Jan Tielens' Bloggings

There's a new release for the Hippo.NET project; version 1.5.0. This version improves dramatically the performance of the build process (some builds are 10 times faster!). When a build is requested, the Hippo.NET Server engine creates a tag for each file in the SourceSafe database. Thanks to Dave Ehrlich, a new mechanism to add the tag to each file is implemented. You can download the source and binaries over here.

One of the nice things about SharePoint is that there are many ways of accessing the data. The most obvious is of course the web interface, but to accomplish thight integration with for example Office 2003, SharePoint offers a bunch of web services. These web services provide identically functionality as you get using the web interface; everything you can do in the web interface is possible using the web services! A nice example of the use of these web services is the integration with Office 2003. When you open a Office 2003 document that's stored in SharePoint, you'll get some extra information about the SharePoint site.

This weekend I struggled a little but with an installation of Windows SharePoint Services. I had a test server installed with ASP.NET and a SQL Server running on it; the goal was to install SharePoint that should be using the SQL Server instance instead of installing Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE). By default, the Setup installs an new instance of MSDE to use as database, even if there's a SQL Server available on the same machine. The trick is to use the remotesql command-line option with the setupsts.exe application. The only nasty thing is that first you have to run the STSV2.exe package, so the installation files are decompressed, and then abort the STSV2.exe package:

Sometimes you find a really cool site on the internet by checking your referrers. Nice work Chris and Charles! From their site:

Probably some old news, but today I stumbled over the Microsoft XSD Inference tool:

Did you ever wonder how you could replace the default generated test/help page of a web service by your own page? This could be useful in a number of situations: you could use your company lay-out, provide contact information or documentation, ... First of all: how is the default test page generated? There is a single ASPX file that takes care of this: DefaultWsdlHelpGenerator.aspx, which is located in the X:\<WindowsDir>\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\CONFIG directory (for the .NET Framework V1.1). It's possible to alter this file, but be aware it will have an effect for all web services running on that machine!

UPDATE: For solution when using WSE, see here!

Ted Neward (Editor-in-Chief of TheServerSide.NET) posted a link on this site to my previous post about Reporting in a SOA World. There are some intresting comments and links posted over there discussing how InfoPath can be (ab)used as a reporting engine: