Steve Pietrek - Everything SharePoint

My continuous learning of SharePoint…

Archive for January, 2008

Sleepless in Chicago - All Night SharePoint, Office, and Silverlight Training

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 30, 2008

I’m heading to Chicago tomorrow for the Sleepless in Chicago event. Pretty psyched, though a little nervous about staying up all night. I usually in bed by 10:30 pm every night and can’t remember the last time I stayed up past 2:00 am let alone all night.

Wish me luck!

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Links (1/30/2008)

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 30, 2008

  1. **** New Web Part: Access Checker
  2. SharePoint Object Model Tips
  3. Google Search Web Part
  4. Sharing Links: Adding User Help to Web Parts
  5. Open Source Faceted Search for MOSS 2007 and Microsoft Search Server 2008 - Part 1 of 2
  6. StarLight put a smile on MOSS - another public-facing MOSS site
  7. Configuring SSL in SharePoint 2007 development environment
  8. SharePoint site by any other name
  9. Dashboards for WSS 3.0 Part II Apply the XSLT to the Data View (DVWP) using SharePoint Designer
  10. Fun with Group Policy
  11. Can I store terrabytes of data in SharePoint?
  12. To transform Windows Server 2008 in a Workstation (to directly develop on MOSS 2007)
  13. OpenSearch provider for MOSS search
  14. STSDEV: Simple Tools for SharePoint 2007 Development
  15. SharePoint is really an enterprise operating system
  16. Generating MOSS Features with CTFC (Content Type Feature Creator)
  17. How to programmatically monitor SharePoint
  18. Image Tab Navigation Using the SharePoint Content Editor Web Part
  19. SharePoint Enhanced Blog Edition Sites
  20. SharePoint Great Platform for .NET Developers
  21. Central Administration and Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) (issues with Content Deployment and SP1)
  22. SharePoint Security (RunWithElevatedPrivileges)
  23. Adding values to sharepoint lists
  24. How To: Adding a Content Type to a List the Correct Way
  25. Attachment: tool for creating columns and content types
  26. Integrating business systems with Office and SharePoint
  27. SharePoint 2007 Design Tip: Import your CSS for SharePoint Themes

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Custom Application.Master: Script error when creating new list column

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 30, 2008

OK, learn something new everyday. After the success of creating a custom application.master and applying it correctly (I am currently using Method #1 until I can find the time to do an application development method), I ran into an issue creating a new list column. Within IE7, I received an “undefined or null” script error. Firefox wouldn’t do anything.

Fired up Firebug and reviewed the SubmitPage() method. Set a few breakpoints and realized the FrmSubmit object is undefined. Doh!

Realizing the FrmSubmit information is set by the PlaceHolderUtilityContent placeholder, I quickly saw my error. The problem was I had embedded the PlaceHolderUtilityContent placeholder within the main <Form>. Moved the following line outside of </form> but above </body> and I am good to go.

<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderUtilityContent" runat="server"></asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

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Customize application.master

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 29, 2008

I have been doing some research on customizing application.master. I found a good KB on Microsoft’s web site listing two ways to customize application.master.

  1. Customize the files in the Layouts folder (recommended)
  2. Create a custom Layouts folder

The two methods above work well.

I have been messing around with an application development method using a feature, HttpModule, and SPWebConfigModification. The premise of the feature is for every page, in the PreInit event, I check to see if the page’s current MasterPageFile is application.master. If it is, I set the MasterPageFile to my custom application.master. I plan on blogging on this method soon.

Posted in SPAdmin | 1 Comment »

Error: Cannot convert type ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.DelegateControl’ to ‘System.Web.UI.IAttributeAccessor’

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 29, 2008

Today I was modifying application.master and ran into the following error:

“Cannot convert type ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.DelegateControl’ to ‘System.Web.UI.IAttributeAccessor’”

Instead of following my own advice on disabling My Site and My Links, I commented out the two lines in the custom Master File I created. I copied the commented code from my custom Master File to application.master. When I refreshed the page, I received the error above. At least for the two lines I commented out, SPD adds characters for spaces and such. It does not cause any issues for end-user Master Pages but it does for application.master. Figuring that was the issue, I put back the correct code and uncommented. Error went away.  

