The website for the SharePoint Best Practices conference is now up. Visit the site to see the agenda and register.

Occasionally, I see a question about determining if a given installation is MOSS or simply WSS. I am unaware of any Object Model method or property that indicates this, but I did find a different way. The User Profile service is a web service that is included in MOSS and not WSS. So, if the asmx file exists, then MOSS is installed.

Here is a code snippet:

Daniel Larson has been sending smoke signals for the last week about using the RunWithElevatedPrivilege (RWEP) method. He finally goes into further detail today with his cautionary tale and a recommended SPUserToken work-around.

I have seen several programs that use RWEP to accomplish updates on behalf of a user. (In fact, I use the method in the Image Upload Web Part.) In this circumstance Daniel is advocating using impersonation via the SPUserToken for the "System Account." I believe this to be sound advice and will be updating my code accordingly.

We released an update to our product today. DeliverPoint :Permissions v3 includes a limited-functionality license for free. All the details can be found on http://www.deliverpoint.com.

All of us at Barracuda are excited about this product. And we've hit our groove with quarterly releases, which means you can expect much more going forward!

The governance of SharePoint has been a hot topic lately, championed by Joel and the SharePoint product team. And many are discussing the best practices in deploying SharePoint. The MVPs who wrote the book (literally) are hosting a conference to discuss these topics.

I will be part of the developer roundtable at the Regional SharePoint Conference being held by the SharePoint User Group of DC (SUGDC). Hope to see you there!  

Windows Network Load Balancing error:

Starting update...
Going to bind NLB...
Bind operation failed.
Update failed with status code 0x80041002

Turns out that the Network Load Balancing service must be installed before attempting to configure the cluster.

Introduction

The out-of-the-box Image Web Part can be used to display an image on a site. The web part has a property that specifies the web address of the image. For most site members, this is problematic – how do they get an image on the web site? And how do they determine the web address? For power users, these steps are understood, but are time consuming to complete.

The Image Upload Web Part will allow the site member to browse their local computer for the image. Once the image is selected, the web part will automatically upload the image to a location specified by an administrator and set the web address.

The result is a solution that works for both groups. Site members can display pictures from their computer and administrators can provide storage for those pictures with changing the permissions of their site and with minimal training.

More information available in the download or at the project's page on CodePlex.

My recommended reading list on the right is woefully out of date. It is on my to-do list, but in the interim I want to call out Ben Curry and Bill English's book on SharePoint Best Practices. It is not yet available, but you can pre-order on Amazon.

Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 Best Practices (Pro - Other)

I will be speaking at the MOSS Camp in St. Louis on April 5th. I will giving an overview of the Porting Workflows project and community site.

Hope to see you there!