Paul Ballard's WebLog

Last year, I published a widely unread set of what I thought were humorous predictions for the technology world in 2007.  One of those items titled "AJAX 2.0" stated that Google would create a technology that makes it possible for web applications to access the local resources on the user computer, thereby recreating ActiveX.  This was an attempt at a joke aimed at the fervor with which the development industry jumped on the AJAX bandwagon after the technology had been around for years. 

I've been very pleasantly surprised with the number of people downloading the forms based authentication web parts I created.  I hope you find the code valuable.  I've also received via the comments section several questions about implementing one or more aspects of the solution.  I haven't had time to answer many of these lately and so I thought my loyal readership (up to 3 now!) deserved to know why.

My avid readers (both of you) know that I've done quite a bit of work around Outlook 2007 Form Regions in Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office.  If you missed those posts, you can read more about them here and here.  Form Regions are a great way to add custom functionality to Outlook forms but there's another way you can add features and Windows forms to all of the Office applications and unlike Form Regions (pre-Orcas) it's really easy.  Therefore one of my favorite features is Custom Task Panes.

Yesterday I had the honor of joining such names as Ken Getz, Tim Huckaby, and Robert Green by recording a webcast for MSDN in the VSTO Straight from the Experts Series.  In this webcast I demoed the FormRegionAddin templates I created for Visual Studio 2005 and showed how they worked under the covers to help make building Outlook 2007 Form Regions easier.  I also showed how the new Table object in the Outlook object model can greatly improve performance when working with itmes in folders. 

Kathleen McGrath has a great blog post about her favorite feature in the upcoming "Orcas" release of VSTO, the new Ribbon Designer.  The Ribbon Designer lets you extend the Office 2007 Ribbon interface with your own controls.  She even includes a video walkthrough of using the designer to create tabs, groups, and buttons.  She also points out some limitations in the Ribbon designer in that you can't directly reuse the button events from the Office product, i.e. you can't add a new button that calls Word's built-in Bold functionality.  Hopefully this is something that will be addressed in later CTPs.

In my prevous life as Editor for TheServerSide.NET, one of my favorite duties was to come up with ideas for .NET humor.  This took the form of several cartoons, "Top 10" lists, and one April Fool's news post that got MASSIVE linkage.  Unfortunately though, when a new humor item came out it tended to replace what was there and so prior cartoons where gone forever. 

SharePoint 2007 and MOSS 2007 are built on ASP.Net 2.0 which means they can leverage many of the same features of ASP.Net 2.0 including the AspNetSqlMembershipProvider for use with Forms Based Authentication.  While the ability to use the SQL based authentication exists in SharePoint, the other features like user registration and password recovery are not available.  So having some time on my hands I decided to create a custom web part for FBA sites to allow users to login, register, and recover their password.