Microsoft Webcasts Tech·Ed 2004 Series

http://www1.msteched.com/content/webcasts.aspx

Again yesterday, Microsoft released updates to the SDK. These new versions don't seem to be much different from those released recently, except the default installation path is under Program Files. It seems the integration with Office is occuring at the documentation level as well.

There are two different downloads:

• SharePoint Products and Technologies 2003 SDK
• Windows SharePoint Services 2003 Software Development Kit (SDK)

The first one is a superset of the second, adding information about Portal Server.

Kent Sharkey posted the regex code necessary for ASP.Net to recognize Firefox & Netscape 7.1.

If I understood regular expressions, I would provide the update for Safari.  But I don't, so instead I'll provide you with the User Agent strings for the various versions.

This SDK also includes new documentation for the Web Part Page Services Component (WPSC),

Download here.

From John West, Principal Consultant with Microsoft:

Default Security Rights

The TechNet article John cites:

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies: Technical Overview

I added an article to my SharePoint blog that describes Setting the DisplaySize on a Text Field.

When the form for a list is displayed, the input box for a single-line text field is always big -- regardless of the max length specified for the field. Why?

I don't have the answer, but I did hack a work-around. Most of the code necessary to display a different size box is already part of the product, so it's a relatively benign hack.

Details later...

Another thing I discovered...

Defining a relation/contraint between two tables in the DataSet designer does not always create the DataRelation in the resulting DataSet object.

I use strongly-typed datasets. I like the intellisense and it IsXXXNull methods. And I bind them to data grids. Everything is good.

When acting on a datagrid in ItemCreated or ItemCommand, it is common to access the underlying data. This is acheived via e.Item.DataItem. When a grid is bound to a DataSet or DataTable, this property returns a DataRowView. My lovely, strongly-typed object is gone. :(

I needed to build a page that displayed hierarchical data. So, instead of binding my grid to a DataTable, I was binding to a GetChildRows method, which is a DataRow(). My strongly-typed DataRow is back!!!

To get the strongly-type datarow without a relation, bind to dataSet.dataTable.Rows.

Mr. Vasters is the author of the dasBlog blogging engine that powers this site. If you use dasBlog, provide your feedback here.

New page from Microsoft: SharePoint Portal Server Technical Library

A while ago, I upgraded my dasBlog installation to version 1.6.  I finally got around to looking at the new features, and found the drawArchiveMonths macro. This is now included, on the left below the categories.

Interestingly, it was one year ago when I vanished from the blogosphere (I don't like that word!). I'm determined to prevent that from happening again!

I need to bind a dropdown list control to some data from an XML document. Initially, I tried to specify the DataSource as a node list and the DataText & DataValue properties to “@attribute_name”. No luck.

Thanks to the internet, I found the ASP.NET DropDownList XML Binder Class from the XML for ASP.Net site. This class is written to read an XML file from the specified path and create the ListItems that are added to the control.  It's not databinding in the same sense as ASP.Net, but it works!

The class uses an XMLTextReader. Since I already have a document, I can use the XMLNodeReader and I'm done.