EricScho's Blog

Life takes over

I am 110% at work right now and will be for the next month or so.  There are some significant career opportunities that I need to take advantage of.

I will still be watching all my regular blogs and posting when I find something particularly interesting, but I will not be as active as I have been.

Thanks.

Google Video

Search closed caption data and view screen shots for the resulting program with Google Video BETA.  I think this is pretty cool, don’t know what I would use it for right now, but if I wanted to find a show that contained specific dialog this would be a good way to do it.

When are they going to let me subscribe and view the download the resulting shows to my computer?  I would pay cable prices to be able to do that.

EBay Feedback

This guy knows how to leave proper feedback.

andy46477

Super SharePoint Tools

Just a couple links to some very handy SharePoint Portal Server tools, most of them solve problems that I have encountered and been able to solve easily with these tools, the rest just look really cool and have been added to my tool box for future analysis

• SharePoint Query Builder Tool

  I have worked with the SharePoint Search Engine a lot without this tool. From the looks of it this tool will simply that process quite a bit. [from Stramit's SharePoint Blog]

• Web Part Toolkit

  The most valuable tool in this toolkit for me is the SharePoint Configuration Analyser (also available here).  The configuration analyser provides a lot of helpful information about the current SharePoint Portal Server installation and can help figure out what is going on when a stubborn error is present and SharePoint is not providing a descriptive explanation.  There are some other tools in this toolkit I have learned a few things by looking at them using Reflector.

• SmartPart for SharePoint

  This is an excellent tool allowing web parts to be developed using ASCX UserControls and being able to take advantage of the visual design experience in Visual Studio .NET.

• Visual XPATH

  Although not SharePoint specific I have found this tool to be very useful when building DataView web parts or while working with any code that parses an XML document. Definitely worth a look.

• Internet Explorer Extender - Full Source

  Also not SharePoint specific but I find it very useful when JavaScript is editing the contents of a page. It allows you to see the current code that is being displayed in the browser complete with any modifications that scripts may have made to the contents.

This is my list of “Must Have” SharePoint or related tools.  Please respond in the comments if you think I missed any and I will update this post if I agree with you.

Enterprise Library coming soon

Microsoft’s Enterprise Library will be available for download on January 28th.  This product was developed at Avanade and has been adopted by Microsoft.  Very nice set of tools, check it out when it is available from the Microsoft Download Center.

Recycle Bin, a better way to move

Patrick Tisseghem points out something about Maxim and my Add a Recycle Bin to Windows SharePoint Services for Easy Document Recovery article that could have been better.  I agree with him 100% and apologise for over looking this method of moving a document from one library to another without hosing the meta data.

Thank Patrick!

WSS/SharePoint Recycle Bin

The article that Maxim and I wrote is getting a little bit of attention, I have gotten a few positive emails and the online article rating seems to be trending in a positive way.  If you read the article I would appreciate you rating it, it helps me to improve.

Here is a list from Technorati of other bloggers that are mentioning our article:

This blog has also received a number of additional links around the net due to the noise that this article has generated. Interesting.

Dodgeball

My company is having a big regional event in Las Vegas this weekend.  I’m a new hire and it looks like I get to play a dodge ball game against other new hire teams.  I’m looking at the rules and they don’t make a whole lot of sense, does not seem like the dodge ball I played in elementary school.

CapitalDesign update

I just updated my CapitalDesign.Controls project and I have decided for the time being to release my projects under the MIT license.  I’m calling the current CapitalDesign.Controls release v1 beta so that I can make some changes if anyone finds some immediate problems.   I am currently working on the SpsBrowse post, the actual control is in the assembly, you can find some information about it in the documentation and in the project post.

Comments?

NotificationHost, Internet Explorer Information Bar

Explanation:

I have appreciated the Information Bar's form of user feedback since it came out in the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox. I think that it is a clean unobtrusive way to communicate with the user. I developed this control so that I could simply drop it into my applications, directly onto a form or into another container such as a panel.

I have attended a few seminars that discuss alternative methods of interacting with the user and this is the one that I have always thought was the best. Some would argue that this is a complete replacement for message boxes, I don’t know if I agree with that assertion. I think that there is still a place for message boxes, this is simply an effective method of reducing the amount of message boxes in your application. Please let me know what you think, I'm very appreciative of all types of feedback.

Features:

• Provide the user with notifications without using obtrusive message boxes that interrupt the users experience and are often ignored when users simply reach for the OK button.
• Multiple notifications can be displayed at once.
• Each notification can be displayed for a custom period of time.
• Custom notification types can be developed using the provided INotification interface.
• Use custom events in your notifications to receive feedback from the user.
• Simple design time support. Design Time animation can be enabled or disabled using the DesignTimeDemo property.
• Provided BasicNotification type
  • Three different notification styles; information, warning, and error.
  • Left clicking on the notification will display a details windows that is similar to a typical message box.
  • Right clicking the notification will cause it to disappear immediately.
  • Clicking on the close button will cause it to hide without pausing for the remainder of it's display time.

Implementation:

All of these examples assume that a NotificationHost control has been added to a form and these code snippets are running in the context of that form.

• Display built-in BasicNotification using NotificationHost.DisplayTime:

  notificationHost.DisplayNotification(CapitalDesign.Controls.NotificationHost.BasicNotificationType.Error, "There has been an error.", "There has been an error and these are the details on how to resolve that error.");

• Display built-in BasicNotification using custom display time:

  notificationHost.DisplayNotification(CapitalDesign.Controls.NotificationHost.BasicNotificationType.Warning, "This is a warning.", "This is a warning telling the user that specific actions may result in unwanted results.", TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10));

• Display custom notification:

  CustomNotification cn = new CustomNotification();
  notificationHost.DisplayNotification(cn);

Images

A BasicNotification object displaying on a form.


BasicNotification object detail pop ups.

Links:

• CapitalDesign.Controls project