Part 3 – Sign Out/Sign in as a Different User

A project I am working on called for a custom implementation of the SharePoint Welcome menu control. The replacement control needed to provide the following:

• Implement the look and behaviors that the designers created.
• Exclude some default SharePoint menu items (such as My Regional Settings).
• Reuse some existing SharePoint menu items (such as Sign Out/Sign in as a Different User).
• Allow for the addition of other custom menu items in the future.
• Display thumbnail of the user’s profile picture.

I had to create a control that looked and behaved like the following:

The designers came up with some clean, semantic markup married with some jquery, for me to start from:

<div class="header">

    <img class="header-logo" src="/images/header_logo.png" alt="" width="169" height="78" />

    <div class="header-bar">

        <div class="profile_menu">

            <a href="#" class="profile_btn">

                <span class="image"><img src="" style="width:20px;height:20px" /></span>

                <span class="name">John Doe</span>

                <span class="arrow"></span>

            </a>

            <div class="profile_dropdown">

                <div class="dropdown_bkgrd">

                    <ul>

                        <li>Edit Profile</li> 

                        <li>My Site</li>

                        <li>Log Out</li>                        

                        <li>Sign in as a Different User</li>

                    </ul>

                </div>

            </div>

        </div>

    </div>

</div>

This is part 3 of a three part series.

1. Part 1 – Overview, Profile Picture, and User Name
2. Part 2 – Edit Profile and My Site links
3. Part 3 – Sign Out/Sign in as a Different User

Continue reading “Creating a Custom Welcome Menu for SharePoint Server 2010 – Part 3″

Tags: ascx, SharePoint, Welcome menu

Part 2 – Edit Profile and My Site links

A project I am working on called for a custom implementation of the SharePoint Welcome menu control. The replacement control needed to provide the following:

• Implement the look and behaviors that the designers created.
• Exclude some default SharePoint menu items (such as My Regional Settings).
• Reuse some existing SharePoint menu items (such as Sign Out/Sign in as a Different User).
• Allow for the addition of other custom menu items in the future.
• Display thumbnail of the user’s profile picture.

I had to create a control that looked and behaved like the following:

The designers came up with some clean, semantic markup married with some jquery, for me to start from:

<div class="header">

    <img class="header-logo" src="/images/header_logo.png" alt="" width="169" height="78" />

    <div class="header-bar">

        <div class="profile_menu">

            <a href="#" class="profile_btn">

                <span class="image"><img src="" style="width:20px;height:20px" /></span>

                <span class="name">John Doe</span>

                <span class="arrow"></span>

            </a>

            <div class="profile_dropdown">

                <div class="dropdown_bkgrd">

                    <ul>

                        <li>Edit Profile</li>

                        <li>My Site</li>

                        <li>Log Out</li>

                        <li>Sign in as a Different User</li>

                    </ul>

                </div>

            </div>

        </div>

    </div>

</div>

This is part 2 of a three part series.

1. Part 1 – Overview, Profile Picture, and User Name
2. Part 2 – Edit Profile and My Site links
3. Part 3 – Sign Out/Sign in as a Different User

Continue reading “Creating a Custom Welcome Menu for SharePoint Server 2010 – Part 2″

Tags: ascx, SharePoint, Welcome menu

Part 1 – Overview, Profile Picture, and User Name

A project I am working on called for a custom implementation of the SharePoint Welcome menu control. The replacement control needed to provide the following:

• Implement the look and behaviors that the designers created.
• Exclude some default SharePoint menu items (such as My Regional Settings).
• Reuse some existing SharePoint menu items (such as Sign Out/Sign in as a Different User).
• Allow for the addition of other custom menu items in the future.
• Display thumbnail of the user’s profile picture.

I had to create a control that looked and behaved like the following:

The designers came up with some clean, semantic markup married with some jquery, for me to start from:

<div class="header">

    <img class="header-logo" src="/images/header_logo.png" alt="" width="169" height="78" />

    <div class="header-bar">

        <div class="profile_menu">

            <a href="#" class="profile_btn">

                <span class="image"><img src="" style="width:20px;height:20px" /></span>

                <span class="name">John Doe</span>

                <span class="arrow"></span>

            </a>

            <div class="profile_dropdown">

                <div class="dropdown_bkgrd">

                    <ul>

                        <li>Edit Profile</li> 

                        <li>My Site</li>

                        <li>Log Out</li>                        

                        <li>Sign in as a Different User</li>

                    </ul>

                </div>

            </div>

        </div>

    </div>

</div>

This is part 1 of a three part series.

1. Part 1 – Overview, Profile Picture, and User Name
2. Part 2 – Edit Profile and My Site links
3. Part 3 – Sign Out/Sign in as a Different User

Continue reading “Creating a Custom Welcome Menu for SharePoint Server 2010 – Part 1″

Tags: ascx, SharePoint, Welcome menu

Generic Handlers (.ashx files) deployed to the _layouts directory are not directly supported by Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint projects like custom .aspx application pages are.

If you try to Add New Item… and select the Web or SharePoint categories in a VS 2010 SharePoint project, you won’t find Generic Handler anywhere.

You’ll find ASP.NET Handler, but this will require you to create entries in web.config to make your handler work. In order to add a new .ASHX generic handler and get it to deploy properly, you can use the following steps:

• Right-click the project, and select Add New Item…
• Choose the Application Page template.
• In the name box, enter a name for your file, with an .ashx extension.
  
• Open the .ashx file, delete the contents and replace with the following, changing your Class= attribute with your desired namespace and class name:

  <%@ Assembly Name="$SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$" %>

  <%@ Assembly Name="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>

  <%@ WebHandler Language="C#" Class="MyNamespace.MyGenericHandler" %>

  Note: If you want to reference other SharePoint assemblies in your code-behind, you will need to add an @ Assembly directive for each DLL.

• Open the ashx.cs file.
  • Add a using statement for System.Web.
  • You probably don’t need the using statement for Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls, so remove it.
  • Change your namespace if necessary.
  • Change the class to inherit from IHttpHandler.
  • Implement the IHttpHandler interface. Your code should now look something like this:�

    using System;

    using Microsoft.SharePoint;

    using System.Web;

    namespace MyNamespace

    {

        public partial class MyGenericHandler : IHttpHandler

        {

            #region IHttpHandler Members

            public bool IsReusable

            {

                get { throw new NotImplementedException(); }

            }

            public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)

            {

                throw new NotImplementedException();

            }

            #endregion

        }

    }

• In the Solution Explorer, delete the ashx.designer.cs file, it is not needed.
• In the Solution Explorer, click the .ashx file, and in the Properties pane, set the Build Action to Content.
• In the Solution Explorer, click the .ashx.cs file, and in the Properties pane, set the Build Action to Compile.
• Make sure to enable Token replacement for .ashx extensions. This will replace the $SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$ token with the full strong name of your assembly, enabling you to reference other classes in your compiled assembly from the ashx code-behind.You can read more about token replacement here. To enable this for your Project, Unload your Project, Edit the .csproj file and add the following text to a PropertyGroup, and Reload your project:

  <PropertyGroup>

    <TokenReplacementFileExtensions>ashx</TokenReplacementFileExtensions>

  </PropertyGroup>

Tags: ashx, ASP.NET, generic handlers, SharePoint

Just wrapped up a project developing a custom metadata editor to plugin to the Colligo Contributor for SharePoint client.

If you aren’t familiar with Colligo, it’s a desktop client application/outlook add-in/explorer file manager, that enables users to save documents or emails directly to SharePoint, and be prompted for metadata at the time of saving.

Colligo reads the content type of the target lists/libraries, and generates a default form very similar to what SharePoint does with the default EditForm.aspx ListForm web part. If you don’t like the default form, or need to customize the metadata entry experience (for example custom validation, pulling from external data sources, inter-dependent controls), you can develop a custom editor and show your own Windows Forms-based form to the user.

The default Colligo Editor form, shown here when adding a new Announcement.

How to Start

To start developing a custom editor, begin by installing Colligo Contributor, and obtaining your product and sdk keys from Colligo.

Create a new Visual Studio Class Library project, and add a reference to the Colligo dlls in the GAC.

Add the necessary using statements:

using Colligo;

using Colligo.Properties;

using Colligo.Util;

using Colligo.WML.MetaData;

Change your class to inherit from the ICustomEditor class:

namespace MyNamespace

{

    public class MyCustomEditor : ICustomEditor

    {

    }

}

Implement the Interface methods:

namespace MyNamespace

{

    public class MyCustomEditor : ICustomEditor

    {

        // SDK Key

        private const string SDK_KEY = "XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX";

        #region ICustomEditor Members

        public string GetSdkKey()

        {

            return SDK_KEY;

        }

        public EditorResult ShowEditor(IEditContext context)

        {

            // Show your form here

        }

        public ResolveConflictResult ShowResolveConflictDialog(IResolveConflictContext context)

        {

            return ResolveConflictResult.UseDefaultResolveDialog;

        }

        #endregion

    }

}

In the ShowEditor method, this is where you can create an instance of a Windows Form, and call the ShowDialog method on it. You can also pre-validate and avoid showing your form for situations that are not appropriate.

public EditorResult ShowEditor(IEditContext context)

{

    // Check if this is something we care about

    if (!context.List.IsDocumentLibrary)

    {

        return EditorResult.UseDefaultEditor;

    }

    if (!string.Equals(context.List.Name, "Private Documents", StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase) &&

        !string.Equals(context.List.Name, "Public Documents", StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase))

    {

        return EditorResult.UseDefaultEditor;

    }

    // Only show for Create/Edit (use the default Colligo form for Viewing)

    if (context.EditorMode == EditorMode.Create || context.EditorMode == EditorMode.Edit)

    {

        using (myCustomWindowsForm myForm = new myCustomWindowsForm(context))

        {

            DialogResult createResult = DialogResult.None;

            createResult = myForm.ShowDialog(context.Parent);

            switch (createResult)

            {

                case DialogResult.Cancel:

                    return EditorResult.Cancel;

                case DialogResult.OK:

                    return EditorResult.OK;

                case DialogResult.No:

                    return EditorResult.UseDefaultEditor;

            }

        }

    }

    else

    {

        // View - Show the default editor

        return EditorResult.UseDefaultEditor;

    }

    // Fall through

    return EditorResult.OK;

}

Notice I am passing in the IEditContext instance into my form’s constructor. The IEditContext object has all the goodies in it, and will give you access to the list, the web, the content types, list item metadata, etc.).

What to Consider

Some basic things to consider are:

• Which scenarios will your editor cover? View, Create, Edit?
• Is this only for documents, or list items, or both?
• Will you support content types? A list/library can be configured with multiple content types, which you will need to create a UI for selecting/changing if you decide to support that.
• How will you handle multiple files? Will you enable setting different data for each item, or will you force all items to use the same entered metadata? Think carefully about the “Name” field for documents in document libraries. You want to make sure that the same name is not used for multiple documents.
• Will you allow changing folders (for document libraries with folders enabled)? If so, you’ll need to build this UI.

There are a number of ways/methods that may kick off the display of your form, and you need to consider each of these:

• User selects New > Item from within Colligo Contributor
• This is similar to the New > [Content Type] menu directly in SharePoint. You can expect that EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType will not be null.
• User selects Upload from within Colligo Contributor
• This is similar to Upload Document from within SharePoint. EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType may be null.
• User drags/drops a single file onto Colligo Contributor
• EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType may be null.
• User drags/drops multiple files onto Colligo Contributor
• EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType may be null.
• User performs a single File > Save As from within an application
• EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType may be null.
• User drags/drops multiple files onto the Colligo area in Windows Explorer
• EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType may be null.
• User selects Edit Properties from within Colligo Contributor
• Need to grab existing values and prepopulate your controls. EditorContext.ContentType and EditorContext.ListItems[0].ContentType will not be null.

Some Gotchas

Following are some gotchas to be aware of:

Check for Null

Don’t make any assumptions about any of the items in the IEditContext object. ContentTypes may be null, Fields may not exist or be null, other relevant ILists in the Web may not be synchronized locally, and will be null, etc., etc., etc. Check everything for null first, and test everything that returns a collection/array for Count and Length > 0. If there are fields/lists/lookup column values that your form expects, check for the existence of these things right away, and exit if you don’t find them.

Parent Windows

If your form is called via the Save As dialog from an application (or via the FileManager), the ParentWindow handle may not be valid, so be careful with the ShowDialog(IWin32Window) overload, which threw a System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception for me. I had to wrap my ShowDialog(context.Parent) in a try>catch, and then try it without any parameters (ShowDialog() ).

