Sharad Kumar

Making system-file changes in “12 hive” folder of SharePoint is always a hot topic. Microsoft doesn’t recommend that unless you know what you are doing, and also has support clause against it. Despite that, there are numerous KBs at their support site which point to directions of making necessary changes by following steps that leads us to opening a file in “12 hive” and modifying to achieve the desired effect. I think – without much ado – that its important to assess what you intend to do, and when you certainly need to then there should be a manageable way to make changes to system-files that are otherwise part of SharePoint release. In my previous post I gave an example of a case when one needs to make “12 hive” changes; here are the high-level objectives…

Collaboration features on SharePoint 2007 are undisputedly excellent, but there is occasional quirk which impede serious usability. One of them is absence of left navigation, or “quick launch”, on custom created web-part pages in any SharePoint site. Though you can choose from various web-part page layout style during creation, there is no option to make the left navigation visible other than playing page-by-page with SharePoint Designer! In large utilizations, its impossible to go to each web-part page and hope to fix it in SharePoint Designer. Not everyone has it, nor they know how to play with mark-up of page/master page.

Stephen from SharePoint Designer Team had lately published a great article about options available to users for locking down SharePoint Designer 2007 (SPD). I review & re-visit that list to evaluate requirements missing, and what can be done by a developer to fill the gap of “selective lockdown”.

To my surprise, today when I checked out my Subversion repository – running VisualSVN on a Windows Home Server – it downloaded just as expected. Only when I made some changes, did I realize that something is wrong as I received following error!

Unit testing with SharePoint is never easy, especially when you aren't live. So is the case with ASP.NET and Silverlight etc. TypeMock is releasing a new bundle and below are details. Once I get to play little more, I'll share details... 

SharePoint storing BLOBs in SQL Server carry its overhead (cost, doc size & storage limits…) and when your farm grows you may want to consider using External Blog Storage API that was exposed with WSS 3.0 SP1, in early 2008. Later a project on Codeplex also became visible, for EBS implementation, but doesn’t seem to be accessible now. WSS SDK has been updated with documentation regarding “guidance” on how to implement your own EBS, but I think its bit high-level and leaves a daunting task for .NET developer. Especially if he is unfamiliar with unmanaged code! Apart from that, Kyle Tillman has a awesome 3 series post that goes to a great length describing the steps he took to implement his own, though he shy away from sharing complete code (employer concerns).

Well, I think this was super exciting new year gift that Microsoft gave to ahead-of-curve users and, most importantly, to its broader set of developers. No wonder, there was frenzy to download, now public, beta on announcement from Steve at CES 2009 and its rumored to have almost brought down microsoft.com!

Quick assortment of some cool commercials on YouTube: