Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Today just a little trick that I needed when I started to customize SharePoint sites with FrontPage 2003. One of the first things you'll probably be doing when you want to alter how a SharePoint site looks, is deleting some table rows and cells from the default SharePoint layout. Sometimes it happens that you (accidentally?) delete one element too much… (at least it happened to me!). A tricky one to get back is the SharePoint navigation bar on top of the screen. To imitate the “real” one you can paste following HTML into your page:
<table class="ms-bannerframe" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%" height="25px">
  <tr>
     <td class=ms-banner width=100% nowrap ID="myNavigationBar" valign="middle">
       <!--webbot bot="Navigation"
                S-Type="sequence"
                S-Orientation="horizontal"
                S-Rendering="html"
                S-Btn-Nml="<a ID='onettopnavbar#LABEL_ID#' href='#URL#' accesskey='J'>#LABEL#</a>"
                S-Btn-Sel="<a ID='onettopnavbar#LABEL_ID#' href='#URL#' accesskey='J'>#LABEL#</a>"
                S-Btn-Sep="&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;"
                B-Include-Home="FALSE"
                B-Include-Up="FALSE"
                S-Btn-Nobr="FALSE"
                U-Page="sid:1002"
                S-Target -->
     </td>
  </tr>
</table>

Some people are wondering if it’s possible to display the contents of a SharePoint list that resides on another SharePoint site. Yes this is possible, even better: I’ll show you how to accomplish this! Suppose you have a SharePoint Task list on your root site that contains some tasks. You also have a sub site on which you want to display the contents of the Task list of the root site. First of all you need to create the Task list on the root site of course.

Is hard to keep up with the new releases of documentation, updates, ... Microsoft (and others) is releasing each day. Here are the new ones I discovered this morning:

Microsoft Belux is starting to blog! :-) Last week Yves Kerwyn joined to blogosphere, this week it's Rudi Larno's turn, welcome Rudi! I hope I'm not spoiling any suprises here, Rudi's entrance was quite “discreet”...

Patrick Tisseghem loves creating SharePoint webparts using ASP.NET user controls, in one of his latest posts he simplifies this technique by using the dynamically compiled assembly (that is build the first time the user control is rendered on an ASP.NET page) which contains the user control. He even made a video that shows step-by-step how this works! Thanks Patrick for the free U2U course! ;-) I think this process could be even more simplified (as Patrick suggests) by using a utility that would compile the ASP.NET user control, without having to render that user control on a web form. I don’t know the compiler parameters that should be used to emulate what ASP.NET does, maybe someone else can help us out? My first experiences in a test environment were quite positive (after referencing the right assemblies :-). The procedure feels a little bit weird (you rely on ASP.NET to compile the user control), but there has to be a cleaner way to get a hold of the assemblies you need…

The BizTalk team has kept it's promise, the documentation and SDK updates are available! Additionally, the Installation Guide and Orchestration Designer for Business Analysts (Visio Add-in) are also published today.

If you're into SharePoint Customization, check out this article on the FrontPage 2003 Customization Kit site. Did you ever wonder which item on a SharePoint site maps with which CSS style? This site has for each type of SharePoint page (e.g. default home page, documents page, events page, ...) an image with tooltips that gives you this information!

[Via Patrick Tisseghem] I would like to welcome Yves Kerwyn to the blogosphere, another Belgian blogger! I'm expecting a lot of cool SharePoint and FrontPage posts, so subscribe here.