Jan Tielens' Bloggings

UPDATE: If you want to add breadcrumbs to pages provisioned in the SharePoint Central Administration site, read the follow post: http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2008/10/10/adding-breadcrumb-navigation-to-application-pages-in-sharepoint-central-administration.aspx

Yesterday I finally had some time to finish a project I've been working on for some time: the Autocomplete Text Field for SharePoint 2007. Click here for a small demo screencast on Soapbox, or download the high resolution video from the CodePlex site.

A long, long time ago, back in the SharePoint 2003 days, I created some pretty popular web parts which filled in some gaps the out-of-the-box functionality left open. In SharePoint 2007 most of those web parts are obsolete; for example the Breadcrumbs web part is not necessary anymore since SharePoint 2007 has breadcrumbs by default. But a lot of people contacted me to ask for a SharePoint 2007 version of the What's New web part. This web part displayed a list of new and changed items on site. It's arguable that this functionality is not needed anymore because in SharePoint 2007 we have RSS feeds, the Content Query Web Part (MOSS only) etc. But apparently some people like the simplicity of the original What's New web part so much ... and just for those people I've create a new SharePoint 2007 What's New web part! :-)

[Cross posted from my photo blog] My dear friend and esteemed colleague Kevin DeRudder is hosting a photowalk in his home town: Gent (Belgium), next Saturday (22th of March). And of course everyone is invited: geeks, non-geeks, hobbyists, amateurs, professionals ... Kevin has created a nice outline of the day that starts at 2pm, you can find more details in the Photowalk Belgium group on Flickr (discussion here). The agenda is still open so feel free to comment and contribute. When you want to join, just drop a line in the Flickr group discussion (or on this blog if you don’t have a Flickr account). If you miss the 2pm start time: I'll do my best to post some updates on our location on my twitter account. If you want to join but don't know any of us, we'll be the geeky looking group with a higher-than-average-number-of-camera's-per-person. I'll bet Kevin will be wearing his famous "I'm blogging this" t-shirt:

The SPWebConfigModification class allows developers to write code that will make modifications to the web.config files of SharePoint sites. This is quite often necessary when you want to deply SharePoint customizations together with configuration settings. Using the SPWebModification class is not without any danger! :-) You can mess up your web.config files especially if you don't think about how you want to be able to undo your changes. Mark Wagner wrote an excellent article about the best practices related to the SPWebConfigModification class; required reading for every SharePoint developer. Mark explains some very important things you should know to get started:

Did you ever want to integrated Silverlight with SharePoint? Check out the brand new Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint site: http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/ !

Did you ever had the need to navigate to a SharePoint list item or document, when you only got the ID's of the item, the item's container (list or document library) and the item's web? I sure did! For example when you query SharePoint data by making use of the SPSiteDataQuery class; the resulting data table includes all those ID's (and additional properties if you want), but it doesn't include a link back to the item. You could make use of the Object Model to build the link in code, but that is both resource intensive and pretty complex. In that case you have to check out the CopyUtil.aspx page, which is also used by the Content Query Web Part by the way. The CopyUtil.aspx page is an application page to which you can provide a bunch of ID's, as a result the page will redirect you to the corresponding item or document.