Rainy days seem to wind up sunny, 
Long as you got a little spending money.

Jimmy Buffett, Spending Money

While vowing to continue to support the newsgroups (microsoft.public.*), Microsoft has put up an online forum.

Access the forum at http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/default.aspx. An explanation is provided by Jim Glass and the VSXUE Team

The next installment of my SharePoint series is now available:

Building a Searchable Phone Directory with Windows SharePoint Services
A standard item in every intranet is a staff/employee list. Most companies implementing Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) are large enough to have a database that contains all employees. We will use the aggregation features of SharePoint to include data from this database into our intranet.

I wrote before about how you could try Windows SharePoint Services without purchasing a license. Now, Microsoft's Technet site has created a virtual lab for SharePoint Portal Server. This includes a downloadable training guide and 90-minute blocks for each module.

If you are just evaluating SharePoint, this is a perfect opportunity.

Mike Fitzmaurice conducted a webcast on March 21st (view the webcast) that included a few demos. Those demos are now available on GotDotNet.

• SharePoint List Browser/Copier Demo Application
• Example of how to upload a file to a SharePoint library via the FrontPage RPC protocol
• SharePoint Document Library Event Handler for Parsing JPEG Images
• What's New Web Part for SharePoint Sites>
  

Mike Fitzmaurice
"I'm the developer evangelism contact within Microsoft for Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server."

He has only posted a few times, but the information is very relevant to WSS/SPS developers. The FrontPage RPC nugget is very timely for a project I'm on right now...

Full Source
Full Source is an Internet Explorer menu extension which displays the source Internet Explorer is displaying, directly from the Internet Explorer object model. This is useful wherever javascript is dynamically writing HTML into the DOM, or where XSLT has been used to generate HTML.

If you have ever looked at the source of a list edit form, you'll know that you need this utility!

Their other utility (Toggle Borders) is neat as well.

In Part 2 of my continuing series on Intranet Journal, I look at the basic installation of a corporate intranet and some basic customization options.

Thanks to Bob Mixon for his technical review.

I had an interesting email conversation today discussing SharePoint and it occurred to me that it is possible to try it out free of charge.

• Get the trial version of Virtual PC.
• Get the Windows 2003 Evaluation Kit.
• Add Windows SharePoint Services.

Jan. 12, 2006: Updated the links to point to the most recent versions.