Matt Ranlett's SharePoint and Office blog

If you are programmatically adding list entries to a SharePoint 2007 list which contains a lookup field, you have to supply the ID of the source list's ListItem. If you fail to supply the ID you might see error messages such as this: "Invalid data has been used to update the list item. The field you...

Continue reading "SPLookupField Helper function"

If you're having problems with MOSS 2007 Search indexing the user profiles which you have imported from AD or some other source, check the identity of the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service. I bet it's set to Network Service . That's not going to work. Instead, set it to Local System (like the...

Continue reading "SharePoint Search not indexing People?"

Have you ever run into a situation where you log into a site with SharePoint Designer to make a change or add a workflow. Later, you need to log into the site as a different user (you're not logging in as the admin user all the time, are you?) but SPD never gives you the chance to provide different credentials...

Continue reading "SharePoint Designer caching login credentials"

Sunday night started off with me begging for a bed as my intended roommate's reservation got him a king sized bed. So I have ended up rooming with Dan Attis (thanks again Dan!). Since then it's been a veritable Who's Who of SharePoint MVPs for me the last two days. Sunday night saw me drinking in the...

Continue reading "SharePoint Conference Day 1 in the bag"

This has been annoying me for an hour or two, so I thought I'd put the solution up here. I'm using VMWare to host a pair of development machines (a domain controller and a SharePoint/SQL box). Because I've got a few other developers here in the room with me sharing the same virtual machines, we are all...

Continue reading "Visual Studio reports the project location is not trusted"

I recently faced this at work, and figured that sharing the problem and the options might be valuable. Here's the situation My parents went away on a week's vacation and They left the keys to the brand new Porsche... Ok, that's enough of that. Sorry for the interruption. The real situation is that I...

Continue reading "Copying Site Collection options"

If you weren't aware of it, a lot of thought went into SharePoint in terms of making it a viable platform for web hosting. You can use Active Directory OR Forms Based Authentication. You can actually read the entire 126 page document titled Creating Shared Hosting Solutions on Windows SharePoint Services...

Continue reading "SharePoint for Web Hosters: Host Header-based Site Collections"

I'm still waiting for the day that some Microsoft architect promised me back at TechEd 2005 when they showed off the Whitehorse UML to code engine which allowed developers to draw pretty pictures and have the source code generated for you. As it is, development in general is frequently frustrating and...

Continue reading "Tougher than it needs to be?"