John Koerner's Page

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:

So it seems the WoW 2.3 patch broke my custom apps that download Armory XML for a few days.

They appear to be working again, so I am going to leave the source code unchanged for the time being. If anyone experiences issues with them, let me know.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love my MSU Spartans. They are having another off year in football, but I still felt the need to show off my Spartan pride. So, as any geek would do, I created a script that output an Ascii art version of the spartan block S to my powershell screen upon login:



For anyone interested in the code, you can download it here:
WriteSpartan.ps1

So I have been playing with Powershell a bunch lately and I am really liking the scripting that can be done using the .Net framework. So the first script I wrote was one that would launch a google search, just by typing a command.



I simply added this function to my Profile (The file that is stored in the $profile variable from within PS). To use the function, you just type:

Ever since I started my little charting project with my WoW character data, I thought it would be great if I could web enable it. Well I have taken the first step towards this by setting up the charting application on the web and graphing the data using fixed data points to a web image.

To see an example, click here.

The image is built on the fly and I am working on setting it up to use my real info, instead of the hard coded data.

I had an idea of downloading the WoW Armory data each night for a character, to see if I could create a nice chart application from the data. I have come up with a mock up of what the interface will look like and I have gotten the code working for downloading the data. I think this could be a neat way to track your character's progress.