This may be old news but I just noticed that Bob Fox (Microsoft SharePoint MVP) has an article published on "Improve SharePoint 2007 design and navigation with managed paths" over on the http://searchexchange.techtarget.com website. In my opinion "managed paths" is a very important piece of a SharePoint solution and if you haven't checked out the article then please give it a read.

Cheers,
Michael

A week before I switched over to my new blog I had an email conversation with some colleagues about what 3^rd party software product could be used to collect stats for a SharePoint 2007 site beyond the out of the box tools and Google Analytics came up. I didn't know anything about this product so I figured that I would give it a test drive on my new blog and surprising enough there was a section in my admin area just for such a thing and it used Google Analytics as an example.

I went out to Google and signed up for Google Analytics and started the registration and during that process it gave me some JavaScript code to put into my Tracking script section (shown above) and once I did this and saved my changes I went back and had Google Analytics recognize that the code was in place and then the registration was complete. The next day all my tracked traffic was presented in 3 different main areas (Visitors, Traffic Sources and Content). Each area allows you to drill down into the stats to get very precise information. For example, Visitors area has a sub area called Map Overlay and this area displays a flat map of the world and shows where the visitors came from. For the United States it drills down to the state and then city level. For other countries it goes straight down to the city level. So far I'm really impressed with what it gives you for free and I've just probably just skimmed the surface of this product. To be honest Google Analytics is over kill for my blog but it would be a great product for a retail site or something along those lines because it gives you great details about the people using your site and how they got there.

Well enough of me rambling on about this tool but I just wanted to share my experience about it because I thought it was a very nice tool.

Cheers,
Michael

I'm happy to say that I'll be speaking at the Orland Code Camp on March 22^nd and the code camp is already at 92 percent capacity. I'm really excited about this code camp because I'll be doing my InfoPath 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 session but will be adding FBA (Forms Based Authentication) content into the mix. I'm really not sure if it will be a good idea to add the extra complexity to the session but I wanted to change it up a little because I've been doing the same presentation for the last 3 or 4 code camps. In this presentation I'll be writing code into the VS 2008 VSTO project and showing how to debug the InfoPath 2007 form after it has been deployed to InfoPath Forms Services. In the future I'll be building a new .NET Class for retrieving the FBA user information like I do for AD user information and show how the code will know which user data store to query. Below are a few links for the Orlando Code Camp and I hope to see you there.

Orlando Code Camp home page

http://www.orlandocodecamp.com

Registration Page

https://www.clicktoattend.com/register.aspx?eventid=124997

Cheers,
Michael

Last week B&R Business Solutions won a contract for a SharePoint and FBA installation and that got me on the kick of FBA again. Last weekend I built some code to retrieve the username for a FBA user and during that process I ended up wanting to debug my browser based InfoPath 2007 form. This was going to be the first time for me to try this because in the past I've always made my forms code free because I never wanted any of my clients to maintain code for InfoPath 2007 form if it could all be built in Visual Studio Web Service or Class project. My thought was it should be extremely easy to do because I had a Visual Studio 2008 VSTO InfoPath 2007 project and the form was web based. I was hoping debugging was going to be as easy as SharePoint debugging is and believe it or not it was. To debug my web based form all I had to do was attach the w3wp.exe process where my InfoPath 2007 web based form was running under to my Visual Studio 2008 VSTO InfoPath 2007 project and set my break point in the code. I was really surprised it was this easy to do because I was guessing that there had to be something funky to make it work but I was totally wrong.

Since I'm doing this extra SharePoint/FBA project with Nas, I only suspect that I will do more things with InfoPath and FBA. Most likely I will end up building a new .NET Class for retrieving FBA user information based off user id for pre-populating web based InfoPath 2007 forms.

Well it's time for me to get some sleep because I've a lot of things to do tomorrow. I hope everybody has a great weekend.

Cheers,
Michael

My current assignment has made me get back into the groove of SharePoint web part development and I really have enjoyed it a lot even though my love is really with InfoPath 2007 and InfoPath Forms Services. The code that I'm doing is unfortunately not something I can share but I can still talk about what I did and what resources I used to solve my situation.

