I posted a new article to the SharePoint blog:

A description of the code and HTML to replicate Microsoft's Tool Pane user interface. Sample code is included.

We "launched" the beta site yesterday. The beta group has 25 users, all in the IT department, including the all-important help desk and training department. The "site" is really just one page -- and it contains only what is on the current home page. We don't want to throw new things out yet.

The page has three web parts, plus a fourth in the virtual server gallery. Two more parts are under development and will be added next week. These parts:

Announcements

Yes, I know that announcements are included. We have two years worth of announcements in the current system that don't really fit in the default announcement list. Also, we don't want a different interface for the end users, so we just brought over the existing code.

That code is from the old SQL Server Digital Dashboard. (That is a story for a different day!) The web part is just a DIV tag and a bunch of client-side script. The script uses the MSXML dll's to pull the announcement data from SQL (using SQLXML) and an XSL stylesheet from the legacy web server. The script runs the transformation to the innerHTML property of the DIV.

Long term, we'll migrate this data into a WSS list so that it is included with the search results. I expect that I'll need to keep the existing format, so I'll be using another custom part, or a custom view if possible.

Corporate Links

This is just a WSS list that is populated with specific links to our corporate websites. The end-users can only view this. The fun thing about this part is that I wrote a small .Net console application to populate the list using the WSS Web Services. (That console app will most likely grow to be the conversion program for the announcements.)

Intranet Navigator

This is the part with the custom toolpart. The top-level "units" of the organization are displayed. Click on one and it expands to show the child units. The other top-level items are then hidden. The tool pane allows you to select which down-level items are displayed in the initial view.

Department Roster

This is just a fancy phone list. Each of the department pages has this part to show their members. The part reads an SQL table related to the HR system, so the built-in members part was not used.

Our first feedback meeting is this afternoon.  I hope it goes well!

Steve Clarke, in my comments, points out a few other sites with information about CSS in WSS.

The same reference is over here:
http://www.sharepointcustomization.com/resources/tipstricks/wss_cssguide.htm

And for something even cooler, check out this version. Hovering over an element reveals the style:
http://www.frontpagedevkit.com/wss/articles/themes-custom2.htm#Identifying_the_styles_that_change_key_elements

Thanks Steve!!

I was looking throughout the SDK help file for these CSS Class Definitions and never did find them!! Of course, now that I've scoured the source of many pages, I find it...

I hurriedly wrote the post last night but did not have time to explain why.  My own little cliffhanger!

My part needs to get data from an XML file, both in “regular” mode and in “tool pane” mode. I figured that I could put the file in the ASP.Net application cache and grab it during On_Load(). This seems to be a bit different -- rather than having declared controls that show some data, I have data that defines the controls. This doesn't seem to match up well with the WebPart model.

So, I moved the XML load routine to On_Init(). But, a valuable lesson learned.

I posted a new article to my SharepointBlog titled ToolPane Customization. (I practice code re-use all the time -- even in the blog titles!) None of this is really ground-breaking, just some background on what I'm trying to do. I don't know how many parts the series will have, but I hope you'll stick around for the series.

I've been deep in coding my first web part. It is a rather complicated one, but I need to replicate one of the functions on our existing intranet site.  I'll post the details in a later post, because I want to document it carefully.

Any of you WSS developers out there, drop me a note. I know your out there, and I want to find you!!

Alex Chang writes about his experience installing WSS. Of particular interest is the discussion in his comments about included/excluded paths.

Thank you for all your efforts at "personalizing" Microsoft. I certainly appreciate it.

I know that you are working on bringing RSS throughout the company.  I would love to see a feed added to the "Columns" page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/using/Columns/default.aspx). In my opinion, this is one of the best areas of MSDN online.

From Christa Carpentiere:

The Knowledge Base is your friend

For about the umpteenth time, I've seen a newsgroup question on how to merge data from two or more DataTables responded to with a link to HOW TO: Implement a DataSet JOIN helper class in Visual C# .NET. This is just one in a series of KB articles on a DataSetHelper class that can be used to address common data merging and filtering questions. They can be handy - if you want to see what's available, just go to http://support.microsoft.com and search on "datasethelper".

Wow!  I knew that there where How To articles in the KBase, but I didn't know the depth of this subject. I wonder how much “gold” is in there...

The initial stress test went well. I was able to get over 1100 connections to each server. According to the test tool, I generated almost 300 requests per second.

One thing that I don't like about performance numbers is the vast quantity of them! I need to find more time to research the particular items to record to ensure that I am watching the right things. So, while the test was running, I fired up the browser and navigated to the site being tested.  I did not notice any difference. WOO HOO!!!!

For those interested, the servers each reported an average of 175 requests executed per second, which exceeds the 300 the clients reported. During the 15 minute test, 266,000 requests were issued with 2400 failed connections. (This is less than 1%, so we will most likely not follow-up until later.)

The performance is deemed acceptable, so now we push forward with a “beta” roll-out starting April 1st. I have a few parts to create, so it's off to the SDK.

I came across the following post:

From: Tom Rizzo [MSFT]
Subject: Free Chapters and samples on SharePoint 2003 Development
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.development
Date: 2003-10-06 22:42:29 PST

I just finished my Exchange and Outlook book (linked below) and the book was too long to include all the SharePoint material I wrote so we made it available for FREE on the mspress website. It's about a 500 page book on WSS and SPS 2003 development including web parts (basic, async, toolpane, toolparts, connections, galleries, etc) and the API (document libraries, lists, etc).

Be sure to download the supplemental chapters and also the sample applications for the book.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Enjoy!

Tom

--
Looking for a good book on programming Exchange, Outlook, ADSI and SharePoint? Check out http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/5517.asp

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

This is terrific stuff!!

I noticed a descrepancy on page F-68. When discussing the HtmlDesignerAttribute, there are a few examples. Look at these two (specifically, the bold part):

[HtmlDesignerAttribute(BrowserBuilderType.Dynamic,
"DialogFeatures=center:yes;dialogHeight=11;dialogWidth=12;status=no;"
+ "resizable=no;unadorned=yes;")]

[HtmlDesignerAttribute(BrowserBuilderType.Dynamic,
DialogFeatures="center:yes;dialogHeight=11;dialogWidth=12;"
+ "status=no;resizable=no;unadorned=yes;")]

The first example has DialogFeatures included in the quoted string, the second does not. I can't get either version to work in a VB project. Can anyone help?

Wayne Hall is asking about using a SharePoint list to track assets in IT.

Personally, I would not want to use the plain interface in SP lists for entering this much information. I would want a rich front-end experience (WinForm, InfoPath).

My preference would be to use an automated discovery tool (Altiris comes to mind) and integrate their back-end into my site.

I'm going to get 8-10 machines to act as drones for the test. They are old, retired desktops, but they can handle running 10 threads, with 10 connections on each thread, for a simulated load of 100 users each. That will definitely stress the system more than the user community.

As part of my setup/experimenting, I used the load balance administration program to stop one of the servers in the web farm. The other server picked up the load after a few seconds.  Out of 20,000 socket connections, only 100 failed! I expect that the ratio will be higher in the event of a failure, since the load balancer detection process has some latency. I did a similar "shut down" in the SQL Cluster, and the delay was about 45 seconds.  This will certainly impact the users more, but at least the backup machine will handle the load while I fix things.

So far, I'm very encouraged about our hardware.  I hope to get more testing done over the weekend.