point-n-click

Regular expressions are a representation of a grammar that helps computers and programs interpret and validate human input.  Unfortunately they are a huge time-suck and are a form of mental masturbation.  But one person's poison is another's Picasso; some regular expressions are like poetry to the mathmatically-bent computer scientists, and great debate has ensued over the best interpretation of RFC822 , the internet's email address specification.  Also, with the 16-Nov-2009 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN's) move to accept multi-byte, internationalized top-level domain names (IDN/TLD), I wonder how many hosts will need to update their assumptions in their regex.  Also I wonder what google mail, yahoo, amazon, ebay, facebook, or twitter might consider for their own RFC822 validation routines going forward. Since there seems to be as many regular expressions developed and published as there are email addresses, I'll contr...

I think its funny/slightly sad that very little about this list of URLs have changed since Heather Solomon wrote this information up  in July 2005 - 4.5 years later; this is a relevant and useful administrative list of URLs that are sometimes hidden depending on a few factors in your deployment: Portal and WSS Function Add to the URL Notes Manage List Template Gallery /_catalogs/lt/Forms/AllItems.aspx Manage Site Collection Users /_layouts/1033/siteusrs.aspx To access you must be an admin on the server or a site collection admin for the site. Manage Site Groups /_layouts/1033/role.aspx Manage Users /_layouts/1033/user.aspx Manage Web Part Gallery /_catalogs/wp/Forms/AllItems.aspx Site Usage Report /_layouts/1033/UsageDetails.aspx Site Usage Summary /_layouts/1033/Usage.aspx User Information /_layouts/1033/userinfo.aspx Web Parts Maintenance Page ?contents=1 Add to the end of the page URL Portal Only Function Add to the URL Notes ...

What do you call a smiling, SOBER courteous person at a SharePoint conference? A: The caterer. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some SharePoint consultants appear bright until you hear them speak. A good SharePoint consultant is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip. How many SharePoint consultants does it take to screw in a light bulb? How many can you afford? I always take SharePoint with a grain of salt, ...plus a slice of lemon, ...and a shot of tequila. Client says to SharePoint consultant - Well aren't you a waste of two billion years of evolution. SharePoint: working daily to make the human brain obsolete. I told my boss that everyone hates SharePoint. He said I was being ridiculous… everyone hasn't used it yet. SharePoint work is something you do that nobody notices until you don't do it. Top three things SharePoint Consultant won't say: You're right; we're billing way too much for...

I really love when a fix is simple. Back story : in this case, I am in the midst of using a combination of wspbuilder and spsource to reverse engineer, package up and deploy a few custom content types. wspbuilder is a codeplex Visual Studio extension that helps package up SharePoint code into a Solution file (WSP) for deployment. spsource is another tool that tries to analyse a SharePoint site and tease out a schema.xml for a list, and column & field information for a content type.  I use the term 'tries' because depending on how clean your dev environment is, your mileage may vary.  Problem description : when running WSPBuilder -> Build WSP, the output window in Visual Studio says Could not load file or assembly 'CabLib, Version=6.9.26.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=85376ef9a48d191a' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. It is my belief this problem is related to the installer not detecting/s...

A man and a woman are playing golf.  They are playing on this old, rustic course and they come to this old barn on the side of this course. The guy hits the ball over there, and he goes over: Guy: You know,  I'm going to take a drop and just forget about the barn, just take the stroke penalty. Wife: Wait a minute, honey. What if you just open up the doors and hit right through?  You don't have to take the penalty.  So he hits the ball, and it ricochets off something and ricochets off something else, hits his wife in the head, kills her dead . One year later, the guy is playing the same course.  Comes to the same hole.  He is playing with a buddy of his.  He pushes the ball into almost the same place.  And he tells his buddy Guy: Hey man, I'm just going to pick it up and take the stroke penalty.   Buddy: Hey man, no, you know what you should do?  Open up the doors and hit it right through - then you won't have to take th...

The problem statement is in MOSS 2007, when the user adds custom content types to an existing document library and then set them up to appear in the new document dropdown, MOSS still uses the default Document content type (though after saving, you can edit properties to set the correct content type - how undesirable!). Stephen Muller pointed me in the right direction for a fix, but mine differs slightly from his. Solution: Create a document library and set the default Document Template to None . i.e. do not select Microsoft Word, Microsoft Office Word 97-2003 template, etc. After the document library is created, do this within the Document Library Settings: Create Column s or Add from existing site columns go Advanced Settings > Allow managment of Content Types=Yes,    then Add from existing site content types then Change new button order and default content type and set the new content type up as #1 (for example)

When building custom workflows, often we want custom Task edit screens as well.  A custom Task Content Type allows us to collect much deeper data than 'completed'.  However, since we are ditching the default Task edit pages, we lose a couple of useful features; a link to the underlying Workflow item as well as the implied context of the Task. Given the need to provide context to the user when overrriding the default task form, you may come across the desire to display some file information, custom columns/properties, links, etc on the task edit page.   To accomplish this, we need to gain two pieces of understanding: How and when to modify ASPX page elements from the code-behind c# class How to extract the underlying information from the Workflow's original item When: during the page_load() of inherited class; protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!Page.IsPostBack) { ...