Custom Field Types

If you are using any custom field types, be really careful to make sure and store the data in the proper format. My customer was using a couple of custom field types found on CodePlex, and one of them extended the Lookup field, and it took me a few traces with Fiddler to figure out that it wanted its values in lookup column format (“52;#ItemName”);

Site Lookup Columns

If you have any lookup columns that are defined in higher-level sites, and you are using those site columns in lists located in subsites, then Colligo will not be able to see the lookup values. In order to implement these scenarios, you will have to force your users to synchronize the higher level sites as well as the subsites.

Tags: Colligo Contributor, SharePoint

I’ve been writing a slurry of code to return list item XML so that it can be parsed and consumed by AJAX components on the client side. Since Lists.asmx does not work in anonymous access scenarios, I’ve been creating many proxy .ashx Http Handlers installed in the LAYOUTS directory, to query via the object model and return the XML of the list items, using the .Xml property of a SPListItemCollection.

I had one particular scenario where I couldn’t pre-filter the items in the collection with an SPQuery object (too complicated a query for CAML), so I needed a way to filter the SPListItemCollection afterwards using C#, before returning the XML.

The SPListItemCollection offers the .Delete() and .DeleteItemById() methods, however they will commit the deletion back to SharePoint. I wanted to simply remove some items from the in-memory collection, not delete the items from the server. There was no way that I could see to remove items from an SPListItemCollection in memory only.

I looked into sub-classing or extending the SPListItemCollection class, but there is no public constructor in the base class, and no way to get at the logic behind the .Xml property without nasty reflection.

I ultimately ended up resorting to using Linq to XML to delete the rows directly from the returned XML, and then adjusted the ItemCount accordingly.

Here’s the code:

// Get the list items from a list

SPListItemCollection items = myList.GetItems(mySPQuery);

// Get the xml of the list items

itemXml = surveyItems.Xml;

XNamespace z = "#RowsetSchema";

XDocument xdoc = XDocument.Parse(itemXml);

IEnumerable<XElement> rows = xdoc.Root.Descendants(z + "row");

List<XElement> rowsToDelete = new List<XElement>();

foreach (XElement row in rows)

{

    // Here is where you can test for a condition, and decide to remove a row

    if (row.Attribute("ows_Title").Value.Contains("Some string to filter on"))

    {

        rowsToDelete.Add(row);

    }

}

while (rowsToDelete.Count > 0)

{

    // Update the parent row count

    int rowCount = Convert.ToInt32(rowsToDelete[0].Parent.Attribute("ItemCount").Value);

    rowsToDelete[0].Parent.Attribute("ItemCount").Value = (rowCount - 1).ToString();

    rowsToDelete[0].Remove();

    rowsToDelete.RemoveAt(0);

}

// Get the newly filtered xml

itemXml = xdoc.ToString()

Tags: Linq to XML, Linq2XML, SharePoint, SPListItemCollection, XLinq

Windows Azure Improvements since last year:

1. Support PHP, CGI, Apache, other frameworks
2. Expose very low-level programming efforts (not just .NET).
   Example was a C++ app with pointers exposed as an Azure service
3. Identity framework (support passing tokens from federated locations i.e. onsite AD instance)

SQL Azure Improvements since last year:

1. Not just RESTful consumption of services anymore
2. Works with standard TDS based tools (SQL management studio)

Microsoft has a vision of "Three screens and a Cloud".

The screens include:

1. Mobile devices
2. Desktop computers
3. Internet connected TVs

   They can all be united by data and services in the cloud.

Public Data in the Cloud (Codename "Dallas").

Repository for public data sets that can be consumed in any number of ways (and easily by Azure)

Accessed through Microsoft PinPoint

Sign up for a CTP key

Some data includes NASA mars photos, GIS data, AP News articles

PinPoint:

Centralized marketplace for partner providers, Azure ISVs and implementers, and gateway to "Dallas" public Data.

"System Center" will plugin to Azure to monitor your Azure instances, check to meet SLAs, and enable you to scale up the Azure instances directly.