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Links (1/27/2008)

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 27, 2008

  1. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Template: Product and Marketing Requirements Planning (productplanning.exe)
  2. Office SharePoint Server Health Check Datasheet (Office_SharePoint_Server_Health_Check.pdf)
  3. Announcing: Design and build sites for Office SharePoint Server 2007
  4. DOCTYPES and SharePoint
  5. New SharePoint Developer Tool: STSDEV
  6. New SharePoint Tool: SharePoint Cross-site Configurator
  7. Master Page stsadm commands
  8. New design document on Microsoft SharePoint team blog
  9. How to backup and truncate all log files in a database
  10. WSS FAQ additions and corrections XC (?LXXXX?) - 20th - 26th January 2008
  11. SharePoint Lists as DataTables
  12. SPSiteDataQuery limited to 10 document libraries confirmed by Microsoft
  13. SharePoint Internals: InternalName versus DisplayName
  14. Workflow in VSTO 2008
  15. Getting into MOSS when you are don’t have permission
  16. Lookups with Lists that Reside in Different Sites
  17. Why WSS? Why not MOSS?
  18. Web Part with Toolbar
  19. 2007 Office System Logical Architecture Diagram
  20. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Complete Installation
  21. SharePoint is positioned as a leader within the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals products
  22. What is a Shared Service Provider in MOSS 2007?
  23. Creating a SharePoint Solution Package (.wsp) in 5 steps
  24. Overview: ASP.NET AJAX and Web Parts in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
  25. Case Study: AMD Deployment on Windows Server 2008 and SharePoint Server 2007 is Faster and More Manageable
  26. Remove Web Part ToolParts
  27. Modify the lengths of List Form Fields
  28. Crawling case-sensitive Web content in SharePoint Server 2007 and Search Server 2008
  29. SharePoint 2008 Conference Session Details Available - I’ll be there. Anyone else?
  30. Generating Custom Site Columns and Custom Content Type features from the content database
  31. SharePoint Internals: SPList.GetItems

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Links (1/24/2008)

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 24, 2008

  1. **** UPDATED: Base Master Page - DOCTYPE
  2. **** Download SharePoint 2007 Best Practice Analyzer (sharepointbpa.exe) for WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007
  3. **** How To Enable People Search
  4. **** Which Doctype to use with SharePoint 2007?
  5. **** Two new MOSS 2007 WCM Publishing Site Visual How To’s
  6. **** Silverlight Media Player and SharePoint v2
  7. **** STSDEV - SharePoint code generator - STSDEV is a proof-of-concept application that demonstrates a simple code generator for create SharePoint 2007 development projects targeting Visual Studio. The fact that the STSDEV utility generates project code in a repeatable fashion also makes it possible to build Visual Studio solutions for SharePoint development that adhere to best practices.
  8. Mail merge using SharePoint contacts
  9. Integrating an Asp.Net Application into our SharePoint Portal
  10. Web Part Design: Make Life Easy for Your Users
  11. Searching PDFs, or Using Adobe’s PDF IFilter with WSS 3.0 sp1
  12. How To Extend Wildcard People Search on MOSS 2007
  13. Dashboards for WSS 3.0 Part I The Stylesheet
  14. How To: Add a link to the Top Navigation Bar of a Site
  15. Overview of Backing Up and Restoring Data in Windows SharePoint Services
  16. Theming a SharePoint Site
  17. Sychronizing with Windows SharePoint Services, Part 1
  18. Synchronizing with Windows SharePoint Services, Part 2
  19. Backup, restore and migration of sites on SharePoint 3 pt. 1/3
  20. Backup, restore and migration of sites on SharePoint 3 pt. 2/3
  21. Backup, restore and migration of sites on SharePoint 3 pt. 3/3
  22. Common Authorization flaw in Web Applications: Why disabling buttons (or other controls) is not enough?
  23. InfoPath forms deployment, SharePoint workflow in VS 2008
  24. Content Types: The little engine that could…
  25. Look and feel > Navigation link missing!
  26. Programmatically Add and Remove Items from the Quick Launch Bar
  27. Force a Full Crawl for a Site
  28. Adding a description for a URL in a links list via code
  29. Allow rich HTML text (e.g. Bold, Italic, etc.) via C# code for a multi line text field using SPField
  30. Security Trimming WebControls and ASP Objects
  31. Take SharePoint Content Offline - Colligo Reader
  32. Creating Web Applications Programmatically
  33. Do you miss the old SharePoint Add Web Parts task pane?
  34. Space in column names - “End Use” becomes “End_x0020_Use”
  35. Useful Links on MOSS 2007
  36. How capitalization effects STSADM -o addsolution - hmm, good advice
  37. Multi-valued (ARRAY) Comparisons only for Choice fields
  38. Using Silverlight in your SharePoint 2007 Applications
  39. Developing custom MOSS 2007 SharePoint Workflows on a remote Workstation
  40. BDC Mapper Web Part from Lightning Tools
  41. WSS List DataSource
  42. 7 Ways I Know of to Add Database Data to SharePoint Pages
  43. MOSS Search: TotalAvailable & TotalRows not accurate
  44. SharePoint 2007 redirect solved: using 301 instead of 302 redirects
  45. Requesting SharePoint User Profiles
  46. SharePoint Database Mirroring Script
  47. Leveraging the use of Site Columns – Part I
  48. Custom Action URL Won’t Display for New Feature

