This looks like a great web part to create charts from list data, completely server side. I am going to check this out soon!

Random ramblings from a frustrated man - ListCharts - new web part

Interesting if you want to play a bit with Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 without having to install the thing. If you want to get guided hands-on labs on Windows Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint Portal Server in Belgium, you can always check out http://www.xylos.be.

TechNet Virtual Lab: Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003

Interesting article about the use of blogs and wikis in an enterprise.

Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications?

I came across this product called Scalix. It is an email and calendaring application for Linux. I followed the online demo of the web client and it comes pretty close to Outlook Web Access 2003. Contrary to Exchange, the web client is just as rich in Firefox than in Internet Explorer. It supports context menus, drag and drop, spell check, rich text editing, full calendaring, search etc…

They also have a plugin for Outlook (fat client) that works just like the real thing.

I do not know how it works at the backend because I don’t have the time to install Linux and Scalix at the moment. Anyway, from the client side, it is a serious contender to Microsoft Exchange.

Scalix

Note: the Scalix webclient is a good example of the use of AJAX. Take a look here for more info.

I was playing around with MySite and imported a data view web part using a .dwp file. After refreshing the page, I got a nasty error. The error stated that the web part referenced a list that does not exist. From that moment on, I could not navigate to the http://…./MySite/default.aspx because it always gave me the same error.

How can you solve this? Just open the page like this: http://…./MySite/default.aspx?contents=1. You then get this (click the thumbnail):

From that page you can delete the offending web part.

You will probably know them from the single Warning Shots. It’s played a lot on StuBru. The cd is called The Cosmic Game.

It’s great stuff, one of their better ones to date. Relaxing…

More info about the cd on Amazon.

I bought a Linksys WRT54GS wireless broadband router to replace my old 3Com router. The 3Com had been discontinued so forget about firmware upgrades and such. The 3Com also had several issues including dropping the connection to my ISP. I had to reset the device more than once a day.

So I bought the Linksys because I got intrigued by the possibility of adding another firmware that supports much more stuff than the out of the box setup. I learned about these possibilities when I was playing with the NSLU2 (see other posts).

Almost immediately after I opened the package, I downloaded another firmware from http://www.sveasoft.com (Alchemy-6.0-RC6a v3.01.3.8sv) and put it on the WRT54GS. I then reset the box to factory defaults.

The configuration screens look the same as the ones of Linksys but there are many additional features. Among those features:

• DDNS to more providers, including zoneedit.com where I host my domain name
• VLAN configuration
• Transmit power boost (+900%, ouch…)
• WDS
• DNS Masq
• NTP
• PPTP Server
• SSHD
• Syslogd
• Telnet
• ….

The one feature I really wanted to try is WDS, together with my Apple Airport Express. I wanted to try that because the computer in the study room has a bad connection to the main AP. The Apple Airport Express is in the middle and the connection from the study to the Apple box is quite good. So I setup WDS and I must say that it works great. There are only a few things you have to do:

• On the WRT54GS, in the WDS admin page, enter the Wireless MAC of the Airport Express.
• On the Airport Express, configure a new wireless LAN: same channel as the main one, SSID need not be the same. To connect to the Internet, you specify WDS and you provide the Wireless MAC of the WRT54GS. The configuration of the Airport Express is done with the Airport Admin Utility.

More information about this can be found here: Inderjeet Singh's Blog.

I now have XP saying that signal strength is Very Good instead of Low. And streaming music from the mt-daapd server using iTunes works as well (it did not before, not enough bandwidth).

If you are looking for a high availability solution for Sharepoint, follow the link below. Although it is possible to create a secondary copy of the SQL database using log shipping and such, this solution from Neverfail seems to be more interesting.

Neverfail for SharePoint High Availability Solution and Disaster Recovery

This nifty free tool allows you to do just that… control iTunes from your Smartphone using a bluetooth connection. Gonna try this out soon.

ITunes Remote for Smartphone

UPDATE: I tried the application and it works very well. Not everything worked (yet), but the basic features did. And all done in the .NET Compact Framework!

I have been looking for a way to upload a file to a Sharepoint document library with metadata included. After searching a bit on the net, I found the FPSEPublish sample that uses Frontpage Server Extensions RPC methods to do it.

The zip file you can find in this post contains a binary called FPSEPublish.exe that you can use to test. Source code is included (C#) so you can implement this in your own application.

On our Sharepoint server, I created a test document library with some fields and then used the following command (one line).

fpsepublish putdoc http://portal/restricted/help/test.xls c:\test.xls Custom;SW|Test;Custom2;SW|Hi;Owner;SW|Geert;vti_title;SW|Title;Status;SW|Final;Desc;SW|Describe me"

How you set metadata is a bit strange.

• Syntax: fieldname;XW|value;fieldname;XW|value where X can be S for a string, I for an integer, B for a boolean.
• For the Title property, I had to use vti_title instead of Title.

This will prove to be very useful when we start to build custom applications that need to upload documents to document libraries and set metadata at the same time.

Now that we have deployed Sharepoint Portal Server (SPS), I would like to extend SPS to Pocket PC devices. One of the first things that came to mind was an application to retrieve a profile.

This is not terribly difficult.

On my machine I have Visual Studio .NET 2003 with the Pocket PC 2003 SDK. I created a new smart device project and threw a couple of controls on the designer.

As a test, the idea was to get my own profile from SPS. To get a profile you can use the UserProfile web service of SPS. I added a web reference to https://our server/_vti_bin/userprofileservice.asmx. We can only access SPS using https and since I want to use the Pocket PC application while on the road, I use the reference above.

Ok, time to attach some code to the Go button. The code looks like this:

Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

Dim up As New be.xylos.portal.UserProfileService

Dim usr() As be.xylos.portal.PropertyData

Dim usrprop As be.xylos.portal.PropertyData

Try

System.Net.ServicePointManager.CertificatePolicy = New cert

up.Credentials = New System.Net.NetworkCredential("user", "password", "domain")

up.PreAuthenticate = True

usr = up.GetUserProfileByName("profilename")

For Each usrprop In usr

ListBox1.Items.Add(usrprop.Name & ": " & usrprop.Value)

Next

Catch ex As Exception

MsgBox(ex.Message)

End Try

End Sub

This is actually it. There were two problems. The Pocket PC only supports basic and digest authentication, not NTLM. So I had to change the authentication settings on IIS. The second problem was a bit more difficult. Our server uses a self-signed certificate (temporarily). The Pocket PC application does not want to accept the cert and fails on it. This happens even if you turn off certificate checking (certchk off). The solution: add the following class to the project:

Public Class cert

Implements System.Net.ICertificatePolicy

Public Function CheckValidationResult(ByVal srvPoint As System.Net.ServicePoint, ByVal certificate As System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Certificate, ByVal request As System.Net.WebRequest, ByVal certificateProblem As Integer) As Boolean Implements System.Net.ICertificatePolicy.CheckValidationResult

Return True

End Function

End Class

As you can see from the first code snippet, the class is used in the line:

System.Net.ServicePointManager.CertificatePolicy = New cert

The cert class always returns True when CheckValidationResult is called so the properties of the cert do not matter.

That was all. When I run the application in the emulator, I get this:

Some stuff has been erased to protect the innocent.

Now I need to find some time to make this application more user-friendly. And possibly to add the ability to add information from the SPS profile to a contact. Some other time….

Interesting news. If the price is right and flaws in Sharepoint are fixed, it’s a good move.

More Microsoft server changes on tap for 2006 - Windows - www.itnews.com.au