MOSS Search

It's a crap that the MOSS search is using the IE Language setting to filter out search results.

Really crap! So, if you company is using some default Language setting in the IE and everybody is happy, but when an outsider comes in-house and uses the MOSS search, but with a different language setting in IE than yours - then he's doomed! He finds nothing!

Way to go MS!

SAP iViews in MOSS

Found this [PDF] - offering a solution for the iframe based standard MOSS iView webpart - causing the "poor" SAP iView to reload itself.

The solution is to use the object tag to load the html of the iView, instead of using iframe.

Drawback of the object

<object id="iView_container" name="iView_container" type="text/html" data="http://myserver/iview/url" />

Data Execution Plan galore

Windows wants to protect my computer so it shut down Internet Explorer. Wise I would say - even if it is IE 8.

Lookup fields in MOSS and the MS IE Javascript error

If the lookup list has more then 20 items(see the reflector code) and you happen to use Internet Explorer to edit a list item having a filed of type lookup, then you might have some problems.

There will be a javascript error and no way for you to pick the value that you want, because MOSS decides to help you by adding a input text field used for looking up your value as you type and emulates an select box picker, by positioning a layer containing filtered values.

The positioning fails because the the input text box is nested in a table and the offsetParent/offsetLeft/offsetTop are failing (known IE bug).

So in the core.js there are two functions AbsLeft and AbsTop which you'll have to override in order to get an aproximate positioning.

Ebay - This offer cannot be displayed on the mobile device

A few days ago I ran into this:

I wonder why is that ebay? Are the mobile devices so "scarry"? I mean, we are in 2009 with a few strong mobile platforms on the market like Symbian, Windows Mobile, iPhone etc.

Concentrate, will you? Don't loose them from your focus, ok? 

MOSS 2007 Profile Properties Import Tool

I've used the tool to import, from one development MOSS machine to another, the properties set of the user profile.
It went fine. The only problem is if the servers are having different "custom source" for the profiles import they loose their bindings - and then they are read only - you cannot change the mappings to the other customer source fields.

From Codeplex http://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=sptoolbox&ReleaseId=8728

The tool "Shared Services Provider Property Creation" http://soerennielsen.wordpress.com looks more complete since it syncs more.

Work-work!

Google Email service down in Germany

There are almost two hours since the mail.google.com doesn't work.

502 Server Error
At least from where I am, m-net Munich, Germany

Three tips for the MOSS developer

After the today's workshop, I got these three tips for a MOSS developer:

1.  SPDisposeCheck utility for alloc/dealloc SP objects (SPWeb, SPSite etc.) check up 
   
2. ActiveDirectory wrapper from .NET 3.5 - AccountManagement namespace - easier AD 
   
3. Master pages override - when in need to re-set dynamically the master page to a "non default" one, David Wise writes back in 2007 the code for it, using PreInit event of the Page in a httpModule.
   

Tomorrow is the 2nd day of the workshop.

VSone 2009 11.FEB to 12.FEB

A brief summary from Munich's VSone - MOSS Conference from my side.

What I missed @VSone 2009 was the real life MOSS experience from other companies and definitely the sessions should have been longer, about 2 hours. One hour is simply not enough. Perhaps next year will be better.

Also the audience was a bit too stiff, but hey - it's winter ... blame it on the weather.

Thank you all for the event and sessions.

I attended the following sessions - see below the briefings:

Planung und Aufbau von hochverfügbaren SharePoint-Infrastrukturen with Björn Schneider

Most used MOSS infrastructure for the "life" farm with about 1000 users (where more than 50% are just browse users) is:
- 2 web front servers
- 1 application server
- 1 index/search server
- 2 MSSQL servers

  

Best Practices in der Webpart-Entwicklung with René Hézser

• A set of tools were presented along with the classic VS and SharePoint designer.

• WSP Builder http://codeplex.com/wspbuilder

• Reflector http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector

• ReSharper http://jetbrains.com/resharper

• SharePoint SDKs:

  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms441339.aspx

  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms550992.aspx

• SharePoint Solution installer: http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointinstaller

  
    

Software. Services. Internet with Carsten Humm

Was introduced the cloud computing solution form Microsoft - Windows Azure http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx - it's still CTP and you can try it for free - and it's still slow. Allows any .NET application to run in the space of cloud computing - of course in the boundaries set by the cloud computing OS - Windows Azure.

The only good thing so far comparing with the AppEngine form Google is that the programming language can be any of the .NET family and not only Python like for Google cloud computing implementation (AppEngine http://code.google.com/intl/de/appengine/)

Spaß mit Delegates, Anonymous Types, Lambda Expressions, LINQ und erwiteren C# Features with Christian Liensberger

To point demos - nice presentation out of Visual Studio, but too short.

  

The „fuzzy tail“- wie entwickelt man ein Suchkonzept and Enterprise Search in grossen dezentralen Umgebungen with Christoph Müller

It means that the most popular search results could be displayed with even using the search and the focus for searching should then move to the less popular items. This means that the search usage should be monitored and understood so that the "best bets" can be easily maintained.

Also using the search results shouldn't be restrict to a link and a few words, using more sources of information more user oriented search results can be displayed. For example if somebody is searching for "split nuts" and there is no indexed resource holding that information in any of the document library, but there is something in the MOSS profile (job description) of the some person(s), than those person(s) should be displayed as hit results since they know something about "split nuts" - for example production or manufacture engineers.
PS. Cool presentation using Apple’s Keynote with a MacBook and its remote. ;)

   

MVC in der Praxis with Rouven Haban

Short intro into the MVC (model-view-controller) paradigm implemented by MS for ASP.NET http://www.asp.net/mvc/

Still in beta, it has a great support from the IDE side (VS2008) but there are a lot of thing which are not ripe yet, like the model component and the relationships between the model

 

ADO.NET Enhancements for SQL Server 2005/2008 with Klaus Aschenbrenner

• Asynchronous data access (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms379553(VS.80).aspx)

• Multiple Active Results Sets (MARS) (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345109.aspx)

• Batch Updates (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aadf8fk2.aspx)

• Filestream data from/to MSSQL 2008 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc716724.aspx)

• Table-valued parameters  - stored procedure parameters as tables(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb675163.aspx), the only limitation is that a column in a table it can't be another table.