Friday catch-up blogging

I’m just going through a few hundred emails and RSS feeds as I do everyday and getting caught up (in addition to dusting off my workspace due to construction out back). I wanted to address a few things in the SharePoint Forums Web Part.

First is performance. Some people have mentioned it’s taking a long time to load the pages when there are a lot of posts. I’m going to do some more tests this weekend and see what’s going on. When I first built it, I had a small routine to fill the forums with 10 posts in 100 topics in 10 forums, which I thought was a good test (10,000 messages). Load times were negligible (less than 5s) even on my VM so I thought this was acceptable. I’ll go back and revisit this and might have to do something different for the June 19th release.

Second is deployment. I still get emails from people who are putting the files in the “web server extensions\bin” folder so obviously my instructions are not clear enough (or people are not reading). There are some that refuse to put my dll in the GAC which is fine (you can deploy that assembly to the bin folder if you want). And there are others that still have security problems. So I’m doing a couple of things to rectify this. First I’m going to recheck the impersonation code and run it on a portal with an account that absolutely has no permissions. I’ve done this before and it worked fine, but this time I’m going to set it up and screenshot/cast it so you’ll see the step-by-step which should help you configure it in your own environment. Second, I’m going to produce a special single-dll version of the code for the next release so you can just deploy the web part and not have to worry about where this file goes or do any ugly GAC stuff. Finally, I will get an installer working (and maybe take another stab at with the single assembly) but this probably won’t be ready for next release as I have too many things to do before now and then.

As for the source code, it is going to be posted on CodePlex and no, I’m not hiding anything. I’m just trying to figure out how to get the silly thing up there without having to “upsize” my 2003 project to a 2005 one. I wish the command line would just do a “tf -import” or something but it keeps looking like I have to import every file AND associate every checkin with a package. Oh, how much I LOVE Team Foundation.

And yes, I still need to post the Calgary Code Camp presentations and code. Watch for that this weekend.