When Software Attacks!

Problems with Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint 2007

If you are using Forms Based Authentication and try to access Site Policies you may well find that you get an Access Denied response. If you do, this post will help you! I’ve been meaning to post this for a while because I’m sure it may help somebody. As usual, it’s been pushed back and back until now I finally have some time. I also have another, workflow-related post on another problem which will follow shortly.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 3, 2008

Workflow History and SQL Error

When trying to view an item in a list which has workflows run against it, you get an error: Some part of your SQL statement is nested too deeply. Rewrite the query or break it up into smaller queries Problem Background Trying to explain the exact nature of our configuration in this case would break many people’s heads. This, therefore, is a bit of a simplification. We have a custom webpart which allows users to log an enquiry.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 3, 2008

Catching Up

I’ve been far too busy lately and whilst there have been lots of things I wanted to post about, time has not been on my side. Before I start to forget some of the points I thought a quick post was in order. @media 2008 was great. Slides and audio are just filtering onto the blog now. A highlight for me was Indi Young’s talk on Mental Models. I now have her book on my desk (waiting for having the time to read it) and I’m excited about how the technique might interface nicely with the User Stories we use for feeding requirements into our Scrum development process.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, June 13, 2008

Blogging On The Move

We try to dogfood here at Black Marble so I’m writing this on my HTC TYTN. How? With Richard’s new app

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Community Launch Events

A big thanks to everybody who came to the Server 2008 launch event last week. Andy and myself had a great time presenting to such an enthusiastic crowd. In the end we ran long because of the amount of dialogue around the new features of Server 2008 and I hope everyone went away having got something useful. Now I need to reduce the two hours of material down to a perky 45 minutes for delivery at the VBug-hosted launch event on April 30th.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, April 14, 2008

Hats off, lads

Just seen the sad news of the passing of Arthur C. Clarke. The world was better for his having been in it, and will not be the same without him.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Insightful

Joel Spolsky has a biting and articulate article on the IE8 standards debate.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 18, 2008

A great article on handy SharePoint controls

I don’t know about you, but I always mean to gather various bits of knowledge into one place, but just like tidying my filing at home, I never quite get around to it. Fortunately for me, Chris O’Brien is a bit more organised and in my ever expanding blogroll today I saw a great article about really useful SharePoint controls to use in custom pages for that handy bit of functionality.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, March 17, 2008

Taking time to enjoy the scenery

You know, the thing about RSS is that it’s a bit like the advent of the motor car - you miss things. Just as driving around means you don’t get to pass the time of day with folk, or discover that tiny little deli you’d never notice from the road, RSS dehumanises the web. For example, I subscribe to the blog of my good friend Nick Smith. Since he hasn’t posted about his new redesign, I didn’t know about it.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, March 17, 2008

Searching SharePoint through an IE8 Activity

IE8 Activities look cool. They’re almost like favlets from where I stand, but they offer a very simple way for users to access online services and pass simple parameters. I decided I wanted to play, and we use SharePoint heavily here at Black Marble. The obvious thing to do was to create an activity which would allow the user to search for the selected text using SharePoint search. Activities are defined through XML.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, March 6, 2008