Dot Net Mafia

There are a ton of tools out there to create SharePoint solution packages (.wsp files) for you, but it is still a good idea to know what those tools are creating for you exactly. Sometimes, things don't always work right, and you may need to customize...

Tulsa Tech Fest was a lot of fun last year and I am excited to be speaking at it again this year. This year, I will be giving a talk on Implementing Partial Trust in SharePoint . It should be a good talk in explaining how to create SharePoint solutions...

If you are using LINQ to XML, sooner or later, you will need to work with XML documents that don't use the namespace. For example, you might be working with the XML from an InfoPath form and you want to get the value of a particular element. InfoPath...

Well SharePoint MVP Andrew Woodward thinks so. Check out his paper on doing test driven development with SharePoint. His paper walks you through building a Web Part the TDD way. I haven't had a chance to read It but I'm really interested in this...

So you have written your first Silverlight application and deployed it to IIS but when you hit the page nothing happens. No error, nothing. You are just sitting there staring at a blank web page. Chances are you haven't registered the Silverlight...

Today, I am continuing in my How to series of posts. According to the stats, they have been quite popular, so I will keep them coming. We are going to talk about how to create a SharePoint security group. A group (represented by SPGroup) is an internal...

I was writing some client code that calls some .NET Web Services and getting a strange error. I wanted to post this just to warn people to watch out for the DateTime object and null values. I have two web services, one gets an array of Entity objects...

I recently needed to write a stored procedure that would take a search string from a web form and search three columns: name, description, and keywords. The keywords column and the input string can both be comma delimited. The key to the sproc is going...

As anyone that has worked with SharePoint knows, there is next to zero correlation to what something is called in the SharePoint UI with what it is called in the SharePoint API. A lot of this is due to the fact that they changed the name for most everything...

I have been doing some quite a bit of mentoring to new SharePoint developers lately and was asked the question of what the difference was between a .dwp and .webpart file and which one should be used. Yes, I know this is an intro topic but if you are...

I was pleased to see that a new version of the Faceted Search web parts had come out recently. On my last couple of projects, the Faceted Search worked, but it didn't quite meat all the clients needs. Mainly it didn't work with fixed queries,...

I am putting today's post out there in a hope of getting more of a feel for what the community does in regards to web parts. The question is when you need to write custom functionality on a SharePoint site (i.e.: a form, some fancy data binding code...

On the Google App Engine mailing list (of all places...in case you don't know, that's a python-only platform), I ran across this exchange recently: > > VB.NET is inelegant. > yeah I know I have C# it's more advanced, Now, this is one of those common stereotypes that irritate me. So I figured it was time to take a stick to that dead horse again....

I decided to go with an intro topic for Enterprise Search today. If you are like me, you often find yourself in a situation where you are doing ECM related activities such as creating custom content types that use site columns. This may present itself...

This post is going to assume that you already know how to create a custom master page for SharePoint. There are dozens of articles and posts explaining how to do this. This post is a quick tip about when you have already applied your master page to your...