Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Serge van den Oever posted some interesting questions regarding my SharePoint Workflow project:

Finally RSS is finding it's way to Belgian News sites! The site of De Standaard has started a few weeks ago with a weblog called En nu even ernstig. Various authors post column-style texts, often quite funny. But the first news site that has RSS feeds of the actual news items, is Het Belang Van Limburg / Gazet Van Antwerpen. Look here and here for a list of feeds for each regional site. It's a great initiative and I hope the other news sites will follow soon.

I always tell everyone that SharePoint is very extensible and customizable, and this is really true. For example, let's take a look at the search functionality in SharePoint. By default only Office documents (which are in a document library for example) are indexed by the Indexing Service so they can be found by using the search functionality of SharePoint. Of course in the real world there are a lot more document types that are used, for example a lot of companies have PDF documents. So I get quite a lot questions of people asking if PDF documents can be indexed too. The good news is that the Indexing Service can be extended by using the IFilter interface:

Yesterday Kaneboy created a GotDotNet Workspace for his SharePoint Workflow Engine. It's a pitty that all his documentation and installation guidelines are in Chinese. Although I do not speak Chinese, I've checked out this project and it resembles my Workflow Lite For SharePoint project a lot (bases on the screen shots). The only difference is that Kaneboy's approach is to create actions in code (C#) rather than having a set of predefined actions. Anyway I have to practise my Chinese a little bit more to keep an eye on this project! :-)

It must be around 16 or 17 years ago that I got my first computer on which I actually wrote some code on: a Commodore 64 (previously I had a Sinclair ZX81, but I’ve never programmed on that little black box). I vividly remember the first computer code I ever saw, it was a demo program written in Basic that was shown in a welcome demo:
10 INPUT “Number”, number
20 FOR i = 1 TO number
30 PRINT i * number
40 NEXT i

Some time ago I've posted a code snippet to solve following exception which in some cases can happen when you're calling a web service:

To install the Workflow Lite For SharePoint event handler, you need to complete following steps, which are described in more detail in the ReadMe.txt file that’s included in the beta release:

Generic configurable document library event handler that can be used to create simple workflow and approval scenarios in Windows SharePoint Services or SharePoint Portal Server 2003.