"It's Silverlight, it's strong and tight, they got it right, try it tonight"

Over at Dan Wahlins blog you can listen to a new Silverlight song.

Go check it out and relax to some sweet Silverlight music.

- I know, I'm a geek.

Published: Apr-30-08 | 3 Comments | 2 Links to this post

SharePoint Forums WebPart : What's going on?

As a follow-up to my previous blogpost: "Forum Web Part for SharePoint" I thought I'd let you know the status of my personal pet-project.

I've been getting alot of feedback regarding the Forum WebPart which is soon to enter it's beta-testing stage. Thanks for the feedback in terms of the comments to my previous blogpost and all the emails I keep getting regarding the SharePoint Forum WebPart.

Status

The status of this project is as follows:

I'm currently trying to get as much done on the SharePoint Forum WebPart as I possibly can on my (few) free hours right now. I've got tons to tend to before I go to Egypt in May (which by the way will be awesome).

I plan to release it for alpha-/betatesting before I go on vacation to Egypt though, and I've been getting some response as to whom might be interested in testing it.
Unfortunately not everyone left their email, which makes it hard for me to contact those individuals.

So if you're not sure, or know that you didn't send over your email but you want to try the WebPart out, add a comment here and include your email. ;)

This is what the SharePoint Forum WebPart currently looks like:

Basic overview of all availible forums
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Basic overview of threads in a forum
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Basic features:

Forum Management

Manage what forums exists (Using the default SharePoint interface)

Thread Management

Manage threads (Using the default SharePoint interface)
Create new threads (Using a custom interface) - ugly as hell

Post Management

Manage posts (Using the default SharePoint interface)
Create new posts (replies) - also ugly as hell :)

Breadcrumbs

[Home] > [Forum] > [Thread]

Forum Statistics

Last post
Last poster
Total posts
Total threads
Total forums

Paging (WebPart Property, meaning you can set this property yourself to a desired amount of items per page)
Theming

Supports all built-in themes
Supports custom made themes
(All styles for the forum is using the built-in SharePoint CSS classes)

etc. etc.

Feedback, suggestions, comments and all of that

This is still a work in progress, and I'd like for YOU to leave a comment with suggestions about functionality, accessibility, usability, usage, features etc.

Thanks for tuning in, see you around!

Published: Apr-28-08 | 311 Comments | 20 Links to this post

Office Labs site launched - I urge you to check it out!

All I can say is, go check out "Office Labs" for yourself (click here).

And by the way, DO check out the "Community Clips" section. It's awesome.

That's all I had for now, back to coding some enhancements on the Forum WebPart which is coming along nicely... Just wish one had more time ;)

Published: Apr-28-08 | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Forum Web Part for SharePoint

People have been requesting a better discussion forum functionality than the one in SharePoint by default. I took that request and made it into a new personal project of mine.

Currently the forum looks like any forum you see on the web, but it's using- and is based entirely on SharePoint and the SharePoint database (no need for additional SQL setups etc).

I can only give you a preview of how it looks so far, there's still some issues to take care of before the first beta will be released for those interested in testing it out.

The Forum WebPart supports theming and therefore you can simply design your own theme, or use a built-in theme in order to modify the look and feel to adjust itself to your SharePoint site.

As seen with one theme
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As seen with another theme
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Feedback please

Some people have requested to be betatesters for this WebPart when it's being published to beta.
If you're interested in being a betatester, please leave me a comment and you'll be one of the first to try it out.

If you've got some comments and/or suggestions in general for a Forum Webpart like this, please leave a comment.

Thanks for tuning in again, see you around!

Published: Apr-15-08 | 29 Comments | 1 Link to this post

Italy next - arrivederci for now!

We're going to Italy with our company (350+ nerds).

It'll be a blast and we'll stay there until this Sunday.

Keep your eye out for new posts when I get back - I've got some nice ideas cooking.

Published: Apr-10-08 | 1 Comment | 1 Link to this post

Pingback/Trackback hell with EBE 2.0 Final

As many of you have noticed, I'm getting a whole lot of spam in my ping- and trackbacks - Enhanced Blog Edition for SharePoint is missing some kind of spam-check for the trackbacks.

I will get to it to clear them out as soon as possible, but I'm going to Italy tomorrow and got tons of things to tend to before that.

Hang in there ;)

Published: Apr-09-08 | 9 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Tip: RequestAccessEnabled programatically using the SharePoint Object Model

I bumped into a strange problem today. It wasn't hard to solve, but worth mentioning.

To manually enable the option to request permissions to the site, you do this from Site Actions - Site Settings - Advanced Permissions - Settings - Access Request.
From that page you can specify if users should be able to request permissions to the site, and who should receive the email.

RequestAccessEnabled via code instead

No worries so far, but this time I had to do this through code upon dynamically creating a new site. This means that we need to speak to the object model in order to get things right...

When you consult MSDN, it clearly states that this property ( web.RequestAccessEnabled ) is a get/set property which you can get or set via code. However this is not the case. It's a get-only property which means that you can't really use it to enable access requests.

This is simply solved by using the somewhat similar property called RequestAccessEmail. So, if you do web.RequestAccessEmail = tobias@zimmergren.net; you're automatically enabling the request access for that site.

Now your users can simply see the "Request Permissions" link in order to submit a request to the specified email-address in order to join the site.

(Just a tip to those of you who read MSDN and tried to follow it blindly ;)

Have a good day.

Published: Apr-09-08 | 1 Comment | 0 Links to this post

The attack of the RSS - Sorry

As I've been re-writing some (many) of the URLs in my blog people have been complaining that they got duplicate RSS entries.

The URL re-write took about 20 minutes, under which period a total of 7 people sent me the comment that my RSS was fubar - Now it's fixed :)

Thanks for tuning in, and thanks to David for noting the errors in the URLs.

Published: Apr-09-08 | 2 Comments | 0 Links to this post

CKS:Enhanced Blog Edition - Enable Search

The other day I started coding a custom searchfunctionality to use with the Community Kit for SharePoint's Enhanced Blog Edition (CKS:EBE) - which is what this blog is running on.

However, while it would be fun and all to create a new custom search functionality for the EBE - someone beat me to it.

Daniel over at ZevenSeas has posted a blogpost on the subject and explains what the searchbox can do.

You can download the project on codeplex here.

Screenshots of the searchbox in use with the EBE:

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Hope that you can find some good use for this searchbox, it's working really good to be honest. Good work Daniel.

Some more customizations are to be done, then I'm set for tonight and will shortly begin my Silverlight 1.0 integration blogpost which I've postponed for too long now.

Cheers

Published: Apr-01-08 | 7 Comments | 1 Link to this post