Shane is rallying the troops on WSSv3 customization.

I started the process on Friday afternoon, so you may need to adjust each days activities...

Day 1 (afternoon)

Create Virtual Machine and Virtual Disk; Install Windows 2003 Server R2; Download 32 patches from Windows Update.

Day 2

Watch A.J beat the Cubs in the ninth-inning sandwich by the World Cup semi-finals.

Day 3

Mow lawn; Buy new garage door opener; Pay for installation (It is a hardware problem!); Other honey-do's.

Day 4

Work on a setup project for the SharePoint Forums WebPart.

Day 5

Independance Day parade, cook-out and fireworks.

Day 6

Download and install WSS and its prerequisites. Ian Morrish has them summarized on his demo site.

Day 7 (morning)

Configure Forms Authentication using tips from Nick Swan and code from the ASP.Net Quick Start. (In an interesting intersection of old and new, I used Notepad to create an ASP.Net 2.0 application!)

The SharePoint Team has done a fantastic job! 

Bil Simser is bootstrapping a community publishing site. Kick it!

Symptom:

When performing a search on a WSS page that has been customized, the standard WSS error page displays with the message "Unable to validate data"

Cause:

The search box is rendered via the <SharePoint:ViewSearchForm> tag. In the customized pages, this tag was inside the <form runat="server"> tag

A new Technical Article is online discussing the cases in which Dispose() should be called.  A must read for all SharePoint developers.

Best Practices: Using Disposable Windows SharePoint Services Objects

One of the patches on June 13, 2006 is causing problems on some pages. A few pages to review to get up to speed and the work-around:

InfoWorld's article

KBase Article

MSDN Technical Article with the work-around

InfoWorld posted an article describing some of the things that cause visitors to leave. One of those things -- flashing ads that distract the reader.

On the page, I'm sure you can guess what I saw...

The SharePoint Team blog has another entry today: Configure it out

Read the post carefully and you can discover additional details about the next version. My favorite -- "simultaneous vanilla LDAP & Windows auth (on separate URL namespaces, both hosting the same base content)."

I knew that non-Active Directory authentication was coming, but this is huge! Employees authenticated via AD, external users authenticated in a different fashion. If the external connector license is reasonable, SharePoint deployments should grow dramatically. (As if they weren't already!)

Some time ago, Infotech Canada release a theme pack for WSS. But, if you want a custom theme that looks exactly like you want, you should get in touch with Heather Solomon. First-class!

Todd Bleeker has a great explanation of sites and other SharePoint nouns.