I often create Xsl stylesheets to make my Xml documents more readable, especially when I’m going to send them to someone else to read. Add the following line, just below the <?xml declaration, using the path to your stylesheet:

This example comes from a data file that we use for testing. The application reads the xml data, but having an Xsl stylesheet makes it easy to read the data for entry into the app for testing.

In this example, we just email the testers a copy of both files and tell them to drag the xml file into Internet Explorer. Of course, you can save the stylesheet on a server and use a fully-qualified url in your <?xml-stylesheet declaration too.

Is your system taking longer to boot than you’d like? Want to find out how long it’s actually taking or if there are hidden boot problems? Vista already has all the answers you need, they’re just hidden.

Ed Bott has a helpful article on using Vista’s event viewer and built-in diagnostics to track down problems and crunch your boot time numbers.

You may also want to read his article Five secrets to faster Vista starts.

When you’re ready to fix the problem, there’s no better tool than SysInternal’s Autoruns.

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If you want to quickly change the theme for a single SharePoint site, then this post is for you. If you want to change the colors on the “Simple” theme for your entire enterprise or add a new theme for everyone to apply – this post is not for you (you can learn how to do that here or  here).

Prerequisites

1. Site owner rights
2. Knowledge of Css and Html
3. SharePoint Designer 2007
4. FireBug or the IE developer toolbar or some other way to find the styles or IDs of page elements on the screen. (Note: View Source is not an acceptable substitute unless you have 10 hours of free time)

Ok. Let’s get started. The first thing to do is to go to Site Actions –> Site Settings –> Site Theme and choose the theme that is closest to the look you want. For our example, we’ll say you choose the “Simple” theme.

Click apply and your site will now take on the look of the theme.

Next, open your site in SharePoint Designer. You should have a new folder “_themes” with a subfolder “Simple” that contains all the theme files.

There are a several Css files in the theme folder. This is where you will make most of your changes. You can also replace the theme images with your own if you want custom gradients or drop shadows etc. For the Css changes, I use Firebug or the IE Developer toolbar to identify the style name or ID of the elements I want to change and then update the styles accordingly.

 
  This is the IE Developer toolbar where you can see the elements and class names.

I won’t go into detail on how to change the individual styles etc. I’m assuming you already know how to do that. If not, Heather Solomon has some good references on her site to get you going.

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