This project has several custom web parts and they all have a date columns and the company is international (does this sound familiar). So I started to look at how to change the date format to be dd-mmm-yyyy but one of their requirements was that they wanted all date fields to have the same format no matter if it was custom or out of the box. After I learned this information I already knew deep down dd-mmm-yyyy date format was out of the question because of time constraints and I didn't have the option to create new definitions or use SharePoint Designer (I'm still not 100% sure if I could have accomplished this with those options). I then turned my focus on using the Regional Settings option under Site Administration from the site Settings.aspx page.

I noticed when I changed the Locale all the dates would change even the date fields in the custom web parts without any extra code. I thought this was a great thing and then it dawned on me that we could just educate all the users on how set their personal My Regional Settings and then all the dates would change without any extra code.

When I tested this I discovered that all out of the box dates changed but none of the custom dates changed. After I discovered this I started researching and found the following links and discovered how to format the date per the Locale from their My Regional Settings page if it was different from the site Regional Settings page. Find the necessary information and putting it together was not difficult at all but there wasn't just one source that had all the information.

I found this link and it gave me the information about the Locale ID that is specified in the My Regional Settings that I needed.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spregionalsettings.localeid.aspx

This link gave great information on how to format dates with Locale ID

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5hh873ya.aspx

This link showed me how to get the current user object from the SPWeb object, which has the regional settings information

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/08/02/OfficeSpace/default.aspx

This solution really didn't take that long to put together and it was really easy to find all the information I needed through the search engines. When SharePoint 2003 was released a solution like this would be nearly impossible or couldn't be done. Over the last year and half I've been really impressed how much more versatile SharePoint 2007 is compared to the older version and I can't wait to see the new changes for the next version of SharePoint.

Cheers,
Michael

The post didn't go as well as I was hoping but I think the 2 major problems listed below are just configuration issues but time will tell.  The third problem probably will not be fixable but it's not a major thing for me.  Below are the problems that I had with this post.

• Images didn't upload to the blog but I'm thinking it's just a configuration issue
• Originally the bullets were numbers but I'm sure this is something I did incorrectly on my part
• The post wouldn't publish because the category didn't already exist.  Once I created the category manually then the post published with no problems.

I'm probably going to give it a couple more tries before making my mind up on it but overall I think it was pretty nice to use and I hope I can get the problems fixed or find reasonable work a rounds.

Cheers,
Michael

********* Original Post *********** 

Several months ago I discovered the option "New blog post" in Word 2007 and I was really interested in it but never tried it because I was using community blog host and I didn't want to cause any problems for that host so I just didn't do anything with it. When I switched over to BlogEngine.NET an open source platform and paid for my own hosting I figured I would try it and see if I liked the Word 2007 option. Below are the steps that I took to setup Word 2007 and publish my first blog entry from the software.

• I opened Word and clicked the "Office Button" and then the "New" icon. Then I highlighted the "New blog post" and clicked the "Create" button.

• Then I was presented with the "Register a Blog Account" screen and clicked the "Register Now" button.

• The "New Blog Account" screen appeared next and I picked the appropriate entry in the dropdown list, which was "other blog" for me because I'm using BlogEngine.NET.

• The "New Account" screen was the next to appear and for me I changed the API dropdown list to "MetaWebLog" and then for the "Blog Post URL" I used "http://blog.michaellotter.com/metaweblog.axd". The user name and password is the username and password that you use for signing into your blog. Once everything is filled in then click the "OK" button.

• Since everything was successful I received the "Account registration successful" pop-up window and then everything was ready to go after the "OK" button was clicked.

For this post I also added a new category called "Word 2007" and I did this by clicking the "Insert Category" option. Now I was ready to post it and I went ahead and saved it to my hard drive for safe keeping and then clicked the "Published" button.

Cheers,
Michael

Just recently I download and installed the IE 8 Beta 1 on my Windows Server 2003 SP2, Visual Studio 2008, Office 2007 SP1 and MOSS SP1 virtual machine because I was really curious if it was going to break anything and I just wanted to check out the new features of IE 8.  I’m happy to say after an easy install and a quick reboot that I’ve had zero problems viewing my web based InfoPath forms.  Some of the new features are really nice and I look forward to the full release whenever that will be. I'll be using IE 8 beta 1 for all my code camp demo from now on that way I can get some good testing in.

Cheers,
Michael