This solution contains no resources scoped for a Web application and cannot be deployed to a particular Web application

Good information from Jeremy Jameson on running STSADM commands to load a solution that just puts files into the hive…

http://blogs.msdn.com/jjameson/archive/2007/06/17/issues-deploying-sharepoint-solution-packages.aspx

Slick way to access Web Part Maintenance page.

Ever add a web part to a page that totally hoses the page up and results in a generic “Error on page” page?  If you’re lucky, the bad web part will still allow the page to load and give you a link to the web part maintenance page to remove the web part in question from the page.  If you’re not so lucky, just add “?contents=1″ (without the quotes of course) to the end of your page URL and you can access that web part maintenance page to remove any web parts from the page that’s causing issues.  Nice little tip.

“An unexpected error has occurred”. Hey SharePoint, how about some more info..

I, like many others I’m sure, am very tired of seeing this generic error on a SharePoint web part page.  Not only is it not helpful, it’s insulting.  Why would I want to know that an unexpected error has occurred but not be able to see anything describing what the problem is?  Anyway, I found a blog post from across the pond with a simple fix to show the call stack and at least give some direction as to what caused the problem: http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/02/15/a-solution-to-quot-an-unexpected-error-has-occurred-quot-in-wss-v3.aspx

SharePoint Development – The Easy Way (STSDEV)

Being a “newbie” to developing web parts, page templates, etc. for SharePoint… and trying to figure out all the xml files needed to package code for deployment was getting a bit frustrating.  Not to mention, trying to find a “standard” way of doing it for our dev team seemed daunting.  Along comes STSDEV.  STSDEV is a proof-of-concept app which standardizes development for SharePoint, integrates smoothly into Visual Studio, and takes the hassle out of starting, building, packaging, and deploying solutions to a SharePoint environment.  Built by a number of SharePoint MVP’s, this tool is worthy of being included as part of the next release of Visual Studio… hopefully Microsoft sees it the same way.

 In addition to the small, single executable download, Ted Pattison put together some great screencasts on what STSDEV is and how to use it.  With any luck, this will turn out to be a perfect way of standardizing our SharePoint development.

Branding a SharePoint 2007 publishing site

There are many blogs out there covering the topic of branding a site using master pages, CSS, and themes.  My task is to brand our corporate extranet site for our business partners.  The nice part is I already have a style guide to follow that was created as part of our customer-facing site.  The not so nice part is I was having a fair amount of trouble making SharePoint look like that site.  After trudging through many blog posts and articles online I think I’ve found the method that will work.  Here goes…

 Heather Solomon’s postings were invaluable in figuring out how to do this.  If you’re just beginning to brand your site, read her blog for both background and excellent tips.  In my case, I began with her base master page which is essentially a stripped-down master page containing only the necessary controls to make the page run on SharePoint.  I set my site to use that master page in the Site Actions|Site Settings|Modify All Site Settings|Look and Feel|Master Page.  I then created an empty CSS file and loaded that in my site style library and selected it as an alternate CSS file on the same settings page as above.  That worked great for some things but, in particular, the main navigation bar still wouldn’t use my styles.  It appeared that some inline styles were being added to that control at run time which were overriding my custom styles.  In order to get my styles to be used, I ended up having to update the controls in the master page to use my custom styles instead of the canned ms-(*) styles.  That seems to have done the trick.  More to come as we progress…

My SharePoint Links

Below is  a list of links that I have found useful in my working with SharePoint.  This list doesn’t include blogs that I follow on the topic as those are listed in my Blogroll.

General Links

Resources & Tools for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007

SharePoint on MSDN

SharePointPedia – Tons of useful, searchable articles and links

What Not To Store In SharePoint (Joel Oleson)

Open source Features (CodePlex)

Branding & Customization

Page elements to double-check while rebranding SharePoint (Heather Solomon)

Tutorials & How-To

End-user SharePoint tutorials

SharePoint Screencast Tutorials

Creating a web part quickly

Package & Deploy a Web Part as a Solution

Automation

STSDEV (CodePlex)

WSP Builder (CodePlex)

Registering a web part in SharePoint 2007 –

After struggling with this a couple different times, I’ve decided it’s worth documenting how to do this so I don’t have to go through the pain again.  Basically, once you have your web part compiled (See Mart Muller’s blog entry on how to create a web part) you need to:

1. Add the web part assembly (the dll file) to the GAC by copying the dll file to the c:\windows\assembly directory.
2. Designate the web part as a safe control in your web.config file.  This is the one that got me.  There are many web config files to choose from.  To determine which one should be updated I:
   • Opened IIS and found the web site I was working with.  
   • Viewed the properties of that web site
   • On the Home Directory tab, the Local Path field tells you where your web.config is stored.
3. Add the web part to your site’s web part gallery.  The above steps ensure your web part is registered and designated as a safe control.  But when you try to add the web part to one of the web part zones in your page it won’t be in the list to select.  There’s one more step that needs to be done…add your new web part to the web part gallery.   Within your site;
   • Go to Site Actions| Site Settings |Modify All Site Settings. 
   • Under the Galleries heading, select Web Parts.  Your new web part won’t be listed. 
   • Click New at the top and a list of all available assemblies will be displayed. 
   • Click the checkbox next to your new assembly and click the Populate Gallery button to make your web part available to be added to web part zones in your site.