DevConnections, here we come!

Well, now it's official. I am attending DevConnections in Las Vegas, November 5th - 9th, 2007.
Or more specifically, in my case, SharePointConnections.

I will be one of six (!) people traveling from ErgoGroup. Thanks to our boss :)

The conference will be followed by a week of vacation for all of us, which is including a trip to Grand Canyon, and some days and nights in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Can't wait!

Activate fly-out menus in SharePoint 2007

SharePoint comes with a great new menu control called AspMenu, for displaying both top menu and quick launch (left menu). This control has several cool properties (most inherited from ASP.NET 2.0 Menu control. One of them is MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels.

This control can be found in the default.master page. Out of the box, this property is set to 1. If you change this property to a higher number, it will display several levels of fly-out menu items (if you have subsites under sites and so on.

Check out this great article from Heather Solomon with step-by-step on how to set this up.
If you do run in trouble, check out these tips:

• Make sure that you have checked "Show subsites" in the Navigation Settings
• In default.master, when not modified after installation, there are two menu objects: "QuickLaunchMenu" and "TopNavigationMenu". Make sure you make changes on the correct one, which is "TopNavigationMenu"
• When you have made the change and saved the master page, make sure you also publish it! Otherwise, only you will see the changes, and no one else.

I've set this up on our MOSS installation now, and it works like a charm. But, as Heather states, beware of setting this level to high, as the end users might get trouble navigating. For most cases, a level setting of 2 should be sufficient.

MOSS and WSS SDK Updated

Yesterday both MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 SDKs were updated to version 1.2. Both packages have been updated with the following:

MOSS 2007 SDK:

• Improved installation
• Start menu items, for easy access to elements in the SDK
• Lots of new tools and samples
• Several "How do I" overviews
• Code samples
• White pap
• Visual Studio Project Templates for SharePoint Server 2007 workflow

WSS 3.0 SDK:

• Compiled Help file that contains technical articles and Visual How Tos.
• Web Part Framework Create, package, and deploy Web Parts on SharePoint sites.
• Server-side object model Work with individual lists and sites or manage an entire Windows SharePoint Services deployment.
• Web services Use default Web services, or create custom Web services, to interact with Windows SharePoint Services from external applications.
• Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) Customize the schemas that define lists and sites, define queries for use with members of the object model or Web services, and specify parameters for use with methods in Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol.
• Master Pages Specify all of the shared elements of your site in the master page or pages, and add content page-specific elements to content pages.
• Workflows Create workflows that encapsulate business processes to be performed on items in Windows SharePoint Services, and attach those workflows to items in Windows SharePoint Services.
• Custom Field Types Create custom field types that conform to your business data. These custom field types can be based on the base field types already included in Windows SharePoint Services, and can include custom data validation, field rendering, and field property rendering and processing.
• Information Rights Management (IRM) Specify IRM for files located in document libraries and stored as attachments to list items. Create IRM protectors for your own custom file types.
• Document Property Promotion and Demotion Use the built-in XML parser to synchronize the document properties and list column data for XML documents. Create document parsers to do the same for your custom file types.
• Search Use the new Query object model and Query Web service to retrieve search results. Search in Windows SharePoint Services now shares the same SharePoint search technology used by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Both is said to be compatible for installation on Windows 2003, Windows Vista and Windows XP. However, to take advantage of samples and samples projects, Visual Studio 2005 and WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 is required, which at the moment narrows it all down to Windows 2003.