2010 will include ability to have the Azure cloud be able to establish a network connection to on-premise resources (i.e. self hosted SQL Server)

WordPress is moving to Windows Azure

Tags: appfabric, azure, pdc09, WCF

Rating:

I’m implementing the AKS for a customer, and I’m having a hard time understanding how this product actually made it to a public release. It feels like a product that is half finished, that was used as a springboard to creating a commercial product, while leaving the original free version to the wayside. If you are considering working with this, you might want to read about the frustrations I encountered below:

Installation experience – Where are those .bat files?

When you download the AKS, you’ll get a zip file, which contains a folder and a single EXE installer.

Running the installer will perform the following tasks:

1. Installs control adapters and reference files into an AKS folder in your Program Files directory.
2. Copies a feature and master pages/css styles to the /12/Templates/Features folder in your SharePoint installation (if you are running 32 bit).
3. Creates a Start Menu icon group for AKS tasks and links.

After running through the installer, a quick look at the “Welcome to the Accessibility Kit…” PDF informs you that you need to install and activate the feature:

The AKS Feature
The AKS Feature is not the AKS Kit but a part of the Kit that works as a feature in MOSS. The AKS
Feature installs the Example Master pages and the Modified CSS. You must install this by
selecting Install AKS Feature from the Start Menu:  Start | All Programs | AKS by HiSoftware |
AKS Feature install.  Once the feature is installed, you will still need to activate it within your
SharePoint application through: Site Settings | Site Collection Features. Please note if you are
on a 64 Bit server please follow the 64 Bit instructions.

I looked all over for those “64 bit instructions”, but there was nothing. There was a “64bit Feature Install” icon in the Start Menu, but no text anywhere instructing me to click on it.

I figured out that to install the feature, you need to click on either the 64bit Feature Install icon or the AKS Feature Install icon in the Start menu (note that the shortcuts are only created for the current user, and there is no way to tell the installer to install for everyone). If you run these shortcuts from the Start menu, the command window will flash, execute, and then immediately disappear, before you can check if it finished successfully or not. On a 64 bit server, you’ll see a flash of xcopy commands that copy styles and master pages into the /12 folders.

I wanted to be sure that it installed, so I tried to find the location of the batch file so I could run it again in a command prompt and actually see the result. I right-clicked the shortcut and went to Properties to figure out the target location, and it was greyed out:

I looked for the bat file in the Program Files directory, but no luck. Yuck! A .bat file that I can’t see or easily get to?

I figured out that it installed, because I then saw the feature in my Site Collection Features page. I activated it, and then tried to take a look at the master pages and styles.

Control Adapters – Incorrect C#

The AKS comes with several control adapters that rewrite some of the out-of-box control html to make it more compliant. Some of the C# adapter files have mistakes in the C# code that make them not able to compile. For example, in the Web Part Zone Smart Adapter for WCAG2.0, there is an extra curly brace, and even a reference to a variable that is not even declared in the file anywhere:

   1: else

   2: {

   3:

   4:     } // <-- Extra brace?

   5:

   6:     //Output sOutputBuilder to be rendered

   7:     oOutput.Write(sOutputBuilder.ToString()); // <-- sOutputBuilder is never declared in this file!

   8: }

“Smart Adapters” (not too bright)

The AKS comes with several “Smart” control adapters (adapters that do not need a lot of configuration). The Web Part Zone Smart Adapter sounded like it had some promise, as it would convert a web part zone to use divs instead of tables.

However, when you install it, it has the side effect of not rendering any of your web part’s “Titles”. If you want to use the headers that come with the web parts, then this control will not work for you. It also prevented viewing web parts in Design mode, they would just disappear from the page.

Finally, it was hard to see the point of using the adapters at all, as all they appeared to do was add some labels to blogs, wikis, and search boxes. They will certainly not do anything at all if you use the CKS EBE or Wiki versions, or if you have customized/branded the search controls.

Master pages and styles do not exist!

Once you install the feature, a set of master pages and css styles will get installed to the master page and style library galleries for your site collection. I cracked open SharePoint designer, tried to open a master page, and got a nasty error message that the file did not exist and could not be opened.

In order to open the file, I had to run through the SharePoint UI, and “Publish” each master page and CSS style before I could access it via SharePoint designer. There was no mention of this anywhere in the documentation.

Relative font sizes? Good luck!

