This could be old news and everybody knows it but I was banging my head against the wall. I was attempting to display a stock quote on my client’s site. I found a feed and if I took the Url, pasted it into a browser, and refreshed it, the data would update every 5 minutes or so. I then took the feed and used it in RSS Viewer Web Part and the update would not match the browser - even after I refreshed the page.

Turns out the issue is the OOTB RSS Viewer Web Part has a built in cache interval of 30 minutes. Duh!

Below are three, non-OOTB, RSS Web Parts available: 

• http://codeplex.com/FeedReader
• http://www.timheuer.com/blog/archive/2004/02/28/382.aspx
• http://blah.winsmarts.com/2008-3-Announcing_the_release_of_SPRSS.aspx

Hopefully this saves someone some time.

Thanks to John Ferringer for keeping my sanity.

My client had a requirement to display a tab strip with 4 tabs in it. On each tab they wanted a way to enter some simple HTML text. Great, sounds easy enough. I have some experience with Telerik’s fine ASP.NET controls so I quickly put something together. The client wanted the control to look a certain way. Lucky for me, it was close enough to Telerik’s standard ClassicBlue theme.

After going through the regiment of creating a webpart file, a feature, and a solution package, after adding my web part to the a page, the theme did not come through. The theme was included in the page source but was defined as the following:

/RadControls/Tabstrip/Skins/ClassBlue/styles.css

Easy enough, I copied the source path to my virtual directory, iisreset, refreshed the page, and the theme came through. However, this is where the problems starting occurring. First, if I entered site anonymously, I would either get prompted for a user name and password on any page where the tabstrip web part was placed (very confusing at first) or worse I would receive an 403 error. Second, I had a difficult time figuring out how to include this theme in a WSP file so I could deploy it.

The first issue was simple enough to resolve. I opened Windows Explorer, right-clicked on the RadControls folder, selected properties - Security - and added the anonymous user (servername/iurs_servername). After an iisreset, all was well. This is not the most elegant solution though. I would run into the same issues if I forget to add the security (unfortunately ran into this issue yesterday at the client site - most embarrassing). Also, the quick fix doesn’t doesn’t solve my deploy issue. Back to the drawing board.

Solution: After reviewing the page source, I soon realized I should be able to specify my own path to the skin. Telerik controls have a SkinsPath. I assigned the following path:

_tabstrip .SkinsPath = “/_layouts/images/rsc/RadControls/TabStrip/Skins”

Once I included the proper theme files in my WSP, everything worked properly. This solved both issues. I’m a happy camper!

This is Part 6 of a series on creating web parts and deploying them to SharePoint using a VS 2005 Solution Project. There are 6 parts in the series.

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This is Part 5 of a series on creating web parts and deploying them to SharePoint using a VS 2005 Solution Project. There are 6 parts in the series.

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This is Part 4 of a series on creating web parts and deploying them to SharePoint using a VS 2005 Solution Project. There are 6 parts in the series.

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This is Part 3 of a series on creating web parts and deploying them to SharePoint using a VS 2005 Solution Project. There are 6 parts in the series.

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This is Part 2 of a series on creating web parts and deploying them to SharePoint using a VS 2005 Solution Project. There are 6 parts in the series.

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This is Part 1 of a series on creating web parts and deploying them to SharePoint using a VS 2005 Solution Project. There are 6 parts in the series.

Read the rest of this entry »

During my web part exercises, I want to find an easier way to delete a web part from a page. Enter the Web Part Page Maintenance page.

http://portal/area/default.aspx?contents=1

Whew, this one was a head scratcher!

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