Jan Tielens' Bloggings

There's a very good article and extensive (88 pages!) on MSDN that covers a lot of the problems and issues that you will encounter when you are developing using BizTalk Server 2004. A must-read for anyone who is working with BizTalk! Some of the discussed topics:

Some time ago Patrick, Karine and myself were brainstorming on what cool tools we could create for SharePoint. One of the things was to create a VS.NET extension like the Server Explorer, or the BizTalk Explorer. We never started developing it, but luckily Ciaran had the same idea and did started a similar project on GotDotNet: SharePoint Explorer. I haven’t got the time to check it out, but it sounds promising: (extract from an email he sent me) “The developer will be able to browse the whole portal through a tree structure, similar to windows explorer, and view web-parts, properties, etc. on each site along the way, and then at any point the developer could right click on a site or web part and be able to view it in the VStudio browser or IE. There would also be a limited amount of administrative tasks the developer could perform, tasks like creating/deleting sites, security, and others that can be decided as the project is planned.  I have already created a basic sample of this and I have uploaded the source into the source control of the workspace, you can also see some screen shots that I have made available from a link in the top news item on the front page.”

There's a new version of my favorite RSS reader available: RSS Bandit v1.3.0.29. One of the reasons why I like RSS Bandit (besides that it's free) is that it supports authentication. Why would you use authentication on a RSS feed? Well suppose you have your SharePoint sites extended with RSS feeds (using the U2U RSS Feeds for SharePoint) and you have some feeds that are not available to anonymous users. That's when you can use RSS Bandit to access them, using your own Windows user account.

Just like Patrick I'm having a pretty densed travelling schedule the last few weeks. This week I was in Saudi Arabia, teaching a BizTalk course. This is really an amazing country, if you ever have a chance to visit it ... Some of my students gave me a personal sight seeing tour in the city of Jeddah: impressive. Thanks guys!

Today I got the excellent news that I am now MVP for SharePoint Portal Server, just like my pal Patrick! I would like to thank the SharePoint community and everybody who made this possible. Especially U2U for giving me the opportunities to accomplish this.

Last week I did some SharePoint consultancy for a Belgian University (LUC), where they had an interesting issue with SharePoint Portal Server areas. Each research group in the university has it's own WSS site(s) in which they work on documents. Once such a document is finished, the document is published to an SPS area. Ok nothing special you may think, but the tricky part is that only selected people have read access to the WSS site where the actual document is located. Remember that when you publish a document to a SPS area, only a link will appear in the area pointing to the corresponding site. So if a user which doesn't have read rights on the WSS site visits the area, he will see a link to the document. But if he clicks that link, he will get the famous login popup because he cannot access the document! So how do you solve this issue without having to replicate data?

A lot of people are wondering if they still should invest in web part development. ASP.NET 2.0 is comming and will have something called "web parts" as well. Will they fit in the current version of SharePoint? Will the "old" web parts fit in the new version? Finally there are some answers, Mike Fitzmaurice has written a good post about what you should take into account when you will be developing web parts. A must-read if you're into web part development!

Dino Esposito has written a nice article about webparts, both in SharePoint and ASP.NET 2.0: "Webparts: From SharePoint to ASP.NET 2.0". This article also mentions the SmartPart! :-)