The AKS stylesheets attempt to change all SharePoint font size declarations into relative sizes in ems, rather than fixed pixel/point sizes. This might work fine for anonymous internet site pages, but if you will ever let your visitors view any of the system pages like list new/edit/upload pages or use out-of-box web parts, good luck tweaking styles for a month to get things right.

Woops, what about default.master?

The AKS installs alternate versions of the out-of-box publishing master pages, such as BlueBand.master, BlackBand.master, etc. I don’t know about you, but none of my customers have ever started from those master pages on internet sites, and all my intranet applications make heavy use of default.master. I was really disappointed to see that there was no alternate version of default.master.

HCCE – Nothing but trouble

The HiSoftware Code Compliance Kit (HCCE) is a SharePoint event handler that will look for a certain string of text in your SharePoint web pages, and replace it with different (possibly more accessible) text. You use a text file in which you specify pipe-delimited lines of text to find and replace (e.g. “Text to find|Text to replace with”). The HCCE has the following problems when implemented:

• There is only a debug build provided (no release version).
• There is no source code (you cannot recompile).
• There is no regex option for pattern matching. All strings must be matched and replaced exactly.
• The DLL looks for a hard-coded path to the configuration text file in C:\Program Files\HiSoftware… This doesn’t work on 64bit systems because the installer installs to Program Files (x86). Since you can’t recompile the DLL, your only option is to copy the text file to the Program Files directory.
• Once you implement the feature, your SharePoint Welcome menu will get rendered above the <html> tag, causing it to appear at the top of your screen and out of place. Several posts about this, and no response at all from HiSoftware.
• The install/uninstall .bat files do not work, and need to be adjusted for 64bit machines. Why no WSP?

Conclusion

Poorly documented, sloppily put together, and full of holes and mistakes, I was very disappointed in the AKS. Coupled with a total lack of support and responsiveness to issues on their web site, I think it reflects poorly on HiSoftware as a company.

Tags: accessibility kit for SharePoint, aks, SharePoint, wcag

The implementation of the BDC entity picker dialog (opened with the Browse button) can cause some firewall and security software to think a worm or sql injection attack is happening and block the traffic.

The manner in which properties and entity IDs are encoded into long query string values makes the urls appear to be injection attacks. On a particular client’s BDC application, the picker dialog used a url similar to the following:

http://domainname.org/_layouts/Picker.aspx?MultiSelect=False&CustomProperty=uU2hhcmVQb2ludC5Qb3J0YWwsIFZlcnNpb249MTIuMC4wLAF%2F%2FAQAAAAAAAA9QcmltYXJ5Q29sdW1uSWQQU3lzdGVtSW5zdGFuY2VAAA
AAAMAgAAAF9NaWNyb3NvZnQjAsIEN1bHR1cmU9bmV1dHJhbCwgUHVibG
ljS2V5VG9rZW49NzFlOWJjZTExMWU5NDI5YwUBAAAAPk1pYAEAAAD%2F%2F%23Jvc29mdC5TaGFyZVBvaW50LlBvcnRhbC5XZWJDb250cm9scy5JdGVtUGlja2
VyRXh0ZW5kZWREYXRhB
JZAhFbnRpdHlJZBNTZWNvbmRhcnlDb2×1bW
5zSWRzAAAABw8PDw8CAAAANw4AAAcOAAAIDgAACQMAAAAPAwAAAAAAA
AAPCwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
3D&EntitySeparator=%00&DialogTitle=Choose%20User&DialogImage=%2F_layouts%2Fimages%2Fbizpicker.gif&PickerDialogType=Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.ItemPickerDialog%2C%20Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal%2C%20Version%3D12.0.0.0%2C%20Culture%3Dneutral%2C%20PublicKeyToken%3D71e9bce111e9429c&DefaultSearch=

Using the HTTP GET for this kind of thing is a bad idea, and I hope that Microsoft fixes this in the future.

Tags: BDC, SharePoint

Here is a script for configuring WSS 3.0 installation without Active Directory, where SQL Server resides on a separate box:

psconfig -cmd -configdb -create -server DBSERVERNAME -database wss_admin_config -user WSSSERVER\AppPoolAccountName -password p@ssword -dbuser SQLDBUSERNAME -dbpassword p@ssword -admincontentdatabase wss_admin_content

Based on the post here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/fooshen/archive/2007/02/01/installing-moss-without-ad.aspx

Tags: psconfig, SharePoint, WSS