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Links (1/20/2008)

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 20, 2008

  1. WSS FAQ additions and corrections LXXXIX - 13th - 19th January 2008
  2. SharePoint Workflow feature in VS 2008 (Part II)
  3. The impact of developing an accessible web site in SharePoint 2007
  4. Video showing how to Format the DateTime in a SharePoint data view
  5. CSS Expansion issue in SPD and Expression
  6. Pulling in Querystrings into a SharePoint 2007 Survey
  7. What happens when you close web parts rather than deleting them?
  8. CodeMash “LINQ to Everything” and “My Life with KateMOSS 2007″ materials
  9. Using the expression option and XPath statement for comparing two values in InfoPath 2007 Condition statement
  10. Finally a hotfix for the Event ID 7076, 6398, and 6432 recurring errors!
  11. SharePoint Skinning - video
  12. XML encoding and “Data at the root level is invalid” error message
  13. Silverlight Display Web Part
  14. SharePoint and Videos
  15. Global SharePoint Deployment Partner Solutions
  16. MOSS 2007 Filter webparts part 4 - Context filters: filtering using site metadata
  17. Slick SharePoint Popup Video
  18. Favicon’s in a SharePoint Master Page
  19. SPUrl not a recognized Prefix
  20. White Paper: Implementing MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 Solutions
  21. Upcoming Personalized Weather SharePoint Web Part
  22. Checking for a NULL Date Field in SharePoint Designer Workflow
  23. All about SharePoint Search for Developers
  24. Workflow: tasks which can only be actioned by task owner
  25. Setup a SharePoint Medium Farm Environment - install MOSS

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Links (1/17/2008)

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 17, 2008

  1. OneNote shared notebooks - notebooks on SharePoint
  2. What may happen when I crawl MILLIONS of files in MOSS/MSS? Part I
  3. How To: Add security trimming info to custom actions in SharePoint
  4. Developing a Web Part for MOSS 2007
  5. Sharepoint Workflow Custom Activity for Active Directory & Deployment on MOSS 2007
  6. SharePoint 2007 Documents to go - working with online/offline documents
  7. Colligo Contributor vs Outlook SharePoint Lists - Working online/offline
  8. Windows Server 2008 and SharePoint Resources
  9. Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint - beta is available
  10. How to start a workflow programmatically in the InfoPath code using Workflow web service
  11. Rewriting Links In Search Results (XSLT)
  12. Assigning more than 2 site collection administrators
  13. Using PowerShell for MOSS application deployment testing
  14. Access Denied when using SPSite.AllWebs - CurrentSite.OpenWeb().GetSubwebsForCurrentUser();
  15. A summary of the OneNote powertoys from the test team for 2007
  16. SharePoint Workflow Tools: Video Interview with John Durant

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Links (1/16/2008)

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 16, 2008

  1. Administrative & Service Accounts for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) & Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
  2. U2U CAML Query Builder Feature Second Version is Released
  3. Pilots, Proof of Concepts, Test, and Pre Production Environments - couldn’t agree more. too many times clients think you should just throw it in.
  4. Cloning SharePoint List Security (Freeware Security Tool)
  5. How To Change Search Box Image
  6. Iterating Through All WebParts On Page
  7. Free SharePoint Training
  8. Clearing the SharePoint configuration cache
  9. SharePoint Products and Technologies White Paper: Implementing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Solutions
  10. Colligo Contributor vs Outlook SharePoint Lists - Working online/offline
  11. Adding bindingredirects through SPWebConfigModification

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Links (1/15/2008)

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 15, 2008

  1. SharePoint Workflow feature in VS 2008
  2. Hide Edit Page in Site Actions Menu
  3. SharePoint Automated Deployment Using MSBuild
  4. Roadmap to using SharePoint Server 2007
  5. SharePoint 2007 Product training on your desktop
  6. SharePoint and Visio
  7. Silverlight Media Player and SharePoint
  8. .NET Rocks! #307 - Sahil Malik Shares the Point
  9. How to create a ‘Slipstream’ installation for MOSS with SP1
  10. Web Part WSP Template for VS 2008
  11. Adding Custom Quick Access Buttons to the Page Editing Toolbar in SharePoint Server 2007
  12. Adding Code-Behind Files to Master Pages and Page Layouts in SharePoint Server 2007
  13. TOC Web Part is Not Working
  14. Move MOSS 2007 from test to production
  15. Binding to lists in ye olde ascx user control
  16. SharePoint Lookup fields does not support “user or groups”
  17. Programmatically adding a SiteCollection with custom membership provider

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Links (1/13/2008)

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 13, 2008

  1. **** Two new MOSS 2007 WCM Publishing site Visual How To’s
  2. MOSS 2007 Filter webparts part 3 - Adding and connecting SharePoint filter webparts in code and a the page layout
  3. Integrating MOSS 2007 and Dynamics AX Part I - setting up your development environment
  4. How do I? – Restore access to my Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Central Admin site after adding a new server to the farm
  5. MOSS 2007: Creating a custom AJAX UserControl that will query the SharePoint Search Query Object Model to perform searches
  6. Remember that little STSADMWin gem? v3 is here!
  7. Import Profiles Only for Active Users
  8. WSS FAQ additions and contents LXXXVIII - 6th - 12th January 2008
  9. Wiki in the knees
  10. Customize the OOB list menus in SharePoint 2007 lists
  11. Preventing Anonymous Users from Viewing Pending Draft Items
  12. Programmatically Adding Web Parts to Pages
  13. Automatically marking up abbreviations and acronyms in SharePoint 2007
  14. SharePoint WebPart Property Attributes
  15. SharePoint Visual Studio Project and Deployment Templates
  16. Workflow “Failed on Start (retrying)”
  17. Unique ID in SharePoint list
  18. Hit enter, fire a web part event the easy way
  19. What was it again with those Content Type ID’s?
  20. SharePoint search is not psychic! - configure your search
  21. Getting user profile values that support multiple value
  22. SharePoint Connector for Confluence - How We Did It
  23. OneNote Shared Notebooks - Options and Troubleshooting - Part 2: Notebooks On SharePoint
  24. Tafiti can now use SharePoint as a Data source
  25. Real-life Team-Based Development for Web Content Management with SharePoint 2007

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CANCELLED - January Cincinnati SharePoint User Group Announcement

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 10, 2008

CANCELLED

The January Cincinnati SharePoint User Group meeting will take place on 1/14 at 6:00 pm at MAX Technical Training in Mason. Check out the website. There are two sessions:

  1. Sharepoint integrating with Document Management, Caleb Miller, Tahoe Partners
  2. Integrating Enterprise Data with SharePoint: Using The BDC, Steve Caravajal, PhD, Microsoft Corporation

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Links (1/10/2008)

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 10, 2008

  1. Remote WebPart Development with Visual Studio 2008 for MOSS 2007
  2. BDC Mapper Web Part - new release
  3. Upcoming MOSS WCM Training - Andrew Connell
  4. MOSS 2007: Using AJAX UserControls in SharePoint
  5. WebPart File is not Overwritten After First Solution Deployment
  6. Accessing SharePoint List Data as XML
  7. Display Custom Site Properties in a Web Part
  8. Integrate Virtual Earth maps into SharePoint
  9. How to get a mailto link in your SPGrid Webpart without using Javascript
  10. SharePoint Database Resources - migrating MOSS/WSS databases
  11. SharePoint Custom Content - Structure Report
  12. SharePoint 2007, AJAX and web parts
  13. How to invite IntelliGantt users from a SharePoint web page
  14. MOSS Public Web Site How we Did it - case study
  15. How to Display an AD group in a SharePoint DataView

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Links (1/8/2008)

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 8, 2008

  1. Customizing the SharePoint Search Control
  2. Delving into SharePoint 2007 Event Receivers
  3. Deploying MOSS 2007 SP1 to your environment? Create your SSP first!
  4. How to: Windows Workflow Foundation downloadable samples
  5. Custom SharePoint Designer Subject Lines with Calculated Fields
  6. UNDERSTANDING PerformancePoint and MOSS 2007 B.I. Capabilities
  7. CodePlex: WSS3 Workflow Designers
  8. Handling Default Values With LINQ to SQL
  9. Keep Tabs on Newly published content for MOSS 2007
  10. Is it possible to modify SharePoint email notifications?
  11. Workflow Insights: Correlation
  12. Integrating SAP and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
  13. Is SharePoint Going To Die?
  14. Saving Important Email to SharePoint
  15. More on Custom Site Definitions: Adding the CEWP with Custom Content
  16. SharePoint 2007 CSS friendly control adapters
  17. SharePoint 2007 (MOSS/WSS) Issue with lookup column to Doc Lib Name Field

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Links (1/6/2008)

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 6, 2008

  1. **** Implementing Consistent Navigation across Site Collections - using a SiteMapProvider
  2. Branding Tools for SharePoint
  3. How to: Adding Custom Workflow Activities to SharePoint Designer 2007
  4. WSS FAQ additions and corrections LXXXVII - 30th December 2007 - 5th January 2008
  5. SharePoint Products and Technologies Search Deployment
  6. To add an item to a document library, use SPFileCollection.Add()
  7. Grant Users Admin Access to all Site Collecrtions per Web Application
  8. Debugging workflows
  9. MOSS 2007: Add support for AJAX in your SharePoint installation
  10. Article:Managing the SharePoint Learning Curve
  11. New Beta Extranet Collaboration Toolkit
  12. Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint
  13. MOSS and SAP Integration
  14. Error when creating My Site - “Your personal site cannot be created because the managed path “http://server_name/mysite.aspx” has not been created for this site. Contact your site administrator for more information.”
  15. External Storing of Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) in Windows SharePoint Services
  16. Video: Building Presentations from SharePoint Site Content
  17. SafeControl Adder utility for SharePoint
  18. Video: Publishing Features and Site Templates
  19. 6 generations of Portal Technology: from Content Aggregation to Portal Aggregation
  20. Overview: ASP.NET AJAX and Web Parts in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
  21. Installing ASP.NET AJAX Extensions in Windows SharePoint Services
  22. Walkthrough: Creating a Basic ASP.NET AJAX-enabled Web Part
  23. User Comments and Ratings web parts are now FREE
  24. Selecting Multiple Categories for SharePoint Blog Posts
  25. Associating Custom Content Types with a Custom Site Definition
  26. Create a KPI from a SharePoint List View
  27. SharePoint development: handy little utility to get GUID’s and Attribute names - I wrote a similar project when I first started learning the SPOM.
  28. Automatically generating a hierarchical Title in element
  29. SharePoint Content Management Package (CMP) explorer
  30. Integrating Custom Help Pages to the SharePoint 2007 Help System
  31. Roadmap to using SharePoint Server 2007

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Debugging Assemblies Located in the GAC

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 2, 2008

Update: Please see this post for a better alternative.

I have been creating feature receivers which I installed to the GAC. Of course I ran into issues and needed to debug the code. Below are the steps I ran through to do so:

  1. Install the assembly to the GAC. There are a few ways of doing this. First, create a WSP file which installs the assembly to the GAC. Second, you can use gacutil.exe to install it.
  2. Select Start - Run and type in %SYSTEMROOT%\Assembly\GAC_MSIL
  3. Open the folder which contains the DLL.
  4. Open the folder with the version number and public key you are interested in.
  5. Open Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008.
  6. In the Solution Explorer, right-click on the solution and select Properties.
  7. On the Build tab, set the Output Path to the folder which contains the DLL (the folder in step #4).
  8. Build the project. This will copy in the PDB file to the GAC folder.
  9. Select Debug-Attach to Process.
  10. Select the correct w3wp process. To know the correct w3wp process, see this post.
  11. Set breakpoints accordingly.
  12. Execute code by activating/deactivating the feature in browser.

Note: I need to do some more research on this but the breakpoints were not hit if I activated/deactivated the feature using STSADM. Breakpoints were only hit when I activated/deactivated the feature in the browser. Just something to be aware of.

Posted in SPDev | 2 Comments »

Links (1/2/2008)

Posted by Steve Pietrek on January 2, 2008

Happy New Year!

  1. Building Workflow Templates for SharePoint v3 Using Visual Studio 2008
  2. Moving to a new database server (or instance)
  3. What’s new in CRM 4.0 - Part 1
  4. What’s new in CRM 4.0 - Part 2
  5. Some More MOSS Gotchas
  6. Anonymous Access in SharePoint
  7. Creating a Custom Site Definition (Part 1)
  8. Creating a Custom Site Definition (Part 2)
  9. InfoPath 2007 / WCF Nasty Gotcha
  10. Top 5 Apps every Office developer should know
  11. Using Business Data Catalog Definition Editor
  12. SharePoint Event on List Creation
  13. WSS FAQ - additions and corrections - LXXXVI - 23rd - 29th December 2007
  14. Enable Workflow development in a class library project being used to create a WSSv3 Solution
  15. 7 Years of SharePoint - a History Lesson
  16. Performance Monitors for SharePoint
  17. Create a web part to show sites and sub-sites
  18. Team Development in a SharePoint Environment
  19. SharePoint: How to display blog feed using XML Web Part?

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