.) Rename the ListDefinition1 folder in your solution.
2.) Change the URL in the Instance.XML. You'll probably want to change the display name as well, but that is not necessary.
3.) Change the Name in the ListDefinition.xml. Again, you'll probably want to change the display name as well.

Some things to keep in mind are that the display name column is used in one of the folder names that is created by the extensions, so if you use a character that SharePoint doesn't like (i.e. an apostrophe) you will get an error.

If you get an error when deploying, your best bet is to fix the error in VS, delete the PKG folder, and then rebuild and deploy your solution.

I found a nice little snippet on Heather Solomon's site for customizing the CQWP. She had a nice little debugging XSL style for items to see what properties were available.

After doing a little digging with the XSL, I enhanced it just a bit, so I could get both the parameter name and the value:



The output then looks like:

P:ListId=FF486727-3DD6-4FFB-A5F5-B9A922366E9E
P:WebId=FF7C38FA-BBAA-4240-9A2B-63B8F508C780
P:ID=1
P:x007B_ff564e0f_x002D_0c70_x002D_4ab9_x002D_b863_x002D_0177e6ddd247_x007D=Welcome to your Project Diary!
P:FileRef=Customers/Customer1/CustomerProject/Lists/Posts/1_.000
P:x007B_ff22ea11_x002D_1e32_x002D_424e_x002D_89ab_x002D_9fedbadb6ce1_x007D=1
P:Modified=2008-03-25 12:50:55
P:Author=System Account
P:Editor=System Account
P:Created=2008-03-25 12:42:02
P:PublishingRollupImage=

I have a dataview web part (aka dataform web part) pointed to a list with items that are all in sub folders. By default the web part displays just the items from the root folder. I did some searching on the net and found people had this problem with CAML queries and that they had to set the Scope property of the query to Recursive. Since I was doing this through the SharePoint designer, I had to figure out where to set the property. To save everyone else (and myself in the future) some time, here is how I did it:

Open up the page in split or code view. Scroll to the SharePoint:SPDataSource object inside of your DataFormWebPart.



Click somewhere inside the SPDataSource tag. This will bring up the tag properties window on the left. From here you can set your scope property.



The four properties are documented in the MSDN library in the SPViewScope enumeration.

I have been building a Virtual Machine for my MOSS development and testing. I had not configured active directory on the machine, but one piece of software required it for me to continue. So I setup my machine as a domain controller and created a domain called VMDomain. This worked and everything seemed fine. I then went to do some work in sharepoint and noticed that some features were erroring out. I checked the event viewer and had quite a few messages in there stating "The specified account name is invalid." I also had other errors about usernames not mapping to security IDs. I was positive that this was something that had been broken because of the domain change. I changed accounts on services, application pools, and anything else I could find, but I was still getting those errors every few minutes.

I googled the errors I was getting, but didn't really get any good results. Finally, I was messing around in central admin, when I noticed one screen that I had not been in yet. Under the operations tab, under the Security Configurations group, the Service Accounts item. I selected Web Application Pool and then selected the Sharepoint - 80 app pool and modified the ID and password. After making the update, all of my event viewer errors seemed to go away.

So I needed a stopwatch today to time a project I was working on, so I decided to write a quick PS script to do it for me: